Legenda Maris (21 page)

And next he took a piece of wood and
worked on it, sawing and hammering it, while the kettle sang on the hob and the
fire spat from a dose of fresh peat. The wind was not so easily heard in this
way. Nor anything much outside. Though when the knock came sharp on his bolted
door, Huss Hullas heard it well enough.

In all the years he had lived on Dula,
there had only been one other time someone had knocked on the door by night.
There are some two hundred souls live there, and no phone and not even a vet.
One summer dark, with a child of his ailing, a man came to ask Huss Hullas to row
him over to the mainland for a doctor. Huss Hullas refused to row, but for
three pounds he let the man hire his boat. That was his way. Later that night
the doctor was operating for appendicitis over the hill on a scrubbed kitchen
table. The child lived; the father said to Huss Hullas: “Three pounds is the
worth you set on a child’s life.”

“Be glad,” was the answer, “I set it so
cheap.”

Money or no, Huss Hullas did not like to
be disturbed, and perhaps it was this made him hesitate, now. Then the knocking
came and a voice called to him out of the crying of the wind.

“Open your door,” it said. “I see your
light under it.”

And the voice was a woman’s.

Maybe he was curious and maybe not, but
he went to the door at last and unbolted it and threw it wide.

The thick dull glow of the lamp left on
the mantelpiece fell out around him on the rock. But directly where his shadow
fell instead, the woman was standing. In this way he could not see her well,
but he made a guess she was from one of the inland crofts. She seemed dressed
as the women there were dressed, shabby and shawled, and her fashion of talking
seemed enough like theirs.

“Well, what is it?” he said to her.

“It’s a raw night,” she said. “I would
come in.”

“That’s no reason I should let you.”

“You are the man hunts the seals,” she
said.

“I am.”

“Then I would come in and speak of
that.”

“I’ve nothing to sell. The skins are in
the sheds across the water.”

“One skin you have here.”

“Who told you so?”

“No matter who told me,” said the woman.
“I heard it was a fine one. Beautiful and strangely coloured, and the size of
two seals together.”

“Not for sale,” said Huss Hullas,
supposing sullenly one of the other sealers had jabbered, though how news had
got to Dula he was not sure, unless he had been spied on.

“It is a love gift, then?” said the
woman. “You are courting, and would give it to her?”

At this, his granite temper began to
stir.

“This skin is mine, and no business of
yours,” he said. “Get home.”

When he said this the wind seemed to
swell and break on the island like a wave. Startled, he raised his head, and
for a moment there seemed to be a kind of mist along the water, a mist that
moved, swimming and sinuous, as if it were full of live things.

“
Get home
,” the woman repeated
softly. “And where do you think my home to be?”

When he looked back at her, she had
turned a little and come out of his shadow, so the lamp could reach her. She
was not young, but neither was she old, and she was handsome, too, but this is
not what he saw first. He saw that he had been mistaken in the matter of the
shawl, for she was shawled only in her hair, which was very long, streaming
round her, and of a pale ashy brown uncommon enough he had never before seen
it. Her eyes, catching the lamp, were black and brilliant, but they were odd,
too, in a way he could not make out, though he did not like them much.
Otherwise she might have seemed normal, except her hair was wet, and her clothing,
which was shapeless and looked torn, ran with water. Perhaps it had rained as
she walked over the hill.

“Your home is nothing to me,” he said.
“And the skin is not for sale.”

“We will speak of it,” she said. And she
put out her hand as if to touch him and he sprang backwards before he knew what
he did. Next moment she came in after him, and the door fell shut on the night,
closing them in the croft together.

In all his life Huss Hullas had never
feared anything, save the ocean, which was more common sense than fear. Now he
stood and stared at the woman with her wet dress and her wet hair, knowing that
in some way fear her he did, but he had not the words or even the emotion in
him to explain it to himself, or what else he felt, for fear was not nearly all
of it.

He must have stood a long while, staring
like that, and she a long while letting him do so. What nudged him at length
was another thing altogether. A piece of coal barked on the fire, and in the
silence after, he realised the wind had dropped, and its eerie wailing ceased.

“Your name is Huss Hullas,” the woman
said in the silence. “Do not ask me how I learned it. My name, so we shall know
each other, is Saiuree.”

When she told him her name, the hair
rose on his neck. It did not sound human, but more like the hiss the spume
would make, or the sea through a channel, or some creature of the sea.

“Well,” he said harshly. “Well.”

“It shall be well,” she agreed, “for
I’ll have the skin from your shed. But I’ll pay you fairly for it, whatever
price you have set.”

He laughed then, shortly and bitterly,
for he was not given to laughter, he did it ill and it ill-became him.

“The price is one you would not like to
pay, Missus.”

“Tell it me, and I shall know.”

“The price,” he said brutishly, “is to
spill between a woman’s spread legs.”

But she only looked at him.

“If that is what you wish, that is what
I can give you.”

“Ah,” he said. “But you see, it’s not
you I want.”

“So,” she said, and she was quiet
awhile. He felt an uneasy silly triumph while she was, standing there in his
own croft with him, and he unable to show her the door. Then she said, “It is a
black-haired girl on the mainland you would have. Her name is Morna.”

His triumph went at that.

“Who told you?” he said.

“You,” said she.

And he understood it was true. She
smiled, slow and still, like a ripple spreading in a tide pool.

