The Beastly Bride

THE CHILDREN OF THE SHARK GOD Peter S. Beagle

Once there was a village on an island that belonged to the Shark God. Every man in the village was a fisherman, and the women cooked their catch and mended their nets and painted their little boats. And because that island was sacred to him, the Shark God saw to it that there were always fish to be caught, and seals as well, in the waters beyond the coral reef, and protected the village from the great gray typhoons that came every year to flood other lagoons and blow down the trees and the huts of other islands. Therefore the children of the village grew fat and strong, and the women were beautiful and strong, and the fishermen were strong and high-hearted even when they were old.

In return for his benevolence the Shark God asked little from his people: only tribute of a single goat at the turn of each year. To the accompaniment of music and prayers, and with a wreath of plaited fresh flowers around its neck, it would be tethered in the lagoon at moonrise. Morning would find it gone, flower petals floating on the water, and the Shark God never seen — never in that form, anyway.

Now the Shark God could alter his shape as he pleased, like any god, but he never showed himself on land more than once in a generation. When he did, he was most often known to appear as a handsome young man, light-footed and charming. Only one woman ever recognized the divinity hiding behind the human mask. Her name was Mirali, and this tale is what is known about her, and about her children.

Mirali’s parents were already aging when she was born, and had long since given up the hope of ever having a child — indeed, her name meant the long-desired one. Her father had been crippled when the mast of his boat snapped during a storm and crushed his leg, falling on him, and if it had not been for their daughter the old couple’s lives would have been hard indeed. Mirali could not go out with the fishing fleet herself, of course — as she greatly wished to do, having loved the sea from her earliest memory — but she did every kind of work for any number of island families, whether cleaning houses, marketing, minding young children, or even assisting the midwife when a birthing was difficult or there were simply too many babies coming at the same time. She was equally known as a seamstress, and also as a cook for special feasts; nor was there anyone who could mend a pandanus-leaf thatching as quickly as she, though this is generally man’s work. No drop of rain ever penetrated any pandanus roof that came under Mirali’s hands.

Nor did she complain of her labors, for she was very proud of being able to care for her mother and father as a son would have done. Because of this, she was much admired and respected in the village, and young men came courting just as though she were a great beauty. Which she was not, being small and somewhat square-made, with straight brows — considered unlucky by most — and hips that gave no promise of a large family. But she had kind eyes, deep-set under those regrettable brows, and hair as black and thick as that of any woman on the island. Many, indeed, envied her; but of that Mirali knew nothing, She had no time for envy herself, nor for young men, either.

Now it happened that Mirali was often chosen by the village priest to sweep out the temple of the Shark God. This was not only a grand honor for a child barely turned seventeen but a serious responsibility as well, for sharks are cleanly in their habits, and to leave his spiritual dwelling disorderly would surely be to dishonor and anger the god himself. So Mirali was particularly attentive when she cleaned after the worshippers, making certain that no prayer whistle or burned stick of incense was left behind. And in this manner did the Shark God become aware of Mirali.

But he did not actually see her until a day came when, for a wonder, all her work was done, all her tasks out of the way until tomorrow, when they would begin all over again. At such times, rare as they were, Mirali would always wander down to the water, borrow a dugout or an outrigger canoe, and simply let herself drift in the lagoon — or even beyond the reef — reading the clouds for coming weather, or the sea for migrating shoals of fish, or her own young mind for dreams. And if she should chance to see a black or gray or brown dorsal fin cutting the water nearby, she was never frightened, but would drowsily hail the great fish in fellowship, and ask it to convey her most respectful good wishes to the Shark God. For in that time children knew what was expected of them, by parents and gods alike.

She was actually asleep in an uncle’s outrigger when the Shark God himself came to Mirali — as a mako, of course, since that is the most beautiful and graceful of all sharks. At the first sight of her, he instantly desired to shed his fishy form and climb into the boat to wake and caress her. But he knew that such behavior would terrify her as no shark could; and so, most reluctantly, he swam three times around her boat, which is magic, and then he sounded and disappeared.

When Mirali woke, it was with equal reluctance, for she had dreamed of a young man who longed for her, and who followed at a respectful distance, just at the edge of her dream, not daring to speak to her. She beached the dugout with a sigh and went home to make dinner for her parents. But that night, and every night thereafter, the same dream came to her, again and again, until she was almost frantic with curiosity to know what it meant.

No priest or wisewoman could offer her any useful counsel, although most suspected that an immortal was concerned in the matter in some way. Some advised praying in a certain way at the temple; others directed her to brew tea out of this or that herb or tree bark to assure herself of a deep, untroubled sleep. But Mirali was not at all sure that she wanted to rid herself of that dream and that shy youth; she only wanted to understand them.

Then one afternoon she heard a man singing in the market, and when she turned to see she knew him immediately as the young man who always followed her in her dream. She went to him, marching straight across the marketplace and facing him boldly to demand, “Who are you? By what right do you come to me as you do?”

The young man smiled at her. He had black eyes, smooth dark-brown skin — with perhaps a touch of blue in it, when he stood in shadow — and fine white teeth, which seemed to Mirali to be just a trifle curved in at the tips. He said gently, “You interrupted my song.”

