Only Sofia-Elisabete

by Robin Kobayashi

  Conn MacPhee added, “Usually a merman preys on a girl. But here, the merman became Sorcha’s prey,” and he chuckled.

  “To be sure,” said Rose MacPhee, “the sea-creature hirpled about for many a day, making it impossible to flee from his captor. ‘Let him be named Edan,’ determined Sorcha. Using a magic sea-shell comb, she untangled his hair to make him fall in love wi’ her. On the tenth day, he leapt onto the ferry. Sorcha told the ferryman to throw him off since Edan hadn’t the money to pay the fare.”

  The men muttered their disapproval. Poor they may be, but not paying one’s fare was wholly unacceptable. Rose MacPhee concluded her story for us.

  “The night before last at a ceilidh—a celebration—MacLeish announced his daughter’s betrothal to Edan. The two shall wed when the minister comes next to our isle. But the marriage is doomed. A seer prophesized that once Sorcha’s betrothed found his clothes that she had hid from him, the sea would reclaim him, because he was born o’ the sea, an’ to the sea he first belongs.”

  She shook her head at the tragic lovers, as did I. Our guide then asked whether there were any other young strangers. An old wrinkled islesman rapped his walking-stick upon the ground, eager to speak.

  “A lad from Glasgow, by the name o’ Mundy, that made a pilgrimage here some weeks ago, still hasn’t left the isle. Back home, he was to become a medicine man, but his father, Old Mundy, cast him off. These days he survives by fishing for flounder.”

  My red beads turned hot. “Fishing?”

  “Och, aye. Young Mundy is daft. He abandoned his wife—a pretty little lass. He says it’s better if she thinks he’s dead since he has no money.”

  “Dead!” cried I, uneasy about it.

  “Och, no. He’s very alive, an’ wi’ good reason. He’s friendly enough wi’ the widow Mòrag, one o’ those MacMillans.”

  “She’s seventeen an’ well worth looking at, too,” said another.

  “Very beautiful she is,” agreed Rose MacPhee.

  “Pray, sir, do you know young Mundy’s given name?” A troubling feeling came over me.

  He searched his mind. “Mòrag calls him Kitt.”

  “That’s my husband’s name.” At first, I refused to believe it was my Kitt. I refused to believe he had been unfaithful to me. Then why was my heart beset with an unspeakable dread?

  “If it’s your Mr. Munro, shall I challenge him to a duel?” the colonel joked with me.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” I told him, blinking away unwept tears.

  “Let us walk amongst the ruins then, before we return to Mull. The days are short.”

  My brow clouded. “No. I must speak with this Kitt Mundy.”

  The colonel thought it unwise, but I persuaded him to accompany me.

  We trooped up a dirt path in a northerly direction. We came upon the ruins of the roofless church, where a clattering of jackdaws roosted in the tower, and soon after that, we skirted a hill tipped in mist. At twenty minutes further on, we reached a clachan—a small cluster of dwellings—that overlooked the sands on the northeast end.

  “There it is,” said our guide. “Young Mundy’s abode.”

  The “it’ was a stone hut plastered with clay, its roof thatched with straw and tied down with twisted ropes of heather. A fresh dunghill near the entrance fouled the air. Had my Kitt concealed himself here, pretending to the world that he was dead? My indignation got the better of me. I marched up to the hut, determined to know the truth.

  The pretty widow—one of those MacMillans—along with another girl, knelt on the ground, grinding barley at the quern, an ancient hand-mill. They sang a quern song—“Ho, brath, brath, bleith!” Upon seeing me, Mòrag stood defiantly, her arms akimbo. She eyed me with disdain.

  “Who are ye?”

  “I’m Kitt’s wife.”

  “Are ye, now?”

  Rough girls like her didn’t intimidate me. I went up to the small doorway, which, by the bye, didn’t have a door. Loose boards had been propped up against the opening, so I knocked on one of them.

  “Kitt!” I called out in a sorrowful voice. “Oh, Kitt, it’s me—your wife, your own!”

  “Go back home,” came a muffled response from somewhere inside.

  “I don’t care about your father’s money.”

  “I do.”

  Tearfully, I asked, “Won’t you even come out to see me? Oh, Kitt.”

  “I shan’t come out,” was his obstinate reply.

  “Be a man and have the courage to face your wife,” demanded the colonel.

