Bradley, Marion Zimmer - SSC 03

by Lythande (v2. 1)

  This done, she drew from a small pouch at her waist a quantity of herbs that had no magical properties whatever (unless the property of bringing relaxation and peace to the weary can be counted magical), rolled them into a narrow tube, and set them alight with a spark blazing from the ring she bore. She inhaled deeply, leaned back with her narrow feet stretched out to the fire, for the sea-wind was damp and cold, and considered.

  Did she wish, for the prestige of the Order, and the pride of a Pilgrim-Adept, to go out against a mermaid?

  Powerful as was the magic of the Blue Star, Lythande knew that somewhere beneath the world of the Twin Suns, a magic might lie next to which a Pilgrim-Adept's powers were mere hearth-magic and trumperies. There were moments when she wearied, indeed, of her long life of concealment and felt she would welcome death, more especially if it came in honorable battle. But these were brief moods of the night, and always when day came, she wakened with renewed curiosity about all the new adventures that might lie around the next bend in the road. She had no wish to cut it short in futile striving against an unknown enemy.

  Her music had indeed recalled the enchanted man to himself. Did this mean her magic was stronger than that of the mermaid? Probably not; she had needed only to break through the magical focus of the man's attention, to remind him of the beauty of the world he had forgotten. Then, hearing again, his mind had chosen that real beauty over the false beauty of the enchantment, for beneath the magic that, held him entranced, the mind of the man must have been already in despair, struggling to break free. A simple magic and nothing to give overconfidence in her strength against the unknown magic of mermaids.

  She wrapped herself in the mage-robe and laid herself down to sleep, halfway inclined to rise before dawn and be far away before anyone in the village was astir. What were the troubles of a fishing village to her? Already she had given them a gift of magic, restoring the innkeeper's husband to himself; what else did she owe them?

  Yet, a few minutes before the rising of the pale face of Keth, she woke knowing she would remain. Was it only the challenge of testing an unknown magic against her own? Or had the helplessness of these people touched her heart?

  Most likely, Lythande thought with a cynical smile, it was her own wish to see a new magic. In the years she had wandered under the eyes of Keth and Reth, she had seen many magics, and most were simple and almost mechanical, set once in motion and kept going by something not much better than inertia.

  Once, she remembered, she had encountered a haunted oak grove, with a legend of a dryad spirit who seduced all male passersby. It had proved to be no more than an echo of a dryad's wrath when spurned by a man she had tried and failed to seduce; her rage and counterspell had persisted more than forty seasons, even when the dryad's tree had fallen, lightning-struck, and withered. The remnants of the spell had lingered till it was no more than an empty grove where women took their reluctant lovers, that the leftover powers of the angry dryad might arouse at least a little lust. Lythande, despite the pleas of the women fearing to lose their husbands to the power of the spell, had not chosen to meddle; the last she heard, the place had acquired a pleasant reputation for restoring potency, at least for a night, to any man who slept there.

  The village was already astir. Lythande went out into the reddening sunrise, where the fishermen gathered from habit, though they were not dragging down their boats to the edge of the tide. Seeing Lythande, they left the boats and crowded around.

  "Say, wizard, will you help us or no?"

  "I have not yet decided," said Lythande. "First I must speak with everyone in the village who has encountered the creature."

  "Ye can't do that," said one old man with a fierce grin, " 'less ye can walk down into the Sea-God's lockup an' question them down there! Or maybe wizards can do that, too?"

  Rebuked, Lythande wondered if she were taking their predicament too lightly. To her, perhaps, it was challenge and curiosity; to these folk it was their lives and their livelihood, their very survival at stake.

  "I am sorry; I should have said, of course, those who have encountered the creature and lived." There were not, she supposed, too many of those.

  She spoke first to the fisherman she had recalled with her magic. He spoke with a certain self-consciousness, his eyes fixed on the ground away from her.

