by Tanith Lee
Then Sapphyra made an apron of her skirt, and she darted about the cave, until she had gathered everything she could, and rather more. And still she was digging out rings and necklaces and putting them on, and tying others into her corset ribbons and her black hair.
After a time, however, a louring weariness seemed to overtake her. She sat down on the sand, holding the treasure to her. Then she spoke to Elaidh, and though no words were to be heard, Elaidh heard them.
“Madam,” said Elaidh, “it is a great disservice I have done you, although I did it without malice, or intent, without thinking. Listen now. Keep these jewels from your husband, the prince. Then, when a time comes that what you wish for most you find you do not have, put on some of these gems, and go to him. Then he will give you back what I have taken from you. And if it is really mine, it is also his, and shall be yours.”
Riddles! said the crystal bubbles from the lips of the princess.
But next moment Elaidh raised her up, and gave her a push that sent her spinning, and Sapphyra found, to her indignation, she was rushing out of the cave, and up and up through the light-changing water, with the three Attendants whirling around her. Until all four broke the skin of the sea, and fell out on the sands of the earth. And there lay the tame wild gardens of the palace, and all around the gold and jewels that had tumbled from their skirts.
Years passed. To the prince and princess they seemed only a few in number. So that, should they add them up, they were startled always. To others, the number of the years was more than twenty-five.
They were not often together, the prince, the princess.
She would be at cards, or at her dressmakers, or she would be lying on her sofa, eating something that had to do with chocolate. Or in the theatre, in a dream.
He would be riding, and then he would be aching from the ride. He would be up all night to drink or gamble. Or, now and then, with one of the scatter of his mistresses. Or he would play the piano in the echoing marble music-room of the palace, surprising himself by how often his fingers stumbled on the keys.
There was a solitary odd story told of the royal couple.
At the start, for a decade, almost, they had been childless. Then one day the princess had given birth—astounding the physicians who had, it seemed, burst in too late to do more than ponder the flawless child—and shake their heads over its largeness and the adjacent slenderness of the princess, which had persisted throughout her term, right up to the morning of the child’s unheralded appearance.
Once, at a dinner some months later, the princess had drunk a great deal of champagne. Pointing at a sapphire necklace she had on, she exclaimed, “Do you see this? This is the reason for my child.” Which was thought, by the assembly, very daring, perhaps rather too bold, and also most curious.
More curious still was the truth. But there came a night the prince told it to his heir, the son the Princess Sapphyra had shown to him that morning, eighteen years before.
The boy entered the music-room, and found his father, the prince, seated there at the piano.
Cuzarion was no longer young. His hair had turned grey, and though his court, and the mistresses, still lauded him as handsome, it was a sort of handsomeness which might have looked better on a statue than a man.
But the boy—oh, the boy. He was like the morning sun, so young and straight and fair, his hair the light brown of acorns, his eyes the green of apples. In honesty, he resembled neither his father nor his mother, the princess, at all.
In the tradition of the royal household, the prince’s son had the same name as his father, just as the prince had had his own father’s name. Cuzarion, they were all named that.
“Cuzarion,” therefore said Cuzarion, to his son, “I’ve called you to me to tell you a tale that you will think a lie. Or else you’ll think I have gone mad.”
But Prince Cuzarion’s son, Prince Cuzarion, smiled kindly at his father.
“No, sir. I would never think that.”
“Well, then, we’ll sit here. Let me tell it through, and then decide, for you have reached a proper age, both to hear it, and to judge.”
Then the elder prince spoke of the voyage he had made those few years, more than twenty-five, in his past. Of the storm and the sinking ship, of how Elaidh had saved him and every other living thing aboard. But then he told of how he had loved Elaidh, and lain with Elaidh, and presently left Elaidh to come home and resume his life. To do him credit, the elder Prince Cuzarion did not paint his love for Elaidh as anything more than it had been, the passion of a month, nor himself as any more than he was, a man capable only of a month’s fidelity.
