This time she did not need to put her story into words, which meant that she could tell it all, exactly as it had been. She felt that she could show, did in fact show the Kraken every sunlit droplet that had whipped from the wave-tops and every wisp of cloud-stuff that had puffed from the black tubes as the fight went on. She created again the arc of the sword through the air, created the precise poise, serene, passionate, unrepeatable, in which the lovers had balanced on the rail while the struggle had raged beyond them and the woman had buckled the sword belt round them so that they should go down unseparated into darkness. She created the final splash, and the attackers crowding to the rail.
At this point the Kraken seemed to lose interest. While Ailsa had been creating the moment, its whole mass had glimmered with a network of the streaking lines, but now these mostly died. At the same time her own mind went dull. If she had gone on to tell it, about her dive to reach the lovers, she would have had to do so with ordinary, fuzzy, gappy memory. The brilliance of full recall was gone. That was something that the Kraken had summoned from her, much as it had summoned the inner light from her jewels. As the tendrils withdrew from the back of her head, she felt a vague sense of loss. It crossed her mind that the Kraken would now take her into itself too. She was too numb, too exhausted, to be frightened by the idea.
As she waited for whatever would happen next, she became aware of the cold, and the pressure. Even merfolk, used to the chill and weight of water, cannot survive long at such depths. Soon, she thought dully, I shall be dead. I’m sorry for father—first mother, now me.
A brief command came into her mind. She held out both hands and the Kraken placed something in each. She recognised the feel of the rope in her right palm, but not the hard, small, sharp-cornered thing around which her left hand closed.
Another command said Go, so she lashed with her tail and rose, hauling the sleds behind her. They came so easily that she supposed that the Kraken had loosed all the ropes and sent her back with the sleds empty, but when light began to glimmer round her and she could look back, she saw that the lovers’ bodies were still there. The woman’s hair was floating loose, so the Kraken had taken even the little mother-of-pearl combs that had held it in place.
Then the scouts, patrolling the edge of darkness, found her. Conches called, and the blue-fin came surging down, driven so hard that the cavity bubbles streamed in their wake. Hands took the rope from hers, her father grasped her in one arm and wheeled his blue-fin and surged with her up into the warm and golden waters where she belonged. From there the funeral party rode hallooing home, and the mountain emptied to greet them.
They dreamed of green shadowy light, of wave-lap, of half-heard voices. Their heartbeats quickened.
Ailsa gazed at the dark jewel, the Kraken’s gift. It was more than black, beyond black. It was beyond cold—that is to say that it did not feel chill to the touch, but this wasn’t because it was at the same temperature as the touching hand. Instead, contact made the hand aware of the soft warmth of living flesh, its own warmth. So with light. The jewel was faceted and polished like one of Ailsa’s jewels, but no light shone back from any of its surfaces. Instead it sucked light into itself, calling it out of other things. If she took an emerald and placed it beside the black jewel, the emerald, which before had merely refracted the light from the phosphorescent corals that roofed the room, now blazed intensely green, blazed as a star does with its own generated light.
Looking at the black jewel, Ailsa knew that it was as close as she would ever come to understanding the Kraken’s world, that world in which cold and darkness were life, and heat and light were what Councillor Hormos had called “utterly other.”
“I’m sorry about Mother’s jewels,” she said.
“They’re nothing. I thought I had given my daughter to try to save the mountain.”
They were in one of his private rooms, where they had supped together, something that she had never done alone with him before. The walls and floor were strewn with treasures. (Since merfolk do not walk, floors are as good a place as walls for pretty things.) All of them, jewels and coral and gold and mother-of-pearl and amber, seemed alive in the black jewel’s presence, sending out their different lights in answer to its call.
And not only the jewels. Ailsa picked up the Kraken’s gift and cradled it in her palm. Though it was no broader than the base of her middle finger, she could see that inside it the darkness went on for ever. Now she herself felt the same summoning call, and she answered. Answered willingly. Let something—the thing that made her Ailsa and no one else—be drawn into that darkness, let it close around her.
Yes, it went on for ever, before, behind, above, below. There was nothing else, anywhere. But it wasn’t frightening. It had shape, structure, life, meaning, not in any ways she could understand—it was too other. But she was sure they were there.
A thread of understanding wound itself into her mind. Or perhaps it was in the Kraken’s mind, and she was there too, because the thread seemed to glimmer in the darkness like the thoughts she had seen racing to and fro across the Kraken’s huge mass in the darkness beyond the limit. Once again she heard the voiceless command, Go.
She withdrew, and the darkness released her.
She was floating in her father’ private room, staring at the Kraken’s gift, while that luminous thread found its place and meaning in her mind.
“I don’t think it was me the Kraken wanted,” she said slowly. “It wasn’t the airfolk either, really. Not for themselves, I mean. It was the moment. Just before they jumped. It was . . . I don’t know. . . . They were going to die, so they took their whole lives, everything before and after, and pressed all of it into that one moment together. I saw it. I felt it. I shan’t ever forget it. And the Kraken, all that way below . . . even right down there, the Kraken felt it too, and wanted it . . .
“I suppose it’s a bit like the jewels. Jewels are about light, aren’t they? It’s what they do with light that makes them what they are. And that’s why it wanted the moment—everything it could have of it—the airfolk—what I’d seen—to tell it about life. Our kind of life, merfolk and airfolk.”
“Why should it want these things? And what gives it the right to destroy our mountain for a whim, because it has been prevented from adding some bright little object to its collection?”
“I don’t think it’s like that. Whims, I mean. I think it needed the moment. It had been waiting for something like that since . . . since . . .
“It’s because we belong in the light, us and the airfolk. And that moment . . . it was so full of light—I’ll never see anything like it again all my life. Not just sunlight and glitter . . . it was them, the way they loved each other . . . everything shone with it. . . . That’s what the Kraken wanted . . . needed . . .
“The Kraken isn’t going to die, you know. But when the sun goes cold and there’s no light left, it will have the whole world, not just the bottom of the sea. But the moment will still be there, with all the other things it’s collected ever since time began, waiting to be born again when light comes back. That’s why it needs them. . . . Yes, because it’s our . . . our dark guardian . . .
“And I don’t think it gave me this . . .”
She touched the black jewel.
“. . . just to say thank you, just to be nice to me. It gave it to me because it thought we needed it. So that we can begin to understand its darkness. How other it is.”