Wonders of the Invisible World (12 page)

The horse gathered its muscles, turned, and leaped so cleanly into the mist over the lake that Ned did not hear a sound from the water, and the hatchling ducks floated serenely by, undisturbed. The silence seemed to spread over the world, through Ned’s heart; he couldn’t find a word, a sound, for what he had seen. Beside him, Wilding was as still; he didn’t breathe.

Only Noakes made noises, dropping something with a clatter, calling incoherently and puffing as he ran out of the boathouse. He stared at the quiet water and cried again, a shocked, harsh noise. Ned moved then, trembling, stumbling, his heart trying to outrace him as he reached the boathouse.

“Noakes—” he said, gripping the old man. “Noakes—”

“What was—What happened?” Wilding demanded raggedly.

“We must go out there—You take one boat, Noakes, we’ll take the other—Hurry!”

“No time to hurry,” Noakes said, wiping his twitching face. “No place to hurry to. Never,” he added in a whisper, “saw that before in my long life. Heard about them but never thought I’d live to see one.”

“One what?” Ned cried.

“Kelpie,” Noakes said. He wiped at his brow, trembling, too; his cap fell on the ground. “I’m sorry, lad.”

“Kelpie—What’s a kelpie?” Ned asked wildly.

“What you saw. That white horse. A water sprite. No mercy in them. They lure you onto their backs with their beauty, they carry you into the water, and then—and that’s the end.”

“What end?” Wilding asked sharply.

The old eyes, gray as the water, gazed back at Ned with a sheen of tears over them. “In all the tales I ever heard, you drown.”

Emma, after the first gasp of shock from the horse’s sudden plunge into the cold water, was holding her breath. They were going down, she realized, down and down, deeper than the shallows of the lake had any right to be. She had slid off the horse’s back, but her fingers were still locked into its mane. Water weeds trailed past her, and schools of startled fish. The horse, which was behaving like no horse she had ever met in her life, dragged her ruthlessly. It galloped in water effortlessly; she was as buffeted, roiling around its body, as she would have been on land. Sometimes, flung over its outstretched head, she glimpsed a black, wicked eye, a widened nostril, its great muscular neck snaked out, teeth bared. It shook its head now and then, trying to loosen her grip, she thought; she only clung tighter, her lungs on fire, her eyes strained open, round and staring like a fish’s, unable not to look at what could not be possible.

If I must breathe, so must it, was her only coherent thought; she clung to that as well, ignoring all the implications of the horse’s magic. Beneath that thought lay a confused impulse, a fragment from some fairy tale or another, the only thing shaken to the surface of her mind as the monstrous horse surged into impossible depths and she twisted in the water like an eel clamped to a writhing fish.

Don’t let go.

And then the pain spilled through her, burst out of her until it must have filled the world, for she felt nothing else, not water nor motion nor the coarse mane, long and wet as sea grass, in her fingers. She closed her eyes at last, and drowned in pain.

She woke again, at which she felt vaguely surprised. Drenched and limp as a bundle of beached sea kelp, she lay on sand in what must have been the bottom of the world. A hollow of rock rose around her; a cave, holding air like a bubble. Beyond it, she saw the gray-green glimmer of water, shadowy things moving among trailing weeds.

The great horse loomed over her, its long white head with its onyx eyes and great dark nostrils swooping down as though to bite. Its mouth stopped an inch from her cheek. It only scented her, once, fastidiously, as though it were uncertain what she was.

“Am I dead?” she asked. Her voice had no more strength than a tendril of water moss.

“You should be,” its eye told her, or its thoughts; she couldn’t tell exactly where the voice came from.

She sat up slowly, pulling herself together in piecemeal fashion, bone by bone off the fine white sand. It crusted her hair, her clothes; she tasted it on her lips. The horse backed, stood watching her motionlessly. She saw a glimmering, moving reflection in its eye, and turned stiffly; her bones might have been there for centuries, they felt that creaky.