Mirali started 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 deep-water 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 finger under Mirali’s chin, lifting her face to his and saying, “My wife, I could no more forget that you are my wife than forget what I am. Understand that we may not live together on your island, as others do, for my life is in the sea, and of the sea, and this form that you hold in your arms is but a shadow, little more than a dream, compared to my true self. Yet I will come to you every year, without fail, when my tribute is due — every year, here, where we lie together. Remember, Mirali.”

Then he closed his eyes, which were black, as all sharks’ eyes are, and fell asleep in her arms, and there is no woman who can say what Mirali felt, lying there under the mangroves with her own eyes wide in the moonlight.

When morning came, she walked back to her parents’ house alone.

In time it became plain that Mirali was with child, but no one challenged or mocked her to her face, for she was much loved in the village, and her family greatly esteemed. Yet even so it was considered a misfortune by most, and a disgrace by some, as is not the case on certain other islands. If the talk was not public, it was night talk, talk around the cooking fire, talk at the stream over the slapping of wash on stone. Mirali was perfectly aware of this.

She carried herself well and proudly, and it was agreed, even by those who murmured ill of her, that she looked more beautiful every day, even as her belly swelled out like the fishermen’s sails. But she shocked the midwife, who was concerned for her narrow hips, and for the chance of twins, by insisting on going off by herself to give birth. Her mother and father were likewise troubled; and the old priest himself took a hand, arguing powerfully that the birth should take place in the very temple of the Shark God. Such a thing had never been allowed, or even considered, but the old priest had his own suspicions about Mirali’s unknown lover.

Mirali smiled and nodded respectfully to anyone who had anything to say about the matter, as was always her way. But on the night when her time came she went to the lagoon where she had been wed, as she knew that she must; and in the gentle breath of its shallows her children were born without undue difficulty. For they were indeed twins, a boy and a girl.

Mirali named the boy Keawe, after her father, and the girl Kokinja, which means born in moonlight. And as she looked fondly upon the two tiny, noisy, hungry creatures she and the Shark God had made together, she remembered his last words to her and smiled.

Keawe and Kokinja grew up the pets of their family, being not only beautiful but strong and quick and naturally kindly. This was a remarkable thing, considering the barely veiled scorn with which most of the other village children viewed them, taking their cue from the remarks passed between their parents. On the other hand, while there was notice taken of the very slight bluish tinge to Keawe’s skin, and the fact that Kokinja’s perfect teeth curved just the least bit inward, nothing was ever said concerning these particular traits.

They both swam before they could walk properly; and the creatures of the sea guarded them closely, as they had sworn. More than once little Keawe, who at two and three years regarded the waves and tides as his own servants, was brought safely back to shore clinging to the tail of a dolphin, the flipper of a seal, or even the dorsal fin of a reef shark. Kokinja had an octopus as her favorite playmate, and would fall as trustingly asleep wrapped in its eight arms as in those of her mother. And Mirali herself learned to put her faith in the wildest sea as completely as did her children. That was the gift of her husband.

Her greatest joy lay in seeing them grow into his image (though she always thought that Keawe resembled her father more than his own), and come to their full strength and beauty in a kind of innocence that kept them free of any vanity. Being twins, they understood each other in a wordless way that even Mirali could not share. This pleased her, for she thought, watching them playing silently together, they will still have one another when I am gone.

The Shark God saw the children when he came every year for his tribute, but only while they were asleep. In human form he would stand silently between their floor mats, studying them out of his black, expressionless eyes for a long time, before he finally turned away. Once he said quietly to Mirali, “It is good that I see them no more often than this. A good thing.” Another time she heard him murmur to himself, “Simpler for sharks. ”

As for Mirali herself, the love of the Shark God warded off the cruelty of the passing years, so that she continued to appear little older than her own children. They teased her about this, saying that she embarrassed them, but they were proud, and likewise aware that their mother remained attractive to the men of the village. A number of those came shyly courting, but all were turned away with such civility that they hardly knew they had been rejected; and certainly not by a married woman who saw her husband only once in a twelvemonth.

When Keawe and Kokinja were little younger than she had been when she heard a youth singing in the marketplace, she called them from the lagoon, where they spent most of their playtime, and told them simply, “Your father is the Shark God himself. It is time you knew this.”

In all the years that she had imagined this moment, she had guessed — so she thought — every possible reaction that her children might have to these words. Wonder. awe. pride. fear (there are many tales of gods eating their children). even laughing disbelief — she was long prepared for each of these. But it had never occurred to her that both Keawe and Kokinja might be immediately furious at their father for — as they saw it — abandoning his family and graciously condescending to spare a glance over them while passing through the lagoon to gobble his annual goat. Keawe shouted into the wind, “I would rather the lowest palm-wine drunkard on the island had sired us than this — this god who cannot be bothered with his wife and children but once a year. Yes, I would prefer that by far!”

