Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology by Nancy Holder, Kami García, Saladin Ahmed, Jim Butcher, Jane Yolen, Heather Brewer, Rachel Caine, Gillian Philip, Peter Beagle Read Free Book Online

say to you, you
are not yet prepared to hear,” came the voice in the sea. “Stay with me a
little, Shark God’s daughter. I am not what your father is, but I may perhaps
be a better teacher for you.” When Kokinja hesitated, and clearly seemed about
to refuse, Paikea continued, “Child, you have nowhere else to go but
home—and I think you are not ready for that, either. Climb on my back
now, and come with me.” Even for Kokinja, that was an order.
    Paikea took her—once she had managed
the arduous and tiring journey from claw to leg to mountainside shoulder to a
deep, hard hollow in the carapace that might have been made for a frightened
rider—to an island (a real one this time, though well smaller than her
own) bright with birds and flowers and wild fruit. When the birds’ cries and
chatter ceased for a moment, she could hear the softer swirl of running water
farther inland, and the occasional thump of a falling coconut from one of the
palms that dotted the beach. It was a lonely island, being completely
uninhabited, but very beautiful.
    There Paikea left her to swim ashore,
saying only, “Rest,” and nothing more. She did as she was bidden, sleeping
under bamboo trees, waking to eat and drink, and sleeping again, dreaming
always of her mother and brother at home. Each dream seemed more real than the
one before, bringing Mirali and Keawe closer to her, until she wept in her
sleep, struggling to keep from waking. Yet when Paikea came again, after three
days, she demanded audaciously, “What wisdom do you think you have for me that
I would not hear if it came from my father? I have no fear of anything he may
say to me.”
    “You have very little fear at all, or you
would not be here,” Paikea answered her. “You feared me when we first met, I
think—but two nights’ good sleep, and you are plainly past that .”
Kokinja thought she discerned something like a chuckle in the wavelets lapping
against her feet where she sat, but she could not be sure. Paikea said, “But
courage and attention are not the same thing. Listening is not the same as
hearing. You may be sure I am correct in this, because I know everything.”
    It was said in such a matter-of-fact
manner that Kokinja had to battle back the impulse to laugh. She said, with all
the innocence she could muster, “I thought it was my father who was supposed to
know everything.”
    “Oh, no,” Paikea replied quite seriously.
“The only thing the Shark God has ever known is how to be the Shark God. It is
the one thing he is supposed to be—not a teacher, not a wise master, and
certainly not a father or a husband. But they will take human form, the
gods will, and that is where the trouble begins, because they none of them know
how to be human—how can they, tell me that?” The eye-stalks abruptly
plunged closer, as though Paikea were truly waiting for an enlightening answer.
“I have always been grateful for my ugliness; for the fact that there is no way
for me to disguise it, no temptation to hide in a more comely shape and pretend
to believe that I am what I pretend. Because I am certain I would do just that,
if I could. It is lonely sometimes, knowing everything.”
    Again Kokinja felt the need to laugh; but
this time it was somehow easier not to, because Paikea was obviously anxious
for her to understand his words. But she fought off sympathy as well, and
confronted Paikea defiantly, saying, “You really think that we should never
have been born, don’t you, my brother and I?”
    Paikea appeared to be neither surprised
nor offended by her bold words. “Child, what I know is important—what I think is not important at all. It is the same way with the Shark God.” Kokinja opened
her mouth to respond hotly, but the great crab-monster moved slightly closer to
shore, and she closed it again. Paikea said, “He is fully aware that he should
never have taken a human wife, created a human family in the human world. And
he knows also, as he was never