Legenda Maris (28 page)

If you are angry he will speak softly of
little things. If you are sad he will murmur that all will be well. But he has
already told you that. Perhaps this is his only concession.

When, that evening or night, or that
next day, he has taken you back over the water, and you get out on the
mainland, hard as concrete, built high and blown loud with life, then you will
be in a position of examining properly, if you mean to, what you have seen and
heard. You will decide then, and possibly in a different form from your
decision in the village. You may find you believe it all, or some of it, or
none of it. Or next year you may. One dusk, or dawn. Or never. You may never
ever believe a word.

I do.

Xoanon:
Primitive, usually wooden image of deity supposed to have fallen from heaven.

Concise Oxford Dictionary (1987
)

Land’s End, The Edge of the Sea

Have
you ever seen them? Many have.
I
have. Once I saw two very young
children. Her hair was the colour of honey, his like molasses. The morning sky
was blue and the sun shone with summer. They were playing, running to and fro,
throwing little sticks, each for the other to catch, laughing and careless as
the young, if possible, should always be.

Intuitively, having watched them a
moment, smiling, pleased with their pleasure, I glanced beyond them to see if
some nearby cottage, their home, stood there, just above the line of the water
and the sand.

No house was to be seen. It must be
farther off, then, or a little further inland. No matter. They were in the
prime of health and high spirits, obviously cared for.

Presently, together, they ran away along
the surf-line fizzing on the beach, sprinting towards the early west.

The second time, about three months
later, I saw a young couple, he perhaps twenty or so, and she a little less.
There they were, strolling there, at the brink of the land, the water,
alternately leaving their elegant footprints in the sand, or splashing through
the foam.

Her hair was black as a crow’s wing, and
his was pale as barley. They laughed gently and talked intently, the way,
still, lovers may.

The next couple I beheld, it was quite a
few years later. I had been elsewhere. They too held hands, like lovers, and
both their sets of hair were iron grey. They were some eighty or ninety years
in age, I thought. They did not chatter or murmur, but in a while he picked up
a cream-white shell, and they passed this delicately and respectfully between
them, as if it were some great treasure.

He walked then on the inside of the way,
tending left and nearest to the land. But the fourth time I saw them, I was in
company with two or three friends. We had come from a village feast a little
farther up the coast. It was almost midnight and we bore a single flaming
torch. She, now was on the inside of the way. Her dress had spangles on it and
none that saw them could doubt it was a wedding dress, and that they had been
joined together that very day.  They were in age about thirty.

One of the strangest times, perhaps, was
when she was far older, and he a little boy, running up to her, smiling. Their
skins then were smoky dark but their eyes a pale blue. Sister and brother?
Mother and child?

How delighted they were in each other’s
company, but nothing smug or excluding about this—if they caught your eye, they
would willingly exchange talk with you. There was one time, an old fellow from my
own birthplace had stumbled and hurt his ankle, and carefully and
good-humouredly, the man and woman, then about twenty years old perhaps, helped
him to the nearest house. He said later, he felt he knew them, was even related
to them, but did not know how, or from where.

Another acquaintance of mine, a young
fisher-woman, glimpsed the couple at midday, out in the full bright sun, and on
this occasion, they were two babies, rolling and chortling, as ever at the
border between land and water. My friend was concerned for they were so
very
young and no one with them... but they seemed, she said, to dissolve into
the midday glow.

No one I know has seen them either
swimming or walking inland. They paddle through the surf, or walk the land side
about four feet in.

It is the border, the literal seam that
connects land and ocean. Where the glittering and restless join of white
stitchwork is, of surf and sand. The sea never fully empties there. The land
never encroaches.

Water and earth have married. They
became each other, and new things, and human things, and doubtless too others,
marine and harder to perceive—fish and sea-crabs, limpets and beings of the
rock-pools, blue serpents like ropes.

The very last time I beheld them was a
year back. Her skin was black as iron, her hair like golden thread. His skin
was tanned to copper and his hair like silver silk. She was about eighteen
years young, and fresh as the spray and the first spring flowers. And he,
despite his colouring, plainly was as old as the hills inland, and old as the
tides beyond the surf.

None of us really know their purpose, if
even they have one.

It is enough they are there. As it is
enough the fluid sea is there, and the water’s edge, and the solid land, the
sky, night and day and time. And the air and the void of space. Every one with
its join, its border, its compact, its marriage.

All things are separate. And all things:
One.

Publishing History of the Stories

Girls
in Green Dresses

Weird
Tales
.
No 321 (Vol 57, No 1), Fall 2000.

Octocon
Souvenir Programme
.
The National Irish Science Fiction Convention 2004, Dublin.

Magritte’s
Secret Agent
–
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine
. Vol 1 No 2, May 1981.

Dreams
Of Dark And Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee
, Arkham House,
USA, 1986.

The
Gorgon And Other Beastly Tales
, DAW Books, New York, 1985. New edition
Fantastic Books, USA, 2013.