“That one day has always lighted my way to the next,” his mother said quietly. She turned to Kokinja. “And as for you, child—”

But Kokinja interrupted her, saying firmly, “The Shark God may have a daughter, but I have no more father today than I had yesterday. But if I am the Shark God’s daughter, then I will set out tomorrow and swim the sea until I find him. And when I find him, I will ask questions — oh, indeed, I will ask him questions. And he will answer me.” She tossed her black hair, which was the image of Mirali’s hair, as her eyes were those of her father’s people. Mirali’s own eyes filled with tears as she looked at her nearly grown daughter, remembering a small girl stamping one tiny foot and shouting, “Yes, I will! Yes, I will!” Oh, there is this much truth in what they say, she thought to her husband. You have truly no idea what you have sired.

In the morning, as she had sworn, Kokinja kissed Mirali and Keawe farewell and set forth into the sea to find the Shark God. Her brother, being her brother, was astonished to realize that she meant to keep her vow, and actually begged her to reconsider, when he was not ordering her to do so. But Mirali knew that Kokinja was as much at home in the deep as anything with gills and a tail; and she further knew that no harm would come to Kokinja from any sea creature, because of their promise on her own wedding day. So she said nothing to her daughter, except to remind her, “If any creature can tell you exactly where the Shark God will be at any given moment, it will be the great Paikea, who came to our wedding. Go well, then, and keep warm.”

Kokinja had swum out many a time beyond the curving coral reef that had created the lagoon a thousand or more years before, and she had no more fear of the open sea than of the stream where she had drawn water all her life. But this time, when she paused among the little scarlet-and-black fish that swarmed about a gap in the reef, and turned to see her brother Keawe waving after her, then a hand seemed to close on her heart, and she could not see anything clearly for a while. All the same, the moment her vision cleared, she waved once to Keawe and plunged on past the reef out to sea. The next time she looked back, both reef and island were long lost to her sight.

Now it must be understood that Kokinja did not swim as humans do, being whom she was. From her first day splashing in the shallows of the lagoon, she had truly swum like a fish, or perhaps a dolphin. Swimming in this manner she outsped sailfish, marlin, tunny and tuna alike; even had the barracuda not been bound by his oath to the Shark God, he could never have come within snapping distance of the Shark God’s daughter. Only the seagull and the great white wandering albatross, borne on the wind, kept even with the small figure far below, utterly alone between horizon and horizon, racing on and on under the darkening sky.

The favor of the waters applied to Kokinja in other ways. The fish themselves always seemed to know when she grew hungry, for then schools of salmon or mackerel would materialize out of the depths to accompany her, and she would express proper gratitude and devour one or another as she swam, as a shark would do. When she tired, she either curled up in a slow-rocking swell and slept, like a seal, or clung to the first sea turtle she encountered and drowsed peacefully on its shell — the leatherbacks were the most comfortable — while it courteously paddled along on the surface, so that she could breathe. Should she arrive at an island, she would haul out on the beach — again, like a seal — and sleep fully for a day; then bathe as she might, and be on her way once more.

Only a storm could overtake her, and those did frighten her at first, striking from the east or the north to tear fiercely at the sea. Not being a fish herself, she could not stay below the vast waves that played with her, Shark God’s daughter or no, tossing her back and forth as an orca will toss its prey, then suddenly dropping out from under her, so that she floundered in their hollows, choking and gasping desperately, aware as she so rarely was of her own human weakness and fragility. But she was determined that she would not die without letting her father know what she thought of him; and by and by she learned to laugh at the lightning overhead, even when it struck the water, as though something knew she was near and alone. She would laugh, and she would call out, not caring that her voice was lost in wind and thunder, “Missed me again — so sorry, you missed me again!” For if she was the Shark God’s daughter, who could swim the sea, she was Mirali’s stubborn little girl too.

Keawe, Mirali’s son, was of a different nature from his sister. While he shared her anger at the Shark God’s neglect, he simply decided to go on living as though he had no father, which was, after all, what he had always believed. And while he feared for Kokinja in the deep sea, and sometimes yearned to follow her, he was even more concerned about their mother. Like most grown children, he believed, despite the evidence of his eyes, that Mirali would dwindle away, starve, pine and die should both he and Kokinja be gone. Therefore he stayed at home and apprenticed himself to Uhila, the master builder of outrigger canoes, telling his mother that he would build the finest boat ever made, and in it he would one day bring Kokinja home. Mirali smiled gently and said nothing.

Uhila was known as a hard, impatient master, but Keawe studied well and swiftly learned everything the old man could teach him, which was not merely about the choosing of woods, nor about the weaving of all manner of sails and ropes, nor about the designing of different boats for different uses; nor how to warp the bamboo float, the ama, just so, and bind the long spars, the iaka, so that the connection to the hull would hold even in the worst storms. Uhila taught him, more importantly, the understanding of wood, and of water, and of the ancient relationship between them: half alliance, half war. At the end of Keawe’s apprenticeship, gruff Uhila blessed him and gave him his own set of tools, which he had never done before in the memory of even the oldest villagers.

