Legenda Maris (20 page)

Cuzarion was no longer young. His hair
had turned grey, and though his court, and the mistresses, still lauded him as
handsome, it was a sort of handsomeness which might have looked better on a
statue than a man.

But the boy—oh, the boy. He was like the
morning sun, so young and straight and fair, his hair the light brown of
acorns, his eyes the green of apples. In honesty, he resembled neither his
father nor his mother, the princess, at all.

In the tradition of the royal household,
the prince’s son had the same name as his father, just as the prince had had
his own father’s name. Cuzarion, they were all named that.

“Cuzarion,” therefore said Cuzarion, to
his son, “I’ve called you to me to tell you a tale that you will think a lie.
Or else you’ll think I have gone mad.”

But Prince Cuzarion’s son, Prince
Cuzarion, smiled kindly at his father.

“No, sir. I would never think that.”

“Well, then, we’ll sit here. Let me tell
it through, and then decide, for you have reached a proper age, both to hear
it, and to judge.”

Then the elder prince spoke of the voyage
he had made those few years, more than twenty-five, in his past. Of the storm
and the sinking ship, of how Elaidh had saved him and every other living thing
aboard. But then he told of how he had loved Elaidh, and lain with Elaidh, and
presently left Elaidh to come home and resume his life. To do him credit, the
elder Prince Cuzarion did not paint his love for Elaidh as anything more than
it had been, the passion of a month, nor himself as any more than he was, a man
capable only of a month’s fidelity.

And the younger prince listened gravely.
Even when his father explained how Elaidh was a magical being, the daughter of
a human man and a mermaid of the deeps of the ocean.

Then the elder prince mentioned his marriage
to the Princess Sapphyra. That it was pleasant enough. That it went by. And
that one day he found her sobbing, and she said, “We have no children, you and
I.”

“And we had done everything that humans
may do,” said the elder prince, “to ensure a child between us. Yet none
arrived.”

“But then I did arrive,” said the young
prince. “It is most sorry I am, to have kept you and mother waiting.”

“My son,” said the elder prince, “you
were born of a spell. You are my child, it is a fact, but not the child of the
princess. The mermaids have their children by another means. It is the father
brings them forth, having carried them a while, without knowing it. It seems
Elaidh visited the princess before her wedding. Elaidh gave her sapphires, for
her name, from the depths of the sea. And one night Sapphyra came to me in a
necklace of these jewels. Later, as I slept, I dreamed of Elaidh, and in my
sleep I possessed Elaidh as a man possesses a woman. And when I woke, the sheet
was damp from my lust.” He glanced here at his son, a little afraid to have
embarrassed him. But the younger prince was not ashamed. Still he sat gravely,
listening, as if in his heart he somehow knew it all.

“Sapphyra too,” said the elder prince, “lay
in the bed that night. In the dawn, a ray of sun fell on the coverlet. Then she
and I woke, for something stirred on the mattress between us. And when she
threw off the covers, a baby lay there, white as the sea-foam, and clean as the
morning.

“And this was I?”

“And this, my son, my mermaid’s son, was
you.”

“Then,” said the young man, “Elaidh is
my mother.”

“So she must be.”

“Shall I ever meet her?”

The eider prince sighed. “Perhaps. I
hope you may. But I think it will never be in my lifetime. For I think I shall
never meet that lovely girl again, she that was the evening star to me, and
the flight of a bird. She that I forgot then, as I forget now how to play my
piano, and everything—but her.”

But the boy was in a sort of trance, and
could only look glad, thinking of his new history. He said, “How shall I know
her, if she should come here?”

“Ah,” said the elder Cuzarion. “Easily
enough. She will look, I think, just as she did. Eighteen she will look, your
own age now. For her kind live long but never grow old. And she is in her
colouring also like you. Her hair is brown that has a spirit of green in it.
Her skin is clear as waters.”

“And since she is half mermaid, how will
I notice that?”

“As I did, my son, if I’d looked as I
should. For though she shed no single tear, the sea was in her eyes.”

Because Our Skins Are Finer

In the
early winter,
when the seas are strong, the grey seals come ashore among the islands. Their
coats are like dull silver in the cold sunlight, and for these coats of theirs
men kill them. It has always been so, one way and another. There were knives
and clubs, now there are the guns, too. A man with his own gun and his own boat
does well from the seals, and such a man was Huss Hullas. A grim and taciturn
fellow he was, with no kin, and no kindness, living alone in his sea-grey croft
on the sea rim of Dula under the dark old hill. Huss Hullas had killed in his
time maybe three hundred seals, and then, between one day and the next, he
would not go sealing anymore, not for money and surely not for love.

Love had always been a stranger to him,
that much was certain. He had no woman, and cared for himself as any man can in
the islands. And once a month he would row to the town on the mainland, and
drink whisky, and go upstairs with one of the paid girls. And row back to Dula
in the sunrise, no change to be seen in him for better or worse. Then one time
he went to the town and there was a new girl working at the bar. Morna was her
name. Her hair was black as liquorice, and her skin was rosy. As the evening
drew to a close, Huss Hullas spoke to Morna, but not to order whisky. And Morna
answered him, and he got to his feet and went out and banged the bar door
behind him. It seemed she would not go with him as the other girls would. She
had heard tell of him, it seemed. Not that he was rough, or anything more than
businesslike in bed, but he was no prince either, with no word to say and no
laugh to laugh, and not even a grunt to show he had been gladdened. “I will not
go upstairs with a lump of rock, then,” she said. “There are true men enough
who’ll pay me.”

