Legenda Maris (2 page)

Girls in Green Dresses

This
is for John Kaiine, who, on my mentioning the story-less title, told me who they
were, and promptly recounted most of the tale of Elrahn.

In
the dim diluted light an hour before the dawn, the girl’s father took her hand.
And soon after they set out on the long walk to the lake among the reeds.

The river flows into the lake from the
hills, then flows away again, down to the sea. It is a green river, and the
lake, tidal but also capable of deep stillness, is green too. The tallest reeds
grow there, taller far than a child-girl of thirteen years, as was Elaidh that
morning. Men and women, and children too, go there now and then to cut the
reeds for the thatch, and for their healing value. But not so often any more.
Since the lake is thought an unsafe and mysterious place, not gentle with
humankind.

Yet it looked well, that morning, the
water a milky green among the circle of the round hills, and the mist just
stealing away as the sun came up unseen, only the sky lighting to show its
path. A heron rose from the reeds, steel-pale in the twilight, but every stem
shivered, and the ripples fled over the lake as a woman gathers her stitches
when she sews a cloth. But then the reeds were once more still as if made of
iron, and the lake was like a plate of misty glass. And silence spoke with its
own voice.

“Are you cold?” asked the father, Elrahn.

“No, dadda.’’

“Are you afraid?”

“No, dadda.”

“We’ll sit, then. We must wait. We’ll
eat our breakfast on the shore.”

So in the lea of a willow they ate their
bread, dipped in sweet black tea. They waited. He did not tell her the story
then, for he had already told her, over and over, all the years of her life
that she could listen. Only the silence spoke, then sang

He
had been a baby, Elrahn, when he took the snow-sickness Not many take it, nor
live that take it. Those that do are ever after marked.

And that was how he grew up then a fine
young man, but with hair and skin so white, and his face and body, all his
fleshly surface, pitted by the silvery pocks the fever had made on him, that
are like a mountain leopard’s paw-marks in the snow.

“He will have second sight,” said the
old women. But he did not.

“He’ll go off for a soldier,” said the
men. He never did.

“Religion is always a refuge and
consolement,” said the priest, standing lonely under the church’s dome. But
Elrahn did not come to be taught about God.

“He will never wed,” said the girls, “though
we should like him, if it were not for his snow-leopard skin.”

And Elrahn did not court or marry. He
did not even glance at the girls, and if he thought of them when he was not
with them, it was impossible for them to say.

His mother was a widow—his father was
long dead of the spirit that he had brewed at his own still. But when Elrahn
was seventeen or so, the mother too died. And besides she had never liked
Elrahn much nor been very kind to him, preferring her other sons. These
presently kicked him out, and it was winter too. “Go cuddle the snow or find a
leopard to live with, or a wolf, Elrahn. It’s sick of the sight of your white
scales we are.”

Elrahn did not answer. He seldom said a
lot. He picked himself up and walked off along the village street through the
snow, not looking back once. Only the priest followed him a little way,
shouting, “Return, dear Elrahn. God loves you.” But Elrahn did not return.

Elrahn walked all through the dark,
white day, and when he was hungry and thirsty, he took up some of the snow, or
plucked an icicle and sucked it. Later he found a barn to sleep in and there
was a cow there with a calf, and he had a little of the warm milk

The next day Elrahn met a kind of
travelling show. There were three painted wagons strung with bells, and drawn
by shaggy ponies, and in the wagons were those who danced or jumped through
fire, or performed magic tricks for money. And also there was a woman pretty
enough to make you blink, but she was only the height of the back of a young
dog. And also there was a dog, that had wings. Though it could not fly until
hoisted up in a harness from invisible wires by night, to deceive the ignorant
in various villages.

The show-master was a man in a fine coat
with brass buttons. He gave Elrahn a piece of cheese with bread and a cup of
liquor. “Well, my handsome fellow, are you marked like that all over? What do
you say to going with us? You can be our serpent prince, the child of a man and
a female snake. Your food, and one hundredth of whatever we’ll take in coins.”

Elrahn was staring at a blue ape that
could walk across the tops of narrow sticks and was doing so. The cheese was
tasty, and besides the pretty dwarf had given him a sort of look he had never
been given—or noticed he was given—before.

“I will,” said Elrahn.

Some
while Elrahn was with the show-wagons. In the villages and little rambling
stone towns, he stood naked but for a kilt and some ornament painted to look
like gold. The people gaped, for in those parts they had never even heard of
the snow-sickness. And when he stuck out his tongue, stained black for purpose,
they gasped.

Life among the wagons was not bad. It
was better than it had been in the village and with the mother and her other
sons.

The blue ape was full of jokes and the
winged dog liked running, and would warm your feet by the fire. The troupe were
daring. And besides, there was the lovely dwarf.

But then one day, in a town above a high
forest, a rich man saw the dwarf and he made her an offer of love and marriage.

“Elrahn,” said she, “we have been good
friends, but I would be a fool to refuse this chance. He is a kind man, if not
good-looking or young. And I am coming to the end of my bloom. You’ll tire of
me, in any case.”

Another man in Elrahn’s place might have
said, Never! But Elrahn said nothing like that. Nor did he say, You are
breaking my heart, or, You are a bitch. Only his eyes filled with tears, but he
looked away, and she did not see, or if she did she did not say. Instead he
answered, “I wish you well and happy.”

After the dwarf woman was gone, Elrahn
had less interest in the wagons. He told the master so.

