by Tanith Lee
5
Soon after he lit the taper, the tunnel had plunged unnervingly in a series of steep and sloping steps.
At any rate, this scoured the last tipsiness out of Vendrei.
With extreme care he descended, and after about five minutes the tunnel floor levelled somewhat, and he heard, instead of his own hurried pulse, the slow heartbeat of the sea.
A vague luminous quality began. Then the taper became obsolete. He blew it out to save it for going back.
The rock curved, and next opened out into a wide low cave, where Vendrei must first stoop double, and then get down on his knees and crawl.
Full afternoon light now came in from the cave mouth. It displayed for him a jumble of rocks and slabs, mossed due to moisture, some clung with pallid ocean weeds. Shells were littered about, and the tiny delicate bones of fish. There was a matured fishy smell, but no note of human decay. For a burial vault it was, that way, an odourless place. Empty also. No grave or tomb of any sort that Vendrei could see. All there was—
All there was were two heaps of broken twigs and branches, small stones, sand, this strewn with wild flowers. The heaps lay side by side right up against the opening in the cliff that showed the sea. They were each about the size and length one might expect of an average man’s body, lying flat.
Vendrei now, despite his former superstitious unease, swore colourfully.
He had, he believed, heard of such customs among some of the primal fisher communities of the region. Although devoutly orthodox in religion, sometimes antique rites of conception, birth, marriage or death were celebrated, that went back to the sunrise of time, and the ancient gods who had then supposedly ruled the world. Just as a newborn babe might be baptised by such people in the sea, before ever it felt holy water, just so those the sea had drowned but then cast up on land, were blessed in the names of saints before being returned into the waters. They were the sea god’s, Neptune, Poseidon. He sent them home to say goodbye; thereafter they must be restored to him.
It was true luck for Vendrei. Meant for him. Now he would not have to unearth some deep-dug grave, but need only lift off the branches and the flowers, to find the pair of swords his destiny demanded.
Carefully, being as respectful as he could, he removed the covering of the first man.
Yes, he recalled the poor fellow from the voyage. Wealthy and young, his sad face battered, bloated by the water. And yes, yes—here in the spoiled scabbard, the blade of good steel, nearly the right weight too, just a touch light, but that would not matter. Cursed thin Zephyrin should have this one.
With less respect, for he was in haste now, Vendrei pulled the piecemeal carapace from the second man.
And froze. Froze there, and let his arms fall loose, leaning, staring, not crediting what he saw.
For the second dead man, one Vendrei did not even recollect, was a drowned sailor, handsome and oddly unmarked, but most of his clothes and accoutrements taken by the waves. Decidedly he had no blade of any type, not even a knife to whittle sea-ivory.
Two men, two swords. But it was two men and one sword. Only one.
Vendrei kneeled there like the fool he had called himself, almost blind and half-dead himself with leaden disappointment .
One. Only one.
Fate’s joke.
The greybeard had tried to explain the method of burial, that was the giving back to the god. Vendrei had forgotten the mention of the “tall sea”.
In the Mediterranean sink, as a rule tides were mild and sluggish. Here and there, due to some eccentricity of rock or sea-floor, another rogue tide might come to be, such as that, it seemed, which had flushed the survivors of the wrecked ship out on to this coast, and brought in too some of her dead.
At sunfall, here in the hidden bay, an even more sprightly element of this rogue tide would, at certain seasons, leap upward to the cliff, missing the village, but bursting into the cave. Swirling then like a giant spoon, it would set down fish and weeds and shells, and gather up in payment any unfastened thing left for it. Such as two dead men in easily broken ‘graves’ of twigs.
The sun went, carmine red, and Vendrei was still in the cave, nursing the single sword, stunned as a child promised a horse and given only saddle and bridle.
And as the sun went, the sea came.
It crashed up and washed the cave from end to end, poured out and came ploughing back, smashing off the remains of the burial covers, picking up the two dead without difficulty, trying to pick up as well a third, living man.
He resisted, having woken to himself at the last instant.