  "I heard her singing, that's all I can remember, and it seemed there was nothing in the world but only that song. Mad, it is, I don't care all that much for music;— savin' your presence, minstrel,' he added sheepishly. "Only I heard that song, somehow it was different, I wanted no more than just to listen to it forever. . . ." He stood silent, thoughtful. "For all that, I wish I could remember. ..." And his eyes sought the distant horizon.

  "Be grateful you cannot," Lythande said crisply, "or you would still be sitting by your fire without wit to feed or clean yourself. If you wish my advice, never let yourself think of it again for more than a moment."

  "Oh, ye're right, I know that, but still an' all, it was beautiful—" He sighed, shook himself like a great dog, and looked up at Lythande. "I suppose my mates must ha' dragged me away an' back to the shore; next I knew I was sitting by my fireplace listening to your music, minstrel, an' Mhari cryin' and all."

  She turned away; from him she had learned no more than she had known before. "Is there anyone else who met the beast, the mermaid, and survived the meeting?"

  It seemed there were none; for the young girls who had taken out the boat either had not encountered the mermaid or it had not chosen to show itself to them. At last one of the women of the village said hesitantly, "When first it came, and the men were hearin' it and never coming back, there was Lulie—she went out with some of the women—she didna' hear anything, they say; she can't hear anything, she's been deaf these thirty years. And she says she saw it, but she wouldna' talk about it. Maybe, knowin' what you're intending to do, she'll tell you, magician."

  A deaf woman. Surely there was logic to this, as there was logic to all the things of magic if you could only find out the underlying pattern to it. The deaf woman had survived the mermaid because she could not hear the song. Then why had the men of the village been unable to conquer it by the old ruse of plugging their ears with wax?

  It attacked the eyes, too, apparently, for one of the men had spoken of it as "so beautiful." This man said he had leaped from the boat and tried to swim ashore. Ashore—or on the rocks toward the creature? She should try to speak with him, too, if she could find him. Why was he not here among the men? Well, first, Lythande decidedj she would speak with the deaf woman.

  She found her in the village bake shop, supervising a single crooked-bodied apprentice in unloading two or three limp-looking sacks of poor-quality flour, mixed with husks and straw. The village's business, then, was so much with the fishing that only those who were physically unable to go into the boats found it permissible to follow any other trade.

  The deaf woman glowered at Lythande, set her lips tight, and gestured to the cripple to go on with what he was doing, bustling about her ovens. The doings of a magician, said her every truculent look, were no business of hers and she wanted nothing to do with them.

  She went to the apprentice and stood over him. Lythande was a very tall woman, and he was a wee small withered fellow; as he looked up, he had to tilt his head back. The deaf woman scowled, but Lythande deliberately ignored her.

  "I will talk with you," she said deliberately, "since your mistress is too deaf and perhaps too stupid to hear what I have to say."

  The little apprentice was shaking in his shoes.

  "Oh, no, Lord Magician ... I can't. . . . She knows every word we say, she reads lips, and I swear she knows what I say even before I say it. ..."

  "Does she indeed?" Lythande said. "So now I know." She went and stood over the deaf woman until she raised her sullen face. "You are Lulie, and they tell me that you met the seabeast, the mermaid, whatever it is, and that it did not kill you. Why?"

  "How should I know
?" The woman's voice was rusty as if from long disuse; it grated on Lythande s musical ear.

  It was unfair to think ill of a woman because of her misfortune; yet Lythande found herself disliking this woman very much. Distaste made her voice harsh.

  "You have heard that I have committed myself to rid the village of this creature that is preying on it." Lythande did not realize that she had, in fact, committed herself until she heard herself say so. "In order to do this, I must know what it is that I face. Tell me all you know of this thing, whatever it may be."

  "Why do you think I know anything at all?"

  "You survived." And, thought Lythande, I would like to know why, for when I know why it spared this very unprepossessing woman, perhaps I will know what I must do to kill it—if it must be killed, after all. Or would it be enough to drive it away from here?"

