The Mermaid's Tale

by D. G. Valdron

  He pulled his head back.

  The little Arukh tried to bolt, but somehow, the Traditional drifted in front of the place she was running. She turned and turned again, returning to my back.

  The naked vampire licked between my breasts. I swallowed, trying to keep from trembling. His jaw worked, his tongue lapping up along my neck.

  “The Trolls, I am told,” he whispered, “have a saying. That there are only two kinds of beings: Ones you talk to and ones you eat.”

  Hot breath in my ear.

  “I speak,” I said quickly.

  “You make noises that sound like words,” he said. “But is there any meaning? Does anyone hear you? Does anyone listen? Does anyone speak to you? Or is it just... noise in the emptiness.”

  “Let the creature be,” one of the beast tenders said. “It’s foolish to play with such things. It is unreal.”

  “Why not?” a city Vampire said. “Let it speak if it can. Perhaps it will amuse us.”

  The beast tender spat.

  “What of it, Rughk? What is real to a creature without soul?”

  They were all looking at me.

  The naked Vampire stepped back.

  The Traditional draped himself over me, his chin resting on my shoulder. I glanced at him, saw only amused interest. He wasn’t even looking at me. For him, I was not a being. I had no more reality, no more meaning than a breeze or a piece of wood. Or perhaps even less than that.

  What was real?

  “Now,” I said. “That is real. This moment. This place. These things are real.”

  The Traditional shifted behind me. I could feel his body pressing against mine for a second, our bare flesh rubbing against each other.

  “Only now?” the beast tender asked. “What of other moments, other places.”

  I’d interested them, for a few seconds at least.

  “They’re real,” I whispered, my throat was dry. The taste of cool water from a brook near the old Troll’s place was in my mind. That was so long ago, but suddenly, I could taste it again. “Other places I’ve been, other times I’ve known. That’s real too.”

  I paused.

  “I’ve drunk, felt water down my throat. Eaten, felt it on my tongue and in my belly. I’ve felt hurt and seen my blood run from wounds. All these things are real to me. I know nothing else.”

  I waited.

  They glanced at each other.

  There was a burst of tittering laughter.

  “Oh we’ve got it wrong,” the naked male said. He slid from his feet, reclining over one of the cattle in a single graceful motion. “The Rughk only is real.”

  He ran his hands along its flank, caressing it. His fingers tracing the shapes of old blood wounds in its hide.

  “Foolish Rughk, to be the only real thing in an unreal world? Do you think that is why the rest of the world hates you so much?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said quickly. I was afraid of them, but becoming angry. Memories of anger flowed through me. Black rage. Flat rocks. New moon.

  Stop. I tried to focus on the scene before me. My heart was racing.

  “Oh,” he said, stroking the beast, “and what of the sacred beast? Is it real if you are not drinking its blood?”

  His face wrinkled with distaste.

  “Is it real if you are not... eating its flesh?”

  “No,” I said, feeling flushed and angry, “it’s real.”

  “Two real things,” said the beast tender.

  “All things are real,” I snapped. “You, me, the trees and grass, buildings. Everything but dreams.”

  They stopped, shocked. I began to fear that I’d gone too far.

  I was shocked too. A strange insight had come over me. The beast was as real as I was. When I was fighting in the war for my life, it was... what? Eating grass? Being groomed? Whatever it had been doing, wherever it had been, it had been there. It had gone on with its life without notice or attention to my own.

  They all had. All their lives were real. They’d ridden and laughed and drank and had sex. They’d been born, just like I’d been, and grown as I had, and passed day after day, as I had. They had passed the same days, the same moments. Wherever I’d been, whatever I’d done, they too had existed in those moments in some other place, doing things, being things.

  It was too big a thought, it felt like it wouldn’t fit into my head, but I didn’t know how to get it out. For a moment, I felt like the little Arukh, almost bursting with words with ideas that would not come out.

  They laughed.

  Had I been speaking? My thoughts raced along, but I couldn’t seem to catch up with them.

  I shrugged off the traditional’s weight, and he was suddenly gone.

  I stared at them helplessly, caught in the jaws of this vast idea. I stared at them, and saw them in a way I’d never seen before, that I couldn’t describe. It was as if I wasn’t just seeing them, but seeing their past and future with them. Seeing the inside of them as well as the outside. It was as if I saw them and not just what they looked like. Heard them, and not just the sounds they made.

  “Arrah,” I grunted. I turned and staggered away. My head felt strange, I held it in my hands, as if trying to keep it from falling apart.

  They called after me. I ignored them, I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to hear them.

  I felt the little Arukh pulling at me. Her whimpering was in my ears. I was lying down, crouched into a ball. How did I get there? I allowed her to pull my resisting muscles, as she dragged me to my feet. I felt both massive and weightless.

  I looked at her, her face full of fear and tension.

  And suddenly, I was back watching her after the rape, silently watching her cry and howl. I recoiled. The two images, her now and her then, existing together before me.

  In the reflections of her eyes I could see myself.

