by Tanith Lee
Alan nodded, and took his daughter from the medic’s arms. He looked down at her face, pink and distressed, and took the waving fist in his own. The baby quieted, and he smiled at her as she watched him, curious now rather than afraid. “Come on, little one,” he whispered. “Let’s go and see Mummy.”
Seaborne
Kari Sperring
Sometimes, the tide left dead men for her on the strand. It was her sole companion, the tide, sealing off her point from the curious, dropping broken gifts for her on the shore. The wolves might have found her long ago without the treacherous, daring tide. There was no friendship between them, exactly, but there was something. She needed the tide.
The new man arrived one dusk. She came dancing heedless and trackless across the sand, so that her feet were the first to find him. He lay caught up heavy amidst the sea-wrack and tumble, hair dirty with grit, clothes torn, one hand flung out before him. His skin was no colour she had seen before. His eyes were closed. She liked that. It made her afraid when drowned men looked at her. Their minds were too open, eager to tangle her down to fill their own empty insides.
This man was different. His mind was full of the sea. A still greenness enveloped him, shadowed by the memory of wave-sound. It washed over her, taking nothing away, tickling a little, like the sand between her toes.
She squatted beside him to watch the water trickling from his hair. Soaked as it was, she could not be sure of its colour. Perhaps he would still be here when the sun rose and it would have a chance to dry. Perhaps the tide, having displayed him, would tug him back to itself. She didn’t know. She just liked to look. She had not known that skin might be the colour of tree-bark. Her own skin was moonlight and cobweb. All the dead men before this had worn the sea under their skins: white turned to green and liable to darken at a touch. When she laid a light finger on this man’s palm, his colour did not change.
His hand was cold and firm. She touched it again, and his dead fingers moved. She recoiled, crab-bitten. There was a pause. His fingers moved again. She waited. The man’s head rolled a little to one side and he coughed. Water bubbled between his lips. A strange clawing sound came from his throat. His head jerked once as if he would lift it, then fell back. The sound increased. Her feet wanted to run away. But her eyes and her mind held her. And her rash wild hands reached out to the man and pushed him, hard. He rolled under them onto his side and the water escaped from his mouth. He coughed and heaved and lay still again. Then his eyes opened. They were dark, like his drenched hair and they were not the eyes of a dead man.
They looked at her, square.
The tide had left her a living man. She had reason to fear the living. The living should in no wise be able to set eyes upon her. Yet this tide-driven man could see her. She turned to run. Soon or late, the tide would return and take him back. The man coughed again and said a word she did not know. His vagabond hand raised a scant inch from the sand. He said, still echoing the sea, “Please...”
His voice was as strange to her as the colour of his skin. It hooked onto her, holding her from flight. She trembled. His hand fell back, limp and dirty. His mouth twitched faintly as if he tried to smile. He did not look like a wolf.
She might leave him here to take his chances with the tide. She had no use for the living, out here on her point.
The tide had never left her anything remotely this troublesome before. His eyes closed again. Sand clung to him: there were stains on his wrecked garments. He did not look as though he might become a threat. She was not used to having to decide. It had been long and long since she had had any dealings with any creature save herself and the winds and the tide. The water from his hair made narrow braids in the sand. He was still.
She chose. Her hands had moved him once: they might do so again. Besides, she liked to look at him. Her hands rolled and tugged him up the beach, to a place where the tide would not reach high enough to pull him away. He did not move himself again. He made no sounds.
She sat beside his still form all through the night.
Sunrise drove her from the beach. When dusk drew her back, the man was no longer where she had left him. She looked at the dry sand. No sign there that the sea had exerted itself to steal him back. The sand was mussed and marred where his body had lain. An irregular pattern of tracks trailed away, bordering the beach. She followed them edgewise, aware of the gravelling tide. She did not often wander so far from the point and its guardian shelves. The man had been looking for something. Her nervous feet felt that, a vague warm questioning. They drew her into the rock-tumbled, wire-grass bounds, where the sand lay thick and dirty out along the curving rim of the bay. The grass did not know her, whispering to itself of her passing. The sand was sluggish and dull. It told her no tales. The sky above was overcast, no stars, no hint of either moon. It left her thin, skittish, world-shy. She gathered shadow about her to bring fear upon this man who had come to litter her point, her shore, with his living bones.
