Patricia McKillip - The Changeling Sea

VIP免费

2024-12-21 1 0 303.01KB 112 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Changeling Sea

Patricia A. McKillip

3S XHTML edition 1.0

scan notes and proofing history

Contents

|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|

BOOKS BY PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP

The Throme of the Erril of Sherill

The House on Parchment Street

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

The Night Gift

The Riddle-Master of Hed

Heir of Sea and Fire

Harpist in the Wind

Stepping from the Shadows

Moon-Flash

The Moon and the Face

The Changeling Sea

A Jean Karl Book

Atheneum 1988 New York

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval

system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Atheneum

Macmillan Publishing Company 866 Third Avenue,

New York, NY 10022

Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc. First Edition Designed

by Eliza Green

Printed in U.S.A. 10 987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McKillip, Patricia A. The changeling sea/Patricia A.

McKillip.—1st ed.

p. cm. “Jean Karl book.”

Summary: A floor scrubber and a magician try to help a

prince return to his home beneath the sea and help his

half brother, a human trapped in the body of a sea

monster, return to land.

ISBN 0-689-31436-1

[1. Fantasy. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Islands—Fiction.] I.

Tide. PZ7.M478678Ch 1988 [Fie]—del9 88-3435 CIP AC

FOR

JEAN KARL

ONE

NO ONE REALLY KNEW where Peri lived the year after the sea

took her father and cast his boat, shrouded in a tangle of fishing

net, like an empty shell back onto the beach. She came home when

she chose to, sat at her mother’s hearth without talking, brooding

sullenly at the small, quiet house with the glass floats her father

had found, colored bubbles of light, still lying on the dusty

windowsill, and the same crazy quilt he had slept under still on the

bed, and the door open on quiet evenings to the same view of the

village and the harbor with the fishing boats homing in on the

incoming tide. Sometimes her mother would rouse herself and cook;

sometimes Peri would eat, sometimes she wouldn’t. She hated the

vague, lost expression on her mother’s face, her weary movements.

Her hair had begun to gray; she never smiled, she never sang. The

sea, it seemed to Peri, had taken her mother as well as her father,

and left some stranger wandering despairingly among her cooking

pots.

Peri was fifteen that year. She worked at the inn beside the

harbor, tending fires, scrubbing floors, cleaning rooms, and running

up and down the kitchen stairs with meals for the guests. The

village was small, poor, one of the many fishing villages tucked into

the rocky folds of the island. The island itself was the largest of

seven scattered across the blustery northern sea, ruled for four

hundred years by the same family.

The king’s rich, airy summer house stood on a high crest of land

overlooking the village harbor. During the months when he was in

residence, the wealthy people of the island came to stay at the inn,

to conduct their business at the king’s summer court, or sometimes

just to catch a glimpse of him riding with his dark-haired son down

the long, glistening beaches. In winter, the inn grew quiet; fishers

came in the evening to tell fish stories over their beers before they

went home to bed. But even then, the innkeeper, a burly,

good-natured man, grew testy if he spotted a cobweb in a high

corner or a sandy footprint on his flagstones. He kept his inn

scoured and full of good smells.

He kept a weather eye on Peri, too, for she had a neglected look

about her. She had grown tall without realizing it; her clothes were

too loose in some places, too tight in others. Her hair, an awkward

color somewhere between pale sand and silt, looked on most days,

he thought, as if she had stood on her head and used it for a mop.

He gave her things from the kitchen, sometimes, at the end of the

day to take home with her: a warm loaf of bread, a dozen mussels,

a couple of perch. But he never thought to ask her where she took

them.

Occasionally her mother, who had simply stopped thinking and

spent her days listening to the ebb and flow of the tide, stirred from

her listening. She would trail a hand down Peri’s tangled, dirty hair

and murmur, “You come and go like a wild thing, child. Sometimes

you’re there when I look up, sometimes you’re not…” Peri would sit

mute as a clam, and her mother’s attention would stray again to

the ceaseless calling of the sea.

Her mother was enchanted, Peri decided. Enchanted by the sea.

She knew the word because the old woman whose house she

stayed in had told her tales of marvels and magic, and had taught

her what to do with mirrors, and bowls of milk, bent willow twigs

buried by moonlight, different kinds of knots, sea water sprinkled

at the tide line into the path of the wind. The old woman’s

enchantments never seemed to work; neither did Peri’s. But for

some odd reason they fascinated Peri, as if by tying a knot in a

piece of string she was binding one stray piece of life to another,

bridging by magic the confusing distances between things.

