In Great Waters Read online

  “Bad place?” Henry said. These were precautions for places where sharks gathered.

  “No, Henry. But you will be quiet.”

  A few days ago Henry might have agreed without further question rather than risk provoking Allard, but he had lost his fear of this breathless man. “Why quiet?” he said.

  “You will be quiet, or you will not go outside.”

  “Will go outside. Why quiet?” Henry refused to lower his eyes. He craned his neck and gave Allard back stare for stare.

  Allard looked at him for a long moment. “I do not want anyone to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Henry, you are not a king yet.”

  “Sub-jets see king man before he be king,” Henry said. The concept would have been very difficult to express in his own language, and his vocabulary was still inadequate to handle such shifts of time, but it was an important point. “King not come from not-know-what-place today, king tomorrow. See king.”

  Allard, who had turned away, turned back. He studied his charge again, then sat down. “You are right,” he said. “But you cannot fight a king now. You are too small. And the—” He stopped, frowned, gave Henry a careful look. “Henry. If you were a king, who would you want to be king after you?”

  “No man,” Henry said. “Stay king.”

  “After you died, Henry. If you had to choose another king.”

  “Stay king, not die.” Deepsmen seldom died of old age. Sharks took them, dolphins; they lost fights.

  Allard shook his head. “When the king is old, he wants to know who the next king will be.” He said it firmly. “Who would you want to be the king after you?”

  Henry gave up on death, which he had no intention of succumbing to, and thought about it. “Deepsman,” he said. “Deepsman king talk to deepsmen, talk to landsman.”

  “Yes,” Allard said. “The kings on the land want their sons to be kings after them.”

  Henry said nothing. He had never had a father in the sea. He had seen other children’s mothers with the men, taking food from them that they brought to their children, but no man had ever shown much interest in him beyond twisting his ear if he got in the way.

  “You are not a king’s son. What would the king do if he knew you were here?”

  “King not here.”

  “He must not find out,” Allard said. “Or he will send his soldiers.” Henry reached for his staffs and raised himself as tall as he could. His head reached just above Allard’s waist. “Show me outside.”

  “You will listen to me first,” Allard said.

  “Outside!” Henry raised his voice; landsmen seemed unable to shout as loud as he could, and he’d noticed before that they tended to flinch when he yelled.

  Allard did flinch, but he didn’t step away. “You will have another lesson, and then we will go outside,” he said. “You need to understand something.”

  Henry bared his teeth: the prospect of more unreasonable demands, when outside had been so close within his grasp, was infuriating. “Outside,” he said.

  “You will listen now, or you will not go outside for a month,” Allard said.

  Henry snarled again, but behind the snarl, he was dismayed. Allard had kept him inside for so long already; months and months, as far as he could understand the term. Exactly how long a month lasted was still unclear—Allard had told him to watch the moon, but his eyesight still hadn’t cleared well enough to see much beyond a white blob in the sky—but it sounded much too long, and the prospect of another one trapped inside was sickening. He dropped his sticks and sat on the ground with a thump; his head remained defiantly turned away, but he didn’t argue any further.

  “There is a word for boys like you,” Allard said. “Bastard. Can you say it?”

  The idea of there being a word for him, not just a random name but a useful description caught Henry’s attention. “Bastard.” It wasn’t too difficult to say.

  “Good,” Allard said. He looked into the distance for a moment, seeming to gather himself.

  “Bastard,” Henry said again, trying to get his attention. He wanted his explanation, and he wanted to go outside.

  Allard inhaled, a whistling gulp of air. “Angelica’s children became the royal houses of Europe,” he said. “She had many children. And she found landsmen she wished to favour, and found them deepsmen brides, to have more children, to marry her own.”

  “Brides?” That wasn’t a word Henry had heard before; it certainly didn’t sound like anything the deepswomen did.

  “Wives.” Two words for one thing was an annoyance Henry was already used to, but he wasn’t pleased to find it applied to his own people. “There have to be children, but brothers and sisters—children with the same mother and father—cannot marry. Their children get ill, come out wrong.”