“Oh, Huss Hullas,” said she, “I might
have filled this room up with pearls, and not have missed them, or covered the
floor with old green coins from the days before any man lived here. There is a
ship sunk, far out, and none knows of it. There are old shields rotting black
on the sides of it and a skeleton sits in the prow with a gold ring on his
neck, and I might have brought you that ring. Or farther out there is another
ship with golden money in boxes. Or I could bring you the stone head with stone
snakes for hair, that was cast into the sea for luck, and make you rich. But
you will have your bar girl and that is your price.”

Huss Hullas sat down in his chair before
the fire and wished he had some whisky by him. At the woman who called herself
Saiuree, he snarled: “You’re mad, then.”

“Yes,” she said. “Mad with grief. Like
those you heard in the wind, crying for the sea they have lost and the bodies
they have lost, so they may not swim anymore through the waterworld, or through
the towered city under the ocean.”

“I’ve no interest in stories,” he said.

“Have you none.”

“No. But you’ll tell me next you are one
of the Shealcé, and the skin you seek is your own.”

“So I am,” she said. “But the skin is
not mine. It is the skin of my only son, Connuh, that you shot on the ice for
his beauty and his strength as the dawn stood on the water.”

Huss Hullas spat in the fire.

“My mother had a son, too. There’s no
great joy in sons.”

“Ah,” she said, “it’s that you hate
yourself so much you can never come to love another. Well, we are not all of
your way. Long before men came here, the Seal People held this water and this
land. And when men came they took the fish from us and drove us out. And when,
in passing then, we paused to rest here, they killed us, because our skins are
finer than their own. How many of this People have you slain, man? Many
hundreds, is it not? And today with your gun you slew a prince of this People.
For he was of the true Shealcé, from whom all the Shealcé now take their name.
But still even we do not give hate for hate, greed for greed, injustice for
injustice. I’ll pay your price. Look in my eyes and see it.”

“I’ll not look in your eyes.”

“So you will,” she said.

She came close. No steam rose from her,
nor was she dry. Her dress was seaweed, and nothing else. Her hair was like the
sea itself. He saw why he had misliked her eyes. About their round bright
blackness there was no white at all. Even so, he looked at them and into them
and through them, out into the night.

Above,
the night sea was black, but down, far down where the seal dives, it was not
black at all. There was a kind of light, but it came from nothing in the sea.
It came from the inside of the eyes of the ones who swam there, who had seen
the depths of the water in their own way, and now showed it to the man. If Huss
Hullas wished to see it, who can say? Probably he did not. A man with so little
life-love in him he was like one without blood, to him maybe to see these
things he saw was only wasted time. But if he had only walled himself in all
these years against his own thought and his own dreams, then maybe there was a
strange elation in the seeing, and a cold pain.

At first then, only the darkness through
which he saw as he went down in it, like one drowning, but alive and keeping
breath, as the
seals
did,
on land or in ocean both. Then there began to be fish, like polished knives
without their hafts, flashing this way and that way. And through the fish, Huss
Hullas began to see the currents of the water, the milky strands like breezes
going by. All around there too, the dim shadows of the Shealcé, each one
graceful and lovely in that gentle shape of theirs, like dancers at their play,
but moving e
ver down and down, and ever northwards.

They passed a wreck. It was so old it
was like the skeleton of a leaf and in the prow a human skeleton leaned. It had
a gold torc round its bone throat, while the shields clung in black bits and
flakes to the open sides of the vessel, just as Saiuree had said. It was a
Wicing longboat of many, many hundred years before.

The seals swam over and about the wreck,
and then away, and Huss Hullas followed them.

And it began to seem to him then that he
felt the silk of the water on his flesh, and the power and grace of the seal
whose body he seemed to have come to inhabit, but he was not sure.

Shortly
beyond the wreck
there was a space of sheer blackness, that might have been a wall of rock. But
here and there were openings in the black, and one by one the seals ebbed
through with the
water
and
Huss Hullas after them. On the farther side was the city of the Shealcé.

Now there are many tales told of that
spot, but this was how he
saw
it for himself.

It must in part have been a natural
thing, and this is not to be wondered at, for the Shealcé have no hands in
their water form with which to build, whatever figure they may conjure on the
land. Above would be islets, no doubt, where they might bask in the sun of
summer. But here the cold-sea coral had grown, pale greyish red and sombre
blueish white, and rose in spines and funnels all about. It seemed to Huss
Hullas like a city of chimneys, for the curious hollow formations twisted and
humped and ascended over each but all went up—in places ten times the height of
a man and more—and at their tops they smoked and bubbled, and that was the air
brought down into them by the Shealcé themselves, in their chests and in their
fur, which gradually went up again and w
as
lost in the
water.

So he beheld these pastel spires, softly
smoking, and glittering too. For everywhere huge clusters of pearls had been
set, or those shells which shine, or other ornaments of the sea, though nothing
that had come from men, not silver or gold, nor jewels.

But strangest of all, deep in the city
and far away, there were a host of faint lights, for all the world like
vague-lit windows high in towers. And these yellow eyes beamed out through the
water as if they watched who came and who departed, but if the Shealcé had made
and lit them he did not know. Nor did he think of it then, perhaps.

For all the seals swam in amid the
chimneyed city and he with them, and suddenly he heard again that dreadful
hopeless crying, but this time it was not in the wind he heard it, but in his
own brain. And this time, too, he knew what it said. He saw, at last, the
shapes about him were shadows for sure, were wraiths, the ghosts only of seals,
who swam out this final journey before their lamenting memory should die as
their bodies had already died from the bullets of men.