by Tanith Lee
For a while I had recalled the cloaked woman and her son. I said nothing of it, and put it from me. And soon I had seen other sights like that, and many since that time. The worst was when they tried to save each other, or worse yet, comfort each other. Those poor souls. Yet, like my dog, I would start then turn my eyes away. I could not help them. Nor would I have, if I could. We lived by what we took from them, lived by their dying. All men want and will to live. Even a dog does, swimming for the shore.
Iron is here now. He leans on my leg and the leg of the chair. Strange, for there is iron metal there also, but he does not know this. They are kind, compassionate to have let him in. Well then. Let me tell the rest.
I had seen fogs often, and of all sorts. Sea-frets come up like a grey curtain but they melt away at Hampp and are soon gone. The other sort of fog comes in a bank, so thick you think you might carve it off in chunks with your rope-knife. And it will stay days at a time, and the nights with them.
In such a fog sometimes a ship goes by, too far out and never seen, yet such is the weird property of the fog that you will hear the ship, hear it creak and the waves slopping on the hull of it, and the stifled breathing of the sails if they are not taken in and furled. It is often worthwhile to go down with extra lanterns then, and range many lamps too along the cliff by the notch, for the ship’s people will be looking for landfall and may see the lights, even in the depths of the cloud. But generally they do not. They pass away like ghosts. After they were gone men cursed and shrugged, wasting the lamp-oil as they had and nothing caught. But now and then a ship comes in too far, misled already by the fog, and by the deep water that lies in so near around our fanged rocks. For surely some demon made the coast in this place to send seafarers ill, and Hampp its only luck. These ships we would see, or rather the shine of their own lanterns, and they were heard more clearly, and soon they noticed our lamps too, and sometimes we called to them, through the carrying silence, called lovingly in anxious welcome, as if wanting them safe. And so they turned and came to us and ran against the stones.
That night of the last fog I was seventeen years, and Iron my dog about eight, with a flute of grey on his muzzle.
I had been courting a girl of the village, I will not name her. But really I only wanted to lie with her and sometimes she let me, therefore I knew we would needs be wed. So I was preoccupied, sitting by the fire, and then came the knock on the door. “Stir up, Jom Abinthorpe. Haro—waked already? That’s good. There is a grey drisk on the sea like blindness, come on in the hour. And one’s out there in it, seen her lamps. Well lit she is, some occasion she must have for it. But sailing near, the watch say.”
So out we went, and all the village street was full of the men, shouldering their hooks and pikes and hammers, and the lanterns in their muffle giving off only a pale slatey blue. By now I did not even look for my dog Iron, though a few of the men had their dogs with them, the low-slung local breed of Hampp, with snub noses and big shoulders, that might help too pulling the flotsam to shore.
We went along the cliff, near the edge now all of us, but for the youngest boys, three of them, that we posted up by the notch. Then the rest of us went down to the beach.
It was a curious thing. The fog that night was positioned like a fret, one that stayed only on the sea, and just the faintest tendrils and wisps of it drifted along the beach, like thin ribbons of smoke from off a fire.
The water was well in, creaming clear on the shale, the tide high enough, and not the tips of the fangs below showing even if the vessel could have made them out. But the ship was anyway held out there, inside the box of the fog, under the fog’s lid, like a fly in thick grey amber.
It was a large one, too, and as our neighbour had said, very well lit. In fact crazily much-lit, as if for some festival being held on the decks. We all spoke of it, talking low in case our words might carry, as eerily they did through these fogs. The watchman came and said he reckoned at first the ship had caught fire, to be so lighted up. For she did seem to burn, a ripe, rich, flickering gold. How many lamps? A hundred? More? Or torches maybe, flaming on the rails—?
A dog began barking then behind us, a loud strong bell of a bark. Some of the men swore, but my father said, “It’s good. Let them know out there land is here. Let them hear and come on. Let’s show the lanterns, boys. I’ll bet this slut is loaded down with cash and kickshaws—we’ll live by it a year and more.”
