The Mermaid's Tale

by D. G. Valdron

  I grabbed hold hard on his leg and twisted it, feeling loose bones barely held together snap and break.

  “Don’t play with me, Man!” I snarled fiercely. “I can hurt you.”

  “He killed the Mermaid,” I told him angrily as he screamed. “He killed the Mermaid.”

  “Hurh huh,” he sucked air, gasping for breath. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now, eater of shit.”

  I reached out to twist his neck as I had before, but stopped myself. The sudden emptiness of the other man was still fresh in my mind. I would not make him dead as I had the other.

  There was bravery there in his eyes. And fear. I stared. What past did he have? Who would mourn him? To kill him was the work of a heartbeat. But it was not necessary, and if I did, something would be gone from the world.

  Behind us, the other, the dead man was conspicuous in his silence.

  “Is that your wish, manling? To be killed?” I asked softly. What future would he have? Hardly much, crippled as he was, but then I thought of the Arukh cripple.

  “Are you going to do it?” Very cautious. Somewhere deep down, he did not want to die.

  I shrugged.

  “Your choice,” I said. “I have questions for your King. I want someone to take them to him.”

  “What are your questions?” he said. There, he’d made his choice.

  He didn’t want to show weakness by begging for his life, nor to throw it away foolishly either. He bit back something more defiant. He’d seen what happened to the other man.

  “What hand do you fight with?” I asked him.

  “What?” he asked confused. His right hand twitched.

  Not clever, this manling. Not clever at all.

  Right hand, left leg. I took his hand.

  “You are not clever,” I told him. “I want you to remember. You remember good?”

  I snapped his little finger.

  I waited for him to finish screaming. I watched his pain indifferently.

  “The first question is: Who will catch fish for you? You understand that.”

  I waited for him to nod, and then made him repeat it.

  “Good,” I said, and snapped the next finger.

  When he finished screaming, I said. “Ask him: Who will drive beasts for him?”

  Again, I made him repeat it, and when I was satisfied, broke another finger. He yelped, but held much of it in. His face, shining with sweat, was contorted with pain.

  “Who will sing for you?”

  Snap. A yelp, and then a series of sobbing gasps. He repeated it on his own.

  “What good is a kingdom that is only a mound of skulls?”

  All of this, the little Arukh watched uncomprehending.

  When it was done, I picked up the man by his good limbs, and slung him across my back. I carried him across the city. Three times we stopped to rest. Once, he asked for water. I gave it to him.

  Some people, who did not love Humans, tried to come near as I walked. I just smiled at them, and they went away.

  I dropped him near the Human places.

  “Scream now, Man, and they will come. I will be away. But you remember my questions.”

  I turned away, and then turned back. He cowered away from me.

  “Tell the Prince...” I said, holding his terrified face in my arms, “tell him....”

  I thought for a second. “Tell him that I know what he does. Tell him I know what he is.”

  I nodded his face for him, and then took off. Behind me, I could hear the manling screaming.

  “Why have you done this?” the female asked.

  Why had I done it? I wondered. It was stupid and pointless. What did the Human King care about fish and beast and songs?

  Then I thought about the fisher Captain, and the Vampire who’d been wounded trying to help them. Maybe these questions mattered to them.

  I shrugged. Arukh are not good at thinking. I am told this over and over.

  “No fish today,” I told her softly. “Arrah.”

  We walked along in silence.

  “What you said?” she asked sadly. “It was like the way Vampires speak...”

  I looked at her.

  “It meant something else, it was for someone else...” she stammered, “when you spoke of a great falling beast, crushing its rider. You didn’t say it to the Horseman...”

  She met my eyes.

  “You said it to me. You were talking about yourself.”

  “Arrah,” I said softly.

  “They will kill you,” she said.

  “We all die. Everything dies. Everything but the Arukh. Arukh are born dead,” I replied. “It is not to be celebrated.”

  I should run, I thought, I’d run out of allies and run out of prospects. Reduced to pointless foolish gestures I had almost nothing left to try.

  I should run, I thought, knowing I wouldn’t.

  As we walked, she fell further and further behind. Just as she had when we’d trapped the Hobgoblin together. But when I finally turned around, she was gone.

  Almost nothing left.

  I had a dream.

  I was standing in a smoke-filled lodge with Many Faces. She danced before me.

  “First you go to Forty Friends to beg your act of murder, and now you come to me?” she asked. “You insult me. Again.”

  “There is blood on your hands,” she said. “So much blood.”

  My fingers curled.

  “You have insulted me,” she said, “for the second time. Why do you offend me further with your presence?”

  But the face she presented on her shoulder was sardonic amusement. She turned and moved, presenting a variety of expressions carved or painted into the shapes of her body. Contempt. Irritation. Curiosity.

  Compassion.

  Hips swaying, she moved close, putting a hand on my shoulder. I started, barring my teeth.

  “Would you hurt me, beast?” she asked. “With your bloody hands.”

  “I killed Copper Thoughts,” I told her, and instantly regretted saying it. I wasn’t here to threaten her.