  I’d watched her, I thought suddenly. On the rooftop, she’d silently watched me cry and howl, as if we were distorted reflections of each other in muddy water. Weeping and watching, above and below. Like when I saw the Mermaids, the moon in the sky and in the river together, reflections of each other. Everything was a reflection of everything else.

  We were the same person, I realized, with hideous clarity. She was me and I was her, and we’d shared the same moments, living on mirror sides of each instant, and the knowledge was almost too big for my head.

  Vhoroktik appeared in my mind. I was watching again that strange communion she’d had with the little Arukh. Shared pain opening to shared knowledge.

  The nest, the frantic desperation as I tore at the nest, terrified of what I would find, wanting them to be alive, desperate for even one of them to be alive. They’d killed them all, and I was too late. I couldn’t stop them. They’d come and killed the goblins who had never done them harm. I tore at the nest, but every one I found was dead. I found Mothers...

  They are not like him at all. Not patient. Their traps are dangerous and they almost catch me. They are after me and I am struggling and the ice is breaking under me, and I am going to die.

  I watched them rape her, again and again, and I listened to her howl, and it was the sound that I made, and...

  I remembered that pain, the soul aching wound that seemed endless and unbearable. My fingers twisted, feeling the remembered shape of the heavy rock.

  I lunged away, breaking unfelt grip, staggering through the night. My thighs wet with blood. Weeping and weeping in terrible pain I couldn’t name, stopping to touch myself, licking away the blood on my fingers, but there was always more blood and I was dying and I knew it and he’d killed me finally and left me to die and I felt the rock in my hand and held it to my heart and crawling back to find him sleeping I lifted the rock and lifted the rock and lifted the rock and there was blood everywhere....

  I vomited.


  The little Arukh was beside me and there was no rock in my hands and no blood, no blood between my legs, no blood anywhere. I shook my head angrily.

  No rock, I told myself. No blood. That was long ago. It wasn’t real any more.

  “Get out of me,” I snarled angrily, or thought I did, shoving the little Arukh away.

  She melted away from my push like a Traditional, seeming to stand unmoved only a foot or so from me.

  I staggered away. The Traditional appeared in front of me. His eyes found me and I knew I was real because he was seeing me. I was seeing myself reflected in his eyes. I lunged like the bull, feeling dirt beneath my hooves.

  I thought I felt him for a second, but then he was gone. I weaved blindly this way and that. Trying to hold my head together, trying to keep me inside and everything else outside.

  A sacred beast appeared in front of me. I reeled, tottering away from it’s staring eyes, from its realness.

  Finally, I crawled to the side of a building. It too was real, but without the palpable existence of living creatures. I curled into a ball, holding my head. I tried to make the ideas go away.

  Something touched me. The little Arukh. I tried to ignore her, but somehow my hands found hers and held them tight.

  “Get up,” she was whispering desperately over and over. “Get up or you will die.”

  I couldn’t move any more.

  “Get up,” she whispered, “or they will kill us.”

  “She’s mad,” a voice said finally.

  “The statement lacks meaning and contributes nothing. Madness is what the Rughk are,” another voice replied.

  I recognized the voice. The Cull.

  I opened one eye. The Cull was back. As was the Traditional. And the naked Vampire and a couple of others. They stared at us.

  I unfolded myself enough to stare back up at them.

  They were still real, still more real than real, still vibrating, radiant, dense with reality. But it was bearable now.

  I found myself thinking of Vhoroktik again, of how the Hobgoblins had been around her. They’d acted like...she’d belonged among them.

  Even different as they were from each other, I could tell they belonged together, these Vampires.

  I could not see myself belonging the way they did. Not to them. Not to Hobgoblins. Not to other Arukh. Arukh belonged to nothing. The cold knowledge made me shiver.

  “What use is there to feed dreams to the soulless?” the Cull asked lightly.

  Was there something like anger in her voice?

  The naked Vampire, his oiled body glistening in the moonlight, shrugged. I watched the play of muscles on his body.

  “It was amusing,” he replied petulantly. “I would do it again.”

  “You will never do it again,” the Cull snapped.

  Songs, I thought, songs were real. I could not see them, or bite them, I could not touch them or eat them or hurt them. But they were real enough. In the back of my mind I heard the haunting strains of the song of Ara. Not any part of it, but the whole thing, sitting there all as one.

  The Cull shrugged, as if I’d spoken. Had I spoken? She knelt down before me.

  “Rughk,” she asked, “where are you?”

  I blinked at the question.

  “Here.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you know who you are?”

  I hesitated, uncertain for an instant.

  “The High Vampires will see you,” she told me, speaking slowly and carefully. “They will listen to your story.”

  I had the sudden impression that there were layers of meaning to these simple statements. That I could almost perceive them, and if I just tried a little harder, I could understand everything she was saying.

  “Your story,” she repeated.

  The High Vampires. The story. The Prince. The Mermaid. And suddenly, for just a second, it went clear in my head, the awful wrongness of it all, not just the Mermaid, but all the lives the Prince had ended, all the real women with their own lives, with their own moments, all full of realness, made into ragged red ruins by the Prince.

