After the ball, she drifted to the surface and there she heard a bugle sounding and thought, “He is certainly sailing nearby, he on whom my wishes depend, and in whose hands I should like to place the happiness of my life. I will go to the sea witch. She can give me counsel and help.”
And then the little seamaid went out from her garden, and took the route to the foaming whirlpools, behind which the evil sorceress lived. The little seamaid had never been that way before: neither flowers nor grass grew there; nothing but bare, gray, sandy ground stretched out to the whirlpool, where the water seized everything and cast all together into a fathomless deep. The route lay right across a quantity of warm, bubbling mire. Beyond this stood a strange forest of polypi: half animals and half plants who looked like serpents or medusas, each with a hundred heads growing out of the ground. The long slimy arms of the polypi had fingers like flexible worms that constantly clutched. All that could be reached in the sea they seized upon and held fast until if it had lived it died. The little seamaid was so alarmed at what she saw, that she stood still, and her heart palpitated with fear.
“This is the worst place in the world,” she said out loud. “What am I doing here?”
She very nearly turned back, but she thought of the beautiful boy and the mysteries of the beautiful upper world and her courage returned. She fastened her long flowing hair round her head, so that the polypi might not seize hold of it. She laid her hands together across her bosom, and then she darted forward between the grasping arms and fingers of the ugly polypi, which were reaching for her. As she swam she saw that each held in its grasp something it had seized. In some were the white bones of human beings who had perished at sea, in others the skeletons of land animals, oars, rudders, and chests of ships. At last she saw the body of the lost seamaid, whom they had caught and strangled; and this seemed the most shocking of any sight she ever could see.
At last she came to a space where fat water snakes rolled over each other in disgusting union. In the midst of this orgy sat the sea witch, allowing a toad to eat from her gaping maw. She called the ugly water snakes her little chickens, her little loves, and allowed them to crawl all over her bosom and shoulders.
“I know what you want,” said the sea witch; “you are a very stupid creature. It is so very stupid of you, but you shall have your way. It will bring you to sorrow, my pretty little cookie. You want to get rid of your fish’s tail, and to have two supports instead of it, like human beings on earth. You want the boy to fall in love with you, and to show you what life is like above the water.” At this the witch laughed so loud and disgustingly that the toad and the all snakes fled away from her. “Alright then. I will prepare a draught for you, with which you must swim to land tomorrow before sunrise, and sit down on the shore and drink it all. Your tail will then shrivel and dry up and fall off. Two legs will stab through the place where your tail had been and you will feel great pain, as if a sword were passing through you twice. But you will have your legs and all who see you will say that you are the prettiest little human girl they ever saw. You will still have the same floating gracefulness of movement that you have now and this no one land-born will be able to match. No dancer will ever tread so lightly, but at every step you take it will feel as if you might die. If this is what you want, then say it. You can have what you want if you will bear all this from me and if you are prepared to find out what your boy and his world are really like. Because it amuses me, I will help you.”
“Yes, I will,” said the little seamaid so quietly the witch demanded she repeat herself. “I will,” said the seamaid.
“Say, I do,” said the witch. “That’s what they say. Remember you will not be able to breathe underwater. You will not be able to return. You are still very young, remember, you can live for hundreds more years. Your aunties and your sisters and your grandmother will never recover from the grief.”
“I will do it,” said the little seamaid, “I do,” and all her color washed away.
“And I must be paid. You will soon learn about prices,” said the witch, “You must give me your voice. It is the best thing you possess and I will I have it as the price of my draught.”
“But if you take away my voice,” said the little seamaid, “How will I tell him who I am? How will I make him love me? How will I share my thoughts with him?”
“He will not care to hear your thoughts. You will have your beautiful form and your expressive eyes. You will be able to touch him with your hands and he will be able to touch you with his; surely you believe he will love you and know you as his savior when you are in front of him? Well, have you lost your courage? Put out your little tongue that I may cut it off as my payment; then you shall have the draught.”
“I must,” said the little seamaid and she put her sweet little tongue into the hideous barbed hand of the witch.
The witch drew a blade quickly across the seamaid’s tongue and slipped the severed, bleeding organ into her pocket. The little seamaid held her mouth shut with her hands to keep from screaming. And then the witch placed her cauldron on the fire, to prepare the magic draught.
When at last the magic draught was ready, it looked like golden liquor. “There it is for you,” said the witch. “If the polypi should seize hold of you as you return through the wood,” said the witch, “that is not my problem.” But the polypi sprang back in terror from the little seamaid when they caught sight of the glittering draught, which weighed in her hand like a bomb.
Before the little seamaid left, she stole into the garden, took a flower from the flowerbeds of each of her sisters, kissed her hand a thousand times towards the library, and then rose up through the dark blue waters. Dawn was still distant when she came in sight of the beautiful boy’s home, and approached the marble steps that led into the water. At the base of the steps the little seamaid drank the magic draught. It burned her mouth and throat and as it passed through her it seemed as if a double-edged sword had struck her down. She fell into a swoon, and lay as if dead on the bottom step.
