Ealdstan bit his lip and tried to hold back a sneer.
_____________________
V
_____________________
They were walking underneath the ocean and, contrary to expectations, it was extremely dry. Apart from a general damp in the air, and the odd slippery black slime underfoot and on the walls, there was nary a trickle of water anywhere.
Alex was impressed that the mechanics; while rudimentary, they were extremely effective. The strange diving mechanism involved a pool about four metres in diameter into which a massive framework dangled a greased length of chain attached to a cast iron weight. It was basic enough—you just cranked the weight up, put your feet in the stirrups, and held on to the braces, and then pulled out the locking mechanism. The weight plunged into the pool and dragged you with it—fighting the shock of the cold water and the oppressive pressure—to the bottom of the pool where you let go of the chain and navigated a U-shaped bend and climbed up into the tunnel system. The tunnel was dry since the air was in a closed system, not being able to escape out of either end. It was, however, very unpleasantly like being flushed.
To his credit, one of the Cornish knights volunteered to go first, making pessimistic predictions all the way. They waited for a breathless minute for him to return. The mechanism reset and then activated again, and he bobbed up, back on the chain. He was very wet and rather shaken, but otherwise fine. The rest of the knights pushed each other aside in an attempt not to be the last to so valiantly take this next step of the journey, leaving Alex and Ecgbryt to bring up the rear.
Dry though it may be, it certainly wasn’t pleasant under the ocean floor. The air pressure was almost unbearable; Alex kept having to clear his ears, and his eyes watered and he just felt—foggy, groggy.
Fortunately, the cave itself was well-carved and easy to traverse. It was smooth and fairly straight, yet they hadn’t gone a mile when it split. Ecgbryt made just the slightest pause at the split in the cave openings and then took the left path.
“Wait, hang on,” Alex said, flicking his torch on and wiping condensation off the map covering. “That’s south.”
“Swa swa,” Ecgbryt said, nodding. “Just so.” He and the eight newly awakened knights halted and turned to regard Alex.
“Well, so . . . I don’t see this here. Surely we want to bear north if we want to get up to Ireland.”
“We’re not going to Ireland.”
“No?”
“No, we’re going to Cornouaille.”
Alex blinked. “We were just in Cornwall.”
“No,
Cornouaille
, in the Franks’ land.”
“The Franks’ . . . ? You mean
France
?”
Ecgbryt nodded. “Just so.”
“There’s a Cornwall in France? How does that work?”
“It is a part of the original kingdom,” one of the Cornish knights broke in. Alex thought his name was Denzell. “Our people were once connected—Brytannica, Armorica, Gallaecia—a series of peninsular outposts and colonies.”
“Peninsular—?”
“I could tell you tales of King Mark and his faithful warrior—”
“Yes!” called Ecgbryt. “I would hear those tales!”
“In a minute,” Alex interrupted again. “About France—’’
“We are closer to it than we are to Ireland, and it seems doubtful to me that any other yfelgóp band would make this journey.”
“Also, we can expect no love from the knights of Eire.”
There was a general murmur of agreement among the knights.
“Prickly most of the time, unpredictable at best, they have long memories and most likely would not forgive the licenses of the past. There is much bad blood.”
The knights carried on, chatting merrily, leaving Alex to tread along in a bewildered state. “Bad blood? Do they think France is going to be different?”
_____________________
VI
_____________________
Terrified now that she was so far out to sea that she couldn’t see the shore, Gretchen clutched tighter, resolving her dead man’s hold around the seal’s neck. This done, she then concentrated on breathing, which was fairly difficult under the circumstances.
She cursed herself. She was in a world of trouble now, and no mistake. There was a word for her creature-companion and she knew it well: selkie. It was a word she had learned from her great grandmother when she went around to her house as a very young girl. Her great grandmother had just a couple battered children’s books kept in a box with some uninteresting wooden toys. When those stopped amusing, and Gretchen got restless, then Great Grandmother would talk to her. Sometimes it was just about what was going on with the people in the village, but on occasion she would tell one of her stories, one of the old and ancient tales of the area.
Gretchen always had trepidations about the stories and would never ask for one. That was because the stories absolutely terrified her. There wasn’t one of them that ended well for the little girls (and it was always little girls; Gretchen felt, even at five years old, that the way her great grandmother poked her in the ribs whenever she said “little girl” was needlessly heavy-handed). And, just like the situation Gretchen was in now, the heroines were always
such victims of circumstance or innocent desire that there didn’t seem, at any point in the story, a way for them out of the sticky messes they had become mired in. Inevitably, that lead to their death, which her great grandmother would draw out beyond all taste or decorum, even for a five-year-old.
And so while she hadn’t spent much more than a dozen afternoons by herself with her grandmother, and had only actually heard a small number of her great grandmother’s tales, every word of them were etched on her young mind. They were much more memorable than those of the battered children’s books with their toothless pastel colours and safe endings, or indeed any of the books she owned and read repetitively. But she
could
remember every phrase of her great grandmother’s stories—“The Orphan Girl and the Goblins,” “The Seamstress and the Tricksie Brownies,” “The Changeling and Its Sister,” “Bluebeard’s Young Bride,” and, of course, “The Selkie Mother.”
Yet even with those vivid warnings to deter her, here she found herself being pulled out to sea on the back of a changeling man. She could almost hear her great grandmother say, “I told you so.”
The sky continued to darken, but she could see something on the horizon. It was a grey lump that grew quickly into a black, rocky jag of a windswept island, probably not large enough to provide food or shelter for even one small sheep.