Now love was a stranger to him, but so
was failure. And though this was a small prize to fail at the winning of, yet
he did not like to fail. If he would eat a rabbit or bird for his meal, he
would find and shoot one. If he baked bread, it would rise. If he broke a bone,
he could set it himself, and it would mend. Only the sea had ever beaten him,
and that not often, and he is a foolish man will not respect the sea, who
lives among her isles. Even the Shealcé, the Seal People, dropped down before
Huss Hullas’s gun obediently. And since he had never yet asked a free woman to
take him, he had never yet been refused, till Morna did it.

When he went again to town, he went
before the month was up, and when Morna came by his table, he said she should
sit down and drink whisky with him. But Morna stepped sharply away. “I will not
do that, neither.”

“What will you do, then?” said Huss Hullas.
“Will you begot the sack?”

“Not I,” said she. “The rest like me.
They have cause.”

“I will give you a pound more,” he said.

Morna smiled. “No.”

“How much, then?”

“Nothing, then.” And she was gone, and
presently so was he.

When he came back the next month, he
brought her a red lacquer comb that had been his mother’s.

“What now?” she said. “Is it wooing me,
you are?”

“Learning your price, then,” he said.

“Well, I’ll not go with you for an old
comb.”

“It’s worth a bit.”

“I have said.”

“For what, then?”

Morna frowned at him angrily. It must be
made clear, he was not a bad-looking man for all the grim way he had with him,
which had not altered, nor his stony face, even as he offered her the comb. And
his eyes, dark as the hill of Dula, said only:
You will do it. This is just
your game.
And so it was.

It was winter by then, and all along the
shore the oil-lamps burned where the electricity had not yet been brought in,
and the seals were swimming south like the waves, as they had swum for hundreds
of years.

“Well,” said Morna, “bring me a sealskin
for a coat, and I’ll go upstairs with you. That is my promise. It shall keep me
warm if you cannot, you cold pig of a man.”

“Ah,” said Huss Hullas, and he got up
and went out of the bar to find another woman for the night, on Fish Street.

The
seals came that month and beached on all the islands west of Dula. They lay
under the pale winter sun and called to each other, lying on the rocks where
the sea could find them. On some of these bleak places it might seem men had
never lived yet in the whole world, but still men would come there.

One or another rowed over to Dula and
hammered on Huss Hullas’s door, and he opened it with a rod and a line he was
making in one hand.

“The seals are in. Are you ready, man?”

“I am.”

“We shall be out at dawn tomorrow, with
the tide to help us.”

“I’ll be there.”

“So you will, and your fine gun. How
many will you get this winter?”

“Enough.”

“And one for her on the mainland.”

“We’ll say nothing of that,” said Huss
Hullas, and the man looked at him and nodded. Grim and hard and black, the eyes
in Huss Hullas’s head could have put out fires, and his fists could kill a man,
as well as a seal.

In the first stealth of the sunrise,
Huss Hullas rowed away from Dula with his gun and his bullets by him. He rowed
to where the ocean narrows and the rocks rise up to find the air. In the water
ever westward, dark buoys bobbed in the blushing water that were the heads of
seals. Tarnished by wet they lay, too, on the ledges of the isles, shelf on
shelf of them, and sang in their solemn inhuman way, not knowing death
approached them.

There was some ice, and here and there a
seal lay out on the plates of it. They watched the men in the shadowy boats
from their round eyes. The Shealcé is their old name, and still they are named
so now and then, the Seal People, who have a great city down under the sea.

When the guns spoke first, the Shealcé
looked about them, as if puzzled, those that did not flop and loll and bleed.
When the guns spoke again, the rocks themselves seemed to move as shelf upon
shelf slid over into the water and dived deep down. The guns shouted as if to
call them back, the pink water smoked and blood ran on the ice. Men laughed. It
is not the way, anymore, to know that what you kill is a living thing. It was
different once, in the old times, very different then, when you would know and
honour even the cut-down wheat. Men must live, like any other creatures, and it
is not always a sin to kill, but to kill without knowledge may well be a sin,
perhaps.

Huss Hullas had shipped his oars, and
let the current move him through the channels. He knew the islands and their
rocks as he knew his own body, their moods and their treacheries, and the way
the water ran. He drifted gently in among the panic of the seals, and slew them
as they hastened from the other men towards him, along the ice.

Each one he killed he knew, and would
claim after. Every man marked his own.

Then, as Huss Hullas’s boat nosed her
way between the rocks, the sun stood up on the water. In the rays of it he saw
before him, on a patch of ice, one lone seal, but it was larger by far than all
the others, something larger than any seal Huss Hullas had ever seen. Plainly,
it was a bull, but young, unscarred, and shining in the sunlight. It had a coat
on it that, in the dawn, looked for sure more gold than grey. And even Huss
Hullas could not resist a little grimace that was his smile, and he raised the
gun.

