Xulai turned toward him and met the eyes of a dolphin, head and body tilted in the water so it could see her better.
It warbled, in Tingawan, “Is this your drylander daughter, Sea King?”
“It is,” he rumbled.
“Swim well and swiftly, sea daughter,” said the dolphin. “I will tell my people.”
“He speaks our language,” she murmured, watching it swim away. There was something strangely fringed about the flippers. Were those fingers at the edges?
“Those of us Sea People who speak, speak a language we have chosen to speak. We have our own languages as well, but we chose a simplified Tingawan to become the language of the sea. Dryland Tingawan has many more words than are strictly necessary. We are not writing a thesis here. We seek only to communicate!”
Across the bulk of him she saw something very strange. It looked like, it seemed to be . . . “What is that?” she asked, pointing with several tentacles.
He laughed, that deep, interior gurgle. “That is the dolphin’s joke. They said, because I am a king, I must have a castle. The corals grew it for them. Corals don’t talk; I don’t know how the dolphins told the corals what to do, but they grew me a castle! The dolphins had seen castles, here and there, where men live near the coast. When they had built it, the eels liked it very much, so they moved in. So, the Sea King has a castle full of eels.”
It was true; the place crawled with them. It actually seemed that one huge eel went up the entire height of the structure, and she had to stare for a moment to realize it was actually a tail at the bottom, several middles of eels at various places in between, and one quite large head at the top.
“I suppose everyone in the sea knows about it,” she said. “Your castle?”
“I suppose,” he said.
“There are people, refugees,” she said. “They say they are refugees from you, Sea King. They live on the great cliff of the highlands of Ghastain. Each of them wears an earring, a tower with what I thought was a snake winding through it.”
“I know. If you look very closely at what they wear, there is a little line of waves at the very top, hardly visible. That tells you the crest is an underwater tower with an eel wound through it. Those people are not refugees from me, Daughter. They take refuge from the sea. Their islands have been drowned, but I did not drown them. They are partly Tingawan, but the islanders have a different culture, a different language. We, Clan Do-Lok and I, asked them to settle there, to be an army, if we ever need an army. Some of our best geneticists are among them. They keep us informed of what is happening. They send messages to Wellsport and the dolphins bring them to Tingawa. They tell us who goes where. We offered them sea eggs in exchange for their help.”
“But there were no sea eggs then.”
“They know that. They live in hope, as we do. The Duchess of Altamont amuses—that is, amused herself with them, or they with her. They have sent messages to tell us she is dead, her mother the queen is dead. King Gahls is alone now. He is not an intelligent man. He will go on having parades while the water rises.”
“Gahls is not alone enough,” she replied. “Rancitor is Mirami’s son. He has evil blood. I’m sure the Tingawans know that. He must not become king.”
He shrugged enormously. “Forget it for a time. For this little time, simply enjoy the sea.”
He went to the castle and she turned aside to admire a marvelous fish. When she turned back, the Sea King had disappeared.
He did not reappear. Disoriented, she turned, turned again, finally called out. “Sea King!” She was looking at the last place she had seen him. And he emerged, there, from the background, laughing at her.
“How did you do that?”
“How did you do it? When you became a little child?”
“Precious Wind told you! I never knew how I did it.”
“You took the color of the thing you wished to be, the color of the background.”
“I was wearing clothes!”
“When you change, you are like water. You can leak through your clothes, tiny bits of you, like needles, holding the color of your background. I cannot do that, but then, I don’t have to.”
“You planned that!”
He laughed. “It was totally unforeseen. Precious Wind said you had done it. It took us a long, long time to figure out how.”
Precious Wind knew about it. Well, let it be; she did not really believe it. It had surprised her at the time, but it had felt much more like a mental thing to her, something she did with her mind, not her body.
Together they explored the coral-flowered, fish-gemmed castle, from its laughably porous dungeons at the bottom to its towers just below the water’s surface, one of which held a flagpole that waved a tiny red seaweed pennant. It was tenanted by great numbers of the Sea King’s children, safe from the eels because they did not taste good. After a time—short or long, she didn’t know—he reached out a tentacle and together they moved back toward the beach. Once there he thrust her toward the sand and moved away. “Change back.” It was only a whisper, but it was a command.
And she did, as she crawled onto the sand. Her head had not split, it had merely become flexible. Bits of skull joined together. Starting at the neck, her body came together and buttoned itself up like a long shirt and pair of trousers, though her real shirt and trousers lay on the sand where she had slipped out of them on her way into the ocean. All the little bits of bone slipped together like the oddly shaped pieces of those sawn puzzles Bear had made for her when she