  “Aye, be a man, ye coward,” snarled out the jealous widow.

  “Whisht, Mòrag!” A frowzy fellow, short of stature, and sporting a gobber-tooth and a mouth as crooked as a flounder’s, stepped into the dim sunlight.

  “Who are you?” we asked each other in shock. He wasn’t my Kitt. And I wasn’t his wife. No doubt we were both very relieved about it.

  I turned a hundred colors of foolishness. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  Young Mundy smothered a laugh upon that crooked mouth of his.

  “Come—let’s get on.” The colonel placed a protective arm round me.

  He had no sooner led me away than I erupted in tears—huge salty tears of despair that I would never find my Kitt. I threw a backward glance to where young Mundy and Mòrag stood, mocking my misery. Like will to like, as they say, and those two sinners didn’t care a fig that somewhere out there, probably in Glasgow, a broken-hearted young wife didn’t know her Kitt Mundy was still alive and had been unfaithful to her.

  While we had been searching for young Mundy, the waters had turned rough in the sound, with frothy waves threatening to capsize the open boats and wherries. There was nothing for it but to seek shelter on Iona. We had to fend for ourselves, without servants, because Neville and Baillie had stayed on in Mull, at the village of Bunessan, awaiting our return. Fortunately, our guide’s kinswoman, Rose MacPhee, invited us into her humble stone cottage. A thick, pungent, pleasant odor from her peat-fire welcomed us.

  Her son, like many others, had gone to the Lowlands to harvest crops. The poor widow lived alone most of the year until her son returned for the winter. The hard-trodden earth floor had been swept clean. A heap of stones served as a fireplace in the center of the cottage, and the black smoke nearly choked us as we stood before the flaming peats.

  “The smoke, like the fire, keeps us warm,” Rose MacPhee told us.

  The colonel made a wry face that only I could see.

  There being no chairs to sit on, our kind hostess brought us some old hassocks stuffed with heather, which would serve as our beds tonight, and so, we sat upon those. The best fare she could offer us was warm milk. Once upon a time, she had possessed a kettle, but the Good People had borrowed it.

  “Ye must see them at Sìthean Mòr,” she advised me.

  “What is that?”

  “The Fairy Hill, where the fairies might grant ye a wish.”

  “Fairies!”

  “Aye, ye must go in an hour, at sunset, when the fairies walk the ground as we do.”

  The colonel, having felt badly about the Mundy business, would do anything to secure my happiness. And I was wild to go.

  I told everyone, “I must see the fairies before it’s too late.”

  We set off in a howling wind to find this fairy mound. According to Conn MacPhee, who led us to a grassy knoll somewhere south of the road to the machair, this was where St. Columba had prayed each evening, when the day met night, and the darkness descended on the isle. A young monk, who had secretly followed St. Columba one time, witnessed the angels of light who illuminated the saint while he prayed.

  Were the fairies fallen angels? I wondered how St. Columba summoned these fairies who lived underground. All that I could see in the distance were the black-faced sheep and the shaggy brown cows, and the women-folk coming to milk. A tiny girl tugged at my cloak. She had brought me a dish of milk. Urged on by her, I poured a libation of this milk into the hollow o
f a large stone.

  “Dear Good People,” I implored them. “I wish to find my husband, Kitt Munro.”

  “Tee hee,” giggled the tiny girl, and she frolicked about to the merry music of fiddles.

  Surprising myself, I fell a-dancing with her, atop the fairy mound.

  “You are bewitched,” called out the colonel.

  Music? A tiny dancer? He heard and saw nothing of the kind.

  Conn MacPhee begged me to stop. “The women-folk think ye’r a fairy, who will steal away their babes.”

  From atop the fairy hill, I could see the frightened women, who scattered in different directions, carrying their squalling infants, and slopping their milk-pails. And there, amongst the fleeing women-folk, stood Sorcha, the milkmaid. Her Edan staggered forth drunk, from out of the shieling. The herdsman there must have poured him a copious libation of whisky, clandestinely brewed. Sorcha, a robustious girl, would have none of Edan’s nonsense, and she shoved him into a wheel-barrow, not caring that his legs dangled precariously over the side. They and their creaking wheel-barrow disappeared in the gloaming.

  “Aweel, aweel, that was an interesting scene,” remarked Conn MacPhee, when I had rejoined them.