As the sun rose she recovered. She felt consumed by the pain in her tail until she realized the legs had emerged. Before her stood the beautiful boy. He fixed his flat black eyes upon her. She looked down upon her own body and saw as pretty a pair of white legs and tiny feet as any young girl could have; she saw as well that she was naked and she felt a stab of embarrassment under his inscrutable gaze. She lowered her head and wrapped herself as best she could with her own long hair. The beautiful boy stood over her and asked her who she was, and where she came from. His tone was cold. She looked at him mildly and sorrowfully; she could not speak. He called behind him to a man to carry her up the stairs into the great house.
It was true what the witch had said; every step was agony. She might have been treading with needles pushed through her feet. But she stepped lightly by the beautiful boy’s side, thinking all the while, “I did it! I did it!”
He and his parents and all who saw her wondered at her gracefulness. She was very soon arrayed in costly robes of silk and muslin, and was the most beautiful creature in the house; this pleased her. The clothes were soft and she knew she impressed. But she never forgot that she was dumb, and could neither speak nor sing to give her thanks.
Upon her introduction to the council of the boy, his parents and the other important men and women of the land, she was asked to sit and watch a performance. Beautiful female slaves, dressed in silk and gold, stepped forward and sang before the council: one sang better than all the others, and the boy clapped his hands and smiled at her. This was great sorrow to the little seamaid for she saw that the woman had chains about her ankles and she knew how much more sweetly she would sing if she were free. “But I can’t tell him what he does is wrong,” she thought. “I have given away my voice forever, to be with him.”
The slaves next performed several pretty dances. The council laughed and the little seamaid became aware that there was somethin
g pathetic about the dances, but she could not understand what. One slave tripped and was dragged away by guards while the boy clucked his tongue with disapproval. The slaves looked so tired, so defeated to the little seamaid. They could barely raise their heads. The little seamaid felt such compassion for the slaves that she raised her lovely white arms, stood on the tips of her toes, and glided over the floor, and danced as no one yet had been able to dance. As she danced the slaves rested.
The little seamaid’s expressive eyes were fixed upon the boy and his parents, appealing. “Release them,” she begged with her gaze. “Let them return to their families.”
Everyone was enchanted by the dance, especially the boy, who began to speak of her in endearments, calling her his little foundling, his dolly, his discovery; she, not understanding what he said and seeing only that she seemed to reach him, danced again quite readily, to please him, to appeal to him, and she ignored the fact that the slaves were still in chains and the extraordinary pain she felt each time her feet touched the floor.
The boy said she should remain with him always, and he gave permission to her to sleep at his door, on a velvet cushion. She would have preferred a bed, any bed if not his. But she liked the cushion and he had a sweet dog who slept by her and licked her face and snuggled against her and kept her warm. The boy had a uniform made for her, his name was embroidered across the back, so that she might accompany him on horseback and be identified as his. They rode together around his lands. The little seamaid noted the sweet-scented woods, the green shadows of trees, the high voices of songbirds trilling in their boughs, but the boy spoke of plans to destroy the forest and build a market. This market would showcase goods from around the world bought abroad very cheaply and resold at a premium. The boy spoke of villages in Asia where fabrics of the most elusive brilliance could be bought for less than the price of a coffee from a family too dumb to speak the real value of their own talents. At last the little seamaid saw an opening in the trees and in the opening she saw a village where women and men in torn clothing were playing with their children, and cooking around an open fire and talking loudly and laughing amongst themselves. Before she could stop herself she pointed to the village and tried to show her delight to the boy. The boy scowled and assured her that the village would be burned down by the morning. The seamaid was horrified. She waved her arms and shook her head and stomped her feet.
“My little darling,” the boy exclaimed. “How worried you are for me! You are the most loyal of doves, and the sweetest of cupcakes. Tonight you can sleep on the floor of my room.”
The next day the little seamaid climbed with the boy to the tops of high mountains; her tender feet bled so that every step was marked, but the boy only laughed and announced how invigorating was the view. She followed him until she could see the clouds beneath them and she thought of leaping from the mountainside and falling through those clouds back into the sea and down and down until she was at home again.
When all the household was asleep, she went to sit on the broad marble steps, for it eased her burning feet to bathe them in the cold seawater; then she thought of all those below in the deep. “It serves me right to be in such pain,” she thought. “How could I have left them? How could I have loved this monstrous boy?”
Once during the night as she slept shivering on the steps with a caftan wrapped about her, and the little dog who was so loyal lay against her, she heard the dog growl and she opened her eyes to see from the window her sisters arm-in-arm, singing sorrowfully, floating in the water. She waved to them, and then they recognized her and swam as one towards her. She tried to mime for them how deeply she grieved for them, how great her mistake had been.
