by Tanith Lee
This night though, as the fish were seething and the sun going down into the water on a path of blood, he walked back to the out-house, and took a stare at the sealskin drying on its pegs. In the last sunglare, the fur of the pelt was like new copper. It had a beautiful sheen to it, and no mistake. It was too good to be giving away. But there, he had made his bargain—not to the girl, but to himself. Set in his ways, he had not the tactics to go back on his word. So with a shrug, he banged shut the outhouse door, and went to eat his supper in the croft.
It was maybe an hour after the sunset that the wind began to lift along the sea.
In a while, Huss Hullas put aside the sleeve he was darning, and listened. He had lived all his life in sight and sound of the ocean, and the noise of water and weather was known to him. Even the winds had their own voices, but this wind had a voice like no other he had ever heard. At first he paid it heed, and then he went back to his darning. But then again he sat still and listened, and he could not make it out, so much any could tell, if they had seen him. At last, he got to his feet and took the one oil-lamp that was burning on the mantelpiece, and opened the door of the croft. He stood there, gazing out into the darkness, the lamp swinging its lilt of yellow over the sloping rock, and beyond it only the night and the waves. There was nothing to be found out there. The sea was not even rough, only a little choppy as it generally would be at this season of the year. The sky was open and stars hung from it, though the moon would not be over the hill for another hour or more.
So there was no excuse for the wind, or the way it sounded. No excuse at all. And what had caught Huss Hullas’s attention in the croft was five times louder in the outer air.
It was full of crying, the wind was, like the keening of women around a grave. And yet, there was nothing human in the noise. It rose and fell and came and went, like breathing, now high and wild and lamenting, now low and choked and dire.
Huss Hullas was not a superstitious man, and he did not believe any of the old tales that get told around the fires on winter nights. He had not enough liking for his own kind to have caught their romancing. Yet he heard the wind, and finding nothing he went inside again and bolted the door.
And next he took a piece of wood and worked on it, sawing and hammering it, while the kettle sang on the hob and the fire spat from a dose of fresh peat. The wind was not so easily heard in this way. Nor anything much outside. Though when the knock came sharp on his bolted door, Huss Hullas heard it well enough.
In all the years he had lived on Dula, there had only been one other time someone had knocked on the door by night. There are some two hundred souls live there, and no phone and not even a vet. One summer dark, with a child of his ailing, a man came to ask Huss Hullas to row him over to the mainland for a doctor. Huss Hullas refused to row, but for three pounds he let the man hire his boat. That was his way. Later that night the doctor was operating for appendicitis over the hill on a scrubbed kitchen table. The child lived; the father said to Huss Hullas: “Three pounds is the worth you set on a child’s life.”
“Be glad,” was the answer, “I set it so cheap.”
Money or no, Huss Hullas did not like to be disturbed, and perhaps it was this made him hesitate, now. Then the knocking came and a voice called to him out of the crying of the wind.
“Open your door,” it said. “I see your light under it.”
And the voice was a woman’s.
Maybe he was curious and maybe not, but he went to the door at last and unbolted it and threw it wide.
The thick dull glow of the lamp left on the mantelpiece fell out around him on the rock. But directly where his shadow fell instead, the woman was standing. In this way he could not see her well, but he made a guess she was from one of the inland crofts. She seemed dressed as the women there were dressed, shabby and shawled, and her fashion of talking seemed enough like theirs.
“Well, what is it?” he said to her.
“It’s a raw night,” she said. “I would come in.”
“That’s no reason I should let you.”
“You are the man hunts the seals,” she said.
“I am.”
“Then I would come in and speak of that.”
“I’ve nothing to sell. The skins are in the sheds across the water.”
“One skin you have here.”
“Who told you so?”
“No matter who told me,” said the woman. “I heard it was a fine one. Beautiful and strangely coloured, and the size of two seals together.”
“Not for sale,” said Huss Hullas, supposing sullenly one of the other sealers had jabbered, though how news had got to Dula he was not sure, unless he had been spied on.
“It is a love gift, then?” said the woman. “You are courting, and would give it to her?”
At this, his granite temper began to stir.
“This skin is mine, and no business of yours,” he said. “Get home.”
When he said this the wind seemed to swell and break on the island like a wave. Startled, he raised his head, and for a moment there seemed to be a kind of mist along the water, a mist that moved, swimming and sinuous, as if it were full of live things.
“Get home,” the woman repeated softly. “And where do you think my home to be?”
When he looked back at her, she had turned a little and come out of his shadow, so the lamp could reach her. She was not young, but neither was she old, and she was handsome, too, but this is not what he saw first. He saw that he had been mistaken in the matter of the shawl, for she was shawled only in her hair, which was very long, streaming round her, and of a pale ashy brown uncommon enough he had never before seen it. Her eyes, catching the lamp, were black and brilliant, but they were odd, too, in a way he could not make out, though he did not like them much. Otherwise she might have seemed normal, except her hair was wet, and her clothing, which was shapeless and looked torn, ran with water. Perhaps it had rained as she walked over the hill.
“Your home is nothing to me,” he said. “And the skin is not for sale.”