But by dint of youth, strength and fright, Vendrei expelled himself from Poseidon’s hungry sea, which pursued him, growling like green dogs, back along the tunnel to the awful steps. Even up the first steps the sea chased him. But perhaps it was simply chasing him off.
Only stars saw him finally drag himself out of the tunnel above the village. He was again soaked through, demented, clutching the useless uniqueness of the sword. Below, lamps were lighting in the little houses. But Vendrei did not go there. He turned from the village as from a cruel mocker, and getting down the cliff by another track, to the interest of five or six goats stationed there, he regained the shore and staggered away towards the survivors’ camp. And his enemy.
6
“Heaven pardon me,” Vendrei would murmur, much later. “I should have begged their forgiveness too. Should have prayed for them, those drowned men in the cave. Have I lost my human heart? What have I become through all this?”
But much later was not yet, certainly not that night.
Having heard of the village, and that therefore some form of civilisation was near—food, shelter, a small boat that might ferry them to larger settlements—Frokash and Jacenth, with the help of Dakos and Crazt, had created a second smaller fire in the lea of the cliffs, and settled there for the night, with the widow Maressa.
Vendrei and Zephyrin were left at the larger fire, to their own devices, they and the single sword. Ymil also remained. “Someone should stay,” Ymil answered the merchant quietly, when asked to the second, calmer fireside.
“Not to leave them to their madness, eh?”
“Merely to watch,” Ymil replied, with abnormal truth.
Nevertheless, he sat back, some feet away from them.
No one spoke. From the other fire drifted faint talk, silences, presently the low snores of Crazt. The moon had come and gone long before.
When the big fire sank, Vendrei or Ymil replenished it from the store of driftwood and branches. Once Vendrei went up to the pool, then came back and sat down again. He had eaten nothing and refused the brandy. Although he was so quiet the smoulder of his rage was on him. His hair had dried, shone like guineas in the firelight, and the sword shone too, planted there, presiding, deriding the two unarmed men and their mortal dream of a duel.
Ymil, watching, saw how Zeph watched also only Ven. Those dark green eyes scarcely blinked, so fixed they were, But Ven watched nothing, or else only the angry blank his thoughts had become.
Well past midnight, Ymil began quietly but audibly to talk, almost as if to himself.
“How bizarre it is, that just the few of us were saved. Is our rescue then for a purpose? I mean, some purpose we have yet to fulfil? What can it be? Maybe, in my own life... I once did a cruel and stupid thing. There was a young lady I was set to marry. But I changed my mind. And—I abandoned her.” Under his watchful eyelids, (for Ymil sometimes watched even with his eyes shut), he studied Zeph’s finely chiselled profile. True to the aristocratic father’s embarrassed words, this young captain did look delicate enough to be taken for a woman, if one ignored the clothes. But that would be most unwise, for the core of Zephyrin, it seemed, was made of purest steel. Did the invented story Ymil now told touch any nerve? (Admittedly, in the father’s account, the genders were reversed, it was the son who had been abandoned by a girl.) No reaction? It was impossible to be sure. “I regretted my actions afterwards. I heard s
he had fallen very ill—my fault, I must assume. I wonder if I can atone for my crime against her. Or am I too late?”
Vendrei said nothing, did not even look up. Had he even heard? Why should he besides have any response to the tale, either the father of Zephyrin’s tale, or Ymil’s altered one ?
But now Zephyrin turned that pale wonderfully-wigged head and stared full at Ymil, so for an instant Ymil reckoned his role as tracker and spy had been sussed.
Zephyrin however said, “She sounds a spineless simpleton, your lady. Some dolt deserts her. She falls into a sickness. You’re better, sir, well shot of the ninny.”
And that was that again. At least upon the subject of desertion.
For about another hour after, as the stars wheeled ever over and on into the west, Zephyrin announced:
“Well. Vendrei, it appears you’re content to sulk and do nothing else to conclude our quarrel. Why am I not astonished?” (Vendrei offered no word). “Yet as I said, quantities of stuff from the doomed ship are scattered over the beaches further east. Where the cliffs close down upon the sea there, I thought I saw too some wreckage far out on the water. It seems to me now there’s a chance there could be weapons in with it, if only the weapons of dead men that you, Vendrei, naturally, would never mind thieving and employing.”
