“And the song? What is it? Where does it come from?” In spite of his fear, the song tugged at the stranger’s heart.
“It is the lure of the Sirens. They call to men who happen within range of their song, drawing them to their isle, from which there is no return.”
“Why do they hate men so?”
Odysseus contemplated the question, flinging water from his face. “Perhaps it is not hate they harbor. They search for something that eludes them. Peering into the souls of men is the only means they know which may yield the thing they seek. Men who fall captive to their song are searching to fill some longing within themselves as well I think. The fervor of their desire betrays them. They will not find what they yearn for upon the isle of the Sirens.”
Odysseus’ warnings and the ferocity of the storm could not dampen the stranger’s attraction to the song. He found the sea and the wind, the king and his ship, all dissolving into the soothing strain. The song became his world entire, all his will compelled to seek it out. How he came to be adrift in the sea, fighting the turbulent waves, he could not fathom. Perhaps the ship gave in to the ongoing assault, broke apart, and cast out its occupants. Maybe the waves swept him overboard. Odysseus had vanished. In truth, none of that mattered, only the song mattered and finding its source.
His head bobbed above the surface one last time before he drifted below the roiling waters. He felt life leaving, floating up even as his body sank further and further down. Fear of death did not accompany him, only the regret that the song lay forever lost. Gentle hands grasped him beneath his arms and lifted him high above the raging torrent. He rose up out of the sea into a night sky filled with the sound of music and wings.
A meadow, green and lush, filled with flowers of every kind and color, cradled him as he recovered his bearings. He could still hear the wind and waves, but faint and distant. Dozens of shapes hovered in the air all about him—women with the wings of birds. Their naked bodies, perfect, appeared chiseled from the finest marble. Each shone with a vibrant glow, the moonlight reflecting off supple skin.
The splendor of this place, and its inhabitants, took his breath. Snow-capped peaks towered against the horizon, pools of sparkling blue with surfaces like glass gleamed in the warm glow of the sun. Animals drank from the clear waters, showing no fear, relishing the company of the Sirens. A serene peace overcame the stranger. This place existed in the eye of the storm. A place forever hidden from the world, it shared a forbidden secret with its denizens.
The Sirens floated above him, wings fluttering in rhythmic undulation. They sang to the stranger, only to him, as if in worship. The voices at once distinctive and blended in unison. The song enveloped all. This must be heaven. Surrounded by beauty, he let go…sweet release.
A single note buried somewhere amidst the melody slowly turned sour and rose in pitch and timbre. Its tone rang all wrong, and he knew the song must soon collapse, or change to gain harmony with the new note. A new melody rebelled against the old, discordant, eerie in its mystery, its threat of horror.
His mind filled with this shrill new song. Unbearable pressure built as each voice added to the cacophony. The Sirens sang. They sang with a yearning so deep it made his heart ache and his soul shatter. The stranger knew this song, for he sang it too. He sang it through the tears of an unanswered longing, through the sorrow of loss, and the absence of absolution. A single fleeting hope that’s fruition lay forever just on the edge of feeling, its image dim, and its substance like smoke escaping through grasping fingers.
They came close now, dozens of women bearing the wings of eagles, hovering above the meadow floor. Some of their faces he knew well, others only a faint recollection, but he had seen them all in another time and place. Hair of blonde, red, ebony, and brown flowed out in streamers as if the meadow sank beneath the surrounding sea, their bodies now floating amidst cool pure waters.
They encircled him; the song took him to his knees. Their faces changed to reflect the inharmonious choral. Eyes, mirrors consumed with hurt, betrayal, and disappointment, blind and turned a foul grey, stretched from their heads on thin worming stalks. Mouths grimaced with hunger and turned from horizontal to vertical, covering the length of those terrible visages, each lined with shining silver swords. At the apex of each mouth a single bulbous eye fixed into the V where the two lips met. Only this eye possessed sight. Its vision locked onto the stranger seeking to peer beneath his skin. That terrible prescience burned away all that lay inside.
