The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic 2 Read online

  And then his heart jumped up like a hare. For she made a movement, not cat-like, not creatural or oceanic. Lifting her left arm, lightly and unmistakably she beckoned him to come to her.

  Well, he froze. He stopped there like a damned stone and could not make himself try a step. And even as this happened, he swore at himself with the terrible foul words he had gained with his sixteen to seventeen years. But it did no good. And presently, without any sign of displeasure or amusement, the sea-girl flipped over and was gone down once more into the water.

  At that, he ran. He pelted full tilt at the place she had been, sliding and almost falling, and he was yelling too, pleading that she would stay. But when he reached the spot, there were only the fish bones lying there, some of them cracked by her teeth.

  Michael looked out across the empty sea. From this vantage the sun was down behind the headland. A shadow filmed the water, making it transparent and opaque together. Again, before he knew what he did, Michael began to wade out into it, silent now, and he said that tears spurted from his eyes, he could not have said why.

  Then from the sea, like a white bird, she darted out. He caught the flash of her – like the lightning it was, so unlooked for, yet expected. And her arm was raised, and it still beckoned, and he knew that she wished him to follow her, and in that moment he had gone far enough that he could do it.

  Unlike half of the village he could swim, could Michael, and he launched himself into the warm sea without another thought. ‘There was never,’ he said, ‘another hour like that one. It was more, you see, like flying than to swim. And all the doubt left behind on the land.’

  He had her in sight, for she allowed it, keeping herself above the sea, and he could make her out easily, the glint of her hair and skin, and, every so often, the flare of her fish tail catching the last sun. She went around the cliffs, under the old tower, and he decided she would be going to the bluff beyond, which at low tide is set back from the sea, and crumbling, full of galleries and carious chambers, unsafe and unvisited. It seemed to him she would know this cliff, maybe it had been a land-haunt of hers for centuries, for did not her kind live three hundred years at least?

  Sure enough she turned towards the bluff, to which the tide was now coming up, and swam in under a deep blind shadow that was falling down into the water from the rocks. She vanished there into some hidden channel, and then reappeared two minutes later above him, before he had got himself frantic, on a high dim overhang. She had ascended so swiftly it was like a challenge. Unable to locate the underwater passage, he dragged himself out and pushed up the bluff-side, slipping and stumbling, on his two legs, to reach her.

  Between finally was a sort of tunnel, thickly dark, fishy, and cold, smelling of the core of the ocean, which in its time had been there very much, and when he had thrust himself through this, he found her cave before him.

  There could be no doubt it was hers. It was littered with her things, her possessions, what she had borne in to tinker with, for she too was a visitor. She had her trophies of seaweeds, and a hoard of shells, and some keepsakes from the beach, a broken glass in a plastic frame, a scent bottle, a crushed and empty can of beer. Also, scattered about, were the familiar bones of fish, the carapace of a crab.

  There was no comfort in the cave. It was stone and rock and slime and impending night. It chilled him right enough, but not sufficiently to send him away. For she was there, somewhere, in the dusk.

  ‘I believe that I spoke to her,’ said Michael, ‘some courting phrase.’

  He trod over the bones and the crab, cautious not to spoil the shells and glass and can, which were her toys, and then he made her out, stretched on the stones before him in the darkness. She glowed, like the phosphorus on the water by night. He gazed down, and she was less than three feet from him, lying there, and he saw her as she was at last.

  ‘If I had thought,’ he said, ‘I would always have reckoned it to be like dying. The drowning death. And the door opens, and you see the face of God. All your days you’ve known you will come to it, and longed for and feared it, but it will be. But then as the door flies wide, you see – it is the truth you see. And truth is terrible.’

  The image that shone up for him on the darkness was the truth of the mermaid.

  She was a mammalian female from her head and torso to her lower belly, where she became the fish. But though she was a female, she was not properly a woman. Her face was flat, with little fluttering nostrils set without a nose, and her mouth was wide and lipless and through it he could detect the thin fence of narrow teeth, each of which was pointed. Her eyes were a fish’s eyes, round and yellowish, lidless, the soulless eyes that glare from the net. Her hair streamed back and was not hair but a tangle of strange rubbery filaments, and he saw she had no ears but there were the gills there, flaccid as withered pods.