A man entered the cave. Some manlike creature, at any rate, if not truly mortal. His skin seemed opalescent, wavery gray-green, like the water; his green hair floated like sea-grass around his head. He wore a coronet of gold and pearl and darkly gleaming mother-of-pearl. In his tall grace and beauty, in his eyes the shade of blue-black nacre, he bore a startling resemblance to Bram Wilding.

She sighed. “Out of the frying pan...” she whispered. Her throat hurt, as though she had tried to scream under water. “Who are you?”

He gave her a look she couldn’t fathom before he spoke. “You are in my realm,” he answered, a lilt in his voice like the lap of waves against the shore. “This water is my kingdom.”

“How do you understand me?” she asked with wonder.

“I am as old as this water. I have been hearing the sounds that mortals make since before they learned to speak.”

“What happens now?”

He gave a very human shrug. “I have no idea.” She stared at him. “No one has ever ridden my kelpie and lived.”

“I’m still alive?”

“So it seems.”

“I wasn’t sure. I feel as though I have gotten lost in someone else’s dream. Why did the kelpie come to kill me?”

“It’s the way of things,” he answered simply. “To ride the kelpie is to drown.”

“But I didn’t.”

“No.”

She thought a moment; her mind felt heavy, sluggish with water, thoughts as elusive as minnows. “You could,” she suggested finally, “have the kelpie take me back.”

He scratched a brow with a green thumbnail; a tiny snail drifted out. “I could just leave you in here; you would die eventually. But the kelpie kills, not I. Perhaps you were not meant to die. Every other mortal dragged underwater lets go of the kelpie to swim. It swims too deep, too quickly; they can never reach the surface again before they drown. But you would not let go.”

“I think I got my tales confused,” she answered fuzzily.

“Are there rules for such things?” the lake king asked curiously. “What happens in other tales at times like this?”

She tried to remember. Her childhood seemed very distant, on the far side of the boundary between water and air, stone and light. Inspiration struck; she felt absurdly pleased. “We might bargain,” she told him. “You could ask me for something in return for my life.”

He grunted. “What could you possibly have that I might want?”

She felt into the pockets of her smock, came up with a soggy handkerchief, some crumbled charcoal, sand, an unfortunate carp, a few crushed strawberries. “Oh,” she breathed, a sudden flame searing her throat.

“What is that?” the lake king asked.

“It was part of our breakfast.”

“No. Not that in your hand. That in your voice, your eye.”

She blinked and it fell. “A tear,” she told him. “I just remembered how happy we were, running out into the morning. We were going to row onto the lake, eat scones and strawberries, paint the world. And then Wilding came. And then the kelpie. And now here I am, and Mr. Bonham might as well be on the moon for all we can see of one another.” She wiped away another tear. “He must think I am dead. In no conceivable circumstances would it occur to him that I might be sitting in a cave under water talking to the king of the lake.”

The king came to kneel beside her, his eyes like the kelpie’s, wild and alien, as he studied her.

“You have words I don’t know,” he said. “I hear them in your voice. What are they?”

“Sorrow,” she told him, her voice trembling. “Joy. Eagerness. Dislike. Astonishment. Anger. Love.”

“Are they valuable?”

“As air.”

He was silent, his strange eyes fixed on her, his beautiful underwater face so like and unlike Wilding’s it made her want to laugh and weep with rage: even there, that far beyond the known world, she could not get away from him.

“Give me those words,” the lake king said, “and I will send you back.”

She gazed at him mutely, wondering at the extraordinary demand; it was as though a trout had asked her to define joy. Slowly, haltingly, having no other way but words in that underwater world to explain such things, she began a tale. She started with her brother, and then Bram Wilding came into it, and then painting, and Boudicca, and the women’s studio, and Edward Eustace Bonham, and how he and she had so unexpectedly fallen together into the depths of a word. All that had made her understand the words the lake king had heard in her voice, she told him, having no idea how much he understood, and not daring to hope that they might be worth more to him than a handful of pretty pebbles she might have picked up on the shore and lightly tossed into his realm.