“We will speak of it,” she said. And she put out her hand as if to touch him and he sprang backwards before he knew what he did. Next moment she came in after him, and the door fell shut on the night, closing them in the croft together.
In all his life Huss Hullas had never feared anything, save the ocean, which was more common sense than fear. Now he stood and stared at the woman with her wet dress and her wet hair, knowing that in some way fear her he did, but he had not the words or even the emotion in him to explain it to himself, or what else he felt, for fear was not nearly all of it.
He must have stood a long while, staring like that, and she a long while letting him do so. What nudged him at length was another thing altogether. A piece of coal barked on the fire, and in the silence after, he realised the wind had dropped, and its eerie wailing ceased.
“Your name is Huss Hullas,” the woman said in the silence. “Do not ask me how I learned it. My name, so we shall know each other, is Saiuree.”
When she told him her name, the hair rose on his neck. It did not sound human, but more like the hiss the spume would make, or the sea through a channel, or some creature of the sea.
“Well,” he said harshly. “Well.”
“It shall be well,” she agreed, “for I’ll have the skin from your shed. But I’ll pay you fairly for it, whatever price you have set.”
He laughed then, shortly and bitterly, for he was not given to laughter, he did it ill and it ill-became him.
“The price is one you would not like to pay, Missus.”
“Tell it me, and I shall know.”
“The price,” he said brutishly, “is to spill between a woman’s spread legs.”
But she only looked at him.
“If that is what you wish, that is what I can give you.”
“Ah,” he said. “But you see, it’s not you I want.”
“So,” she said, and she was quiet awhile. He felt an uneasy silly triu
mph while she was, standing there in his own croft with him, and he unable to show her the door. Then she said, “It is a black-haired girl on the mainland you would have. Her name is Morna.”
His triumph went at that.
“Who told you?” he said.
“You,” said she.
And he understood it was true. She smiled, slow and still, like a ripple spreading in a tide pool.
“Oh, Huss Hullas,” said she, “I might have filled this room up with pearls, and not have missed them, or covered the floor with old green coins from the days before any man lived here. There is a ship sunk, far out, and none knows of it. There are old shields rotting black on the sides of it and a skeleton sits in the prow with a gold ring on his neck, and I might have brought you that ring. Or farther out there is another ship with golden money in boxes. Or I could bring you the stone head with stone snakes for hair, that was cast into the sea for luck, and make you rich. But you will have your bar girl and that is your price.”
Huss Hullas sat down in his chair before the fire and wished he had some whisky by him. At the woman who called herself Saiuree, he snarled: “You’re mad, then.”
“Yes,” she said. “Mad with grief. Like those you heard in the wind, crying for the sea they have lost and the bodies they have lost, so they may not swim anymore through the waterworld, or through the towered city under the ocean.”
“I’ve no interest in stories,” he said.
“Have you none.”
“No. But you’ll tell me next you are one of the Shealcé, and the skin you seek is your own.”
“So I am,” she said. “But the skin is not mine. It is the skin of my only son, Connuh, that you shot on the ice for his beauty and his strength as the dawn stood on the water.”
Huss Hullas spat in the fire.
“My mother had a son, too. There’s no great joy in sons.”
“Ah,” she said, “it’s that you hate yourself so much you can never come to love another. Well, we are not all of your way. Long before men came here, the Seal People held this water and this land. And when men came they took the fish from us and drove us out. And when, in passing then, we paused to rest here, they killed us, because our skins are finer than their own. How many of this People have you slain, man? Many hundreds, is it not? And today with your gun you slew a prince of this People. For he was of the true Shealcé, from whom all the Shealcé now take their name. But still even we do not give hate for hate, greed for greed, injustice for injustice. I’ll pay your price. Look in my eyes and see it.”
“I’ll not look in your eyes.”
“So you will,” she said.
She came close. No steam rose from her, nor was she dry. Her dress was seaweed, and nothing else. Her hair was like the sea itself. He saw why he had misliked her eyes. About their round bright blackness there was no white at all. Even so, he looked at them and into them and through them, out into the night.
Above, the night sea was black, but down, far down where the seal dives, it was not black at all. There was a kind of light, but it came from nothing in the sea. It came from the inside of the eyes of the ones who swam there, who had seen the depths of the water in their own way, and now showed it to the man. If Huss Hullas wished to see it, who can say? Probably he did not. A man with so little life-love in him he was like one without blood, to him maybe to see these things he saw was only wasted time. But if he had only walled himself in all these years against his own thought and his own dreams, then maybe there was a strange elation in the seeing, and a cold pain.
At first then, only the darkness through which he saw as he went down in it, like one drowning, but alive and keeping breath, as the seals did, on land or in ocean both. Then there began to be fish, like polished knives without their hafts, flashing this way and that way. And through the fish, Huss Hullas began to see the currents of the water, the milky strands like breezes going by. All around there too, the dim shadows of the Shealcé, each one graceful and lovely in that gentle shape of theirs, like dancers at their play, but moving ever down and down, and ever northwards.
