Water (11 page)

She gave a great gasp, and felt the cold water rush into her lungs; but she did not drown. And

they walked down the shoaling sea-bottom to the centre of the harbour, which was very deep

indeed, and her hair drifted up from her head, and her clothes swirled around her, and she found

that they chafed her, and then she felt Dreiad’s hands on her, loosening them. For a moment she

fought him, but he did not realise it, for he thought she was only fighting the constriction of her

useless clothing; and then she understood what he was doing, and shed her clothes willingly, and

found she was the same neutral, hairless, faceted, silvery color that he was beneath her clothes,

here, as she was, under the sea, for such was the magic of the kiss of the sea-man who loved her.

He took her clothes carefully from her, for if they had been set adrift they would have been taken

by the water eddies, and tossed and tangled here and there; and he folded them, deftly, in a way

she could not have done, under water as she now was, and laid them on the sea-bed, and put a

rock on them. “We will find them for you when I take you back,” he said, “for you will need

them again then; and we do not want to lose them, or have them wash ashore and be found by

someone who recognises them.”

And he took her down into the deeps of the sea, and taught her how to choose walking on the

sea-bottom or swimming like a fish, and how what on land were merely lungs for the taking in

and pushing out of air now became a kind of swim-bladder that she could adjust as she chose,

although the effort of it was strange to her, and her chest hurt afterward, as a strained muscle

does when it performs some feat beyond its strength. And he took her to the great palace where

his parents lived, and they made her welcome, and it turned out that she was less of a surprise to

them than either she or Dreiad expected, for the sea-king had noticed the direction his son took

when he set off on his mysterious absences; and the story had got back to him as well of his

son’s search for the old sea-woman who knew many tales of things and many charms that had

made the tales possible, and while he did not know what Dreiad had asked her, he had guessed at

what it might have been, and he had guessed right.

And Jenny went riding on the tall slender-legged seahorses with the foamy manes, and chased

fishes like hares through the bowing trees behind grey-green hounds; and he introduced her to

his cousins, who were sea-princesses with great curls of golden-green hair that lay behind them

on the silvery water that was their air. And also they rode to visit the old sea-woman who had

told Dreiad of the charm to permit Jenny to visit under the sea; and the two women were

delighted with each other, and found each other easy to talk to; the sea-woman reminded Jenny

of her mother and her mother’s friends, and the conversations they had, of cooking and

midwifery and the doings of their neighbours.

And her prince took her back up to the land, where her horse and her hound awaited her, and

kissed her once more, and she was an ordinary land-person again, dressed in dripping-wet

clothes; and she had a tricky time of it, that night, getting herself back indoors and dry before her

parents saw her.

The next day they did it better, and after he kissed her, she waited till the itchiness of her

clothing grew unbearable, and she undressed on the beach as a silvery sea-person, and tucked her

clothes into the empty saddlebag she had thoughtfully hung to her mare’s saddle that day, that no

one might notice anything amiss, did anyone notice a horse and a hound near this haunted

harbour-shore where no one came. And Gruoch watched from under the tree where Flora was

tied, and did not try to stop Jenny walking into the sea this second day; but she greeted her again

anxiously when she came out.

On the third day, Jenny said to her sea-prince, “If I kiss you, can I bring you to my parents’ farm,

and introduce you to them?”

His smile lit up his face even more wonderfully than it had before, and he said, “Yes, if you love

me.”

She laughed, and kissed him, and gave him the clothes that she had borrowed from the back of

her father’s cupboard, and there then stood before her a tall young man with big long-fingered

hands that stuck out too far from the ends of his sleeves, and a nice, ordinary, kind, open face.

And she took him home.

She decided that the only thing she could tell her parents was the truth; for however much they

would wish not to believe her, they would believe her because she was their daughter, and so she

could take them down to the shore after she told them the story they would not want to believe,

and they could see her prince turn silvery, and walk into the water, and they would believe her

then because they had to.

And so this is what Jenny and Dreiad did; and her parents did not want to believe them, but they

did accompany the two of them to the shore, and saw them kiss, and saw the silveriness break

out first across the forehead of the young man with the open honest face, whom they had liked at

once, and watched it creep down his cheeks, and then across the backs of his hands under the

too-short sleeves; and they saw him undress, and walk into the water till the surface of it closed

over his head. And they believed, because they had no choice.

But it was only the two of them who could come and go in each other’s worlds, for it was only

the two of them who loved each other in the way to bring out the charm. But both sets of parents

knew what was before them in their children’s eyes, and were not surprised when Jenny and her

prince came to each of them in turn and asked permission to marry. Neither parents would have

wished their child to marry someone of so distant a country that none of their family or people

could visit it; but both sets of parents loved their only children deeply, and would not stand in the

way of their happiness: and the two families met on the shore of the harbour, and liked each

other, and that was a help, for they found themselves supporting each other’s feelings as they

would have done for good friends in the ordinary way of things; and thus found that their

feelings were much alike. And on that same shore Jenny and Dreiad were married, and began

dividing their time between land and sea.

