_Anthology - Myths

by _Anthology

  Oha'i rose. As he did, he ran his tongue over his teeth. They had grown jagged and sharp. The thought that he could, if he wished, bite through the thickest shark skin armor danced through his mind. He had no time for such foolishness, not when his hunger raged like a lava-lit flame.

  He strode toward the cave's mouth. The stars and moon blazed, brighter than any school of darting reef fish. Oha'i flexed his shoulders. Always strong, he now felt as though he could carry a whole pig -- perhaps two, perhaps even a fully loaded war canoe -- with ease.

  He gazed at the cliff-top. The climb had been difficult with the rope. Without one, it would be impossible, he told himself. Instinctively, Oha'i reached out a hand and caught the sheer cliff face. Without conscious volition, his fingers found crevices too small to conceal a fly. He lifted himself onto the cliff face. His other hand and his toes sought tiny crevices in the rock. Oha'i hung there, amazed at what he could now do. With less effort than climbing a coconut tree would once have taken, Oha'i ascended the cliff.

  When he reached the top, he paused. His fierce hunger would not be denied. He strode toward the village.

  As he neared, village swine grunted in their pens. Oha'i snarled. The pigs squealed in terror. Oha'i shook his head. He was not yet ready to face the village. The hut of Coconut Skin stood near. Oha'i slipped inside. There, on a bed of tapa cloth, Coconut Skin lay naked, on his back. Bliss splashed across his wrinkled face. Kalamahi, wearing the royal feathered robe -- although not the headdress that he would have worn if he had already been made king -- lay between Coconut Skin's legs. Kalamahi's head bobbed as he gave pleasure to the old man.

  As if some invisible god whispered into his ear, Oha'i knew what could satisfy his aching hunger. He grabbed Kalamahi and effortlessly shook the young royal as he might once have shaken dew from a newlyharvested papaya. The royal robe's feathers flew. Coconut Skin's ecstatic expression changed to openmouthed shock. Kalamahi opened his mouth as if to scream.

  Oha'i's teeth clamped on Kalamahi's swollen ule. Oha'i bit down. Tissue separated. Oha'i turned. He spat out the morsel of severed flesh.

  Kalamahi's eyes went wide. His mouth became a soundless circle. Oha'i's mouth clamped down over Kalamahi's wound. The red fluid of Kalamahi's life exploded. Oha'i drank from the spurting fountain. After a few moments, his burning hunger retreated. Oha'i tossed Kalamahi aside. Kalamahi still lived. He writhed, blood spurting from his wound. Would Kalamahi die? Would he even want to live, with his ule gone? Oha'i did not know, nor care. Such matters now seemed as much beneath his notice as the affairs of the elders had seemed beyond a slave's concern. Coconut Skin scuttled backwards, a brown and wrinkled crab. His mouth moved for several heartbeats before he found words. "What are you?" he asked, eyes wide with terror.

  "Something I was not," Oha'i answered. It was an unsatisfying answer, but the best one that he could give... for now.

  "I can free you," Coconut Skin blurted. "Don't you want freedom?"

  "I already have it," Oha'i replied.

  Coconut Skin's voice became a thin rattle. "Are you going to kill me?" Oha'i licked his lips clean and considered Coconut Skin's question. For a dozen heartbeats, he did not know the answer. Coconut Skin had intended that Oha'i die in King Wana's burial chamber. Oha'i should kill the old man ... but, after he drained Coconut Skin, what next? Would his hunger drive him from hut to hut, until the island was empty? What then?

  Suddenly, everything came to him with the clarity of the waters of Laniki Bay. Had the mana of Kalamahi's royal blood made him wiser? Perhaps. In any case, Oha'i knew what he should do. Without a word, Oha'i hoisted Coconut Skin onto his shoulders. The old man started to scream. Oha'i clamped a hand over Coconut Skin's mouth. Coconut Skin struggled to escape. The old man accomplished nothing.

  Carrying the old man, Oha'i walked through the sleeping village. Only the pigs' frightened squeals marked his passage.

  In moments, he reached the cliff-top. He uncovered Coconut Skin's mouth. "Scream if you want," Oha'i told him. "It will not matter."

