Water Read Free

was
    strange. She told them her name, but they could not say it, nor she theirs. Instead they sang, not
    opening their mouths but humming with closed lips. You have often heard me humming the song
    of the sea-people.”
    “This one?” said Pitiable, and hummed the slow, wavering tune that she had heard so often.
    Mercy joined her, and they hummed it together, their voices twining like ripples in water. When
    they finished, Mercy smiled.
    “That is how I used to sing it with my own mother,” she said. “And then with yours. It needs two
    voices, or three. So Charity sang it with the sea-children in their cave, and they hummed the
    tunes she taught them, The Old Hundredth and Mount Ephraim and such, so that they should be
    able to praise their Creator beneath the waves. So as the days went by a kind of friendship grew,
    and then she saw that they began to be troubled by what they had done. At first, she supposed,
    she had seemed no more than a kind of toy, or amusement, for them, a thing with which they
    could do as they chose, like the shining fish. Now they were learning that this was not so.
    “They made signs to her, which she did not understand, but supposed them to be trying to
    comfort her, so she signed to them that she wished to return to her own people, but they in their
    turn frowned and shook their heads, until she went to the place where the shining fish was
    trapped and started to take down the wall they had built. They stopped her, angrily, but she
    pointed to the fish as it sought to escape through the gap she had made, and then at herself, and at
    the Avails that held her, and made swimming motions with her arms, though she could not swim.
    They looked at each other, more troubled than before, and argued for a while in their own
    language, the one trying to persuade the other, though she could see that both were afraid. In the
    end they left her.
    “She sat a long while, waiting, until there was a stirring in the water that told her that some large
    creature was moving below the surface. She backed away as it broke into the air. It was a man, a
    huge, pale man of the sea-people. If he had had legs to walk upon, he would have stood as tall as
    two grown men. She could feel the man’s anger as he gazed at her, but she said the Lord’s Prayer
    in her mind and with her palms together walked down to the water’s edge and stood before him,
    waiting to see what he would do.
    “Still he stared, furious and cold. She thought to herself and closed her lips and started to hum
    the music the sea-children had taught her, until he put up his hand and stopped her. He spoke a
    few words of command and left
    “She waited. Twice he came back, bringing stuff from the wreck, spars and canvas and rope,
    which he then worked on, in and out of the water, making what seemed to be a kind of tent
    which he held clear of the water and then dragged back in, with air caught inside it, so that it
    floated high. He then buoyed it down with boulders to drag it under. He took it away and came
    back and—worked on it some more, and then returned, having, she supposed, tried it out and
    been satisfied. Meanwhile she had gathered up her own clothes and wrapped them tightly in
    oilskin, and stripped off the ones she was wearing, down to the slip, and tied her bundle to her
    waist
    “When he was ready, the man, being unwilling himself to come ashore, signalled to her to break
    down the Avail that held the shining fish, which she did, and it swam gladly away. So in utter
    darkness she walked down into the water, where the man lifted his tent over her and placed her
    hands upon a spar that he had lashed across it for her to hold and towed her away, with her head
    still in the air that he had caught within the canvas and her body trailing in the water. She felt the
    structure jar and scrape as he towed it through the opening and out into the sea. By the time they
    broke the surface, the air had leaked almost away, but he lifted the tent