R Z Held - [BCS291 S01] - Swimming Apart (html) Read online

  That wasn’t strictly fair to Seriola, but Seriola hadn’t been strictly fair to her, and the only way Deania saw to win this fight was to steal the last word, so she kicked away. One movement couldn’t take her out of the range of her friend’s—her former friend’s—voice, but ducking under the surface could. She glided long, picking any direction as long as it was away. No wonder Seriola had begged off from all her invitations. Reckless. Deania wasn’t reckless, Seriola was a coward!

  As she came up for air, she heard Seriola’s desperate voice. “Deania, don’t get lost!”

  Deania kicked up to lift her chin from the water. “I’m looking for a way out.” She hugged the nearest wall, circled it.

  Circled it indeed. Understanding snapped into place. These weren’t tunnels, they were the spaces between great, round pillars, large enough to need perhaps ten people, holding hands, to make a full circle around them. Pillars to hold up the ceiling, in row upon row, with the straightness that humans preferred.

  One had symbols painted upon it, original white glazed over with dripped deposits but definitely there. Deania supposed Seriola would be able to read them. With a slow kick, conserving energy, Deania considered the symbols from one direction, then the other. She wouldn’t develop the ability to read them for staring at them harder. And yet, she couldn’t bear to ask Seriola to do so, after what she’d said. Deania found the adventure, Seriola’s knowledge channeled it; wasn’t that exactly what Seriola had just rejected?

  Within the lum-swallowing darkness and oppressive, soft water sounds of a place without wind to create branch-shiver or wave-crash, Deania’s thoughts had nothing to do but chew over her anger at Seriola. Why had she even come, if she now hated treasure-hunting and adventure so much?

  And there it was below all the anger, like a single shell revealed when the waves washed away a child’s edifice built of sand. Deania had her own part in this. Seriola had come because Deania had dragged at her, invitation after invitation. Perhaps she’d even come for the sake of those same memories Deania had accused her of trying to erase.

  It was no great distance to swim back to where Seriola was now running a hand along the wall, folded in on herself with worry. Deania hesitated, floating, for a few heartbeats longer, then set her feet to the floor and stood partly in the air. “Seriola, I—”

  She didn’t have the right words for what she wanted to say, she realized, which was odd. She would have had those words for a lover. She supposed she’d never thought before of friendships as something that had an end, sometimes desperately needed to have an end.

  Deania supposed she’d been wrong enough so far, she might as well use the wrong words as well. “I think what I need to say is that it hurts, to lose you as a friend, but much less than it hurts right now, to try to drag you back. Look at us.”

  Yes, Seriola signed, not hidden under the water but right there in the air, near her heart. “We’ve both changed. I realized I was assuming it was just me, and you were stuck exactly the way you were when I left. But you’ve changed in your own direction, a good direction, harnessing your curiosity and risk-taking to a purpose that does keep everyone safe. But that’s why we’re so very far apart now—neither of us has been standing still.”

  “And we’re both trying so hard.” At least Deania was. She saw in Seriola’s watery smile that the words captured what she felt as well. It hurt too much to laugh at the irony, so instead that smile. “In there”—Deania gestured to the next pillared room—“I realized you’re hurting me, I’m hurting you...”

  Here were the words she’d been searching for.

  “Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t have to hurt each other anymore? I wish we could still find adventures together, but if that’s not right for you, I’d rather not poison the memories of those we did have.” No one else knew as much about humans as Seriola, but Makaira would love the pure physical challenge of places like this, swimming long and hard until a path could be found. Deania would hardly have to hunt her treasure alone in the future, just more slowly without a guide.

  No, more enlivened by the excitement of discovery without a guide.

  “I’d never have told anyone, about the ship.” Seriola dropped her hands to her sides. “Everyone made so much of my bravery, going into the human lands. But all that knowledge I gathered, the right clothes, those were armor. I didn’t need to be nearly so brave, hiding behind them, as you were that evening, hoisting yourself over the rail. You didn’t have any armor at all except speed and silence and you were smiling. I don’t think I’ll ever understand how to be brave like that.”

  Deania wasn’t sure if the line between brave and reckless fell quite where Seriola had placed it this time, any more than it fell where she’d placed it in the heat of accusations about getting the two of them lost. What drew Deania to hunt treasure and slip onto ships was the quite-selfish shivery pleasure she found in it, like diving from a great height. But this was the calm water that was needed between them, and now it was time to leave this place. “I could truly use your human knowledge one more time.” She stroked away slowly, head up, and Seriola followed without hesitation.

  When they arrived at the particular pillar she extended her lum all the way down the lines to her shoulder, swam near the symbols to strengthen the utility of the diffuse glow as much as she could. “What do these say?”

  “Nineteen.” After speaking, Seriola came to trace the symbol but had no apparent hesitation in her translation. Deania thought perhaps she was bemused at finding it in such a place.

  It took a lot of swimming, around and around pillars, lum down to her fingertips now and dragging at Deania’s energy, for them to find eighteen, upward along the angled depth of the floor. From there, seventeen was easier, and by sixteen the water was only up to their ankles. “This path seems wider than most of the others. I think we’re going the right way.” Deania spotted another square alcove for a candle and rested there for a moment, to hide that her head was swooping. She should cut back on her lum, but what if they missed a number and went astray? She’d be all right.

  By the time they ascended wood stairs, shoved open a rotting wood door to wind and such bright grayness, Deania was leaning on Seriola’s shoulder, a reversal of how she’d pulled them through to air. They stared around at the rock breaking through the scrubby grass between the trampled dirt of the humans’ abandoned paths. “We must be at the center of the island,” Seriola said.

  “With all the distance we swam and walked, we must have been under the ocean.” Deania pointed back the way they’d come, to the shore dimly visible, trying to overlay it on her memories of swimming below. Groundwater, below rock, below the ocean. Huh. Interesting.

  Seriola adjusted Deania’s arm more securely over her shoulder now that their skin was drying properly in the chill wind. They were built for even colder water, but it did tend to bite at the tips of fingers, and Deania curled hers in as much as she could. “Later, if you want treasure, it’ll be in the remains of their houses, you know.” A tip of Seriola’s chin served to indicate a listing building farther along the path, all color stripped from it by relentless weather.

  “They’re all empty.” Deania had verified that for herself the moment she was old enough to explore on her own.

  “You have to look in their middens.” Seriola detoured their steps to pull a short stick from some sort of wall falling down around the first house. With the stick, she scratched at a mound that was more dirt than stone, in contrast to the hummocks around it. Suddenly there was shine among the dull dirt. The white of pottery, the brown of glass.

  Seriola bent away from Deania and plucked up the pottery, brushed away sandy clods until it could catch the light on its paint, then straightened and offered over the finger-length shell-like shape. Deania accepted the pottery delicately. It was hollow, slightly curved, open at one end and partially covered at the other, smooth and carefully formed and simply amazing.

  “It’s a teapot spout,” Seriola
offered. Deania was not entirely sure what that meant, but she held the words close to puzzle out later.

  It was of just the right size—she lowered her hand with it to her hip, where Seriola wore her watcher. If she tied a custom net, so the rounded length wouldn’t slide through a single knot, it would look very nice. “Thank you.”

  Seriola must have noticed her glance at the watcher, realized the bond her gift had forged. A bond of remembered, rather than continuing, friendship. She huffed, a noise that to Deania held something of regret, something of relief. “You’re welcome.” She squeezed her fingers over Deania’s shoulder and got them moving again, back to the path and toward the village.

  © Copyright 2019 R.Z. Held