She put out her arm and Sparks took it somberly; they shook, hands clasping wrists. The clasp became a hug before she knew it, and the doubts in her heart burned away like morning fog. “Sparkie, I love you… more than anything under the sky.” She kissed him, tasting salt on his lips. “Let the Sea Mother witness that you hold my willing heart, only you, now and forever.”
He repeated the words, clearly and proudly, and together they sipped sea water from their cupped hands to complete the vow. “Nobody can say we’re still too young to pledge after this journey!” They had pledged their love for the first time when they were barely old enough to recite the words, and everyone had laughed. But they had been true to each other ever since; and through the years they had shared everything, including the hesitant, yearning inevitability of lips touching, and hands, and flesh…
Moon remembered a hidden cranny among the rocks on a leeward bay; warm callused hands of stone cupping their shivering bodies as they lay together in love under the bright noon, while the tide whispered far away down the beach. Now, as then, she could feel the strength of the need that bound them together: the heat they made between them that held the cold loneliness of their world at bay. The union of souls that overcame them in the final moment — the height, the wholeness, that nothing else in their world could ever give her. Together they would enter this new life, and at last they would belong to their world as completely as they belonged to each other… Sparks’s lips brushed her ear; she leaned forward, her arms going around him again. The boat nosed toward shore, untended.
“Do you see anything?”
Sparks checked the boat a last time where it lay beached firmly in shells and storm wrack, beyond the high-tide line. The family totem carved at its prow regarded him with three staring painted eyes. The tide was still going out, but it had already exposed enough wet-mirrored sand so that dragging the canoe up the beach had taken away their breath. One of the mers had actually come out onto the shore with them, let them stroke its wet, slick, brindle fur with timid hands. He had never been close enough to touch one before; they were as large as he was, and twice as heavy.
“Not yet — here!” Moon’s voice reached him, along with the frantic waving of her hand. She had followed the mer’s floundering progress as it moved on up the beach. “Here by the stream, a path. It must be the one Gran told me about!”
He started across the littered beach slope toward the freshwater outlet, abandoned shells crunching under his feet. The stream had laid down a wide band of red silt in the ochre, cut into the red with channels of moss-green water flow. Where it left the shore, Moon stood waiting to start into the hills.
“We follow the stream up?”
She nodded, following the swift blue-green rise of the cloaked land with her eyes. Naked peaks of raw red stone soared even higher. Those islands were new on the measureless time scale of the Sea; their spines still clawed the sky, undulled by age.
“Looks like we climb.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, uncertain.
“Yeah.” Moon watched the mer start back down the beach. Her hand tingled with the feel of its heavy fur. “We’ll dance in the rigging today.” She looked back at him, suddenly very much aware of what their presence here meant. “Well, come on,” almost impatiently. “The first step is the hardest.” They took it together.
But it was a step that had been taken before, Moon thought as she climbed… how many times? She found the answer engraved in the hillsides, where the passage of feet had worn down the airy volcanic pumice until sometimes they walked in narrow tracks eaten away to the height of their knees. And how many have climbed it just to be refused? Moon thought a quick prayer, looking down as the trail became a narrow ledge running ankle deep above a canyon of evergreen fern and impenetrable bush. The day was utterly silent when the wind died; she had not seen a trace of any living thing larger than a click beetle. Once, perhaps, the distant cry of a bird… The stream winked at her from cover hundreds of feet below, and on her left the green-coated wall vaulted another hundred into the sky. Though she was used to the precarious footing of sailors and the narrow paths among fish pens, these contrasts made her giddy.
Sparks clutched at a protruding bush, scratching his face. “This isn’t for weak hearts,” not really meaning to say it out loud.
“Probably the point,” she mumbled, and wiped her own face on her sleeve.
“You mean maybe this is the test?” They pressed gingerly past a crumbling patch of eroded wall.
“Lady!” half curse, half prayer. “It’s enough for me!”
“How far does this go? What if it gets dark?”
“I don’t know… The valley’s closing, up there.”
“I thought you said Grandpa did this, when he was young? I thought you knew.”
Moon swallowed. “Gran told me he gave up and turned back. He never even found the cave.”
“Now you tell me!” But he began to laugh. “This isn’t what I thought it would be, somehow.”
The stream curved back on itself below, and beyond the next turn of the wall the ledge widened and the trail widened with it. Here in this inland valley cut off from the sea wind, the heat of the sun echoed and re-echoed from the heated rock. Moon pulled off her heavy parka as she walked; Sparks already wore his knotted around his shoulders. The breeze pressed her damp linen shirt against her chest. She unlaced the shirt down to her belt, scratched herself, sighing. “I’m hot, you know that? I’m really hot! What do people do when they get too hot? You can always put on more clothes, but you can only take off so many.” She loosened the waterskin from her belt and drank. Somewhere ahead she heard a rushing sound, but she only thought of fat sizzling in a kettle.
“We probably won’t have to worry about it.” Sparks shrugged with good-natured reasonableness. “High summer’s still a long way off. We’ll probably be dead before it gets that hot.” His foot slipped; he went down on one knee with a grunt. “Maybe sooner.”
“Funny.” She helped him up; her own feet were as clumsy as stones. “You can already see the Summer Star. I saw it through my fingers a few days… Oh—” whispered. She rubbed her stinging face with the back of her hand.
“Yes.” Sparks slumped against the out curving wall. Beyond the final turn of the trail the rushing became the roar of water flung over a precipice, battered by rocks, a silvered sacrifice falling eternally to its death. And there the trail ended.
They stood breathless and confused in the cacophony of sound and spray beside the falls. “It can’t end here!” Sparks struck at the falling water. “We know this is the right path. Where is it?”
“Here!” Moon crouched, peering over the edge beside the water curtain, loose strands of hair falling forward in dripping fingers. “Handholds in the rock.” She stood up again, wiping her hair back. “Suddenly this isn’t…” She shook her head, the words lost as she looked back at him and saw the anger on his face.
“What is this, anyway?” Sparks shouted down the valley toward the sea. “What more proof do You want? Do we have to kill ourselves?”
“No!” Moon pulled at his arm, his temper grating like sand on her fatigue. “She wants us to be sure. And we are.” She crouched down again, pulling off her boots, and put a foot over the edge.
She began to climb down, letting the roar and the spray fill her senses, batter down her fear. She saw Sparks begin the climb above her; telling herself that countless people had gone down before her, through countless years… (foot fumbling over wet rock)… she would do it, too… (another step! her fingers clutched a lip of stone)… this wet climb was no more than the rigging of a ship, which she had climbed without thought countless times… (and once more)… always trusting in the Sea Mother to place her hands and feet surely… (fingers cramping; she bit her lip)… She concentrated on belief, in the Lady, in herself; because only if she doubted either one would she… (her foot beat against the wet-slimed wall, finding no crevice, no step, no — )