Lior and the Sea Read online

  It was at the end of their fourth day together that Lior was too tired to walk straight home from the sailing-master’s house and her latest battle with the woman’s slowly remitting stomach cancer. Almost blind with fatigue, she walked over to the edge of the cliff and sat on one of the big boulders that flanked the trail down to the beach. Aren came to stand silently beside her, looking at the water; and Lior wondered wearily whether she had forgotten to tell him that word, perhaps the most important of all. She waved a hand down at the shoreline, as she had waved at so many other things lately. “The Sea,” she said.

  Aren gazed at it with the expression of someone who has been away from home too long and finds all the familiar things turned strange. “I know,” he said, and looked over at her. “Aren,” he said, waving down at the water.

  “I know,” Lior said. Even through her weariness, the wonder touched her deep. “Aren,” she said on impulse. “Why? Why did you… why me?”

  He looked sorrowful. “The words...”

  “Ahh, no,” Lior said, regretting. “I’m sorry. It can wait. When you have more words—”

  “No.” He sighed. He had needed no teaching to do that; the sound was the same as that of the waves beneath them, sliding into the Gulf. “No. You—” Aren slowly smiled; for the first time the warmth in his eyes was in his voice too. “You fought. The children say it: ‘I dare you.’ You dared. Dared me.”

  “Challenged,” Lior whispered.

  “Challenged, yes. You challenged me. The first one. ‘Me against you. Just the two of us.’”

  “But I lost,” Lior said, wondering.

  “You dared,” the Sea said.

  Lior was silent while the two of them looked westward, toward where the Sun was going down into a burning bed of feathery clouds. “Aren,” Lior said at last, “this…” She reached out to touch his arm; he almost shied from her, then held still, endured the touch. “How? How did you do this?”

  He looked around him helplessly, as if searching for some one thing to point at, then gave that up; tried a few times to say something, and gave that up too. Finally he spread out his arms and looked out into endless air, like a man trying to embrace everything at once. He let his arms fall. “I asked,” he said. “Asked…”

  “The Goddess,” Lior whispered.

  “The One Who Is,” Aren said.

  Lior put her face down into her hands, caught between awe and an unclassifiable unease at something that seemed to be happening. “O my Mother,” she said, and breathed out, not knowing what to think. The gentle fingers beneath her chin, touching the softest place just under the jawbone, brought her head up again. Aren looked at her out of silvershot eyes, and the wind of approaching evening stirred his dark hair as the seahorse’s mane had once stirred of itself. “I need more words,” he said.

  Lior shook her head. For the first time since her childhood, she was beginning to be afraid. “So do I,” she said, and took Aren’s hand, and took him home.

  *

  They were rarely apart, the Rodmistress and the man saved from the Sea. By day he was her shadow, always just behind or alongside her; by night he would go down with Lior to her accustomed place on the beach, and there they would stay until far into the night, doing no one knew what. The only certainty was that Lior never took her Rod with her anymore. The two of them would go to communal suppers and business meetings together, and Aren was still usually silent, except for one supper that turned first into a drinking match and then into a songfest. Lior watched and listened in a warm haze of wine as her townspeople sang one raunchy sea chantey after another, and she smiled when the inebriated sailing-master pushed the lute into Aren’s hands. He didn’t know what to do with it, but the look in his eyes drew a silence about him; and when it was fullest he raised his voice and began to sing, unaccompanied, in a raspy, warm-timbred tenor. His singing was a wordless music, and one the townspeople had never heard. But Lior saw tears brightening in their eyes just as they did in hers—the bells of Entellen sang as poignantly through Aren’s throat as they had across the water. She heard the waves shifting under the seahorse’s feet again, saw the moonlight on the glittering spires… and his voice dwindled and faded, and the dream was gone. So was Aren, through a door left standing open. Lior went after him.

  She found him on the beach, sitting with his back against a boulder. Lior sat down beside him, and waited, as she had waited on so many other nights.

  “Entellen,” he said after a long while, his hushed voice running together with the waves’ whisper. “Did you like it?”