  Henry thought about that. The complexities of adult courtship had been beyond him while he lived in the sea; he’d seen the dances, the woman and man spiralling each other, crooning and trying to impress, but how they’d chosen each other in the first place was not something he’d considered. Now Allard mentioned it, he was right: brothers and sisters did not mate. Deepsmen with too many sisters would sometimes leave the tribe, go and join another.

  “Angelica’s children could not marry each other,” Allard said. “She lived a long time. The Venetians did not want her children to be princes in other countries: they did not want princes in other nations who could challenge them. But Angelica made it happen. When Venice would not agree, she went into the sea for two months and would not come back. She said that nations could have her children and grandchildren, that she would see to the breeding of deepsmen kings, if they would submit themselves to the Venetian Empire. That the Empire would be ruled by brothers, and would be strong. But that this was her will, and if her people would not submit to it, she would not protect them. She went away, and when she came back, the Venetians agreed. And she was right. She built a great empire, and while she was alive, it held together. Angelica was an extraordinary queen, there has never been a queen like her. But after she was dead, there were wars.”

  “No.” Henry did not know how to express the feeling, but the idea of Angelica being dead rather upset him. She had sounded strong, victorious. Death, as Henry had witnessed it, was a matter of defeat; strong deepsmen stayed alive.

  “There were wars, Henry. Angelica had favoured her most loyal men, chosen them to go out into the canals and—and marry with deepswomen. Their children married her children, those children were kings. But when she was gone, there was no one to choose who would have deepsmen brides and who would not. Men fought for the right, tried to take brides in secret, would not accept children born to the wrong men. There was no order without Angelica, and men killed each other, sent assassins and held battles. Nobles fought for the right to decide who would have deepsmen children and who would not, and they sent soldiers, battles on land, where the deepsmen could not help. The world grew dark, it was a terrible time.”

  This was harder to follow: landsmen tended to care about strange things, so following why they’d be angry was an uncertain business. It sounded like a power struggle, but back home such fights only happened with children that already existed. A mother might lash out at another tribeswoman who threatened her baby; fighting over children not yet born was bewildering. Possibly Allard was talking about mating fights, but the idea seemed strange: what was the point of landsmen having mating fights over deepswomen, fighting on land where the deepswomen couldn’t see them? Such a man was likely to find himself with an unconvinced mate, Henry considered, and would have endangered himself for nothing.

  “What bastard?” he said, returning to the important point.

  “I am coming to that, Henry,” Allard said. “After too many wars, the Venetian Empire started to fall. China went its own way, the Arab princes made treaties with their own tribes of deepsmen to protect their traders and would not have to do with Europe any more. We could not stay allied with pagans, no
t stay at peace with them. Christendom and the heathens—could not treat together. There were wars, wars between the faiths. We have been apart from them for centuries, we are only enemies now. But they—they do not have as many seas between them and their rivals as we do. We needed deepsmen kings. Christendom did. Europe was alone again. Europe made a law that no landsman could—marry a deepswoman. The kings we have now, they are all the children of that first century, all from Angelica’s time. A landsman is not allowed to marry a deepswoman. But those children—they were born hundreds of years ago. They—they married each other. They are too close to all being brothers and sisters now. Their children are not always strong.”

  “So, Henry fight them, be king.” The news seemed good; it was hard to see why Allard appeared so uncomfortable saying it.

  “That is the point, Henry. Sometimes—your father must have been a landsman. Nowadays, nobles do not try to take deepswomen brides. The women swim away, take their babies with them. But we have sailors, Henry, men who are on ships, on the sea for many months. Sometimes, they go into the water with the deepswomen. It is not allowed, but sometimes it happens. Then there is a child like you. A bastard. Understand, Henry, you have the body of a king, but not a king’s parents.”

  “So, fight king.” Henry still didn’t see the problem.

  “It is not allowed, Henry. A king wants his own children to be kings after him, not a bastard.”

