Authors: Tanith Lee
So out we went, and all the village
street was full of the men, shouldering their hooks and pikes and hammers, and
the lanterns in their muffle giving off only a pale slatey blue. By now I did
not even look for my dog Iron, though a few of the men had their dogs with
them, the low-slung local breed of Hampp, with snub noses and big shoulders,
that might help too pulling the flotsam to shore.
We went along the cliff, near the edge
now all of us, but for the youngest boys, three of them, that we posted up by
the notch. Then the rest of us went down to the beach.
It was a curious thing. The fog that
night was positioned like a fret, one that stayed only on the sea, and just the
faintest tendrils and wisps of it drifted along the beach, like thin ribbons of
smoke from off a fire.
The water was well in, creaming clear on
the shale, the tide high enough, and not the tips of the fangs below showing
even if the vessel could have made them out. But the ship was anyway held out
there, inside the box of the fog, under the fog’s lid, like a fly in thick grey
amber.
It was a large one, too, and as our
neighbour had said, very well lit. In fact crazily much-lit, as if for some
festival being held on the decks. We all spoke of it, talking low in case our
words might carry, as eerily they did through these fogs. The watchman came and
said he reckoned at first the ship had caught fire, to be so lighted up. For
she did seem to burn, a ripe, rich, flickering gold. How many lamps? A hundred?
More? Or torches maybe, flaming on the rails—?
A dog began barking then behind us, a
loud strong bell of a bark. Some of the men swore, but my father said, “It’s
good. Let them know out there land is here. Let them hear and come on. Let’s
show the lanterns, boys. I’ll bet this slut is loaded down with cash and
kickshaws—we’ll live by it a year and more.”
And just then the vessel slewed, and the
line of it, all shown in light, altered shape. We knew it had entered the
channel and was ready to run to us.
Something came rushing from the other
way though, and slammed hard against my legs, so I staggered and almost fell.
And turning I saw my dog there. He was standing four-square on the shale,
panting and staring full at me with eyes like green coals. Brighter than our
uncovered lamps they seemed.
I said, Iron would never come to the
sea, nor anywhere near it.
“Wonders don’t cease,” said my father.
“The dog wants to help us with it too. Good lad. Stay close now—”
But Iron turned his eyes of green fire
on my father, and barked and belled, iron notes indeed that split the skin off
the darkness. And then he howled as if in agony.
“
Quiet
! Quiet, you devil, for the
sake of Christ! Do he want to sour our luck?” And next my father shouted at me.
I had never seen him afraid, but then I did. And I did not know why. Yet my
whole body had fathomed it out, and my heart.
And I grabbed Iron and tried to push him
back. “Not now, boy. Go back if you don’t care for it. Go home and wait. Ask Ma
for a bit of crackling. She knows when you ask. She’ll give it you. Go on home,
Iron.”
And Iron fell silent, but now he sank
his teeth in my trouser and began to tug and pull at me. He was a muscular dog,
though no longer young, and tall, as I said.
The other men were surly and restless.
They did not like this uncanny scene, the flaming ship that drove now full
toward us and cast its flame-light on the shore, so the cliffs were shining up
like gilt, and the opened lanterns paled to nothing—and the dog, possessed by
some horrible fiend, gnawing and pulling, his spit pouring on the wet ground
in a silver rain, as if he had the madness.
And then there came the strangest
interval. I cannot properly describe how it was. It was as if time stuck fast
for a moment, and the moment grew another way, swelling on and on. Even Iron,
not letting go of me, stopped his tugging and slavering. And in the hell of his
eyes I saw the wild reflection of the gold fire of the ship growing and moving
as nothing else, for that moment, might.
“By the Lord,” said my father softly,
“it’s a big one, this crate.” It was such a foolish, stupid thing to say. And
the last words I ever did hear from my father.
They call them she; that is, the
seafarers call each ship
she
. As if she were a woman. But we did not. We
could not, maybe, seeing as how we killed them in the Night Work. Just as we
ignored the women who died with the ships, and the children who died.
But now I must call it she. The ship,
the golden ship.
Believe this or not, as you will.
I do not believe it, and I saw it happen.
I never will believe it, not till my last breath is wrung from me. And then, I
think, I shall have to.
