Was it luck or some vestige of the sea witch’s magic, or true love, which has its own gravitational power, that he was walking on the shore at exactly the right time?
As soon as he saw her, he said, “You’re the girl I saw among the waves. The one who rescued me.”
She tried to answer—she had lost her song, not her voice—but he could not understand what she was saying, and her voice tired quickly, trying to speak through this new medium. The sea-folk learn to understand human speech, from listening to sailors in their boats and children playing along the shore. They must guard the sea from us, so they learn about us what they can. But we, proud and ignorant, thinking there is no intelligent life but that of the air, do not learn about them, and so only a few of us speak their language. Those who do are often considered mad. They spend their lives gathering things the tide has thrown up, living as they can on the detritus of the sea.
The prince carried her to the castle, put her in the grandest of guest bedrooms, and announced to his mother and father that this was the girl he was going to marry. When asked who she was, this girl with nothing—no clothes, no voice, no name—he said she was the daughter of the sea king himself. When his father asked about her dowry, he said it was safety among the waves. If she were queen, their ships would be safe—at least from the sea-folk, who often sank ships for their cargoes of furniture and figurines, which were to them the finest of trinkets, decorating their underwater caves.
In a seafaring nation, which had made its fortune from trade with distant lands—in spices, printed fabrics, hand-painted porcelain—this dowry was judged to be better than gold or jewels. And it is a fact that the fishing boats of that country had luck with their catches once the prince married the girl he had found among the tidal pools. After their marriage, the old king abdicated in favor of his son. The county had never been so prosperous as under King Cedric and Queen Melusine.
It took a few years, working with speech therapists and vocal coaches, for her to communicate clearly with her subjects, to sound merely foreign rather than outlandish and otherworldly. When she laughed, it still startled the palace staff—it sounded so much like barking. She could never learn to walk—she did not have the internal structure for locomotion on dry land. Sometimes she missed the ease of movement under water. Often in dreams she would be swimming, and she would feel the smooth movement of her tail, the strong forward thrust through water, with pleasure. But she loved the prince, later the king, who treated her with such tenderness, carrying her himself anywhere she wished to go—trying to compensate for the loss of her watery kingdom. She loved her children, with their strange pink feet and tiny toes, kicking and waving in the air as their nappies were changed or they threw tantrums. And we all make difficult choices.
The strangest thing about life on land, she told the sea witch once they started holding these conversations, was reproduction. The monthly cycle of blood, as though she were expelling a red tide. Incubating a child herself instead of depositing it in her mate’s pouch, to develop safely in that second womb, coming out only for lactation. She did not understand the concept of a wet nurse. When her children were brought to her for feedings, she laid them beside her and imagined moving through the water, with them swimming alongside, latched to her breast. That is how a child of the sea-folk feeds beneath the waves.
Eventually, she taught them to swim in the palace baths, which dated to Roman times. Her legs could not give her the thrust of her lost gray tail, but with a strong breast stroke, she could pull herself through the water and recapture, for a while, what it had been like to swim through the depths of the sea.
She still swims sometimes. And she makes lace—the most delicate, intricate lace. Her fingers have grown crooked, but this is an ancient art of the sea-folk, which they learn as children: they knot strands made of seaweed, pounded and pulled into long fibers. It is a strong thread that shimmers in sunlight. Into her lace, she weaves patterns of starfish and cuttlefish and stingray. When she is too tired to do either, she reads poetry or stares out the window—the king, her husband, made sure that her bedroom window overlooked the sea. She has had a full life. She could, if she wished, spend every moment remembering it. Her childhood in the palace of her father the sea king, swimming through rooms on whose walls grew coral and anemones, coming up to the surface only to breathe the necessary air, although the sea-folk can hold their breath for hours at a time, then diving down again into her natural element. Hunting and foraging with her sisters through algae forests, for the children of the sea-folk have the freedom of the sea from a young age. Rescuing her prince from the storm after his ship went down, dragging him back to shore on a broken spar through turbulent waves. Going to the sea witch, making the fatal bargain. The years of being a wife, mother, widow.
Once a day she is wheeled out to the balcony. The sea witch comes, rising from the waves, and they speak.
Usually, their conversation follows a familiar pattern. But on this day, the queen dowager asks a question she has never asked before. It has never, before, seemed the right time to ask. “Do you regret your decision?” she asks the sea witch, wondering if she is being rude or too personal. But surely between old friends? After all this time, they must consider themselves that.