And the younger prince listened gravely. Even when his father explained how Elaidh was a magical being, the daughter of a human man and a mermaid of the deeps of the ocean.
Then the elder prince mentioned his marriage to the Princess Sapphyra. That it was pleasant enough. That it went by. And that one day he found her sobbing, and she said, “We have no children, you and I.”
“And we had done everything that humans may do,” said the elder prince, “to ensure a child between us. Yet none arrived.”
“But then I did arrive,” said the young prince. “It is most sorry I am, to have kept you and mother waiting.”
“My son,” said the elder prince, “you were born of a spell. You are my child, it is a fact, but not the child of the princess. The mermaids have their children by another means. It is the father brings them forth, having carried them a while, without knowing it. It seems Elaidh visited the princess before her wedding. Elaidh gave her sapphires, for her name, from the depths of the sea. And one night Sapphyra came to me in a necklace of these jewels. Later, as I slept, I dreamed of Elaidh, and in my sleep I possessed Elaidh as a man possesses a woman. And when I woke, the sheet was damp from my lust.” He glanced here at his son, a little afraid to have embarrassed him. But the younger prince was not ashamed. Still he sat gravely, listening, as if in his heart he somehow knew it all.
“Sapphyra too,” said the elder prince, “lay in the bed that night. In the dawn, a ray of sun fell on the coverlet. Then she and I woke, for something stirred on the mattress between us. And when she threw off the covers, a baby lay there, white as the sea-foam, and clean as the morning.
“And this was I?”
“And this, my son, my mermaid’s son, was you.”
“Then,” said the young man, “Elaidh is my mother.”
“So she must be.”
“Shall I ever meet her?”
The eider prince sighed. “Perhaps. I hope you may. But I think it will never be in my lifetime. For I think I shall never meet that lovely girl again, she that was the evening star to me, and the flight of a bird. She that I forgot then, as I forget now how to play my piano, and everything—but her.”
But the boy was in a sort of trance, and could only look glad, thinking of his new history. He said, “How shall I know her, if she should come here?”
“Ah,” said the elder Cuzarion. “Easily enough. She will look, I think, just as she did. Eighteen she will look, your own age now. For her kind live long but never grow old. And she is in her colouring also like you. Her hair is brown that has a spirit of green in it. Her skin is clear as waters.”
“And since she is half mermaid, how will I notice that?”
“As I did, my son, if I’d looked as I should. For though she shed no single tear, the sea was in her eyes.”
Because Our Skins Are Finer
In the early winter, when the seas are strong, the grey seals come ashore among the islands. Their coats are like dull silver in the cold sunlight, and for these coats of theirs men kill them. It has always been so, one way and another. There were knives and clubs, now there are the guns, too. A man with his own gun and his own boat does well from the seals, and such a man was Huss Hullas. A grim and taciturn fellow he was, with no kin, and no kindness, living alone in his sea-grey croft on the sea rim of Dula under the dark old hill. Huss Hullas had killed in his ti
me maybe three hundred seals, and then, between one day and the next, he would not go sealing anymore, not for money and surely not for love.
Love had always been a stranger to him, that much was certain. He had no woman, and cared for himself as any man can in the islands. And once a month he would row to the town on the mainland, and drink whisky, and go upstairs with one of the paid girls. And row back to Dula in the sunrise, no change to be seen in him for better or worse. Then one time he went to the town and there was a new girl working at the bar. Morna was her name. Her hair was black as liquorice, and her skin was rosy. As the evening drew to a close, Huss Hullas spoke to Morna, but not to order whisky. And Morna answered him, and he got to his feet and went out and banged the bar door behind him. It seemed she would not go with him as the other girls would. She had heard tell of him, it seemed. Not that he was rough, or anything more than businesslike in bed, but he was no prince either, with no word to say and no laugh to laugh, and not even a grunt to show he had been gladdened. “I will not go upstairs with a lump of rock, then,” she said. “There are true men enough who’ll pay me.”