  This diverted the colonel. “You, my girl, caused a great stir with your fairy dance.”

  “Look here!” I stooped to pick up something my foot had stumbled against.

  It was the Widow MacPhee’s missing kettle, which had mutton soup bones in it, and a goodly number of potatoes and turnips as well. The fairies had been generous. The kettle was ready to return home, to surprise its poor owner with a hearty meal and to beg her forgiveness for being gone so long.

  We awoke the next day to a sea leaping with dolphins. It made me not want to leave Iona just yet, but the colonel said we must take advantage of the cold clear weather before it changed. We had scarce left the bay on a brown-sailed wherry, when we heard Sorcha’s frantic cries of mo ghraidh, mo chridhe—my love, my heart. She had lost her sweetheart somewhere, or the fairies had taken him. The colonel swept the isle with his pocket spyglass.

  “Zounds! The merman must’ve found his clothes.”

  “Pray give me the spyglass,” cried I, keen to see this merman.

  It was true. The merman had found his things. Gone were his ragged woolen clothes and cap. Gone, too, was his scraggy beard. He, the prince of the sea, wore a crown of purple seaweed. Quickly he bounded towards the ruins of the church, where he sank to his knees before a tall Celtic cross that had been sculpted on a solid column of grey rock. Conn MacPhee said, “St. Martin’s cross.”

  The merman got up, and he looked out to sea. “It can’t be him,” I muttered to myself. As if he had heard me, the merman strode forward, right into my view. He was none other than Kitt’s doppel-ganger! My spirits sank. The isle-folk say that revenants and hobgoblins haunt the ruins on Iona. It seems I had been chasing after a revenant, one who walks after death, and he had brought me here to Iona to tell me that Kitt was really, definitely, tragically dead.

  I wailed out in misery, “My Kitt is dead!”

  “What?” The colonel snatched the spyglass from me. “Ah, there’s our boy.”

  “It’s not him,” and I sobbed into my hand.

  “Of course, it is. He had us fooled with his disguise.”

  The time had come to confess my secret.

  “It isn’t a disguise. Kitt’s doppel-ganger has been ghosting me.”

  The colonel eyed me curiously, as though I were cracked in the noddle.

  “Has he? Well, I suppose we ought not to interfere, when he prefers to lead two lives, one happily betrothed to the milkmaid.”

  This certainly displeased me.

  “The wraith must love his sweetheart,” the colonel continued on, “so much so that he would rather be a struggling tenant farmer, living in poverty for the rest of his days. Oh, what do you care, when, as you say, this co-walker isn’t your husband?”

  Ay! Kitt—a doppel-ganger or not—owed me an explanation. How dare he betroth himself to the milkmaid when he was married to me. Why should he and his milkmaid get their way so easily? Cupping my hands round my mouth, I shouted angrily with all my might, so loudly that the entire isle must’ve heard me.

  “Kitt Munro! Kitt Munro! Kitt—” but then I became hoarse with emotion.

  Kitt had plainly heard me. He tumbled forth to the rocky edge of the isle, where he now stood, a desperate mute, waving his arms madly overhead. “Edan!” came Sorcha’s relieved cry. She must’ve espied her merman.

  “Shall we leave him here with Sorcha?” The colonel brushed away my tears.

  Contrite of heart, I shook my head. “I’m still nutty upon him.”

  He grinned. “Quite nutty.”

  The colonel, having conferred with our boatman, Ian MacDiffie, shouted out to Kitt, “Get you to the White Strand of the Monks—the east end facing Mull—and be quick about it!” Kitt dashed off northward while Sorcha lumbered after him.

  “Do please hurry on,” I begged Ian MacDiffie.

  Our three rowers, after taking a copious draught of whisky, bent to their oars for what seemed an eternity, and they sung Gaelic verses to a beautiful air that made my heart ache. Conn MacPhee said it was about a gille dubh, a kind and gentle lad—one clothed in leaves and moss—and known to be a wild mountain spirit.

  O, where was my own gille dubh, my kind and gentle Kitt?

  At the White Strand of the Monks, near the shoreline, a rabble of grey pebbles that had been lapped by the tide contrasted sharply with a bright crescent of sand. Its serenity didn’t calm my fast-beating heart whatsoever. This place had a violent history, according to Conn MacPhee. Centuries ago, the Vikings had massacred the Abbey’s monks here.

