It was unfair to think ill of a woman because of her misfortune; yet Lythande found herself disliking this woman very much. Distaste made her voice harsh.
“You have heard that I have committed myself to rid the village of this creature that is preying on it.” Lythande did not realize that she had, in fact, committed herself until she heard herself say so. “In order to do this, I must know what it is that I face. Tell me all you know of this thing, whatever it may be.”
“Why do you think I know anything at all?”
“You survived.” And, thought Lythande, I would like to know why, for when I know why it spared this very unprepossessing woman, perhaps I will know what I must do to kill it—if it must be killed, after all. Or would it be enough to drive it away from here?
Lulie stared at the floor. Lythande knew she was at an impasse; the woman could not hear, and she, Lythande, could not command her with her eyes and presence, or even with her magic, as long as the woman would not meet her eyes. Anger flared in her; she could feel, between her brows, the crackling blaze of the Blue Star; her anger and the blaze of magic reached the baker woman and she looked up. Lythande said angrily, “Tell me what you know of this creature! How did you survive the mermaid?”
“How am I to know that? I survived. Why? You are the magician, not I; let you tell me that, wizard.”
With an effort Lythande moderated her anger. “Yet I implore you, for the safety of all these people, tell me what you know, however little.”
“What do I care for the folk of this village?” Lythande wondered what her grudge was that her voice should be so filled with wrath and contempt. It was probably useless to try and find out. Grudges were often quite irrational; perhaps she blamed them for her loss of hearing, perhaps for the isolation that had descended on her when, as with many deaf people, she had withdrawn into a world of her own, cut off from friends and kin.
“Nevertheless, you are the only one who has survived a meeting with this thing,” Lythande said, “and if you will tell me your secret, I will not tell them.”
After a long time the woman said, “It—called to me. It called in the last voice I heard; my child, him that died o’ the same fever that lost me my hearing; crying and calling out to me. And so for a time I thought they’d lied to me when they said my boy was dead of the fever, that somehow he lived, out there on the wild shores. I spent the night seeking him. And when the morning came, I came to my senses, and knew if he had lived, he wouldna’ call me in that baby voice—he died thirty years ago, by now he’d be a man grown, and how could he have lived all this tame alone?” She stared at the floor again, stubbornly.
There was nothing Lythande could say. She could hardly thank the woman for a story Lythande had wrenched from her, if not by force, so near it as not to matter.
So I was on the wrong track, Lythande thought. The deaf woman had not been keeping from Lythande some secret that could have helped to deal with the menace to this village. She was only concealing what would have made her feel a fool.
And who am I to judge her, I who hold a secret deeper and darker than hers?
She had been wrong and must begin again. But the time had not been wasted, not quite, for now she knew that whereas it called to men in the voices of the ones they loved, it was not wholly a sexual enticement, as she had heard some mermaids were. It called to men in the voice of a loved woman; to at least one woman, it had called in the voice of her dead child. Was it, then, that it called to everyone in the voice of what they loved best?
This, then, would explain why the young girls were at least partly immune. Before the power of love came into a life, a young boy or girl loved his parents, yes, but because of the lack of experience, the parents were still seen as someone who could protect and care for the child, not to be selflessly cared for.
Love alone could create that selflessness.
Then—thought Lythande—it will be safe for me to go out against the monster. For there is, now, no one and nothing I love. Never have I loved any man. Such women as I have loved are separated from me by more than a lifetime, and I know enough to be wary if any should call to me in the voice of the heart’s desire, then I am safe from it. For I love no one, and my heart, if indeed I still have a heart, desires nothing.
I will go and tell them that I am ready to rid the village of their curse.
~o0o~
They gave her their best boat, and would have given her one of the half-grown girls to row it out for her, but Lythande declined. How could she be sure the girl was too young to have loved, and thus become vulnerable to the call of the sea-creature? Also, for safety, Lythande left her lute on the shore, partly because she wished to show them that she trusted them with it, but mostly because she feared what the damp in the boat might do to the fragile and cherished instrument. More, if it came to a fight, she might step on it or break it in the boat’s crowded conditions.
It was a clear and brilliant day, and Lythande, who was physically stronger than most men, sculled the boat briskly into the strong offshore wind. Small clouds scudded along the edge of the horizon, and each breaking wave folded over and collapsed with a soft, musical splashing. The noise of the breakers was strong in her ear, and it seemed to Lythande that under the sound of the waves, there was a faraway song; like the song of a shell held to the ear. For a few minutes she sang to herself in an undertone, listening to the sound of her own voice against the voice of the sea’s breaking; an illusion, she knew, but one she found pleasurable. She thought, if only she had her lute, she would enjoy improvising harmonies to this curious blending. The words she sang against the waves were nonsense syllables, but they seemed to take on an obscure and magical meaning as she sang.
She was never sure, afterward, how long this lasted. After a time, though she believed at first that it was simply another pleasant illusion like the shell held to the ear, she heard a soft voice inserting itself into the harmonies she was creating with the wave-song and her own voice; somewhere there was a third voice, wordless and incredibly sweet. Lythande went on singing, but something inside her pricked up its ears—or was it the tingling of the Blue Star that sensed the working of magic somewhere close to her?
The song, then, of the mermaid. Sweet as it was, there were no words. As I thought, then. The creature works upon the heart’s desire. I am desireless, therefore immune to the call. It cannot harm me.
She raised her eyes. For a moment she saw only the great mass of rocks of which they had warned her, and against its mass a dark and featureless shadow. As she looked at the shadow, the Blue Star on her brow tingling, she willed to see more clearly. Then she saw—
What was it? Mermaid, they had said. Creature. Could they possibly call it evil?
In form, it was no more than a young girl, naked but for a necklace of small, rare, glimmering shells; the shells that had a crease running down the center, so that they looked like a woman’s private parts. Her hair was dark, with the glisten of water on the smooth globes of bladder wrack lying on the sand at high tide. The face was smooth and young, with regular features. And the eyes....
Lythande could never remember anything about the eyes, though at the time she must have had some impression about the color. Perhaps they were that same color of the sea where it rolled and rippled smooth beyond the white breakers. She had no attention to spare for the eyes, for she was listening to the voice. Yet she knew she must be cautious; if she were vulnerable at all to this thing, it would be through the voice, she to whom music had been friend and lover and solace for more than a lifetime.
Now she was close enough to see. How like a young girl the mermaid looked, young and vulnerable, with a soft, childish mouth. One of the small teeth, teeth like irregular pearls, was chipped out of line, and it made her look very childish. A soft mouth. A mouth too young for kissing, Lythande thought, and wondered what she had meant by it.
Once I, even I was as young as that, Lythande thought, her mind straying among perilous ways of memory; a time
—how many lifetimes ago?—when she had been a young girl already restless at the life of the women’s quarters, dreaming of magic and adventure; a time when she had borne another name, a name she had vowed never to remember. But already, though she had not yet glimpsed the steep road that was to lead her at last to the Temple of the Blue Star and to the great renunciations that lay ahead of her as a Pilgrim-Adept, she knew her path did not lie among young girls like these—with soft, vulnerable mouths and soft, vulnerable dreams, lovers and husbands and babies clinging around their necks as the necklace of little female shells clung to the neck of the mermaid. Her world was already too wide to be narrowed so far.
Never vulnerable like that, so that this creature should call to me in the voice of a dead and beloved child....
And as if in answer, suddenly there were words in the mermaid’s song, and a voice Lythande had not remembered for a lifetime. She had forgotten his face and his name; but her memory was the memory of a trained minstrel, a musician’s memory. A man, a name, a life might be forgotten; a song or a voice—no, never.
My princess and my beloved, forget these dreams of magic and adventure, together we will sing such songs of love that life need hold no more for either of us.
A swift glance at the rocks told her he sat there, the face she had forgotten, in another moment she would remember his name.... No! this was illusion; he was dead, he had been dead for more years than she could imagine.... Go away, she said to the illusion. You are dead, and I am not to be deceived that way, not yet.
They had told her the vision could call in the voice of the dead. But it could not trick her, not that way; as the illusion vanished, Lythande sensed a little ripple of laughter, like the breaking of a tiny wave against the rocks where the mermaid sat. Her laugh was delicious. Was that illusion, too?
To a woman, then, it calls in the voice of a lover. But never had Lythande been vulnerable to that call. He had not been the only one; only the one to whom Lythande had come the closest to yielding. She had almost remembered his name; for a moment her mind lingered, floating, seeking a name, a name... then, deliberately, but almost with merriment turned her mind willfully away from the tensed fascination of the search.
She need not try to remember. That had been long, long ago, in a country so far from here that no living man within a ten-day’s journey knew so much as the name of that country. So why remember? She knew the answer to that; this sea-creature, this mermaid, defended itself this way, reaching into her mind and memory, as it had reached into the mind and memory of the fishermen who sought to pass by it, losing them in a labyrinth of the past, of old loves, heart’s desires. Lythande repressed a shudder, remembering the man seated by the fire, lost in his endless dream. How narrowly had she escaped that? And there would have been none to rescue her.
But a Pilgrim-Adept was not to be caught so simply. The creature was simple, using on her its only defense, forcing the mind and memory: and she had escaped. Desireless, Lythande was immune to that call of desire.
Young girl as she looked, that at least must be illusion, the mermaid was an ageless creature... like herself, Lythande thought.
For the creature had tried for a moment to show herself to Lythande in that illusory form of a past lover—no, he had never been Lythande’s lover, but in the form of an old memory to trap her in the illusory country of heart’s desire. But Lythande had never been vulnerable in that way to the heart’s desire.
Never?
Never, creature of dreams. Not even when I was younger than you appear now to be.
But was this the mermaid’s true form, or something like it? The momentary illusion vanished, the mermaid had returned to the semblance of the young girl, touchingly young; there must then be some truth to the appearance of the childish mouth, the eyes that were full of dreams, the vulnerable smile. The mermaiden was protecting itself in the best way it could, for certainly a sea-maiden so frail and defenseless, seeming so young and fair, would be at the mercy of the men of the fisherfolk, men who would see only a maiden to be preyed upon.
There were many such tales along these shores, still told around the hearthfires, of mermaids and of men who had loved them. Men who had taken them home as wives, bringing a free sea-maiden to live in the smoke of the hearthfire, to cook and spin, servant to man, a mockery of the free creature she should be. Often the story ended when the imprisoned sea-maiden found her dress of fish scales and seaweed and plunged into the sea again to find her freedom, leaving the fisherman to mourn his lost love.
Or the loss of his prisoner...? In this case, Lythande’s sympathy was with the mermaid.
Yet she had pledged herself to free the village of this danger. And surely it was a danger, if only of a beauty more terrible than they dared to know and understand, a fragile and fleeting beauty like the echo of a song, or like the sea wrack in the ebb and flow of the tide. For with illusion gone, the mermaid was only this frail-looking creature, ageless but with the eternal illusion of youth. We are alike, thought Lythande; in that sense, we are sisters, but I am freer than she is.
~o0o~
She was beginning to be aware of the mermaid’s song again, and knew it was dangerous to listen. She sang to herself to try and block it away from her awareness. But she felt an enormous sympathy for the creature, here at the mercy of a crude fishing village, protecting herself as best she could, and cursed for her beauty.
She looked so like one of the young girls Lythande had known in that faraway country. They had made music together on the harp and the lute and the bamboo flute. Her name had been... Lythande found the name in her mind without a search... her name had been Riella, and it seemed to her that the mermaid sang in Riella’s voice.
Not of love, for already at that time Lythande had known that such love as the other young girls dreamed of was not for her, but there had been an awareness between them. Never acknowledged; but Lythande had begun to know that even for a woman who cared nothing for man’s desire, life need not be altogether empty. There were dreams and desires that had nothing to do with those simpler dreams of the other women, dreams of husband or lover or child.
And then Lythande heard the first syllable of a name, a name she had vowed to forget, a name once her own, a name she would not—no. No. A name she could not remember. Sweating, the Blue Star blazing with her anger, she looked at the rocks. Riella’s form there wavered and was gone.
Again the creature had attempted to call to her in the voice of the dead. There was no longer the least trace of amusement in Lythande’s mind. Once again she had almost fatally underestimated the sea-creature because it looked so young and childlike, because it reminded her of Riella and of the other young girls she had loved in a world, and a life, long lost to her. She would not be caught that way again. Lythande gripped the hilt of the left-hand dagger, warder against magic, as she felt the boat beneath her scrape on the rocks.
She stepped out onto the surface of the small, rocky holt, wrinkling her nose at the rankness of dead fish and sea wrack left by the tide, a carrion smell—how could so young and fair a creature live in this stench?
The mermaid said in the small voice of a very young girl, “Did they send you to kill me, Lythande?”
Lythande gripped the handle of her left-hand dagger. She had no wish to engage in conversation with the creature; she had vowed to rid the village of this thing, and rid it she would. Yet even as she raised the dagger, she hesitated.
The mermaid, still in that timid little-girl voice, said, “I admit that I tried to ensnare you. You must be a great magician to escape from me so easily. My poor magic could not hold you at all!”
Lythande said, “I am an Adept of the Blue Star.”
“I do not know of the Blue Star. Yet I can feel its power,” said the sea-maiden. “Your magic is very great—”
“And yours is to flatter me,” said Lythande carefully, and the mermaid gave a delicious, childish giggle.
“You see what I mean? I can’t deceive you at all. ca
n I, Lythande? But why did you come here to kill me, when I can’t harm you in any way? And why are you holding that horrible dagger?”
Why, indeed? Lythande wondered, and slid it back into its sheath. This creature could not hurt her. Yet surely she had come here for some reason, and she groped for it. She said at last, “The folk of the village cannot fish for their livelihood and they will all starve. Why do you want to do this?”
“Why not?” asked the mermaid innocently.
That made Lythande think a little. She had listened to the villagers and their story; she had not stopped to consider the mermaid’s side of the business. The sea did not belong, after all, to the fishermen; it belonged to the fish and to the creatures of the sea—birds and fish and waves, shellfish of the deep, eels and dolphins and great whales who had nothing to do with human-kind at all—and, yes, to the mermaids and stranger sea creatures as well.
Yet Lythande was vowed to fight on the side of Law against Chaos till the Final Battle should come. And if humankind could not get its living as did the other creatures inhabiting the world, what would become of them?
“Why should they live by killing the fish in the sea?” the mermaid asked. “Have they any better right to survive than the fish?”
That was a question not all that easily answered. Yet as she glanced about the shore, smelling the rankness of the tide, Lythande knew what she should say next.
“You live upon the fish, do you not? There are enough fish in the sea for all the people of the shore, as well as for your kind. And if the fishermen do not kill the fish and eat them, the fish will only be eaten by other fish. Why not leave the fisherfolk in peace, to take what they need?”
“Well, perhaps I will,” said the mermaid, giggling again, so that Lythande was again astonished; what a childish creature this was, after all. Did she even know what harm she had done?
“Perhaps I can find another place to go. Perhaps you could help me?” She raised her large and luminous eyes to Lythande. “I heard you singing. Do you know any new songs, magician? And will you sing them to me?”
The Complete Lythande Page 12