Authors: Tanith Lee
“Such a hero. I gasp at you.”
“Go to Hell, Zephyrin. Once I find a
second sword, whatever its calibre, I’ll send you there with it. You may as
well familiarise yourself with the country first.”
Of
all things, possibly Ymil did not expect to do more than doze.
Sleep accordingly took him by surprise.
As also it must have done Vendrei who,
exhausted by water, shocks, walking, but mostly by the hundred conflicting
emotions in his mind, had slumped over like a boy, with his cheek pillowed on
his hand.
The sun blew out of the sea, the colour
of Vendrei’s golden-guinea hair.
The people at the two fires woke up, or
were woken by the wakening of others. They were in number seven, and should
have been counted eight. Zephyrin had left them.
They
went down the shore, striding eastward, Mhikal Vendrei and Ymil. On Ymil’s
apparent personal involvement in searching for and locating Zephyrin, Vendrei
made no comment. No doubt he was so obsessed with the captain, Ymil’s
dissimilar yet total obsession seemed only inevitable.
“He’s swum out to that wreckage he
claimed to see,” Vendrei had shouted, rather illogically—for if the wreckage
were not real, why swim out to it? “The currents here, the tides, are
crazed—he’ll drown himself, the devil—anything to deny me the satisfaction of
killing him myself.”
Not long after, unbreakfasted, their
toilette consisting of hand-rubbed faces, finger-combed hair, and
brandy-moistened mouths, the two men set off.
Both barely kept themselves from
running.
The day, however, ran. Forward, upward.
Eventually, in the solar light that was
like smashed crystal, they reached a stretch of whiter sand. Where, gleaming
and sparkled by sun, lay the spars and barrels of the shipwreck, a torn sail
spread like dirty washing, a handful of iron bits, bolts and nails, the
dreadful inefficacious irony of a holy medallion.
Here and there along the route the
booted footfalls of Zephyrin had been discernible in softer sand. Now, these
narrow markers led, infallible clue, to the water’s edge.
The sea had drawn out some way from the
beach. This in itself showed a variant tide, since from what Zephyrin had said,
one deduced that yesterday the margin had been consistently far more slender
here.
“Look! There they are, his bloody boots
thrown off—and the uniform jacket too, the better to swim.”
They scanned across sunlit splinters of
ocean.
Nothing obvious was to be made out.
Neither the alluring wreckage, nor any mortal form.
“If anything was here, the sea’s moved
it. And the fool’s gone after.”
They stood between earth and water,
under air and fire, dumbfounded.
“Oh God,” Vendrei said then, softly,
“why do I hate him so? Why? What did he ever do to me but gaze and jeer, and
what’s that, to a grown man? What have I done to myself these past years of my
escape, to bring me down to this baseness and idiocy? I was never happy in all
that time. I was never free. I drank and gamed and made love and played at
living, and look where it’s carried me. And—carried this young man who so
enraged me— Have I gone mad for certain, Ymil, do you think?”
“It is,” said Ymil, cautious and quite
gentle, “a
kind
of madness.”
“Yes, mad. The mad-house is the vile
hell in which I must leave myself next.” He gazed blindly across the bright
water. “You talked last night, Ymil, of something you called a crime—that you’d
deserted a young woman to whom you had promised marriage. You seemed to want to
go back to her, to make it right. You said, I think, she fell ill... Oh, Ymil,
We have almost the same story. If not exactly. My father sought to force me
into an arranged marriage, with the daughter of a princely neighbour. I was
already reluctant, yet took care I caught a glimpse of her before any formalities
allowed me to meet her. Base as I was, and am, I think if I had been struck in
admiration, I might have gone on with the fiasco. But no such thing occurred.
