Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (5 page)

Kokinja went on backing into moonlight,
which calmed her, and had just begun to swim cautiously around the island when
it moved. Eyes as big and yellow-white as lighthouse lamps turned slowly to
keep her in view, while an enormous, seemingly formless body lost any
resemblance to an island, heaving itself over to reveal limbs ending in
grotesquely huge claws. Centered between the foremost of them were two
moon-white pincers, big enough, clearly, to twist the skull off a sperm whale.
The sound it uttered was too low for Kokinja to catch, but she felt it plainly
in the sea.

She knew what it was then, and could only
hope that her voice would reach whatever the creature used for ears. She said,
“Great Paikea, I am Kokinja. I am very small, and I mean no one any harm.
Please, can you tell me where I may find my father, the Shark God?”

The lighthouse eyes truly terrified her
then, swooping toward her from different directions, with no head or face
behind them. She realized that they were on long whiplike stalks, and that
Paikea’s diamond-shaped head was sheltered under a scarlet carapace studded
with scores of small, sharp spines. Kokinja was too frightened to move, which
was as well, for Paikea spoke to her in the water, saying against her skin, “Be
still, child, that I may see you more clearly, and not bite you in two by
mistake. It has happened so.” Then Kokinja, who had already swum half an ocean,
thought that she might never again move from where she was.

She waited a long time for the great
creature to speak again, but was not at all prepared for Paikea’s words when
they did come. “I could direct you to your father—I could even take you
to him—but I will not. You are not ready.”

When Kokinja could at last find words to
respond, she demanded, “Not
ready
? Who are
you
to say that I am
not ready to see my own father?” Mirali and Keawe would have known her best
then: she was Kokinja, and anything she feared she challenged.

“What your father has to say to you, you
are not yet prepared to hear,” came the voice in the sea. “Stay with me a
little, Shark God’s daughter. I am not what your father is, but I may perhaps
be a better teacher for you.” When Kokinja hesitated, and clearly seemed about
to refuse, Paikea continued, “Child, you have nowhere else to go but
home—and I think you are not ready for that, either. Climb on my back
now, and come with me.” Even for Kokinja, that was an order.

Paikea took her—once she had managed
the arduous and tiring journey from claw to leg to mountainside shoulder to a
deep, hard hollow in the carapace that might have been made for a frightened
rider—to an island (a real one this time, though well smaller than her
own) bright with birds and flowers and wild fruit. When the birds’ cries and
chatter ceased for a moment, she could hear the softer swirl of running water
farther inland, and the occasional thump of a falling coconut from one of the
palms that dotted the beach. It was a lonely island, being completely
uninhabited, but very beautiful.

There Paikea left her to swim ashore,
saying only, “Rest,” and nothing more. She did as she was bidden, sleeping
under bamboo trees, waking to eat and drink, and sleeping again, dreaming
always of her mother and brother at home. Each dream seemed more real than the
one before, bringing Mirali and Keawe closer to her, until she wept in her
sleep, struggling to keep from waking. Yet when Paikea came again, after three
days, she demanded audaciously, “What wisdom do you think you have for me that
I would not hear if it came from my father? I have no fear of anything he may
say to me.”

“You have very little fear at all, or you
would not be here,” Paikea answered her. “You feared me when we first met, I
think—but two nights’ good sleep, and you are plainly past
that
.”
Kokinja thought she discerned something like a chuckle in the wavelets lapping
against her feet where she sat, but she could not be sure. Paikea said, “But
courage and attention are not the same thing. Listening is not the same as
hearing. You may be sure I am correct in this, because I know everything.”

It was said in such a matter-of-fact
manner that Kokinja had to battle back the impulse to laugh. She said, with all
the innocence she could muster, “I thought it was my father who was supposed to
know everything.”