The sea witch is silent for a moment, then shakes her head. “No, at least I tried. You were not the only one, you know. I traded for your voice, the hair of another maiden, the soft gray skin of yet another. He would not love me, no matter how I tried to please him. He loved no one but himself.”
He lived in the deepest, darkest abyss in those parts, an underwater crevasse that seemed to descend to the center of the earth. None of the sea-folk knew how old he was. Four hundred years? Six hundred? Older yet? He had filled himself with the magic of those dark spaces, and did not seem to age.
“He taught me so much,” says the sea witch. “From him, I learned a magic that allowed me to stay under water for days at a time. A magic that raised the waves and created storms. The magic that took your voice. For years, I studied spells and potions under his tutelage. But when I told him that I loved him, he called me a silly guppy, no wiser than an infant, and told me to go away, that I was interrupting his studies. I did not go away—I moved to the edge of the crevasse in which he lived, and there I stayed, living in the cavern in which you found me. I hoped that if he saw my devotion, he would come to love me in time. But it merely irritated him.
“He cared only for knowledge—only for discovering the secrets of that dark abyss and the power it would give him. At first he would go to the surface periodically. But after he drove me out, he began to stay beneath the water for weeks at a time. He told me he no longer needed to breath air. His eyes grew larger, his once-muscular body thinner. He developed a permanent look of hunger. I do not think he ate, except when krill or small shrimp floated by and he could catch them without interrupting his studies. He became hunched, as though curled up on himself. I did not care. I had not loved him for his beauty, which was considerable, but for his intellect, his desire for knowledge. I thought he might admire those things in me as well, so after my attempts to charm him failed, I studied the darkest of arts, the most potent of potions.
“One day, I perfected a spell that was beyond even his power. It was one he had attempted many times himself: a way of turning our tails into the tentacles of a squid, with the squid’s ability to darken the water with its ink. I cast it, triumphant, knowing that he must love me now, or if not love, then at least respect me. At last, feeling the reverberations of that spell in the water, he came to my cavern.
“I thought he would be pleased that I had discovered this secret—that he would praise me and want to learn it from me. But no—he hurled himself at me with the full thrust of his tail and struck me across the face. Then, with his hands, he attempted to strangle me. But you see, I had eight new tentacles that I had not yet learned to control…”
The sea witch pauses for a moment, then says, “I tore him limb from
limb. I could not even see—the water was dark with my ink. When it cleared, there were pieces of him scattered among the coral. The small fish were already nibbling at his flesh.”
Then they are both silent, the queen dowager in her wheeled chair on the balcony, the sea witch floating among the waves, her body half out of water, a woman above, an octopus below.
* * *
What are we left with in the end, but old women telling stories? The first old women who told stories were the Fates. What else could they do, sitting in their chairs all day, spinning, measuring, and cutting the threads of our lives? Each thread was also a story, and as they spun it, they told it. They are telling our stories still.
Once upon a time, says Clotho as she spins the thread on her spindle. There was a king with three sons, the youngest of whom was called Dumbling, or the prettiest girl you have ever seen who was born with the feathers of a swan, or a queen who could not bear a child until a white snake told her that she was pregnant. And then, says Lachesis, the lass lived happily with her bear husband until she wanted to see what he looked like at night, or the prince found a castle in the forest inhabited entirely by cats, or the cook was so hungry that she took a spoonful of soup and all the sudden she could understand the language of animals. Finally, says Atropos, the loyal servant chopped off the brown bull’s head and there stood the prince he had been searching for, or the maid spun linen so fine that it could fit through the eye of a needle so the Tsar took her back to his palace, or the false princess was put in a barrel filled with nails drawn by two white horses, and did she regret her treachery! They lived happily ever after, or not, and they are feasting still unless they have died in the interval. Every story has a beginning, middle, and end. After that end, there are only old women sitting together in the sunshine.
“And were you happy?” asks the sea witch.
“Very happy,” says the queen dowager. “I’m still happy, even when I lie awake at night in a bed that is too large for one shrunken old woman, remembering tenderness that will never come again. Even when I know that soon my body will lie in a dry, dark place. My granddaughter, the youngest, Eglantine—I think someday she will come find you and ask to return to the sea. When she does, I hope you will give her my tail.”
She pauses a moment. “And were you happy?” she asks the sea witch, for everyone deserves a little happiness in life, even witches.
The sea witch thinks for a moment. “No, I cannot say that I was. But I learned a great deal. No one in the sea, or perhaps even on land, has the knowledge I do. If I wished to, I could send a storm to destroy all the ships in this harbor, like a boy breaking sticks. Of course I would not do that, out of courtesy to you…” She bows to the queen dowager, who bows in return. “But I could, and that is something. Knowledge and power—those count for something when one is old.”