But he said also to the boy, “You do not love the boats as I do, for their own sake, for the joy of the making. I could tell that the first day you came to me. You are bound by a purpose — you need a certain boat, and in order to achieve it you needed to achieve every other boat. Tell me, have I spoken truly?”

Then Keawe bowed his head and answered, “I never meant to deceive you, wise Uhila. But my sister is far away, gone farther than an ordinary sailing canoe could find her, and it was on me to build the one boat that could bring her back. For that I needed all your knowledge, and all your wisdom. Forgive me if I have done wrong.”

But Uhila looked out at the lagoon, where a new sailing canoe, more beautiful and splendid than any other in the harbor danced like a butterfly at anchor, and he said, “It is too big for any one person to paddle, too big to sail. What will you do for a crew?”

“He will have a crew,” a calm voice answered. Both men turned to see Mirali smiling at them. She said to Keawe, “You will not want anyone else. You know that.”

And Keawe did know, which was why he had never considered setting out with a crew at all. So he said only, “There is a comfortable seat near the bow for you, and you will be our lookout as you paddle. But I must sit in the rear and take charge of the tiller and the sails.”

“For now,” replied Mirali gravely, and she winked just a little at Uhila, who was deeply shocked by the notion of a woman steering any boat at all, let alone winking at him.

So Keawe and his mother went searching for Kokinja, and thus — though neither of them spoke of it — for the Shark God. They were, as they had been from Keawe’s birth, pleasant company for one another. Keawe often sang the songs Mirali had taught him and his sister as children, and she herself would in turn tell old tales from older times, when all the gods were young, and all was possible. At other times, with a following sea and the handsome yellow sail up, they gave the canoe its head and sat in perfectly companionable silence, thinking thoughts that neither of them ever asked about. When they were hungry, Keawe plunged into the sea and returned swiftly with as much fish as they could eat; when it rained, although they had brought more water than food with them, still they caught the rain in the sail, since one can never have too much fresh water at sea. They slept by turns, warmly, guiding themselves by the stars and the turning of the earth, in the manner of birds, though their only real concern was to keep on straight toward the sunset, as Kokinja had done.

At times, watching his mother regard a couple of flying fish barely missing the sail, or turn her head to laugh at the dolphins accompanying the boat, with her still-black hair blowing across her cheek, Keawe would think, god or no god, my father was a fool. But unlike Kokinja, he thought it in pity more than anger. And if a shark should escort them for a little, cruising lazily along with the boat, he would joke with it in his mind—Are you my aunt? Are you my cousin? — for he had always had more humor than his sister. Once, when a great blue mako traveled with them for a full day, dawn to dark, now and then circling or sounding, but always near, rolling one black eye back to study them, he whispered, “Father? Is it you?” But it was only once, and the mako vanished at sunset anyway.

On her journey Kokinja met no one who could — or would — tell her where the Shark God might be found. She asked every shark she came upon, sensibly enough; but sharks are a close-mouthed lot, and not one hammerhead, not one whitetip, not one mako or tiger or reef shark ever offered her so much as a hint as to her father’s whereabouts. Manta rays and sawfishes were more forthcoming, but mantas, while beautiful, are extremely stupid, and taking a sawfish’s advice is always risky: ugly as they know themselves to be, they will say anything to appear wise. As for cod, they travel in great schools and shoals, and think as one, so that to ask a single cod a question is to receive an answer — right or wrong — from a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Kokinja found this unnerving.

So she swam on, day after day: a little weary, a little lonely, a good deal older, but as determined as ever not to turn back without confronting the Shark God and demanding the truth of him. Who are you, that my mother should have accepted you under such terms as you offered? How could you yourself have endured to see her — to see us, your children — only once in every year? Is that a god’s idea of love?

One night, the water having turned warm and silkily calm, she was drifting in a half dream of her own lagoon when she woke with a soft bump against what she at first thought an island. It loomed darkly over her, hiding the moon and half the stars, yet she saw no trees, even in silhouette, nor did she hear any birds or smell any sort of vegetation. What she did smell awakened her completely and set her scrambling backward into deeper water, like a frightened crab. It was a fish smell, in part, cold and clear and salty, but there was something of the reptilian about it: equally cold, but dry as well, for all that it emanated from an island — or not an island? — sitting in the middle of the sea. It was not a smell she knew, and yet somehow she felt that she should.

Kokinja went on backing into moonlight, which calmed her, and had just begun to swim cautiously around the island when it moved. Eyes as big and yellow-white as lighthouse lamps turned slowly to keep her in view, while an enormous, seemingly formless body lost any resemblance to an island, heaving itself over to reveal limbs ending in grotesquely huge claws. Centered between the foremost of them were two moon white pincers, big enough, clearly, to twist the skull off a sperm whale. The sound it uttered was too low for Kokinja to catch, but she felt it plainly in the sea.

She knew what it was then, and could only hope that her voice would reach whatever the creature used for ears. She said, “Great Paikea, I am Kokinja. I am very small, and I mean no one any harm. Please, can you tell me where I may find my father, the Shark God?”

