Toad Words (7 page)

“Kill your horse then,” said the magic.
Please, say no. Your life is forfeit already, prince. Please refuse me. I do not want to choke down your horse’s flesh.
 

“As you wish,” he said again, and went outside to kill his horse.
 

None of the other knights had brought hawks with them. I ate them next. They died with hoods on, their necks wrung, and they were not even a mouthful each.
 

I wept for the hounds. So did he. That was the moment that I remember most clearly. He sobbed as he killed them—one hoarse dry sob apiece—and I sobbed as I ate them. The last one whimpered piteously as its fellows died, and looked up at the prince with terrible trusting eyes to the last.
 

I prayed to fall down dead, but the gods had abandoned me long ago. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted the world to be unmade, so that it never came to this moment at all. He looked at me, and I saw that I had made him choose between his own life and something that had loved him, and the knowledge of his choice fell between us like a blade.
 

I ate the hounds. He has never forgiven me for that.
 

“Lie down beside me,” I said that night, in a voice choked with wine and misery. The prince nodded jerkily and laid his mantle across the floor. “As you wish,” he said aloud, and then, in a whisper, “God have mercy!”

My hearing was very good. I shuddered and lay down.

The prince was as good as his word. He lay down beside me, on stones slicked with the blood of hawk and horse and hounds, and we touched. I could not feel him—my hide is far too thick for that—but I could smell him, and hear his heart beating against the stones. I stared into the darkness. I was sure that beside me, he was staring into the darkness as well.
 

He was revolted to lie down beside a monster. I was revolted to lie down beside a man who would kill his own hounds to appease a forest beast. Our mutual loathing was a strange and unwelcome intimacy. I felt as if I could smell his thoughts.
 

The sleep that came upon me was the magic’s doing. I slept as one dead.

When I woke the next morning, I felt small. I went to sleep larger than a bear and woke as a woman. My hands were tiny clawless things. My hide, that could turn swords and spears, had dwindled to skin as thin as paper. There was a naked man beside me, and he was awake as well.
 

He did what men do with women. I did not fight him. I was too small in my new skin, and my bones felt as fragile as a goshawk’s. If I had put my hands against his chest and pushed, surely they must have snapped, and gained me nothing.

Regardless, I do not think he took much joy of it. It was all of a piece with the terrible night that had passed, with the dead hounds and the dead hawks and the dead horse. It hurt, but not as much as a boar spear in the back, and I did not make any sounds at all.

There is little enough left to tell of the story. He was a younger prince, and could marry a mysterious woman of questionable origins without stirring too much outrage. The magic may have laid itself on him, or perhaps he felt that it was only just, after having lain with me in the hall. He is always an honorable man, my husband.

Well.
 

I am not, it must be said, quite as I was. I can still see in the dark better than a mortal woman should. When the light flares up, my eyes reflect it back green, like an animal’s. My fingernails are very sharp, and I take care to keep them blunted.
 

We have had no children. It is, I think, for the best.
 

I still have a hard time with mirrors.
 

I am not aging quite as I should either. They have had priests in to bless me, but it does neither the priest or my husband any good. He is growing old and I am not. This is another thing that he cannot forgive me for.

Before too long, he will be dead. He has taken a cough that will kill him soon, I think. His people do not love me, and I am very tired of them, of all their voices that never stop chattering, and of this closed-in place, and this brittle skin that keeps me bound.
 

On that day, when he has died, I will leave this place. The forest is still there, and the tumbledown hall. The magic is there, too, in rags and tatters. I hope that enough is left.
 

I will walk through the open doorway, framed by the trees that used to be my saplings.
 
When I set foot on the stone floor, on the stain left by the blood of men and dogs, my hide will grow thick again, and the ground will shake under my footsteps. These fragile, foolish fingers will be replaced by my own strong claws. I may die of the change, but I would rather die than live like this.
 

If I live long enough, I will drag myself down to the still water, and look down, and see myself.

As I should be.
 

 
I didn’t take her voice for myself. I want to set the record straight on that, right up front. People got a lot of crazy notions in their heads, the way the story got around, and that was one of them.

 
I’m not saying I never did an evil deed—anyone who says they haven’t is lying through their teeth—but I didn’t take her voice for myself. I didn’t need it. I’ve got a perfectly
fine
voice, thank you, trained
by
whale divas, and it’s
mine.

 
Seriously, you start stealing people’s voices and using them yourself and pretty soon you don’t know which voice is yours and which one’s an echo and then you’re mad and howling and people are standing around in caves during low tide asking where the screaming’s coming from and someone else is saying “Oh, it’s just some trick of the acoustics.”

 
Go ahead, laugh. That trick of the acoustics is my Great-Aunt Meryl and you don’t want to wait for high tide. I’ve seen her tear the head off an elephant seal. With her nails.

 
Best not to start down that channel at all, really.

 
No, I took her voice for two simple reasons—she was a twit and she was in love.  I took one look at her and knew that she’d spill everything she knew in the pretty human boy’s ear, and then where would we be?

 
It doesn’t go so well when humans know about us, have you noticed? Ask one selkie if she’s feeling happier now that she spent a decade on shore with some jerk who stole her hide off the rocks. (Sure, some of them think it’ll be romantic—bull selkies aren’t anybody’s notion of charming, though they do have a certain over-muscled appeal—but it’s not so romantic when you’re spending your youth cooking and cleaning for an illiterate fisherman and bearing his brats through a pelvis that isn’t nearly so accommodating as it used to be.)

 
I’d say “ask a Stellar’s sea cow” but you can’t, because they’re all dead. And just try to find a sea mink. I was very fond of sea mink. They were inquisitive little devils and they made chirpy noises when you stroked them. I haven’t forgiven humans for the sea mink. Or the sea cows, for that matter.