Some time between Jenny and Dreiad’s betrothal and marriage, news came from a farm on the

far side of the other town, that a third son named Robert had married a very pretty girl whose

pregnancy was slightly too advanced even for her loose wedding gown to disguise; and that he

had been apprenticed to her father, who ran a not unsuccessful brewery, although his beer was

not well thought of by anyone who could afford better.

The story of the land-girl and her sea-prince of course got out. But all the big sea-trading

merchants had left the two towns long ago, and there was no one nearby who wanted to take up

the sea-trade again. Somehow the townsfolk had come to believe in the last three generations that

it was not merely the sea-king’s curse but their own blindness that had caused their downfall,

which meant that they took the removal of the curse much as the sea-king himself had, as a relief

of guilty responsibility. But there were a few farmers who had had fisherfolk as greatgrandparents; and some of these came hesitantly down to the harbour again, and set sail in small

boats newly and carefully built on the harbour shores. And the small boats sailed beautifully, and

caught just enough fish that the fisherfolk’s families were content and well-fed, and not so much

that any city merchant came sniffing around to organise them and make a proper profit. And

between the breaking of the old curse and the making of this new marriage, the sea-people and

the land-people found themselves willingly drawn close; and so the sea-people swam to the

surface to say hello when they recognised a familiar hull overhead, and sometimes offered

advice about where the fish were; and the land-people greeted them politely, and listened to their

advice and were glad of it. But these same land-people, when stories of their friendship with their

sea-people brought curiosity seekers to the newly lively towns on either side of the once-haunted

harbour, had nothing to say, and turned blank faces and deaf ears to all questions from both

casual and prying outsiders.

Jenny’s parents’ farm grew in a long wide strip from its original place on a little rise behind the

southern town down to the shore near the harbour mouth. It grew this way in no particular wise

except that it was a track used so often that at last Jenny and Dreiad and her family laid a path, a

queerly shining grey path, to the water’s edge; and in the clearing they had to do to lay the path,

they found earth that the farmers among them decided was too good not to use, and so fields

sprang up on either side of that path till the farm really did stretch down to the shore in an odd

haphazard way. But the farmers were right about the earth, for crops put in those path-side fields

grew easily and abundantly.

Jenny and Dreiad had twelve children. Two of the twelve were sea-people, and had an especial

care for the fisherfolk of the harbour their mother had been born near. Two of them were landpeople, and took over the farm when Jenny’s parents died, and married land-people who were

also farmers; and the farm was held by their family for hundreds of years, and for many

generations after Jenny, its members were astonishingly long-lived; although they now produced

as many fishers as farmers. Jenny herself lived, while not a long time by sea-people’s standards,

still a very long time indeed by land-people’s accounting of such things.

And the other eight were of both land and sea, and could live on either the one or the other; and

if on land they did look a little silverier than ordinary land-people, and if in the sea they looked a

little rosier than ordinary sea-people, still this made no one think less of them, for all of them had

open, honest faces that lit up with gentleness and humour and intelligence when they smiled.

Sea Serpent

by Peter Dickinson

“I am Mel.”

“I have heard of you.”

“You are Iril.” (Not a question, a statement)

“Yes.”

“You will take us across the water.” (The same.)

“How many?”

“Twenty and twenty men. Some gear.”

“Eight large coppers.”

Mel took a bracelet from his wrist and tossed it on the ground in front of where Iril sat. The gold

was as thick as Iril’s small finger.

“You will come with us into the hills and show us how to build rafts so that we may float the

stones downriver to the water,” said Mel. “That done, you will ferry the stones across the water

and help us to float them as far as may be up into our own hills.”

“Stones?”

Mel half turned and considered the space before him. A

shape made itself, shadowy, like frozen smoke, its height twice that of a man and its width a long

pace through each way. Iril measured it with his eye, unsurprised. As he had said, he had heard

of Mel. How could he not have, from the travellers he ferried across the estuary? Much of their

talk these days was of the great new shrine to Awod, the Father-god, that this man Mel was

building up in the hills to the south. Such a shrine would need huge stones for its central ring.

The best stones, the stones with power in them, came from across the water.

“How many such stones?”

“Ten this first year.”

The shape faded. With his crutch Iril hooked the bracelet towards him, picked it up and weighed

it in his hand.

“Twenty and twenty men is not enough.”

“You will bring your own people also.”

“How many days into the hills?”

“Three days. Silverspring.”

Those
stones?”

“Those stones.”

Iril tossed the bracelet back at Mel’s feet and looked away. For twenty and twenty and seven

years he had carried women north across the estuary on their pilgrimage to the ancient shrine of

Tala, the Earth-mother at Silverspring, where Siron was priestess. Tala had been greatest of the

Old Gods, just as Awod was greatest of the New. So there was enmity between them. Iril took no

side in this contest. He served Manaw, the Sea God, who was both Old and New. The sea does

not change.

Mel took another bracelet from his arm and dropped it beside the first. Then a third. All watched