  ‘Even her skin,’ he said, ‘for skin she had, to her waist, it was not like skin at all but the hide of a whale, thick and shiny, and here and there algae growing on it and little mosses out of the deep water, feeding on her.’

  She stank of the ocean floor, of the fish she ate and was. The tail of her was huge and sinuous, gleaming, twitching, and the dark flowers of her ultimate femaleness stared from it. His gorge rose. He choked, but could not move away. He felt the trap; he knew there was no escape for him. She was the sea, which is older than the land, and he had gone to her and was hers.

  And then she beckoned again, aimlessly, cruelly. It was like the waving of the sea-wrack in the tide, some ancient gesture she had learned, but it drew him closer, near to her, so he leaned and then he kneeled above her, and he could no more have not done it than a man can keep from his last breath.

  She put her hand on him then, like his lover. He saw her hand, thin, so he noticed its jelly bones, and the webs between the three fingers which were all she had, and the long greenish curving nails. And in this nightmare instrument, groaning and praying, partly out of his mind, he watched his manhood rise erect for her. But when she drew him in, he shut his eyes.

  ‘She was cold,’ he said. When he said this to me, the word, the word cold, became a new word. Its entire meaning I did not grasp, but in a book you would find it by those other words: Terror, Hell, Evil and Despair. ‘My body worked as she made it do. I clung in my mind and prayed and I do not know for what but I think I never called on God. She was cold, she was cold. She was all the old fish-stinking filth-drowning of the sea. She was the mud and the nothingness. She was the years of the world dying. Ah God. I was fucking death.’

  He does not remember the end, though he is sure, Michael, that he served her as she required. He came up out of her, as from the bottom of the ocean, and he crawled away and vomited, bringing out the poison, but he could never rid himself of all. And somewhere as he writhed and spewed, he heard a faint silken splash under the bluff, and knew that she was gone, dived down into the deep of the evening tide, vanished, where the night and the horizon touch.

  The stars were out when Michael crawled free of the cave and began his long walk homeward.

  All the while he walked, in the clean air of the cliffs, he told himself it was done now.

  ‘But it never was done,’ said Michael. ‘And never will be done.’

  We stood together in the lee of the Rock. The storm was quietening and the waves sloping lower and lower. Sometimes with an angry hiss they came up the granite for us, but her rage was turning away towards some other place.

  ‘Hark there,’ said Michael, ‘Alec is doing good trade.’

  And from the village we heard a shouting and banging of the piano in the pub.

  As Michael moved out into the slow rain, I nearly put my hand on his arm, to ask him or to tell him something. But I did not know what that would be, for he had said it through and no wise sentence of mine could change it. He had lain with the sea and could lie with no other. He had coupled with death and lived with the memory of that. Each night that he lay down upon his own belly did he feel that under him, t
hat icy twisting and smothering and drawing? And did he dream of them still, the hollow girls swinging on the waves with their round annihilated eyes, their taloned fingers, their silent songs?

  ‘Michael...’ I said.

  ‘What would you have?’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you a drink,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks now, but no. It’s late. The Dad will want me up for the shop bright and early. Good night to you.’

  He did not say, Do you not believe me? Or never speak of this. He walked away up the lane as though we had exchanged a few words over the storm. I took note of his progress, and when he had disappeared from sight, I wondered too if he had said any of it to me, that untalking man. But the sea is the thing now, it is she tells you. You have only to listen, to hear.

  For the Memory of Jane

  By K T Davies

  Huginn ok Muninn

  fljúga hverjan dag

  Jörmungrund yfir;

  óumk ek of Hugin,

  at hann aftr né komi-t,

  þó sjámk meir of Munin.

  Iron is as old as us. We know Iron and all its tricks, and samewise, it knows us.

  Iron does not yield.

  Though my claws are blunt they are still as thick as an axeman’s fingers, yet the spare, leafless branch does not yield or flex within my grasp like brother Ash or sister Elm. I endure and tighten my grip on the leafless bow like Draupnir around our Father’s finger.