Oh, she was not unpleasant, a little gawky, brown-haired, busying herself with
some silly woman’s pretence of gardening. Seventeen years of age. An
uneducated, ignorant, skinny child. With a whole ten yards, and most of a thick
hedge between us, I grew incensed. I rebelled. Because besides I thought myself
at that time in love with another woman, the clever, elegant wife of an
acquaintance, let it be said, and I planned to seduce this person and steal her
from her husband. I’ll tell you straight, when I proposed this to her, she
laughed in my face. She said she was ‘
greatly tempted
’ but liked her
house too well to desert it and go ‘
adventuring’
. So then I went off
alone, and wasted four years of my life. And what became of the little girl of
seventeen with the brown hair? She too fell sick, Ymil. And so I heard later,
she died. I had this from a man who had known the family. I beat him at cards
and he took it out on me by telling me this. He said it was well known, she had
died of shame, and her own father had called me her murderer. I might as well
have cut her in half with a sword. And now. Now I’ll kill a man for laughing at
me. Am I so friendly with death, I yearn to
feed
him?”
Vendrei breathed a moment.
“Heaven pardon me, I should have begged
their forgiveness too. Should have prayed for them, those drowned men in the
cave. Have I lost my human heart? What have I become through all this? Mind
lost, heart lost, inhuman, a monster—” And that said, Vendrei sat down and
pulled off with some labour his own well-made boots. “I’ll swim out too, Ymil.
Try to find that boy, save him—”
Ymil had no words to give. He was aware
Vendrei would no more hear them now than he would have listened to his own
contrition, earlier.
As the prince launched himself into the
water, graceful and muscular, assured in this even in his sudden lack of all other
assurances, Ymil squinted away along the beach, attempting to gauge what the
sea did there.
They were difficult to divine, the
moods, the schemes of the sea.
In the end, once Vendrei had vanished
entirely into the distance, Ymil moved on along the beach.
There was for some way still a trail of
objects tossed on the sand. Then the heavy masonry of the cliff put its foot
down and ended the beach entire. Here one jagged rock stuck up in the water,
and draped artistically across the rock was what Ymil, briefly, took to be a
perfectly white garment. Until he saw that it had long green hair.
Ymil had met nothing in his life that
conclusively established things supernatural did not exist. Ghosts, vampires,
feys, all sorts were conceivable. Thus, so might this be. For plainly, a
white-skinned, naked, lovely woman lay over the arm of the rock,
emerald-haired, her flat smooth belly finalizing in a coiled black tail.
He was staring at the mermaid when he
heard Vendrei call from behind him, and the prince trudged up again out of the
ocean, his own arms empty as his distraught face. All his shirt was gone now.
How much of his soul?
Then they stared together at her, the
lady from the sea.
It was Ymil who said at last, “She’s
human after all. It’s weed caught in her hair, that greenness—and see, the
tail’s just the effect of some dark torn material wrapped around her legs.”
Vendrei, who had been more still than
the rock, started violently and said, “She isn’t dead. I thought she was. But
she’s breathing.”
At that second the woman who was not a
mermaid stirred, coughed, and leaning sidelong, quickly voided her lungs of
water. After which she sat up, glanced at them in angry dismay, and put one
slim arm across her very beautiful breasts.
Ymil identified her. Or, recognised her.
For he had secretly known her from those minutes before the tempest struck.
But “Is she from the ship?” asked
Vendrei, as if in a sort of stupor. “Madam,” he added, “allow me to assist
you—”
“Keep your damned hands off me, you
cur,” replied the woman, in the tenor voice of Captain Zephyrin.
Those
years before, Zophyra, at seventeen, had been ill-at-ease, and it was true also
she had been poorly educated. She could read and write, sing and sew. Aside
from that she was continually instructed in a single lesson, being that she
must be feminine, obedient, and ready to marry whichever suitor her father
chose her.
One day the father did choose. Zophyra
was consumed by utter terror. She had heard—and read—plenty of tales of young
maidens wedded to evil and frequently elderly men. Despite her condition not
uninventive, she found a means therefore, at a time when the proposed
bridegroom was visiting the estate, to see him, herself unseen. Her notion was
that if he were foul she would slay herself—or, perhaps, run away.