He had made his way along almost two-thirds of the bay to where water slipped and curved from the land to be absorbed in the sea. It made no sense to her. He had escaped water. Why choose to seek it out again? The living defied all rules. Her shadows clung tighter. She could see that the man had come to rest alongside the little water, limbs drawn up, back to a fallen boulder. Her feet halted, holding her just outside his range of sight. The last of the sea had been driven out of his hair by the day. It had dried lighter than his skin, hung clumped and salt-dusted to his shoulders. Like his skin, his hair held a colour she had not known that the living attained.
The shadows wanted to move. Her eyes counselled caution. Caught between impulses, she swayed, alarmed. His head lifted from his knees, turned itself toward her. She gathered her comforting shadows tight, ready to defend. The living had no place here. The living should flee from her and her shadows. The man peered carefully into the gloom, eyes a little narrowed. He said something which she could not shape. Then he shook his head, and said, in his voice which was unlike her voice, unlike the voices of the sand and the tide and the dead, “Hello. Please don’t be frightened.” The words were clumsy, as though their form eluded him. Her feet trembled on the sand. He straightened up and continued, “I saw you before. Thank you for helping me.” And his lips made the form of a smile.
Long and long since anything had smiled at her. The shadows slipped from her shoulders. He was not afraid. Some darting thing behind her eyes drew her forward, wanting to know more. Two steps, five, then a halt. She crouched down a few paces away from him, and watched. He was calm and still. His thoughts eluded her, smooth and slippery as small fish. He was not afraid. The living were always afraid.
His voice was gentle. “I remembered a child... I’m not quite right, am I? I think you belong here.” She was filling with silence. One of her hands pressed to her mouth, holding the silence inside. The man said “I don’t want to disturb you. But I don’t think I’m strong enough to leave.”
The silence was too big. Her lips parted as it escaped. No thoughts to steal. She had the words only of the drowned. One rose up inside her. “Who?” Such a little sound. It hurt her, breaking free.
He made the smile again. “Thierry,” he said. “I was travelling on a ship, but there was a storm. As if the sea wanted to board us... I was caught by it and pulled overboard.” The smile died. “I suppose the others think me drowned.” A shadow floated over the shape of him. She shivered. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t belong in your place.”
She did not understand. He had no business seeing her and knowing no fear. The wolves... The wolves would rend her apart. His name was no help to her. She used it on her tongue, to discover if taste might provide meaning. “Thierry.”
“That’s right,” he said, nodding. And then, “Do you have a name?”
The wolves would take made names and use them to attack. She would vanish into their mouths. Her feet gathered her to run. Her body bundled her backwards.
The man’s eyes widen
ed. He said, “No, I’m sorry. Don’t go. I won’t hurt you. I was wrong to ask.”
Her feet did not trust him, aching to flee. Her mind counselled more study. She hesitated. He said, “I should have known better. My friend Gracielis says that names have power. I knew someone else like you, long ago.”
Another? She had not known that there could be another like her. She could not hold the notion: another point, another her. There was this beach, this point, this sand, the tide, and herself. This living man. The sea and the sand had never spoken to her of another her. She was afraid. She did not feel big enough for there to be two of her.
The man uncurled. His long limbs looked clumsy. She drew back. The dead had always lain down. She was unaccustomed to the idea of height, of living men like trees. “I thought”, he said, “I’d look for driftwood.” His mouth twisted in a way that was not a smile. “I’m not sure if I know how to start a fire, but it’s a bit too early to give up.”
