Water Read online

  And so she gasped. Robert heard the sound, soft as it was, and stood up, throwing himself away from the pretty naked girl, leaping away from her, whirling to put his back to her as if she had nothing to do with him. He was still dressed, but both his shirt and his breeches were unlaced. His mouth dropped open; for this moment even his gift of ready, flattering speech had deserted him; for a moment he forgot he was beautiful. “Darling—” he said at last, or rather, croaked; and Jenny put her hands over her ears, and turned and fled. He took a step after her, but the wolfhound paused in the barn door and turned back to him, bristling; and he heard her growl. He stopped. The wolfhound slid silently through the door, after her mistress, and disappeared.

  Jenny blundered among the familiar farm buildings like a hare among hounds; she was weeping, and felt that she would die at any moment. But she came, as much by accident as anything, around the corner of the first of the buildings, and looked up to see her grey mare glimmering in the twilight. Flora was anxious, and stamped her hoofs, swung her quarters back and forth, and swished her tail. Jenny made towards her, conscious now too of the tall wolfhound at her side, and she opened the gate in spite of her shaking fingers, untied her mare and led her through, and carefully closed and latched the gate again as any child raised on a farm knew to do by second nature. Then she mounted, and Flora leaped into a gallop without any message from Jenny.

  Jenny did not mean to take the dangerous way. She thought she might die of sorrow and betrayal, but there was nothing in her healthy young spirit that could make her wish to kill herself. But in her trouble the only haven she could think of was the warm safe place she had known all her short life: her parents, her parents’ farm, the farmhouse with its rosy warm kitchen and her bedroom with the quilt she and her mother had made themselves. She could not bear not to go there as quickly as possible; and the angry unfair words she had last spoken to her mother pressed on her too. She had to take them back. As quickly as possible meant the old road across the bridge at the head of the haunted harbour; but she had no thought for sea-people, or old curses, or anything, only that it was a little over an hour home this low way rather than three hours the high roundabout inland way.

  She knew, of course, that the bridge was never used, but everyone from the two towns was familiar with bits of the old road that led to and away from it; the newer roads that had replaced it struck off from it. Since its bridge was shunned, it had to be; but the road itself was not fearful. As the last of the old people, who remembered their parents’ friends’ deaths by drowning, themselves died peacefully in their beds, the custom of not using the road remained while the specific details of the proscription on the bridge faded.

  Furthermore, she had not seen Gruoch turn Robert back at the barn door. The possibility that he might try to follow her was more awful than any ancient malediction. So she set Flora’s nose down the valley.

  The mare had already had one journey today, and she was fretted by her mistress’s mood. She went on as fast as she could, but she was tired. Jenny, who loved her, knew this, even now when she was half-distracted with her great trouble, and pulled up once they were out of sight of Robert’s farm, and let the mare breathe. They went on again, but more slowly, and the twilight was really only the end of dusk, and full night came upon them almost at once. The mare began to stumble. Jenny dismounted and led her; and discovered that her mare stumbled not only from weariness, but from the roughness of the road. They were now on the last bit of road to the bridge, which was never used, and the cobbles had been torn up from sea-storm and land-frost, and the moon was not bright enough to show their way clearly, because streaming horses’ tails of cloud dimmed her light.

  But a little wind came up, and blew the wisps away, and the moon grew brighter. The implications of what had happened began to clarify themselves in Jenny’s unhappy mind as well, but the focus of her worry for the moment was her parents, who would not know what had become of her, and would be the more anxious about her disappearance after the scene with her mother. Already she was adjusting to the fact that she no longer had a betrothed; that she would not be wed in a fortnight’s time. She did not know that her sudden, desperate weariness was partly on account of that adjustment. She only thought that she had had a long journey, and that she was very unhappy, and that her parents would be worried about her. She still had not remembered the sea-people’s curse.

  Her wolfhound set foot on the bridge first, and a tiny ripple of wave curled beneath it, like an echo, and subsided. She was walking at Flora’s shoulder, and it was the mare’s front hoofs that struck the bridge next, before her own feet; and she had just time to notice the same ripple of wave rise and begin to fall before she stepped on the bridge. But as soon as she stood on the bridge herself, it was no ripple but a wave that rose and fell upon the bridge, drenching her mare and her hound and herself. When the wave drained away, back into the harbour, there was a man standing in front of her. He gleamed strangely in the moonlight; there seemed to be something very odd about his skin. She saw him at once as human, even if the moonlight seemed to sparkle off him in flakes and facets, for he had the right number of limbs and the right order of features; and she assumed he was a man because his outline seemed to her more male than female, broader shoulders than hips, a muscular neck and square jaw beneath the wet hair that fell to his breast. But while she could not see that he wore any clothing, she could not see that he had any genitals either. And then as he held his hand up to bar her way, she saw, in the moonlight’s strange little iridescent ripples, that there were webs between his fingers.

  “You may not pass,” he said, and his voice was deep, deeper than any human voice she had heard; almost she had difficulty understanding the words; it was as if the wind had spoken. Or like the roar of a big sea-shell held next to the ear. A cousin had brought her family a huge sea-shell once, as a curiosity, and it lay on the mantelpiece with other useless objects the family was fond of, the pipe-rack a nephew had made, though Jenny’s father had never smoked; the grotesquely hideous sampler that some great-great-great-aunt had made in her childhood which had mysteriously metamorphosed into a family heirloom. Her parents’ sitting-room rose up in 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 land-person 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 sea-water. 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 decla
red 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 land-person 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 land-people, 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 wished 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.