  Lulie stared at the floor. Lythande knew she was at an impasse; the woman could not hear, and she, Lythande, could not command her with her eyes and presence, or even with her magic, as long as the woman would not meet her eyes. Anger flared in her; she could feel, between her brows, the crackling blaze of the Blue Star; her anger and the blaze of magic reached the baker woman and she looked up.

  Lythande said angrily, "Tell me what you know of this creature! How did you survive the mermaid?"

  "How am I to know that? I survived. Why? You are the magician, not I; let you tell me that, wizard."

  With an effort Lythande moderated her anger. "Yet I implore you, for the safety of all these people, tell me what you know, however little."

  "What do I care for the folk of this village?" Lythande wondered what her grudge was that her voice should be so filled with wrath and contempt. It was probably useless to try and find out. Grudges were often quite irrational; perhaps she blamed them for her loss of hearing, perhaps for the isolation that had descended on her when, as with many deaf people, she had withdrawn into a world of her own, cut off from friends and kin.

  "Nevertheless, you are the only one who has survived a meeting with this thing," Lythande said, "and if you will tell me your secret, I will not tell them."

  After a long time the woman said, "It—called to me. It called in the last voice I heard; my child, him that died o' the same fever that lost me my hearing; crying and calling out to me. And so for a time I thought they'd lied to me when they said my boy was dead of the fever, that somehow he lived, out there on the wild shores. I spent the night seeking him. And when the morning came, I came to my senses, and knew if he had lived, he wouldna' call me in that baby voice—he died thirty years ago, by now he'd be a man grown, and how could he have lived all this time alone?" She stared at the floor again, stubbornly.

  There was nothing Lythande could say. She could hardly thank the woman for a story Lythande had wrenched from her, if not by force, so near it as hot to matter.

  So I was on the wrong track, Lythande thought. The deaf woman had not been keeping from Lythande some secret that could have helped to deal with the menace to this village. She was only concealing what would have made her feel a fool.

  And who am I to judge her, 1 who hold a secret deeper and darker than hers?

  She had been wrong and must begin again. But the time had not been wasted, not quite, for now she knew that whereas it called to men in the voices of the ones they loved, it was not wholly a sexual enticement, as she had heard some mermaids were. It called to men in the voice of a loved woman; to at least one woman, it had called in the voice of her dead child. Was it, then, that it called to everyone in the voice of what they loved best?

  This, theri, would explain why the young girls were at least partly immune. Before the power of love came into a life, a young boy or girl loved his parents, yes, but because of the lack of experience, the parents were still seen as someone who could protect and care for the child, not to be selflessly cared for.

  Love alone could create that selflessness.

  Then— thought Lythande—it will be safe for me to go out against the monster. For there is, now, no one and nothing I love. Never have I loved any man. Such women as I have loved are separated from me by more than a lifetime, and I know enough to be wary if any should call to me in the voice of the heart's desire, then I am safe from it. For I love no one, and my heart, if indeed I still have a heart, desires nothing.

  I will go and tell them that I am ready to rid the village of their curse.

  They gave her their best boat, and would have given her one of the half-grown girls to row it out for her, but Lythande declined. How could she be sure the girl was too young to have loved, and thus become vulnerable to the call of the sea-creature? Also, for safety, Lythande left her lute on the shore, partly because she wished to show them that she trusted them with it, but mostly because she feared what the damp in the boat might do to the fragile and cherished instrument. More, if it came to a fight, she might step on it or break it in the boat's crowded conditions.

  It was a clear and brilliant day, and Lythande, who was physically stronger than most men, sculled the boat briskly into the strong offshore wind. Small clouds scudded along the edge of the horizon, and each breaking wave folded over and collapsed with a soft, musical splashing. The noise of the breakers was strong in her ear, and it seemed to Lythande that under the sound of the waves, there was a faraway song; like the song of a shell held to the ear. For a few minutes she sang to herself in an undertone, listening to the sound of her own voice against the voice of the sea's breaking; an illusion, she knew, but one she found pleasurable. She thought, if only she had her lute, she would enjoy improvising harmonies to this curious blending. The words she sang against the waves were nonsense syllables, but they seemed to take on an obscure and magical meaning as she sang.