Driftwood belonged to the sea. The sea had caught him once, and might again. The sea was a miser. She came to her feet. Her hands had control, pulling her forward, pushing at the man, away from the sea. He stepped back obediently, but his brows came down. He said, “I’m cold and I’m hungry. Don’t you remember that?”
She knew cold. Cold came from the sky, on the air across the sea, lashing waves into anger, driving out birds, uprooting grasses. Cold whistled through her, under her borders, tugging and testing. She did not like to be cold. She did not know ‘remember’. She was cold or she was not cold. She did not know ‘hunger’. The sound had claws, like the claws with which the tide stole things. Sometimes the sea lay calm and still, hiding its claws. She looked at the man. There was a stillness in him which might hide anything. The sea took what it would and devoured it. The wolves swallowed everything they found. Fear formed between her eyes and trickled down her spine towards her feet. When it reached them, she turned and ran.
For a night and another night she did not go near the man. If the living felt cold and hunger, then perhaps they might be destroyed by them. The man might be easier to encounter dead. She held to her point, to the strand and the black shale. The tide brought her wood and weed and fragments of cloth. The beach was wiped clear each day of change. The two waters, salt and sweet, swept it clean. For a night and another night, she was dancing feet and moonlight.
On the night after those, the sea came in high over the edges of the point, teasing the dunes and their grasses, holding her back to the place which was less beach than land. In the dry sand of the dunes, the wind brought her intimations of flame. Long and long since she had last known fire. The thing behind her eyes remembered heat, searing bright light from the sky and the sad grasses burning. Fire did not belong. She tracked it, careful, along the curve of the beach into the deep dunes. The fire had made its home in a hollow, well out of reach of the tide, sheltered from the wind. It was a small fire, constricted by a collar of stones and given more to smoke than flame. The man crouched beside it, feeding it driftwood. She halted on the rim of the hollow. He made the smile at her. “The wood is rather damp,” he said, “that makes it smoke.” She liked his tone. It told her he recognised her right to explanation. He said “Are you cold? Come and join me.”
She was not cold. There was not enough anger in the sea and the wind to chill her. Her head shook itself, once, twice, but her feet led her down anyway into the hollow.
“The problem is,” he said, “that I have to stay awake to feed the fire or it goes out. And it’s a terrible trouble to re-light.” He made a hunching gesture with his shoulders. “I don’t think I’m making a very good job of being a castaway. I don’t know how to fish or set snares and I don’t know what’s safe to eat and what isn’t.” He shivered. “The seaweed tastes bad, but I don’t think it’s killing me.” He looked at her. “I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”
His skin was changing its colour; his eyes seemed duller. An air clung to him, reminiscent of the dead. He was cold still, despite his fire: she could hear the murmur of it in his bones. And there was another thing, set deeper, a growling need like the tide’s demand, which grew and grew. This, perhaps, was hunger. The sea took indiscriminately to feed itself. She knew nothing about the feeding needs of the living.
He was not a wolf. He had no interest in her. His surface thoughts were open to her, supplying images she did not understand. Bread and meat and wine. Perhaps the sea would bring these things, leave them awhile in the wake of its rage.
She watched him. He did not seem to mind although he spoke little. In a while, the driftwood fell from his hands and he passed into a state of unwakefulness. She rose and tracked out of the dunes. The sea had drawn back down to the rocks. The beach was littered with prizes, wood and weed and the broken pieces of creatures. She gathered without selection and left her gleanings in the dunes. The man did not wake. His fire had died. A little before sunrise, she dropped some of the new wood into the ashes and told it to ignite.