The lighthouse eyes truly terrified her then, swooping toward her from different directions, with no head or face behind them. She realized that they were on long whiplike stalks, and that Paikea’s diamond-shaped head was sheltered under a scarlet carapace studded with scores of small, sharp spines. Kokinja was too frightened to move, which was as well, for Paikea spoke to her in the water, saying against her skin, “Be still, child, that I may see you more clearly, and not bite you in two by mistake. It has happened so.” Then Kokinja, who had already swum half an ocean, thought that she might never again move from where she was.

She waited a long time for the great creature to speak again, but was not at all prepared for Paikea’s words when they did come. “I could direct you to your father — I could even take you to him — but I will not. You are not ready.”

When Kokinja could at last find words to respond, she demanded, “Not ready? Who are you to say that I am not ready to see my own father?” Mirali and Keawe would have known her best then: she was Kokinja, and anything she feared she challenged.

“What your father has to 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 meant to know, that when your mother dies — as she will — when you and your brother in time die, his heart will break. No god is supposed to know such a thing; they are simply not equipped to deal with it. Do you understand me, brave and foolish girl?”

Kokinja was not sure whether she understood, and less sure of whether she even wanted to understand. She said slowly, “So he thinks that he should never see us, to preserve his poor heart from injury and grief? Perhaps he thinks it will be for our own good? Parents always say that, don’t they, when they really mean for their own convenience. Isn’t that what they say, wise Paikea?”

“I never knew my parents,” Paikea answered thoughtfully.

“And Ihave never known him,” snapped Kokinja. “Once a year he comes to lie with his wife, to snap up his goat, to look at his children as we sleep. But what is that to a wife who longs for her husband, to children aching for a real father? God or no god, the very least he could have done would have been to tell us himself what he was, and not leave us to imagine him, telling ourselves stories about why he left our beautiful mother. why he didn’t want to be with us. ” She realized, to her horror, that she was very close to tears and gulped them back as she had done with laughter. “I will never forgive him,” she said. “Never.”

“Then why have you swum the sea to find him?” asked Paikea. It snapped its horrid pale claws as a human will snap his fingers, waiting for her answer with real interest.

“To tell him that I will never forgive him,” Kokinja answered. “So there is something even Paikea did not know.” She felt triumphant, and stopped wanting to cry.

“You are still not ready,” said Paikea, and was abruptly gone, slipping beneath the waves without a ripple, as though its vast body had never been there. It did not return for another three days, during which Kokinja explored the island, sampling every fruit that grew there, fishing as she had done at sea when she desired a change of diet, sleeping when she chose, and continuing to nurse her sullen anger at her father.

Finally, she sat on the beach with her feet in the water, and she called out, “Great Paikea, of your kindness, come to me, I have a riddle to ask you.” None of the sea creatures among whom she had been raised could ever resist a riddle, and she did not see why it should be any different even for the Master of All Sea Monsters.

Presently she heard the mighty creature’s voice saying, “You yourself are as much a riddle to me as any you may ask.” Paikea surfaced close enough to shore that Kokinja felt she could have reached out and touched its head. It said, “Here I am, Shark God’s daughter.”

“This is my riddle,” Kokinja said. “If you cannot answer it, you who know everything, will you take me to my father?”

“A most human question,” Paikea replied, “since the riddle has nothing to do with the reward. Ask, then.”

Kokinja took a long breath. “Why would any god ever choose to sire sons and daughters with a mortal woman? Half-divine, yet we die — half-supreme, yet we are vulnerable, breakable — half-perfect, still we are forever crippled by our human hearts. What cruelty could compel an immortal to desire such unnatural children?”

Paikea considered. It closed its huge, glowing eyes on their stalks; it waved its claws this way and that; it even rumbled thoughtfully to itself, as a man might when pondering serious matters. Finally Paikea’s eyes opened, and there was a curious amusement in them as it regarded Kokinja. She did not notice this, being young.

“Well riddled,” Paikea said. “For I know the answer, but have not the right to tell you. So I cannot.” The great claws snapped shut on the last word, with a grinding clash that hinted to Kokinja how fearsome an enemy Paikea could be.

“Then you will keep your word?” Kokinja asked eagerly. “You will take me where my father is?”

“I always keep my word,” answered Paikea, and sank from sight. Kokinja never saw him again.

But that evening, as the red sun was melting into the green horizon, and the birds and fish that feed at night were setting about their business, a young man came walking out of the water toward Kokinja. She knew him immediately, and her first instinct was to embrace him. Then her heart surged fiercely within her, and she leaped to her feet, challenging him. “So! At last you have found the courage to face your own daughter. Look well, sea-king, for I have no fear of you, and no worship.” She started to add, “Nor any love, either,” but that last caught in her throat, just as had happened to her mother Mirali when she scolded a singing boy for invading her dreams.

The Shark God spoke the words for her. “You have no reason in the world to love me.” His voice was deep and quiet, and woke strange echoes in her memory of such a voice overheard in candlelight in the sweet, safe place between sleep and waking. “Except, perhaps, that I have loved your mother from the moment I first saw her. That will have to serve as my defense, and my apology as well. I have no other.”

