Billy: Messenger of Powers (52 page)

Billy felt at his neck, half-expecting to find he had grown gills there. But there were none. So how was he breathing? he wondered.

Then he suddenly realized: he wasn’t.

No air was going into or out from his mouth or his nose. It was like he was holding his breath. But there was no discomfort, no burning in his lungs as there should have been. He just simply wasn’t breathing.

Maybe I
am
dead, after all, he thought. And then he wondered if this was Heaven. If it was, his Sunday School teacher had gotten a few things wrong over the years.

He glanced about again, and saw that the giant clam was sitting in the middle of the seabed. All around it were huge blooming flowers of coral, like orchids and lilies in the sea. Brightly colored fishes flitted all around the coral, darting in and out of gaps in the reef like they were playing the world’s largest and fastest game of hide and seek. What looked like tiny shrimp sat astride some of the fishes, preening and cleaning them as they swam.

There was a creaking sound, and Billy suddenly jumped to his feet and pushed off the clam’s muscular body as the clamshell slowly pulled itself shut, encasing the clam in a six-foot shell of solid armor. Billy now found himself hanging lightly a few feet above the floor of the ocean. He looked up, expecting to see the water’s surface not too far overhead: after all, it was so bright that he knew the sun must not have too much water between it and himself. But to Billy’s surprise, he saw that the light all around was being supplied by a thick ceiling of jellyfish, hundreds of thousands of them, which floated about a few hundred feet above him. Their long, trailing tentacles dangled below them like an upside-down jungle. The jellyfish glowed a pale blue, and their tentacles themselves flashed quickly in all the colors of the rainbow. It was entrancing, beautiful, unreal.

Billy’s admiring gaze was interrupted, however, by the blue fish he had first seen when he awoke. It swam up in front of Billy’s face, then made a motion with its head. It swam a few feet away, then swam toward him again and made that same motion once again.

“Do you want…?” Billy began, then stopped. His voice was coming out, but it sounded different. Again, he realized that as he spoke, no breath was coming out of his mouth. It was trapped within him somewhere. And so the noise he was making did not come from air passing through his voice box. It came from somewhere else within his body, just as the song of a whale must do. And like the whales, Billy’s voice now had a sonorous lilt to it, the hint of music unsung.

“Do you want,” he tried again, “me to follow you?” he asked the blue fish, which was still watching Billy.

The fish rolled its eyes. Apparently, no matter where you were, the sign for “Well, duh,” was the same. It swam a few feet ahead of Billy, then turned its head to wait.

Billy had never been much of a swimmer. His best swimming had been done when he had accidentally been invited to a pool party in fourth grade, and everyone there had decided that he would make a great ball in a pickup game of pool volleyball. And even then, he had mostly just done something that could hardly be described as swimming. More like a kind of desperate flopping. So he had no idea how he could possibly keep up with the swiftly swimming fish.

But to his surprise, when Billy reached out to paddle toward the fish, the movement was fluid and practiced. It was as though he had been transformed into an Olympic swimmer. But more than that, because with one kick he shot forward ten feet, moving at a pace impossible for any human to achieve.

The blue fish didn’t give Billy time to ponder this newest magical development, though, as it shot away full speed. Billy swam after it, easily keeping pace, feeling like he could even swim faster if necessary. He was amazed, and felt for the first time in his life as though he could have been picked first for a game of underwater Marco Polo or some other poolside game.

But where are we going? he wondered.

He asked the question aloud to the blue fish, but the fish seemed not to hear the query, apparently intent on just getting to where it was going. Soon, however, Billy spied a large crack in the coral that was piled like a living mountain beside and all around him. The blue fish sped directly at it. Billy was worried for a moment that he wouldn’t be able to make it through the fissure, since the gap seemed a bit too slim for him to squeeze through. But as he swam toward it, the crack opened wider, the coral on all sides pulling itself away to allow enough room for him to pass through easily.

Billy swam through the doorway that had been created, and then found himself somewhere he was quite sure no other human had ever been. He was inside a coral mountain. He knew that coral reefs were created by the skeletons of dead coral, piled high in interlocking pieces, solid through and through and tough as rock. But this coral reef was different. It was hollow.

And it was beautiful. The place Billy now found himself was like a great hall in some amazing palace. Rubies, diamonds, and emeralds the size of a person’s head were inset all over the coralline walls. The walls themselves glowed with the same slowly strobing inner light as the jellyfish had displayed, rendering the inside of the mountain into an ever-moving exhibit of all the colors of the spectrum.

The blue fish was still swimming ahead of Billy, so he had little time to take in all the beauty around him. But he did glimpse that there were numerous window-like holes in the coral mountain, allowing him to view the open ocean outside. He saw enormous shapes outside the mountain, lumbering forms that moved with surprising fluidity and delicacy through the sea.

The whales, he realized. The whales who brought me here. They’re still nearby.

As if in answer to his thought, Billy heard whale song echoing in through one of the windows to this undersea palace. The music was more beautiful than it had seemed before, touching Billy’s heart deeply with the otherworldly perfection of its graceful melody.

