“I’ve seen worse,” said I. “Besides, she’ll have a hard time of it if she wants to outdo my own wicked old robber woman of a mother, and I could always handle her, from the time she used to carry me on her shoulders. But don’t worry—I’ll find some honest way to get your voice back, so as not to lengthen your time of trial.”
So the next day I put more drops of lotion on my eyes, ears, and tongue, and off we set. First we looked some nurses over, and when the air-child pointed a kind one out to me, I hired her to take care of the opera singer while we were gone. Then we went down to the harbor and the air-child showed me which ship to take.
We set sail late that afternoon, and that night in my cabin I tried to explain the situation to my cards. They still didn’t much like me, even after I’d taken the “common” king of clubs out of their midst. But they seemed to be very much impressed with the child of the air, and shared my own feelings about the little opera singer, so I hoped for the best from them.
Next morning I used the lotion again, and the air-child pointed out some whirlpools in the water. I could hardly make them out, the ship was giving them such a careful margin, but it wouldn’t have been any good trying to make the captain sail closer.
I took my necklace out and asked how it worked. “Does it trap the nearest one of you air-children somehow?”
For the first time since I’d met her, I heard her laugh, a cheerful, musical laugh that floated up like the lovely ghosts of notes from pure silver bells. “Trap us?” she cried. “Oh, no! It… enables us, invites us… there’s no human word that is quite right for it, but, you see, if we could stay around humans under the water by our own efforts, no one would ever drown. Sometimes we can keep humans alive for a while by ourselves, but if they are too far out or too deeply under, the water forces us up away from them again, unless they have some such magic as your necklace to which we can cling.”
I put it on, and she gathered herself into it. She was so close around me that I couldn’t see her any longer, only sense her feelings, but overboard we went. Some of the sailors saw me dive, but I ignored their shouts, swam to the nearest whirlpool, and rode it down to the bottom.
That was a fine, exciting ride, but I would never try it again without the right kind of magic. Even with my necklace and the air-child in it, I had a hard time catching my breath around some of the turns.
At the bottom I found nothing around the whirlpools but bare gray sand. Beyond the sand was a seething black mire. On the other side of the mire, I saw the witch’s forest-garden of polyps reaching out for anything they could catch in their hundreds of squirming tentacles. And in the middle of the forest, I could just make out the house of drowned people’s bones, squatting in a muddy clearing.
The sand was easy to cross, so long as I watched out for the whirlpools. The mire wasn’t too much of a problem: all we had to do was swim up high enough to stay out of danger from the heat. The polyps were trickier, but if the air-child had been able to dart between them safely when she was the little mermaid, I could surely do it now, especially with her riding around me to nudge me whenever one reached at me from behind, and to keep reminding me with her emotion that I shouldn’t stop to tease any of them.
The sea witch was a wizened, wrinkled old thing with breasts as floppy as wet sponges, what I could see of them through the water snakes she wore in place of a robe, crawling all over her and her long, thin, finny fishtail. She was letting a little toad pick tidbits out of her mouth, for all the world like a fine lady feeding sugar to a pet canary. Her teeth looked like pearls rotted half away, gaping and uneven. I noticed that one of her upper dogteeth was missing and the other one was broken off a little shorter than the teeth around it. The room she sat in had no roof, I suppose the better to catch bodies and things when they came drifting down through the water.
“If you were a child of the sea,” the witch said, with a glance at me, “I would know exactly why you have come. Since you are a child of the land, I don’t, but it must be a very foolish reason for you to put yourself in so much danger.”
“You don’t frighten me, old witch,” I told her. “If it got around that you killed people who came to you, nobody would ever come again, and then where would you be?”
“Where I am now,” she answered. “In the middle of my forest of dangerous polyps that keep me safe from most intruders. It is they that you have to fear more than me. But do you think I care whether anyone ever comes to me or not?”
“Yes,” said I, “I think you do. If they didn’t come to buy help from you, where would you get your little treasures? Like that pretty rug woven from mermaids’ hair on the wall behind you?” I guessed it was the hair the little mermaid’s sisters had sold her. “Or somebody’s sweet voice?” I went on.
“Ah! So you’ve heard about that, have you?” She gave her hand a languid flip, and the toad somersaulted a little distance away through the water. Then she shook off some of her snakes, reached out, and took a scallop shell down from a niche that was made out of somebody’s old shoulder blade. She opened the shell like a box, and it sent out a soft ruby glow. A jewel lay inside it like a pearl—a great red jewel shaped something like a long little heart—and when she picked it up, it began singing in a voice so sweet that the toad swam to my knee and nuzzled it like a trusting puppy, and I didn’t even feel like tweaking the web between its toes.
The air around my head thrummed as I felt the air-child remember the voice that had been hers when she was the little mermaid.
“This is the prize of all my collection,” the sea witch said. “Once it was the voice of the sea king’s youngest daughter—her little tongue—and if you or anyone else were to put it in your mouth and suck it like a piece of candy until it dissolved, it would become your voice.”
“Really?” I asked, thinking how simply that solved one of our problems. “Why haven’t you ever done it yourself, then?”