Vendrei spoke. “Tomorrow I shall go and see.”
“Such a hero. I gasp at you.”
“Go to Hell, Zephyrin. Once I find a second sword, whatever its calibre, I’ll send you there with it. You may as well familiarise yourself with the country first.”
Of all things, possibly Ymil did not expect to do more than doze.
Sleep accordingly took him by surprise.
As also it must have done Vendrei who, exhausted by water, shocks, walking, but mostly by the hundred conflicting emotions in his mind, had slumped over like a boy, with his cheek pillowed on his hand.
The sun blew out of the sea, the colour of Vendrei’s golden-guinea hair.
The people at the two fires woke up, or were woken by the wakening of others. They were in number seven, and should have been counted eight. Zephyrin had left them.
They went down the shore, striding eastward, Mhikal Vendrei and Ymil. On Ymil’s apparent personal involvement in searching for and locating Zephyrin, Vendrei made no comment. No doubt he was so obsessed with the captain, Ymil’s dissimilar yet total obsession seemed only inevitable.
“He’s swum out to that wreckage he claimed to see,” Vendrei had shouted, rather illogically—for if the wreckage were not real, why swim out to it? “The currents here, the tides, are crazed—he’ll drown himself, the devil—anything to deny me the satisfaction of killing him myself.”
Not long after, unbreakfasted, their toilette consisting of hand-rubbed faces, finger-combed hair, and brandy-moistened mouths, the two men set off.
Both barely kept themselves from running.
The day, however, ran. Forward, upward.
Eventually, in the solar light that was like smashed crystal, they reached a stretch of whiter sand. Where, gleaming and sparkled by sun, lay the spars and barrels of the shipwreck, a torn sail spread like dirty washing, a handful of iron bits, bolts and nails, the dreadful inefficacious irony of a holy medallion.
Here and there along the route the booted footfalls of Zephyrin had been discernible in softer sand. Now, these narrow markers led, infallible clue, to the water’s edge.
The sea had drawn out some way from the beach. This in itself showed a variant tide, since from what Zephyrin had said, one deduced that yesterday the margin had been consistently far more slender here.
“Look! There they are, his bloody boots thrown off—and the uniform jacket too, the better to swim.”
They scanned across sunlit splinters of ocean.
Nothing obvious was to be made out. Neither the alluring wreckage, nor any mortal form.
“If anything was here, the sea’s moved it. And the fool’s gone after.”
They stood between earth and water, under air and fire, dumbfounded.
“Oh God,” Vendrei said then, softly, “why do I hate him so? Why? What did he ever do to me but gaze and jeer, and what’s that, to a grown man? What have I done to myself these past years of my escape, to bring me down to this baseness and idiocy? I was never happy in all that time. I was never free. I drank and gamed and made love and played at living, and look where it’s carried me. And—carried this young man who so enraged me— Have I gone mad for certain, Ymil, do you think?”
“It is,” said Ymil, cautious and quite gentle, “a kind of madness.”
“Yes, mad. The mad-house is the vile hell in which I must leave myself next.” He gazed blindly across the bright water. “You talked last night, Ymil, of something you called a crime—that you’d deserted a young woman to whom you had promised marriage. You seemed to want to go back to her, to make it right. You said, I think, she fell ill... Oh, Ymil, We have almost the same story. If not exactly. My father sought to force me into an arranged marriage, with the daughter of a princely neighbour. I was already reluctant, yet took care I caught a glimpse of her before any formalities allowed me to meet her. Base as I was, and am, I think if I had been struck in admiration, I might have gone on with the fiasco. But no such thing occurred. Oh, she was not unpleasant, a little gawky, brown-haired, busying herself with some silly woman’s pretence of gardening. Seventeen years of age. An uneducated, ignorant, skinny child. With a whole ten yards, and most of a thick hedge between us, I grew incensed. I rebelled. Because besides I thought myself at that time in love with another woman, the clever, elegant wife of an acquaintance, let it be said, and I planned to seduce this person and steal her from her husband. I’ll tell you straight, when I proposed this to her, she laughed in my face. She said she was ‘greatly tempted’ but liked her house too well to desert it and go ‘adventuring’. So then I went off alone, and wasted four years of my life. And what became of the little girl of seventeen with the brown hair? She too fell sick, Ymil. And so I heard later, she died. I had this from a man who had known the family. I beat him at cards and he took it out on me by telling me this. He said it was well known, she had died of shame, and her own father had called me her murderer. I might as well have cut her in half with a sword. And now. Now I’ll kill a man for laughing at me. Am I so friendly with death, I yearn to feed him?”
