by Tanith Lee
Except that, near midnight, as they were all in bed, the master woke Elrahn up. “Tomorrow, at first light, we walk to the lake, you and I.”
“Do you want?”
“Are you a dunce, or what? Do you not know what the old man said?”
Elrahn said he did not.
“Listen then. They call them that here, girls in green dresses. There are mermaids in spring in this lake. And we shall catch one or I’ll be hanged by my tassel.”
They say the mermaids would come in from the sea, up the river to the lake, in spring. As salmon come in, to spawn. But a mermaid is a fish only up to her middle, and from there she is a naked woman. So, if she should stand upright on her tail out of the water among the green reeds, she may look like a girl clad in green...
All this the master explained to Elrahn as down to the lake they went, brushing through the spangle-dew before sunrise.
The sun was just opening its eye when they reached the shore. A sight of beauty it was, the coin of water lying there so still among the misty hills, and the rim of the flame-green reeds, and the sun just touching the world with one crystal finger. And then the dawn wind stirred and blew on the reeds, and they rattled like harp-strings struck by an unseen hand.
But when the wind was gone, all was still again. And Elrahn was taken with the idea that human things and animals breathe, and so are always in a sort of motion, while they live. But the land and the heaven and the water, which do not breathe at all, may lie as still as if turned to glass.
Then the master spoke in a fierce quick whisper. “See! Do you see, there?”
Elrahn looked. A duck was swimming along the lake. No, it was a great fish. And he thought they might have brought a rod or net, to catch some fish for breakfast. And then he thought, curiously, of the Bible, which the priest had kept telling him of, and of the thing spoken to a fisher-man, saying he should be a fisher of men.
Just then the fish broke the surface of the lake, and oh, it was not any fish at all, but a young girl with skin as white as winter snow and hair as green as water. And then down she dived again and there was the flip of her tail, and the unbreathing lake was turned once more to glass.
Elrahn was amazed, but the show-master was already going out between the reeds, standing himself on the shore. And in his hands he held a shining string that looked like gold, but Elrahn knew it would only be painted.
He thinks that will catch her, thought Elrahn. But he himself knew nothing about mermaids, and perhaps it would.
Presently there came again a rippling and whirling in the water, and suddenly the water broke in a hundred pieces, and up out of it burst two creatures, and they were, without any doubt, mermaids, the pair of them.
“See my sweet girls—” boldly cried the master, “look—a golden chain! I have heard how you like to gather treasures. Should you like this golden chain?”
And then they looked and they laughed, the two mermaids.
Elrahn thought he had never heard a sound so charming or so cruel.
It was true they were naked to the waist, and a little below. They had long slim arms and throats, and round white breasts with centres pink as coral. Their lips were pink like that, and the long nails on their hands, and as they laughed he saw their teeth, which were white and very sharp. And Elrahn remembered he had heard once a sailor speak of big fish in the sea with teeth, called sharks.
Their hair was long and green and wrapped them over as they moved and then uncovered them. Their tails were a silvery green, and utterly the tails of fish, with silver fins like fans. Their eyes were pale so he could not be sure of their colour, but it was somewhere between the other colours of them, green and white and silver—and also pink.
“Come, sweetlets, come to me and take the chain—” cried the show-master, gambolling along the shore and jinking the painted string, and the mermaids laughed, and dived and whirled and came up again, always nearer the shore, and then they clove through a reed-bank and stood up among the reeds, tall on their tails, and they were two girls in green dresses.
“Come away,” called Elrahn to the show-master.
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. Mermai
ds in their other half were of womankind. 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 b
een 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.
One morning—the sun shaft was there—Trisaphee took him away up the lake to a spot they had never before swum to. Wide watery caves ran into the under-side of the hills above. They were black as night, yet things clung in them, lichens and weeds and stones that glowed.
Trisaphee sat herself on a rock, and only her hair kept up its furling spun-silk motion. A mermaid’s hair is never so beautiful above the water as it is below.
Presently she spoke in Elrahn’s language, which—as only years later he came to see—she had grown more accomplished at as her time with him progressed.
“You have been with me now a while, my Man. If I were to ask what you would like most in the world that I could give you, what should it be?”
Elrahn looked at her. He said not a word.
“Well,” said she, “it’s tired out by the lake you must be. And so it is with us. Soon we shall be turning down the rivers to the sea. And there I will not take you, for there I could never keep you safe. What shall I be doing with you, then?”
When it seemed she would wait on and on for his answer, he looked her in the eye and he said, “So now you will murder me.”
“No,” said Trisaphee. “You shall live. But what would you like?”
“To live, then,” he said, “and to go free.”
“It’s tired of me too, so you are,” she said.