He ripped his eyes away from the scene outside with difficulty, and realized that the blue fish was gone. He looked around the vast empty space for it, but couldn’t spot it anywhere.

As Billy looked around in confusion, the whales rumbled forth another stanza of music.

“They like you,” said a voice. “It’s why you’re alive.”

Billy turned to the voice, and though he didn’t gasp—he still wasn’t breathing as far as he knew—his eyes bulged out of their sockets at what he saw.

It was a mermaid.

At least, he thought that’s what it was. But where most mermaids—or at least, all the ones he’d heard of in stories—had tails like a fish, complete with fins and scales, this one’s tail was quite different. The fins were there, but instead of scales, the mermaid’s tail seemed to be made of millions of tiny pieces of coral, all hooked together in an intricate maze of color and life. Some of the coral glowed, some of it shot forth tiny tentacles to grab at particles of microscopic food, some of it spread forth long leafy arms, then just as quickly withdrew them.

Nor was that the most interesting thing about the mermaid. Her eyes held that distinction. The eyes had no pupils, and the irises were deepest blue. They were the color of a pure glacier floating in the Arctic Ocean, a blue so deep and true that it spoke of the very Essence of all that was Water. The color of the Blue Element in its rawest form, swift and powerful as all the waves of all the seas.

The mermaid smiled, and her teeth were pointed as a shark’s, spiny and shining like razors. But in spite of her alien appearance, she was quite beautiful. She was beautiful in the way that a tidal pool could be beautiful, or in the way that a manta ray could be beautiful: entrancing, but with more than a hint of danger within it.

Her skin was a light green, the color of seaweed, as was her hair, which hung down about her in a pale green mane that covered her from neck to belly. She had arms, muscular and strong, which waved lazily back and forth in the tiny currents here in the sea palace.

“Who likes me?” Billy finally managed to say.

“The whales,” answered the mermaid. Like Billy’s, her voice was tinged with that hint of song, that music that Billy was rapidly coming to expect as a part of the deep blue around him. “I don’t usually save air-breathers. Those that I see are usually already gone, drowned in the depths of Blue. And those who aren’t, I let be for Blue to take. But the whales spoke for you.”

“They spoke for me?” asked Billy, confusion clear in his tone. “What do you mean?”

“Artemaeus spoke for you,” said the mermaid. She nodded, and Billy looked over his shoulder to see the huge head of a great blue whale poking in through one of the windows in the coral palace. It met Billy’s gaze stolidly with its own, and then slowly dipped its head.

Billy’s mouth gaped open. It was the whale he had seen in the wall! The one he had seen in the Hall of Convergence, where one wall was water and the other was fire. The whale he had seen with Mrs. Russet when on his way to the Test of Five.

“Ar…Artemaeus?” he stammered. The whale dipped its head again, then pulled away from the window and swam quickly off, disappearing from Billy’s view in an instant. “Where did he go?” said Billy.

“Not far,” responded the mermaid. “Tell me, what is your name?”

“Billy Jones,” responded Billy. Then, almost hearing his mom’s voice in his head giving him a mini-lecture on manners, he said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you. And what’s your name?”

The mermaid smiled that beautiful and sharp smile, clearly amused by him. “I have no name,” she said. “I had one once, but gave it up to become what I am. So now I have no name but Blue, because Blue is me, and I am Blue.”

Billy wasn’t sure he really followed what she was saying. “Your name is Blue?” he asked, confused.

The mermaid laughed again. The sound was like raindrops on a roof: soothing, yet energetic. “No, I have no name,” she said again. “But if you wish to call me Blue, I will not object.”

“Okay, Blue,” said Billy uncertainly. He looked around. “You saved me?”

“Yes,” said Blue simply. “Though I prefer air-breathers not to enter my domain, Artemaeus is one of the old ones of the deep. He is wise, and he said you were special, Billy Jones. So he saved you from the sharks, and then sang to me and asked me to let you be here with us in the deep.”

She turned suddenly at that, and began swimming away.

“Wait!” shouted Billy. “What do I do now?”

The mermaid turned back to him, those blue eyes of hers bright and piercing. “Whatever you wish. Swim. Eat. Play. Be happy, for you are a visitor to the Earthsea, a guest of Blue.”

“But wait,” Billy said again as Blue turned once more to leave. “I can’t just stay here! I have friends. They need my help.”

“I can help you assist them if you wish,” said Blue. “I haven’t anything else to do today. What ocean are they in?”

“They’re not in an ocean,” said Billy. “They’re on Dark Isle. Trapped by the Darksiders.”

“Not in the ocean?” said Blue quizzically. “Then why would I help them?”

“Because they’re my friends,” said Billy.

“Ahhh,” sighed Blue, as if in sudden understanding. “Your friends are other air-breathers.”

“Yes,” said Billy. “They’re Powers, they’re on Dark Isle, and they’ve been captured by—”

 A curt wave of Blue’s hand cut him off. “None of that matters,” she said. “Blue does not concern herself with things of the world above.”

“But what if Artemaeus speaks for one of my friends, as well?” asked Billy.

“Would he?” said Blue.

“He might. I think he knows Lumilla Russet.”