Mermaids
And Other Mysteries Of the Deep
. San Francisco: Prime Books, 2015.
Edited by Paula Guran.

Paper
Boat
–
Arts Council Anthology – New Stories, 1978

Realms
Of Fantasy
.
Vol 3 No 3, February 1997.

Lace-Maker,
Blade-Taker, Grave-Breaker, Priest
–
Lace and Blade
, Leda, an
imprint of Norilana Books, 2008, edited by Deborah J Ross.

Under
Fog (The Wreckers)
–
Subterfuge.
NewCon Press, England 2008.

The
Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror 20
. New York: Running Press, 2009. Edited
by Stephen Jones.

The
Sea Was In Her Eyes
–
Octocon Souvenir Programme
. The National Irish Science Fiction
Convention 2004, Dublin.

Because
Our Skins Are Finer

Rod
Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine
. Vol 1 No 8, November 1981.

The
Gorgon And Other Beastly Tales
, DAW Books, New York, 1985. New edition
Fantastic Books, USA, 2013.

Dreams
Of Dark And Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee
, Arkham House,
USA, 1986.

Leviathan
– original to
this collection

Where
Does The Town Go At Night

Interzone
. No 147,
September 1999.

H.P.
Lovecraft's Magazine Of Horror
. Vol 1 No 2. (Spring 2005). Pages
62-74.

Tempting
The Gods: The Selected Stories Of Tanith Lee
Volume One
, Wildside
Press, USA, 2009.

Xoanon

H.P.
Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror
. Vol. 1, No. 1 Spring 2004.

Land’s
End, The Edge Of The Sea
– original to this collection

Books by Tanith Lee

A Selection from her 93 titles

The Birthgrave Trilogy (The Birthgrave; Vazkor, son
of Vazkor, Quest for the White Witch)

The Vis Trilogy (The Storm Lord; Anackire; The White
Serpent)

The Flat Earth Opus (Night’s Master; Death’s Master;
Delusion’s Master; Delirium’s Mistress; Night’s Sorceries)

Don’t Bite the Sun

Drinking Sapphire Wine

The Paradys Quartet (The Book of the Damned; The
Book of the Beast; The Book of the Dead; The Book of the Mad)

The Venus Quartet (Faces Under Water; Saint Fire; A
Bed of Earth; Venus Preserved)

Sung in Shadow

A Heroine of the World

The Scarabae Blood Opera (Dark Dance; Personal
Darkness;

Darkness, I)

The Blood of Roses

When the Lights Go Out

Heart-Beast

Elephantasm

Reigning Cats and Dogs

The Unicorn Trilogy (Black Unicorn; Gold Unicorn;
Red Unicorn)

The Claidi Journals (Law of the Wolf Tower; Wolf
Star Rise, Queen of the Wolves, Wolf Wing)

The Piratica Novels (Piratica 1; Piratica 2;
Piratica 3)

The Silver Metal Lover

Metallic Love

The Gods Are Thirsty

Collections

Nightshades

Dreams of Dark and Light

Red As Blood – Tales From the Sisters Grimmer

Tamastara, or the Indian Nights

The Gorgon

Tempting the Gods

Hunting the Shadows

Sounds and Furies

Also Published
by Immanion Press

The Colouring Book Series

Greyglass

To Indigo

L’Amber

Killing Violets

Ivoria

Cruel Pink

Turquoiselle

Ghosteria Volume 1: The Stories

Ghosteria Volume 2: The Novel: Zircons May Be
Mistaken

A Different City

About the Author

As written by
her

Tanith Lee was born in North London (UK) in 1947. Because her
parents were professional dancers (ballroom, Latin American) and had to live
where the work was, she attended a number of truly terrible schools, and didn’t
learn to read – she is also dyslectic – until almost age 8. And then only
because her father taught her. This opened the world of books to Lee, and by 9
she was writing. After much better education at a grammar school, Lee went on
to work in a library. This was followed by various other jobs – shop assistant,
waitress, clerk – plus a year at art college when she was 25-26. In 1974 this
mosaic ended when DAW Books of America, under the leadership of Donald A
Wollheim, bought and published Lee’s
The Birthgrave
, and thereafter 26
of her novels and collections.

Since then Lee has written
around 95 books, and over 300 short stories. 4 of her radio plays have been
broadcast by the BBC; she also wrote 2 episodes (
Sarcophagus
and
Sand
)
for the TV series
Blake’s 7
. Some of her stories regularly get read on
Radio 4 Extra.

Lee writes in many styles in
and across many genres, including Horror, SF and Fantasy, Historical,
Detective, Contemporary-Psychological, Children and Young Adult. Her
preoccupation, though, is always people.

In 1992 she married the
writer-artist-photographer John Kaiine, her companion since 1987. They live on
the Sussex Weald, near the sea, in a house full of books and plants, with two
black and white overlords called cats.