Legenda Maris Read Free Page A

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.
    But the master did not hear. He thought
he fished for mermaids and held out the bait, and would soon catch both—and
once on land they would be helpless as any fish thrashing and rolling and at
the mercy of anything on legs. Yet Elrahn saw their playful strength and
suppleness and their sharp teeth and the pink under the green of their eyes.
Elrahn heard the old grandda at the inn saying, “Then no man alive, nor God in
His sky, can save you.”
    “Master—come away!” called Elrahn, now
loudly.
    And when he did this the mermaids both
turned their heads as one, and stared right at him.
    And under the silver-green and pink of
their eyes, was black, a black as deep as the unsounded depths of the outermost
seas, from which they had come.
    What a journey it must be for them, with
all the trial and danger the in-running salmon finds. The terrible currents and
waiting enemies, the rocks and tides, the change from salt to soft water. Yes,
they were strong, these girls, and cunning too, for they had survived. Yet why,
he wondered, why did they come in at all? For the salmon came to mate, but
surely these ones— their kind lived in the sea?
    Right then, one of the mermaids dived
down under the reeds. She vanished, but the other lingered there flirting still
and smiling at the master, and at Elrahn too, and waving her hands now, in a
sort of amorous half-embracing way.
    Elrahn strode out towards the master.
This man had, after all, taken him in even if for profit, fed him, and been
polite, and even bought him drink the night the dwarf lady was wed.
    When she saw Elrahn also was striding
towards the lake, the mermaid in the reeds shook her shimmering hair for
pleasure. Then Elrahn broke into a run.
    But he had not yet reached the master
when out of the purling water at the master’s very feet, the first mermaid
broke like a shining spear up from the lake.
    The master shouted and held the golden
string high to entice her on. But in the next moment, she seemed to sink down
over on him like a wave. Elrahn saw her arms about the master’s neck, and her
hair falling all across him, and then the gleaming fish’s tail swung up and
round, and the master, held in the coil of it as if in the coils of a snake,
was falling over. Over into the lake he fell, all twined in tail and hair and
arms. There was a sparkling slither and a splash. Elrahn beheld the fan-like
tail-fins flash from the water once, then go under.
    Both had gone under, the mermaid-girl
and the show-master—gone without a trace. And the water closed shut upon them.
    Elrahn stood there with his heart drumming,
and he thought he must run back now to the inn and get what help he could. And
as he thought this, he knew there was no use at all in it. But he had forgotten
the other one, the other mermaid, and in that very instant in