  She was never sure, afterward, how long this lasted.

  After a time, though she believed at first that it was simply another pleasant illusion like the shell held to the ear, she heard a soft voice inserting itself into the harmonies she was creating with the wave-song and her own voice; somewhere there was a third voice, wordless and incredibly sweet. Lythande went on singing, but something inside her pricked up its ears—or was it the tingling of the Blue Star that sensed the working of magic somewhere close to her?

  The song, then, of the mermaid. Sweet as it was, there were no words. As / thought, then, the creature works upon the heart's desire. I am desireless, therefore immune to the call. It cannot harm me.

  She raised her eyes. For a moment she saw only the great mass of rocks of which they had warned her, and against its mass a dark and featureless shadow. As she looked at the shadow, the Blue Star on her brow tingling, she willed to see more clearly. Then she saw—

  What was it? Mermaid, they had said. Creature. Could they possibly call it evil?

  In form, it was no more than a young girl, naked but for a necklace of small, rare, glimmering shells; the shells that had a crease running down the center, so that they looked like a woman's private parts. Her hair was dark, with the glisten of water on the smooth globes of bladder wrack lying on the sand at high tide. The face was smooth and young, with regular features. And the eyes. . . .

  Lythande could never remember anything about the eyes, though at the time she must have had some impression about the color. Perhaps they were that same color of the sea where it rolled and rippled smooth beyond the white breakers. She had no attention to spare for the eyes, for she was listening to the voice. Yet she knew she must be cautious; if she were vulnerable at all to this thing, it would be through the voice, she to whom music had been friend and lover and solace for more than a lifetime.

  Now she was close enough to see. How like a young girl the mermaid looked, young and vulnerable, with a soft, childish mouth. One of the small teeth, teeth like irregular pearls, was chipped out of line, and it made her look very childish. A soft mouth. A mouth too young for kissing, Lythande thought, and wondered what she had meant by it.

  Once I, even I was as young as that, Lythande thought, her min
d straying among perilous ways of memory; a time—how many lifetimes ago?—when she had been a young girl already restless at the life of the women's quarters, dreaming of magic and adventure; a time when she had borne another name, a name she had vowed never to remember. But already, though she had not yet glimpsed the steep road that was to lead her at last to the Temple of the Blue Star and to the great renunciations that lay ahead of her as a Pilgrim-Adept, she knew her path did not lie among young girls like these—with soft, vulnerable mouths and soft, vulnerable dreams, lovers and husbands and babies clinging around their necks as the necklace of little female shells clung to the neck of the mermaid. Her world was already too wide to be narrowed so far.

  Never vulnerable like that, so that this creature should call to me in the voice of a dead and beloved child. . . .

  And as if in answer, suddenly there were words in the mermaid's song, and a voice Lythande had not remembered for a lifetime. She had forgotten his face and his name; but her memory was the memory of a trained minstrel, a musician's memory. A man, a name, a life might be forgotten; a song or a voice—no, never.

  My princess and my beloved, forget these dreams of magic and adventure; together we will sing such songs of love that life need hold no more for either of us.

  A swift glance at the rocks told her he sat there, the fece she had forgotten, in another moment she would remember his name. . . . No! this was illusion; he was dead, he had been dead for more years than she could imagine. . . .Go away, she said to the iUusion. You are dead, and I am not to be deceived that way, not yet.

  They had told her the vision could call in the voice of the dead. But it could not trick her, not that way; as the illusion vanished, Lythande sensed a little ripple of laughter, like the breaking of a tiny wave against the rocks where the mermaid sat. Her laugh was delicious. Was that illusion, too?

  To a woman, then, it calls in the voice of a lover. But never had Lythande been vulnerable to that call. He had not been the only one; only the one to whom Lythande had come the closest to yielding. She had almost remembered his name; for a moment her mind lingered, floating, seeking a name, a name . . . then, deliberately, but almost with merriment turned her mind willfully away from the tensed fascination of the search.