“Oh, no,” Paikea replied quite seriously.
“The only thing the Shark God has ever known is how to be the Shark God. It is
the one thing he is supposed to be—not a teacher, not a wise master, and
certainly not a father or a husband. But they
will
take human form, the
gods will, and that is where the trouble begins, because they none of them know
how to be human—how can they, tell me that?” The eye-stalks abruptly
plunged closer, as though Paikea were truly waiting for an enlightening answer.
“I have always been grateful for my ugliness; for the fact that there is no way
for me to disguise it, no temptation to hide in a more comely shape and pretend
to believe that I am what I pretend. Because I am certain I would do just that,
if I could. It is lonely sometimes, knowing everything.”

Again Kokinja felt the need to laugh; but
this time it was somehow easier not to, because Paikea was obviously anxious
for her to understand his words. But she fought off sympathy as well, and
confronted Paikea defiantly, saying, “You really think that we should never
have been born, don’t you, my brother and I?”

Paikea appeared to be neither surprised
nor offended by her bold words. “Child, what I know is important—what I
think
is not important at all. It is the same way with the Shark God.” Kokinja opened
her mouth to respond hotly, but the great crab-monster moved slightly closer to
shore, and she closed it again. Paikea said, “He is fully aware that he should
never have taken a human wife, created a human family in the human world. And
he knows also, as he was never meant to know, that when your mother
dies—as she will—when you and your brother in time die, his heart
will break. No god is supposed to know such a thing; they are simply not
equipped to deal with it. Do you understand me, brave and foolish girl?”

Kokinja was not sure whether she
understood, and less sure of whether she even wanted to understand. She said
slowly, “So he thinks that he should never see us, to preserve his poor heart
from injury and grief? Perhaps he thinks it will be for our own good? Parents
always say that, don’t they, when they really mean for their own convenience.
Isn’t that what they say, wise Paikea?”

“I never knew my parents,” Paikea answered
thoughtfully.

“And
I
have never known
him
,”
snapped Kokinja. “Once a year he comes to lie with his wife, to snap up his
goat, to look at his children as we sleep. But what is that to a wife who longs
for her husband, to children aching for a real father? God or no god, the very
least he could have done would have been to tell us himself what he was, and
not leave us to imagine him, telling ourselves stories about why he left our
beautiful mother... why he didn’t want to be with us...” She realized, to her
horror, that she was very close to tears, and gulped them back as she had done
with laughter. “I will never forgive him,” she said. “Never.”

“Then why have you swum the sea to find
him?” asked Paikea. It snapped its horrid pale claws as a human will snap his
fingers, waiting for her answer with real interest.

“To
tell
him that I will never
forgive him,” Kokinja answered. “So there is something even Paikea did not
know.” She felt triumphant, and stopped wanting to cry.

“You are still not ready,” said Paikea,
and was abruptly gone, slipping beneath the waves without a ripple, as though
its vast body had never been there. It did not return for another three days,
during which Kokinja explored the island, sampling every fruit that grew there,
fishing as she had done at sea when she desired a change of diet, sleeping when
she chose, and continuing to nurse her sullen anger at her father.

Finally, she sat on the beach with her feet
in the water, and she called out, “Great Paikea, of your kindness, come to me,
I have a riddle to ask you.” None of the sea creatures among whom she had been
raised could ever resist a riddle, and she did not see why it should be any
different even for the Master of All Sea Monsters.

Presently she heard the mighty creature’s
voice saying, “You yourself are as much a riddle to me as any you may ask.”
Paikea surfaced close enough to shore that Kokinja felt she could have reached
out and touched its head. It said, “Here I am, Shark God’s daughter.”

“This is my riddle,” Kokinja said. “If you
cannot answer it, you who know everything, will you take me to my father?”

“A most human question,” Paikea replied,
“since the riddle has nothing to do with the reward. Ask, then.”

Kokinja took a long breath. “Why would any
god ever choose to sire sons and daughters with a mortal woman? Half-divine,
yet we die—half-supreme, yet we are vulnerable, breakable—half-perfect,
still we are forever crippled by our human hearts. What cruelty could compel an
immortal to desire such unnatural children?”