  “It’s not just the Mermaid,” I said out loud. I was certain that I’d spoken aloud.

  They glanced at each other.

  And not just the Prince, I realized suddenly. The little Arukh loomed in my mind. Khanstantin and Vhoroktik, and the Hobgoblins. The wounded man on the battlefield. The meat seller who I’d seen dead later. And all the ones I’d killed myself, the lives I’d ended and never thought about.

  I grunted and tried to stuff it all back. Not to think of it all. People lived and died all the time.

  The Prince, I thought, the Prince must die. I focused on him, trying to make it all fit together again. Gradually, the wildness in my mind subsided.

  I climbed to my feet.

  Staring at the naked Vampire I said, “Songs are real. I hear them even after they are finished.”

  “Clever animal,” he said. “At least it knows how to talk.”

  He turned away.

  I sat before the massive horned skull of a beast at the end of the hall of the Vampires of the Thundering Dawn Lineage. It was a vast building, only partially roofed, its walls were yet higher than a giant but no giant had built this rude place. Around the inside edges of the building, small ceremonial fires blazed. My back was to them, but I could see the flickering shadows they cast.

  A Vampire, elaborately bedecked in silken robes sat before me. Others stood immobile, in a semicircle around us. The Cull, death herself, stood at my back, the little Arukh at her feet.

  They’d made me wait still longer, forcing me to groom, pouring water and oils over my body to purify me for their presence. It had helped clarify my mind, had focused me on the story I was to tell.

  The Dawn Lineage was a mixed family, half plains dwellers, half city breeds.

  The Vampire that sat before me was a representative of that uneasy mixture. He wore the robes and collars of the city folk, but his gestures and formality was that of the great beast riders. He’d spent much of his youth out on the plains, I thought.

  Vampires paid little attention to their young, at least until they made it past puberty.

  The Prince had been able to kill almost at will among them until he had gone too far.

  “Zhar Yne,” I said. “I hope she is doing well.”

  “My daughter,” he answered, “I spoke to her in the land of dreams, just yesterday. I am surprised she did not mention such a thing as you. Did you know her?”

  His daughter had died over a month ago, gutted like a trout. Her family was among the most influential in the Vampire realm, and certainly the most powerful of the victims’ families.

  “I know of her death. I know who made her death.”

  He looked at me, eyes strangely distant and dreaming the way so many beast riders gazes are.

  “Tell me.”

  So I told him. I told him of the Mermaid. Of the trail of bodies leading from one realm to another. I told him of iron knives and bloody horses and street shamans with too much gold. I told him every bit of it, and in the end, told him the name.

  I told it much better, I realized, than I’d told Khanstantin and his band. Then I’d hesitated, wandering back and forth, telling pieces out of order, and pieces that hadn’t mattered at all. They’d questioned and interrupted.

  There were no interruptions. I simply spoke. The telling to Khanstantin had helped to put it together in my mind. They’d made it easier for me to tell as a story.

  I spoke of Khanstantin, and of his death. Finally, I ran out of things to say.

  There was period of silence.

  “Ah,” he said finally. “And what is this to us?”

  I shrugged.

  “You make war,” I
said simply. “There is one among your enemies who deserves especial killing. Kill him.”

  “You instruct us in both strategy and murder,” the Vampire said acidly. “We take offence. Matters are more complex than your simple lusts.”

  “It is your daughter.”

  He shrugged.

  “It is your blood, and the blood of your line that has been spilled. Avenge it,” I insisted.

  He stared at me. Seconds rolled by.

  “Your people have no children of your own, is that right?” he asked finally.

  I nodded, puzzled.

  “When one of you is born to one of our women, we call it an ‘Uruch’, a miscarriage, an abortion. All the women of the lineage wail and comfort the mother for her misfortune. Sometimes it is called ‘Rughk’, vomit, a shedding of a tumour, an expulsion of evil gatherings from the body,” he said this with no more inflection than he might have used to remark upon the weather.

  “I have heard,” I answered “that women of many lineages prefer to bear Rughk first because it is an easier birth than Vampire. I have even heard that some bear nothing but Rughk, as it is so easy to carry, and saves them from the torture of bearing their own.”

  “Perverse,” he made a face, causing his long fangs to protrude, “You speak to wound me, where I merely speak the truth we both know. You are a wicked creature. You are less than the worms and beetles of the earth.”

  “We call you these things because that is what you are: beings without souls. That is why you can bear no children of your own. For you death is your beginning and your end, your ‘life’ nothing more than a mirage, an illusion of time and space.”

  “Understand that for us, only our body may cease, our spirit goes on to live in the land of dreams. My daughter is not dead.”

  “Do you care for her body? Someone tore the life from it,” I snapped.

  “Indeed. You might care for a knife while it is whole, and defend yourself against any who might steal or break it. But once it is broken why should you keep it? Who should defend it for you then? For what?”

  He paused, gathering his thoughts.

  “But, I thank you for the knowledge,” he said more calmly. Dismissing me.

  “What will you do?”