Legenda Maris (3 page)

But the master did not hear. He thought
he fished for mermaids and held out the bait, and would soon catch both—and
once on land they would be helpless as any fish thrashing and rolling and at
the mercy of anything on legs. Yet Elrahn saw their playful strength and
suppleness and their sharp teeth and the pink under the green of their eyes.
Elrahn heard the old grandda at the inn saying, “Then no man alive, nor God in
His sky, can save you.”

“Master—come away!” called Elrahn, now
loudly.

And when he did this the mermaids both
turned their heads as one, and stared right at him.

And under the silver-green and pink of
their eyes, was black, a black as deep as the unsounded depths of the outermost
seas, from which they had come.

What a journey it must be for them, with
all the trial and danger the in-running salmon finds. The terrible currents and
waiting enemies, the rocks and tides, the change from salt to soft water. Yes,
they were strong, these girls, and cunning too, for they had survived. Yet why,
he wondered, why did they come in at all? For the salmon came to mate, but
surely these ones—
their
kind lived in the sea?

Right then, one of the mermaids dived
down under the reeds. She vanished, but the other lingered there flirting still
and smiling at the master, and at Elrahn too, and waving her hands now, in a
sort of amorous half-embracing way.

Elrahn strode out towards the master.
This man had, after all, taken him in even if for profit, fed him, and been
polite, and even bought him drink the night the dwarf lady was wed.

When she saw Elrahn also was striding
towards the lake, the mermaid in the reeds shook her shimmering hair for
pleasure. Then Elrahn broke into a run.

But he had not yet reached the master
when out of the purling water at the master’s very feet, the first mermaid
broke like a shining spear up from the lake.

The master shouted and held the golden
string high to entice her on. But in the next moment, she seemed to sink down
over on him like a wave. Elrahn saw her arms about the master’s neck, and her
hair falling all across him, and then the gleaming fish’s tail swung up and
round, and the master, held in the coil of it as if in the coils of a snake,
was falling over. Over into the lake he fell, all twined in tail and hair and
arms. There was a sparkling slither and a splash. Elrahn beheld the fan-like
tail-fins flash from the water once, then go under.

Both had gone under, the mermaid-girl
and the show-master—gone without a trace. And the water closed shut upon them.

Elrahn stood there with his heart drumming,
and he thought he must run back now to the inn and get what help he could. And
as he thought this, he knew there was no use at all in it. But he had forgotten
the other one, the other mermaid, and in that very instant in her turn she was
there.

What he had only seen with his eyes a
moment ago, now happened to him.

Her arms were cool and silken and her
clasp unbreakable, and her hair like the green reeds and smelling of spring
flowers and mud. Her mouth, which was a woman’s, laughed in his face and her
breath smelled of the open sea. Then the horror of her tail, muscular as the
body of a leopard, seized him. And he was pulled over at once before he could
do anything, into the white slap of the water and down into the dark of the
dark below.

If
he had thought a single last thing, which he had not, Elrahn would have said a
prayer, knowing it must be death he went to. And, it is no lie, in any other
case it would have been death.

The mermaids came up the river to the
lake in spring to fish for men. And when they caught them, they ate them—but
this Elrahn only learned later, when he had learned too something of the mer-language.
They told him then, or
she
told him, the one who caught him, that just
as men relished fish, so certain fish relished the flesh of men. Indeed, she
said, a mermaid would not eat a fish, for mermaids were themselves partly of
fish-kind. “But you are also of mankind!” exclaimed Elrahn. She said this was
not so. Mermaids in their other half were of
woman
kind. And so they
would not eat a woman either. Not a fish or a woman or a human child. Only a
man. And they preferred, as some humans prefer fresh-water fish—fresh-water
men.

The name of this mermaid, who had caught
and thereafter owned him, was Trisaphee. Hers was the only name among them he
ever learned, for the sounds of their tongue still bewildered him even after he
came to understand it somewhat. Their voices too, under the lake, were also
like water. He never heard them speak or sing or call in the sea, for when the
time came for them to return there, his days with them were over and done.

That
first
day, Elrahn woke up lying not, in darkness, but in dimness. What
he could see was water, and there could be no doubt of what it was. The
movement of it was like that of thin cloths drawn over and against each other,
but bubbles littered through, all bright. And even the sun shone in with one
smoky shaft, though far off.

And he saw too that
they
were
going to and fro, swimming over and about each other in an endless dance.

There were many hundreds of them. A clan
of them. A host. All were female, with breasts and long, long hair, and all
were fish from a little below the waist.

They were very lovely, to be sure. The
loveliest thing he ever looked on, apart from the full moon. But at this hour
he thought of their beauty less than his own terror and the place he was in.

After a while, he next realised that he,
a breathing thing of the world, still breathed.

Then he got up, and he went about to see
how it was that he could. And
then
he found he had been shut up in a
cage, but it was a cage of air, a great round bubble that somehow had been
formed, and when he put his fists against it, its walls did not rupture, only
trembled.

All this while the mermaids swam about
him, some paying him no attention, but some staring in. And their eyes, like
this, under the lake, were sombre green and beautiful and quite human in their
shape and form—yet too, they were luminous as the eyes of cats or
demons
.

Soon,
she
was there. That is,
Trisaphee, only then he did not know her name. She came and she shook her hair
at him, which underwater was like a sequinned veil.

“Let me go, you witch,” said Elrahn.

But the instant he said it he thought he
had been a fool. For though she seemed to grasp what he said—and many of them,
he after found, knew the language of men—she was the more powerful, and his
foe.