Paikea considered. It closed its huge,
glowing eyes on their stalks; it waved its claws this way and that; it even
rumbled thoughtfully to itself, as a man might when pondering serious matters.
Finally Paikea’s eyes opened, and there was a curious amusement in them as it
regarded Kokinja. She did not notice this, being young.

“Well riddled,” Paikea said. “For I know
the answer, but have not the right to tell you. So I cannot.” The great claws
snapped shut on the last word, with a grinding clash that hinted to Kokinja how
fearsome an enemy Paikea could be.

“Then you will keep your word?” Kokinja
asked eagerly. “You
will
take me where my father is?”

“I always keep my word,” answered Paikea,
and sank from sight. Kokinja never saw him again.

But that evening, as the red sun was
melting into the green horizon, and the birds and fish that feed at night were
setting about their business, a young man came walking out of the water toward
Kokinja. She knew him immediately, and her first instinct was to embrace him.
Then her heart surged fiercely within her, and she leaped to her feet,
challenging him. “So! At last you have found the courage to face your own
daughter. Look well, sea-king, for I have no fear of you, and no worship.” She
started to add, “Nor any love, either,” but that last caught in her throat,
just as had happened to her mother Mirali when she scolded a singing boy for
invading her dreams.

The Shark God spoke the words for her.
“You have no reason in the world to love me.” His voice was deep and quiet, and
woke strange echoes in her memory of such a voice overheard in candlelight in
the sweet, safe place between sleep and waking. “Except, perhaps, that I have
loved your mother from the moment I first saw her. That will have to serve as
my defense, and my apology as well. I have no other.”

“And a pitiful enough defense it is,”
Kokinja jeered. “I asked Paikea why a god should ever choose to father a child
with a mortal, and he would not answer me. Will you?” The Shark God did not
reply at once, and Kokinja stormed on. “My mother never once complained of your
neglect, but I am not my mother. I am grateful for my half-heritage only in
that it enabled me to seek you out, hide as you would. For the rest, I spit on
my ancestry, my birthright, and all else that connects me to you. I just came
to tell you that.”

Having said this, she began to weep, which
infuriated her even more, so that she actually clenched her fists and pounded
the Shark God’s shoulders while he stood still, making no response. Shamed as
she was, she ceased both activities soon enough, and stood silently facing her
father with her head high and her wet eyes defiant. For his part, the Shark God
studied her out of his own unreadable black eyes, moving neither to caress nor
to punish her, but only—as it seemed to Kokinja—to understand the
whole of what she was. And to do her justice, she stared straight back, trying
to do the same.

When the Shark God spoke at last, Mirali
herself might not have known his voice, for the weariness and grief in it. He
said, “Believe as you will, but until your mother came into my life, I had no
smallest desire for children, neither with beings like myself, nor with any
mortal, however beautiful she might be. We do find humans dangerously appealing,
all of us, as is well-known—perhaps precisely because of their short
lives and the delicacy of their construction—and many a deity, unable to
resist such haunting vulnerability, has scattered half-divine descendants all
over your world. Not I; there was nothing I could imagine more contemptible
than deliberately to create such a child, one who would share fully in neither
inheritance, and live to curse me for it, as you have done.” Kokinja flushed
and looked down, but offered no contrition for anything she had said. The Shark
God said mildly, “As well you made no apology. Your mother has never once lied
to me, nor should you.”

“Why should I ever apologize to you?”
Kokinja flared up again. “If you had no wish for children, what are my brother
and I doing here?” Tears threatened again, but she bit them savagely back. “You
are a god—you could always have kept us from being born!
Why are we
here
?”

To her horror, her legs gave way under her
then, and she sank to her knees, still not weeping, but finding herself
shamefully weak with rage and confusion. Yet when she looked up, the Shark God
was kneeling beside her, for all the world like a playmate helping her to build
a sand castle. It was she who stared at him without expression now, while he
regarded her with the terrifying pity that belongs to the gods alone. Kokinja
could not bear it for more than a moment; but every time she turned her face
away, her father gently turned her toward him once more. He said, “Daughter of
mine, do you know how old I am?”