Now love was a stranger to him, but so was failure. And though this was a small prize to fail at the winning of, yet he did not like to fail. If he would eat a rabbit or bird for his meal, he would find and shoot one. If he baked bread, it would rise. If he broke a bone, he could set it himself, and it would mend. Only the sea had ever beaten him, and that not often, and he is a foolish man will not respect the sea, who lives among her isles. Even the Shealcé, the Seal People, dropped down before Huss Hullas’s gun obediently. And since he had never yet asked a free woman to take him, he had never yet been refused, till Morna did it.
When he went again to town, he went before the month was up, and when Morna came by his table, he said she should sit down and drink whisky with him. But Morna stepped sharply away. “I will not do that, neither.”
“What will you do, then?” said Huss Hullas. “Will you begot the sack?”
“Not I,” said she. “The rest like me. They have cause.”
“I will give you a pound more,” he said.
Morna smiled. “No.”
“How much, then?”
“Nothing, then.” And she was gone, and presently so was he.
When he came back the next month, he brought her a red lacquer comb that had been his mother’s.
“What now?” she said. “Is it wooing me, you are?”
“Learning your price, then,” he said.
“Well, I’ll not go with you for an old comb.”
“It’s worth a bit.”
“I have said.”
“For what, then?”
Morna frowned at him angrily. It must be made clear, he was not a bad-looking man for all the grim way he had with him, which had not altered, nor his stony face, even as he offered her the comb. And his eyes, dark as the hill of Dula, said only: You will do it. This is just your game. And so it was.
It was winter by then, and all along the shore the oil-lamps burned where the electricity had not yet been brought in, and the seals were swimming south like the waves, as they had swum for hundreds of years.
“Well,” said Morna, “bring me a sealskin for a coat, and I’ll go upstairs with you. That is my promise. It shall keep me warm if you cannot, you cold pig of a man.”
“Ah,” said Huss Hullas, and he got up and went out of the bar to find another woman for the night, on Fish Street.
The seals came that month and beached on all the islands west of Dula. They lay under the pale winter sun and called to each other, lying on the rocks where the sea could find them. On some of these bleak places it might seem men had never lived yet in the whole world, but still men would come there.
One or another rowed over to Dula and hammered on Huss Hullas’s door, and he opened it with a rod and a line he was making in one hand.
“The seals are in. Are you ready, man?”
“I am.”
“We shall be out at dawn tomorrow, with the tide to help us.”
“I’ll be there.”
“So you will, and your fine gun. How many will you get this winter?”
“Enough.”
“And one for her on the mainland.”
“We’ll say nothing of that,” said Huss Hullas, and the man looked at him and nodded. Grim and hard and black, the eyes in Huss Hullas’s head could have put out fires, and his fists could kill a man, as well as a seal.
In the first stealth of the sunrise, Huss Hullas rowed away from Dula with his gun and his bullets by him. He rowed to where the ocean narrows and the rocks rise up to find the air. In the water ever westward, dark buoys bobbed in the blushing water that were the heads of seals. Tarnished by wet they lay, too, on the ledges of the isles, shelf on shelf of them, and sang in their solemn inhuman way, not knowing death approached them.
There was some ice, and here and there a seal lay out on the plates of it. They watched the men in the shadowy boats from their round eyes. The Shealcé is their old name, and still they are named so now and then, the Seal People, who have a great city down under the sea.
When the guns spoke first, the Shealcé looked about them, as if puzzled, those that did not flop and loll and bleed. When the guns spoke again, the rocks themselves seemed to move as shelf upon shelf slid over into the water and dived deep down. The guns shouted as if to call them back, the pink water smoked and blood ran on the ice. Men laughed. It is not the way, anymore, to know that what you kill is a living thing. It was different once, in the old times, very different then, when you would know and honour even the cut-down wheat. Men must live, like any other creatures, and it is not always a sin to kill, but to kill without knowledge may well be a sin, perhaps.