“And a pitiful enough defense it is,” Kokinja jeered. “I asked Paikea why a god should ever choose to father a child with a mortal, and he would not answer me. Will you?” The Shark God did not reply at once, and Kokinja stormed on. “My mother never once complained of your neglect, but I am not my mother. I am grateful for my half heritage only in that it enabled me to seek you out, hide as you would. For the rest, I spit on my ancestry, my birthright, and all else that connects me to you. I just came to tell you that.”

Having said this, she began to weep, which infuriated her even more, so that she actually clenched her fists and pounded the Shark God’s shoulders while he stood still, making no response. Shamed as she was, she ceased both activities soon enough, and stood silently facing her father with her head high and her wet eyes defiant. For his part, the Shark God studied her out of his own unreadable black eyes, moving neither to caress nor to punish her, but only — as it seemed to Kokinja — to understand the whole of what she was. And to do her justice, she stared straight back, trying to do the same.

When the Shark God spoke at last, Mirali herself might not have known his voice, for the weariness and grief in it. He said, “Believe as you will, but until your mother came into my life, I had no smallest desire for children, neither with beings like myself nor with any mortal, however beautiful she might be. We do find humans dangerously appealing, all of us, as is well known — perhaps precisely because of their short lives and the delicacy of their construction — and many a deity, unable to resist such haunting vulnerability, has scattered half-divine descendants all over your world. Not I; there was nothing I could imagine more contemptible than deliberately to create such a child, one who would share fully in neither inheritance, and live to curse me for it, as you have done.” Kokinja flushed and looked down but offered no contrition for anything she had said. The Shark God said mildly, “As well you made no apology. Your mother has never once lied to me, nor should you.”

“Why should I ever apologize to you?” Kokinja flared up again. “If you had no wish for children, what are my brother and I doing here?” Tears threatened again, but she bit them savagely back. “You are a god — you could always have kept us from being born! Why are we here?”

To her horror, her legs gave way under her then, and she sank to her knees, still not weeping, but finding herself shamefully weak with rage and confusion. Yet when she looked up, the Shark God was kneeling beside her, for all the world like a playmate helping her to build a sand castle. It was she who stared at him without expression now, while he regarded her with the terrifying pity that belongs to the gods alone. Kokinja could not bear it for more than a moment; but every time she turned her face away, her father gently turned her toward him once more. He said, “Daughter of mine, do you know how old I am?”

Kokinja shook her head silently. The Shark God said, “I cannot tell you in years, because there were no such things at my beginning. Time was very new then, and Those who were already here had not yet decided whether this was. suitable, can you understand me, dear one?” The last two words, heard for the first time in her life, caused Kokinja to shiver like a small animal in the rain. Her father did not appear to notice.

“I had no parents, and no childhood, such as you and your brother have had — I simply was, and always had been, beyond all memory, even my own. All true enough, to my knowledge — and then a leaky outrigger canoe bearing a sleeping brown girl drifted across my endless life, and I, who can never change. I changed. Do you hear what I am telling you, daughter of that girl, daughter who hates me?”

The Shark God’s voice was soft and uncertain. “I told your mother that it was good that I saw her and you and Keawe only once in a year — that if I allowed myself that wonder even a day more often I might lose myself in you, and never be able to find myself again, nor ever wish to. Was that cowardly of me, Kokinja? Perhaps so, quite likely unforgivably so.” It was he who looked away now, rising and turning to face the darkening scarlet sea. He said, after a time, “But one day — one day that will come — when you find yourself loving as helplessly, and as certainly wrongly, as I, loving against all you know, against all you are. remember me then.”

To this Kokinja made no response; but by and by she rose herself and stood silently beside her father, watching the first stars waken, one with each heartbeat of hers. She could not have said when she at last took his hand.

“I cannot stay,” she said. “It is a long way home, and seems longer now.”

The Shark God touched her hair lightly. “You will go back more swiftly than you arrived, I promise you that. But if you could remain with me a little time. ” He left the words unfinished.

“A little time,” Kokinja agreed. “But in return. ” She hesitated, and her father did not press her, but only waited for her to continue. She said presently, “I know that my mother never wished to see you in your true form, and for herself she was undoubtedly right. But I. I am not my mother.” She had no courage to say more than that.

The Shark God did not reply for some while, and when he did his tone was deep and somber. “Even if I granted it, even if you could bear it, you could never see all of what I am. Human eyes cannot”—he struggled for the exact word—“they do not bend in the right way. It was meant as a kindness, I think, just as was the human gift of forgetfulness. You have no idea how the gods envy you that, the forgetting.”

“Even so,” Kokinja insisted. “Even so, I would not be afraid. If you do not know that by now. ”

“Well, we will see,” answered the Shark God, exactly as all human parents have replied to importunate children at one time or another. And with that, even Kokinja knew to content herself.

In the morning, she plunged into the waves to seek her breakfast, as did her father on the other side of the island. She never knew where he slept — or if he slept at all — but he returned in time to see her emerging from the water with a fish in her mouth and another in her hand. She tore them both to pieces, like any shark, and finished the meal before noticing him. Abashed, she said earnestly, “When I am at home, I cook my food as my mother taught me — but in the sea. ”

“Your mother always cooks dinner for me,” the Shark God answered quietly. “We wait until you two are asleep, or away, and then she will come down to the water and call. It has been so from the first.”

