Bradley, Marion Zimmer - SSC 03 (19 page)

 
          
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 mind 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.

 
          
She
need not try to remember. That had been long, long ago, in a country so far
from here that no living man within a ten-day's journey knew so much as the
name of that country. So why remember? She knew the answer to that; this
sea-creature, this mermaid, defended itself this way, reaching into her mind
and memory, as it had reached into the mind and memory of the fishermen who
sought to pass by it, losing them in a labyrinth of the past, of old loves,
heart's desires. Lythande repressed a shudder, remembering the man seated by
the fire, lost in his endless dream. How narrowly had she escaped that? And
there would have been none to rescue her.

 
          
But
a Pilgrim-Adept was not to be caught so simply. The creature was simple, using
on her its only defense, forcing the mind and memory: and she had escaped.
Desireless, Lythande was immune to that call of desire.

           
Young girl as she looked, that at
least must be illusion, the mermaid was an ageless creature . . . like
herself, Lythande thought.

 
          
For
the creature had tried for a moment to show
herself
to
Lythande in that illusory form of a past .lover
—
no,
he had never been Lythande's lover, but in the form of an old memory to trap
her in the illusory country of heart's desire. But Lythande had never been
vulnerable in that way to the heart's desire.

 
          
Never?

 
          
Never, creature of dreams.
Not even when I was
younger than you appear now to be.

 
          
But
was this the mermaid's true form, or something like it? The momentary illusion
vanished, the mermaid had returned to the semblance of the young girl,
touch-ingly young; there must then be some truth to the appearance of the
childish mouth, the eyes that were full of dreams, the vulnerable smile. The
mermaiden was protecting itself in the best way it could, for certainly a
sea-maiden so frail and defenseless, seeming so young and fair, would be at the
mercy of the men of the fisherfolk, men who would see only a maiden to be
preyed upon.

 
          
There
were many such tales along these shores, still told around the hearthfires, of
mermaids and of men who had loved them. Men who had taken them home as wives,
bringing a free sea-maiden to live in the smoke of the hearthfire, to cook and
spin, servant to man, a mockery of the free creature she should be. Often the
story ended when the imprisoned sea-maiden found her dress of fish scales and
seaweed and plunged into the sea again to find her freedom, leaving the
fisherman to mourn his lost love.

 
          
Or the loss of his prisoner . . . ?
In this
case, Lythande's sympathy was with the mermaid.

 
          
Yet
she had pledged herself to free the village of this danger. And surely it was a
danger, if only of a beauty more terrible than they dared to know and
understand, a fragile and fleeting beauty like the echo of a song, or like the
sea wrack in the ebb and flow of the tide. For with illusion gone, the mermaid
was only this frail-looking creature, ageless but with the eternal illusion of
youth. We are alike, thought Lythande; in that sense, we are sisters, but I am
freer than she is.

 
          
She
was beginning to be aware of the mermaid's song again, and knew it was
dangerous to listen. She sang to herself to try and block it away from her
awareness. But she felt an enormous sympathy for the creature, here at the.
mercy
of a crude fishing village, protecting herself as best
she could, and cursed for her beauty.

 
          
She
looked so like one of the young girls Lythande had known in that faraway
country. They had made music together on the harp and the lute and the bamboo
flute. Her name had been . . . Lythande found the name in her mind without a
search . . . her name had been Riella, and it seemed to her that the mermaid
sang in Riella's voice.

 
          
Not
of love, for already at that time Lythande had known that such love as the
other young girls dreamed of was not for her, but there had been
an awareness
between them. Never acknowledged; but Lythande
had begun to know that even for a woman who cared nothing for mans desire,
life need not be altogether empty. There were dreams and desires that had
nothing to do with those simpler dreams of the other women, dreams of husband
or lover or child.

 
          
And
then Lythande heard the first syllable of a name, a name she had vowed to
forget, a name once her own, a name she would not
—
no.
No. A name she
could
not remember. Sweating, the Blue Star blazing with
her anger, she looked at the rocks. Riella's form there wavered and was gone.

 
          
Again
the creature had attempted to call to her in the voice of the dead. There was
no longer the least trace of amusement in Lythande's mind. Once again she had
almost fatally underestimated the sea-creature because it looked so young and
childlike, because it reminded her of Riella and of the other young girls she
had loved in a world, and a life, long lost to her. She would not be caught
that way again. Lythande gripped the hilt of the left-hand dagger, warder
against magic, as she felt the boat beneath her scrape on the rocks.

 
          
She
stepped out onto the surface of the small, rocky holt, wrinkling her nose at
the rankness of dead fish and sea wrack left by the tide, a carrion smell
—
how could so young and fair a creature live in this stench?

 
          
The
mermaid said in the small voice of a very young girl, "Did they send you
to kill me, Lythande?"

 
          
Lythande
gripped the handle of her left-hand dagger. She had no wish to engage in
conversation with the creature; she had vowed to rid the village of this thing,
and rid it she would. Yet even as she raised the dagger, she hesitated.

 
          
The
mermaid, still in that timid little-girl voice, said, "I admit that I
tried to ensnare you. You must be a great magician to escape from me so easily.
My poor magic could not hold you at all!"

 
          
Lythande
said, "I am an Adept of the Blue Star."

 
          
"I
do not know of the Blue Star. Yet I can feel its power," said the
sea-maiden. "Your magic is very great
—
"

 
          
"And
yours is to flatter me," said Lythande carefully, and the mermaid gave a
delicious, childish giggle.

 
          
"You
see what I mean? I can't deceive you at all, can -I, Lythande? But why did you
come here to kill me, when I can't harm you in any way? And why are you holding
that horrible dagger?"

 
          
Why,
indeed? Lythande wondered, and slid it back into its sheath. This creature
could not hurt her. Yet surely she had come here for some reason, and she
groped for it. She said at last, "The folk of the village cannot fish for
their livelihood and they will all starve. Why do you want to do this?"

 
          
"Why
not?" asked the mermaid
innocently.

 
          
That made Lythande think
a little. She had listened to the
villagers and their story; she had not stopped to consider the mermaid's side
of the business. The sea did not belong, after all, to the fishermen; it
belonged to the fish and to the creatures of the sea
—
birds and fish and waves, shellfish of the deep, eels and
dolphins and great whales who had nothing to do with humankind at all
—
and, yes, to the mermaids and stranger sea creatures as
well.