Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology Read Online Free PDF Page A

to respond, “So? You
interrupt my sleep, night on night”—but she never finished saying what
she meant to say, because in that moment she knew the Shark God. She bowed her
head and bent her right knee, in the respectful manner of the island folk, and
she whispered, “ Jalak...jalak ,” which means Lord .
    The young man took her hand and raised her
up. “What my own people call me, you could not pronounce,” he said to Mirali.
“But to you I am no jalak, but your own faithful olohe ,” which is
the common word for servant. “You must only call me by that name, and no
other. Say it now.”
    Mirali was so frightened, first to be in
the presence of the Shark God, and then to be asked to call him her servant,
that she had to try the word several times before she could make it come clearly
out of her mouth. The Shark God said, “Now, if you wish it, we will go down to
the sea and be married. But I promise that I will bear no malice, no
vengefulness, against your village or this island if you do not care to marry
me. Have no fear, then, but tell me your true desire, Mirali.”
    The market folk were going about their own
business, buying and selling, and more chatting than either. Only a few of them
looked toward Mirali where she stood talking with the handsome singer; fewer
seemed to take any interest in what the two might be saying to each other.
Mirali took heart from this and said, more firmly, “I do wish to marry you,
dear jalak— I mean, my olohe— but how can I live with
you under the sea? I do not think I would even be able to hold my breath
through the wedding, unless it was a very short ceremony.”
    Then the Shark God laughed aloud, which he
had truly never done in all his long life, and the sound was so full and so
joyous that flowers fell from the trees and, unbidden, wove themselves into
Mirali’s hair, and into a wreath around her neck. The waves of the sea echoed
his laughter, and the Shark God lifted Mirali in his arms and raced down to the
shore, where sharks and dolphins, tuna and black marlin and barracuda, and
whole schools of shimmering wrasse and clownfish and angelfish that swim as one
had crowded into the lagoon together, until the water itself turned golden as
the morning and green as sunset. The great deepwater octopus, whom no one ever
sees except the sperm whale, came also; and it has been said—by people
who were not present, nor even born then—that there were mermaids and
merrows as well, and even the terrible Paikea, vast as an island, the Master of
All Sea Monsters, though he prudently stayed far outside the reef. And all these
were there for the wedding of Mirali and the Shark God.
    The Shark God lifted Mirali high above his
head—she was startled, but no longer frightened—and he spoke out,
first in the language of Mirali’s people, so that she would understand, and
then in the tongue known by everything that swims in every sea and every river.
“This is Mirali, whom I take now to wife, and whom you will love and protect
from this day forth, and honor as you do me, and as you will honor our
children, and their children, always.” And the sound that came up from the
waters in answer is not a sound that can be told.
    In time, when the lagoon was at last empty
again, and when husband and wife had sworn and proved their love in the shadows
of the mangroves, she said to him, very quietly, “Beloved, my own olohe, now that we are wed, shall I ever see you again? For I may be only an ignorant
island woman, but I know what too often comes of marriages between gods and
mortals. Your children will have been born—I can feel this already—by
the time you come again for your tribute. I will nurse them, and bring them up
to respect their lineage, as is right... but meanwhile you will swim far away,
and perhaps father others, and forget us, as is also your right. You are a god,
and gods do not raise families. I am not such a fool that I do not know this.”
    But the Shark God put his