The old woman had lived alone, a couple of miles from the village,

in a small house built of driftwood. The house sat well back from

the tide against a rocky cliff; it was shielded from the hard winter

winds by the cliff and the thick green gorse that overflowed the

fallow fields and spilled down around its walls. The old woman had

made her living weaving. When Peri was younger, she would come

to sit at the woman’s side and watch the shuttle dart in and out of

the loom. The old woman told stories then, strange, wonderful tales

of a land beneath the sea where houses were built of pearls, and a

constant, powdery shower of gold fell like light through the deep

water from the sunken wrecks of mortals’ ships. She was very old;

her eyes and hair were the fragile silvery color of moonlit sand. One

day, not long after Peri’s father had died, the old woman

disappeared.

She left a piece of work half-finished on her loom, her door open,

and all her odd bits of things she called her “spellbindings” lying on

the shelves. Peri went to her house evening after evening, waiting

for her to return. She never did. The villagers looked for her a little,

then stopped looking. “She was old,” they said. “She wandered out

of her house and forgot her way back.”

“Age takes you that way, sometimes,” the innkeeper told Peri.

“My old granny went out of the house once to take her hoe to be

mended. She came back sitting on a cart tail three days later. She

never did tell us where she finally got to. But the hoe was mended.”

Peri, used to waiting in the empty driftwood house, simply

stayed.

She was fidgety and brusque around people then, anyway, and

there was nothing in the house to remind her of her parents, both

of them lost, in one way or another, to the sea. She could sit on the

doorstep and listen to the tide and glower at the waves breaking

against the great, jagged pillars of rock that stood like two

doorposts just at the deep water. They were the only pieces of stone

cliff left from some earlier time; the sea had nibbled and stormed

and worn at the land, pushed it back relentlessly. It was not

finished, Peri knew; it would wear at this beach, this cliff, until

someday the old woman’s house would be underwater. Nothing was

safe. Sometimes she threw things into the sea that she had

concocted from the old woman’s spellbindings: things that might,

she vaguely hoped, disturb its relentless workings.

“If you hate the sea so now,” Mare asked in wonder one day,

“why don’t you leave?” Mare was a few years older than Peri, and

very pretty. She came to work in the morning, with a private smile

in her eyes. Down at the docks, Peri knew, was a young fisherman

with the same smile coming and going on his face. Mare was tidy

and energetic, unlike Carey, who dreamed that the king’s son would

come to the inn one day and fall in love with her green eyes and

raven tresses. Carey was slow and prone to breaking things. Peri

attacked her work grimly, as if she were going to war armed with a

dust cloth and a coal scuttle.

“Leave?” she said blankly, knee-deep in suds. Mare was watching

her, brows puckered.

“You haven’t smiled in months. You barely talk. You scowl out

the windows at the waves. You could go inland to the farming

villages. Or even to the city. This may be an island, but there are

places on it where you’d never hear the sea.”

Peri’s head twitched, as much away from Mare’s reasonable voice

as from the sound of the running tide. “No,” she said shortly, not

knowing why or why not.

Carey giggled. “Can you imagine Peri in the city?” she said. “With

her short skirts and her hair like a pile of beached kelp?” Peri

glowered at her between two untidy strands of hair.

“No,” Mare sighed. “I can’t. Peri, you really should—”

“Leave me alone.”

“But, girl, you look like—”

“I know what I look like,” Peri said, though she didn’t.

“How will anyone ever fall in love with you looking like that?”

Carey asked. Peri’s glower turned into such an astonished stare

that they both laughed. The innkeeper stuck his head into the

room.

“Work on my time,” he growled. “Laugh on your own.”

They heard him shouting down the kitchen stairs a moment

later. “Crab,” Carey muttered.

“It’s just,” Mare said insistently, “you have such pretty eyes, Peri.

But nobody can see them with your hair like—”

“I don’t want anybody seeing them,” Peri said crossly. “Leave me

alone.”

But later, after she had gone to the driftwood house and made

something full of broken bits of glass and crockery and jagged edges

of shell to throw into the great sea to give it indigestion, she looked

curiously into the old, cracked mirror that the woman had left on

her spellbinding shelf. Gray eyes flecked with gold gazed back at

her from under a spiky nest of hair. She barely recognized her own

face. Her nose was too big, her mouth was pinched. Some stranger

was inhabiting her body, too.

“I don’t care,” she whispered, putting the mirror down. A moment

later she picked it up again. Then she put it down, scowling. She

went outside to a little cave of gorse where the old woman had

found an underground stream wandering toward the sea, and had

dug a hole to trap it. Peri knelt at the lip of the well and dunked

her head in the water.