When the sun rose, the man woke and found her gifts. She watched him use them before approaching. He raised his head. “Thank you.” He looked rather better than the night before. “The fish were good. And the wood...” He gave her another smile. “Perhaps there’s something I can do for you?” That made no sense. She had no use for the living. He said, “No? I’m sorry. Well, perhaps we’ll think of something.” She was puzzled. She did not know ‘we’. It shaped to mean the man and her, but that could not be so. She was herself. She did not belong with anything aside from her point. She did not belong with the living. The man said, “Did you know there are rock pools at low tide?” Her head assented. “They’re pretty,” he said. “I almost caught a fish. I thought I’d try again tomorrow.” She had changed something, giving him what the tide had left her: she had given him energy. She did not know if she had ever given to anything before. She had put a change in her point, in herself. Perhaps that was this ‘we’. She had put a hand to wet wood, and told it to burn. She had put a hand to the sea’s leavings, and turned them to food.
She had made the man continue living. When she rose to walk with him along the beach, she stood a little taller than before.
A night, and a night, and more beyond those. One moon reached full and turned the sea wild and silver. The other dwindled into blackness. She touched what the tide left and made it change. The man – her man – grew strong. He talked to her about places which were not the point, not the beach, not the sea; about fields of trees, mounds of rock and earth higher than the dunes and coated in grass denser and tougher than any she knew. He told her of great stone places thronged with the living, shaped into houses and streets and halls, huge words she could not hold inside. And as she changed things and heard things, she grew. A dim flush of colour crept through her, starting in her bold feet. Something inside her began to stretch, to explore beyond itself, beyond the confines of the point. She was learning to be bigger. She had grown too big to be able, any more, to feel finely everything within her old world of sea and rock and sand. Her ears filled up with the man and his words. She no longer listened so hard to her point.
On a night of two crescent moons, a wolf came down to the sea. The sand thrilled under her feet as she danced along the strand. The wind tugged and twisted at her, snarling in hair now grown heavy and glossy and brown. The sea cursed and threatened, filling her footsteps. She paused to heed none of them. She danced along the shore, across the rocks, on to the edge of the dunes, to her warm living man and his fire. The sand weighed her down and she flashed anger to it. The wind threw dust in her eyes. The sea growled, too distant to do more. From beside his fire, the man waved. She ran forward, into the dull sand of the dunes.
She ran into the wolf.
He was a young wolf, still very akin to a living man. He had no very great height. His skin was as pale as hers had been. His long hair was dark in the darkness. He had eyes like stone. Passing overhead, the wind called alarm. But the underfoot sand was silent. The wolf looke
d at her. She grew still.
The man, her man, rose from his place by the fire. He said, “What are you doing? Don’t hurt her, Gracielis.”
The wolf did not take his gaze from her. His voice hurt, going under the layers and layers of change. Such a soft voice, to have such teeth. The wolf said, “Do you know what this creature is, Thierry?”
“She helped me,” the man said, building walls with his tone. “She pulled me from the sea. She brought me driftwood and food.”
“Doubtless,” said the wolf. “But I asked what she is, not what she has done.”
“I don’t know,” the man said. “I suppose she’s a ghost of some kind.”
“Ghosts,” said the wolf, “don’t grow up.” His eyes held her motionless. He continued, “Look at it, Thierry. It looks like you. Don’t tell me it had this shape when you first saw it.” The man was silent. The wolf said, “It isn’t human.”
“Neither are you,” said the man.
“No,” said the wolf. His stone eyes gripped her. His voice turned attention wholly upon her. Despite the hard grasp of his eyes, she trembled. “What makes a wolf?” he asked her. “Do you know?” The man took a step forward; the wolf held up a hand. The wolf said to her, “I am born of your kind. When your kind grow too closely akin to a human, learn love, learn desire...” He pointed to the man. “Lie with him, and you make my kind. Would you like that? Are you big enough, yet, to understand?”
She did not understand. She could not hear the sea or reach the wind. Under her feet, the sand admitted more of the wolf than of her. She felt fear, sharp bursts of it along her new long limbs, constricting her. If the wolf looked at her for long enough, she would shrink back to nothing.
She did not know desire. She knew that she wanted to go to the man for shelter.