  “Like it?” Lior tried to find words and finally shook her head. The light, the sound, the stolen glimpse of an ethereal otherness that no one of her world was really ever supposed to see... “It was beautiful,” she said finally, though the word was pitifully inadequate.

  “It was hard knowing if you liked it,” Aren said, speaking slowly to be sure of getting the words right. “The anye, the seahorse—”

  “You were beautiful too.”

  Aren looked at her with grave wonderment. “I was?... I meant to say that that body—well, yes, I wanted—for it to be beautiful, so that you would—” He faltered. “To please you. And that form had power. I could show you my world. But the—the brain of the seahorse does not hear feelings, or make them. They are—were inside but could not come out. And in another, I could not tell—not know—”

  “I could tell, a little,” Lior said. “Your eyes, they—” Now it was her turn to falter. “I saw.”

  Aren put his head down on his drawn-up knees for a moment. “So… another answer was needed. I found it by accident. Sometimes people go up onto high places and cast themselves down into my waters to die. I have never understood it. But this one… had just slipped out of what I wear now when I found it, and saved it.” He breathed a long breath out, closed his eyes. “There is no power in this form, not as I had before. There are words, the names, the feelings ... but still this is hard. She told me it would be.”

  “She…”

  He nodded. “She said She does it all the time. The everything—infinity?—poured into one place, one thing, closed up. Finite. And not eternal, but in flesh that can die. She said that infinity is not interesting unless it is—enclosed. I did not know ‘interesting’—but I knew, knew what I wanted—and so She taught me. But She is infinite, and though I am very big, I am still only finite. This makes it harder, She said. I was sick; there was too much of me.”

  “But you’re—you’re out there—”

  Aren lifted his head, reached out to touch her arm. “You are there sitting, but you are more than this, the—enclosure. Where is what makes Lior Lior? Destroy the enclosure, and Lior endures. The inner—the—”

  “The soul—”

  “The soul.” Aren nodded. “Men’s souls walk my waters, I see them sometimes in the night; but their bodies are elsewhere, they work by themselves until their souls return to them again. My—body works, the same way. My soul—” He looked at his two hands, slid them down his shins, and rested his head on his knees once more. “It is hard. We can talk, but it is hard…”

  More strongly than ever Lior felt that combination of awed wonder and discomfort at being swept up by something beyond her control. But her friend’s pain hurt her too. “What’s hard?” she said, afraid but unable not to ask the question. “Aren, let me help…”

  He made a sound so perfectly balanced between a laugh and a sob that Lior couldn’t tell what to do. “Just that. Who asks the waves what troubles them, who asks the Sea to let them help? You only—ever thought yourself my equal, without threatening... I heard the children say the words, but they were—practicing, they played. And now I must say them and without the practice.” He lifted his head. “O Lior,” he whispered “come be with me, be my loved...”

  There it was, what Lior had been dreading, and nonetheless it took her completely by surprise. Eventually the tumult died down in her head, and she found enough breath and composure to speak.
“If—if two people live together as lovers,” she said, retreating desperately into theory, “they usually give one another something, and take something from each other. What would I have to give you?”

  “An equal,” Aren said, his voice full of longing. “One who dares.”

  “And what would you give me?”

  He reached out to take her hands in his, a child’s gesture, shy and fragile. “Some of it you have seen,” he said, so quietly that she could hardly hear him over the waves. “The rest—I think I can show you, but—but you would have to come into me, far in, all the way—and for that I think you would have to give me your inner Name.”

  Lior was surprised not to feel herself go pale with shock at the very suggestion. Too much was happening, too fast.

  “For me to come that far in,” she said, “I think you would have to give me yours.”

  He hesitated no more than a heartbeat. He gave her his Name; and for as long as it took him to say it, the air went silent as the waves stopped in mid-motion. When he was done, the breakers finished falling and crept up the beach again, but to Lior they sounded terribly subdued.

  “I could never have hurt you again anyway,” Aren said, sounding subdued himself. “But now you know it.”