“Then she has seen you—”

“No. I take my tribute afterward, when I leave her, and she never follows then.” The Shark God smiled and sighed at the same time, studying his daughter’s puzzled face. He said,

“What is between us is hard to explain, even to you. Especially to you.”

The Shark God lifted his head to taste the morning air, which was cool and cloudless over water so still that Kokinja could hear a dolphin breathing too far away for her to see. He frowned slightly, saying, “Storm. Not now, but in three days’ time. It will be hard.”

Kokinja did not show her alarm. She said grimly, “I came here through storms. I survived those.”

“Child,” her father said, and it was the first time he had called her that, “you will be with me.” But his eyes were troubled, and his voice strangely distant. For the rest of that day, while Kokinja roamed the island, dozed in the sun, and swam for no reason but pleasure, he hardly spoke but continued watching the horizon, long after both sunset and moonset. When she woke the next morning, he was still pacing the shore, though she could see no change at all in the sky, but only in his face. Now and then he would strike a balled fist against his thigh and whisper to himself through tight pale lips. Kokinja, walking beside him and sharing his silence, could not help noticing how human he seemed in those moments — how mortal, and how mortally afraid. But she could not imagine the reason for it, not until she woke on the following day and felt the sand cold under her.

Since her arrival on the little island, the weather had been so clement that the sand she slept on remained perfectly warm through the night. Now its chill woke her well before dawn, and even in the darkness she could see the mist on the horizon, and the lightning beyond the mist. The sun, orange as the harvest moon, was never more than a sliver between the mounting thunderheads all day. The wind was from the northeast, and there was ice in it.

Kokinja stood alone on the shore, watching the first rain marching toward her across the waves. She had no longer any fear of storms, and was preparing to wait out the tempest in the water, rather than take refuge under the trees. But the Shark God came to her then and led her away to a small cave, where they sat together, listening to the rising wind. When she was hungry, he fished for her, saying, “They seek shelter too, like anyone else in such conditions — but they will come for me.” When she became downhearted, he hummed nursery songs that she recalled Mirali singing to her and Keawe very long ago, far away on the other side of any storm. He even sang her oldest favorite, which began:

“Keawe never really liked that one,” she said softly. “It made him sad. How do you know all our songs?”

“I listened,” the Shark God said, and nothing more.

“I wish. I wish. ”Kokinja’s voice was almost lost in the pounding of the rain. She thought she heard her father answer, “I, too,” but in that moment he was on his feet, striding out of the cave into the storm, as heedless of the weather as though it were flowers sluicing down his body, summer-morning breezes greeting his face. Kokinja hurried to keep up with him. The wind snatched the breath from her lungs, and knocked her down more than once, but she matched his pace to the shore, even so. It seemed to her that the tranquil island had come malevolently alive with the rain; that the vines slapping at her shoulders and entangling her ankles had not been there yesterday, nor had the harsh branches that caught at her hair. All the same, when he turned at the water’s edge, she was beside him.

“Mirali.” He said the one word, and pointed out into the flying, whipping spindrift and the solid mass of sea-wrack being driven toward land by the howling grayness beyond. Kokinja strained her eyes and finally made out the tiny flicker that was not water, the broken chip of wood sometimes bobbing helplessly on its side, sometimes hurled forward or sideways from one comber crest to another. Staring through the rain, shaking with cold and fear, it took her a moment to realize that her father was gone. Taller than the wavetops, taller than any ship’s masts, taller than the wind, she saw the deep blue dorsal and tail fins, so distant from each other, gliding toward the wreck, on which she could see no hint of life. Then she plunged into the sea — shockingly, almost alarmingly warm, by comparison with the air — and followed the Shark God.

It was the first and only glimpse she ever had of the thing her father was. As he had warned her, she never saw him fully: both her eyesight and the sea itself seemed too small to contain him. Her mind could take in a magnificent and terrible fish; her soul knew that that was the least part of what she was seeing; her body knew that it could bear no more than that smallest vision. The mark of his passage was a ripple of beaten silver across the wild water, and although the storm seethed and roared to left and right of her, she swam in his wake as effortlessly as he made the way for her. And whether he actually uttered it or not, she heard his fearful cry in her head, over and over—“Mirali! Mirali!”

The mast was in two pieces, the sail a yellow rag, the rudder split and the tiller broken off altogether. The Shark God regained the human form so swiftly that Kokinja was never entirely sure that she had truly seen what she knew she had seen, and the two of them righted the sailing canoe together. Keawe lay in the bottom of the boat, barely conscious, unable to speak, only to point over the side. There was no sign of Mirali.

