Sea Music

SEA MUSIC

No wind stirred over the star dark sea. The lights of sturdy, deep
bellied fishing boats reflected in the water as the faint splash of
cheated fish, jumping to their destined end, flecked the water with
tiny sparks of foam. The moon was a thin, pale sickle gleaming in a
blue-black sky scattered with stars. Palm trees stood silent, no breeze
to shake their drooping branches, while the slow, barely perceptible
motion of the tideless sea on the sand produced no wave spray.

She watched from the safety of the water, shoulders beneath the
surface, only her head lifted enough to focus her gaze on the beach.
She had escaped from her father's great gloomy palace in the sea deeps
to swim free in the warm night air on the surface. She stroked her fine
fingered hands along her slim arms and shook her hair out underwater
like cascade of seaweed in a ocean current. Her tail flicked
to-and-fro, keeping her effortlessly above the water, the rocky shelf
of the sea bottom far below her as she floated vertical in the embrace
of the calm night. The measures of man for night and day, hours,
minutes, seconds, were nothing to her, but the first breath of dawn
wind brushed her cheek. He would soon appear. An angular moving shadow
separated itself from the beach. Sand scrunched under the pressure of
feet. She shivered with fear. Feet. She had never been close to anyone
who had feet. Fins, scales, tails, silken shining multi-hued tails she
knew, but feet - unthinkable.

Her mother had told her many a story of mankind from the long years she
had spent near the far west shore of the westernmost land, near a place
men called Zennor. Her own grandmother had once loved a human
man-creature and had tried to take him home with her beneath the sea.
Her mother explained to her that human creatures stop living under
water, like fish do in air, so her grandmother lost her love. But this
time it would be different. She felt her heart beat faster and faster
as the man walked down the beach towards his boat, a small boat that he
began to push into the water. She waited until he had seated himself in
the boat to row before she dived beneath the surface to swim towards
him. Sensing the boat almost above her, she twisted her tail to spiral
upwards and break the surface by the boat's side, her hair flowed round
her shoulders and down her back.

She grasped the worn wood of the gunwale and lifted herself over its
edge. The man dropped his oars and sat still, white faced in the early
hint of daybreak. He looked at her, his lips parted in shocked
unbelief. His eyes widened as he glimpsed the pale oyster pink of the
fine scales that tipped her breasts. She laughed. The sound of soft
surf on sand and distant bells surrounded him. She drove her tailfin
deep into the water and leapt like a salmon going upriver. She landed
in the boat at his feet. Her fine silvery fingers touched his feet.
Feet. She laughed with pleasure. He shivered with the chill of terror.
She trailed her other hand over the side and it left a trail of
phosphorescence. The prow rose out of the water and the boat surged
towards the horizon, driven by some underwater power. She smiled at
him. In the dawn light, her skin gleamed like mother-of-pearl and her
eyes were emerald bright. Her spun-silver hair lifted slightly in the
air that rushed past them as the boat swept on and on over the
sea.

He reaches out to touch her hair. It is made of ice and fire. He could
not let it go. It would not release him. He slips into the bottom of
the boat beside her. Her heavy tail flicks over his legs. He feels the
life ebb out of him as her cold weight presses down on him. She smiles.
Her teeth are as white and sharp as those of a shark. He trembles with
fear. Her pale fingers stroke his cheek. His skin burns and freezes at
the same time. She slithers into his arms and kisses him. His head
spins as the air leaves his lungs. The boat tilts and slides beneath
the sea. She holds him in her arms and draws him down, down, down to
the kingdom of the deep. The coral gates are open, but he will never
see them. The consort throne is ready, but he will never claim it. The
couch of sea-anemones and long sleek kelp strands is prepared, but he
will never share it with her. She frees him from her arms and he floats
like dead fish towards the surface far above.

"Daughter, daughter, what did I tell you about human kind? They cannot
bide with us! Though our kiss has power, it is not strong enough to let
them live out of their element. See now, what wrack and havoc you have
made for those of air. They will weep salt water from their eyes for
the death that the salt waves have brought. I have seen it before. And
they will tell strange tales of sea-maidens to affright their kindred.
You are to blame in this. You knew this could not be!"

"But he had feet, my mother, feet and legs and fair skin, warm skin,
not fish-chill like ours. And I did love, but he was affrighted and all
his life-breath left him at my kiss."

"Come into your own sea-kin, daughter. Those of air and those of ocean
may not possess each other. The love of kind out of kind is ever death.
Take comfort for there are all the vast realms of the great oceans
filled with seafolk fated for you. Though he was fair, there are fairer
yet to be your destiny."

She swam obediently into the inner courts of her father's house with a
lazy flick of her rainbow tail, but she was silent with sadness for the
lost one, her love that might have been, had they been like and
like.

In the cool turquoise depths she began to twist her hair into a long
braid, while she sang out her grief in an endless melody of soft,
pulsing sounds that made the waves break high on the sea shore and the
dawn wind tear at the palm trees, wailing as though in pain. At full
daylight, the fishermen eyed the roughening weather with alarm and
began to search for the missing boat, launched of the beach by their
young companion. When they found his body, they could not know that he
had died for love, drowned by the fascination of the forbidden, the
forever unattainable. The storm raised by her undersea lament washed
his body ashore and when the waves calmed again, they saw his body. He
was unmarked, as handsome in death as in life, only his skin had the
bloated pallor of the drowned.

The sea maiden had sung out her sorrow and braided up her hair. Those
of air shed salt tears of grief for the sea-death, but the sea-maiden
remembered it no more.

? LINDY McNAUGHTON JORDAN, 2001 (1,215 words)