 
Do
not
get me started on the great auk.

 
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that the minute somebody in a position of authority—like, oh, I don’t know, a
prince
—figures out that there’s a whole underwater civilization, we’re in the deep muck. It might start out civilized at first, but it won’t stay that way. Somebody’s bound to figure out that there’s a lot of very useful things in the ocean.

 
Rare things. Hidden things. Things of power.

 
You want to hide something from the prying hands of mortals, you drop it in the sea. It’s been going on for years. I’ve got things in my pantry that could unmake continents if you could find them and get them into the right hands. Or wrong hands, as the case may be.

 
And it doesn’t even have to be the magic rings and the enchanted swords and the world-breakers and the leftover ansible.  Let the humans start mucking about with our people on a purely practical level and it still won’t end well.

 
Hell, they could keep sirens in cages on whaling ships to call the whales in—fish-speakers to drive the king-of-herring’s subjects into the nets—and you don’t even want to know what they’ll do for mineral rights. Gold’s the least of it. There’s a place down around the edge of the cape where you can find diamonds the size of an eel’s skull. Pray the humans never find out about it.

 
Plus, of course, there’s our women. No, not
me
. I’m not saying I’m not attractive, but at my age, I’m more interested in a good meal and a good nap. You find me a man who wants both those things, maybe with a conversation about the finer points of mantis shrimp breeding thrown in, then we’ll talk.

 
But you have two cultures breaking against each other, it’s the young women who are going to come out the losers. Any two cultures. Pick two. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. Some things don’t change.

 
I’ve got nieces, you know.

 
So yes, I did take the little fool’s voice. Her prince wasn’t going to find about us on
my
watch.

 
(But Ursula, you say, she could just have written it all down! Taking her voice wouldn’t stop that! To which I say—did you ever meet her? It took her three tries to write her own name. Our contract was a verbal agreement because otherwise she’d still be reading it and the prince would be dead of old age.)

 
Anyway I gave her voice to an albatross, if you must know. She was tired of endless gliding, had ambitions to be an opera singer. I made her dream come true.

 
Made the poor fool of a mermaid’s dream come true too, for that matter. Gave her legs and brought her to the prince’s attention. That last was included free of charge and was never part of the original contract.

 
It’s not my fault the prince wasn’t much interested. I imagine you meet a lot of beautiful women when you’re a prince.

 
He wasn’t a bad sort, really. He was very polite. He could see she was a few grunions short of a run and he made sure they took good care of her.

 
Good thing he
was
a decent sort. The kind of prince who sees a beautiful girl staggering along the beach, half-naked, unable to talk, with a scarred throat (look,
nobody
can fix gill slits all the way, I did my best and I’d like to see you do better) moving like she’s drunk and falling down a lot—anyway, the kind of prince who sees a girl like that and says “Oh yeah, I gotta get me some of that!”?

 
Yeah, not a nice person. Probably bashes great auks over the head for fun. You don’t want to deal with a prince like that.

 
(And yes, I would have stopped him. I don’t like to see creatures suffer, even stupid young ones in love. Maybe especially stupid young ones in love. He wouldn’t have gotten very far. I’ve got some very interesting stuff in the pantry and the King of Gulls owes me a favor.)

 
Well, anyway.

 
It was a long time ago now. Not by
my
standards—I’m more or less immortal, just like Great-Aunt Meryl—but by hers. The prince became the king in due time, and he married a smart, good-natured young woman who came with a dowry and a very expedient political alliance.

 
But he didn’t forget the young woman on the beach. He was a good king. He took care of her. Even after he died, he made sure of it.

 
The girl who used to be a mermaid is old now. She walks on the beach—very slowly these days, for the stones are small and turn underfoot—and she picks her way carefully. They send a strapping young man to walk beside her, to make sure she doesn’t fall.

 
Sometimes she smiles up at that young man, the way she smiled up at her prince. I think perhaps she doesn’t remember the difference anymore.

 
That’s a happy ending if you like. I see them sometimes, the old woman and the young servant, looking out over the ocean. The tide comes in, the tide goes out.

 
Anyway. The story got around a bit differently. Stories always do. Turning your back on a story is like turning your back on the ocean. Everybody adding details, everybody adding lines that fall on the ear like music and never mind where the truth falls by the wayside.

 
Everybody wants a hero so they know who to cheer for.

 
That’s fine. I don’t expect cheering.

 
She doesn’t look unhappy when she walks along the shore. But perhaps some day that young man will look the other way—distracted by a pretty girl’s smile, say—and she’ll make her way down to the water.

 
And if she wants—and if she still remembers–she’ll be welcome back here. You can always reverse engineer a gill slit. Who knows, all those mortal years might have been enough to learn wisdom.

 
We’ll still be here, under the waves. Nothing much has changed.

 
The tide comes in, the tide goes out.

 
All the same in the end.

“Pudding,” said Stunky, licking his lips. “Blood pudding, with the greasy crunchy bits around the edges.”

Myrtle groaned. After a minute, she said, “Cheese.”

“Cheese?” asked Stunky. “Just cheese?”

“Just cheese
nuthin’,
” hissed Myrtle. “All melty over a slice of bread, or on a cracker, or—or—
anything.
How long has it been since you had cheese?”

Stunky didn’t answer. There was no cheese in Neverland, as there were no cows. There was plenty of blood, but nobody ever thought to make pudding out of it. Possibly no one knew how.

It was all very well to go away in the night with an elfin boy with laughing eyes who taught you how to fly, and promised that you’d never have to grow up, but it turned out that grown-ups had a great deal to do with meals arriving regularly and on time. To get food, you had to beg it off the Indians or steal it from the pirates, and as a result, nearly everyone was hungry all the time, except perhaps Pan.