And just then the vessel slewed, and the line of it, all shown in light, altered shape. We knew it had entered the channel and was ready to run to us.
Something came rushing from the other way though, and slammed hard against my legs, so I staggered and almost fell. And turning I saw my dog there. He was standing four-square on the shale, panting and staring full at me with eyes like green coals. Brighter than our uncovered lamps they seemed.
I said, Iron would never come to the sea, nor anywhere near it.
“Wonders don’t cease,” said my father. “The dog wants to help us with it too. Good lad. Stay close now—”
But Iron turned his eyes of green fire on my father, and barked and belled, iron notes indeed that split the skin off the darkness. And then he howled as if in agony.
“Quiet! Quiet, you devil, for the sake of Christ! Do he want to sour our luck?” And next my father shouted at me. I had never seen him afraid, but then I did. And I did not know why. Yet my whole body had fathomed it out, and my heart.
And I grabbed Iron and tried to push him back. “Not now, boy. Go back if you don’t care for it. Go home and wait. Ask Ma for a bit of crackling. She knows when you ask. She’ll give it you. Go on home, Iron.”
And Iron fell silent, but now he sank his teeth in my trouser and began to tug and pull at me. He was a muscular dog, though no longer young, and tall, as I said.
The other men were surly and restless. They did not like this uncanny scene, the flaming ship that drove now full toward us and cast its flame-light on the shore, so the cliffs were shining up like gilt, and the opened lanterns paled to nothing—and the dog, possessed by some horrible fiend, gnawing and pulling, his spit pouring on the wet ground in a silver rain, as if he had the madness.
And then there came the strangest interval. I cannot properly describe how it was. It was as if time stuck fast for a moment, and the moment grew another way, swelling on and on. Even Iron, not letting go of me, stopped his tugging and slavering. And in the hell of his eyes I saw the wild reflection of the gold fire of the ship growing and moving as nothing else, for that moment, might.
“By the Lord,” said my father softly, “it’s a big one, this crate.” It was such a foolish, stupid thing to say. And the last words I ever did hear from my father.
They call them she; that is, the seafarers call each ship she. As if she were a woman. But we did not. We could not, maybe, seeing as how we killed them in the Night Work. Just as we ignored the women who died with the ships, and the children who died.
But now I must call it she. The ship, the golden ship.
Believe this or not, as you will.
I do not believe it, and I saw it happen. I never will believe it, not till my last breath is wrung from me. And then, I think, I shall have to.
The moment which had stuck came free and fled. We felt time move, felt it one and all. It was as if the two hands of a clock had stuck, and then unstuck, and the ticking of it and the moving of it began again.
But as time moved, and we with it, it was the ship instead that froze. Out there at the edge of the grey slab of the fog, under it, yet visible now as if only through the flimsiest veil. She was well in on the last stretch. She could not stay her course. No vessel, even a mighty and huge one, could have stayed itself now. So far she had driven in, she must hurl on towards her finish against the rocks, and on the faces of the cliffs around, those that crowded out into the sea to meet her. Yet—she did not move. Our clock ran, hers had halted. But oh, something about her there was that moved.
I behold her stil
l in my mind’s eye. So tall, six or seven decks she seemed, and so many masts, and all full laden with her sheets. There was not a man on her that I could see. None. Nor any lamps or torches to light her up so bright that now, almost free of the fog, half she blinded me. No, she blazed from something else, as if she had been coated, every inch of her, in foil of gold, her timbers, her ropes, her sails—coated in gold and then lit up from within by some vast and different fire that never could burn upon this world, but maybe under it—or high above. Like the sun. A sun on fire at her core, and flaming outward. Lampless. She was the lantern. How she burned.
Not a sound. No voice, no motion. Even the ocean, quiet as if it too had congealed—but it moved, and the waves came in and lapped our boots, and they made, the waves, no sound at all.