Which is not to say that it was empty. There were shapes moving along the top of it; she could see human silhouettes dancing on the island’s crest. As they drew nearer, Gretchen saw that there were also seals watching them, banging their flippers and tails in time to the beat of the music that now drifted out to them. It was a selkie ceilidh.
They circled the island, slowly coming in where the rocks dipped lower into the sea. As she glided by, she saw that they were all naked, just as the man, Ron Glass, had been on the beach. They
danced with a rhythmic, primal swing and sang in a chorus to the accompaniment of pipes.
They came to a shallow inlet and her selkie scraped along the sand. He gave a wriggle and a flap, and then she was holding on to the man, the bit of seal skin flapping between them.
They scampered up onto the slippery rocks, the man rather gallantly helping Gretchen up. For the briefest of moments Gretchen was impressed by this, before she remembered that he had abducted her.
“There is just one fire on the island,” he explained to her as he led her up the rocks by the hand, “but you may not be allowed very near it on your first night. You may keep my skin tonight,” he said, reaching the top and flinging it over her shoulders. “I should not let you have it, but it will keep you warm on a cold night.”
She followed him up the rock and pulled the seal skin around her very cold and very wet body. It was soft, thick, and warm but no drier than her or anything else on the desolate and windy rock. But it was another layer between her and the elements, and it kept the wind off of her, and she was grateful for it.
She hunched her bulky, awkward frame even further inside the skin as she came nearer to the dancing selkies. They were beautiful—the most beautiful people Gretchen had ever seen. All were tall and lithe and perfectly formed. A large fire pit burned in the centre, and the flames and embers lit their skin with a warm red and yellow glow, making them luminescent and otherworldly. The girls were willowy and soft-skinned with wide hips and long, dexterous hands and feet that they twisted inward and out in time to the rhythm; their long hair, alternately straight and curly, swinging. The men were built similarly to Ron, but some were fair, some were dark, and one or two were red, all with fine, firm, and occasionally sharp, Celtic features. They were uniformly smooth and unadorned by any hair except that which grew on their heads.
They all wove around one another, frenetically spinning and twisting. They did not ever knock into another or trip one another up, but when someone crossed their path, they would reach out and grab that person, sometimes quite intimately, and swing them around and then let them go, and both would continue their whirling jig. Their dance mimicked the path and motion of the sparks that the fire threw up into the night sky.
No one took much of a notice of Gretchen. They were too busy dancing and singing their song.
Up and Dance, for light is dawning,
Night will turn to day;
Dance because the world is turning,
And we cannot stay.
Hear the sounds of stars revolving,
Sweeping night away—
Sing a song of dark resounding,
For we cannot stay.
See, the sky at last is lightening,
The sea will soon be grey;
Weep my friends, for dawn is breaking,
And we cannot stay.
The burning orb of fire is rising,
laugh, and music play;
The cover for our fun is fading,
And we cannot stay.
Why this cruelty, Brightness shining,
Why this price we pay?
Why should unclothed flesh need shaming?
Why, I cannot say.
Curse the sun and keep on dancing,
Grab my hand and say,
“Dance the night, and dance in darkness,
Come, I cannot stay.
“Life is short and pleasure fleeting,
Grab what sin you may.
Morning brings our deeds’ discovering,
Thus we cannot stay.”
Someday perhaps, we’ll need not hiding,
Light and law decay;
The day the sun his house not biding
Will be the day we stay.
Until that hour we must keep moving,
Blow the pipes and play!
Dance with me and dance to morning,
For we cannot stay.
Gretchen stood, watching, and somehow the orbit of the dancers grew, and the cold blackness of the night shrunk so that the orange dancers were the only created thing in the universe, and she was standing on the outside edge. They spun before her, those who passed closest would hold their arms out to her when they saw her. A few of them even grabbed her briefly, but she never let herself be drawn in. Even so, she found herself jostling awkwardly in the path of the dancers, drawn into their orbit. There seemed to be more of them now. Perhaps more of the seals had slipped their
skins off and joined in. She felt doubly out of place now—even more unattractive and clumsy in the context of such beauty and grace of movement.
There was a strange elation to being here, with them and among them, and it was with a warm flush of embarrassed excitement when she realised it was because they all seemed to want her here. It was such a profoundly unfamiliar feeling, and it felt so achingly good . . .
Was she under a spell? She knew she should feel more anxiety than she did. She knew she should try to escape, but only in a vague and abstract way that brought no compelling emotion or immediacy.
Ron was suddenly at her side. “Drink this,” he said, and placed a shell containing a clear liquid in her hands. She took a sip and felt her mouth burning.
“What is it?”
“We found a few casks of whiskey bobbing in the ocean and brought them here.”
Gretchen didn’t need her great grandmother to tell her of the stories of seals playfully leading sailors and fishermen astray and causing general havoc. Those were told by almost everyone. “Found?”
“Aye, found. The ship had landed upon rocks somehow. Drink up.
Slàinte.
”
Gretchen tipped her shell up and drank. The contents did help to warm her, but she didn’t think that she should have any more. However, another shell was placed in her hands almost immediately.
“Go ahead, drink it.
Slàinte
.” He tipped his back again.
Gretchen didn’t drink hers, but tipped her shell and let it pour out while his head was tipped back. “It’s good,” she said.
“Isn’t it? Let’s dance.”
“No, thank you.”
“It’ll warm you up better than the drink.”
“I’m too tired. Let me rest. Maybe later. When are you going to take me back?”
“Back where?”
“To where you found me.”
“You don’t want to go back there.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I live there.”
“You live on the beach? Why not stay here with us?”