  She laughed, faces presenting amusement.

  “Copper Thoughts is nothing. A shaman’s name is like mist in the morning, with the passing of the shaman, so goes his name. You’d do better to claim another death.”

  “The Prince?” I begged.

  Her hand on my shoulder was light, yet somehow, she was rocking me back and forth. I stiffened.

  Her touch vanished. She stepped too close to me, putting a curious shoulder forward. I backed a step, turning to the side.

  “Kill him yourself.”

  “I cannot.”

  She stepped forward again; I backed turning.

  “Then what do you want of me?”

  She withdrew. Involuntarily, I stepped forward.

  “Kill him for me. Or give me the magic to kill him.”

  “What will you give me?” Her voice was soft, almost musical. It made me sleepy. Her lips were suddenly close to mine.

  “Anything,” I whispered.

  She laughed, throwing her arms above her head, her hips swayed as the expressions of her body changed. It was as if all the faces of her laughed at me.

  “The Troll’s interdict has been called upon you, the warring Kingdoms have turned away from your voice, and even the Secret Kingdom has driven you off to howl like a dog in the night. You have gone to everyone but your own people. Why have you not taken your quest to the Arukh?”

  I started to speak, but then my voice caught. Without gold? Without strength? I had nothing to offer the Arukh. To what purpose? The Arukh were a people without power. We were less than dust to the Kingdoms.

  She inclined a shoulder. The face seemed to smile at me. As if it, as if all her faces knew my secrets. I had nothing left
to offer. I was here as a beggar.

  “Tell me your name,” she demanded. “Your secret name, your true name. Surrender that to me, I will consider your request.”

  My breath caught in my throat.

  “There is no name,” I whispered.

  She turned her back to me, head dipping, breaking a pattern I’d barely known was forming. The faces on her shoulder blades rose in mute contempt.

  “Is it true,” she asked, “that the Arukh have no names among themselves?”

  I nodded.

  “It is not good to be known,” I told her. “To be known, to be named, is power to our enemies.”

  “And what of your friends.”

  I shrugged.

  “None,” she whispered. “So alone, each one of you, that to be known to any can only be ill. How sad.”

  “The world is many, the world is vast,” I said. “We are small and alone. We cannot fight them all.”

  “What of Zerika the Fierce? What of Vhoroktik Hobgoblin Queen? Big Biter? Morbius Troll Cutter? What of them? For are these not Arukh with names?”

  I grunted.

  “These ones Mistress, they do not fear names,” I told her. “These, Mistress, are feared above all things. They have names, not so as to be known, but to be avoided...”

  She regarded me gravely, and struck a fierce pose.

  “The earth trembles at the touch of Zerika’s feet...” she declaimed, mockingly.

  I nodded.

  Approach. Pose.

  “And death blooms beneath the gaze of Morbius...” A momentary pose of ferocity incarnate.

  I nodded.

  Approach. Pose. Her hand rested on my hip.

  “I have heard of one,” she said. “One the Arukh whisper about, they tell stories to each other about this one. One Arukh beyond all others, one who trails secret names behind her as the tails of a comet. One whose names are legion. One who answers to nothing, but is named again and again.”

  She moved forward, her hip rolling. I moved backward with her, my hips moving, guided by her touch.

  I swallowed.

  “There is no such one,” I said finally.

  We stopped.

  “There are stories, told by a people without stories. They tell of this one. What of these tales...”

  She pulled me forward. Our shoulders dipped together, we turned together, my body floating weightless.

  “There are stories,” I said. “But there is no one to bear their weight. There are names, but there is no one to wear the names.”

  Pause. Pose. Advance, sweeping me with her, her movements somehow commanding and reflecting my own.

  “There was no one who gambled with the High Gnomes? No ferocious woman who saved the Kobold children? Who started the war, and ended it by raising up the Secret Kingdom? No beast ever walked with high and low? No monster ever cast the bones of war and peace? There’s no one who fascinated the Trolls? There’s no one that dreamers see when they whisper Orc Nation in their slumber.”

  I shook my head, my cheeks burning. I tried to turn away, but only wheeled under her touch.

  “There was never such a one as walked in the stories as they are told,” I whimpered.

  Everywhere I looked, her faces waited, mocking, observing, questioning. I could see nothing but her. She had become the world.

  Pause.

  She stepped back, letting utter stillness envelope us.

  “And no Arukh,” she asked softly, “there was never such an Arukh who loved the Mermaids?”

  I swallowed, rocking back and forth grunting.

  She laughed softly.

  Then she swept forward, and suddenly I was whirling. My body swaying to her gay touches.

  “You’ve not even a name to give me,” she said. “Poor beast. What can you offer me? Bits of mud and pebbles? Cold ashes stolen from some abandoned hearth? Scavenged bones fallen from the tables of your betters? What could you possibly give me that I could want?”

  “Anything,” I said, “name what you want, I will give it to you.”

  “You’ll give me whatever I want,” she mocked.

  Name a price and I will pay it. Name a thing and I will bring it to you. Name a deed and I’ll give my life to it.”