  Lior trembled. She did not have to go through with this. She could back out. And she now had such power as no one had ever had. She knew the inner Name of the Sea. She could bind it, control it—

  I had power already.

  But there’s more to life than power.

  Oh Goddess, have I gone mad?

  Her world was shattering around her under the onslaught of Aren’s terrifying trust. Suddenly she had everything to lose, and nothing was safe. The image of that first wave rose up in her mind, towering, leaning, about to fall—

  She met the silvery eyes with her own, and gave Aren her Name; and her terror, hearing itself named at last, rose up and blinded her.

  Aren bowed his head into her hands and showed her what he would give.

  *

  It started as a silence that began to reach all through Lior, like some dark new blood. Sinuous and gentle, it sighed through her thought, darkening it like smoke, drowning the light of her self. Black, all black; like the seahorse, like the depths of the Ureistine, unrelieved darkness.

  And suddenly, light above the darkness, as in the vision of worldbirth that the Indweller had shown them; silver light, of starlight and moonlight, of bright day on beaches that shone. There was always light above, so that the darkness came in shades: the drowned dusk-green of Sonacharre, or the lucent crystal blue of water in places where summer never left the shores; golden and crimson evening seas ablaze with wildfire sunsets; glass-brown waters, glowing green, burning silver, white; she was all of them at once. Lior stretched languidly into the colors that were her, shone under the Sun, shrugged spray-borne rainbows about her shoulders. The Moon pulled at her back; she arched like a cat under its caress, let it stroke her toward it—the Goddess’s hand, touching her in the softest place… constant lover, never quite in reach but never out of sight.

  Feelings. Touching everything, everywhere. Sand smooth as skin, modeling itself silkily to her whim everywhere she brushed it; the bright razors of coral, dividing herself from herself a million million times, the sensation both exquisitely painful and fascinating; cracked rocks, blunt boulders, sunk deep and motionless as buried memories. Ages of silent gliding about sunken isles and those not raised yet, threading herself through wreck and undersea cave and sliding, stroking weed. Crushed in her own depths, weightless in her own shallows; outflung forever, meeting herself and embracing everything—coastlines, continents, the hot heart of the world— all within her, covered, encompassed, surrounded. Hers.

  And life, all the lives, her lives—from the tiniest mindless light-eaters of the upper waters to the great complex minds of whales and the unfathomable beings of the boiling dark… all open to her to share, to be, to be within. Quick bright schools of silver fish, zigzagging like random thoughts: the long leisurely dances of the great whales, arguments in a stately philosophy of doctrine and doubt; dolphin-song, tender and fiery, and the unceasing bass mantra of giant kelp; death-wishes sliding through her on silent sharkfins, dreaming in a dim mist of blood all their lives. A huge millionfold consciousness that never really changed, though birth and death made it new every second. . . .

  And him, of course. Oh, not a “him” truly, but the Sea’s own self, its soul and being. Intelligent, as any life will become with time when so many pathways for thought are bound together by one shared system—and until now, despite the hugeness and complexity of that system, all alone. But no more, if she would become part of it. Nor would she ever be alone again, ever lack for another who touched, cherished, loved. He would always be there; the vast eternal self that had poured itself into this little shape, crippled, finite. For her.

  For her.

  She found herself staring dumbly down at his head, still bowed into her hands. She was still trembling. So was he. “All that,” he said. “And more. This shape—some of the thoughts still will not come through. But more. And forever; for as long as there is a Sea. While I am, you would be too.”

  She struggled for breath. It seemed odd, not breathing water—not being water. “My Name,” Lior said, “my heart— you know mine, now, as I know yours. My faults, my failings. But you would, would still—”

  “Forever,” he said.

  Some fire that was not blue ran under her skin, yet cold sweat stood out on her, and she felt pale and frail as grass withered in the blast of day. Surely this was what death was like—

  “I would even— There is a sharing,” Aren said very low, and then had to swallow and start again. “The children— they said there was a special sharing; one person with another. They did not know much about it yet. They said I would find out when I grew up.”