She laughed. “Because I like my own voice the way it is, harsh and scratchy.”
“The better to frighten your customers with.”
She cackled and nodded. “I see that we understand each other, you and I. Yes, and besides that, one can never hear one’s own voice quite as it sounds to other ears. Keeping this as my little music box, I can always enjoy it exactly as it really is, whenever I tire of the sound of my own wheeze in my ears.”
“Yes, I’ve heard the story,” said I. “They say that what you really wanted was the sea king’s throne, and that you tempted his daughter and cheated her pitifully to get it.”
“Who says that?” the witch asked curiously.
“Oh, the people who tell these tales and make plays out of them.”
“What would I want with the old king’s throne?” The sea witch cackled again. “Let him keep it, with all the headaches of ruling the seven seas! I do very well for myself here, thank you! letting people alone and letting them let me alone, except when they come seeking me out for themselves. I tempted the poor little mermaid, they say? Far from it, I said all that I could to talk her out of it, but she would insist on loving her prince, little as he or his fine soul were worth it. I warned her of everything that would happen to her, all the pain she would have to endure when every step she took with her human legs would feel as if she danced on knives sharp enough to make the blood flow. And I set my price so high I thought that must discourage her when nothing else did. But it did not, so why shouldn’t I have reaped some benefit, where no one else did?” She touched the jewel-voice and laughed again. “So now she is sea foam on the waves, centuries before her time, and nothing left of her except her voice.”
It seemed that the sea witch knew nothing about the little mermaid’s having been turned into a child of the air, and I didn’t see fit to enlighten her.
She closed the scallop shell, put it back on the shelf, and chuckled. “Of course they may tell whatever lies they like, up there in the human lands, for that’s the way of the world.”
“Exactly what I alwa
ys say,” I agreed.
“Do you, now? Yes, I might expect it of someone like you. But you still don’t say what you came to me for.”
I whistled a few notes before I replied, “Why, for somebody’s sweet voice, of course. The little mermaid’s will do.”
The sea witch cackled with delight and rubbed her bony hands together. “What, my prize, the prettiest treasure in all my collection? So you want that, do you? And what do you expect to pay for it, you saucy young human?”
“Nothing,” I told her coolly. “I expect to win it from you with a game of cards.”
“Cards? Yes, I know what they are. And how, my chickabiddy, do you hope to play with pasteboard things here beneath the sea?”
“If you’re as skillful an old witch as you pretend,” said I, “you’ll think of something.”
She chuckled and hissed a few words to her snakes. They swam up and wove themselves into a ceiling and latticework above and around us. Then the witch puffed her cheeks out and blew. The water flowed away from us and stopped just short of the snakes, leaving us in a big bubble of air.
“I can breathe air as easily as water,” the sea witch said, her laugh sounding not too much different from the way it had before, but echoing more. “Well, what will you stake against my little mermaid’s voice? Your heart, perhaps?” Oh, no, she was not going to get me that easily! “The cards themselves,” I answered, pulling them out of my pocket, where the air-child around me had kept them dry along with my clothes.
“My dear, packs of cards have fallen to me in plenty from shipwrecks and such.”
“Yes, but cards like these?” I spread them out on a flat rock that lay between us.
“Ho-hum!” said the king of spades, who was Alexander the Great.
“Where are we this time?” asked the queen of hearts, who was Helen of Troy, pretending that I hadn’t explained things to them the night before.
Looking interested, the sea witch picked them up and held them spread in her knobby fingers. “Do you sing, too, my pretty faces?” she wanted to know.
The knave of diamonds, who was Roland, blew his horn, and they all pitched into a chorus of “The Tree in the Forest.”
The sea witch nodded and said, “Yes, these are very fine. In fact, if you’d rather, I might be talked into trading the little mermaid’s voice for all these cards, with one or two other little trinkets thrown in. Say, two or three of your toes. Toes from living people are rare enough at this depth.”
“I can guess they are,” I answered, shaking my head, “and I don’t like to think what kind of witchcraft you could work with them. No, I’ll just keep all my toes, thank you, and it’s a game or no deal at all.” If she had asked for a few coins, or even the jeweled rings and things I’d gathered over the years, I might have agreed… or then again, maybe not, because by playing, I had a chance to keep the cards and all for myself, and I thought it ought to be a better chance now that they’d heard me refuse to trade them outright. After all, what card would want to risk living at the bottom of the sea?
I misjudged those cards. More self-willed and mischievous even than an ordinary pack, they were. Maybe a little spiteful, too.
I had to explain all the rules to the sea witch, of course, and its being her first game ought to have given me one advantage, anyway. And then, I shuffled long enough and carelessly enough to let my cards fall into whatever order they liked. But when I dealt them out, I got a hand that needed just one card to make it perfect… and that one card was the king of clubs!
So the sea witch won, with diamonds, and I felt a sort of sigh around my neck. It was the air-child trembling with disappointment, there in the necklace I had never taken off, even though I no longer needed it as long as the sea witch kept her room filled with air.
I gave the cards a reproachful glance. The knave of clubs winked up at me and said, “She’ll keep us safer than we ever were with you, galloping around the world the way you do.”