  The rain hammers down, as hard as Mjolnir. It rings against my thin-feathered, wax-thick skull; but old as I am, like the Iron tree on which I perch, I prevail against the storm, lofty and unbowed.

  I tilt my head from earth to heaven. Though even my keen eyes cannot see it, I know that above the bow of the sky lies Valhalla. Beyond the boiling clouds where heat and ice wage constant war, where wings are seared or frozen on a whim, there lays the starlit path that I long to fly once more. Oh, but it has been so long since I crossed the bridge. I wonder; am I too old to fly the course? Are these wings too stiff?

  ‘No.’ Thought answers and I thank my brother for his encouragement. My heart beats fast and clean against my wish-thin breast and I remember. I am old, but like Iron, I will not yield.

  Below the limbless tree, the screaming beasts roar ceaselessly upon a river of ash, devouring air and spewing filth. I trace by eye their brutal tracks cut without thought through the paths that guide the wise and the wild.

  These ... roads stink and spread like flood run, through glass canyons and stone cliffs. The dead litter them; killed but not consumed by the roaring beasts with fire eyes. I spy pigeon, cat, pheasant, and fox, all pressed into the hard packed ash. I do not understand why they leave their kill to rot, but their loss is my gain. I swoop down and glide between the roaring beasts, spinning runes in the air as I go to guard me while I eat my fill. The riven flesh tastes like Jotun shit, but an offering is an offering, and all that is spilled beneath the shadow of the Raven Banner belongs to my Father.

  And so I eat the despair of the wild and wonder at the waste. ‘I do not understand the City.’ I say.

  Huginn’s laughter is faint, but rings as sweet as a rill, as bright as a hammer against an anvil. ‘You have the right of it there, foolish old bird, now get thee hence. The shield maiden cannot wait forever.’

  I sigh. I am a foolish old bird, that is a truth, and in truth there is power. My runes waver and dissolve in the blue tinged air. I let the wind lift me as the beasts roar by, blind eyes burning against the dying day. Up I go, spiralling above the City. I wonder, when did this happen? This dwelling place by the broad ford has spread between blinks and now lies like a carpet of moss across the gritstone crags where the kin of my kin have fledged for a thousand years. This City by the broad ford has swallowed the valleys of green and grey that once slept beneath the shadow of our dark span. I knew everything then. Every secret of every dell, every song of every bird. Yet this place has always shifted like mist, lying as it does on the edge of the Dane Law. It has always been a battleground and now it grows too swiftly for this old bird to keep up. I cannot remember it all and if I cannot remember, my lord will forget and turn his face from here and we will lose another fief. I drift on a sighing breeze and watch hungry giants crawling along the ashen tracks, snapping at the frayed hem of our domain. If only I’d come here sooner, if only I’d forgotten it entirely. For good or ill, the Raven Banner was hoisted here and the land was claimed by axe and fire and so it has been lodged in my memory, mapped and fixed and I must remember it.

  ‘Foolish, Muninn. Now frame thi’ sen,’ Huginn chides.

  I ignore him and soar to the icy bow of the sky to freeze my tears before they fall. The sun dips to the horizon, drawing a string of light taut against the curve of the world, poised to loose stars into the sky, bright enough perhaps to light the way home, for I have forgotten. As the tapestry of our tales grows ever more threadbare and the green sward is broken, my memories are scattered on the winds like plucked feathers. And so, reluctantly, I have come to the bitten edge, to the very rim of the shield where I might find my memories of this place. The wolf age is upon us, and no man will have mercy on another unless we remember where, and who we are.

  A twist of pinions and down I go. The air tears through my flights, seeking weakness. Old I may be, but I am wise to the wind and like Skidbladnir’s hull, my wings are slight but strong enough : for now. I settle onto my leafless perch on the Iron tree and brood until the rain abates and the Thunderer hammers south. I listen to him annealing the fabric of world upon world, welding the then with the now to forge the blade of tomorrow. In the distance, I see a spit of fire flash from Asa-Thor’s forge, it is bright against the falling shadow of night. Beneath me the bright runes of this dwelling place by the broad ford burst into life. I am blinded for a heartbeat as the beads of my eyes are filled with blazing gold, azure, and scarlet. I do not understand how these fires can burn so unwaveringly. I do not understand what these runes painted in light mean.