“Stay with him,” her father ordered Kokinja, and he sounded as a shark would have done, vanishing instantly into the darkness below the ruined keel. Kokinja crouched by Keawe, lifting his head to her lap and noticing a deep gash on his forehead and another on his cheekbone. “Tiller,” he whispered. “Snapped. flew straight at me. ” His right hand was clenched around some small object; when Kokinja pried it gently open — for he seemed unable to release it himself — she recognized a favorite bangle of their mother’s. Keawe began to cry.

“Couldn’t hold her. couldn’t hold. ” Kokinja could not hear a word, for the wind, but she read his eyes and she held him to her breast and rocked him, hardly noticing that she was weeping herself.

The Shark God was a long time finding his wife, but he brought her up in his arms at last, her eyes closed and her face as quiet as always. He placed her gently in the canoe with her children, brought the boat safely to shore, and bore Mirali’s body to the cave where he had taken Kokinja for shelter. And while the storm still lashed the island, and his son and daughter sang the proper songs, he dug out a grave and buried her there, with no marker at her head, there being no need. “I will know,” he said, “and you will know. And so will Paikea, who knows everything.”

Then he mourned.

Kokinja ministered to her brother as she could, and they slept for a long time. When they woke, with the storm passed over and all the sky and sea looking like the first morning of the world, they walked the shore to study the sailing canoe that had been all Keawe’s pride. After considering it from all sides, he said at last, “I can make it seaworthy again. Well enough to get us home, at least.”

“Father can help,” Kokinja said, realizing as she spoke that she had never said the word in that manner before. Keawe shook his head, looking away.

“I can do it myself,” he said sharply. “I built it myself.”

They did not see the Shark God for three days. When he finally emerged from Mirali’s cave — as her children had already begun to call it — he called them to him, saying, “I will see you home, as soon as you will. But I will not come there again.”

Keawe, already busy about his boat, looked up but said nothing. Kokinja asked, “Why? You have always been faithfully worshipped there — and it was our mother’s home all her life.”

The Shark God was slow to answer. “From the harbor to her house, from the market to the beach where the nets are mended, to my own temple, there is no place that does not speak to me of Mirali. Forgive me — I have not the strength to deal with those memories, and I never will.”

Kokinja did not reply; but Keawe turned from his boat to face his father openly for the first time since his rescue from the storm. He said, clearly and strongly, “And so, once again, you make a liar out of our mother. As I knew you would.”

Kokinja gasped audibly, and the Shark God took a step toward his son without speaking. Keawe said, “She defended you so fiercely, so proudly, when I told her that you were always a coward, god or no god. You abandoned a woman who loved you, a family that belonged to you — and now you will do the same with the island that depends on you for protection and loyalty, that has never failed you, done you no disservice, but only been foolish enough to keep its old bargain with you, and expect you to do the same. And this in our mother’s name, because you lack the courage to confront the little handful of memories you two shared. You shame her!”

He never flinched from his father’s advance, but stood his ground even when the Shark God loomed above him like a storm in mortal shape, his eyes no longer unreadable but alive with fury. For a moment Kokinja saw human and shark as one, flowing in and out of each other, blurring and bleeding together and separating again, in and out, until she became dazed with it and had to close her eyes. She only opened them again when she heard the Shark God’s quiet, toneless voice, “We made fine children, my Mirali and I. It is my loss that I never knew them. My loss alone.”

Without speaking further he turned toward the harbor, looking as young as he had on the day Mirali challenged him in the marketplace, but moving now almost like an old human man. He had gone some little way when Keawe spoke again, saying simply, “Not only yours.”

The Shark God turned back to look long at his children once again. Keawe did not move, but Kokinja reached out her arms, whispering, “Come back.” And the Shark God nodded, and went on to the sea.

PETER S. BEAGLE was born in Manhattan in 1939, on the same night that Billie Holiday was recording “Strange Fruit” and “Fine and Mellow” just a few blocks away. Raised in the Bronx, Peter originally proclaimed when he was ten years old that he would be a writer. Today he is acknowledged as an American fantasy icon, and to the delight of his millions of fans around the world he is now publishing more than ever.

In addition to being an acclaimed novelist and writer of short stories and nonfiction, Peter has also written numerous plays, teleplays, and screenplays; and is a gifted poet, librettist, lyricist, and singer/songwriter. To learn more about The Last Unicorn, A Fine and Private Place, I See By My Outfit, “Two Hearts,” and all the rest of his extraordinary body of work, please visit www.peterbeagle.com.

I’ve always been fascinated by the stories and folktales of the South Seas — just like my friend, the singer-songwriter Marty Atkinson, who hasn’t spent any time there either. It’s probably due to a Bronx childhood spent reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Samoan tales like “The Bottle Imp” and “The Beach of Falesá,” along with a lot of Jack London and my father’s beloved Joseph Conrad. I cherished visions out of Herman Melville’s haunting classic Typee, and fantasies of running off to Tahiti, like Gauguin. I did make it to Fiji once, but it was for a week’s vacation on a private island: not at all the same thing as arriving on a whaler and jumping ship forever. Not at all the same.

“The Children of the Shark God” is, both in story and style, very much my attempt at a tale in the manner of Stevenson. All these years and miles away from the Bronx he is still one of my literary heroes, for lots of reasons.