  “What if I wanted a song, such as the Mermaid’s sing? Could you make such a thing, could you sing it to me? Is that in you to give me?”

  “What?” I asked. I was trying to find strength, mass within myself. I felt as insubstantial as air, a shape of dust hanging in the stillness, to be dissipated by a breeze or ray of light.

  “No? What’s left then? A bone, a bit of mud, a scrap of leather, a burned out ember...”

  Laughter.

  Whirl.

  “Arrah,” bubbled burning out of my throat. I stepped back, breaking her rhythm, away from her touch, hunching in on my self, black anger welling up.

  “Easy beast,” she soothed. “Easy, easy.”

  I relaxed.

  “What makes the Arukh?” she wondered aloud, her voice soft and still. “What are you?”

  Her hand slid around my cheek, collecting tears that I did not realize had flowed.

  “What small shrivelled creatures you are,” she said. “Tiny helpless things holding on to your bits of pale and fading light. Burning your way through the shadows of your lives, stumbling headlong to the shadow that must cover all.

  “A race so forlorn and barren that almost nothing is held, not light or love, not family or friendship. Do you know a mother’s love? Or a lover’s kiss? I think not. Your existence mired in such poverty, you cannot even bear names among yourselves. Among the lot of you, you have barely a word to share.

  “Despised by every God, cursed by all that lives, you yet endure, defying the world by your very existence.

  “It is a wonder,” she told me, “your very survival. And a greater wonder that any of you even bother. Do you like your existence, is there some pleasure you take in your suffering? Do you seek to avenge yourself on a world that tortures you? Or do you imagine that perhaps somehow the horror might lessen?”

  She paused before continuing. Giving the words time to sink. She vanished from my sight. Reappeared whispering in my ear.

  “Do you know hope?” she asked. “Is that it? Hope?”

  I sucked in breath. Did not reply.

  “And among this cursed and friendless race,” she whispered, her voice insidious, “is one, just one, cursed beyond all others. One for whom the Trolls have pronounced their Interdict, one especially for whom each race utters its hatred and thirsts for its blood. One for whom every being that walks upon two legs shall swear as enemy to hunt and hound and kill.”

  She stopped.

  I stopped moving, only realizing as I did that she’d swept me into her spell, her dance again.

  She knew me. She knew who I was. I froze, waiting.

  She knew me.

  We stared at each other.

  “What are you creature, to be the most despised of a despised race? For what sin are you cursed beyond every other thing in the world?”

  For a second, there was nothing but silence.

  What could I say? What could I tell this one, who knew everything? How could I defend myself, knowing the terrible truth of her words? A truth that burned me like the sun.

  I cowered. Searching within myself for any core of certainty.

  “He killed the Mermaid,” I said, suddenly. “This must not be done. He killed Ryssa the Kobold, and the White Bear Daughter. He killed...” I pronounced the names, all the names I knew, pouring out of me. “He killed them all, and more, all these lives, wanting to live. He killed them and made empty places in the world. These things must not be done. These things are wrong.”

  Exhausted, I ran out of words. I ran out of names. Without them to w
arm me, I stood there shivering, barely looking at her.

  She stood away from me, arms folded, elbows out, her faces presenting stern contemplation. She no longer tried to entrap me with her dancing spells. Perhaps I was already entrapped, my freedom, my will, merely a thing on a short leash.

  “Wrong,” she said finally, “you are a strange little monster, aren’t you.”

  I stared at her, no more words left in me.

  After a time, she spoke.

  “What are any of these things to me?”

  “You are of the Mermaids’ people.”

  She had to understand. She just had to. I couldn’t do it myself. I had nothing left.

  “Yes, but are they of my people?”

  Startled, I met her eyes then. She was Selk and not Selk? I couldn’t understand it. Had they cast her out? Had she left? What did that mean?

  “You say names,” she said, ignoring me, she turned around and around, spinning around me, her body a dizzying assortment of faces and expressions, as I turned to watch her. “Names and more names. Who are they to me? Nobody. What do they mean to me? Nothing. What do they matter to me?”

  She put a hand on her hip, body arched, her faces looked at me, demanding an answer.

  “Blood is red,” I said urgently, remembering all the ruined bodies. I suddenly remembered touching myself between my legs so long ago, desperately licking the blood on my fingertips and knowing that I was dying. I remembered the little Arukh doing it. Had it been like that for them? Had they seen their blood welling up from their ruined bodies and known they were dying?

  “All blood is red,” I said dumbly. I didn’t want to think of it.

  She stopped, absolutely still. Waiting for more.

  “You’re strange,” she said finally. “You are full of things no one has ever seen in Arukh, perhaps things no one has ever seen before. What was it that made you?”

  She advanced on me, her hand touching my hip. I moved back before her, my hip swaying at her touch.

  “Poor little monster,” she said.

  She retreated, somehow pulling me before her. Bending at the knees my body swayed in time with hers as we moved together. Advancing, retreating.

  “You suffer not knowing why. You don’t even understand what’s wrong with you, or why you feel what you do. You’ve been torn open without a wound inflicted.”