The moment which had stuck came free and
fled. We felt time move, felt it one and all. It was as if the two hands of a
clock had stuck, and then unstuck, and the ticking of it and the moving of it
began again.
But as time moved, and we with it, it
was the
ship
instead that froze. Out there at the edge of the grey slab
of the fog, under it, yet visible now as if only through the flimsiest veil.
She was well in on the last stretch. She could not stay her course. No vessel,
even a mighty and huge one, could have stayed itself now. So far she had driven
in, she must hurl on towards her finish against the rocks, and on the faces of
the cliffs around, those that crowded out into the sea to meet her. Yet—she did
not move. Our clock ran, hers had halted. But oh, something about her there was
that moved.
I behold her still in my mind’s eye. So
tall, six or seven decks she seemed, and so many masts, and all full laden
with her sheets. There was not a man on her that I could see. None. Nor any
lamps or torches to light her up so bright that now, almost free of the fog,
half she blinded me. No, she blazed from something else, as if she had been
coated, every inch of her, in foil of gold, her timbers, her ropes, her sails—coated
in gold and then lit up from within by some vast and different fire that never
could burn upon this world, but maybe under it—or high above. Like the sun. A
sun on fire at her core, and flaming outward. Lampless.
She
was the
lantern. How she burned.
Not a sound. No voice, no motion. Even
the ocean, quiet as if it too had congealed—but it moved, and the waves came in
and lapped our boots, and they made, the waves, no sound at all.
And then the dog, my Iron, he began to
worry at me, hard, hard, and I felt his teeth go through the trouser and he
fastened them in my very leg. I shouted out in pain and turned, not knowing
what I did, as if to cuff him or thrust him away. And by that the spell on me was
rent.
I found I was running. I ran and sobbed
and called out to God, and Iron ran by me and then just ahead of me. It seemed
to me he had me fast by an invisible cord. I had no choice but to fly after
him. And yet, oddly, a part of me did not want to. I wanted only to go back and
stand at the sea’s brink and look at the ship—but Iron dragged me and I could
not release myself from the phantom chain.
I was up on the cliff path when I heard
them screaming behind me and some one hundred and fifty feet below. This
checked me. I fell and my ankle turned and a bone snapped, but I never heard
the noise it made, for there was no sound in that place but for the shrieking
of the men, and one of them my father.
Of course, I could no longer stir either
forward or back. I lay and twisted, feeling no pain in my foot or leg, and
stared behind me.
And this is what I saw. Every man upon
that shore, every lad, even the youngest of them, ten years old, and the dogs,
those too, and those screaming too as if caught in a trap, all these living
creatures—they were racing forward, not as I had inland, but out toward the
sea, toward the fog, toward the golden glare of the ship— But they howled in
terror as they did so, men and beasts, nor did they run on the earth. They ran
on
water
. They ran through the
air
. The three children from the
cliff-top—they too—off into the air they had been slung, wailing and weeping,
and whirling outward like the rest. And up and up they all pelted, as if racing
up a cliff, but no land was there under their feet. Only the ship was there
ahead of them, and she waited. The thin veil of the outer fog hid nothing. The
light of her was too fierce for anything to be hidden. The men and the boys and
the dogs ran straight up and forward, unable to stay their course until, one by
one, they smashed and splintered on the cliff-face of the golden ship, on the
golden fangs and cheek and rock of the ship. I saw so clear their bones break
on her, and the scarlet gunshot of their blood that burst and scattered away,
not staining her. As they did not either, but fell down like empty sacks into
the jet black water. Till all was done.
After which, she turned aside, gently
drifting, herself as if weightless and empty, and having moved all round she
returned into the fog, under fog, and under night and under silence. She slid
away into the darkness. Her glow went soft and melted out. The fog closed over.
The night closed fast its door, and only then I heard the waves that sucked the
shale, and the pain rose in my leg like molten fire.
They
will be hanging me tomorrow. That is fair; it is what I came to the mainland
for, and made my confession. At first I never said why I had had to. How I had
crawled up the path, with my dog helping me. And in the village of Hampp, all
the faces, and seeing that each one knew yet would not speak of it. My mother,
she like the others. How I stayed two months there, alone, until I could walk
with a stick, and by then almost everyone had left the place, the empty houses
like damp caves. And then I left there also. But I came here, and my dog quite
willing to cross water, and I found a judge, and was judged.
