Water (8 page)

her mind’s eye, and she shivered with loss and longing, for in this first great sorrow of her life, it

seemed a thing more wonderful than a silver man who had formed himself from a wave.

“You may not pass,” he said again as she stood dumbly, but she thought that there was a

reluctance to his words; perhaps it was only the odd echoing quality of his voice. “No landperson may set foot on this bridge and live, and I must drown you.”

She was still thinking of her parents’ sitting-room, and she remembered then the cousin telling

the story of the sea-people’s curse when he had brought them the sea-shell. And she shivered

again, for she found she was sorry to die; she realised she would not have died of love, and

despite her weariness a flame of anger rose in her, that she should die for so stupid an error as

loving a man who did not love her. For a moment her anger warmed her, and she stopped

shivering.

The sea-man turned away from her, and she thought all these things in the crack of a second, as

she saw that a wave as swift as the first that had drenched them was arching up over them now;

and she knew that this one would fill her mouth and her lungs, and drown her. “No, wait!” she

said, and put up her own hand.

The sea-man stopped, almost as if he were glad of the excuse, and turned back to her; and the

wave curled back instead of forward, and fell again into the harbour, and a few drops only

rebounded, and twinkled on the bridge. Her heart was beating quickly, and she knew she had no

case to plead; she knew the curse as well as any child born of these two towns knew it; she had

only forgotten it, because it had not seemed to her important. Her present position was her own

fault. But perhaps she might spare those dear to her something.

“I beg you to let my mare and my bitch go free,” she said, her voice shaking, for it was all she

could do not to fall on her knees and beg for her life, now that she understood that she was to die

and that she wanted to live. Her fingers clutched Flora’s saddle-skirts to keep her on her feet, for

the shivering had seized her triply hard as soon as she spoke. “Spare them and send them home

as they are, dripping with sea-water, that at least my parents may know what has happened to

me.”

The sea-man looked at her, and his eyes gleamed in the moonlight much as his skin did. “Tell me

about your parents,” he said.

She took a long, rough, choking breath, for she knew that her self control could not bear her

much further. But gallantly she began to talk of her parents, not so much thinking that if he

listened then she might live a few moments longer, but that she might have as her last thoughts

some memories of her parents, who had truly loved her. She said that she was their only child,

and she told him about the governesses, and the dogs and the ponies and the cats and the

songbirds, and the quilt that she and her mother had made that lay on her bed, and she did not

even notice that she wept again as she spoke. Then she went on to tell him about the man who

had been her betrothed, and how much she had loved him, and how she had at last understood

that he did not love her, and how she had gone to his farm to—talk to him, though she did not

know what she would say, and she had there found him ... with another girl. A pretty girl, and

she touched her own ordinary face, and did not realise that it was wet with tears and not seawater. She could think of no more to say, and fell silent.

Silence stayed a little while, broken only by the sound of the ripples of sea-water caressing the

barnacled stones the bridge stood on. The sea-man had turned a little away from her again,

looking down the harbour to the sea-mouth.

At last he turned back to her. “I am the king of the sea-people,” he said. “It was I whom the

merchant cheated, and I who declared this curse on these towns and all their people, who would

not give me justice only because I was of the sea instead of of the land. My wife begged me to be

less harsh, but I was young and furious, and revelled in my own strength to get revenge. And I

was angry for a long time, and for the first few years I enjoyed pulling down the docks and

drowning land-people, in the memory of ours who had died, for I did not differentiate one landperson from another, just as they had not cared anything about me and mine but that I was not of

them.

“But that was a long time ago, even for sea-people, and I have grown old, and I have had less

and less joy in guarding this harbour and this bridge.

“In the meantime, my wife and I have had a son. And as I listen to you, I think what it would

mean to me, if his horse and hound came home some day, gouged by the weapons of the landpeople, so that I would know what had happened to him, and know that I would never see him

any more. And I understand, now, why my wife would have made me hold back my wrath, and

not say my curse.

“No one has set human foot on this bridge for many a long year, now. You are the first

“And I cannot drown you. If this is a loss of honour for me, then so be it I am no longer young,

and I have learned about things other than honour, or perhaps I have learned something about

honour that has less to do with pride. Mount up your mare and ride home, and let the weariness

and sorrow of this sea-king go with you, and be driven into the dry ground by your horse’s

hoofs.”

She stood, staring, her mind numb with trying not to beg, and her body numb with the cold of the

night and a drenching in sea-water.

“Go!” he said again. “Mount and ride! And ride quickly, for the land-people, I now remember,

cannot bear the touch of the sea, and grow sick from it, and I see by your trembling that this

sickness touches you already. It is something I have no charm for. Go!”

But as she scrabbled at her mare’s stirrup, she was shaking too badly, and could not get her foot

in; and even when she had her foot in place, she had not the strength to pull herself into the

saddle. The sea-king took two steps towards her, and seized her by the waist, and lifted her into

the saddle. As he released her, one of his webbed hands touched hers, and she felt a shock, and

before her eyes rose up a glamour of sea-palaces and a land beneath the sea where the people of

this king lived, and it was very beautiful. But perhaps it was only fever, for by the time her mare

brought her home to her desperate parents, she was deep in delirium, babbling about waves and

sea-men and moonlight on strangely iridescent skin, and no word at all of Robert, and her parents

did not know what to think. For they remembered the curse, and the smell of sea-water was

strongly on her, and they wondered if perhaps the curse had changed, and that now the sea-king

for his vengeance took only the minds of those who crossed him, and not the lives.

