“Iardu… said that he loved you.”
Indreyah halted, the webbed spikes along her spine shifting, the tiny gills on either side of her slim neck pulsingm nm'›
“Long ago, I believe he did,” she said. A wall of pink anemones waved their tentacles along the garden wall. “That is why he stole the Pearl.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jealousy,” she said. “I loved the sea… and Iardu loved me. For a while he was enough, but I could not stay away from my true love… and he would not follow me into its depths. I founded an empire here while he sat brooding on his island. At times he would come to me, always tempting me to leave my people behind and return to the sunlit world. He could never accept my marriage to the sea. My responsibilities here. He was insistent that I be his, so I banished him from the ocean… but he never forgot his obsession.”
“Is that all love is?” asked Sharadza. “Obsession?”
Indreyah caressed the sea-plants as she moved along the coral maze. “Perhaps,” she said. “You ask wise questions, Sharadza.”
“What happened? With the Pearl?”
“Iardu’s last desperate attempt,” said the Mer-Queen. “He sent Vod to steal it, knowing it was an object of worship that my people cherished above all else. Aiyaia was the Sea God’s daughter, and she made the Pearl in an age now forgotten. Iardu took the Pearl, using Vod as his hands, thinking I would come to his island and beg – or bargain – for its return.”
“And did you?”
“No,” said Indreyah. “I would not play his game. He might capture me forever with his magic if I left my own realm. So I let him keep the Sacred Pearl, for all the good it did him.”
“He told me he betrayed you…”
“So he did. Wicked, selfish Iardu. He could not shape me as he shaped the rest of the world. This he could not stand.”
“Perhaps he truly loved you,” said Sharadza.
The Mer-Queen shook her head. “True love seeks not to possess, but only to share itself.”
“What about my father? Why did he steal your Sacred Pearl for Iardu?”
“Who can say but Iardu himself? You might visit his island and ask him yourself.”
Or find him in the streets of Udurum telling stories to drunken laborers.
“I will ask him,” Sharadza told the Mer-Queen. “By the Gods of Earth and Sky, I will.”
The mer-folk brought her a great chest of stone banded with rusted iron, some relic of a sunken ship. Salt- crusted emeralds decorated the lid, and inside (said the Queen) lay the giant bones of her father. She did not have the heart or stomach to look at them. She trusted the word of the Sea-Folk on the matter. The Queen granted her a cadre of warriors to carry the chest to the shore, then it would be up to Sharadza to bring it a tthethe rest of the way home.
Indreyah offered her the hospitality of the palace for as long as she wished, but already Sharadza was growing cold in the marine depths, and she craved the fresh air and open spaces of the surface world. The Queen gave her a necklace of tourmalines and opals, dazzling in all the colors of the sea. At its center hung a fish-shaped talisman of dark jade, carved with the intricate skill of the Sea-Folk.
“This amulet will keep you safe beneath the waters,” said the Mer-Queen, “and grant you passage among the People of the Sea. And if you wear it while you sleep, we may speak together in dreams. Do you wish this?”
Sharadza nodded her assent and embraced the Queen.
“I can give you only my thanks,” she said, “and the friendship of Udurum.”
Indreyah smiled at her. “That is more than enough.”
The Sea-Folk watched, astonished, as she took the form of a golden eel, and the chest-bearers swam after her toward the upper waters. For some while they glided just beneath the surface, coming at last upon the white sands of a Stormlands beach. She was not sure exactly where, but somewhere on this same coast lay the port town of Murala.
She walked from the sea in her true form, shedding seawater like liquid sorcery. The mer-folk, eight of them in all, carried the chest onto the beach and set it gently on the sand, where its great weight sank a few fingerspans deep. The lid-stones gleamed in the sunlight, reminding Sharadza of her mother’s green eyes. The Sea-Folk said farewell in their bubbly language and dove beneath the waves.
She sat down on the wet sand, one hand on the lid of the chest-coffin, and wept. It was a clear day on the shore, and no boats or wandering villagers were around to witness her sorrow. It would not have mattered. She cried until she was done with crying. Then she stood, breathed in the crisp, salty air, and stared past the dunes toward the green plains.
At least there could be a funeral now. At least there could be a final acceptance of her lo ss. Her brothers would bear their sadness with grace. Fangodrel might not even care, or would hide his feelings in scrawled verse. Her mother had already wept enough. For her, too, this would bring a welcome closure. One final bout of grief and their lives could find a new pattern.
Why, Father? she asked the trapped bones. Why did you march off to death, believing it was the Sea Queen who tormented you? I must know the answer.
She laid her forehead upon the chest and reminded herself that Vod was an Uduru, a Giant. She was the daughter of an Uduru. Her heart pumped Uduru blood throughout her limbs.
The part is the whole…
Now she stood three times the size of a man, a full-grown Uduri Giantess. The sea wind caught up her black hair like a tangled mass of ravens’ wings. Her face was hardly changed, but her Giantess feet sank to the ankles in the sand. She lifted the massive chest onto her shoulder like a sack of flour and marched northward.
A flock of white gulls flew above, an aerial procession for the dead King’s homecoming.
16
The benevolent rains of fall gave way to the season of cruel ice-storms. The northern wind swept across the walls of New Udurum and took up residence in its frosty streets and courtyards. The branches of trees in the royal gardens were sheathed in crystal, and the brown carcasses of plants were frozen in perpetual decay. The black towers themselves took on a silvery skin, and the cobbled streets of the city became a dangerous place for men and horses to walk.
After the siege of each icy tempest, the Giants went forth along the streets breaking up the ice with bronze shovels and stamping boots. Uduru did not mind the cold of winter that kept humans huddled about the warm hearths of their houses. Even in the depths of the icy season commerce thrived, and the Central Plaza swarmed with fur-wrapped traders, vendors, and commoners. Outlying farms slept through the season, but those who stored and preserved their produce did a fine business. The smokes of the blacksmiths’ stalls mingled with the effluvia of five thousand chimneys. The city steamed in its thin mantle of ice.
Shaira watched the flow of trade from the highest window of her tower. She hated the winter and its frigid onslaught. The season reared its death-colored head each year and breathed a sea of frost across the northern world. She missed the blessed heat of the desert and the gentle shade of palm trees… the breeze of the delta and the fragrant winds blowing through the Valley of the Bull. It seemed another world, a vision that had faded centuries ago, as if it was never real. The desert was gone now, and so was her life in sunny Shar Dni.
The Queen sat alone in a padded chair, the empty bed immaculate behind her and as cold as the ice along the window’s casement. She had grown used to the absence of Vod these past months… the yawning void in her life that was once filled only by his presence. The touch of his rough fingers, the strength of his embrace. The end of these things she had learned to accept, and the constant ache that never truly left her heart.
As the frosted city bustled far below, her eyes were dry. She had gone beyond sorrow. She sat enthroned in the iron tomb of loneliness. Her children were gone, like her husband. They might all be dead. Vod was certainly
