Farslayer's Story (2 page)

She saw the young magician’s gaze pass, hungrily for a moment, across her breasts, and she made no move to try to cover them with her hair. Mermaids had nothing to hide, very little to lose, and little to fear in the way of rape. Or so Black Pearl thought. She was as far beyond fear as she was beyond courtesy.

He looked away from her at last, and once more seated himself on his rock, this time settling squarely, knees up, elbows outside knees, staring at the linked fingers of his two hands, on which certain rings of power flashed in the sun.

“Let me speak to you plainly, Black Pearl,” Cosmo said in a level voice, not looking directly at her. “It was not the spirits of sunlight that I sought to call with my music today, or any elemental of the river. I set out to call up a mermaid, and I have done so. But please believe that my purpose was not to capture you or sell you.”

There was a pause, long enough so that at last the mermaid felt compelled to ask: “Why, then?”

“It may be no accident that you, out of all the fishgirls in the Tungri, were the one my little spell attracted. Oh, it’s only a very little spell indeed. Quite gentle. You can break it at any moment, if you wish. Plunge off that rock and swim away.”

“I know that. I can feel my freedom. But I am still here.”

“Good. Black Pearl” and here his dark eyes turned full upon her once again “are you happy to be a mermaid? Or would you like to walk the land on two good legs once more?”

“That is a madman’s question. What woman could ever be happy like this?” And the flatness of her tailfins smacked at the water, with a violence worthy of some much larger creature.

He looked a question at her.

Her anger quivered in her voice now. “Don’t you understand? We lived on land, all of us, until we were ten or twelve years old, not knowing that this was going to happen to us, but knowing that it might. All because of some curse pronounced a hundred years ago, in that damned stupid feud between your family and those others. And then one day, like a bad dream really coming true, the curse struck me. And when that happens it is really the end of life. Because what is there for a mermaid to live for? We can never be women. We can never walk, never be away from the smell of the river and of fish. And in a few more years the curse strikes its final blow, and we die, and float down the river like so many dead fish for the turtles to eat. Have you ever seen an old mermaid? One who lived long enough to have gray hair?”

Halfway through this tirade the young man, Cosmo as he had named himself, had begun shaking his head soberly. When Black Pearl was finished he said quietly: “I believe your answer. Believe me, in turn, that I did not ask the question lightly.”

“Why then do you ask it at all?”

“Because I think I may be able to help you.”

“Help me how?”

“Help you to cease to be a mermaid.” With a swirl of the short wizard’s cape that hung from his shoulders he stood up on the rock. “How willing and able are you to keep a secret?”

* * *

Before the day was over Black Pearl had learned from the young magician of the existence of a grotto on Magicians’ Island. In the island rather; it was a strange cave of a place carved out at some time in the dim past for some purpose of magic or ritual that no one any longer understood or believed in. A daring mermaid could reach this grotto easily by swimming underwater for only a few meters, from an entrance almost un-findable amid the outer limestone rocks of the island’s upstream end, and emerging at last into a pool in the bottom of a roofed cave near the island’s center. Here on this island, as Cosmo said in welcoming her to the grotto, the influences were favorable for good magic.

But mermaids as a rule kept clear of this small isle entirely, for there were certain frightening things, creatures of magic, who dwelt here. Black Pearl became fully aware of those powers for the first time only when, at the young magician’s insistence, she was swimming through the tunnel. When the powers came buzzing invisibly around her ears, considerable determination was required for her to go on. Had she not already begun to believe Cosmo’s promises to her, she would have managed to turn around somehow—no matter that the underwater tunnel was barely wide enough for her to pass straight through— and would have hurried back to the open river.

As it was, she clenched her teeth and swam on, meanwhile hearing and feeling the magic powers as they swarmed about her head and body. They were small, no more intelligent than insects, and like certain insects indifferent as to whether they moved in air or water.

But the tunnel was really very short, and the guardian powers did not sting, at least in the case of this invited visitor. Black Pearl was intrigued by what she found at the inner end of the tunnel. The small pool and its enclosing cave had rough walls of stone and appeared to be partly a natural formation. Higher up there were a couple of ways into the cave for people who breathed only air, and walked on land. Through those openings enough daylight was coming in now, on a bright day, to make the place almost cheerful.

Still Cosmo had a small oil lamp burning, at least partly for magical purposes, as Black Pearl supposed.

There was an easy, sloping ledge on each side of the little pool in which the tunnel terminated, and at the magician’s invitation Black Pearl sat on one of these flanges of rock. She and the young magician talked for a while, and as the minutes passed she gradually came to feel at ease.

They discussed, among other things, her history. In general it was rare for any mermaid to come back to this valley after having been sold away. Rare, but not unheard of. And in Black Pearl’s case, at least, no complaining purchaser had so far come looking for her. That had been known to happen in other cases in the past.

Cosmo expressed his own quiet outrage over the whole situation, his own quiet determination to find a way by which the mermaid curse could be ended for good and all.