As he did so the seal turned and looked
at him with its circular eyes, blacker than his own.

Yes, now, keep still,
the man
thought. For to blunder in the shot and spoil such fur would be a grave pity.

Huss Hullas was aiming for one of the
eyes, but at the last instant the great golden seal lowered its head, and the
bullet, as it speared away, struck it in the brain. It seemed to launch itself
forward, the seal, in the same instant, and the dull flame of its body hit the
water beyond the ice. Huss Hullas cursed aloud and grabbed up one of his oars.
Already dead, the seal clove the water in a lovely arching dive—and was dammed
against Huss Hullas’s wooden rower.

His strong arms cracking and his mouth
uttering every blasphemy known among the islands—which is many and varied—Huss
Hullas held the seal, first with the oar, next with his hands, and as the boat
roiled and skewed and threatened to turn herself over in the freezing sea, he
struggled and thrust for the nearest edge of rock. Here, by some miracle, he
dragged the dead weight of the seal the boat, himself, aground, his hands full
of blood and fur, and the oar splintering.

He stood over the seal, until another
boat came through the narrows. Frost had set the seal’s dead eyes by then, as
he towered over it ranting and cursing it, and the golden fur was like mud.

“That is a rare big beast, Huss Hullas.
It should fetch a good price at the sheds.”

“This is not for the sheds.”

Taking out his knife then, he began to
skin the great seal.

When he was done, he tossed the meat and
fat and bones away, and took the heavy syrupy skin into the boat with him. After
the other seals had been seen to, he left his share with the rest of the men.
They saw the oar was ailing, and they knew better than try to cheat him.

He rowed back to Dula with the skin of
the one seal piled round him and the oar complaining.

The
remainder of that day, with the skin pegged up in the out-house, Huss Hullas
sat fishing off Dula, like a man who has no care on earth, and no vast joy in
it, either. If he looked forward to his next visit to the town, you could not
have said from the manner of him. But he caught a basket of fish and went in as
the sun was going out to clean and strip them and set them to cook on the
stove.

The croft was like a dozen others, a
single room with a fireplace in one wall and a big old bed on another. Aside
from the stove there was a cupboard or two, and tackle for the boat or for the
fishing stacked about, some carpentry tools, and some books that had been his
father’s that Huss Hullas never read. A couple of oil-lamps waited handy to be
lit. Often he would make do with the light of the fire. What he did there in
his loneliness, sitting in his chair all the nights of the months he did not go
drinking and whoring, was small enough. He would clean his gun, and mend his
clothing and his boots; he would repair the leg of a stool, cook his food and
eat it, and throw the plate into a pan of water for the morning. He would brew
tea. He would think to himself whatever thoughts came to him, and listen to the
hiss and sigh of the sea on the rim of Dula. In the bed he would sleep early,
and wake early. While he slept he kept his silence. There rose up no
comfortable snoring from Huss Hullas, and if he dreamed at all, he held the
dreaming to himself. And two hours before the sun began, or before that, he
would be about. He could stride right across Dula in a day, and had often done
so and come back in the evening, with the stars and the hares starting over the
hill.

This night though, as the fish were
seething and the sun going down into the water on a path of blood, he walked back
to the out-house, and took a stare at the sealskin drying on its pegs. In the
last sunglare, the fur of the pelt was like new copper. It had a beautiful
sheen to it, and no mistake. It was too good to be giving away. But there, he
had made his bargain—not to the girl, but to himself. Set in his ways, he had
not the tactics to go back on his word. So with a shrug, he banged shut the
outhouse door, and went to eat his supper in the croft.

It was maybe an hour after the sunset
that the wind began to lift along the sea.

In a while, Huss Hullas put aside the
sleeve he was darning, and listened. He had lived all his life in sight and
sound of the ocean, and the noise of water and weather was known to him. Even
the winds had their own voices, but this wind had a voice like no other he had
ever heard. At first he paid it heed, and then he went back to his darning. But
then again he sat still and listened, and he could not make it out, so much any
could tell, if they had seen him. At last, he got to his feet and took the one
oil-lamp that was burning on the mantelpiece, and opened the door of the croft.
He stood there, gazing out into the darkness, the lamp swinging its lilt of
yellow over the sloping rock, and beyond it only the night and the waves. There
was nothing to be found out there. The sea was not even rough, only a little
choppy as it generally would be at this season of the year. The sky was open
and stars hung from it, though the moon would not be over the hill for another
hour or more.

So there was no excuse for the wind, or
the way it sounded. No excuse at all. And what had caught Huss Hullas’s
attention in the croft was five times louder in the outer air.

It was full of crying, the wind was,
like the keening of women around a grave. And yet, there was nothing human in
the noise. It rose and fell and came and went, like breathing, now high and
wild and lamenting, now low and choked and dire.

Huss Hullas was not a superstitious man,
and he did not believe any of the old tales that get told around the fires on
winter nights. He had not enough liking for his own kind to have caught their
romancing. Yet he heard the wind, and finding nothing he went inside again and
bolted the door.