by Tanith Lee
And then his lust, for he did lust after her, this made him do a pragmatic, cool thing. It made him look at her in dismay, thinking that if she had no legs, then how might it be possible… But there were some markings on her tail, he saw, like the flowering apertures of dolphin. In a boiling rush of embarrassment, he knew what they were, and because of it, not even knowing what he would do, he stood up and shouted at her.
She moved her head, quite slowly, as she had at the passing of the gull. There was nothing shy or timid in the gesture, but something feral there was. Although he could not see her eyes, he saw she stared at and beheld him.
It was a long moment. Every second he expected her to fling herself over back into the sea. But she did not do it until he had taken five or six strides down from the ledge. And then the curving body, the flaunt of the tail, were limpid, nearly flirting.
It was as if she said, I know your kind, as you know mine. I say no, now. But perhaps not, tomorrow.
For if the holiday girls were amoral, what must she be, this fey half-being out of ocean?
He had seen her hair was green, too. Pale, pale green like those cream peppermints you can buy in chocolate. Her skin looked only lily white and her tail like the grey-silver foil that wraps up tobacco and coffee.
Well, he would woo her. He would court her. And he knew how it must be done. For where he would take the mortal girl a carton of talcum or a bunch of flowers, he would bring this one the fish of his catch, raw, as of course she would want them.
He had some pains over it. Going out at dawn the next day, baiting his line for the lovely dainty fish they call along the coast fairies, and catching them - because he must; filling up a crock with them, and carrying it down to the offshore rocks where she would come back -
because he would accept nothing other.
The water was mild as milk and the beauty of the full-blown summer
lay like a kiss upon the sea, the cliffs, the sky. It was a magic time, and anything might happen in it. This he had always truly believed, and now it had been given him to know it for sure.
When he went off he did not go far, only to the shore's edge where the wet sand sank between the claws of the rocks and their emerald gardens, and everything of the land ran out into the water, which looked blue now as the sky was gold.
She came early. He saw her, lifting her effortless, spilling body from the sea. She scented the fish at once, and though she acknowledged Michael with one upraised, untremulous glance, she hurried instantly to the catch and began ravenously to devour it.
Even now he was not near enough to see her sharply, only the suggestion of her features. And that she ate like a wild beast did not alarm or disgust him. She was a creature of the sea, and she was hungry.
When she was finished, she did something exquisite, too, as if to make up for the ravening. She rinsed her face with her hand, in the cat-like motion that seemed most ready with her. And having done this, she turned and stared towards him. She seemed to be considering, Michael thought, if he was anything to her or not.
And then his heart jumped up like a hare. For she made a movement, not cat-like, not creatural or oceanic. Lifting her left arm, lightly and unmistakably she beckoned him to come to her.
Well, he froze. He stopped there like a damned stone and could not make himself try a step. And even as this happened, he swore at himself with the terrible foul words he had gained with his sixteen to seventeen years. But it did no good. And presently, without any sign of displeasure or amusement, the sea-girl flipped over and was gone down once more into the water.
At that, he ran. He pelted full tilt at the place she had been, sliding and almost falling, and he was yelling too, pleading that she would stay. But when he reached the spot, there were only the fish bones lying there, some of them cracked by her teeth.
Michael looked out across the empty sea. From this vantage the sun was down behind the headland. A shadow filmed the water, making it transparent and opaque together. Again, before he knew what he did, Michael began to wade out into it, silent now, and he said that tears
spurted from his eyes, he could not have said why.
Then from the sea, like a white bird, she darted out. He caught the flash of her - like the lightning it was, so unlooked for, yet expected.
And her arm was raised, and it still beckoned, and he knew that she wished him to follow her, and in that moment he had gone far enough that he could do it.
Unlike half of the village he could swim, could Michael, and he launched himself into the warm sea without another thought.
'There was never,' he said, 'another hour like that one. It was more, you see, like flying than to swim. And all the doubt left behind on the land.'
