“And there will be some dry land left?” queried a schoolmistress from Dania. “We would miss our forests.”
Genevieve assured her, “Anything at the altitude of Galul or above. That will include the uplands of Langmarsh, the mountains of Sealands, most of Dania, all of Havenor and Upland, though Barfezi will become marshlands, and virtually all of Merdune and Frangia will be submerged. Havenpool will be nothing but a shallow lagoon of the sea. Since there is considerable vulcanism involved, however, there will also be new islands, some of them of considerable size. Though we will not live to see all these changes, our children’s children will.”
“We will not see the depths of the sea, either,” said Mrs. Blessingham firmly, though sadly. “But our children’s children will.”
Genevieve went home to Langmarsh House, where, as they had agreed on their way home, Aufors Leys had been busy reorganizing the Duke’s estates and parceling various farms and businesses out to the men and women who had always worked them. Genevieve, watching him before he knew she was there, saw the satisfaction in his face. He actually looked happy! His welcome, when he saw her, was almost as ardent as she remembered.
“All finished?” he asked.
She heaved a great breath. “I think so.”
“And what now?”
She surprised herself by weeping, tears spilling down her cheeks as though his words had released a dam. “Oh, Aufors, I feel finished, too. Done with my purpose in life! I think it’s a great pity to come to the end of one’s purpose in life when one is not yet twenty-two.”
He actually laughed. “You think you’ve come to the end, do you?”
He said it teasingly, but it rankled nonetheless, and she frowned, aware she was behaving childishly, unable to behave in any other way. Too much had happened to her. Too much all at once.
“Come,” said Aufors, reaching for her hand. “I want to see.”
“See what?”
“See the cellars where your mother took you.” He caressed her hand, and though she could not fathom his reason, his tone said it was important to him. They went down the stairs, she leading him by one hand, a candle in the other, as she herself had been led all those years of her childhood. They traversed the extensive cellars, far under the foundations of Langmarsh House, to those deep pools where she had learned to be what she was.
He looked at her, and at the pool, and at her again. The candlelight reflected on the pool in little shattered ripples of fire. Far off, the water dripped ceaselessly with a musical phrase that repeated, with variations, over and over. He ran his hands down her neck, where he felt nothing at all but sweet flesh and soft skin, though his eyes told him there were little lines there that other women might not have. Some other women.
“It’s only a deep pool of water,” he said, gesturing. “I thought it would be more mysterious.”
“It’s pretty mysterious at two in the morning, especially in winter. It’s cold in there, and it’s dark,” she murmured, half hypnotized by the ripples on the water. “I was always afraid there were eely things in there. Still it’s not unnatural, and I’m not unnatural either, anymore than whales are unnatural. We are both creatures born to the land who are going back to the sea.”
“That’s the part you haven’t explained,” he said. “It’s why I wanted to come down here. I want everything. Everything the spirit said to you. All that you’ve told me so far, I’ve managed to accept, but you haven’t really said why. Why are we to go back to the sea?”
“Fingers,” she murmured, remembering the words of the spirit. “We got fingers before we got good sense. You know, one of our early ancestors was called Homo Habilis, the toolmaker. We learned to manipulate and change things before we learned to look at what we were changing. So did the whales, and the dolphins, long before us, but they have bigger brains than we do, and after they made a few mistakes, they decided — philosophically, you understand — that it would be better to go back to the sea and practice humility first by thinking things out thoroughly. Then, when they’d done that, they could crawl back up on the land in a few million years or so. Only they never got the chance because of us! We , we made mistakes, too, but we didn’t have any humility. We never bothered to think things out. We just . . . went on. Wreck this, destroy that, gamble our souls on the odds of whether we’d ever do it right . . .”