However, even through the vast bubble of
air, she said something to him. He knew not a word of it, even if he could make
out the liquid sounds. But then she spoke in his own tongue, and she said, “Stay
still, you Man. You belong to me, and we will not harm you.”

This done, she swam away.

Then all of them swam off, and not long
after the shaft of sun faded, and everything was darkness.

Perhaps he slept, or simply lost his
wits again from fear. Waking once more, he saw the moonlight pierced the water
as the sun had done. And in the rays of the moon, more dreadful than any sight
he ever saw before or after, Elrahn made out the skull and bones, and something
of the body, what had been left of it, of the show-master, lying there on his
own fine coat with the brass buttons, with the gold-painted string of bait
tangled between.

How
long exactly Elrahn lived in the bubble he was afterwards unsure. But he said
that he kept some count, by the gilded shaft of sun and the bluish one of the
moon, and maybe it was a fortnight.

The very second day, the master’s bones
were cleared. But he knew that was not for any Godly burial, for he saw one of
the mermaids gnawing at a thigh bone—and some while after this one returned,
and lo and behold, she had refashioned the bone as a pipe and she played on it
a low, mournful, underwater song, which Elrahn took a mortal hatred for.

But then too, Elrahn thought, the master
would have caught a mermaid if he could and put her in his show. Perhaps she
would have had less kindness than he gave the dog or the ape—she would have
been a slave, and crippled on the land by her tail.

It was Trisaphee who took care of Elrahn.

She brought him fresh fish, newly killed
and cleaned, and though he must eat them raw in the bubble, they were not so
bad. Also she brought him ducks’ eggs, and once or twice human bread, and once
a bottle of tea with some berry jam stirred in—but these last things he would
not bring himself to swallow, for they had certainly come from others who had
been killed and devoured.

Why had she not slain and eaten Elrahn?
He never had to ask her, for in the end, he fathomed it for himself. It was his
skin. His skin which, though that of a man, stayed—save at the head and groin—hairless
and clear white as any mermaid’s. Also was he not, from the snow-sickness,
pocked and scaled like a snake or a fish?

He came to see, between the clocks of
the sun and the moon, that he was kept by Trisaphee as her pet. She fed him,
and even she pushed in—like the food through the sides of the bubble, by some
uncanny aperture of which he was never certain—lake water in a crock that, he
might drink and wash himself.

As a prisoner will, where they are able,
he tried to keep himself in health, and keep his brain in sanity and his soul
in hope.

But one morning, by the sun-shaft clock,
Trisaphee came and she lashed the side of the bubble with her tail, and the
lake gushed through. The water covered all and in a minute or less, Elrahn was
drowned.

And then he thought,
But I am not
.
Nor was he. And so he found that, by a magical means in the bubble, which was
itself, maybe, part air and part water, he had mastered the art of breathing
liquid. Then out he swam, and in the marvel of this wonder, he turned and saw
Trisaphee was smiling at him in a loving, tender way. And she stroked his hair
and kissed him with her icy mouth, between the eyes, before she put on to him
the harness and the lead.

He
was her dog, then. Where she went, he might go with her, if so she wished. But
when she did not wish it, she tied him to some post or rock or curious aqueous
stalagmite under the lake.

To the surface they never ascended. But
now and then into the depths they did go, where it was so black he could not
see, and then she shortened the leash, and guided him, with her other hand
resting on his neck.

What did he think of this? He was angry,
but also he liked her touch. Yes, even though she was what she was and had done
what she had done. And not long after, as he learned from her pieces of her
language and she spoke somewhat in his own, she announced to him she herself
had not eaten any of the body of his friend, the show-master. And when Elrahn,
hearing that, swore an oath, she too swore she was blameless of it, and this in
his own tongue. And she swore on the name of God.

This gave Elrahn pause. For the priest
in his birthplace had once assured him no soulless or evil thing could speak
God’s name.

Then again, Trisaphee gave Elrahn
presents. He did not, of course, want the leash, though it was plainly of real
gold, a very proper metal, and set with pearls. But also she gave him a silver
ring fixed with a jewel like a fox’s eye, and then she regaled him with stories
of treasure hoards in the seas to which her kind had access. And when his
clothes wore out in the water, she brought him leggings of some strange stuff.
She said they had been made from the skin of a shark her kind had killed in
war.

“Do you fight, then, Trisaphee?”

She assured him they must, to live.

“How were you born?’’ he asked her once,
one time when they rested under a cliff far down in the lake to watch the
clouds of fish, which blew about there.

“In the usual way,” said she.

“But,” he said, “seeing you are a woman
but also—a fish, like these, and also because you say your kind are
only
female—”

But she would not answer him directly,
and only said she had lived many hundreds of years and would live many hundreds
more, and could not recall her start.

At this time, it must be admitted, he
felt he understood the tongue of her kind better than perhaps he did, and so
may have mistaken her words. But also she had spoken partly in his own tongue,
and he could have had the right of it.

Always he had been an outcast. And even
when he had journeyed with the wagons, Elrahn had not existed as most men do,
nor lived by the normal laws. In this way, for him, this being under the lake
among the green fish-girls was only another eccentric phase of his odd life.
While he himself had been well taught he was a monster of some type.

He flowed along with his fate therefore,
resisting only a little, and that only in the matter of the harness and lead,
and those moral issues to do with eating human flesh. He flowed with the
currents, and in the company of Trisaphee. And now and then he saw not only
that she was beautiful but that she was a living thing, and even under the lake
she breathed, as he did, and was not made of glass or water.