Men have gone to search the waters off
the coast below Hampp. They find nothing of the dead ships. We took all there
was to take. As for corpses, bones, theirs and ours are all mingled, like the
gargoyles and angels in the stones of the beach.
When I did tell the priest of the ship,
he refused to believe me. So I have told you now and let it be written down,
since I was never learned to make my letters.
You see there is an iron manacle on my
ankle, but it is quite a comfort. It supports the aching bone that snapped. The
rope perhaps will support my neck and then that will be crushed, or it will
also break, and then I will leave this world to go into the other place, from
which golden things issue out.
It is kind they let me say farewell to
Iron, my dog. Yes, even though he is no longer mine. They have told me a widow
woman, quite wealthy, is eager to have him, since her young son is so taken
with Iron, and Iron with him likewise.
I have witnessed it myself, only this
morning from this window, how the dog walked with the child along the street,
Iron wagging his strong old tail that is only a touch grey to one side. The
child is a fair boy too, with dark sad eyes that clear when he looks at Iron.
And certainly his mother is wealthy, for her cloak is of heavy fur.
That is all, then. That is all I need to
say.
No. I am not sorry for my village. No, I
am not afraid to go to the scaffold. Or to die. No, I am not afraid of these
things. It is the other place I fear. The place that comes after. The place
they are in, the men of Hampp, and my father too. The place where she came
from. The Ship. I cannot even tell you how afraid I am, of that.
The Sea Was In Her Eyes
This
sequel to “Girls in Green Dresses” is also for John Kaiine - who told me something
too, of Elaidh
Day
by day the great ship swung across the ocean. She was rigged so full she seemed
to carry the clouds above her decks. At first, the passengers had looked up,
wondering, at these. Then they looked down and about, and most of them saw the
young woman, for she was the only human female thing aboard.
“She’s a fine-looking girl, she is so,’’
they said. Her hair was brown and piled up heavily on her head.
She was slender and green-eyed. Her
clothes were good, but more than those, they noted three ruby rings on her
fingers and the long rope of pearls, nearly long as she was tall, that she wore
at night to dinner in the saloon.
“She’s alone. Such a girl should have
some company,” said they.
They generously tried to give her company
then, the older men and the younger men, the sailors and the passengers both.
She was quiet and graceful with them all, but they slid from her surface as
fishes slip through water.
“It’s a pity she is a tease,” they said.
“She’s plain as dough,” they said, “despite
her rubies and pearls.”
“She has emeralds for eyes and a cold
green heart.”
The sea was wide as the sky, but now and
then a bit of land appeared, the thin strip of a coast. Here passengers got off
and new passengers walked on. At one land-strip, which had an edging of
mountains, a young man stepped aboard, with six brass-bound boxes and a chest,
and two servants, two white horses and two black dogs, and an owl that would
sit on his arm. His hair was dark and his skin fair. He was handsome, too, and
like everything else, his looks came aboard with him.
Half the day he would sit reading, and
the other half playing the piano in the saloon. He was rich. A prince, they
said.
“Prince Cuzarion,” they said, bowing to
him. And they tried to win his money off him at cards, or by means of bets and
wagers, inviting him to race his dogs against other dogs on board, or to set
the owl on some passing gull. But they never won a penny, and the dogs did not
race, and the owl never chased the gull.
Sometimes the passengers would tell stories
in the saloon after the dinner.
One night the prince, if so he was, told
a marvellous and clever story, about a prince who, on a voyage, was carried
down into the deep by a mermaid where he lived with her some while—she having,
by then, taught him how to breathe under the sea.
“Is that what you’d like, then?” they
asked.
“I am already betrothed,” said Prince
Cuzarion. “Although perhaps I might not mind it, for a month or so.”
All this while, the girl had sat in her
usual corner, drinking her glass of wine, the rubies burning on her white hands
and the pearls weeping down her dress.
Maybe some of them had noticed she would
often glance at the prince. Maybe some of them had even seen her gaze at him
very long.
So now, one of the other men said to
her, “Well, my lady, what do you think of mermaids?”
Although she was so young, she was never
discomposed. And now she spoke calmly and clearly, with neither arrogance or
shyness.