The Sirens converged, each in turn, on wings morphed into those of great bats. Elongated tongues snaked out to taste his flesh. Razor sharp teeth bit down on torso, leg, arm, and neck. A deep and lingering bite. The sickly sweet scent of blood permeated the air, streaks of crimson created macabre masks for each Siren to wear. They reveled in his agony, their song now shrieks of delight and rage, his own anguished cries serving as an ear shattering counterpoint to their hideous lullaby.
Each took a piece of him. What he gave would never sustain them, only momentary in its nourishment. What they gave lasted forever—scars gouged upon his soul. The illusion shattered, all laid bare. The horrible truth of longing, of loneliness, of guilt, made known in screams and pain.
He should have ignored the song and sailed the waves down into the depths of the raging black waters. He should have felt the dreams anchored to him. Dreams he betrayed. So many promises broken. So many hearts…. Yet, if he could somehow have managed to hold onto the beauty, before the note turned bitter, if he could remember the song as it should have been, the scars might fade, and the promise of paradise revealed—one woman with wings like a dove and the stranger, lost in sweet harmony, at home in the bosom of the sea.
DRAUGAR
Bryan Clark
The Surt rolled over the waves, its flexible construction allowing it to buck and bend with the rough water. The other ships in the fleet were pulling ahead, while the knarr was falling behind and being drawn farther south by powerful storm winds. Not as long as many of the skeid in the raiding fleet, but wider and riding higher in the water, and with fewer oar benches to aid the sails in giving speed, the Surt was finding difficulty maintaining the pace of the rest of the fleet in the storm. Olaf the Strong had demanded at least one cargo ship join the raid, however, for he predicted massive takings and wanted the extra capacity at hand should it be needed.
The raiding fleet was headed for the Orkneys—a fertile land for pillage, but a brutal journey across hundreds of miles of open sea. Solar compasses were accurate to a point, but although a war-band may have their ships aimed in the right general direction, it was always a game of chance whether they would land next to a fat, rich monastery, or find themselves fighting to keep from being dashed to pieces against walls of stone.
Thorstein Shieldbreaker stood and roared at his crew, “Pull those oars til your bones crack and your skin splits, lest Odin take you for a lot of feeble Englishwomen and laugh when you plead entrance to Valhalla!”
“We're pulling, Thorstein,” said a raider named Kark. “But this storm is fighting us like Jormungandr himself!”
“None of the other ships seem to be having the same difficulties, Kark. It is unwise to invoke the name of the Midgard Serpent in these waters. Perhaps we should throw you overboard as a sacrifice, and the lightening of the boat would ease the other men's labor.”
“Just shut your mouth and row, Kark,” snapped Torben Bent-Leg, the navigator. A dour man, he shared naught of the other raiders' bloodlust. He fought and went a-viking, not for the joy of the thing, but to please the gods, and do his duty as a man of the Vik.
“We've lost the others in this wretched mist. Torben, try to keep us on a straight line. We shall have to wait until the weather clears to catch them up.”
Sigurd the Bastard, Thorstein's second in command, stopped rowing and looked around nervously. “Do you feel that?” he said.
“Feel what, Sig?” asked Torben.
“The wind is changing direction, driving the
spray and rain ahead of us. Feel it on your face.”
Several of the men stopped, lifting their faces to the sky. The wind had indeed changed, and the soaking mist was changing to painful, ice-cold lances of rain, picking up speed. The gray skies, the gray rain, and the gray sea all blended together until the men couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Then a low moaning insinuated itself into the consciousness of all aboard, rising with alarming speed to a deafening howl. Locks of soaked hair whipped into dripping, freezing faces as they struggled to see.
“You woke Jormungandr, calling his name like that!” said Bjorn the Shipbuilder.
“Nonsense!” said Kark.
The gale parted the condensing mist enough to permit them to see the solid wall of rain just yards away from the boat and approaching faster than any of them had seen weather move.
“Handholds! Find handholds!” roared Thorstein over the storm, and then it slammed into them and the boat was tossed as though they were in the heart of a maelstrom.