And then the dog, my Iron, he began to worry at me, hard, hard, and I felt his teeth go through the trouser and he fastened them in my very leg. I shouted out in pain and turned, not knowing what I did, as if to cuff him or thrust him away. And by that the spell on me was rent.
I found I was running. I ran and sobbed and called out to God, and Iron ran by me and then just ahead of me. It seemed to me he had me fast by an invisible cord. I had no choice but to fly after him. And yet, oddly, a part of me did not want to. I wanted only to go back and stand at the sea’s brink and look at the ship—but Iron dragged me and I could not release myself from the phantom chain.
I was up on the cliff path when I heard them screaming behind me and some one hundred and fifty feet below. This checked me. I fell and my ankle turned and a bone snapped, but I never heard the noise it made, for there was no sound in that place but for the shrieking of the men, and one of them my father.
Of course, I could no longer stir either forward or back. I lay and twisted, feeling no pain in my foot or leg, and stared behind me.
And this is what I saw. Every man upon that shore, every lad, even the youngest of them, ten years old, and the dogs, those too, and those screaming too as if caught in a trap, all these living creatures—they were racing forward, not as I had inland, but out toward the sea, toward the fog, toward the golden glare of the ship— But they howled in terror as they did so, men and beasts, nor did they run on the earth. They ran on water. They ran through the air. The three children from the cliff-top—they too—off into the air they had been slung, wailing and weeping, and whirling outward like the rest. And up and up they all pelted, as if racing up a cliff, but no land was there under their feet. Only the ship was there ahead of them, and she waited. The thin veil of the outer fog hid nothing. The light of her was too fierce for anything to be hidden. The men and the boys and the dogs ran straight up and forward, unable to stay their course until, one by one, they smashed and splintered on the cliff-face of the golden ship, on the golden fangs and cheek and rock of the ship. I saw so clear their bones break on her, and the scarlet gunshot of their blood that burst and scattered away, not staining her. As they did not either, but fell down like empty sacks into the jet black water. Till all was done.
After which, she turned aside, gently drifting, herself as if weightless and empty, and having moved all round she returned into the fog, under fog, and under night and under silence. She slid away into the darkness. Her glow went soft and melted out. The fog closed over. The night closed fast its door, and only then I heard the waves that sucked the shale, and the pain rose in my leg like molten fire.
They will be hanging me tomorrow. That is fair; it is what I came to the mainland for, and made my confession. At first I never said why I had had to. How I had crawled up the path, with my dog helping me. And in the village of Hampp, all the faces, and seeing that each one knew yet would not speak of it. My mother, she like the others. How I stayed two months there, alone, until I could walk with a stick, and by then almost everyone had left the place, the empty houses like damp caves. And then I left there also. But I came here, and my dog quite willing to cross water, and I found a judge, and was judged.
Men have gone to search the waters off the coast below Hampp. They find nothing of the dead ships. We took all there was to take. As for corpses, bones, theirs and ours are all mingled, like the gargoyles and angels in the stones of the beach.
When I did tell the priest of the ship, he refused to believe me. So I have told you now and let it be written down, since I was never learned to make my letters.
You see there is an iron manacle on my ankle, but it is quite a comfort. It supports the aching bone that snapped. The rope perhaps will support my neck and then that will be crushed, or it will also break, and then I will leave this world to go into the other place, from which golden things issue out.
It is kind they let me say farewell to Iron, my dog. Yes, even though he is no longer mine. They have told me a widow woman, quite wealthy, is eager to have him, since her young son is so taken with Iron, and Iron with him likewise.
I have witnessed it myself, only this morning from this window, how the dog walked with the child along the street, Iron wagging his strong old tail that is only a touch grey to one side. The child is a fair boy too, with dark sad eyes that clear when he looks at Iron. And certainly his mother is wealthy, for her cloak is of heavy fur.
That is all, then. That is all I need to say.