What she saw, on that amber harvest
morning, when the scent of wheat and hay, apples and white alcohol was buzzing
in the air, was Mhikal Vendrei, then just twenty-two years of age, marvellous
as a young god.
She fell in love with him at once.
A favour, alas, he did not return on the
subsequent occasion that, unbeknownst to Zophyra,
he
had spied on
her
.
A trio of months following he jilted
her, (unmet), and was gone into the wide world.
Her father and his vied with each other
to make each other recompense. She meanwhile felt fragments of her shattered
heart rattling in her breast, piercing her, and she succumbed to a recurrence
of the dangerous fever, which seemingly still lay dormant in her blood. In
infancy this malady had almost finished her. Now it made a worse assault. She
had been, unknowing in delirium, given the last rites, when that very midnight
the febrility cracked like a burning-glass and spilled her forth. As before,
all her hair had fallen out. (In childhood the first attack of fever had turned
it nearly white on its return, and ever since her father had seen to it that
this albino tendency was corrected with a brown dye. He had not wanted to scare
off possible swains with her almost-uncanny pallor). In adulthood once again
the hair grew back, if anything whiter than before, only her brows and lashes
retaining their darker shade. But by then her father never saw this. For as
soon as she was able, still perhaps slightly unhinged from heartbreak and
sickness, Zophyra fled the parental home.
She rushed out into the unknown and
extraordinary world, which she had had the sense, (having also read a few
rather ridiculous stories of such things), to approach in male attire and the
assertive pretence of masculinity. Or masculinity as she perceived it:
arrogant, overbearing, unkind, elusive. All this only worked because, despite
her naivety, she had the cunning instincts of a genius.
She passed herself off as fourteen. As a
lad she appeared much younger than her actual span. She joined one of the roving
armies of the Steppes, more because it presented itself before her than for any
concrete reason. She had been so scorched by passion and its rejection,
(someone had told her Vendrei had seen her and been unimpressed), she was by
then fearless, generally reckless. Among the men she would pass for a boy. The
vagaries of Fate had aided her too, for her feminine monthly courses,
traumatised by the fever, ceased for the time being to occur. By the time they
did, she was well able to protect herself from any scrutiny.
She learned early on to fight. She was
skilful and daring. She had begun to have a goal. She took proper lessons too
whenever she could, from such scholars as she encountered, on many subjects,
including the Latin and ancient Greek languages, literature and philosophy.
(The one she hated was, she had been told, a paragon in this area). She paid
for tuition with her army pay and was otherwise abstemious in all things. (When
men advised her to visit the brothels, she told them she had a sweetheart at
home she would not betray. As in much else they found her, or the youth she
acted, weird but not unlikeable. And she was, they also knew, a demon with the
drawn blade).
When she was nineteen, had grown taller,
beautiful if she had known it, and must bind her breasts to protect and prevent
discovery, she shaved her head and told those who commented on her lack of
facial hair that a fever had depilated her almost entirely. Later, leaving the
battalion, she
grew
her hair, told the same tale and claimed the real
hair to be a wig. It was unusually thick and lustrous enough, added to its
paleness, that she was believed.
Her goal, needless to say, remained
constant.
She had, too, heard rumours of her own
‘death’ at home on the old estate. Nothing if not quirky, it seemed to her
that
Zophyra
had
died, had indeed been murdered by the callous suitor who had
not wanted her.
She intended now to find this man.
Firstly she would demonstrate to him she was his equal, or superior. Next she
would make a mock of him, present him to others as shoddily as she could.
Lastly, so well able to fight, not to mention tutored in the mental symmetry
of poetic revenge, she would run him through the heartless heart with a steel
blade. For had he not, metaphysically, spiritually,
carnally
, done as
much to her?