CHAPTER FIVE Down #2
Everything had been said already. We’d been through all of it in the small hours, the practical things, where the money is, if I’m not back by, in the flat voices two people use once they’ve agreed not to make a scene.
There was nothing left that would survive being said on a beach with three strangers looking on.
So he took my hand and turned it palm up and pressed his thumb into the middle of it, once, hard. He meant it to hurt a bit.
“That’s so you’ve something to think about.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It is, yes.” His voice was perfectly steady. His eyes weren’t. “Go on.”
? ? ?
Kael walked me out along the reef to the deep end, where the black ribs drop away into six or seven feet even at low slack and the water lies dark and glassy and lifts, very slightly, like something asleep.
“Now. You’ll have questions. I’ll answer two.”
“Will it hurt?”
“No. Stupid question, and I’m glad you’ve got it out of your system.” He crouched and laid a hand on the water, flat, palm down, like a man testing a bath he disapproved of. “Second.”
I looked at the water. Six feet of it, then the shelf, then a hundred and ninety fathoms of nothing, and then a place.
“How far down?”
“Far.” He stood up. “That’s the honest answer and I shan’t dress it up.
There’s nothing gradual about it, madam.
You won’t paddle about getting used to it.
You’ll go down at the speed we go down, which isn’t a speed people go down at, and you’ll want to stop, and you won’t be able to.
The wanting lasts about forty seconds. Then it goes and doesn’t come back. ”
“That’s not an answer. That’s a warning.”
“It’s both. Most things are. In you get.”
? ? ?
Here’s what I hadn’t allowed for.
I’d been in that water four hundred times. I learned to swim in that cove. Samuel threw me off that reef when I was six and our father hit him for it, and I thought it was the finest thing that had ever happened to me.
I stepped off the black rock into water I’ve known my whole life, and it took me the way a hand takes a glove.
It wasn’t cold. Nobody will believe that part.
October, the north coast, water that would kill a Duskmere man inside twenty minutes, and it closed over my head and it was nothing at all, neither warm nor cold, the temperature of the inside of your own mouth.
Being wet simply stopped. What was left was a sort of suspension, the held instant at the top of a swing before it drops.
I opened my mouth and let it in, and my lungs took it with no more fuss than a room takes air.
Above me, small and silver and rocking, was the underside of the surface with the morning on it, and Elias’s shape on the shingle, broken up and wobbling and already going strange.
Then Kael set one hand flat between my shoulder blades and pushed, and the bottom fell out of everything.
? ? ?
Forty seconds, he’d said.
It was longer than that. It was worse than he’d made it sound, and I’d not have come through it without that hand.
The light goes first, and it goes in bands, and you can see the edges of the bands.
Green for an age, everything green, my own hands green, Threnn’s grey cloak gone green and streaming out behind her.
Then blue with no green left in it, a blue that goes on and on until you’re sure it has to be the last. Then a blue that’s nearly violet, and by then there’s nothing above you.
No surface, no hint of one. No up, except that your body keeps insisting on it.
Then colour stops. Black is a colour, and this wasn’t black. This was absence. My eyes kept working and nothing came into them, and my mind did something frantic and made-up to fill the gap, so that for a while I was looking at my own kitchen, and the pike in the Crown’s passage, and Samuel’s face.
That was the forty seconds. Somewhere in them I fought. I remember my hand hitting something, and Kael’s grip moving to the scruff of my neck, the way a woman carries a cat.
The pressure came on about then. It didn’t crush. It gathered, slow and immense, from every side at once, closing on me like a fist with all the time in the world, and I knew, perfectly clearly and without any panic, that this was what would kill Elias.
Then it eased. Some wall in me gave and let it in, and I was through.
? ? ?
The first light from below was so faint I thought I’d made it up again.
It came up, not down, which the mind refuses for a good while. A dim blue-gold wash from somewhere under my feet, spreading and sharpening, and as we fell towards it the water round me started filling with shapes.
Kelp first. Only it wasn’t kelp, or not any kelp I knew: a forest of stalks two hundred feet tall, rising out of the glow and swaying together in a swell so slow it took ten seconds to pass through them.
Then fish, a column of them, silver, thousands, streaming up past us like ash off a bonfire and parting round the four of us so that not one touched me.
And below the kelp tops, laid over the floor of the world as far as the light went in any direction, there were lights.
They weren’t torches, or windows. The whole seabed glowed in patches and lines, blue and gold and a deep rose I had no word for, and the shapes weren’t random. Long curving avenues. Great slow spirals. Clusters, and gaps between them, in a pattern too big to take in from any one place.
Somewhere in all that I stopped struggling and hung in Kael’s grip with my mouth open, taking water in and letting it out, which was what breathing had turned into.
Threnn drifted down beside me and said something. Down there a voice doesn’t come through the air. It arrives in your chest, low and blurred, and you understand it the way you understand someone talking in the next room when you already know what they’re going to say.
Look left.
I looked left.
And out of the dark at the edge of everything, hanging over the glow with its towers climbing up into the black, drowned and lit and enormous and past any doubt a city, was the place my mother was born.