Water, page 7
part #1 of Tales of Elemental Spirits Series
But as it happened, Dreiad was too full of something else to notice her mood: too full of the same suppressed excitement she had seen in him two days before, only it was much stronger now, it was as if he moved carefully for fear it might burst out of him without any decision from him to yield to it. They must already be betrothed, she thought drearily.
He held out a hand as if to take hers, and then dropped it, remembering; she had made no answering motion, having not forgotten. “I have something to tell you,” he said.
“Yes?” she said, and was pleased to notice that her voice was calm, even cool.
He looked at her in a little puzzlement, as if first taking in that perhaps not all was well with her; but the excitement bubbled up again and would not be stoppered. “I went to visit someone yesterday, which is why I could not be with you. This is someone I have been looking for for some time, someone who could answer my dearest wish.”
She nodded, her hands clasped at her belt.
“And I have found her!” He laughed as if he could not help himself, but then, looking at Jenny, the puzzlement came back for a moment. “Can you not guess?” he said, but in a quieter voice; and again his hand reached to touch hers and withdrew, and again hers had made no motion to meet his.
She made herself smile. “Yes, I think I can guess,” she said, but the tone of her voice was wrong and he heard it, and the puzzlement deepened, and the excitement sank out of his eyes and some uncertainty crept in, and distress with it.
“I—” he said, and paused. “I was so sure you would be as pleased as I. It is the answer, you see. Or I hoped it was.”
She did not hear his words, but she saw the distress and was sorry. She was breaking her promise already. She tried to smile. “Tell me,” she said.
But the excitement had left him, and he stumbled over what he had to tell her. “She lives far away, and at first I only knew the rumour of her, and I couldn’t ask openly, of course, but everyone is accustomed to my having strange fits of curiosity about this and that and I didn’t tell anyone why I wanted to find her, of course, and I was able to at last, without telling anyone, I mean. I had to tell her, of course, but it won’t matter, soon. . . . I mean, I thought it wouldn’t matter. . . . I thought. . . .” He looked at her, miserably.
His misery touched her, for she did love him. And her hands made the same gesture that his had, twice, wanting to reach her, touch her. Her hand reached towards him and, remembering, retreated. “Tell me,” she said again, her voice stronger. “I do want to know.”
“It’s only that she told me how you may visit under water,” he said in a rush. “Visit me.”
It was so completely not what she was expecting that her mouth dropped open; and when he saw that she had not guessed what he had to tell her, he laughed for pure relief. “She is very old, and will not tell you her name; I believe nobody has known her name for centuries; she is very old even by our standards. And she says that it is not that she doesn’t want to help anyone, it’s just that almost everyone has such silly ideas of what they have to have help with, and she got tired of sending silly people away, and so now she is very hard to find in the first place. She says sometimes the silliest people are the most stubborn, and she wonders if some of the people with the problems she really could help with simply decide that it is their fate and stop trying; but then maybe if that is their attitude, it is their fate. But when I found her, and told her about us, she was perfectly willing to help, but she said it was an unusual situation and she could remember only one other case, but it was a long time ago, and she would need time to remember what she knew about it. That’s why I couldn’t tell you last time. I wanted to wait—just in case she couldn’t remember, couldn’t help us, though I was pretty sure she could, she had all but promised that she could.”
Jenny was responding to his excitement without, still, really taking it in. All that she understood clearly was that this she was not his betrothed sea-princess, and that Dreiad was calling himself and her, Jenny, we. And so she listened to the tone of his voice and was happy. But when he came to the end and drew breath, she still didn’t know what she was happy about.
“She’s really very nice,” he said, finally, “and it’s funny, because she likes to talk. It’s not that she doesn’t like people or anything. I’ll take you to meet her. You’ll like her too.”
Jenny couldn’t speak. She stood, smiling, her misery evaporating like fog in sun.
“Well,” he said, beaming at her. “Will you come?”
“Come?” said Jenny, still thinking, He calls us we. It was too absolute a thing, the division between land and water, the division between her and him. By tomorrow she would have figured out a way to see even this as merely a putting off of the inevitable, putting off their eventual, absolute parting; he was offering her a visit to his land, like the visits he could make to hers. That was all. That was why she still resisted taking it in, because of what would follow.
“With me,” he said. “To my home.” And then his self-possession broke, and his hands reached for hers and seized them, and he said, “Oh, Jenny, I love you so!” Her hands had reached too, to seize his the sooner, and the clasp was as if their two hearts met, for neither noticed that one was too warm and too dry, and the other too cool and too wet. He drew her into his arms, and wrapped them around her, and hers went round him, and she laid her face against his cool wet shoulder, and his damp hair brushed her flushed cheek.
But after a moment, solemnly, he took a step back from her, though he kept his hands around her waist. “It is a risk for you,” he said.
“I care for no risk,” Jenny said, and realised that she meant it; at this moment she could have slain a dragon, defied any number of sea-kings and their curses. “What is this risk?”