Shivering and sputtering, she threw more driftwood on the fire,

and sat beside it for an hour, tugging and tugging at her hair with

a brush until all the knots came out of it. By that time it was dry,

but still she brushed it, tired and half-dreaming, until it rose

crackling around her head in a streaky mass of light and dark. She

remembered a long time past, when she was small and the old

woman had brushed her hair for her, singing…

“Come out of the sea and into my heart

My dark, my shining love.

Promise we shall never part,

My dark, my singing love. …”

Peri heard her own voice singing in the silence. She stopped

abruptly, surprised, and heard then the little, silky sounds of the

ebb tide washing against the shore. Her mouth clamped shut. She

put the brush down and picked up a clay ball, prickled like a

pincushion with bent nails and broken pieces of glass. She flung

open the door; firelight ran out ahead of her, down the step onto the

sand. But something on the beach kept her lingering in the

doorway, puzzled.

There was an odd mass on the tide line. Her eyes, adjusting to

moonlight, pieced it together slowly: a horse’s head, black against

the spangled waves, a long, dark cloak glittering here and there

with silver thread, or steel, or pearl… She could not find a face.

Then the sea-watcher sensed her watching. A pale, blurred face

turned suddenly away from the sea to her, where she stood in the

warm light, with her feet bare and her hair streaming away from

her face in a wild, fire-edged cloud down her back.

They stared at one another across the dark beach. A swift, high

breaker made the horse shy. The rider swept the cloak back to free

his arms; again came a moonlit spark of something rich, unfamiliar.

He rode the dark horse out of the sea and Peri closed her door.

“The king came back to the summer house last night,” Carey said

breathlessly the next morning as the girls put on aprons and

collected brooms and buckets in the back room. “I saw his ships in

the harbor.”

Peri, yawning as the apron strings tangled in her fingers, made a

sour noise.

“It’s early,” Mare commented, surprised. “It’s barely spring. The

rainy season isn’t over yet.”

“Prince Kir is with him.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked one of the sailors.” Carey’s eyes shone; she hugged her

bucket, seeing visions. “Think of the clothes and the jewels and the

horses and the men—”

“Think of the work,” Mare sighed, “if they stay from now till

summer’s end.”

“I don’t care.”

“Jewels?” Peri echoed suddenly. Something teased her brain, a

glittering, moonlit darkness…

“Girl, will you wake up?” Mare grabbed Peri’s apron strings, tied

them impatiently. “This place will be full by nightfall.”

There were already strangers in the inn, tracking sand across the

floors, demanding fires, spilling things. By the end of the day, the

girls were almost too tired to talk. The innkeeper met Peri at the

back door and gave her oysters to take home. He studied her, his

brows raised.

“You washed your hair!”

It shouldn’t have been all that surprising, Peri thought irritably,

taking one of the cobbled streets through the village. A moment

later she didn’t care. She was climbing over a low stone wall to slip

burrs into the back pockets of Marl Grey’s fishing trousers, hanging

on his mother’s line. He had called her names a couple of days ago,

laughing at her wild hair, her short skirt. “Let’s see how funny you

look,” Peri muttered, “sitting down in a boat on those.”

Then she went to see her mother.

She didn’t decide to do that; she was just pulled, little by little, on

a disjointed path through the village toward her mother’s house.

She didn’t want to go: She hated the still house at the time of day

when the boats were coming in. No matter how hard she looked,

her father’s small blue boat would not be among them. It would be

idle, empty, moored to the dock as always. And yet she knew she

would look. She opened the gate to her mother’s yard. A hoe leaned

against the wall among a few troubled clods of dirt. Already the

thistles were beginning to sprout.

She went into the house, tumbled the oysters out of her skirt

onto the table, and sat down silently beside the fire. Fish chowder

simmered in a pot hung over the fire. Her mother sat at the

window, gazing at the sunlit harbor. She turned her head vaguely

as the shells hit the table, then her attention withdrew. They both

sat a few moments without moving, without speaking. Then Peri’s

mother lifted one hand, let it fall back into her lap with a faint sigh.

She got up to stir the soup.

“The king is back,” Peri said abruptly, having an uncharacteristic

urge to say something. She even, she discovered in surprise, wanted

to hear her mother’s voice.

“He’s early,” her mother said disinterestedly.

“Are you making a garden?”

Her mother shrugged the question away. The hoe had been

standing up in the weeds for months. Her eyes went to the window;

so did Peri’s.

