18

The Lost Island

Luce swam blindly away that night, barely conscious of the need to stay near the shore. Her sense of the geography was a bit hazy, but she knew she’d have to swim through Bristol Bay and then around the Alaskan Peninsula and through the Aleutian Islands. That might take a few days. On the far side she’d soon be beyond the reach of the worst sea ice, but she’d also be in areas that would probably have too many humans for comfort. But Luce had a vague memory of someone telling her that there were vast forests and wild cliffs along the coast south of Anchorage. There’d probably be caves along the waterline, and she’d find one and pass the winter in solitude. It would be lonely and maybe kind of boring, but she’d have plenty of time to practice her singing, and in a few months she’d swim home again.

Dorian would wait for her. He loved her no matter what. The fact that they could love each other in spite of everything that stood between them proved that anything was possible. The important thing was to remember that so that she could face the long, dark months ahead bravely and not crack up somehow.

She skimmed along below the surface with the dark shore to her left. Her thoughts were so full of Dorian that she barely saw the clouds of silvery fish or the dipping seals, and hours passed in darkness. She felt nothing but the sinuous movements of her own swimming. It must have been morning when she finally stopped to rest somewhere along the peninsula. The coast was low and grassy and she couldn’t find a cave, but the beach where she finally stretched out seemed isolated enough that humans probably wouldn’t discover her there. Her tail fanned through the water, and her head rested on a patch of grayish sand.

Luce slept and woke with her whole body aching, convinced in the first few moments that Dorian was sleeping beside her and that he was somehow perfectly comfortable halfsubmerged in the Bering Sea. Then she realized how alone she was, and she shivered. She didn’t even have his jacket to nestle in.

And, she suddenly remembered, there were still half a dozen of his library books stacked on a rock in her cave.

***

The constant bluish dimness made it hard to guess the time. Luce looked out on an inky sky and thrashing waves as she ate mussels and braced herself for the onward journey. The pack ice was thinner down here at least, and there was no nilas clinging to the shoreline. Her muscles were so sore that she was reluctant to face another long night of swimming, but this beach obviously wasn’t a good place to stay for long. It was too open. If she hadn’t been so exhausted she never would have stopped here at all.

The wind yowled and battered the stunted trees behind her. Luce pulled herself together and swam on, forcing herself to keep a steady pace for hours through the growing twist and push of the water. At first she tried to hug the shore, but as she went on the increasingly powerful currents threatened to overwhelm her. One towering wave caught her off-guard, swinging her high up through a blur of gray mist and then hurling her against the stone beach. For a few seconds she rolled, battered and confused, with her tail exposed and blasted by the stinging wind. She was only bruised, and she slipped back to sea on the next breaker that rolled in, but she couldn’t escape the realization that she could easily be stranded beyond the reach of the water next time.

Luce drove herself through the heavy currents, heading into deeper waters. She didn’t want to accept the possibility that a severe storm was gathering, but by the time the Alaskan Peninsula began to break into distinct, sharply peaked islands with huge slablike breakers rolling between them, it was becoming unmistakable. The only islands she could see had low, flat shores buffeted by the violent waves; there were no crags or caves where she could wait out the storm in safety.

She looked around hopelessly. At the bottom of each swell she could see nothing but sculpted walls of black water and whorls of bright foam. It was only as each wave lifted her that she could even glimpse those unwelcoming islands and the dark vacancy between them that might offer a way through to the other side. A few ice floes darted and pitched around her, and she had to dive abruptly to keep from being brained.

Luce sighed wearily and went on. There was no telling how long it would be before she could rest, though her tail muscles burned and her head swung heavily with the urge to sleep. The wind screamed as she surfaced again, and she strained to force her way against the current that seethed between the two islands in front of her. Billows of snow were falling, hissing like embers as they met the waves. Luce began to sing, trying to call a countercurrent the way she’d done before. If she could just make her way between those islands she might have a better chance of finding shelter.

The song-current came at her call, but this time it wasn’t strong enough. The thrust of the water was still carrying her backwards, and the towering waves lifted and dropped her again and again. Each time the blow would knock all the breath from her lungs, and her voice would die until she could manage to reach the surface and seize another quick inhalation. Luce realized she’d never seen a storm like this before. It was fierce and unyielding, intolerant of any effort she could make to fight it.

An ice floe pitched at her so suddenly that she had no time to duck out of its path. With a sudden instinctive lunge Luce threw herself on top of the white coarse surface instead, almost skidding straight off its far side before she managed to get a grip on the jagged edges. The floe was longer than her body and roughly triangular, tapering to an end narrow enough that she could wrap her arms partway around it. She gasped in relief. Wildly as the floe bucked, harsh and dizzying as it was to ride it like a raft, it was still wonderful to stop struggling with the water. She let her tail go limp, let her fins flop over the brink. Shooting stars of pain coursed through her muscles, and she felt herself shuddering from sheer exhaustion.

So many waves were crashing over her that there was no chance her tail would dry out, at least. She pressed her cheek against the ice and accepted that the storm was stronger than she was. It was senseless to pretend she could fight it, and she closed her eyes and surrendered.

Luce clung hard to her ice floe as it lurched on wildly through frothing darkness that could be either night or day. She had no idea where she was going.

***

Again and again Luce drifted into a murky half-sleep, only to catch herself with a jolt as she began to slip from the ice floe that carried her. Sliding into these black, mountain-steep waves would probably kill her. She was so exhausted that she didn’t think she’d be able to keep swimming long before her strength gave out and she sank weakly to impossible depths. Sometimes at the top of a tall surge she’d take advantage of the height by quickly scanning the horizon, but she couldn’t see land anywhere. Nothing but the rollicking waves, the flying gouts of foam and maddened snow.

