The Tree of Water (5 page)

“I saw Madame Sharra again,” he said. “You've not met her, Amariel, but Char has.”

Char spat out the seawater from the wave that had filled his open mouth.

“Madame Sharra?
Where?
”

“As Amariel said, at the end of Asa's pier. Just as he was about to cut our gills, I saw that rainbow flash, and Time seemed to stop. She gave me another dragon scale—and these.” He held his fist up out of the waves and opened his fingers slightly.

The stones that had glowed in the heavy air of stopped Time now looked like little more than shiny soap bubbles.

Amariel and Char looked down at them. The merrow shrugged, and Char shook his head.

“These are bits of elemental air,” Ven explained. “If Char and I carry them, and don't lose them, we will be able to breathe underwater without gills.”

“What's wrong with gills?” Amariel demanded.

“For you, nothing—you were born with them. But sooner or later the kind that Asa can cut seal shut on a human or a Nain, and if that happens deep underwater—well, we're unlikely to make it back to the surface safely. So if we carry these, we should be able to follow you wherever you want to go.”

The merrow exhaled. “Well, all right then. There won't be any blood in the water, either, which is always a bad thing. Sharks can smell even the smallest amount of blood in the water.”

Char grabbed his neck again.

“Put this in your pocket,” Ven said as he handed Char one of the air stones.

“I don't have a vest,” Char protested. “And my trousers' pocket doesn't have a button like yours.”

“Fill your pocket with stones on top of it,” Amariel suggested. “The extra weight should hold it down, and help you keep underwater.”

“Good idea,” Ven said. He bent down and began gathering pebbles from beneath the dock. “You said you saw a sunshadow, Amariel—what is a sunshadow?”

Amariel stared at him for a moment, then sighed. The fury went out of her green eyes.

“I had forgotten that you really don't know anything about the sea,” she said. “All right. Let's have a quick lesson, and then we should go if we want to catch the outgoing tide.”

Char finished filling his pocket with pebbles, then grabbed hold of a post as well, shivering.

“Under the sea,” Amariel began, “the sunlight breaks the surface now and then, and goes down very far, leaving a bright, fuzzy beam. If there is any thrum in the way, it causes a sunshadow.”

“Thrum?” Ven interrupted.

“Thrum is the special vibration that comes from each creature, each thing on earth. Land-livers don't know about thrum, because the vibrations are caught by the air and the wind of the upworld, and so you can't usually feel or hear thrum there. But in the sea, beneath the waves, you can feel thrum all around you. When a school of whales goes through, you can hear the thrum for miles. Volcanoes, giant sharks, sinking ships—all of them give off thrum. That's how I met you, Ven—my school could hear the explosion of your ship, and we came, looking for a party in the wreckage.”

“I remember,” said Ven.

It seemed a million miles away and many years ago, even though only a few months have passed since then. I blew up a ship my father had sent me to inspect, the
Angelia
. Amariel rescued me from drowning, and Captain Snodgrass, along with the sailors of the
Serelinda
, had rescued me from the sea. That's how I met Char, and came to live on the Island of Serendair.

And now my two best friends and I are off to explore the wonders of Amariel's world.

My curiosity is on fire.

Even the water all around me can't put it out.

“Do you hear thrum?” Char asked. “Or do you feel it?”

“It's hard to say whether you feel it or you hear it,” Amariel said. “But it's the way the entire ocean makes noise. You don't need to talk with your mouth underwater—your thrum does it for you. And your thoughts are a large part of thrum. If you happen to be in a shaft of sunshadow when you are thinking strongly about something, your thoughts sometimes appear as pictures in the hazy water. It can be very embarrassing.”

“I'll bet,” Char muttered.

“So unless you want everyone and everything around you to know what you are thinking, try not to get too excited or think too hard about something near a sunshadow. You wait until you're in regular drift before doing that.”

“Drift?”

“Drift is just the normal current of the sea, the movement of the water. When there's no storm, drift is just like being in the air of the upworld. You feel tugged by it when you are close to shore because of the tides, but once you are out in the Deep, you are barely aware of the drift around you unless it changes suddenly. And that usually means trouble is coming.”

“Why did you think Madame Sharra was a sunshadow, then?” Ven asked.

Amariel shrugged. “She looked like she wasn't real, exactly. She seemed to be in a shaft of light that came from behind the walls of the Gated City. And while that beam started out in the Gated City, it ended in your head. Which was, I might add, lying at the moment on a box waiting to have gills cut in the neck below it.”

“Really?” Ven exclaimed.

“Yes. Very powerful people—like the Sea King—can use sunshadow to send messages or even objects across wide expanses of ocean, just by the strength of their thoughts. So it seems to me that this golden woman who you saw in your head is really in the Gated City, but she was sending you a message, and perhaps your bubble and shell, using a land sunshadow.”

She took a deep breath.

“All right. Enough mouth talking. It's making me tired. The tide's going out—are we leaving with it?”

“Absolutely,” said Ven. “Let's go.”

“Hold up a minute,” Char said quickly. “Can we at least try out these bubble-stone things before we get in over our heads?”

“Sure,” said Ven. “Hold your breath, and we will just walk out behind Amariel into the harbor. If it works the way it should, the stone should breathe for you. You'll know whether or not that's happening pretty quick.”

Char sighed. “That's really not what I meant.”

“Follow me,” said the merrow. “And, for goodness' sake, if we come upon a shark, hold still and don't make any noise or movement until I discover if it's one of my friends or not. They can tell where you are by your movements. And your smell, of course, especially if you're bleeding. If you're bleeding, my friends might eat you by mistake—or even me. Blood in the water kind of cancels out any notion of politeness or friendship.”