They passed a wreck. It was so old it was like the skeleton of a leaf and in the prow a human skeleton leaned. It had a gold torc round its bone throat, while the shields clung in black bits and flakes to the open sides of the vessel, just as Saiuree had said. It was a Wicing longboat of many, many hundred years before.
The seals swam over and about the wreck, and then away, and Huss Hullas followed them.
And it began to seem to him then that he felt the silk of the water on his flesh, and the power and grace of the seal whose body he seemed to have come to inhabit, but he was not sure.
Shortly beyond the wreck there was a space of sheer blackness, that might have been a wall of rock. But here and there were openings in the black, and one by one the seals ebbed through with the water and Huss Hullas after them. On the farther side was the city of the Shealcé.
Now there are many tales told of that spot, but this was how he saw it for himself.
It must in part have been a natural thing, and this is not to be wondered at, for the Shealcé have no hands in their water form with which to build, whatever figure they may conjure on the land. Above would be islets, no doubt, where they might bask in the sun of summer. But here the cold-sea coral had grown, pale greyish red and sombre blueish white, and rose in spines and funnels all about. It seemed to Huss Hullas like a city of chimneys, for the curious hollow formations twisted and humped and ascended over each but all went up—in places ten times the height of a man and more—and at their tops they smoked and bubbled, and that was the air brought down into them by the Shealcé themselves, in their chests and in their fur, which gradually went up again and was lost in the water.
So he beheld these pastel spires, softly smoking, and glittering too. For everywhere huge clusters of pearls had been set, or those shells which shine, or other ornaments of the sea, though nothing that had come from men, not silver or gold, nor jewels.
But strangest of all, deep in the city and far away, there were a host of faint lights, for all the world like vague-lit windows high in towers. And these yellow eyes beamed out through the water as if they watched who came and who departed, but if the Shealcé had made and lit them he did not know. Nor did he think of it then, perhaps.
For all the seals swam in amid the chimneyed city and he with them, and suddenly he heard again that dreadful hopeless crying, but this time it was not in the wind he heard it, but in his own brain. And this time, too, he knew what it said. He saw, at last, the shapes about him were shadows for sure, were wraiths, the ghosts only of seals, who swam out this final journey before their lamenting memory should die as their bodies had already died from the bullets of men.
Oh, to be no more, to be no more, the seals were crying. To be lost, to be lost. The hurt of the death was less, far less, than the hurt of the loss. Where now are we to go?
If he felt the hurt they cried of, he did not know himself, most likely. But he was close to it as generally no man comes close to anything, and rarely to his own self.
And then one of the yellow-eyed towers was before him, and he swam up into the light and the light enclosed him—
—and he was in the corridor above the mainland bar with Morna opening a door.
Then they were in the bedroom, and she was not sulky or covetous, but smiling and glad. And she took her stockings off her white legs and bared her rosy breasts and combed her liquorice hair with her hands. He forgot the seals that moment, and the water and the crying. “Lie down with me, sweetheart,” said Morna, and took him to her like her only love. And he had something with her that hour he never had had with any woman before, and never would have again so long as he lived.
A while before dawn, just as the sky was turning grey under the hill, he woke up alone in his bed in the croft. That he thought he had been dreaming is made nothing of by the fact he came instantly from the covers, flung on his clothes, and went to the door. He meant to go a
nd look in the outhouse, doubtless, but he had no need. What he sought lay on the rocky edge of Dula, less than twenty strides below him.
The whole sky was higher, with the darkness going fast. He had a chance to see what he was staring at.
There by the ocean’s brink a woman knelt, mourning over a thing that lay along the rock and across her lap. Her showering hair covered what remained of this thing’s face, and maybe Huss Hullas was thankful for it. But from her hair there ran away another stream of hair that was not hers, richer and more golden, even in the ‘tween-light. And beyond the hair stretched the body of a young man, long-limbed and wide in the shoulder, and altogether very large and well-made, and altogether naked. At least, it would seem to be a body, but suddenly you noticed some two or three shallow cuts of a knife, and then you would see the body had no meat to it and no muscle and no bone—it was an empty skin.
There came some colour in the sky within the grey, and the woman, with a strange awkward turn, slipped over into the water and dragged the human skin with her, and both were gone.
And then again, as the sun came up over the hill of Dula, and Huss Hullas was still standing there, he saw the round head of a seal a half mile out on the water, with an odd wide wake behind it as if it bore something alongside itself. He did not go to fetch his gun. He never shot a seal from that day to this. Nor did he go drinking or to find women in the town. Indeed, he went inland, over the hill, to live where he might not heed the noise of the sea. He kept away from his own kind; that did not change.
Do you think it was guilt then that turned him from his outward ways, deeper into those inner ways of his? Perhaps only he saw the seal tracks on the rock and sand, or found a strip of seawrack in between the covers of the bed, and knew what he had lain with, even if it had passed for rosy Morna. The Shealcé are an elder people. It is said in the stories they can take each form as they will, the seal or the human, as it suits them, or some older form that maybe they have, which no one knows anymore who has not entered the heart of their city of coral and pearl, and remembered it.