“Ah, then, just come down to the reedlands
with me,” said the man, “for they say there you can find a mermaid, and I should
like, I would, to have a mermaid among my show.”

Elrahn agreed to this. He thought he
might as well go on with them until he found some other thing to do.

The spring was begun, and the reedlands were
green. The greenest place on earth they seemed, as they always do then, and in
the summer. Even the sky looks green, in its way, between the stems, and from
willow islands in the rivers, the emerald ducks fly out in swarms like bees.

There was a big old inn, and here the
three wagons stopped for several days.

As he drank beer under the low beams,
the show-master asked to hear the local tales.

So then they were telling him
everything, of giants in the hills who had left the ruins of their castles
there, of ghosts that dance on the thirteenth night of every month and of the
demon-fox that steals babies left in the fields and changes them to foxes.

The show-master and his troupe listened
to all this, but Elrahn could see the master was impatient. Elrahn wondered why
the master did not ask straight out for the tale he wanted, the story of the
mermaids. But as Elrahn never said a lot, he never said a single word now.

And then an old man came over and held
out his mug for some beer.

‘‘Welcome, grandda,” said the master. “What
tale do you have, then?”

“No tale at all,” said the old man. “Only
this warning. Do not go down to the lake in these days of the spring.”

“And why is that, grandda?”

“If you do, you may see there the girls
in green dresses. And then no man alive, nor God in His sky, can save you.”

A great thick hush had fallen. Even the
fire dropped down on the hearth, and the winged dog folded his wings close, and
went under the table.

“Why is that, then, grandda? Are they so
terrible, these girls in green dresses?”

“So they are.”

“And
why
are they?”

The old man said, “Ask the dead, for
they know.”

Then the show-master nodded, and
refilled the old man’s beer-mug, and said the ape would dance on the rafters
upside down, which it did. And the other matter was let go.

Except that, near midnight, as they were
all in bed, the master woke Elrahn up. “Tomorrow, at first light, we walk to
the lake, you and I.”

“Do you want?”

“Are you a dunce, or what? Do you not
know what the old man said?”

Elrahn said he did not.

“Listen then. They call them that here,
girls in green dresses. There are
mermaids
in spring in this lake. And
we shall catch one or I’ll be hanged by my tassel.”

They
say the mermaids would come in from the sea, up the river to the lake, in
spring. As salmon come in, to spawn. But a mermaid is a fish only up to her
middle, and from there she is a naked woman. So, if she should stand upright on
her tail out of the water among the green reeds, she may look like a girl clad
in green...

All this the master explained to Elrahn
as down to the lake they went, brushing through the spangle-dew before sunrise.

The sun was just opening its eye when
they reached the shore. A sight of beauty it was, the coin of water lying there
so still among the misty hills, and the rim of the flame-green reeds, and the
sun just touching the world with one crystal finger. And then the dawn wind
stirred and blew on the reeds, and they rattled like harp-strings struck by an
unseen hand.

But when the wind was gone, all was
still again. And Elrahn was taken with the idea that human things and animals
breathe, and so are always in a sort of motion, while they live. But the land
and the heaven and the water, which do not breathe at all, may lie as still as
if turned to glass.

Then the master spoke in a fierce quick
whisper. “See! Do you see,
there
?”

Elrahn looked. A duck was swimming along
the lake. No, it was a great fish. And he thought they might have brought a rod
or net, to catch some fish for breakfast. And then he thought, curiously, of
the Bible, which the priest had kept telling him of, and of the thing spoken to
a fisher-man, saying he should be a fisher of men.

Just then the fish broke the surface of
the lake, and oh, it was not any fish at all, but a young girl with skin as
white as winter snow and hair as green as water. And then down she dived again
and there was the flip of her tail, and the unbreathing lake was turned once
more to glass.

Elrahn was amazed, but the show-master
was already going out between the reeds, standing himself on the shore. And in
his hands he held a shining string that looked like gold, but Elrahn knew it
would only be painted.

He thinks that will catch her,
thought Elrahn.
But he himself knew nothing about mermaids, and perhaps it would.

Presently there came again a rippling
and whirling in the water, and suddenly the water broke in a hundred pieces,
and up out of it burst two creatures, and they were, without any doubt,
mermaids, the pair of them.

“See my sweet girls—” boldly cried the
master, “look—a golden chain! I have heard how you like to gather treasures.
Should you like this golden chain?”

And then they looked and they laughed,
the two mermaids.

Elrahn thought he had never heard a
sound so charming or so cruel.

It was true they were naked to the
waist, and a little below. They had long slim arms and throats, and round white
breasts with centres pink as coral. Their lips were pink like that, and the
long nails on their hands, and as they laughed he saw their teeth, which were
white and very sharp. And Elrahn remembered he had heard once a sailor speak of
big fish in the sea with teeth, called sharks.

Their hair was long and green and
wrapped them over as they moved and then uncovered them. Their tails were a silvery
green, and utterly the tails of fish, with silver fins like fans. Their eyes
were pale so he could not be sure of their colour, but it was somewhere between
the other colours of them, green and white and silver—and also pink.

“Come, sweetlets, come to me and take
the chain—” cried the show-master, gambolling along the shore and jinking the
painted string, and the mermaids laughed, and dived and whirled and came up
again, always nearer the shore, and then they clove through a reed-bank and
stood up among the reeds, tall on their tails, and they were two girls in green
dresses.

“Come away,” called Elrahn to the show-master.