Ven thought back to a sight he had witnessed aboard the
Serelinda
, the ship that had rescued him from drowning, on which Char had served as a cook's mate. A giant fin, tall as the mainmast, had surfaced from the Deep, belonging to a prehistoric creature that had caused the hardened sailors of the
Serelinda
to freeze in terror.

“What about a shark like Megalodon?” he asked. “Isn't he so big that our blood would be of no notice to him? He's longer than the biggest ship I've ever seen moored at my father's factory.”

Amariel shook her head.

“His pilot fish would notice even the smallest amount of blood,” she said. “Megalodon is frightening, but the pilot fish is said to be utterly evil. He clings to Megalodon, helping guide him through the sea, and feeds off the scraps left behind from whatever Megalodon devours. And there always are some. You better hope we only meet sharks that are friends of mine.”

Char swallowed nervously.

“I don't suppose Megalodon is a friend of yours,” he said, half joking, half hopeful.

Amariel's voice was cold as frost on winter ground, clear in the air of the upworld.

“Megalodon has no friends,” she said. “Even the pilot fish isn't his friend. The whole ocean fears him. Fortunately, it's a big ocean, and he lives fairly deep in it, down in the Twilight Realm. He only comes up every now and then to hunt. You have both seen Megalodon once already in your lives. It's pretty unlikely, unless you are
very
unlucky, that you will ever see him again. Especially if you don't call his name once you're underwater. Now, come on. The tide won't wait.”

At first I was very afraid.

I have been swimming most of my life, something about me that my family finds very upsetting, because Nain aren't supposed to be able to swim. I learned to swim in salt water, because my family's home and factory were in the seaside city of Vaarn, down on the harbor.

So I am used to my eyes stinging from salt.

It was hard to get out from under the dock. The small waves were more powerful than they seemed. They pushed us back toward shore even as they dragged at our feet. It took a few minutes to get out to where the water was over our heads.

Because Char is a little taller than me, it happened to me first.

The water closed over my nose and mouth. I tried not to panic and kept my mouth closed, but my breathing did not change. A moment later it was up over my eyes and ears, and that's when I felt a big difference.

Once my ears were under the water, all the sound of the upworld was gone. There was nothing but a pounding, like a heartbeat, in my head.

I looked above me, and was surprised to see that the sky was still visible beneath the water's surface. It moved and danced above the waves, which made me feel a little dizzy.

Suddenly, something slithered across my hand and my attention was drawn away from the sky. I was surrounded by schools of small fish, darting in between Char, Amariel, and me, zipping back and forth with perfect speed. Amariel waved them away like a swarm of flies in the upworld.

Char and I were so busy watching the fish that it took us several moments to notice that we were breathing underwater without any problem.

“Let's keep going.”

Ven could hear Amariel's voice in his head. She was smiling, and her lips had not moved, but he had heard her as clearly as if she had been standing right beside him.

“Lead on, Amariel,” he thought to himself.

The merrow smiled more broadly, then nodded that she had heard him as well. She turned and headed out into the depths of the harbor, into the blue-green darkness streaked with dusty shafts of light.

Char looked at him. Ven could feel his best friend's sigh of despair in his skin. Then the two of them began swimming, as if walking in the air of the upworld, after her.

The thrum of the ocean was so slight, so distant, that they did not notice the schools of fish suddenly stop, then scatter quickly into the deeper shoals.

As if in fear for their lives.

 

6

Kingston Harbor

I have always liked words.

It would not be honest to say that I was a great student back in Vaarn. Whenever the teacher was telling tales of history or geography, of places far beyond the small city in which I lived, he always had my complete attention. There was nothing more exciting to me than the prospect of exploring the world, or fighting in great battles, or solving riddles and puzzles. But when the lessons turned to mathematics, or spelling, or something else that failed to fire my imagination, I often found myself watching out the window of the schoolhouse, searching for pictures in the clouds.

My mind wanders easily.

My body wanders too, though much less easily, especially these days.

But I have always had a fondness for words. When I was at school I spent many nights writing down each new word I learned that day by candlelight. This made my brothers, Leighton and Brendan, who shared a room with me, hurl shoes at my head. By the time I turned fifty on my last birthday, making me about twelve in human years, I had a very thick journal of nothing but words that had tickled my fancy. I have been told I have a good vocabulary for a lad my age.

But nowhere in that thick volume would I have been able to find words that could describe what I saw all around me in the world beneath the waves.

Because there are none.

 

The farther they got out into the harbor, the less the sand on the bottom shifted. The water around them became clearer, and bluer. Seaweed floated everywhere, and the boys watched how Amariel flipped her tail and waved her arms to get it to move out of her way as she swam.

“Not sure how we're supposed to do that,” Char grumbled, slapping a patch of slippery weeds away. “I've only been in the sea a few minutes, an' already I can see you sorta have to have a tail to survive here.”

“Not everything in the sea has a tail, Chum,” said Amariel. The anger was gone from her voice now, replaced by excitement. “Only the lucky ones. If the crabs can survive without one, so can you.”

Ven was not paying attention. He was watching a huge school of bright blue-and-yellow fish swim in and out of clumps of seaweed, above skittering shells that drifted toward the shore with each big wave.

“The colors in the sea are so much different than they are in the upworld,” he said, marveling at a large, flat, many-legged creature, orange and flower-shaped, moving quickly along the bottom.

“Careful of that,” Amariel warned. “That's a sunflower starfish. It may look pretty, but it's one of the hungriest creatures in the sea. I don't know if you can hear the thrum, but there's a whole colony of sea urchins screaming in fear up ahead. They can feel it coming, and they know that very few of them will escape being its lunch. They just can't move fast enough.”

Ven shuddered. “Madame Sharra said that everything in the sea is food to something else, and that the sea is always hungry. It was the last thing she said to me.”