“We want to settle down,” the queen of clubs added.
And the ace, which I hadn’t even known could talk, put in, “But you wouldn’t so much as consider selling us to her.”
The sea witch chuckled again and gathered up the cards, because they were hers now. Fairly, I suppose, since I had played fairly, and so had she: I know how to watch for cheating and sleight of hand. But never, never trust any pack of cards!
They had continued singing the whole time we played, and they sounded as fine as any chorus I ever heard in the Opera House, I’ll say that for them. “I might still sell you the little mermaid’s voice,” the sea witch said, “now that I have all these others.…” and she ran her fingers lovingly over the cards, who purred like contented old cats.
“Not for my toes,” said I.
“Well, well, what else then?” Looking me over as if she found it hard to make up her mind—and I’m sure she had it already made up by the time we’d started our game, the old sea biddy!—she said at last, “Your necklace then.”
“What, this old thing?” said I.
“Old things are sometimes best,” said she. “And, looking at it, I think we should agree that it belongs down here. Only I warn you: First you must put the necklace into my hand, before I put the little mermaid’s voice into yours.”
I hesitated a long time, pretending to finger the necklace that had let me find my way to her alive. Even if she knew that, did she know how it worked?
“You want my necklace, do you,” said I at last, “to make a dry space for the cards, where they’ll never be in any danger of the water breaking in on them?” Of course she knew I must have some kind of magic in order to be here alive, and I wanted to pay the cards back by making them nervous. The sea witch’s leathery old skin was drying out and cracking in the dry air, so I knew she would have to let the seawater flow back in around her soon. “But I won’t let go my end of the necklace,” I went on, “until I can put my fingers around the shell with the little mermaid’s voice in it.”
“I agree to that.” The witch cackled again. “But when once our bargain is completed, if you should drown on your way up, my snakes will bring you back to me, and I will keep your body and the little mermaid’s voice, too.”
“In that case,” said I, “you can make a box out of my skull and keep the scallop shell between my jaws. But once we start, it’s only fair to finish the trade as fast as we can.”
I’ll say this for the old sea witch, that she never made the least attempt to cheat me. She made her own rules, and they might be loaded in her favor to begin with; but once she stated them, she stuck to them fair as Justice—and it’s not very often you can find that in the world!
The moment I had the scallop shell tucked in my pocket, and she had the necklace wrapped around the cards, she snapped her knuckly fingers, the snakes whisked themselves out of their latticework, and the water clumped back in on us like an avalanche rushing from all sides at once—from east and west and north and south and up from beneath as well as down from above—and the force of all the other directions shot me up and out of her house in spite of the force from above.
Well, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of there through dry air, anyway. But I was sorry to miss seeing whatever happened to those cards. Because, you see, the air-child stayed around me. As she had explained to me in the ship, the necklace didn’t bind her, but only enabled her to stay with its wearer if she chose. I never knew if there was another air-child in the sea near the witch’s house, or if any of them would have considered it a good deed worth doing to keep that pack dry; but I doubt it. Maybe the sea witch used more of her own magic in time. Meanwhile, I had problems of my own.
Instead of going back the way we had come, I was trying to bob straight up for the surface. We couldn’t avoid the polyps that way, however; the hungry forest arched high over the house made out of dead folks’ bones, its black branches rising up around us on every side, flowing back and forth every way in every current, and snapping their thousands of pods a
t us. They couldn’t have held the air-child—she seemed to be having a hard time staying with me anyway—but one of them just touched my hand and grabbed it tight enough to leave an ugly red patch when I yanked free. If enough of them had gotten a real hold, they could have kept me there until the snakes came to collect my bones for the next room the sea witch wanted to add to her house. That is, if the snakes themselves dared swim up between those sticky dark branches. If everything the polyps caught didn’t just stay wrapped in their coils until they let it go of their own accord.
I’m sure they would have gotten me half a dozen times from behind, if the air-child hadn’t watched my back and nudged me like a tiny puff of breeze hinting me away from the long strands whenever they reached out for a shoulder or piece of neck. Between that and filling my nostrils, she must have had harder work of it than I did, and I wasn’t exactly lazing my way up to the surface. If every now and then she slipped and floated a short way away from me, like a huge, ghostly bubble, before she could catch her balance and get back around me again, who could blame her, poor child? Not I! Not when I stopped gasping, anyway.
Why make a longer story of it? Once out of range of the witch’s forest-garden, all we had to dodge was a shark or two, and eventually a big sea turtle slipped up beneath me, took me onto its back, and brought me the rest of the way to the surface.
By now the lotion was pretty well worn off or washed away, but I had just enough left in the bottle for a drop on my right eyelid, one in my left ear, and one on my tongue. There was my air-child, gasping a bit herself after her exertions, and whispering in the turtle’s ear.
Then she turned to me, her face all radiant, and sang, “Oh, thank you, thank you! Such a deed as this is worth three years to me! But how could I have done it if I had not grown up a child of the sea? And how would I ever have become a child of the air, if it had not been for the sea witch—even though she did not mean it. But you have meant a good deed all around, and bless you for it forever!”
Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley Fantasy Magazine, Volume 2 Page 12