Legenda Maris Read Free Page B

her turn she was
there.
    What he had only seen with his eyes a
moment ago, now happened to him.
    Her arms were cool and silken and her
clasp unbreakable, and her hair like the green reeds and smelling of spring
flowers and mud. Her mouth, which was a woman’s, laughed in his face and her
breath smelled of the open sea. Then the horror of her tail, muscular as the
body of a leopard, seized him. And he was pulled over at once before he could
do anything, into the white slap of the water and down into the dark of the
dark below.
     
    If
he had thought a single last thing, which he had not, Elrahn would have said a
prayer, knowing it must be death he went to. And, it is no lie, in any other
case it would have been death.
    The mermaids came up the river to the
lake in spring to fish for men. And when they caught them, they ate them—but
this Elrahn only learned later, when he had learned too something of the mer-language.
They told him then, or she told him, the one who caught him, that just
as men relished fish, so certain fish relished the flesh of men. Indeed, she
said, a mermaid would not eat a fish, for mermaids were themselves partly of
fish-kind. “But you are also of mankind!” exclaimed Elrahn. She said this was
not so. Mermaids in their other half were of woman kind. And so they
would not eat a woman either. Not a fish or a woman or a human child. Only a
man. And they preferred, as some humans prefer fresh-water fish—fresh-water
men.
    The name of this mermaid, who had caught
and thereafter owned him, was Trisaphee. Hers was the only name among them he
ever learned, for the sounds of their tongue still bewildered him even after he
came to understand it somewhat. Their voices too, under the lake, were also
like water. He never heard them speak or sing or call in the sea, for when the
time came for them to return there, his days with them were over and done.
     
    That first day, Elrahn woke up lying not, in darkness, but in dimness. What
he could see was water, and there could be no doubt of what it was. The
movement of it was like that of thin cloths drawn over and against each other,
but bubbles littered through, all bright. And even the sun shone in with one
smoky shaft, though far off.
    And he saw too that they were
going to and fro, swimming over and about each other in an endless dance.
    There were many hundreds of them. A clan
of them. A host. All were female, with breasts and long, long hair, and all
were fish from a little below the waist.
    They were very lovely, to be sure. The
loveliest thing he ever looked on, apart from the full moon. But at this hour
he thought of their beauty less than his own terror and the place he was in.
    After a while, he next realised that he,
a breathing thing of the world, still breathed.
    Then he got up, and he went about to see
how it was that he could. And then he found he had been shut up in a
cage, but it was a cage of air, a great round bubble that somehow had been
formed, and when he put his fists against it, its walls did not rupture, only
trembled.
    All this while the mermaids swam about
him, some paying him no attention, but some staring in. And their eyes, like
this, under the lake, were sombre green and beautiful and quite human in their
shape and form—yet too, they were luminous as the eyes of cats or demons .
    Soon, she was there. That is,
Trisaphee, only then he did not know her name. She came and she shook her hair
at him, which underwater was like a sequinned veil.
    “Let me go, you witch,” said Elrahn.
    But the instant he said it he thought he
had been a fool. For though she seemed to grasp what he said—and many of them,
he after found, knew the language of men—she was the more powerful, and his
foe.
    However, even through the vast bubble of
air, she said something to him. He knew not a word of it, even if he could make
out the liquid sounds. But then she spoke in his own tongue, and she said, “Stay
still, you Man. You belong to me, and we will not