by S.E. Diemer
The Witch Sea
by S.E. Diemer
Copyright 2012 S.E. Diemer
All rights reserved
Edited by Jennifer Diemer
I knew what she was. When she came up the path, feet quiet, deliberate, I knew it from the way she moved, the webbing between her bare toes, how she faltered when she reached the lighthouse landing, like she had never seen things like stairs before. I knew, and I said nothing, because we were all, in our own way, monsters.
"Nor," she said, sticking out her hand as if she expected me to shake it.
"That's what he named you?" I asked, arms folded before me.
"Yes," she said.
I did not touch her.
She had come by boat. She had to. They could not touch the saltwater. He wouldn't let them, and they obeyed him.
If they touched the water, if they slipped or tripped or dared, the spray made them scream, mouths wide, tongues distended. A wave made them crumple, skin sagging and bloated, until their flesh fell apart, obliterated by the blue, leaving a clean, new creature beneath: sometimes a seal, wet coat slick, brown eyes still human. Sometimes a walrus, growing until the human body burst apart, revealing tusk and tooth. Sometimes it was a small, silver fish that flopped helplessly until it reached the water—or did not, lying, rotting, in the sunshine.
She wasn't human, Nor. But neither was I.
"They call you a witch," she said, smiling, moving facial muscles into toothy grin, like a silent growl. "Are the stories true? Do you keep the fish from the bay so that the people starve? Do you dance in the moonlight? Did you sell your soul?"
"I am not what you think I am," I said, and let her into my house, with her wet brown eyes and hands she kept clasped in front of her. If I had shut the door, if I had kept her out, she would have remained on my island, anyway. He had sent her. We both knew he had sent her. And he was dauntless.
"They call you Meriel," she said then, sitting down at the table stiffly. "Is that your name?"
"It is."
"You hate us."
"I do not."
"You hate me?"
A seal's eyes are innocent, contain no malice, no human anger or rage, and though she showed a human shape now, she was still seal. Her eyes were limpid, round, deep when she looked up at me, hands on the table, widespread. They were webbed, too, her fingers, but only a little. He was getting better.
"I do not hate you," I told her. It was not a lie.
"He hopes that you will reconsider his offer, you know. He is not a bad man. He never was a bad man."
"No," I said, and it was so tired.
"I will come again tomorrow," she said, and she stood, too sudden, jerky. "I hope that you will reconsider, too, Meriel." Her voice was warm and soft, skin smooth, brown, beautiful.
She held out her hand again as she departed. I did not take it.
I watched her as she walked away and down the dirt path. Her hips swung gently from side to side, the thin skirt lying along her curves.
He had tried everything else, and this was a last resort; I knew that. Again, he would fail. She would fail.
But I thought of her that night, hand over my own breast, listening to the crash of the waves against the rock outside my window, watching the faint flash of silver upon the ceiling, reflection of my finely woven net of spells that kept the fish out of the bay.
In the morning, I checked the line, standing on the shore, hands extended, feeling the push and pull of the tide and waves as I crawled over every inch of the silver net with my head and heart, testing it and pulling it and mending it where mends were needed, shaping the magic in long strands, crisscrossed—always crisscrossed.
The bright sunshine reflected off of the water, blinding me, and I did not see her approach in the little boat, did not see her get out and climb the path to me. I squinted, blinked, and suddenly, she was there, as if by magic. I rose from my work, and I went to meet her, bright spots along my vision outlining her in a riot of color.
"Good morning, Meriel," she said, and she curtsied. Her movements were more certain than the day before, nearly graceful. It did not take some of them long to get used to the land, to how their new limbs and muscles worked. She seemed almost human now.
"Good morning, Nor," I told her.
"He wishes me to ask you to change your mind, Meriel. He has said that he will double his offer, if only you will cease."
"I will not," I said, and it was laughable, the formalities: how prettily he'd dressed her up this morning; the doubling or tripling of his offer of gold, of house and land and a hundred thousand things he hoped might tempt me. They did not. They would not. I wondered when he would tire of this.
The sea was patient. He was patient. But patience could wear thin.
"Oh," was what she said, and it was obvious that she was disappointed, confused, that she had thought today would be the day when I would smile, nod, give in to his demands. She opened her mouth and shut it, so like a fish. Beneath it all, they were always like fish.
"Go back," I said, not unkindly. "Tell him 'never.'"
"He will not accept that, you know." She lowered her chin, looked over her shoulder, stepped closer. She smelled of salt. "He will send me back every day, Meriel."
"As you will," I said.
She left.
~*~
I was born on Bound Island. My mother pushed me out, and--that same night--had to tend to the nets. Back then, it was roughly every seven days that breaks would occur, that the magic would have to be woven back into the silver strands. Now it was every day.
Nothing living could slip through the nets and enter the bay. Not intact. If it slipped through, it would…change. And it would become his--Galo's.
So I tended the nets.
Once, twice, a million times, I asked my mother to tell me the story of Galo. I remember her familiar movements as she banked the fire, drew me close, traced a protective circle in the dirt about our forms.
She always whispered it.