No. I am not sorry for my village. No, I am not afraid to go to the scaffold. Or to die. No, I am not afraid of these things. It is the other place I fear. The place that comes after. The place they are in, the men of Hampp, and my father too. The place where she came from. The Ship. I cannot even tell you how afraid I am, of that.
The Sea Was In Her Eyes
This sequel to “Girls in Green Dresses” is also for John Kaiine - who told me something too, of Elaidh
Day by day the great ship swung across the ocean. She was rigged so full she seemed to carry the clouds above her decks. At first, the passengers had looked up, wondering, at these. Then they looked down and about, and most of them saw the young woman, for she was the only human female thing aboard.
“She’s a fine-looking girl, she is so,’’ they said. Her hair was brown and piled up heavily on her head.
She was slender and green-eyed. Her clothes were good, but more than those, they noted three ruby rings on her fingers and the long rope of pearls, nearly long as she was tall, that she wore at night to dinner in the saloon.
“She’s alone. Such a girl should have some company,” said they.
They generously tried to give her company then, the older men and the younger men, the sailors and the passengers both. She was quiet and graceful with them all, but they slid from her surface as fishes slip through water.
“It’s a pity she is a tease,” they said.
“She’s plain as dough,” they said, “despite her rubies and pearls.”
“She has emeralds for eyes and a cold green heart.”
The sea was wide as the sky, but now and then a bit of land appeared, the thin strip of a coast. Here passengers got off and new passengers walked on. At one land-strip, which had an edging of mountains, a young man stepped aboard, with six brass-bound boxes and a chest, and two servants, two white horses and two black dogs, and an owl that would sit on his arm. His hair was dark and his skin fair. He was handsome, too, and like everything else, his looks came aboard with him.
Half the day he would sit reading, and the other half playing the piano in the saloon. He was rich. A prince, they said.
“Prince Cuzarion,” they said, bowing to him. And they tried to win his money off him at cards, or by means of bets and wagers, inviting him to race his dogs against other dogs on board, or to set the owl on some passing gull. But they never won a penny, and the dogs did not race, and the owl never chased the gull.
Sometimes the passengers would tell stories in the saloon after the dinner.
One night the prince, if so he was, told a marvellous and clever story, about a prince who, on a voyage, was carried down into the deep by a mermaid where he lived with her some while—she having, by then,
taught him how to breathe under the sea.
“Is that what you’d like, then?” they asked.
“I am already betrothed,” said Prince Cuzarion. “Although perhaps I might not mind it, for a month or so.”
All this while, the girl had sat in her usual corner, drinking her glass of wine, the rubies burning on her white hands and the pearls weeping down her dress.
Maybe some of them had noticed she would often glance at the prince. Maybe some of them had even seen her gaze at him very long.
So now, one of the other men said to her, “Well, my lady, what do you think of mermaids?”
Although she was so young, she was never discomposed. And now she spoke calmly and clearly, with neither arrogance or shyness.
“I think that they exist,” she said, “but they are not as you imagine, being a cruel race, who like to eat men raw and sometimes alive, spitting out the bones to make flutes.”
This shocked everyone. The idea itself, and that this young girl should speak of it. So they said no more to her. But Prince Cuzarion, he flipped her one look. It was probably only the second he had ever given her, for she had not taken his fancy, though perhaps he had taken hers.
That night a storm came up out of the sea, boiling and black. It put out the stars and smashed the plate of the moon. That done, it scanned about for something to harm, but though the land was not far off, it did not want the land. Then, it saw a ship dancing along, rigged with clouds, and with lights shining from the port-holes and in the lanterns, and under the howl of the wind fluttered the notes of a piano.
“I’ll have you,” said the storm, and flung itself forward, kicking the waves from its path.
When the storm hit the vessel buffeting blows, the ship’s world went to pieces. Lights and wine glasses and coffee-pots flew one way, and with them the chairs and boxes, and the piano even. And all the passengers. Then everything went another way