For two exhausting hours they rode out the worst storm any of them had ever seen in all their years at sea. Then, as though all their pleas to all their various gods were heard and answered all at once, all was calm. Twenty men looked out from under their tarpaulins and from behind their thwarts. Bjorn was the first to speak.
“What was that? Where is the water?”
“Beneath us, and still as glass,” said Torben.
“The storm must have passed,” said Kark. “The water is calm, and everything is silent. Not so much as a dripping of water from the oars.”
“The fog seems to have stayed. Thick as milk, but at least it's not that damned freezing mist,” said Torben. “Something is wrong, though. We're nowhere near the Orkneys, the Vik, the fleet, or anything else any of us has ever known.”
“There's nothing but water in all directions, you old fool, how can you tell that?”
“Hah! I've spent more years at sea than you've lived. I know the sea, the sky, the winds, the play of the sun on the waves. You would sail off the edge of the world, or straight into a mountain, were I not with you.”
“Very well, where are we then?”
“I think,” said Thorstein, “that you are all asking the wrong questions. Our location may be a mystery, but I find myself more curious about the fact that Bjorn seems to have gained a bench mate.”
The men turned as one to look at Bjorn, who was staring straight ahead as if frozen, afraid to look beside him. A glutinous, slurping intake of breath, as through a throat clogged by phlegm and rot, made Bjorn jump and drop his oar. It slipped into the perfectly smooth water without a sound and disappeared. Finally, Bjorn summoned up the courage to turn his head, and what he saw almost made him follow his oar over the side.
Next to him was a hunched figure garbed in ragged, decayed clothes and draped in seaweed that pooled in coiling strands at the figure's bare, skeletal feet and traced paths of shining salty slime across the deck when the figure shifted. Its flesh was rotted and mottled blue-gray, hanging here and there in tattered, congealed strips from exposed bone beneath. It turned slightly and looked back at Bjorn cowering against the gunwale, regarding him with eyes that once may have been bright blue, but now were obscured by bone white cataracts. The sense of weary exasperation in its expression was almost palpable.
“Had I wanted to kill you, your life would already be mine,” it gurgled. “You men have nothing to fear from me. We are all—” Here the thing stopped to remove a tooth that had come loose and was getting in the way of its tongue as it tried to speak. It examined the tooth for a moment, rolled it between forefinger and thumb, shrugged, threw the tooth over the side, and continued. “We are all in the same boat.” The dead man laughed at his own joke, and the sound of his syrupy chuckling sent the men's scalps crawling.
“You are a draugr?” said Thorstein.
“As are you all.”
“No, we live!” said Kark.
“Do you?” said the draugr.
“Of course! We breathe, we speak, we—”
“Am I not breathing and speaking to you?”
Kark opened his mouth to reply again, but found the words had all flown from him.
“I am dead and drowned, and so shall you all be in the fullness of time. Look you, there is shore ahead. Mark well the rocks, and beware.”
The men all turned to look ahead where the draugr pointed. Just as the shade had said, there was a shadow looming up out of fog that billowed like thick curtains of spider web lofted in a gentle breeze.
“What must we beware?” asked Thorstein, turning back to the draugr. But the ghost was already fading away with a rattling, phlegmy sigh. The look on its face as it melted away into the fog was one of sorrow, pity, perhaps even a trace of fear. What could a ghost have to fear? Thorstein thought to himself. Then he remembered the warning to mark the rocks, and forgot for the moment what a ghost might fear when there was much for living men to fear while approaching a strange shore in a thick fog.
“Stop gawping, and put your oars back in the water!” Thorstein said. “Row slow, look for rocks, and sing out if you see anything. We don't know what lies ahead, and ghost or no, we must take the draugr at his word. I, for one, do not wish to meet my end tearing out the bottom of my boat so close to our goal and see his prophecy fulfilled.”