Long ago, before man or woman or stories, there was the sea. It crashed and roared and boiled, churning life into being. At the center of the sea swam Galo. He was larger than the island, larger than the bay, with four limbs that turned into tentacles that turned into hoofed legs, and a long, equine nose with teeth as long as oars and sharp as stars. He had been in the sea from the beginning, rising from the muck and mud at the bottom of the world, fully formed. He was the oldest sea god and the most powerful. Storms came from him; whirlpools followed his finned hooves. His heart was black, and he knew only chaos, and everything in the sea feared him mightily.
Land came then. And some things from the sea ventured upon it, exchanging their fins for legs, their gills for lungs. Man came into the world, and the sea was forsaken. The men forgot their origins, forgot their fathers who had crept from the salt, and they shook their fists at the water. They built boats and crossed the seas and believed they had conquered the waves.
Forgotten, too, Galo slept at the bottom of the world. One day, he awoke and saw how much had changed, saw how man defiled his mother, the sea, saw how there was no reverence in man's heart for the ocean that had given him life. Galo's own black heart grew even blacker, and he thought and he thought, and he formed a plan.
He changed from his equine form, shed his fins and his sharp teeth, and he crawled upon the land, now a man. He shaped a town from mud, and he turned back to the waters and lifted his new arms. Out of the ocean crept all manner of creatures: the whales and the fish and the octopus and the shark, and they shed their animal forms and become people, too.
"We will make a great
army," Galo said to them, "and we will punish the humans for their sacrilege. We will destroy them on land, we will devour them upon the sea, and man will cease to be. The ocean will reign again."
The sea people, as one, gave a great shout and said, "We will obey you, Galo, for you are mighty and strong." And more creatures began to emerge from the sea, and more and more, until the beach teemed with people who had shark eyes and whale hearts, dripping hair and tusks for teeth.
But then the march of animals stopped abruptly. For, at the mouth of the bay, upon our own Bound Island--though it was not known as such back then--stepped a witch. Your grandmother, Meriel, for whom you are named. She drew down a star, and from its shimmering bulk, she fashioned something so large, so ludicrous, it stretched across the entire mouth of the bay, both ways.
She said, "While those of my bloodline live, Galo, you will never get your creatures. I curse you to remain in the town you have built, trapped and unable to summon the sea to your aid."
And, because he was small, a man, and no longer mighty, the curse stuck to Galo like a barnacle.
I sometimes wondered at the audacity of Grandmother. The oldest god of the sea took the form of a mortal man, and she wove a net and curse so tightly that he was spellbound by it. Did she ever fear retribution? Did she ever look through the curtains of the tiny cottage at night and watch the people come to the edge of the water, all along the beach of the bay? Did she watch them stand, silent, looking out to the sea they could no longer touch, would never touch again, as long as the curse remained? Galo was cruel. While he must remain in the town he had fashioned, he demanded that all of his creations did, too.
The people stood beneath the stars along the shore and looked out to the sea, mourning its loss. And they cursed my grandmother.
And my mother.
And now me.
I used to think this was bigger than all of us. My mother told me the story of Galo and of my grandmother and how we must remain, for all time, upon the island. We were the axis of the world, she said, as she dusted my nose with flour or tossed me into the air. We were important.
My mother told me, too, of how she'd seduced my father to the island. How I would also have to seduce a man in order to keep our bloodline alive. If our bloodline died out, the curse would break. And the world would end.
She'd said it all so matter-of-factly, hands upon the washboard, drawing the tea towels over the ridges again and again, scrubbing the stains out. I watched her hands go up and down, and I felt a remorse like fire rake through my stomach, my heart. I would not seduce a man, and there was no simple way to tell my mother this truth. So I never did.
But I was so lonely.
My mother had left me the island, a legacy, and a stone. The first two were burdens; the last was my saving grace in those hard days following her death. It was a plain stone, the size of my palm, and clear. When I stared within it, it showed me what I wished to see. Not fantasies but facts, as they happened--real, true life.
I watched the townsfolk and Galo in the stone's depths. If they ever suspected an outsider saw them, observed them, they made no gestures to indicate it. They moved within the stone like little pictures, stories, lives I could see but never touch.
Sometimes, when I was little, I stole away my mother's stone, and I peered into it and asked it for friends. It showed me the inhabitants of the bay town, then, too, showed me the women with hair like tentacles, the men with shark eyes and sharp teeth, and I wondered why it presented me with visions so contrary to my request.
But over time, over the years, I understood. The sea people did become my friends. In a way. They were all I knew.
~*~
When Nor left me for the second time, I dusted my hands against my apron pockets and climbed up and into the lighthouse. The shack along the lighthouse proper, where a lighthouse tender should have lived, had long since disintegrated, crumbling to the ground like any manmade thing left too long near the unforgiving kiss of the sea. I had to live in the lighthouse itself now, a solid stone structure that towered up towards the heavens and wouldn't disintegrate for as long as I was alive. That's all that mattered.
I tugged up the corner of my mattress and took out my comforting stone, shaped like a tiny pillow, and the weight of it filled my palm, my heart, with a sense of peace. I pressed its worn curves to my hand and closed my eyes, cleared my mind.