She fell into a kind of trance, letting her mind lunge and spin with her body. Sometimes she saw white bursts of light on the inside of her closed lids; at other moments she thought she heard Nausicaa’s voice. Her arms were racked with cramps and seemed paralyzed in their endless grip on the ice. Luce couldn’t understand how she still had the strength to hold on, hour after hour. At one point her hands seemed to melt into an icy liquid and she almost let them give way, almost yielded to a fall with no end.

What matters is that you made the choice to save me as you did, Nausicaa whispered in Luce’s ear. Her voice was so vivid and warm that Luce couldn’t tell if it was dream or reality, but it broke through her trance and brought her back to awareness of her loosening hands. She tightened her grip on the floe again until its ragged edges scraped the soft skin of her inner arms.

It also mattered if she made the choice to save herself, Luce thought. And she was sure that Nausicaa would agree with her.

At some point the water turned strangely warm. At some point the floe stopped its feverish lunging and only pranced gently, knocking against a rocky pinnacle that stuck straight up out of the water. The wind still shrieked, but it seemed to pass by above without striking her anymore. More important, the waves barely sloshed across her tail. Luce looked up in a daze and realized that she’d arrived at a small conical island with a few dense patches of steeply leaning spruce and an uneven coast. Everything was padded in thick snow. The island didn’t seem to be part of the Aleutian chain. There was nothing in sight but water, and far in the distance a dark blue line that could be either land or a ribbon of settling storm clouds.

Luce tumbled off the floe into shallow water. She’d barely managed to drag herself to a spot where she could rest her head on the shore before she was seized by sleep.

***

There was a dull rattling noise. Luce shook herself, annoyed at the sound’s intrusion on her sleep. She wanted to dream on, unmoving, for a hundred years. Her cheek squeezed harder against the pebble shore as if that could make the sound go away. That seemed to help, and Luce drifted again, dimly aware that there was something strange about the air here, the wind. The warmth of the water soothed her, and there was a vague whispering licking in and out of the breeze. There were sounds that were almost words, but she couldn’t make out what they were trying to tell her. She slept on, dreaming that she was pressing her ear against the page of a whispering book, unable to understand the story.

The crunching noise came back, and this time her irritation was sharper. “Cut it out,” Luce murmured. It was a regular, repeating sound of small pebbles grinding together. Then her eyes flashed wide open, taking in the feeble daylight, and she froze. That was the sound of human footsteps, and they weren’t so far away. As lightly and silently as she could Luce slid back under the water, her heart throbbing frantically. There was no way to tell if she’d been seen. She skimmed behind the rocky pinnacle she’d knocked against the day before and then let her head glide upward very slowly until her eyes hovered just above the glinting skin of the water. She kept her movements as light and soft as drifting seaweed so that she wouldn’t attract attention and peered around the edge of the rock.

A hunched human figure stood on the beach some thirty feet away from her. Clumps of brownish hair hid his face, and his tall frame was so heavily swaddled in crudely stitched-together seal skins that he barely looked human at all. His feet were wrapped in strips of fur bound together with grayish strands that Luce realized were probably dried intestines. He walked with a slow, shambling gait, his matted beard swaying. If he’d noticed Luce he gave no sign of it. Instead he just shuffled tiredly to the water’s edge and stood there, staring down with sullen concentration.

The murmuring in the wind seemed to gather itself just a bit tighter, knot into sounds that were somehow closer to becoming actual words, though Luce still couldn’t make them out. An electrical prickling brushed through her skin. “Whatever it was she was hearing, she was sure she wasn’t imagining it. The tone became a little softer, more like a whirl of blurred human voices; it sounded like a troop of invisible dancers who kept whispering insistently as they spun. Luce thought there was something disturbingly familiar about those voices. Hearing them felt like trying to recapture a lost memory. The memory kept purring and buzzing and hinting at itself but always stayed just out of reach...

She could hear the voices gusting in from all over the island, but they didn’t pay any attention to her. Instead they seemed to concentrate around the ragged man, hissing and cooing to him. His face remained stock-still and expressionless even as the water in front of him began to eddy. The waves bubbled and coiled, and Luce could make out the flash of bright scales just below the surface. The whispering grew louder, bubbled like the water, then abruptly expired in a shrill hiss that sounded somehow like a command. There was a flash of leaping silver and translucent fins, and Luce couldn’t stifle a gasp. A large pink-silver fish crashed down hard just inches from the man’s feet. It beat its iridescent tail against the beach, its body arching and falling. The man bent and seized the fish with one hand then casually swung its head against the rocks, knocking it unconscious.

“Okay, already,” the ragged man said loudly, staring into the whispering air just ahead of him. “At least let me have some peace while I eat, all right?”

Luce’s tail gave an uncontrollable flip, sending up a shower of bright water, and a small sharp cry burst from her throat. The man didn’t seem to notice. He was already straggling away from her, up the hill and into the woods, small dislodged rocks skittering down the slope behind him. Luce watched helplessly as he left. There was obviously some unknown magic at work here, but beyond that she didn’t know what to think. After a while she saw a thin coil of smoke rising from the far side of the island and knew that the man was cooking his fish over an open flame.

There was something in the tone of those whispering voices that suggested faded memories, sleepless nights, and things lost forever. But the voices also suggested something more specific to Luce—or someone. The voices had seemed to be nudging at her, trying to recall someone to her. She just couldn’t quite tell who it was.

But the man’s voice had also seemed astonishingly similar to another voice Luce had once loved. And in his case she had no trouble recognizing whose it was.

He’d sounded exactly like her father.