Huss Hullas had shipped his oars, and let the current move him through the channels. He knew the islands and their rocks as he knew his own body, their moods and their treacheries, and the way the water ran. He drifted gently in among the panic of the seals, and slew them as they hastened from the other men towards him, along the ice.
Each one he killed he knew, and would claim after. Every man marked his own.
Then, as Huss Hullas’s boat nosed her way between the rocks, the sun stood up on the water. In the rays of it he saw before him, on a patch of ice, one lone seal, but it was larger by far than all the others, something larger than any seal Huss Hullas had ever seen. Plainly, it was a bull, but young, unscarred, and shining in the sunlight. It had a coat on it that, in the dawn, looked for sure more gold than grey. And even Huss Hullas could not resist a little grimace that was his smile, and he raised the gun.
As he did so the seal turned and looked at him with its circular eyes, blacker than his own.
Yes, now, keep still, the man thought. For to blunder in the shot and spoil such fur would be a grave pity.
Huss Hullas was aiming for one of the eyes, but at the last instant the great golden seal lowered its head, and the bullet, as it speared away, struck it in the brain. It seemed to launch itself forward, the seal, in the same instant, and the dull flame of its body hit the water beyond the ice. Huss Hullas cursed aloud and grabbed up one of his oars. Already dead, the seal clove the water in a lovely arching dive—and was dammed against Huss Hullas’s wooden rower.
His strong arms cracking and his mouth uttering every blasphemy known among the islands—which is many and varied—Huss Hullas held the seal, first with the oar, next with his hands, and as the boat roiled and skewed and threatened to turn herself over in the freezing sea, he struggled and thrust for the nearest edge of rock. Here, by some miracle, he dragged the dead weight of the seal the boat, himself, aground, his hands full of blood and fur, and the oar splintering.
He stood over the seal, until another boat came through the narrows. Frost had set the seal’s dead eyes by then, as he towered over it ranting and cursing it, and the golden fur was like mud.
“That is a rare big beast, Huss Hullas. It should fetch a good price at the sheds.”
/> “This is not for the sheds.”
Taking out his knife then, he began to skin the great seal.
When he was done, he tossed the meat and fat and bones away, and took the heavy syrupy skin into the boat with him. After the other seals had been seen to, he left his share with the rest of the men. They saw the oar was ailing, and they knew better than try to cheat him.
He rowed back to Dula with the skin of the one seal piled round him and the oar complaining.
The remainder of that day, with the skin pegged up in the out-house, Huss Hullas sat fishing off Dula, like a man who has no care on earth, and no vast joy in it, either. If he looked forward to his next visit to the town, you could not have said from the manner of him. But he caught a basket of fish and went in as the sun was going out to clean and strip them and set them to cook on the stove.
The croft was like a dozen others, a single room with a fireplace in one wall and a big old bed on another. Aside from the stove there was a cupboard or two, and tackle for the boat or for the fishing stacked about, some carpentry tools, and some books that had been his father’s that Huss Hullas never read. A couple of oil-lamps waited handy to be lit. Often he would make do with the light of the fire. What he did there in his loneliness, sitting in his chair all the nights of the months he did not go drinking and whoring, was small enough. He would clean his gun, and mend his clothing and his boots; he would repair the leg of a stool, cook his food and eat it, and throw the plate into a pan of water for the morning. He would brew tea. He would think to himself whatever thoughts came to him, and listen to the hiss and sigh of the sea on the rim of Dula. In the bed he would sleep early, and wake early. While he slept he kept his silence. There rose up no comfortable snoring from Huss Hullas, and if he dreamed at all, he held the dreaming to himself. And two hours before the sun began, or before that, he would be about. He could stride right across Dula in a day, and had often done so and come back in the evening, with the stars and the hares starting over the hill.