“I think that they exist,” she said, “but
they are not as you imagine, being a cruel race, who like to eat men raw and
sometimes alive, spitting out the bones to make flutes.”
This shocked everyone. The idea itself,
and that this young girl should speak of it. So they said no more to her. But
Prince Cuzarion, he flipped her one look. It was probably only the second he
had ever given her, for she had not taken his fancy, though perhaps he had
taken hers.
That
night a storm came up out of the sea, boiling and black. It put out the stars
and smashed the plate of the moon. That done, it scanned about for something to
harm, but though the land was not far off, it did not want the land. Then, it
saw a ship dancing along, rigged with clouds, and with lights shining from the
port-holes and in the lanterns, and under the howl of the wind fluttered the
notes of a piano.
“I’ll have you,” said the storm, and
flung itself forward, kicking the waves from its path.
When the storm hit the vessel buffeting
blows, the ship’s world went to pieces. Lights and wine glasses and coffee-pots
flew one way, and with them the chairs and boxes, and the piano even. And all
the passengers. Then everything went another way
There was a great yelling and praying.
From the depths of the ship the pair of horses neighed, and above, dogs
barked. But in the ship’s seams the rats looked philosophically about, for
they always knew things might end in tears, and tonight it would be the tears
of the sea.
None saw, or if they did they paid no
heed, to the slight young girl with her hair blown from its pins, standing on
the upper deck, and staring over at the churning waves.
Then the ship split from one end of herself
to the other, and everything spilled out into the sea.
That moment, the girl jumped over the
side. And if any had spied her, they would have seen she was naked as a knife,
but for her ruby rings and the rope of pearls, and her long brown hair.
Cuzarion—and he was a prince—had a great
many accomplishments. He had matchlessly waltzed in glittering ballrooms, and
faultlessly fought on foot and on horseback; he could play the piano better
than most. But swim he could not.
So now, as the cold black water closed
over him, he thought with wrathful despair of all he would miss, and gave
himself up to darkness.
But in the dark, just as the last light
in his brain was going out, he felt a cool warmth pressed all the length of his
body, and through the shadow saw a naked woman held him, while her hair swirled
round them through the currents like a huge flag. She pressed her lips to his,
but all he could taste was salt. Then she blew into his mouth.
“Why
have I not died?’’ Cuzarion presently asked the deeps of the icy sea. But then
he thought that probably he had, and just did not know it yet.
Up above, on the surface of the water,
which was as tumultuous as the lower reaches were almost still, a curious
thing happened.
Among the floating spars and smashed
rails, which were all that was left of the ship, amid the turmoil of night and
waves, the storm, having successfully broken something, was ebbing away to
sleep, but the elements remained all disturbed and out of kilter. Now a
lantern bobbed by, still burning in the murk, and you might see two pale horses
swimming, led by long brown reins, and it was a girl leading them on, and hair
that made the reins. And then several dogs went by, balanced companionable on a
piece of stiff sail, and towed along. And an owl perched on a shattered mast,
to which twenty men were also clinging, lifting its wings above the brine.
Later, when they had come to shore—and not
one of them was lost, although, to be exact, they thought that one of them of
them had been—they told this strangest tale. Of a woman in the sea who drew
them up from the ocean and hung them out like her washing on the bars and
stays and wreckage of the ship. Who bound them there with wet wippy weed from
the under-shores of the sea, and pressed, with small slender hands as strong as
steel, the water from their lungs, then dragged them in, by a net of weed—and
some said of brown hair—to the shores of the land.
There then, in the last of the awful
night, men stood by the driftwood fires they had made, wringing out their
washing-wet clothes and fear-sodden souls, while the horses stamped and the
dogs ran about and the owl dried its feathers. Then rescuers came, with torches
and brandy, from the nearby town.
“It is a miracle—is every man here?”
“Every man and every beast. Look, even
the bloody rats are saved and brought ashore!”
“No, no,” cried one of the servants, “we
have lost our prince.”
“They have lost their prince.”
“And her, we’ve lost the young lady—”
cried another. But when he said this, the rest shushed him.
“She was no girl or maid or lady.”
“What then? What?”
“The sea she was.”