On the shore, the assembled houseparty stared numbly across the water. They had spent the morning rowing frantically over the lake, searching for any sign of Emma. Noakes had summoned villagers, who carried more boats over the hill on their wagons. Ned had refused to come in until the oars slipped out of his aching hands, and one of the villagers pulled him and his boat ashore. Adrian tried to persuade him to rest. But he could only pace along the water’s edge, tormented by visions of Emma floating among the reeds in a lonely, distant stretch of shoreline.

Adrian, his eyes reddened, his face white and set with shock, kept asking reasonably, “How could she possibly have been taken by a kelpie? It’s not real. How could it be real? These things belong in tales and paintings, not in life. We imagine them! They have no power over us.”

“Yes, they do,” Wilding finally said. “They have power. They force art out of us.”

His imperturbable composure had not only been shaken; it had dissolved. He looked as stunned and wretched as any of them; for once in his life he had not a tactless word to say. He had very little to say, Ned noticed dimly. He was just there, whenever a hand was needed to push a boat out, when a trek to one cove or another was planned, when Coombe, searching the murky water under the boathouse, came defeated to shore and needed a blanket.

What Wilding said to Adrian worked its way finally into Ned’s thoughts. Winifred came among them with a tray of mugs and fresh tea. He took one, warmed his hands and took a burning sip. Then he looked at Wilding. “What we paint is real. That’s what you’re saying?”

“You saw,” Wilding reminded him inarguably.

He shook his head, took another swallow. “I never thought such things were real,” he said huskily. “But if we—if we see these realms and paint them, then why can’t we—why should we not be able to find our way into them? Find their doorways, cross their borders? Why can’t we?” Wilding didn’t answer. Ned turned his eyes back to the lake. He was gathering strength to resume his search, along the shore or on the water or in it, any way he could.

“We can’t breathe water,” Wilding said gently. “That’s the boundary we can’t cross.”

“Neither can horses,” Ned reminded him. “Yet nobody saw the kelpie come back up for air.”

“It’s a symbol,” Adrian said heavily. “Kelpie means death. That’s what Noakes said.” He dropped his hand on Ned’s shoulder, left it there a moment. On the lake, in shallower waters, the villagers had dropped grappling hooks. So far they had pulled up only weeds.

“If it’s only a symbol, then how could it kill Emma?” His voice shook, and then his face; he turned blindly away from them, staring at the stony hills. “There must be a way,” he whispered when he could. “There must be a way in. Those standing stones—doorposts, they’re said to be—All those tales of people coming and going, taken and then finding their way back—”

“It’s never anyone you or I know,” Adrian said, “who finds their way back out of fairyland. It’s always someone in a tale.”

“This time it’s Emma,” Ned said fiercely. “Where there’s a way in, there must be a way out. I’m going to find it.” He dropped his cup on the grass, went towards the water. All the boats were in use. But they were no good anyway, he thought. They only sat on the surface of the water, keeping you safe and ignorant. How to find the place where tale becomes truth... He pulled off his shoes, felt the water on his feet, and then around his knees. And then, before he could reach the depths and glide beneath the surface, seek out the true kingdom of water, someone caught at him, pulled him back.

It was Wilding. Ned broke free of him, stumbled back. Wilding lost his balance, splashed down among the reeds.

“All this is your fault!” Ned shouted at him furiously. “You hounded her—you drove her up here, and even then you couldn’t leave her alone, you had to come here yourself and drive her away from you again—she rode that kelpie to get away from you!”

“I know.” Wilding was shivering in the water. His face, without its mask of arrogance and irony, was nearly unrecognizable. “Do you think,” he asked Ned huskily, “that I will ever forgive myself? But the kelpie didn’t come for me or you. You won’t find it this way.”

“I might,” Ned said stubbornly, wading out again. “I can swim so close to death I might see its white mane and its black eye. I’ll ride that kelpie then, and I will never let it go until it shows me where it has taken Emma. We paint such things because it’s safe—we see them without danger—Our canvas is the boundary between worlds.”