He had her in sight, for she allowed it, keeping herself above the sea, and he could make her out easily, the glint of her hair and skin, and, every so often, the flare of her fish tail catching the last sun. She went around the cliffs, under the old tower, and he decided she would be going to the bluff beyond, which at low tide is set back from the sea, and crumbling, full of galleries and carious chambers, unsafe and unvisited. It seemed to him she would know this cliff, maybe it had been a land-haunt of hers for centuries, for did not her kind live three hundred years at least?
Sure enough she turned towards the bluff, to which the tide was now coming up, and swam in under a deep blind shadow that was falling down into the water from the rocks. She vanished there into some hidden channel, and then reappeared two minutes later above him, before he had got himself frantic, on a high dim overhang. She had ascended so swiftly it was like a challenge. Unable to locate the underwater passage, he dragged himself out and pushed up the bluff-side, slipping and stumbling, on his two legs, to reach her.
Between finally was a sort of tunnel, thickly dark, fishy, and cold, smelling of the core of the ocean, which in its time had been there very much, and when he had thrust himself through this, he found her cave before him.
There could be no doubt it was hers. It was littered with her things, her possessions, what she had borne in to tinker with, for she too was a visitor. She had her trophies of seaweeds, and a hoard of shells, and some keepsakes from the beach, a broken glass in a plastic frame, a scent bottle, a crushed and empty can of beer. Also, scattered about,
were the familiar bones of fish, the carapace of a crab.
There was no comfort in the cave. It was stone and rock and slime and impending night. It chilled him right enough, but not sufficiently to send him away. For she was there, somewhere, in the dusk.
'I believe that I spoke to her,' said Michael, 'some courting phrase.'
He trod over the bones and the crab, cautious not to spoil the shells and glass and can, which were her toys, and then he made her out, stretched on the stones before him in the darkness. She glowed, like the phosphorus on the water by night. He gazed down, and she was less than three feet from him, lying there, and he saw her as she was at last.
'If I had thought,' he said, 'I would always have reckoned it to be like dying. The drowning death. And the door opens, and you see the face of God. All your days you've known you will come to it, and longed for and feared it, but it will be. But then as the door flies wide, you see - it is the truth you see. And truth is terrible.'
The image that shone up for him on the darkness was the truth of the mermaid.
She was a mammalian female from her head and torso to her lower belly, where she became the fish. But though she was a female, she was not properly a woman. Her face was flat, with little fluttering nostrils set without a nose, and her mouth was wide and lipless and through it he could detect the thin fence of narrow teeth, each of which was pointed. Her eyes were a fish's eyes, round and yellowish, lidless, the soulless eyes that glare from the net. Her hair streamed back and was not hair but a tangle of strange rubbery filaments, and he saw she had no ears but there were the gills there, flaccid as withered pods.
'Even her-skin,' he said, 'f
or skin she had, to her waist, it was not like skin at all but the hide of a whale, thick and shiny, and here and there algae growing on it and little mosses out of the deep water, feeding on her.'
She stank of the ocean floor, of the fish she ate and was. The tail of her was huge and sinuous, gleaming, twitching, and the dark flowers of her ultimate femaleness stared from it. His gorge rose. He choked, but could not move away. He felt the trap, he knew there was no escape for him. She was the sea, which is older than the land, and he
had gone to her and was hers.
And then she beckoned again, aimlessly, cruelly. It was like the waving of the sea-wrack in the tide, some ancient gesture she had learned, but it drew him closer, near to her, so he leaned and then he kneeled above her, and he could no more have not done it than a man can keep from his last breath.
She put her hand on him then, like his lover. He saw her hand, thin, so he noticed its jelly bones, and the webs between the three fingers which were all she had, and the long greenish curving nails. And in this nightmare instrument, groaning and praying, partly out of his mind, he watched his manhood rise erect for her. But when she drew him in, he shut his eyes.