  ‘That’s why yer ‘ere,’ Huginn says with another’s voice. In the distance I can hear wolves howling.

  I rise from my perch, fly above the rivers of ash and the serried Iron trees now aglow with cold fire. Like an arrow, I fly to the edge of a mirrored pool that lies placid and unruffled before a cathedral of stone. The rock has been teased and primped into turrets and spires and carved gods hunch in niches that run the full span of its breast. These idols have long since withered to blunted nubs beneath the touch of Njord and Freyr, as is only right and proper. These upstarts with neither sword nor song should wilt before the gods of rain and wind. For good measure, I shit on them as I fly over and caw my distain.

  Glittering, glass palaces trim the edge of the lake. In the bale light of deathless fires it gleams like the boss of Surtr’s blazing shield. This is our doom. The land is covered by undying fire and the giants wield not one, but a thousand burning blades. I am too late.

  Doubt cripples me.

  I fall through air that has turned as thin as my hopes. My wings brush the dead edge of stone, made of stone as I grapple with the breath of the Thunderer.

  ‘Seek stronger tides,’ Huginn whispers.

  And thus reminded, I do, and let my beak lead me to warmer air where I rise until the shield of Surtr is nothing more than a dainty broach pin, set against Midgard’s night-drenched cloak. This is not the land of my Father. This is the land of my father’s children and in this moment it is beautiful.

  I wheel into the wind; the tips of my wings questing for warm skeins threaded in the flow. I find them, and let them draw me to the place I must go. I am the weft, forcing myself through sweet-scented air redolent of lands far from here.

  *

  ‘Not a bad innings, though, is it? When you think about it, she’s nowt to moan about, has she?’

  ‘What? Shut up, why don’t you? She’s not dead yet, you…’ Val hesitated. She wanted to say ‘fucker’ but, as she said, Jane wasn’t dead yet and the old dear didn’t like swearing. Despite the mor
phine, Val knew that the old lady wasn’t asleep. She had a sense for these things after working on D1 for so many years. Jane was holding on, bless her. Val didn’t know why, she looked knackered, little more than a wrinkle in the bed. She’d been a big woman in her prime, a nurse auxiliary in the army. They didn’t have lifts then, they had to do it all themselves, under fire. Now she was nothing more than a twist of cotton. Still, if she wanted to stay, Val would make sure she was comfortable, never mind pillocks like Jo who just saw full beds or empty beds, rather than the people in them. Jo wasn’t a bad nurse, as such; she was just a rubbish person, no warmth in her.

  They finished making the bed in silence. When Jo left, Val smoothed the covers on her side and then checked Jo’s just to make sure that the sheet wasn’t creased. They were fine, but because Jo was always so perfunctory Val never felt like she could trust her to do her very best. Her colleague’s disrespect pissed her off. ‘We have a duty to care for the dying, and the dead, come to that.’ Was what she always wanted to say to her when she started talking about their patients as though they were already dead, but she never did. Life was short and she needed the job; and nobody liked a whinger.

  Val picked up the chart hanging on the end of the bed. There was nothing to fill in. No medication and no change. Jane Frowe was 97 and dying of old age. That was it, no cancer, no heart failure, nothing other than a steady and relentless decline, no doubt accelerated by the death three months earlier of Harri, her husband of seventy four years. There was a picture of the two of them, propped against a vase of wilting flowers on her bedside cabinet. They’d been young when it was taken, time and chemical reaction had pocked and faded the silvery edge of the print, but the figures of a blonde haired girl and a one-eyed, dark haired young man were still clearly visible. She was wearing a flaring skirt, patterned with big, blousy roses. He was wearing an Air Force uniform, a bright blur of medals pinned to his chest. The eye patch was a recent acquisition thanks to ‘the krauts’ as Jane told her with a knowing wink.