“You must believe that I love you,” he said, gravely, looking at her.
She laughed. “Do you love me?” These words had never passed between them before: the fact that they could not touch each other felt as if it precluded such words, negated the feelings behind them—till now, till just now, when he had told her that he loved her, when he had told her that he had learned of a way that she might visit his underwater country. And yet she knew that she was still of the land; if she stayed in his arms for long, much as she wished to be there, she would grow cold and faint; already she felt colder than she had, despite the warmth of joy.
“Yes,” he said, and while he tried to say it solemnly, his eyes lit up with the excitement she had taught herself to fear. “I love you.”
“Then I believe you,” she said, joyously.
And he kissed her.
His kiss was cool, and damp, like his skin; but when he dropped his arms from around her and took her hand, it did not feel so cool or so damp as it had done only a moment before. He led her down, into the water, and her wet clothes bound her legs, and she paused: and Gruoch had leaped in after her, drenching them both with spray, and she felt the drops pour down over her face and found them refreshing. Gruoch thrust her nose into Jenny’s hand and shivered; and Jenny stroked her head and said, “You must wait for me here, little one, for I will return”; and she knelt down in the cold sea-water and looked deep into her bitch’s eyes, and she could see Gruoch giving up whatever it was she needed to give up, as a good dog will do for the person it loves, and Jenny stood up again while Gruoch waded back to the shore. She looked over her shoulder then, but Jenny pointed away, and the tall hound trotted to where Flora stood tied in the shade of a tree, happy to browse over the summer grass without care till her lady returned and set her saddle on her back and asked her something she understood. Jenny watched Gruoch lie down—back obediently to the shore—and then she turned again to Dreiad, and put her hand in his, and walked deeper and deeper into the sea, till the water closed over her head.
She gave a great gasp, and felt the cold water rush into her lungs; but she did not drown. And they walked down the shoaling sea-bottom to the centre of the harbour, which was very deep indeed, and her hair drifted up from her head, and her clothes swirled around her, and she found that they chafed her, and then she felt Dreiad’s hands on her, loosening them. For a moment she fought him, but he did not realise it, for he thought she was only fighting the constriction of her useless clothing; and then she understood what he was doing, and shed her clothes willingly, and found she was the same neutral, hairless, faceted, silvery color that he was beneath her clothes, here, as she was, under the sea, for such was the magic of the kiss of the sea-man who loved her.
He took her clothes carefully from her, for if they had been set adrift they would have been taken by the water eddies, and tossed and tangled here and there; and he folded them, deftly, in a way she could not have done, under water as she now was, and laid them on the sea-bed, and put a rock on them. “We will find them for you when I take you back,” he said, “for you will need them again then; and we do not want to lose them, or have them wash ashore and be found by someone who recognises them.”
And he took her down into the deeps of the sea, and taught her how to choose walking on the sea-bottom or swimming like a fish, and how what on land were merely lungs for the taking in and pushing out of air now became a kind of swim-bladder that she could adjust as she chose, although the effort of it was strange to her, and her chest hurt afterward, as a strained muscle does when it performs some feat beyond its strength. And he took her to the great palace where his parents lived, and they made her welcome, and it turned out that she was less of a surprise to them than either she or Dreiad expected, for the sea-king had noticed the direction his son took when he set off on his mysterious absences; and the story had got back to him as well of his son’s search for the old sea-woman who knew many tales of things and many charms that had made the tales possible, and while he did not know what Dreiad had asked her, he had guessed at what it might have been, and he had guessed right.
And Jenny went riding on the tall slender-legged sea-horses with the foamy manes, and chased fishes like hares through the bowing trees behind grey-green hounds; and he introduced her to his cousins, who were sea-princesses with great curls of golden-green hair that lay behind them on the silvery water that was their air. And also they rode to visit the old sea-woman who had told Dreiad of the charm to permit Jenny to visit under the sea; and the two women were delighted with each other, and found each other easy to talk to; the sea-woman reminded Jenny of her mother and her mother’s friends, and the conversations they had, of cooking and midwifery and the doings of their neighbours.
And her prince took her back up to the land, where her horse and her hound awaited her, and kissed her once more, and she was an ordinary land-person again, dressed in dripping-wet clothes; and she had a tricky time of it, that night, getting herself back indoors and dry before her parents saw her.
The next day they did it better, and after he kissed her, she waited till the itchiness of her clothing grew unbearable, and she undressed on the beach as a silvery sea-person, and tucked her clothes into the empty saddlebag she had thoughtfully hung to her mare’s saddle that day, that no one might notice anything amiss, did anyone notice a horse and a hound near this haunted harbour-shore where no one came. And Gruoch watched from under the tree where Flora was tied, and did not try to stop Jenny walking into the sea this second day; but she greeted her again anxiously when she came out.
On the third day, Jenny said to her sea-prince, “If I kiss you, can I bring you to my parents’ farm, and introduce you to them?”
His smile lit up his face even more wonderfully than it had before, and he said, “Yes, if you love me.”
