A heavier crash, and cries of many voices. The smaller ship staggered, swung sideways, wallowed. Part of the towering white fins that seemed to drive it were twisted away, falling, collapsing. The other ship came surging on with a mass of airfolk gathered at its front. Sunlight flashed off weapons. There was a louder crash, bellows, screams, fighting. She watched, amazed and distressed, until two figures appeared at the front of the stricken ship, one white and glittering like sunlit spray, the other dark and tall. The fight continued, with the attackers driving forward. Sharp whipping cracks rapped out amid the yells. The white figure—Ailsa, unthinking, had drifted herself near enough to see that it was a woman—turned her head, watched the fight for a moment, turned back and spoke.
“It is time to go,” she said softly.
She had let her green cloak fall and stood at the rail in the dress that had been stitched for her marriage, though not to this man. Ten thousand seed pearls patterned its surface, and on it she had pinned every jewel she had brought, and they were many, for she was a king’s daughter. The sun dazzled off her as if she had been white sea foam. On her cheek was a smoky burn, the back-flash from a pistol. The ship lurched and wallowed. The yells neared as the pirates started to force the companionway to the foredeck.
He flung his sword out to sea and with brisk fingers unbuckled his sword-belt. He grasped a stay, climbed, balanced on the heaving rail and helped her up to stand beside him. She laid her body against his, passed the belt around their waists and fastened it tight. The empty scabbard dangled by her side.
“I have brought you to this,” she said, putting her arms around his neck. “It was all my doing. You had the whole world before you.”
He bowed his head.
“My world is in your arms,” he said.
The pirates erupted onto the foredeck and rushed towards them, but he clasped her to him and leapt clear. They hit the water with a glittering splash, and at once the weight of his armour carried them under. Her dark hair streamed above them as they sank, mixed with the pearl-like bubbles of their breath.
Ailsa saw the sword arc through the air, dived and was already swimming towards it as it splashed into the downslope of the next wave. She lashed with her tail and caught it not three lengths under. When she rose, the white figure and the black were poised on the rail at the very edge of the ship. A man and a woman. Lovers. Their pose and gestures signalled love. With one hand the man gripped the rope that rose beside him and with the other steadied the woman while she bound some kind of strap around their waists. She put her arms round his neck and spoke. He bowed his head to hers and answered. Time stopped.
The waves stood still, the spume hung brilliant in the air, the wisps of cloud-stuff remaining from the fight hovered motionless, and Ailsa’s own heart paused between beat and beat. The lenses of her eyes seemed to adjust so that she could see every detail with diamond clarity.
And then they leapt, and the splash of their entry sparkled in the sunlight, while the pirates gathered with yells of anger to the rail and gazed down at the spreading circle of foam.
The moment held Ailsa in its trance. She had no need to try to understand what had happened. The moment was all that mattered, with its focussed brilliance and beauty, as if forces, whole lives, had been gathered into it from before-time and after-time, the way that light is gathered into a drop of spume or a jewel. They had made it so, in and for each other, choosing to leap, choosing to die. . . . Yes, die. Ailsa knew that airfolk could not live long in water, any more than she could in air.
The thought broke the trance. If she was quick, perhaps they did not have to die. She dived, twitching the lead rope as she lashed herself downward. Almost at once Carn was beside her, positioned so that she could grasp the hand-grip. Still swimming, she slid the sword under the centre-strap, laid her body against his and flicked him into full surge while she loose-rode him down.
But blue-fin, like merfolk, are creatures of the upper layers of ocean. The wild ones never enter the sunless underdeeps. The green-gold light changed through heavier green towards full dark in which they would see nothing at all. Carn tried to level out, and even with the leverage of the harness it was an effort to force him on down. She was fighting to hold course when she saw the lovers, right at the edge of her dwindling sphere of vision.
Their lips were on each other’s lips as the darkness took them.
“There!” she gasped. And Carn had seen them too, knew what he was here for, and drove on down. The water darkened. The woman’s dress was a shadowy glimmer, almost in reach. A layer of deadly chill slid over Ailsa. Such layers exist in all deep oceans, and the Grand Gulf was deep beyond knowledge. The merfolk call these layers limits, and do not willingly go beyond them.
Now Ailsa could see the lovers no more. She loosed one hand from the grip, reached, groped, touched something narrow and hard, clutched it. The sudden weight loosed her other hand from the grip. She swirled and lashed upward, dragging the weight with her. Terror sluiced through her.
It had happened in the instant of turning. Before, still diving, she had been afraid, of the dark, of the cold, of going too deep to return, ordinary flesh-and-blood fears. This, filling her body as she forced her way upward, was terror. It was as if the cold and the dark had made themselves into a thing, alive, but huge as the immense underdeeps, dark beyond black, cold beyond ice, something that had been waiting there for the lovers to fall into its ice and dark, but now, now that she was dragging them back . . . She had not let go only because the nightmare had locked the muscles of her grip like iron.
She did not notice passing through the limit. Something broke into her nightmare, a soft touch against her cheek, Carn’s querying snout. And it was no longer dark. Almost, but not quite. In wonder she looked up and saw that though she was still many lengths deep she could see far above her the ripple-pattern of the sunlit waves. She was exhausted, her heart thundering, her gills aching with the effort to sift the rush of water. There was a pain in her hand from the ferocity of her grip, and a fierce ache running up her arm from the wrenching weight she had dragged from below. She looked down and made out that she was holding the scabbard of a sword, still fastened to its belt, and the belt was buckled round the bodies of the two airfolk she had seen leap from the ship.
They wavered below her, a man and a woman, he in dark armour, she in a strange white covering which hid all but her head and her hands. (Merfolk wear armour if they need to but have no use for clothes.) This covering had glittered in the sun, and glinted now in the dimness, because it was sewn with innumerable seed pearls, among which were fastened many greater jewels. The faces were calm and pale, their eyes open but unseeing. The woman’s dark hair floated all around them.