  Henry’s heart sank. Landsmen were already proving implacable; since he’d been on land, Henry had yet to gain a single thing, beyond salt, that he really wanted. If the king’s people were anything to go by, there was no hope. Perhaps he’d spend all his life stuck in this stupid room.

  “There have been bastard kings, Henry,” Allard said.

  Henry perked up.

  “But not many. They must fight for the throne. Understand, no king wants a bastard trying to take the throne from his children. But if a bastard can get a throne and keep it, then in five years, everyone will want to marry him, marry his children. He will be healthy, you see.”

  “Bastard king now?” Henry said. Perhaps if there was one already present, he might be inclined to help them.

  “The last one was in France, a hundred years ago. Jean le Bâtard. He was very strong. There was a great war. But now the king of France is healthy, and has three sons. Jean’s children married many princes. The queen of England, even, is his great-granddaughter. That is why she is strong.”

  A hundred years was too long to think about, but Henry gathered that this Jean le Bâtard had gone. The idea that you might vanish even if you were strong was new, and horrifying.

  “Do you understand, Henry?”

  Henry twitched. That word again. He didn’t want to understand. He saw well enough what Allard was talking about. This was a leadership battle. No one welcomed a stranger, but if the stranger proved strong enough to win, everyone would want his protection. It seemed simple enough. He didn’t see why Allard was so nervous talking about it. “Henry not fight king till big and strong. King not want bastard. Yes.”

  Allard took a breath, and nodded. “That is it, Henry. So you must be quiet, and careful.”

  “Outside.” Henry’s voice was peremptory. He had listened, and put up with Allard talking about the strong dying. Allard had talked so much that Henry felt sticky, covered in words. He wanted something new, something he could see and touch, to wash them away.

  “You will be quiet,” Allard said again.

  Henry braced himself on his sticks. “Henry heard you.”

  Going outside required a journey Henry had never made before. His room was high up, and to get down, there were steps. Henry remembered the jolts as Allard had carried him up them, and now he stood at the top, facing straight-edged stone after straight-edged grey stone.

  “Use your staffs,” Allard said.

  Henry looked down. The distance would have been a few seconds’ worth of swimming, but he had learned to be wary of heights.

  Allard reached out and took Henry’s hand, placing one of the sticks on the first step down. The movement tugged Henry out of balance; his legs could flex and adjust, but they were still ill-adapted to carrying him upright. Henry snatched his hand away, dropping the stick and leaving it to rattle down the stairs. He fixed Allard with an aggressive glare, then dropped the other stick, leaving it to follow its partner down and sat, slithering one leg after another over the sharp stone ledges. His skin scraped and bruised as he descended, but he did not fall.

  The chambers he passed through to get to the door were large, but to Henry they still seemed confining: walls on all sides, ceilings, straight-sided furniture, and no better than the chamber he was used to. It was only when Allard opened the door and dazzling light flooded his eyes that the world changed.

  Light was different under the sea: grey shafts wavering at the surface, or a blue haze above that shaded down to nothing beneath. In the few moments of surfacing to breathe, there was nothing more than a quick flash, half-blinding him while he filled his lungs. But here the light had heat, the sun shone from above, and where it fell on his pallid skin, it warmed. And the fields of green stretched on and on, further than he could have seen under water, into what Allard described as “forests,” a stiff, huge gathering of plants that grew straight up, hardly moving—but then a gust of wind passed, stroking cool air over his skin, and the forest swayed, a great rustling roar unlike anything he had ever heard filling the air. The wind continued, and Henry stood, marvelling at this new thing: a current that parted around you, caressed your flesh and gave way to your solidity, not pulling you along, but whispering by. The air was weak: it carried none of his weight, gave him no help in bearing himself up or transporting himself through it, but neither could it drag him with it. It gave way before him.

