Then Knosso turned—as kings must always turn, when surrounded by courtiers—to see who else had come to greet him on the beach.
“You must be Umbo,” said Knosso. “Our landsman told me you were my son’s true friend and fellow time-shifter.”
Landsman, thought Rigg. The Larfolders’ term for their expendable, apparently. Larex, the Odinfolders had called him.
Umbo tried an awkward bow, but Knosso laughed. “I’m no king here, my boy, and there’s no bowing. What would a bow mean underwater? There we swim below the one we wish to honor, and turn our faces upward. But we have no kings in our sea. I had to explain the term to them, when I first arrived. It was strange, that I knew their language, which I had never heard before, and yet they did not know a word of mine.”
“The Wall gives us languages, Father,” said Param.
“So I guessed, my dear, although I could not fathom how,” said Knosso. “And this one, this giant, is the innkeeper Loaf, a mighty soldier and protector. If I were a king, I’d make a lord of you for your service to my son and daughter along the way. As it is, I have to admire the ugliness of the Companion old Vadesh bred for you.”
“You know Vadesh?” asked Rigg.
“Of him, I know of him,” said Knosso. “But his only visit to Larfold came ten thousand years ago, and others must tell you of that. Meanwhile, I have to boast a little. Olivenko, my plan to cross the Wall by water turned out very well!”
“To us, it looked as if you had drowned,” said Olivenko. “Murdered by some faceless water creatures.”
“Faceless,” said Knosso. He walked to the Larfolders clustered around the original group of three women and called out to them in their language—which Rigg understood quite easily now. “Show him what ‘faceless’ looks like!”
At once the mantles of all the Larfolders rose up from their backs around their heads, at first like collars, then cowls, and finally down over their faces like a prisoner’s hood. But then, as if they had been sucked inward, the mantles clung tightly to the bones of their faces. There were no features then, except a slight protuberance over the nose and a hollowness where the eyes should be.
In a moment, though, a new pair of large round eyes sprouted on both sides of every head, at the temples, and where the ears had been, the slits of gills opened up. And at the mouth, a gaping toothy hole opened, the lips puckering and unpuckering like those of little fishes, rather than the gash of a shark’s mouth.
“Those are the creatures that I saw,” said Olivenko, almost laughing in relief. “Not monsters at all.”
“Monsters indeed,” murmured Param.
After only a moment of display, the eyes and gills and mouth dissolved into the skin again, the mantle unclung and rose back over the head and then slacked down the back.
Rigg was fascinated and horrified. What a perfect adaptation to the sea, yet how inhuman.
“The creature must have evolved to fit a very different creature, native to Garden,” said Rigg, “and it was only making do with animals from Earth. The people who arrived to colonize were merely the next in line.”
“They thought it was dangerous at first, I imagine,” said Loaf.
“Let others tell it!” cried Knosso. “I know the story, but it belongs to those whose ancestors lived it, not to me. Mother Mock,” he said, addressing the leader of the women they had first met, “you and the Aunts should tell the tale.”
“And we will,” said Mother Mock. “But with so many ashore, what will we eat? And these are freshwater drinkers, without their mantles—the river is hardly fit to drink here, with all the upland silt it carries, and saltwater backwash.”
“I am Auntie Esh,” said one of the other women, “and this is Auntie Wind. She’s the talker, Auntie Wind, and she’ll tell the tale.”
“I will,” said Wind, “to any who wish to hear it. Bend your bodies to the land, my fingerlings! For you’ll be long ashore before this tale is told!”
Rigg sat down when he saw the Larfolders doing so; Knosso sat beside him on one side, and pulled Param down on the other side. She clung to her father, looking very young and vulnerable, and for the first time Rigg truly understood that she was, in fact, at least as young as he was. Not since their mother had tried to have her killed had she taken such a daughterly pose, and even then she had been trying to display toughness, independence, strength. Now, in the presence of her father, she had no toughness in her. It was as if all the fear and anxiety of the past year had been gathered up and now, by clinging to Knosso, she was finally able to let it slip away from her.
“We came as men and women to this shore,” said Auntie Wind, “borne like dust through space until we settled as river silt into these waters. In those days we did not know our Companions-in-the-waves, except as jellyfish floating on the water. We thought they were from Earth, and dangerous because of their sting. But they had no sting, and were not from Earth. Instead they waited to cling to the noses of animals that came to the river to drink, and turn them into waterbeasts. The Companions would live on their blood, and give birth into their skin; they filled them with a love of the sea, so they would never stray from Grandmother Sea.”
In their language, “grandmother” and “sea” began with the same sound; it was a lovely name.
“At first, when Companions clung to the faces of our ancestors, we panicked and tore them off, which damaged the humans deep inside, for Companions embed themselves deeply in an instant. For a long time, the humans were wary of the Companions, and tried to poison them or drive them away.
“Then came time for a great feast, of landbeasts and waterbeasts, cooked over fires, and Vadesh came for the first time, visiting from his land to the south. The Landsman and Vadesh talked then face to face, for Vadesh wanted to show the people that the Companions were not perilous to us. ‘It is too evolved into its niche for what I want,’ said Vadesh, ‘but here by the shore you have a need for it. Why not divide your people into two, those who take them as Companions and those who don’t? That’s what I have done,’ he said to the Landsman.
“The Landsman said, ‘I forbid no one; I have neither the will nor the power to do so. Neither will I command them, though, or force them. Let them wear the Companion if they wish, and see whether they wish to live the life it makes available to them.”
From that day, there were only two who chose to wear the Companion, and it frightened the others and they shunned them. Lonely and frightened, they turned only to each other and the life under the water, where they soon mated. Do not return to land to spawn, the Companions said to them. Give birth in this place, where we can also give your children a Companion all his life.
“So the child was born, and all the humans discovered that even birth could happen underwater, and the child’s lifelong Companion peeled away from its parent and gave him gills for his first breath there in the river’s mouth. The child could swim from birth, and breathe in the water like a fish; but as he lengthened and aged, he was brought into the land of air and song and standing up, where he