She laughed, and kissed him, and gave him the clothes that she had borrowed from the back of her father’s cupboard, and there then stood before her a tall young man with big long-fingered hands that stuck out too far from the ends of his sleeves, and a nice, ordinary, kind, open face. And she took him home.
She decided that the only thing she could tell her parents was the truth; for however much they would wish not to believe her, they would believe her because she was their daughter, and so she could take them down to the shore after she told them the story they would not want to believe, and they could see her prince turn silvery, and walk into the water, and they would believe her then because they had to.
And so this is what Jenny and Dreiad did; and her parents did not want to believe them, but they did accompany the two of them to the shore, and saw them kiss, and saw the silveriness break out first across the forehead of the young man with the open honest face, whom they had liked at once, and watched it creep down his cheeks, and then across the backs of his hands under the too-short sleeves; and they saw him undress, and walk into the water till the surface of it closed over his head. And they believed, because they had no choice.
But it was only the two of them who could come and go in each other’s worlds, for it was only the two of them who loved each other in the way to bring out the charm. But both sets of parents knew what was before them in their children’s eyes, and were not surprised when Jenny and her prince came to each of them in turn and asked permission to marry. Neither parents would have wished their child to marry someone of so distant a country that none of their family or people could visit it; but both sets of parents loved their only children deeply, and would not stand in the way of their happiness: and the two families met on the shore of the harbour, and liked each other, and that was a help, for they found themselves supporting each other’s feelings as they would have done for good friends in the ordinary way of things; and thus found that their feelings were much alike. And on that same shore Jenny and Dreiad were married, and began dividing their time between land and sea.
Some time between Jenny and Dreiad’s betrothal and marriage, news came from a farm on the far side of the other town, that a third son named Robert had married a very pretty girl whose pregnancy was slightly too advanced even for her loose wedding gown to disguise; and that he had been apprenticed to her father, who ran a not unsuccessful brewery, although his beer was not well thought of by anyone who could afford better.
The story of the land-girl and her sea-prince of course got out. But all the big sea-trading merchants had left the two towns long ago, and there was no one nearby who wanted to take up the sea-trade again. Somehow the townsfolk had come to believe in the last three generations that it was not merely the sea-king’s curse but their own blindness that had caused their downfall, which meant that they took the removal of the curse much as the sea-king himself had, as a relief of guilty responsibility. But there were a few farmers who had had fisherfolk as great-grandparents; and some of these came hesitantly down to the harbour again, and set sail in small boats newly and carefully built on the harbour shores. And the small boats sailed beautifully, and caught just enough fish that the fisherfolk’s families were content and well-fed, and not so much that any city merchant came sniffing around to organise them and make a proper profit. And between the breaking of the old curse and the making of this new marriage, the sea-people and the land-people found themselves willingly drawn close; and so the sea-people swam to the surface to say hello when they recognised a familiar hull overhead, and sometimes offered advice about where the fish were; and the land-people greeted them politely, and listened to their advice and were glad of it. But these same land-people, when stories of their friendship with their sea-people brought curiosity seekers to the newly lively towns on either side of the once-haunted harbour, had nothing to say, and turned blank faces and deaf ears to all questions from both casual and prying outsiders.
Jenny’s parents’ farm grew in a long wide strip from its original place on a little rise behind the southern town down to the shore near the harbour mouth. It grew this way in no particular wise except that it was a track used so often that at last Jenny and Dreiad and her family laid a path, a queerly shining grey path, to the water’s edge; and in the clearing they had to do to lay the path, they found earth that the farmers among them decided was too good not to use, and so fields sprang up on either side of that path till the farm really did stretch down to the shore in an odd haphazard way. But the farmers were right about the earth, for crops put in those path-side fields grew easily and abundantly.
Jenny and Dreiad had twelve children. Two of the twelve were sea-people, and had an especial care for the fisherfolk of the harbour their mother had been born near. Two of them were land-people, and took over the farm when Jenny’s parents died, and married land-people who were also farmers; and the farm was held by their family for hundreds of years, and for many generations after Jenny, its members were astonishingly long-lived; although they now produced as many fishers as farmers. Jenny herself lived, while not a long time by sea-people’s standards, still a very long time indeed by land-people’s accounting of such things.
And the other eight were of both land and sea, and could live on either the one or the other; and if on land they did look a little silverier than ordinary land-people, and if in the sea they looked a little rosier than ordinary sea-people, still this made no one think less of them, for all of them had open, honest faces that lit up with gentleness and humour and intelligence when they smiled.
SEA SERPENT
“I am Mel.”
“I have heard of you.”
“You are Iril.” (Not a question, a statement.)
“Yes.”
“You will take us across the water.” (The same.)
“How many?”
“Twenty and twenty men. Some gear.”
“Eight large coppers.”
Mel took a bracelet from his wrist and tossed it on the ground in front of where Iril sat. The gold was as thick as Iril’s small finger.