'She was cold,' he said. When he said this to me, the word, the word cold, became a new word. Its entire meaning I did not grasp, but in a book you would find it by those other words: Terror, Hell, Evil and Despair. 'My body worked as she made it do. I clung in my mind and prayed and I do not know for what but I think I never called on God.
She was cold, she was cold. She was all the old fish-stinking filth-drowning of the sea. She was the mud and the nothingness. She was the years of the world dying. Ah God. I was fucking death.'
He does not remember the end, though he is sure, Michael, that he served her as she required. He came up out of her, as from the bottom of the ocean, and he crawled away and vomited, bringing out the poison, but he could never rid himself of all. And somewhere as he writhed and spewed, he heard a faint silken splash under the bluff, and knew that she was gone, dived down into the deep of the evening tide, vanished, where the night and the horizon touch.
The stars were out when Michael crawled free of the cave and began his long walk homeward.
All the while he walked, in the clean air of the cliffs, he told himself it was done now.
'But it never was done,' said Michael. 'And never will be done.'
We stood together in the lee of the Rock. The storm was quietening and the waves sloping lower and lower. Sometimes with an angry hiss they came up the granite for us, but her rage was turning away towards some other place.
'Hark there,' said Michael, 'Alec is doing good trade.'
And from the village we heard a shouting and banging of the piano in the pub.
As Michael moved out into the slow rain, I nearly put my hand on his arm, to ask him or to tell him something. But I did not know what that would be, for he had said it through and no wise sentence of mine could change it. He had lain with the sea and could lie with no other. He had coupled with death and lived with the memory of that.
Each night that he lay down upon his own belly did he feel that under him, that icy twisting and smothering and drawing? And did he dream of them still, the hollow girls swinging on the waves with their round annihilated eyes, their taloned fingers, their silent songs?
'Michael…' I said.
'What would you have?' he said.
'I'll buy you a drink,' I said.
'Thanks now, but no. It's late. The dad will want me up for the shop bright and early. Good night to you.'
He did not say, Do you not believe me? or Never speak of this. He walked away up the lane as though we had exchanged a few words over the storm. I took note of his progress, and when he had disappeared from sight, I wondered too if he had said any of it to me, that untalking man. But the sea is the thing now, it is she tells you.
You have only to listen, to hear.
After the Guillotine
In the 1980s I wrote a huge novel on the French Revolution -my only
'straight' historical novel to date.
Off shoots from that book gave me several ingredients for fantasy stories, of which this is one.
The characters are based on four actual people sent to the blade by
Robespierre. In one case at least, the invented name casts a very thin veil over the original - Danton.
The men went to the scaffold singing the Marseillaise, or shouting, or in tears, or all three. At any rate, they made a great deal of noise about death. The girl went sweetly and quietly, dressed like a bride.
There was a reason for that. There were, of course, reasons for all of it.
To die at any time when you are not prepared to die is objectionable.
To die when you are comparatively young, when there are things of paramount importance still to be accomplished, when, in dying, you will lose spring and hope, and those who love you, that also you love; these are fair causes for commotion. The famous figure, D'Antoine the Lion, however, did not roar en route to la Guillotine. He had done his roaring in the courtroom and it had achieved very little good, and actually some harm. He had presently been 'legally' silenced, and that had shut up every one of them. D'Antoine's enemies were terrified of him, his speeches, his voice, his presence. Just as his friends loved him to distraction.
As the tumbrils jounced slowly along over the cobbles of Paris (a form of traffic that had become quite banal) the Lion only occasionally grunted, or flexed his big body with bitter laughter.
D'Antoine, bully, kingly master, charmer, conniver, atheist. 'I'm leaving things in a muddle,' he had said after they condemned him.
For himself, he reckoned on nothing, once the blade came down, hence his bitterness, and his lack of confusion. He was not afraid, or only very little. He had made his mark in the living world. 'Show my head to the crowd,' he would instruct the executioner. 'It's worth looking at twice.' Let us agree with that.
