CHAPTER 21
Companions
What surprised Rigg was how quickly it faded, the emotion he first felt in his father’s embrace. It was pleasing, of course, that the man was so moved to see him. But while Rigg had longed for a father’s affection, this was not the father from whom he had wanted it. The man he knew by that name had been unaffectionate and demanding, but he was also brilliantly intelligent, difficult but not impossible to please, and full of knowledge and wisdom about every aspect of the world. For months at a time, Rigg had had that father’s undivided attention, had lived in constant dialogue with him.
Knosso had Rigg’s face, but who was he, who had he ever been in Rigg’s life? His presence here was the answer to some interesting questions from Rigg’s time in Flacommo’s house. There would be much to talk about. But for Rigg, that was all he could ever be. A resource, a person of interest. The lost opportunity of childhood was still out of reach. Rigg could go backward in time, but not in age. He was too old to need the sort of fatherhood that Knosso’s arms were promising.
The embrace ended. Knosso held him at arm’s length, to look at him again. It made Rigg feel uncomfortable, fearing just a little that the quick fading of Rigg’s affection might be visible in his face.
“Here’s your old apprentice Olivenko,” said Rigg, turning to include the scholar-soldier in their conversation.
Olivenko came forward, but not with his usual bold stride. He was diffident, almost shy. “Sir,” he said.
“Olivenko!” cried Knosso, shaking his hand, gripping his shoulder. “My companion in study, my fetcher of books and hearer of questions! What kind of scholar did you become?”
“No scholar at all,” said Olivenko. “The library thought I had been too close to a certain runaway king.”
“So I ruined your career after all,” said Knosso, “just by being myself.”
“I took a different path is all,” said Olivenko. “The city guard didn’t mind that I already knew my way around the library and could speak to members of the highest social classes. It made me useful as a sort of soldier.”
“Then we have much to talk about, my friend—may I call you my friend, now that you’re a man grown? I’ve found the answers to so many questions, and then so many more questions beyond those. And as you can see, I’ve found my way to a life under the sea, in a world far larger and lovelier than anything our poor folk of Ramfold ever made for themselves ashore.”
Then Knosso turned—as kings must always turn, when surrounded by courtiers—to see who else had come to greet him on the beach.
“You must be Umbo,” said Knosso. “Our landsman told me you were my son’s true friend and fellow time- shifter.”
Landsman, thought Rigg. The Larfolders’ term for their expendable, apparently. Larex, the Odinfolders had called him.
Umbo tried an awkward bow, but Knosso laughed. “I’m no king here, my boy, and there’s no bowing. What would a bow mean underwater? There we swim below the one we wish to honor, and turn our faces upward. But we have no kings in our sea. I had to explain the term to them, when I first arrived. It was strange, that I knew their language, which I had never heard before, and yet they did not know a word of mine.”
“The Wall gives us languages, Father,” said Param.
“So I guessed, my dear, although I could not fathom
“You know Vadesh?” asked Rigg.
“
“To us, it looked as if you had drowned,” said Olivenko. “Murdered by some faceless water creatures.”
“Faceless,” said Knosso. He walked to the Larfolders clustered around the original group of three women and called out to them in their language—which Rigg understood quite easily now. “Show him what ‘faceless’ looks like!”
At once the mantles of all the Larfolders rose up from their backs around their heads, at first like collars, then cowls, and finally down over their faces like a prisoner’s hood. But then, as if they had been sucked inward, the mantles clung tightly to the bones of their faces. There were no features then, except a slight protuberance over the nose and a hollowness where the eyes should be.
In a moment, though, a new pair of large round eyes sprouted on both sides of every head, at the temples, and where the ears had been, the slits of gills opened up. And at the mouth, a gaping toothy hole opened, the lips puckering and unpuckering like those of little fishes, rather than the gash of a shark’s mouth.
“Those are the creatures that I saw,” said Olivenko, almost laughing in relief. “Not monsters at all.”
“Monsters indeed,” murmured Param.
After only a moment of display, the eyes and gills and mouth dissolved into the skin again, the mantle unclung and rose back over the head and then slacked down the back.
Rigg was fascinated and horrified. What a perfect adaptation to the sea, yet how inhuman.
“The creature must have evolved to fit a very different creature, native to Garden,” said Rigg, “and it was only making do with animals from Earth. The people who arrived to colonize were merely the next in line.”
“They thought it was dangerous at first, I imagine,” said Loaf.
“Let others tell it!” cried Knosso. “I know the story, but it belongs to those whose ancestors lived it, not to me. Mother Mock,” he said, addressing the leader of the women they had first met, “you and the Aunts should tell the tale.”
“And we will,” said Mother Mock. “But with so many ashore, what will we eat? And these are freshwater drinkers, without their mantles—the river is hardly fit to drink here, with all the upland silt it carries, and saltwater backwash.”
“I am Auntie Esh,” said one of the other women, “and this is Auntie Wind. She’s the talker, Auntie Wind, and she’ll tell the tale.”
“I will,” said Wind, “to any who wish to hear it. Bend your bodies to the land, my fingerlings! For you’ll be long ashore before this tale is told!”
Rigg sat down when he saw the Larfolders doing so; Knosso sat beside him on one side, and pulled Param down on the other side. She clung to her father, looking very young and vulnerable, and for the first time Rigg truly understood that she was, in fact, at least as young as he was. Not since their mother had tried to have her killed had she taken such a daughterly pose, and even then she had been trying to display toughness, independence, strength. Now, in the presence of her father, she had no toughness in her. It was as if all the fear and anxiety of the past year had been gathered up and now, by clinging to Knosso, she was finally able to let it slip away from her.
“We came as men and women to this shore,” said Auntie Wind, “borne like dust through space until we settled as river silt into these waters. In those days we did not know our Companions-in-the-waves, except as jellyfish floating on the water. We thought they were from Earth, and dangerous because of their sting. But they had no sting, and were not from Earth. Instead they waited to cling to the noses of animals that came to the river to drink, and turn them into waterbeasts. The Companions would live on their blood, and give birth into their skin; they filled them with a love of the sea, so they would never stray from Grandmother Sea.”
In their language, “grandmother” and “sea” began with the same sound; it was a lovely name.
“At first, when Companions clung to the faces of our ancestors, we panicked and tore them off, which damaged the humans deep inside, for Companions embed themselves deeply in an instant. For a long time, the humans were wary of the Companions, and tried to poison them or drive them away.
“Then came time for a great feast, of landbeasts and waterbeasts, cooked over fires, and Vadesh came for the first time, visiting from his land to the south. The Landsman and Vadesh talked then face to face, for Vadesh