  For the first time in her life, Lior felt herself begin to fill with tears that were not of sorrow. It hurt incredibly, as the first use of her Fire had hurt; and she would not have traded the sweet pain for all the comforts of the world. Very gently she turned Aren’s face up toward hers. Tears were running from the silvery eyes. Slowly and carefully she touched them away, one by one, blind to the blurring of her own vision; and at last, “I think,” she said, “I can help you with that.”

  *

  “Tell me something.”

  “Anything.”

  “Why did you run away that last time you were the seahorse?’’

  “Well ... as I told you, that body was not well suited to why I wanted to be with you. It could not well share your joy—or tell you mine. That was a pain to you; so it had to stop. And besides, you were thinking that night of spells and their breaking. And if by some wild chance you had broken it, then I would have had all that work to do again—getting all of me into so small a space from full size. But tell me something.”

  “Anything.”

  “Why were you so eager to break my spell?”

  “Huh? That’s what Rodmistresses do. Free the bound—”

  “So I hear. But if I had been some poor enchanted person, and you had set me free, soon enough you would have been alone again.”

  “Uh…”

  “Is it that you would rather be alone?”

  “It would have been the right thing to do.”

  “The Inhospitable, down in Sonacharre, bound to that stone… doubtless he brought that on himself, and the sentence passed on him was just: the right thing to do. But still sometimes I feel sorry for him. Has no one ever felt sorry for Lior? Not even herself? Who breaks your spells, dear heart?”

  No answer.

  “Now I think I see what you saw in me before. Your voice has gone dumb, but your eyes speak. Lior… Loved, let me help…”

  The sound of sobbing, a soul’s veil tearing from top to bottom. “Aren—no one ever, ever said that to me—”

  “Here, then. Here. No, don’t turn away. Goddess and Mother, look at her; she�
��s afraid to get me wet! Little one, it’s all right, I’m here. She only knows what kept me so long. If I’d known about this, I might have been here sooner. ...”

  “Aren!”

  “What? Am I not supposed to do that when you’re crying? How about this?”

  A brief silence. “No... I suppose I’ll let you do that.”

  “So you said the last time.”

  “Mmm… how many times is that?”

  “Crying? Six.” And sudden laughter.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I have just figured it out. You know what you look like?”

  “Huh?”

  “When you’re crying. A blowfish. You go this way—”

  “Why, you—!”

  Much more strangled laughter, tussling and rustling and an abrupt thump.

  “Aren? Aren? You all right?”

  “Uh, yes. The floor—is a bit harder than I am, that’s all.”

  “Revenge! But I bet that’s a problem you never had before.”

  “What? Revenge?”

  “No, falling out of your bed.”

  “Mph—” More rustling. “It’s dangerous business to mock me, mortal woman.”

  “Oh? And what are you going to do about it?”

  “This.”

  No answer, at least none in words.

  “Revenge is a two-handed game ... my loved.”

  “Aren.”

  They began again to weave that sweetest stillness, the one wrought of swift breath and silence and closed eyes and one another’s Names; and outside, at the bottom of the cliff, the tide ran high.

  *

  They walked through their days and spent their nights with their arms about each other, no longer the shadow and the shadowed, but shining in each other’s light like Sea and sky. Aren learned about sunburn, and why it’s wise to use a blanket when making love on the beach, and about the grateful, not-quite-believing way Lior’s lips would curve when he told her she was beautiful. Lior learned another reason to love the Goddess as Queen of Night, discovering that night is mother not only of dreams but of desire. She learned that there was no need any more for her mind to fill frantically with thoughts when a silence fell, and her meditations became such in truth rather than distractions to keep herself from noticing how alone she was. In her heart the silver day danced with Aren’s warm darkness that underlay it, parting never—but sometimes she would stop that thought, not knowing why. Her life seemed to have flowered into the climax of a fairy tale, prince and princess in each other’s arms at last, surrounded by a bright haze of rejoicing. If there was something Lior had chosen to forget, it was that “happily ever after” often means the storyteller is about to go home.