  That first day, Allard stood by while Henry played in the grass. He made no attempt to stop the boy as he pulled off his clothes and rolled naked on the cool, damp ground, pressing his nose to the earth and inhaling the scent, unfamiliar but pleasant, free from the rank red undertone of so many things he encountered inside, unwashed clothes and cooked meat, the flesh of landsmen and the air of closed rooms. Henry said nothing, but tumbled on the earth, happily stretching out his limbs, while Allard stood over him and scanned the horizon with anxious, watchful eyes.

  SIX

  THE YEAR THAT followed was filled with weapons and movement. Markeley, who had previously been little more than a man who occasionally appeared to draw his wife into a side room, became a constant presence, teaching, pointing, hefting weapons into Henry’s hands and goading, goading, goading him on, forcing his tired muscles to greater efforts, his webbed fingers to grasp the heavy hilts of swords almost as long as he was.

  Allard watched the practice daily, but not continually. As Henry struggled to subdue a reeking, plunging horse unused to having a deepsman on its back, there was something in Allard’s steady stance and folded arms that reminded him of his mother, waiting with her back to him all those years ago.

  Once he had the feel of it, Henry wielded a sword without trouble. The heaviness of his body in the air was never again such a burden once he realised how the wind would part for him, and the speed at which he fell was compensated for by the speed with which a blade sliced through the air as he swung it. Markeley was bigger than him and knew tricks with the blade, but he was also slow. Though barely up to Markeley’s waist, Henry could already wrestle a weapon from an adult hand. Spears and arrows interested him more than toiling to manage a heavy shield, until Allard took away his horse and insisted he fight on the ground.

  Henry’s legs were strong when they gripped his mount or churned the water, but they were not designed to hold him upright. A long shield acted as a prop while he struck with his sword over the top of it. After six months of daily training, Henry was introduced to the manor’s armoury, and on the wall he saw something that suited him perfectly: two heavy blades mounted on either side of a thick pole, a staff that could p
rop him up until he needed to lift it and swing, standing alone for the duration of the blow.

  “What is the name of that?” he pointed.

  “Axe,” said Allard. “Not the weapon of a lord, usually.”

  “It will be mine, give it to me. It must have a longer handle.” Even though Henry was learning English rapidly, Allard was accustomed to Henry’s lack of interest in such words as “please;” but with the boy standing soldierly and deciding for himself, he made no suggestion of manners, only taking the axe off the wall and handing it to his promising young pupil.

  Winter set in, and the grass covered over with frost. Henry still insisted on going out to practice, lying in the frost as often as he could. Markeley, who was a sturdy man of few words with one eye half-closed by an old scar, would shake his head at the sight of the small figure rolling over and over, supple legs twining in the snow and heaping up drifts of white, but would say nothing, clapping his arms against the cold, and occasionally grinning to himself. The snow felt no colder to Henry than a winter sea; a sharp sensation, but not unbearable. As water melted on his skin, he felt it loosen a little; the dry flakes that formed under his clothes would soften, and his flesh would wake up, stimulated and alive. The sight of his breath pluming in the air was an endless fascination—though it was more fun to watch the breath of landsmen. They breathed so often. Markeley had shaken him the first time they had gone out in such cold, apparently worried at the long pauses between exhalations: he had looked into Henry’s black eyes with his white ones, felt for a pulse under the boy’s ear, examined his hands. Henry’s skin was still fairer by far than the pink tint of the landsmen’s, especially as Markeley’s cheeks turned scarlet in the winter air, but he felt quite well. He never got sick at all.

  The only trial that winter brought him was the fires. Great logs, smelling of the clean outdoors, were piled and set alight; the tattered, dazzling flames were a sight that horrified Henry the first time he saw them. Their motion was too quick, the heat they gave singeing; the sight of their bright, flickering forks in an indoor hearth was one that blinded him to all else around him, his eyes unable to adjust to so much light and darkness at once. The landsmen clustered to them, but Henry hung back, alone, as the others reached out their webless hands. The flutter and rush of the air around them, the crack of logs as they broke in the heat, was enough to drive him back, right to the edge of a room. Even a corner was more comfortable than a blaze.