Page 2 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

She was afraid. She’d heard tales of being trapped on land. She did notwantto share her skin with him. But what if she saved him from his wounds only for him to die of exposure? She could not let him die. Not when she’d worked so hard to save him. And so she slipped her heavy sealskin off of her shoulders and draped it over his body.

He shifted, mumbling incoherently, but still did not wake. She watched the man and the stars, shivering. If she could have taken him to her home, she would have had everything he could possibly need. They would both be warm and safe. But he would not survive it. Men could not breathe in the water the way she could.

She cursed this abandoned beach. She cursed the men who had hurt him, the men who had left him. She cursed the cold. She shifted closer to him and adjusted the skin to cover them both, curling against the side of him that hadn’t been stabbed in two different places. She pressed her body against his and breathed warmly against his shoulder. He made a sound that was almost a sigh. Almost a groan. Somewhere in between. He reached out, fumbling with his hand, until he found hers and gripped it tightly in his unconscious delirium. And then he was still. And she was warm.

He didn’t wake the next day, or the day after that. But the sun was too bright and his face burned and chapped, and so she took rocks and stacked them to make short pillars and suspended her sealskin over him for shade during the day, dropping it down to blanket them both by night.

She found a stream and used a bladder to bring him fresh water, which she carefully poured between his parched, parted lips. She left him briefly to fish, going at sunset to dive down and fill her belly before returning to warm him.

On the morning of the fourth day, she woke at sunrise. She needed to give him more water. But as she shifted away from him, his hand closed around her arm firmly. He was strong, even after days with a raging fever, and her heart quickened to imagine his strength when he was fed and rested and whole.

She looked up to see his eyes open for the first time. Gray. Like the skin of whales in soft morning light. Gray like the sky on a stormy afternoon.

“Cò thusa?” he rasped.

She knew his language. She knew many languages. One could learn a great deal when they listened, and she was always listening, just below the surface as the ships sailed over the water, hearing songs and conversations. Some of it was magic, no doubt, but she had a knack for it just the same.

He had asked who she was. There was no way to answer that truthfully.I am the daughter of the sea, of an old god and a mortal woman made immortal.That would not do. And so she said nothing.

“Cò às a tha mi?”Where am I?

She had heard the sailing men refer to these islands as Orkney, though her father had a different name for them. But this man did not speak the language of most of the men she heard nearby.

The man closed his eyes and groaned as he shifted his body. When his eyes opened again, they were wet with tears. He lifted a shaky hand and touched her cheek gently, his rough fingertips barely stroking her skin.

“Tha thu nad aingeal.”

She shook her head. She was no angel.

“Tha mi marbh.”I am dead.

She made a harsh sound in her throat. He nodded. She was afraid. But as the tears streaked down his cheeks, as he dropped his hand from her face and let his arm fall over his face, covering his eyes, she decided that he was no threat to her. Not really. What could one man do to harm the daughter of a god?

“Tha a’ Ghàidhlig agam,” she said.

I have the Gaelic. I speak Gaelic.

He let his arm drop to his side and looked at her again. She brought the bladder of water to his lips, her hand supporting gently under his head. He did not fight her, but his eyes bored into hers as he drank deeply. She shook her head, a small smile playing on her lips.

The water seemed to invigorate him slightly.

“Dè an t-ainm a th ’ort?” she asked as she wiped at his lips with a scrap of his sun-bleached tunic.

“Callum,” he replied, his deep voice a raspy croak.

“Callum,” she repeated, liking the way the syllables sounded as they rolled across her tongue. His name called to mind the image of a dove.

Utnapishtim first sent forth a dove after the great flood. Then a swallow. Then a raven. With no land or place to roost, the dove returned on the first day after the storm. Utnapishtim placed it gently back in its wicker cage. But the raven did not return. Her father liked to tell her that the raven flew far, far away. Across the sea, across the world.

“Callum? A bheil an t-acras ort?”Are you hungry?

He nodded slowly. She shifted to rise to her feet, but he reached out, wrapping her wrist in his hand and squeezing, as if to hold her there. She tilted her head toward the nearby driftwood fire, where the fish she had caught before sunrise was roasting on a spit. He released her.

She brought the fish to Callum and fed him with her fingers, flaking off small bites and placing them at his lips. Once or twice, his tongue licked her fingers, and sparkling electricity, like lightning over the sea, raced through her body.

When he had eaten his fill, his eyes grew heavy. But before they closed, he coughed and asked, “Dè an t-ainm a th ’ort?”

She could not answer him immediately. She had been named for the shimmering pearls that brought her mother such delight. The pearls her father had personally woven into the crown her mother wore, glowing softly in her black hair. She knew the ancient word for it, though the language was no longer spoken on land. She knew the Aramaic word for it. Margdnitha. And in Greek, Margaritári. But she did not know it in his Gaelic.