“As do the memory of loving and being loved,” says the queen dowager.
And then they are silent for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the lapping of waves.
“Well, until tomorrow,” says the sea witch, finally. She knows the queen dowager’s attendants will be coming soon.
“Of course,” says the queen dowager.
The thread is spun, measured, and snipped, whether it be gold or hemp or sea silk. And afterward, the old women sit in the sunshine.
The Nightingale and the Rose
Here is the story:
There was a nightingale.
She looked like nothing at all,
a small brown bird
perched in the rose bushes.
You would scarcely have seen her
unless you were looking carefully.
The roses were still blooming
although it was late summer:
they were hybrid perpetuals, bred
from the old French roses
crossed with roses from China
brought back by sailors and diplomats,
in cargoes with blue porcelain
and embroidered silk.
The nightingale did not know this:
she had not migrated so far.
What she knew was her nest in the thicket
by the orchard, with two eggs in it the size
of your thumbnail, speckled brown.
What she knew was the professor’s garden:
the elm tree, the fountain in which she bathed,
shaking her feathers. The sundial
that told the time and all the local gossip.
The green lizards sunbathing on the wall,
the tennis lawn, the roses in clipped rows,
already losing their petals,
yellow and pink, pink striped red,
apricot, and cream with a yellow heart.
She knew they cost a great deal, for the professor
had said so, walking in the garden
with the university chancellor,
and the lizards had repeated it.
She knew the student who lived with the professor
in a rented room and sometimes left his books
on the garden bench. She knew he was studying
something called metaphysics.
She knew the professor’s daughter,
who walked in the garden and often sang to herself
while cutting flowers—not quite as well
as a nightingale, but one must make allowances.
Anyway, the nightingale thought she was beautiful,
with rich brown hair. But the butterflies
thought she was ugly, so large and human,
always taking away the flowers
so they could be displayed in vases behind glass windows,
and what was the use of that? They were convinced
the flowers belonged to them. After all,
they were the ones who depended on the nectar
for food. They were socialists.
One day as she sat in her nest, the nightingale heard
the student complaining to the lizards, or perhaps to the wall:
She promised to dance with me if I brought her a red rose
to match her dress, but there are no red roses,
only pink streaked with red, or red on the yellow petals.
The lizards scurried along the wall. They did not care
about the student’s relationship problems.
But the nightingale was a romantic.
I shall find him a red rose, she thought.
The student was right: there were no red roses,
not anywhere in the professor’s garden.
Why do you want a red rose? asked the Boule de Neige.
It was the most beautiful rose in the garden, and knew it.
Its buds were red, but opened into white globes
of fragrance. A white rose means innocence,
a white rose means I am pure.
Because the professor’s daughter wants it, said the nightingale.
And red roses mean love. That’s what she truly wants: proof
that the student loves her. And then perhaps
she will permit herself to love him back. Can you not turn
your petals red? For love
is the best thing in the world. Or what she had seen
of the world, from Denmark to the coast of Africa.
She had migrated once already.
Look how the sun loves the waterdrops
that splash from the fountain,
how the wind loves the top of the elm tree,
how the lizards love their wall. That is how
the student loves the professor’s daughter,
I’m sure of it.
There is only one way to turn a white rose red,
said the Boule de Neige. And it is so terrible
that I do not want to mention it.
Tell me, said the nightingale.
I’m not afraid.
You see that rose? My most beautiful rose
at the end of an arching cane. If you perch
&n
bsp; on that cane and put your breast against the thorn,
then press on it, so it drinks of your heart’s blood,
and you sing—remember that you must sing—
slowly the rose will turn red.
The nightingale chirped
and flitted about in her agitation.
But my heart’s blood—will I not die?
She thought of her eggs, her precious eggs,
speckled brown, the size of your thumbnail.
She loved her eggs, as much as the student
loved metaphysics. They had been laid in June,
for she had mated late. In a few days
they would hatch.
That I can’t tell you, said the Boule de Neige.
Very likely, but one must take risks for love,
or so I have heard.
I don’t know, I don’t know, said the nightingale.
Let me return this evening. I must consider
all the options.
The rest of that day, she sat on her eggs.
What if she never came back, and they did not hatch?
What if they hatched and she was not there
when her children called for her? Who would teach them to fly?
Snow White Learns Witchcraft Page 22