Vendrei breathed a moment.
“Heaven pardon me, I should have begged their forgiveness too. Should have prayed for them, those drowned men in the cave. Have I lost my human heart? What have I become through all this? Mind lost, heart lost, inhuman, a monster—” And that said, Vendrei sat down and pulled off with some labour his own well-made boots. “I’ll swim out too, Ymil. Try to find that boy, save him—”
Ymil had no words to give. He was aware Vendrei would no more hear them now than he would have listened to his own contrition, earlier.
As the prince launched himself into the water, graceful and muscular, assured in this even in his sudden lack of all other assurances, Ymil squinted away along the beach, attempting to gauge what the sea did there.
They were difficult to divine, the moods, the schemes of the sea.
In the end, once Vendrei had vanished entirely into the distance, Ymil moved on along the beach.
There was for some way still a trail of objects tossed on the sand. Then the heavy masonry of the cliff put its foot down and ended the beach entire. Here one jagged rock stuck up in the water, and draped artistically across the rock was what Ymil, briefly, took to be a perfectly white garment. Until he saw that it had long green hair.
Ymil had met nothing in his life that conclusively established things supernatural did not exist. Ghosts, vampires, feys, all sorts were conceivable. Thus, so might this be. For plainly, a white-skinned, naked, lovely woman lay over the arm of the rock, emerald-haired, her flat smooth belly finalizing in a coiled black tail.
He was staring at the mermaid when he heard Vendrei call from behind him,
and the prince trudged up again out of the ocean, his own arms empty as his distraught face. All his shirt was gone now. How much of his soul?
Then they stared together at her, the lady from the sea.
It was Ymil who said at last, “She’s human after all. It’s weed caught in her hair, that greenness—and see, the tail’s just the effect of some dark torn material wrapped around her legs.”
Vendrei, who had been more still than the rock, started violently and said, “She isn’t dead. I thought she was. But she’s breathing.”
At that second the woman who was not a mermaid stirred, coughed, and leaning sidelong, quickly voided her lungs of water. After which she sat up, glanced at them in angry dismay, and put one slim arm across her very beautiful breasts.
Ymil identified her. Or, recognised her. For he had secretly known her from those minutes before the tempest struck.
But “Is she from the ship?” asked Vendrei, as if in a sort of stupor. “Madam,” he added, “allow me to assist you—”
“Keep your damned hands off me, you cur,” replied the woman, in the tenor voice of Captain Zephyrin.
Those years before, Zophyra, at seventeen, had been ill-at-ease, and it was true also she had been poorly educated. She could read and write, sing and sew. Aside from that she was continually instructed in a single lesson, being that she must be feminine, obedient, and ready to marry whichever suitor her father chose her.
One day the father did choose. Zophyra was consumed by utter terror. She had heard—and read—plenty of tales of young maidens wedded to evil and frequently elderly men. Despite her condition not uninventive, she found a means therefore, at a time when the proposed bridegroom was visiting the estate, to see him, herself unseen. Her notion was that if he were foul she would slay herself—or, perhaps, run away.
What she saw, on that amber harvest morning, when the scent of wheat and hay, apples and white alcohol was buzzing in the air, was Mhikal Vendrei, then just twenty-two years of age, marvellous as a young god.