  The colonel cried out, “There he is!” We sighted Kitt weaving his way through the tufts of green grass that fringed the strand. He certainly looked like a wild sea-spirit, with his hair tangled up with seaweed.

  Then came Sorcha, the merman-huntress, brandishing a pole with a small fishing-net at one end of it. Her prey dodged the net several times. Determined to get away, Kitt rushed into the surf.

  “What the deuce!” the colonel exclaimed. “He’s going to swim for it.”

  “Mind the current!” shouted Ian MacDiffie.

  Kitt dove headlong into a grey wave. He swam towards us, his arms paddling, his feet kicking, urged on by our shouts of encouragement.

  “Well done, Munro!” cheered the colonel.

  “You have got the boat sure!” I told him.

  “Mind the jelly-fish!” warned Ian MacDiffie.

  But just thirty feet from us, Kitt got caught in a current that whisked him away. He tossed about helplessly before he sank, and we saw him no more.

  “Seonaidh took him, worse luck,” spat out Ian MacDiffie, who then, beneath his breath, cursed in Gaelic.

  I shrieked out, “No! He can’t be gone.” If the colonel hadn’t stopped me, I would’ve jumped overboard to save Kitt.

  The sea god must’ve heard me and my hysterical sobs. Somewhere, from the depths of the sound, a whale of a dolphin surfaced, boldly leaping into the air thirty feet high. It splashed back into the sea and then, swiftly, it swam with the fast-moving current for the space of half a minute. Captivated by the dolphin, I dared not move or say a word to break the magic spell.

  “Seonaidh will rescue him,” declared Ian MacDiffie.

  “Look there!” Conn MacPhee pointed to something.

  I could hardly credit my eyes. The mighty dolphin shot through the waters carrying Kitt on its back. Everyone huzza’d in Gaelic—Hò rò! Hò rò!—I cheering loudly with the men. This noble creature, with Kitt upon it and grasping its fin, rode out the current until it lessened. All we could see now was a far-away black speck in the sound.

  We waited and waited, each of us quiet. Ian MacDiffie crossed himself. Then, to our utter amazement, the black speck veered wide. “They’re coming back!” cried the colonel, who gave me a reassuring hug. But they eventua
lly passed us, continuing up the sound. “You’re going the wrong way!” I shouted after the dolphin. Ian MacDiffie cursed aloud in Gaelic.

  Of a sudden, the dolphin, with Kitt still holding on, turned again, and it single-mindedly aimed for us in a zig-zag line. In this manner, it brought its passenger to our starboard bow. I cheered with everyone, “Hò rò!” Two men pulled Kitt into the wherry, and someone dropped a striped plaid over his head and shoulders. The happy dolphin, whirling itself about, squeaked at us before it sank into the waters and disappeared forever.

  I had no sooner begun to cry in relief than Sorcha claimed Kitt’s attention once more.

  “Mo ghraidh, mo chridhe!” Her plaintive lament carried to us from the shore.

  Kitt gave her a sad little wave—the kind that meant he would never return. Having lost him to the sea, Sorcha fell a-sobbing and threw her apron over her head. Her piercing cries amplified over the sound.

  Ought I to have pitied her? Something like compassion had begun to stir in my heart, when a plaid-hooded Kitt, looking very much like a gruesome sea-monk, with dark shadowy eyes, a foam-grey face and a strand of seaweed coiled about his neck, stumbled towards me. A more disturbing phiz never graced the earth. He was the doppel-ganger, a dead man come from the shadows of the sea to walk amongst us.

  My right cheek felt icy. Touching it, I found there smooth sea-pebbles. I held some of these tiny things up to the dim sunlight, admiring their green translucency and shape of tear drops. The merman’s tears—Kitt’s tears. Had his tears fallen upon me? And then I remembered where I was. I sat up.

  “Madre de Dios!” I shrank back from the ghastly revenant who knelt before me. Sea-pebble tear drops dotted his cheeks.

  Bewildered by my terrified reaction, he held out his palms. His words mysteriously entered my head. Was it trickery? A sleight of voice? Because, when I watched his lips move, I caught his meaning, without sound. Startled by it, I believed myself part of a fantastic dream.

  My sweet wife, do you not know me? he beseeched me, silently mouthing the words. Tears filled his sad blue-greys.

  “Are you … dead?”