But the fever broke, and the delirium shrank back like a tide on the ebb, and did not return. Jenny

lay blinking at her familiar ceiling, with the familiar quilt under her fingers, and when she turned

her head on the pillow, she saw her mother sitting there, watching her. She asked what day it

was. Her mother hesitated, and then said, “You have been sick for seventeen days.” She could

see her daughter counting, and saw the relief on her face when she counted past her wedding day

and knew that it was past; and that told her mother what she wanted to know, and she too was

relieved. But then the full reality of the conversation broke upon her, and she burst into tears and

ran out of her daughter’s bedroom and into her own, where she woke up her husband to tell him

the news, for they had taken it in turns never to leave Jenny’s bedside for the last seventeen days.

And the news was better for him than seventeen nights of good sleep would have been.

The youngest maid servant was in the upstairs hall when Jenny’s mother rushed across it, and

heard her mistress crying, and for a dizzy, awful moment half-guessed the worst. But she

couldn’t bear the thought of being the messenger of such ill tidings, so she tiptoed closer till she

could hear the joy in her mistress’ voice as she spoke to the master, and then fled downstairs

herself to spread the glorious news to the rest of the household.

Jenny recovered only slowly. It was another week before she set foot outside her bedroom, yet

another week before she ventured out of the house, and then only as far as the kitchen garden.

The day after she had taken her first steps out of doors, her mother told her that Robert had been

asking for her. He had come several times when she was ill, the first time the very day after she

had come home wet and delirious, and he had been most anxious to speak to her. Her mother and

father had been polite to him, but they were sorely preoccupied with Jenny s health, and thought

nothing at the time of the peculiarity of his manner, for they had no attention to spare. But her

mother had seen the relief on her daughter’s face when she heard that seventeen days had passed

during her illness. And so now she told Jenny only the brief fact of Robert’s continuing

attendance, without saying that he had become more insistent, in this last week, since she had

admitted that Jenny was recovering. Without saying that when people asked about a new

wedding date, she had been noncommittal in a way that let people guess there would be no new

wedding date. She would have put off speaking of Robert at all, and spared her daughter’s

convalescence a little longer, but that she feared he would find her one day when she was alone,

without her parents to intercede, mediate—send him away for good. What she wanted was that

Jenny be well and strong and happy again. So, briskly, even perfunctorily, she told her daughter

that Robert washed to see her.

Jenny went still in a way that was not just the natural lethargy of the invalid, and the cat in her

lap woke up from its boneless sleep and gathered itself together again into four discrete legs and

a tail, and looked up into her face. “I would prefer to avoid him,” she said, and that was all.

It was a month before Jenny could ride again, and she still tired easily; so it was two months, and

high summer, by the time she felt able to make a journey of more than half an hour from her

parents’ gate. She did not tell her parents where she was going; and she took Gruoch with her.

She rode to the bridge at the head of the harbour between the two towns.

She had told her parents little of what had happened. She had let them think she had somehow

gotten lost and wandered near the sea-shore before she realised what she had done, and been

drenched that way; she let them think that what she had said in her fever dreams of angry,

vindictive sea-men and tender, weeping sea-women were only the result of her belated

recollection of the curse, her own terror of what might have happened to her if she had not turned

her mare away from the harbour in time.

She had not told them that even after her fever left her, she had gone on dreaming of a land

beneath the sea, where the water was the air, but silvery and swirly, and the people walked on the

sea-bottom with a curious, graceful, rippling stride, and there were horses with long slender legs

and foamy manes and tails like little girls always wanted their ponies to have; and there were

great grey-green hunting hounds not unlike her own dear Gruoch; and even the biggest trees had

flexible trunks, and bowed and turned in the heavy air with slow elegance, trailing their frondy

leaves, and that the fish nested in them like birds.

She rode back to the bridge, but she halted a few steps from it, suddenly unsure of herself. The

sea-king had let her go, despite his promise to drown every land-person who touched the bridge

or set boat in the water or dock-post next to the harbour shore, for as long as his people’s

memory should last; and perhaps to thank him was the worst thing she could do. The thanks of a

land-person might be the last thing he wanted, the thanks of a land-person he despised himself

for sparing.

At the same time she remembered how his face had looked when he mentioned his son and his

wife, and she remembered that when he set her on her horse, he had used his strength cautiously

when he might have been harsh with her. But she feared that she remembered these things for the

wrong reasons. Perhaps her desire to thank him was only an excuse to see him again, to see the

person who lived in the land she dreamed of. And she felt ashamed of herself

But as she stood hesitating on the bank, looking at the stones of the bridge but not daring to set

foot upon them, the water below the bridge boiled up as it had done once before. This time the

sun was sliding down the sky but nowhere near setting, and the long rays of afternoon set the

wave on fire, and rainbows fell from every drop of water.

The wave did not wet her nor her horse nor her hound this time, and when it drained away again,

a different seaman stood on the bridge. He looked very much like the sea-man she had seen

before, but not so much that she did not recognise the one from the other; this one was younger

and plainer and had no bitterness in him.

She said before she could stop herself: “You are the sea-king’s son.” She said it as he was

saying: “You must be Jenny.”

“Yes,” they said, again simultaneously, and both smiled; and each saw how the other’s rather