Heros, in the same cart, was one of those who sang, but rather negligently. The others who did so were mostly trying to keep their courage up, for while they sang, some of their terror and despair was held at bay. But Heros did not seem to be either depressed or afraid.
His name, in this instance, is perfect for him, combination that it is of Hero and Eros. Lover and gallant, the image that comes to mind is appealing. One of the handsomest men of the era, he is everything one would wish to be at the hour of one's public death: beautiful, couth, composed. In his not-long career, he had enjoyed most of the sins and pleasures of his day. He had been in the beds of princesses,
perhaps even of a prince or two. Aristocrat to his fingertips, he knew how to face this final couching. He sang melodiously. To the screaming rabble he was aloof, to his friends remotely kind. He kissed them farewell at the foot of the scaffold, and went up first to demonstrate how quick and easy it all was, not worth any show.
Thereby offering a faultless one.
But in his heart, handsome peerless Heros had kept a seed of the Catholic faith, which refused to wither. He believed, in some subdued, shallow bottom of his brain, that he was bound for Hell hereafter. As he disdained to fuss over the loss of his elegant head, just so he would not throw a tantrum at a prospect of centuries of torment in the inferno. His coolness was therefore even more admirable. Let us pause a moment to admire him.
The third man we examine in the forward tumbril, Lucien, rather than being what one would wish to, on the day of one's public death, is more what one fears one would be. As some of his biographers politely put it, there had been some 'difficulty' in persuading him from the prison to the cart. Once installed, raw-eyed from weeping, only the neighbouring strength of the Lion kept him upright. Then, as the reeking, railing crowd pressed in, anger and terror mingled, and rather than sing, Lucien began to shout. As the rabble screamed insults at him, so he screamed back. Ugly, where Heros was handsome and D'Antoine was grand, thin from prison, white and insane, and tearing
his shirt in his struggles to escape the inescapable, or to be heard by the voluntarily deaf, he hurled charges and pleas until his voice, never strong, gave out. He had some justification. His was the spark that had initially fired the powder-keg of the Revolution. But no one listened now. The gist of all his words: Remember what I did for you and set us free - or, in short, Let me LIVE! - was entertaining, but no rallying point for the starving unanswered masses who, like vampires, had taken to existing on blood. There was, too, the matter of Lucien's wife, whom he adored, and who he feared, rightly, was on the same road to the guillotine as himself. To no avail, naturally, he was also trying to shout for her life.
We may be unpleasant here and say Lucien shouted his head off. Or we could say, journalist and pamphleteer that he was, that he wrote it off, by going into print with unwise assertions and demands.
As for an afterlife, he wrote, too, that he believed in the 'immortality of the soul'. So he did, but in a somewhat scattered, indefinite way.
He had been anxious to impress, through his prison reading, the notion of continuance upon himself, as if he would need it where he would be going.
Let us, for the moment, stop talking about Lucien. And go on to that far more visual creature, his wife, the lovely Lucette.
There must have been something about Lucien. There he was, ugly, and there Lucette was - exquisite - and they were blissfully in love through several years of marriage. Maybe she preferred older men -
he was ten years her senior. Or younger men - ten years her senior in age, he was in many other ways younger than everyone. The crime which sent Lucette to the scaffold was love. Because of love she had attempted to save her husband's neck, and thus proved troublesome to his powerful enemies. Thereafter it seemed to them she might become, through love, a focus for strife.
She made the journey to the guillotine some days after Lucien, Heros and D'Antoine. She travelled with an air of calm pleasure. She said,
'Lucien is dead and there is nothing further I want from life. If these monsters hadn't murdered him, I would now thank them with tears of joy for sending me to join him in eternity.' Lucette's inner secret was that she was by nature a priestess who had made Lucien her High Altar. She expected, after her sacrifice, to fall straight from the blade of the guillotine into her husband's arms. Despite, or because of, his rather Dionysian leanings - religions of music, drama, lilies in fields -