The sun was hovering above the horizon, setting the water

ablaze. The first of the fishing boats had just entered the harbor;

the rest of them were still caught in the lovely, silvery light. Peri’s

mother drew a soft breath. Her face changed, came gently alive,

almost young again, almost the face Peri remembered.

“That’s what I dreamed about…”

“What?” Peri said, amazed.

“I dreamed I was watching the sun go down. The way it does just

before it dips behind the fog bank, when it burns up the sea and the

clouds, and the fishing boats coming home look like they’re sailing

on light… like they’re coming from a land you could walk to, if you

could step onto the surface of the sea and start walking. It’s a

country beneath the sea, but in my dream I saw the reflection of it,

all pale and fiery in the sunlight… And then the sun went down.”

Peri’s face was scarlet. “There is no country!” she shouted, and

her mother’s secret, dreaming face faded away, became the weary

stranger’s face once more. “There is no magic country in the sea!

Stop watching for it!”

But her mother was already watching again. Peri ran out of the

house, slamming the door so hard that a flock of sea gulls sunning

on the roof wheeled into the air, crying. Her mother’s face in the

window was still as a sleeper’s, hearing nothing in her dreams but

the tide.

TWO

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Peri climbed the cliff above the old

woman’s house. There was a moon-shaped patch of sand ringed

with gorse at the top; on her days off she could sit in the sunlight

and brood at the sea, yet feel protected from the world within the

green circle. The gorse was beginning to bloom here and there, tiny

golden flowers that made her sneeze. But so far her magic circle

was ungilded.

She wrapped her arms around her knees and watched the white

gulls wheel above the great weather-beaten spires of rock. Clouds

scudded across the sea, making a mysterious weave of light and

shadow on the water beyond the spires. Peri frowned at the

mystery, chewing a thumbnail. What lay beneath the color and the

shadow? Fish? Or some secret world within the kelp that

sometimes floated too near the surface of the sea, disturbing those

who dwelled on land? What would stop it from troubling her

mother? She chewed a fingernail next, then took the finger out of

her mouth and drew a spidery design in the sand.

She studied it critically, then drew another one. Hexes, the old

woman had called them. She had bent soft willow branches into

odd, angular shapes, and then wove webs of thread within them.

Hung in doors and windows, they kept malicious goblins and

irritating neighbors away. They protected cows from being milked

at night by sprites. Perhaps, Peri thought, a few hexes floating

across the sea might trap its strange magic underwater. She would

make them out of tough dried kelp stalk, row out over the deep

water to cast them. She would have to check her father’s boat for

leaks, get new oars, see if the rudder had been cracked. She had not

looked closely at the Sea Urchin since the fishers had cleaned the

sand and seaweed out of it and moored it in the harbor. Someone

had covered it, or it would have sunk under the weight of the heavy

winter rains. It probably dragged a crust of barnacles on its

bottom…

She drew another hex, a crooked, crabbed design. The wind

tossed a gull feather into the circle. She stuck it behind her ear,

then broke off a couple of feet of a wild strawberry runner that was

gliding across the sand, and wove that absently in and out of her

hair. Her dress—her oldest one—barely covered her knees. It was

loose around the waist and so tight in the shoulders the seams

threatened to part. In the gorse circle, it didn’t matter. She

stretched out her legs, burrowed her feet under the warm sand, and

devised another hex.

I wonder, she thought, if I have to say something over them to

make them work. Then she stopped breathing. A feeling skittered

up her backbone. She turned her head slowly, warily, to see who

was watching her.

The dark horseman from the sea gazed up at her, mounted at the

foot of the cliff. She caught her breath, chilled, as if the sea itself

had crept noiselessly across the beach to spill into her circle. Then

she blinked, recognizing him. It was only the young prince out for a

ride in the bright afternoon. The dark horseman was Kir. Kir was

the dark horseman. The phrases turned backward and forward in

her mind as she stared at him. A wave boomed and broke behind

him, flowing across half the beach, seeking, seeking, then dragged

back slowly, powerfully, and, caught in the dark gaze of the rider,

his eyes all the twilight colors of the sea, Peri felt as if the

undertow had caught her.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

TheChangelingSeaPatriciaA.McKillip3SXHTMLedition1.0scannotesandproofinghistoryContents|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|BOOKSBYPATRICIAA.MCKILLIPTheThromeoftheErrilofSherillTheHouseonParchmentStreetTheForgottenBeastsofEldTheNightGiftTheRiddle-MasterofHedHeirofSeaandFireHarpistintheWindSteppingfromtheSh...

展开>> 收起<<

Patricia McKillip - The Changeling Sea.pdf

共112页,预览23页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Patricia McKillip - The Changeling Sea

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: