“So you know it awaits you after the Sacrifice, after the change of being. But you don’t seem to take the change so calmly.”
“How can I? I’m human!”
“Yes. But make me understand. Why does that make your attitude so different? Why are you so angry about something that would happen to you sooner or later anyway?”
“Because I’m too young for this,” Nita said. “All the things I’ll never have a chance to do — grow up, work, live—“
“This,” Ed said mildly, looking around him at the green-burning sea, the swift fish flashing in it, the dazzling wrinkled mirror of the surface seen from beneath, “this is not living?”
“Of course it is! But there’s a lot more to it! And getting murdered by a shark is hardly what I call living!”
“I assure you,” Ed said, “it’s nothing as personal as murder. I would have done the same for any wizard singing the Silent Lord. I have done the same, many times. And doubtless shall again…” His voice trailed off.
Nita caught something odd in Ed’s voice. He sounded almost… wistful?
“Look,” she said, her own voice small. “Tell me something… Does it really have to hurt a lot?”
“Sprat,” said Ed dispassionately, “what in this life doesn’t? Even love hurts sometimes. You may have noticed…”
“Love — what would you know about that?” Nita said, too pained to care about being scornful, even to the Master-Shark.
“And who are you to think I would know nothing about it? Because I kill without remorse, I must also be ignorant of love, is that it?”
There was a long, frightening pause, while Ed began to swim a wide circle about Nita. “You’re thinking I am so old an order of life that I can know nothing but the blind white rut, the circling, the joining that leaves the joined forever scarred. Oh yes, I know that. In its time… it’s very good.”
The rich and hungry pleasure in his voice disturbed Nita. Ed was circling closer and closer as he spoke, swimming as if he were asleep. “And, yes… sometimes we wish the closeness of the joining wouldn’t end. But what would my kind do with the warm-blood sort of joining, the long companionships? What would I do with a mate?” He said it as if it were an alien word. “Soon enough one or the other of us would fall into distress — and the other partner would end it. There’s an end to mating and mate, and to the love that passed between. That price is too high for me to pay, even once. I swim alone.”
He was swimming so close to Nita now that his sides almost touched hers, and she pulled her tail and fins in tight and shrank away from the razory hide, not daring to move otherwise. Then Ed woke up and broke the circle, gliding lazily outward and away as if nothing had happened. “But, Sprat, the matter of my loves — or their lack — is hardly what’s bothering you.”
“No,” she burst out bitterly, “love! I’ve never had a chance to. And now— now—“
“Then you’re well cast for the Silent Lord’s part,” Ed said, his voice sounding far away. “How does the line go? ‘Not old enough to love as yet,/ but old enough to die, indeed—‘ That has always been the Silent Lord’s business — to sacrifice love for life… instead of, as in lesser songs, the other way around…”
Ed trailed off, paused to snap up a sea bass that passed him by too slowly. When his eyes were more or less sane again and the water had carried the blood away, Ed said, “Is it truly so much to you, Sprat? Have you truly had no time to love?”
Mom and Dad, Nita thought ruefully. Dairine. That’s not love, I don’t love Dairine! — do I? She hardened her heart and said, “No, Pale One. Not that way. No one… that way.”
“Well then,” said the Master-Shark, “the Song will be sung from the heart, it seems. You will still offer the Sacrifice?”
“I don’t want to—“
“Answer the question, Sprat.”
It was a long while before Nita spoke. “I’ll do what I said I would,” she said at last. The notes of the song whispered away into the water like the last notes of a dirge.
She was glad Ed said nothing for a while, for her insides gripped and churned as she finally found out what real, grownup fear was. Not the kind that happens suddenly, that leaves you too busy with action to think about being afraid — but the kind that she had been holding off by not officially “deciding”: the kind that swims up as slowly as a shark circling, letting you see it and realize in detail what’s going to happen to you.
“I am big enough to take a humpback in two bites,” Ed said into her silence. “And there is no need for me to be leisurely about it. You will speak to the Heart of the Sea without having to say too much to me on the way.”
Nita looked up at him in amazement. “But I thought you didn’t believe— I mean, you’d never—“
“I am no wizard, Nita,” Ed said. “The Sea doesn’t speak to me as it does to you. I will never experience those high wild joys the Blue sings of — the Sea That Burns, the Voices. The only voices I hear cry out from water that burns with blood. But might I not sometimes wonder what other joys there are? — and wish I might feel them too?”
The dry, remote pain in his voice astonished her. And Nita thought abruptly of that long line of titles in the commentaries in her manuaclass="underline" as if only one shark had ever been Master. Sharks don’t die of natural causes, she thought. Could it be that, all these years, there has been just one Master? And all around him, people die and die, and he — can’t— and wants to? And so he understands how it is to want to get out of something and be stuck with it.
Nita was terribly moved — she wasn’t sure why. She swam close to the Pale One’s huge head for a moment and glided side by side with him, matching his course and the movements of his body.
“I wish I could help,” she said.
“As if the Master could feel distress,” Ed said, with good-natured scorn. The wound in his voice had healed without a scar.
“And as if someone else might want to end it,” Nita said, sarcastic, but gentle about it.
Ed was silent for a long while. “I mean, it’s dumb to suffer,” Nita said, rather desperately, into that silence. “But if you have to do it, you might as well intend it to do someone some good.”
In silence they swam a few lengths more through the darkening water, while Nita’s fear began to build in her again, and one astonished part of her mind shouted at her, You’re running around talking about doing nice things for someone who’s going to kill you? You ‘re crazy!
Ed spoke at last. “It’s well said. And we will cause it to be well made, this Sacrifice. You, young and never loving; I, old and never loved.” Calm, utterly calm, that voice. “Such a Song the Sea will never have seen.”
“HNii’t?” came a questioning note through the water, from southward of Ambrose: S’reee’s voice. “It’s almost your time—“
“I have to go,” Nita said. “Ed—“
“Silent Lord?”
She had no idea why she was saying it. “I’m sorry!”
“This once, I think,” the passionless voice said, “so am I. Go on, Sprat. I will not miss my cue.”
Nita looked at him. Opaque eyes, depthless, merciless, lingered on her as Ed curved past. “Coming!” Nita sang in S’reee’s direction, loud, and tore off southward.
No pale shadow followed.
The next few hours, while the water darkened further, ran together for Nita in a blur of music, and annoying repetitions, and words that would have been frightening if she hadn’t been too busy to be frightened. And something was growing in her, slowly, but getting stronger and stronger — an odd elation. She sang on, not questioning it, riding its tide and hoping it would last through what she had to do. Again and again, with the other Celebrants listening and offering suggestions, she rehearsed what would be the last things she would ever say: