by Andre Norton
“Bright!” crowed Demetria, and grabbed for the find. Vassilika and Andriu saw her tiny, glowing face reflected in its golden surface. She started to croon to the metal as if it were one of her dolls.
Andriu pried the metal from the child’s clutches. No telling what ill she might take of it, he thought. Angered, she twisted her face into a scowl and drew breath.
“With those lungs, the child might make a dream-singer,” Andriu observed, wincing. “Little heart, try this!” He drew a deep breath, calling up the special resonances of dream-singing, and sang a song of bubbles, soap bubbles, glistening like rainbows, bobbing up from the river. Demetria laughed and waved her fists at them.
Andriu’s song grew more intricate. Now amber and violet and blue animals spun and somersaulted in the bubbles he sang up. Demetria, too, began to sing.
Abruptly, others joined the song. It swelled into an actual presence, a pressure that hurt the ears. Andriu fell silent. His hand dropped from harp to dagger. But still the song rose, and with it, the bubbles rising from the river. They grew larger and brighter.
“By the grace of the Three!” cried Vassilika, one hand clutching a spray of flowers and leaves bound into an amulet. Her other hand drew her child to her.
A giant opalescent bubble bounced onto the deck, engulfed the baby before she could be snatched away, then rose from the deck to plunge deep into the river.
“There, on the shore!” Andriu heard the shouts but didn’t pay attention. Demetria! All he’d meant was to give the child pleasure. He flung down his treacherous harp with a crash and dazzle of light and dived into the water.
The song rose to a crow of triumph, then died as if its throat had been cut.
Vassilika was halfway over the rail before Ingvarth could grab her. She screamed and scratched as she fought to plunge over the side after her husband and child. The new silence seemed to mock her as much as the song that had snatched her whole life away. Andriu. Demetria. Gone. She sagged in the crewman’s arms, panting.
“There, mistress.” The steersman pointed. “Where the master thought a mill might have stood. Do you see them?”
“Vodyanoi,” whispered Ingvarth, and made a sign several others imitated.
No wonder no one lived here. No wonder no boats passed them. No wonder the White Bird had vanished and the master traders of the Rhos, practical as always, had sent no one to search for it . . . except for a ship and cocaptains whom it would be well rid of. And the cocaptains, of course, were only too happy to trade on rumors they heard, a map they had from the sole survivor...
A killing. She spat over the side and brushed her long hair back in distraction. A killing: the term betrayed what the Rhos might do for a profit. Then a new thought struck, and she blessed the Rhos practicality she had spat at a second earlier. Survived. What if that man had been released? The Vodyanoi, mill haunters, river dwellers, boat breakers, capered before her, shifting shape. Now they were delicately female, with a lithe grace Vassilika had never been able to lay claim to. Behind her, the older crewmen restrained their younger brothers and cousins. Captains had lost whole crews to the Vodyanoi in their female aspects.
Then the Vodyanoi shifted again. Now they were triumphantly male, with shoulders and loins the mere glimpse of which might heat a woman’s blood—assuming the woman hadn’t just lost her family.
Crafty, the Vodyanoi, with their songs and—so the songs claimed—their palace beneath the river’s bed, with its eternal, brilliant lamps. She could well believe that they might release a captive, arm him with what she and Andriu—nevermind the master traders, whom Vassilika personally was going to tear apart if she made it back to Ithkar alive (no thanks to them)—couldn’t resist, and send him out to woo a trader and a dream-singer, intent on making a killing.
That word again. They were traders, not killers of any sort. If Andriu and Demetria were dead, her desire to excel among the Rhos, his desire to prove himself, had killed them. He’d had no need to prove himself, her heart cried out. Least of all to her. Her hands gripped the railing so tight that splinters drew blood from them.
Why her ship? She could understand the Rhos. But why had the Vodyanoi wanted her ship and her family? The trap had been baited especially for them! She shrugged off offers of ale, or a strong arm back to her cabin, or (the Lordly Ones protect her!) herbal remedies that, at the very least, would leave her as sick of body as she was of heart. There was no time to waste on sickness. She had a question to answer. Of all the traders who plied the rivers, why her?
Obviously, she had something the Vodyanoi wanted—a daughter who had been touched by magic and a husband who could sing flesh into form. Vassilika hadn’t wanted the child. She had hated the fact that a demon had sired it upon her, that she hadn’t even had the chance to fight. Then she had been terrified, knowing the barbarous laws that might be invoked upon her. Then she had met Andriu. She remembered him crouching outside the Temple of the Three Lordly Ones, spitting up blood into a grimy cloth. Though he’d looked three-quarters dead, he hadn’t been too busy dying to offer her hope and a dream-song that had almost gotten him enslaved to Thotharn. Together they had sung a new song. And the jeweled spray turned green and breathing, the gems into dew. . . . Sky Lords help me now! If we did aught for you in crippling Thotharn that day, help us now!
One creature caught her eye and preened himself. Vassilika picked up a hammer and flung it. He arched his long back sinuously, tossing back sleek wet hair. There was no comparison. Andriu, with his diffident smile that widened so easily into a raffish grin, his stooped shoulders, bent from reading in bad light or harping in worse, the gangling frame that had such strong arms to toss a baby up into the air or hold Vassilika close during the midwinter storms. . . .
“What shall we do now?” The steersman looked to her for directions. Clearly his instinct was to steer back to Ithkar as quickly as oar and sail could take them there. Cut your losses: it was an article of faith among the Rhos. Just as clearly, he hated to abandon Andriu and the little girl.
“Now what?” Vassilika echoed him. “Now I’m going to dive down there and see”—agony clenched at her throat, but she fought the words out—“if there’s anything left of them.”
A cheer went up from the rocks.
“That’s what they want, mistress. Don’t do it!”
“I know,” said Vassilika. “So if you’ve got a better plan, tell me.”
No one had, of course. Vassilika stripped to her shift and tied her hair back. “Till sunset, Hjordis,” she told the steers-man. “If I don’t return, get back to Ithkar and report. Perhaps the master traders will send a priest to lay the curse hereabouts. Tell them”—the words came with inexpressible bitterness—“to deduct the priest’s fee from our estate.”
As she turned back to the rail, her eyes fell on Andriu’s harp. When he’d flung it from him, trying to snatch Demetria back from the Vodyanoi and their bubble, he had snapped one of its strings. Glints of silver and auburn curled on the deck beside the harp. When it had been made, she had ordered silver strings and wound them herself with her own hair. Andriu had always said the harp had a mellow, loving tone; she was sure he had never noted the hair. More than anything else, the broken string reminded her that he was gone. Andriu would never have let the string go unmended.
She glared at the idiots who were saying that someone (someone else) ought to restrain her and dived before anyone could try it. The water embraced her—head and arms, body and feet.
Vassilika hadn’t dived like this for years, not since her father had brought her downriver from the great trading posts of the north to place her in the care of his Ithkar-born wife. The current flowed greenly, coldly, over her eyes, and her hair and shift billowed out behind her. She stretched out her hands, struggling to reach the river bottom, where toppled stones still bore crumbled traces of mortar. Hooking fingers into a spray of slimy weed, she looked around. They were nowhere in sight.
High above her, the river’s surface shone
like a wet plate of silvery crystal. Faces—now handsome, now leering and twisted—peered down. In an instant the Vodyanoi would dive. . . . Her throat was burning. Her eyes bulged from lack of air, hot against the cool, flowing water. She couldn’t see Andriu and Demetria anywhere.
Reluctantly, she released the weed and kicked back to the surface.
Again.
And again.
Somewhere around the fifth dive, Vassilika remembered the sailors’ trick of inflating their lungs. Now her breast felt like a drum, taut from so much air. The drum pounded in her brain. Soon its rhythms would be too much for her, and she would scream, swallowing water, all her loss, all her love, rising up to possess and doom her just as surely as the Vodyanoi possessed and doomed her husband and child. As sunset approached, the river was turning molten, forbidding. Soon it would be too dark to dive anymore.
Vassilika drew in one last breath and plunged downward. This time she vowed not to surface until she found traces of her family. She swam rapidly past the rocks she had observed earlier. There . . . once it might have been a passageway. . . . It would be desperate folly to enter there. A rocky spur might catch her shift and hold her forever, so she ripped it off and plunged into the darkness.
The need to breathe consumed her. Breathe . . . push . . . It was like labor. Andriu had scandalized every woman in the hold by entering her room and playing his harp until her need to push, to see her child draw breath, had overpowered the music. Then, he had grasped her hand and chanted encouragement along with the midwife. Push . . . this one was for Andriu . . . this was for Demetria. . . . With a gasp she broke through the water. Air pocket, she thought, and blessed the Lordly Ones before she went any farther. Greenish light shone up ahead, strange to her unaccustomed eyes. It grew until it dazzled her. She took another, rash step and found herself floundering in icy water and a current that snatched her feet out from under her and drowned her senses in a rush of frost and sound.
If Andriu had thought that his dream of playing before kings and princes would bring him to a hall under-river, he’d never have dreamt it, he told himself. At least I might have brought my harp! One comfort: across from him, surrounded by women whose gowns shimmered in all the changeful colors of deep water, sat Demetria. She was dressed like a little princess. A gem dangled from her brow and reflected the splendor of the light shining from the great jewel in the firepit.
For an instant, Andriu shuddered at the immense weight of rock and water above this hall.
“Harper,” the women crooned to him. “Dream-singer.” Long-nailed fingers plucked at his sleeve, pulled him to the center of the hall. Feeling half-drunk from bewilderment, he rose from a crouch and bowed to what had to be the master of the hall. He was even darker than Andriu, and his eyes were strange.
“You are most welcome, dream-singer.” The hall lord’s voice turned it into a title of nobility. “You and your daughter.”
I’ve been drunk, and I’ve had raving fevers, Andriu thought, but never, at my craziest, have I come up with a tale like this. And if I did, I would never have been mad enough to sing it.
That meant it had to be real. Well, he’d played to crowds almost as strange. “You do us too much honor, my daughter and I,” he said. “We cannot accept your hospitality.”
The man smiled and shook his head. “But you must,” he said. At his side, a woman rose and walked toward Andriu. Her features and garments altered until it was Corisande Storm-lover herself who sat down and pulled Andriu to sit beside her. Storm-lover. And, judging from her fingers on his thigh, his lover the instant he let his guard down.
Vassilika would use his guts for fish bait if he did anything half that stupid, he reminded himself. Vassilika . . . she’d be frantic. He had to get back.
“Do you worry about your lady?” asked the hall lord. “A loving husband. For certain we cannot keep you apart. And so . . .”
A squat, hunched figure Andriu couldn’t quite see a face on shambled out of the hall. The grotesque bore little resemblance to the graceful beings who wooed him. Vodyanoi. They were said to be masters and mistresses of illusion. But it was a thought. This Corisande Storm-lover, whose white body gleamed seductively through the veils of mist and twilight that were her only garments—if he saw her true form, would she, too, be twisted?
“Behold your wife, dream-singer,” said the lord.
The servant dropped a body at Andriu’s feet. Its pale flesh was bruised. Long strings of weed tangled about the bare feet. But its hair covered bare shoulders and, even dripping wet, that hair was the color of autumn.
Then the soaked head came up. For the moment before the Lady Corisande’s hand cupped Andriu’s chin and turned his face away, he gazed into Vassilika’s amber eyes.
That’s my last chance gone, Vassilika thought. How could Andriu ever turn away from the woman who sipped from a jeweled goblet, then insisted he, too, drink, with his lips touching the place her mouth had rested? She was lithe and lovely, more beautiful than the creatures so far overhead, who sat and sang on the rocks. (Lordly Ones, protect my crew!)
It was only in Andriu’s songs that a mortal woman could vie with an immortal and come off the winner. Vassilika knew precisely what she was. She freckled in bright sunshine. She had lost only half the weight she’d gained bearing Demetria. The amber girdle she had received as a wedding gift was packed away, part of Demetria’s dowry. . . . She won’t need it now, part of her brain wailed.
A shadow fell across her face. It was almost a relief from the brilliance of the gem in the firepit. The hall lord knelt over her and laid an elegant, ringed hand on her brow.
“Magic guarded the door,” Vassilika reproached him. “Otherwise I’d have made it in here on my own.”
“Quite so, my dear,” he agreed. “Now, we know from your husband’s mind that you are Vassilika. I am Taryn Rhyn Eryn—master here. Can we not make you more comfortable?”
Though the marble on which she lay was wet, it was quite warm. Vassilika remembered that she’d discarded her shift up by the cave. She shrank into a ball, protecting breasts and belly with drawn-up arms and knees.
“My apologies,” said Taryn Rhyn Eryn, and gestured. A breath of fragrant air caressed her, and she dared, flushing, to look down. She’d heard of dawnsilk, but now she found she was wearing a gown of it, spangled at hem and sleeves and neckline with gems. What would an ell of it bring at the fair? she thought, forcing herself to practicality. Then Rhyn Eryn’s hand brushed back her hair and pulled her face up.
“Beautiful,” he murmured, and drew a long finger down her throat. “So warm, so real.” While Vassilika wondered how long he would take to kill her if she spit at him (as she had a mind to do), he traced the line of her shoulder. Still, a treacherous part of her purred beneath the caress.
“Demetria!” she gasped suddenly, twisting away from the persuasive, seductive hand. “Where . . . ?”
Taryn Rhyn Eryn pointed. Attended by three women, Demetria sat at a child-size table, richly inlaid with metals and ivory. She ate from a golden bowl. It was her latest grace, to be able to feed herself without spilling . . . or at least without spilling too much. These women praised her with laughter and little cries.
The child had magic in her soul, Vassilika thought. Look how content she seemed. Had Father Demetrios been wrong?
Taryn Rhyn Eryn approached with a goblet. You couldn’t eat or drink in places like this, she remembered.
The hall lord’s vast, lambent eyes fixed on hers, trying to overpower her. See, they are safe and happy. I worship you. Drink. She shook her head, and he smiled, pleased to be indulgent for now. He led her to share his own high seat, and she dared not draw away.
Vassilika glanced about. The hall was bright not just with gold and silver, but with the strange metal that had sent her on this hunt. Much of the strange metal was worked into shapes that bore as much resemblance to shipboard pumps as Vassilika bore—so she thought—to Corisande Storm-lover. Though they were as shiny as the
day when some unimaginable foundry must have delivered them, Vassilika sensed that they were vastly old.
“Yes,” murmured her companion. “So many years. . . .”
“Too damned long!” shouted the gnarled creature that had dragged Vassilika into the hall. “Enough of this courtesy. Will they help us, or won’t they?”
“I’m trying to ensure their help, idiot!” snarled Rhyn Eryn. He pointed a finger. The creature shrieked, reeled, and collapsed upon itself. The air about it shimmered. And if Vassilika thought its previous form was hideous, its true form was pure horror: tiny head, frog-webbed hands and clubbed feet, and, hanging over the twisted flesh like a fog, a knowledge that the mind and spirit so inadequately housed by deformed flesh were somehow older and angrier than flesh should contain.
Perhaps the hall lord would bargain, Vassilika thought. She glanced over at Andriu. Or perhaps Andriu felt he’d already struck a bargain. She felt a pang of sorrow for him; he was nowhere near the businessman he tried to be for her sake. She folded her hands in her lap and looked attentively at her captor, waiting for the first offer.
“Ah, daughter of traders.” He smiled. “You sense trade. So now, I imagine, you will offer me your own presence, or even yours and your husband’s, just so your daughter may enjoy the upper air. Is that not so? Look how happy the child is, lady. Your offer is foolish.”
Vassilika sat calmly. Let him speak, she warned herself.
“No. I do not offer you your daughter’s freedom. The bargain I offer . . . I think,” he told the Vodyanoi now assembled in the hall, “that we should not be greedy. We have the dream-singer and his child, and I have his wife. Companions of mine, let us allow their ship to pass.”
Involuntarily, Vassilika glanced at the table, her hand leaping to her mouth.
“We do not eat flesh,” Rhyn Eryn said, his voice thin with fastidious disgust. “Our flesh . . . is like your flesh.”