He
woke on a far coast like none he had ever seen, though, being well-read, he had
read of such a place, now and then.
Palms like green spiders on stilts swept
the sand with their legs. The water was a blue turquoise. Above rose wooded
hills, from which blew the scent of orange groves, and the dim ringing of the
bells of a monastery on a high rock.
Nearby sat a girl in a satin dress and a
rope of pearls, toasting fish over a small fire.
“We’re ship-wrecked, then,” said the
prince. “Only you and I. The other poor devils have all gone down. But I
grieve too for my horses and dogs, and the owl. Although perhaps the owl at
least may reach land.”
“Grieve for none,” said the girl, “all
have reached the shore, though another shore than this.”
“Indeed,” said Cuzarion. But a memory
was coming back to him, like a remembered dream. “I think you saved me,” said
he.
“So I did. I saved each and all.”
“That is most praise-worthy and talented
of you,” said Cuzarion, raising his brows. “How, pray, did you do it?”
Then the girl brought him some fish, and
he ate this hungrily, and then drank from the bottle of wine she had also set
by, which was very nicely aged.
“Did people bring these provisions out
of pity for us? And these clothes—this fine shirt and breeches I have on, which
are never mine—and your dress, since—I hope you’ll forgive me—you seemed
without one earlier.”
The girl smiled, not looking at him. She
put back her mass of hair with one hand.
“I brought the fish and the wine, and
the clothes too from chests, out of the deeps of the sea.”
“Did you now,” said Cuzarion.
“Up from the deeps, out of which I
brought you all. It is work I set myself to do.”
Cuzarion made no comment. But then he
said . “It’s a noble thing to be so busy, and at your young age too.”
“How old do you make me out to be?” said
she, tossing her head a little.
“Oh, a great age—eighteen or so.”
“One hundred and eight is nearer the
mark.”
“Ah.”
Then she laughed. “You think I lie, of
course. But I tell you true. My name is Elaidh. My mother was a mermaid, and
she got me by a human man, and left me in his care, the way the mermaids do,
for all that race are female. Then when I was thirteen years old, my mother
wanted me, to transform me to her kind, with a long silver tail and hair green
as grass. But I loved my da, and so I stayed with him. I thought I should only
be a woman, but it seems I have great powers from my mother, though she was
cruel, as mermaids are. I am long-lived, and the ocean is familiar to me. I can
breathe in water easy as air, and I can give my gift to humankind for a little
while, when I blow in their mouths. Also, I can tell the ships that may go
down. I walk about the quays, and suss them out. Then I go sailing on them, and
when they sink, save everyone I can. With your ship I had great luck, and saved
every living thing.”
“I must thank you, then,” said Cuzarion,
attempting to laugh, but seeming uneasy. He added, “Do your pearls and rubies
come from the sea, too?”
“Oh yes. There are great hoards of
jewels and other riches that lie there, mermaid-trove, that I steal from them.
My da and I were rich, while he yet lived.”
“Yet a pity,” said Cuzarion, looking
under his lids at her, “that you only blew the breath of life into my mouth.
All this while I’d been thinking it was a kiss.”
Then she sat back and looked quietly at
him.
“Oh, do you see me now?” she asked.
Cuzarion, though a prince, had the grace
to blush. But then, he was young as a child beside her.
Some
while they were on that coast.
Elaidh taught Cuzarion to swim, and sometimes
she would whisper the magic air into his mouth so he might swim under the sea,
but not very far down. Even so, he saw wonderful sights there. Peculiar
creatures that moved about below the rocks, and mysterious plants and corals,
and fish of rainbow colours.
By day, he and she would swim then, or
walk about the country. Going inland, they went by mustard fields and fields of
lavender, and on the hills the bees rose in clouds, just as the fish rose in
the sea at their passing. Now and then they met with people, who spoke a
language Cuzarion, for all his education, did not know. But Elaidh knew it.
She told him frankly she knew by now most of the languages of the earth, for
she had journeyed nearly everywhere. “There’s no land,” said she, “the water
cannot take me.”
In a village under the monastery rock,
they went into a cool blue church whose walls were figured with saints. And
Cuzarion was amazed Elaidh could do this, and more amazed when she bowed to the
cross, for he had heard mermaids, and their kin, could not have one single
thing to do with God.