  Oha'i descended the cliff. One arm held the struggling Coconut Skin. The other arm and both legs found the cliff face's almost invisible crevices. As morning turned the sky from volcanic-stone black to winter-ocean gray, Oha'i reached the cave where he had left King Wana's body. Oha'i sat Coconut Skin beside him and threw down his aluka shell necklace. "Wear this if you want a slave buried with King Wana," he snapped at Coconut Skin.

  Oha'i turned to go back into the lava tube. The aluka shell necklace rattled behind him as Coconut Skin's trembling fingers touched it.

  "What will happen?" Coconut Skin's voice sounded frail and old. Oha'i shrugged. He supposed that Coconut Skin meant 'what will happen to me?'. That was neither the question asked, nor the one that Oha'i chose to answer. "I could bring destruction on this island," Oha'i replied. "Instead, I will complete the journey that I have begun."

  "Where are you going?" "The elders have said that the sacred caves are passages to the realm of the gods. Not, however, for kings alone. The caves admit any who rises above being human and becomes something else." Oha'i paused. The wind itself seemed to carry mana, for as he stood, he felt his wisdom deepen. "The wind is the breath of the gods, passing through a gate barred to all but the divine."

  "I don't understand," Coconut Skin responded, his voice a pained whine. "You never will," Oha'i answered. Then he strode into the lava tube, following the ancient king that he, in momentary rage, had roused from the sleep of death.

  Gone Fishing

  By Jules Jones It all started with a stroll along a private beach. Well, it started further back than that, with why I was strolling along a private beach. My doctor told me to choose between making still more money on my Internet start-up, or living long enough to enjoy the money I'd already made. I took her advice, sold my company, and spent part of the proceeds on a house on a nice warm isolated beach. Peace and quiet to unwind, enjoy the money I'd made, and maybe come up with another "must have" concept. As it turned out, my timing was perfect, getting out just before the dotcom bubble burst, but I needed to get out anyway. I'm no entrepreneur, just a scientist who got lucky with a bright idea. The pressure was doing things to my mind.

  Which is why I didn't believe my eyes when I saw the mermaid. Beautiful, she was, sitting there on the edge of the rock pool. Beautiful and impossible. I thought it was a trick of the bright sunlight, dazzling my eyes. As I got closer, that explanation got harder to clutch onto. She looked real and so did that damned tail. She looked up at me and smiled, spoke. "Hello, man."

  The prosaic greeting steadied my nerves, if not my legs. I sat down before I fell down, close enough to touch her tail. It was flesh, not a costume. "You're real."

  "Of course I'm real."

  "You can't be." Well, not unless some biology research team hadn't bothered sending a truly spectacular paper on genetic engineering to Nature. "You're a mermaid. They don't exist."

  "Yes we do." She giggled. "We just went away for a while." So there I was, sitting on a rock, talking to something that didn't exist. Fine. People pay good money for chemicals to achieve this sort of experience, or so I'm told. I decided to enjoy it and worry about my sanity later. One of the nice things about being independently wealthy is being considered eccentric, not nutty as a fruitcake. Nobody would bat an eyelid if I went home, called a friend and said, "Hey, I met a mermaid today."

  "All right, mermaid. Where did you go and why have you come back?" "My name's Pearl, not mermaid. And we haven't come back." She leaned toward me, and dropped her voice a little. Nice voice, especially with that huskiness. "Actually, I'm not supposed to be here. But I wanted to see what the land was like. I've heard so many stories about it."

  "My name's Mike." I held out a hand. "Pleased to meet you, Pearl." The name seemed a remarkable cliché, but I refrained from commenting. No need to hurt the lassie's feelings, even if she was a figment of my imagination.

  She looked at my hand, looked back at my face, and then
very gingerly shook my hand. Hers felt cool and damp, but otherwise human. "You're not what I expected."

  "What did you expect?" I asked.

  "Well, I knew you might not believe in me. We've been away for such a long time." "Longer than your lifetime," I commented.

  She nodded. "But I thought you'd be scared. And if you weren't scared, or even if you were..." she looked down, then looked up at me from under her eyelashes, "Well, you're a man. You're supposed to be entranced by me."