"Show me Galo," I whispered to it.
At first, dark shadows spun over the stone, but then it focused, cleared, as if black waters had parted.
Galo had never been a handsome man, not even when I was little, when I stole the stone and started back in fright at his visage. He sat at a small table now and had his head in his hands. His long, tangled hair--white as foam--curled around his ears and down and over his back and chest.
Sometimes, lately, I pitied him.
There was no sound to accompany these pictures, so when his cottage door opened, when Nor entered to stand behind Galo, I gaped. Almost tenderly, she stepped forward and touched his shoulder with one fin-long hand.
He shrugged her off quickly, said something pointed. She drew away from him, mouth downturned, and left the room.
I put the stone away.
That night, I gathered my cloak about me, my grandmother's cloak, much patched and mended, and wandered out of the lighthouse into the star-soaked night. I went down to my own small shore and stood up on the trunk of a tree that the last storm had washed onto my island. I shielded my eyes against the grinning moon and watched the procession of the townspeople.
They came from their houses, from their shacks. Sometimes, when my mother told me the story of how Galo had made the town, forming it from mud, she smirked behind her hand, said, "He didn't know what a town was made of, so he shaped the houses based on glimpses he'd seen from the water. He didn't know how houses worked, what walls and windows were, so the sea people were left with cold floors and doors that would never open."
But I'd seen the insides of those houses, knew that this part of my mother's story wasn't quite right. Perhaps the townsfolk had gotten what they needed from other towns, trading fish or stories for chairs and bowls.
The people came now, trails of people, men and women, walking graceless and graceful in turns down to the edge of the sea in the harbor, a curved beach as smiling as the moon.
They gathered in a long line, one after the other, all turned toward me, but not really me. They were looking out to the sea, the ocean that could not embrace them, the water close but closed off to them.
They stood on the sand of the beach, and they did not move. They did not speak. The splash of the waves was nearly silent upon my little beach, and I watched the sea people, as I did every night. And they watched me.
The moon shifted overhead slowly.
I grew tired as sentinel and stepped down from the tree trunk. I went back inside, shut and locked the door as I had done a hundred times before, a thousand times, and I put myself to bed while the sea people stood along the shoreline and stared, unmoving, at an untouchable sea.
~*~
I saw her before she stepped upon my sands this time. It was morning. Again, I checked the nets, mended the breaks, spun the magic to replace the strings that were too faded, did it all from the edge of the water, eyes closed, hands held out. Her little coracle bumped upon the edge of the beach, and I paused, opened my eyes, turned to take in her small shape as she dragged the boat up onto land. She moved like a girl now, truly, all hints of animal gone.
"Hello," said Nor, coming to greet me, smiling shyly, fingers held out. Today, I took her hand, felt the smooth skin brush against my calloused palm. She held on a bit too long, and then she dropped my hand awkwardly.
Still not human enough.
"Today…" she began, but I shook my head.
"No," I told her, as I would always tell her.
She nodded, still smiling, as if
she'd expected my answer. "Is it all right if I eat with you? I brought lunch.”
I opened my mouth, sighed, nodded.
We shared a quiche with bits of seaweed sprinkled throughout. I wrinkled my nose from time to time but ate my portion without saying anything, staring down at my hands and the small china plate, not up and across at my visitor, who ate her quiche with a knife and fork and had folded her napkin upon her lap.
"Are you ever lonely?" she asked. I didn’t answer.
"You're brave," she said. "I would be very lonely."
I shook my head. I was lonely, and I wasn't brave.
She leaned back in her chair, took in the roundness of the lighthouse, the scrubbed cupboards, the neatly made husk bed opposite the table. She got up, ran her fingers along the wood and stone, circled the room as I watched her with hooded eyes, nervous. Would her touch leave a lingering of her perfume? Her scent was not unpleasant, but it was distinct, different, and I was unaccustomed to different things.
"You live here all alone," she said.
I nodded.
"Did you grow up alone?"
I sighed. "I grew up with my mother. She died when I was fifteen."
"Was that hard?" She sat across from me with her wide, brown eyes, and I knew it was a genuine question. She was curious.
I cleared my throat. "In some ways, it was hard. In others, no."
This seemed to satisfy her, for she stood and gathered her things in her small, plain basket, brushing her fingers over mine when she reached to take my plate. I shuddered, but she seemed not to notice, and she smiled at me when I rose.
"It was lovely to talk to you. You are not a bad witch. I have decided that."
I was too stunned to reply until after she had left, the old door closing fast behind her.
"Thank you," I said.
~*~
"Show me Nor," I whispered to the stone, pressing my hands together. First, the stone showed me a muddy, distorted image. And then there she was.
She was laughing, throwing back her head and laughing at something a tall, thin man had said. He was bent down almost double at the waist to whisper a word in her tiny, shell-shaped ear.
She was surrounded by people, and they all stood in Galo's house, the largest house in the town. There were rich tapestries draped over the walls and thick carpets upon the floor. I thought of my own humble furnishings—old and colorless—and drew my lips together.