“I hate him,” she spelled out in signs. She told them about the slaves and the forest and the village and then she wept so hard the dog began to weep as well. After that, they came to see her every night, promising that they would find away to restore her tail and rescue her. She had no faith in their plans, but to see them was her only pleasure. Once, she saw in the distance a row of her oldest grandmothers, stretching out their arms to her, but they did not venture so near the land as her sisters did.
As the days passed, she hated the boy more keenly, but he was as oblivious to her feelings as his stone likeness had been. He even at times spoke of loving her as his own child, although he would pat her breast in passing. It never came into his head to make her his wife for, in fact, there was little need to secure her further. She was grateful for this oversight as she had seen the liberties the boy took at times with the wives of his slaves and she understood this to be a social obligation of married women, to provide their own bodies as resting places for the powerful.
One day he kissed her rosy mouth and played with her long waving hair, and laid his head on her heart, while she dreamed of killing him.
“I have to travel to meet my bride,” he said. “You will come with me and tell me what you think of her. You are not afraid of the sea, are you, my dumb little child, my sweetbread,” said he. She shook her head, thinking of the sea and how close to her feet it would be beneath the ship. Together they stood on the deck of a noble ship, which was to carry them to the country of the neighboring king. And then he told her his tales of storm and of calm, of strange fishes in the deep beneath them, and of what the divers had seen there; she smiled at his descriptions, for she knew he was an idiot. Halfway across the ocean he drew her into his private chamber and opened a case filled with scrolls and models and plans.
“This is my paper mill,” he said. She listened for hours as he explained the cutting down of trees and the pulping of their essence into a sheet like the one he waved before her. He explained the refuse and chemicals that would be disposed of into the waters of the sea. And then a voice called him from above deck.
“It is the damnedest thing!” the voice exclaimed.
The little seamaid rose to the deck behind the boy. She knew before she exited his shadow that the smell of fish rotting meant they were to see some catch pulled out of the long nets. The boy cried out to his God and before the seamaid were the thrashing bodies of three of her sisters. The boy and his men set upon the seamaids with cudgels and beat at them until they lay still, destroyed, in a spreading stain. The little seamaid walked across her sisters. She held out her arms to the boy. He took her in his arms and stared at her soft face. Tears streamed into her open mouth and he saw for the first time the mangled edge of her tongue, which had grown black and infected. He stepped back in horror and slipped on the guts lining the boards of the deck. Her eyes rolled in her head. Her one hand tore at her hair and her other hand held aloft the dagger she had drawn from his person. She rushed forward and stabbed him. His heart collapsed chamber by chamber beneath her blows. And then the little seamaid threw herself overboard.
She plunged below the surface and opened her eyes. The other seamaids were there. They grasped her and carried her as far from the ship as they could before she would no longer be able to breathe and then they drew her to the surface again. She gasped in deep gulps of air and shook her head and begged them with her eyes to let her drown. “I can’t ever go back to that world,” she signed to them. “Take me home.”
“We love you,” they said. They embraced her and pulled her down to the bottom of the ocean and kept her there.
Fables for Now
The Shipwrecked Dolphin
A SHIPWRECKED DOG IN THE middle of the ocean had been clinging for a long time to a slender bar of broken wood, when a dolphin came up and offered to carry him ashore.
“Oh, thank you,” said the dog and climbed on top of the dolphin’s back.
It was a long way to shore and the dog asked many questions about the dolphin’s life. For hours the dolphin described how to swim and eat fish and get around in the ocean. After a time the dog began to think that he understood so well what it was to be a dolphin that he decided to jump from the dolphin’s back into the sea.
> “Friend, what are you doing?” asked the dolphin.
“It’s alright. Don’t worry. I’m a dolphin,” said the dog.
“But friend, you are a dog.”
“It’s alright. Go away now. I can swim from here,” said the dog as he paddled along.
“It’s miles to shore and you are not aimed in the right direction,” said the dolphin.
“Go away now. I think I know better than you how to be a dolphin. After all, I have learned about being a dolphin whereas you were simply born one.”
For an hour the dolphin pleaded with the dog, out of loyalty or responsibility or because one thing we know of dolphins is that they can tell the difference between themselves and dogs. But the stubborn little fellow charged slowly forward, becoming increasingly insulting to his savior.
At last the dolphin left and went about his business: leaping into the air and diving down for fish and generally enjoying a good life in the interstitial space of the ocean.
Lonely, cold and weak, the dog began to talk to himself about life as a dolphin.
“You see,” he said. “It is the silly dolphins who leap and play when there are channels to cross and dogs that need saving and mice to be caught and cheese to be eaten. Oh, I am so hungry. The life of a dolphin is rife with grief and work.”
The poor dog, who was now further from shore than he had ever been, began to drown. As he drowned he lamented the pain he felt and the cruelty of life as a dolphin. He sank beneath the surface of the water and saw there the last bubbles of his breath rising. A fish swam in front of his eyes and he made a half-hearted snap at it. Perhaps, he thought, I am a dog.
How I Came to Haunt My Parents Page 9