No rocks lurched up out of the sea to tear the hull out from under them. As the boat approached the sandy beach, the men could see a small village of huts huddled miserably around the shore. Several larger buildings, communal structures, no doubt, stood behind like watchful parents tending children at play. No real children played in the village. There was no sign of life at all. At the edge of the water stood a circle of a dozen enormous monoliths, tall as three men standing on each other's shoulders. The sea lapped around the bases of the nearest ones, and one on the village side had toppled onto its side in the sand.
“Those pillars,” said Torben. “Do you think perhaps those were the rocks the draugr meant?”
“They could be,” said Thorstein. “We'll beach the boat next to them. They will save us the trouble of building a palisade, and be far better shelter than a few logs besides.”
“We may not need any shelter, Thorstein. The village appears to be deserted.”
“Either we've gotten incredibly lucky, or we've sailed to Nifelheim,” said Kark.
“Silence,” said Thorstein. “This does not appear to be a terribly wealthy place, so luck wouldn't seem to have much to do with it. The place isn't in ruin, so it can't have been abandoned for long. I dislike the fog and the quiet. Keep your wits about you.”
The men beached the boat and began to leap into the ankle-deep surf. Thorstein assigned Torben, too lame to be of great use in a fight, and Ufuk, their best archer, to stay back, make the boat fast, and keep her safe. “Perhaps I should stay with the boat as well,” said Kark.
“Perhaps you should do as you're damned well told,” growled Thorstein. “We may have been saddled with you because you're Olaf's nephew, but that does not mean I trust you with my ship.”
The other nineteen men moved cautiously ashore, prepared for any surprises in case the village was not as empty as it appeared. As they neared the first of the dwellings, Thorstein raised a hand in the air and the men stopped behind him, senses heightened to an excruciating level. Almost as one, they heard it—the burble of running water. After several breathless seconds of listening, Thorstein turned to the men. “We'll split into three groups,” he said. “Bjorn, take Asmund and Eluf and go beyond the village to find the source of that water. Even if we find nothing of value here, our fresh water supply needs to be replenished. Erling, take half the men and search the eastern part of the village. The rest of you, with me.”
Bjorn, Asmund and Eluf walked up the main path through the middle of the village toward a copse of trees that marched up a low hill a short distance beyond the last buildings. The omnipresent mist crept around every corner, obscuring their vision and gra
sping at their ankles.
“I do not like this mist,” said Eluf. “The entire village could be hiding anywhere, ready to spring an ambush.”
“Yes,” said Bjorn. “Lucky we have those rocks to guard our ship. They'll make a fine redoubt should we find ourselves on the back foot.”
“Where is the sound of the water coming from?” said Eluf. “It comes from here one moment, and there the next. It sounds as though it's moving around through the fog. Sometimes it even sounds as though it's coming from inside the dwellings.”
“That's impossible. The stream must be farther ahead. Everything sounds strange in a fog like this. It makes your senses play tricks on you. Perhaps it will lighten the farther we get from the sea. Once we get a little way up that hill, we should be able to see well enough to find the stream.”
* * *
“What are you doing, Torben?”
“Just having a look at these stones. They're not rough-hewn, as I first thought. Weather and a skin of slime have done much to obscure them, but there are carvings on them, pictures and a writing that is familiar to me.”
“What does it say?”
“I said it was familiar, not that I was fluent. It's a very old language, mostly dead before my great grandfather's time if not before. I remember my father had a few documents with words like these, which he taught me to read. Not all of these are ones I know, but I think I can piece their meaning together from the ones I do.”
Erling's group wove stealthily between dwellings. They were mostly made of earth, with thatched roofs. A few were more sturdily constructed of stone. The earthen ones looked soaked through, as though they were about to collapse, and the stone ones were beaded with cold salt sweat. The thatch on all of them drooped under the weight of the moisture.
The babble of running water swirled around them like the fog, ever-present, intensifying, building, dying away only to spring up in another place. The men could feel the relentless sound combining with losing most of their sight to the fog to fray at their nerves and prey on their minds.
Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror (Vol. I - Seas & Oceans) Page 11