  Well, I said she was beautiful. Entrancingly so, and I could see how a lonely sailor might throw himself into the sea to swim to her, as she sat on a rock. I genuinely regretted that it was wasted on me. "Well, lass," and then I thought that she might not be younger than me, in spite of appearances, "number one, I don't believe you're real, but my grasp on reality has been a bit shaky these last three months, so that's nothing new. Number two, I've seen a good deal worse than you in my nightmares. And number three, you are indeed a very beautiful, and undoubtedly charming, young lady, but even if I could work out how to ravish you, I wouldn't want to. I'm afraid you're rather wasted on me."

  She pouted at me, an appealing gesture and she obviously knew it. "Why?"

  "Because, my dear, you're a mermaid." She stared at me and I saw the moment when she understood. Amusement blossomed in her face and she threw back her head and laughed, a delighted and delightful pealing. Eventually she stopped. "Just my luck. I decide to sneak off and break the rules and I come up with you."

  I grinned back. "Sorry to disappoint you, pet." I decided that I liked this figment of my imagination. I was also less certain that that was what she was. I became even less certain when she made a grab for my groin. "Hey! Stop that!"

  "Just checking. You feel interested." She patted me intimately, then looked puzzled. "You're different. You're interested, but soft."

  Curiosity won the war with embarrassment. "Different to what?"

  "One of my men. Take those clothes off." I could see the headlines in my mind, but did as she asked. She handled me firmly but carefully and quite clinically. "So mother wasn't exaggerating about landmen." She let go and calmly started asking me about sex. Not in a personal interest sort of way, mind. No, it was just that she was even more curious about how my body worked than I was about hers. And I was certainly curious about her. It turned out that she was half dolphin, not half fish, although the last time her people had made a public appearance nobody was bothering to make that distinction. Not really half dolphin, of course, but a mammal, and constructed, at one end at least, like other sea-living mammals -- my external genitalia were what had fooled her as to whether I was interested. And she had a full measure of curiosity from both the human and the dolphin side of her nature. We drifted from sex to other topics, neither of us noticing the time passing by.

  Finally she noticed that the tide was receding, leaving her in danger of being left high and dry. "Will you be here tomorrow?" she asked plaintively, and I assured her that I would be, not voicing my doubts as to whether she would be.

  She was and I was and that's how I started spending several hours a day, whenever the tide was right, sitting in a rock pool talking to a mermaid. The pool wasn't totally enclosed at high tide, so Pearl could get in and out, but the rocks did provide shelter from the surf and somewhere for us to sit. Pearl was intelligent, insatiably curious, and utterly uninhibited. I delighted in her company, if not for the reasons she had expected. And then one day, I arrived at the rock pool and she said, "I want you to meet someone."

  There was a sudden movement under the surface of the water, and then a splash and I was looking at a man treading water. A merman, like Pearl to look at, but handsome where she was beautiful. This time the beauty wasn't wasted on me. Before I knew what I was doing I was in the water, my mind dazzled by what I saw.

  The shock of the cold water woke me. I'd stepped into the rock pool fully clothed, not thinking what I was doing, not thinking at all and, for the first time since I'd met Pearl, I was truly frightened. The splash as I went in had broken my eye contact with the merman and I looked away. Then it was Pearl in my vision and I remembered the legends, mermaids luring seamen to their doom. I was immune to Pearl, but only because Pearl wasn't what I wanted. Now the merfolk outnumbered me and one of them was more than adequate bait even if the other wasn't. I tried to turn around and reach the rocks, fighting down panic, near to screaming when I felt a hand touch me.

  I heard Pearl's voice, "I'm sorry, Mike, I didn't think..." Her hand helped me boost myself on to the rocks. I clambered out, turned around to look at Pearl, only at Pearl. She looked worried.

  "It's just my brother, Mike. He wanted to meet you." A simple enough explanation and, even if it wasn't, I thought I'd be safe on the rocks. I kept looking at Pearl, safe against her glamour at least. "Why?"

  Another voice, a male version of Pearl's. "I wanted to know where Pearl was sneaking off to and made her tell me." Wistfully, "She isn't the only one who wants to know about the land people."

  There was a gurgle of laughter from Pearl. "And I'm not the only one who wants to find out what they're like to fuck."

  I'd long since given up being surprised by her bluntness, but I still cringed with embarrassment, for myself and her brother. Then it sunk in. "Yes, dear," Pearl said. "Since you're not interested in me, I thought you might be interested in him. I didn't realize you'd be that interested, though. Maybe there is something to the tales about us being able to glamour landmen."

  I risked a look at the merman. Lovely face, sleek black hair, fit but not over-muscled body, at least what I could see of it. Pensive expression at the moment, a shy man ready to turn tail. Literally, in this case.

  Everything to press my buttons, so far as above the waist was concerned.

  "I think," I said carefully, "the only glamour concerned is what happens naturally when a man hasn't had any sex for a long time and then sees someone attractive."

  Pearl's brother smiled tentatively and Pearl, being Pearl, said, "Fancy fucking him, then?"

  "Stop embarrassing us." And it was us, to judge by the poor man's expression. Well, I don't think I'd like my sister being quite that blunt in her matchmaking.

  "Well?" she asked.

  "Pearl, introduce us properly, and then bugger off." Pearl smirked. "His name's Malachite and buggering is what you two should be doing." Then she dived under with a cheeky flip of her tail. The last I saw of her was a dark shadow heading for the gap into the open sea.

  I looked at Malachite. He was watching where his sister had gone. Then he turned back to me. "I don't trust her not to sneak back to watch." "Funny, that. Neither do I." We grinned at each other and then I felt shy. So did Malachite, by the look of things. Hardly any wonder in that, this wasn't quite your usual blind date, for either of us. At least I had the advantage of nice long chats with Pearl, I had some idea about the differences in anatomy.

  Come to think of it, Malachite had probably also had the advantage of nice long chats with Pearl. That was why the little sneak had been feeling me up again yesterday. She'd claimed it was so that she could try to understand how land anatomy worked in comparison with her people so she could then explain it to me. Well, that was what she had been doing, she just hadn't bothered to mention that I wasn't the only one getting the benefit of her comparative anatomy studies.

  I sighed. "I take it you've had the lecture on how the other half lives?" He nodded. "So how are we going to manage this?" The merpeople were mammals, air-breathers, but they were oceangoing air-breathers, they could manage far longer than I could. In the water wasn't the best idea. "The rocks are smooth enough." Hard, but smooth, no nasty edges to catch tender skin.

  Malachite looked at the rock I was sitting on. It was a big, smooth rock, plenty of room for two people to lie on. There was a flicker of fear in his eyes. "No." I'd seen fear like that before. One man wanting to play with bondage, the other not quite certain of his partner, willing to trust him with the use of his body but n
ot with control of it. I looked at the rock again. The merman was an ocean dweller, tail instead of legs. The smooth flat surface might as well be a bondage rack, with the advantage it would give me over him.

  "In the water," he suggested. "I'm strong enough to hold you up."

  Strong enough to hold me up -- or hold me down, under the water. The legends came creeping back to haunt me and I snapped "No" without even intending to.

  Malachite looked startled, then resigned. "You don't trust me."

  "Nor you me," I reminded him. "Not yet, anyway." Maybe later.

  "Nets," he whispered. Pearl had never said why her people had withdrawn, centuries ago. They must have their legends, too. Stalemate.

  Then I thought of one place that was neutral territory. "The beach."

  "Pardon?"

  I looked towards the stretch of sand. Perfect, a calm day, the waves a gentle ripple. "On the beach, in the waves. We'll be on an equal footing there."

  "Well, not quite," he said wryly, glancing down. Then he swam over to the rock and propped himself up on the edge, looking towards the sand. "Deep enough for me, shallow enough for you."

  "Exactly." He smiled up at me. "I'll meet you there." He pushed away from the rock edge and dove. I clambered to my feet, stripped off my sodden shorts and tee-shirt, and ran for the shoreline. He beat me there, naturally. I waded out to meet him, in the shallows where we both felt safe. I sat down and he sat in my lap, smooth hide pressing against my cock. He kissed me, a clean fresh taste of sea. It had been a long time for me; I found myself groping for his cock, bewildered when I didn't find it, and then remembering, easing my hand into the narrow slit and stroking rigid flesh, easing it out where I could wrap my hand around it. He moaned into my mouth and shifted in my lap, trying to thrust into my hand. We tumbled over and had to let go of each other. We both came up spluttering and laughing.