Only then, when the mermaid had begun to feel fully at ease with him, did Cosmo’s magical tests begin.

* * *

Words were chanted, incense was burned. By the power of the young wizard invisible forces were gathered in the air of the grotto and then dispersed again. Black Pearl’s tail remained firmly in place, and she gave no sign of growing legs. The problem, said Cosmo, as he had expected from the beginning, was proving to be a difficult one, and a single session of course was not enough to develop a proper counterspell.

Again and again, on that day of their first meeting, before Black Pearl swam away through the narrow tunnel, Cosmo pleaded and threatened and urged absolute secrecy upon her. He assured her again and again that his magical investigations, her hope of ever being cured, depended entirely upon that.

Black Pearl kept the secret until their next session on the following day. Even her friendship with the mermaid Soft Ripple was not enough to induce her to talk about this, though she had the impression that Soft Ripple sensed that something in her had changed, and was trying to puzzle out what it was.

And on the following day, during Black Pearl’s second visit to the secret grotto, in a pause for rest, Cosmo said to her: “You are a strange girl, I think, even for a mermaid. Perhaps it is because of the unhappy experience you had with that magician upstream.”

“He was a much stronger magician than you are.”

Cosmo did not appear to be upset by the comparison. “I don’t doubt it. I know that there are some whose powers exceed mine.”

“But he was wicked, and I hated him from the start. And yes, I think that you are right, there has always been something out of the ordinary about me.”

“Why do you say that?”

The mermaid shrugged her ivory shoulders. “I don’t think my parents were even surprised when I became a mermaid. It happens only to about one of four girls, you know, in the villages. No one knows in advance which girls the curse will strike, but I don’t think anyone was surprised when it struck me.”

“I admit that I have been intrigued by you, since I first saw you.” Suddenly the eyes of Cosmo blazed, so that it seemed remarkable that his voice could remain steady. “Have you kept the secret of our meetings? Even from the other mermaids who sometimes swim about with you?”

“I have kept our secret,” she said softly.

“See that you do. We have already progressed too far, much too dangerously far, for the secret to be revealed to anyone else.”

* * *

Another day, another meeting.

Cosmo had been stroking with his fingers, making magical passes, across her shoulders and her hair. Then suddenly he let her go. “The aura, the touch, of his powers—I mean that one upstream—still clings about you.”

Black Pearl shuddered slightly, through her whole body down to the tip of her scaly tail, as she lay exposed on the flat ledge of rock. “Then cleanse me of it, if you can.”

“I will. I will, as much as possible. But still…”

“Still what?”

“I find it intriguing.”

Her pink lips snarled at him. “You’ve said that before. His touch was evil!”

“Oh, I agree, his was an evil magic, to be sure. But now it is gone. Only the flavor, the aura, the smell of it remains. Weak enough to be attractive. Like a pungent seasoning in food.”

“If you can’t wash it away, don’t speak of it.”

“Oh, I can wash some of it away at least. I am not totally incompetent, and there is much that I can do. But let us thank all the gods that the power of that evil wizard is gone. And I am sure that it was evil. I can sense the impression that it left on you as if you had been clamped tightly in some great, iron fist.”

“Sometimes I think that I can still feel the pressure of that fist around me.”

“No, the power of it is gone. But what I would learn of it are the shaping, the ingredients, that made it so powerful. So that my own magic, which is intended to do good, may be strengthened.”

The mermaid, lying beside the little pool that was not much bigger than a bathtub, looked up at him doubtfully.

Cosmo asked, almost pleading: “Does it seem to you that I am a bad man?”

Despite the feelings she had begun to have for the magician, it took Black Pearl a long time to answer that. “No,” she said at last.

“Then trust me. Will you trust me? It will be very hard for me to help you otherwise.”

* * * * * *

It was during that same meeting, only their third magical session in the hidden grotto, that Cosmo first slipped over Black Pearl’s head the fine chain that held the amulet. She held it up before her eyes and looked at it. The amulet was plain, almost crude, a little knot of glazed clay with symbols on it.

Having put the little chain over her head, he hesitated. Then he said: “We are almost ready to make a serious attempt now; still I fear you are not ready.” But even as he spoke his great dark eyes were glowing their message of compassion, of love, into her eyes, into her heart.

Cosmo moved a little closer, and with his right hand he brushed back Black Pearl’s long, black hair so that he could see more clearly into her eyes. Again he repeated another warning he had already given her several times.

It was this: that the cure, even if against all odds it could be achieved this early in the course of treatment, could be no more than temporary at first.

“However successful we are at this stage, you will revert to being a mermaid again, in less than a quarter of an hour—quite possibly much less. Such a temporary alleviation of the curse would be a first step only. But it would also be proof that eventually other steps are going to be possible. Strong evidence that in time we will find a way to cure you completely, permanently. You and all the mermaid sisterhood.”

The mermaid nodded.

His hand took her hand as she lay floating in the shallow water. And then, as he muttered incantations, his fingers began to stroke her hand, her arm, her shoulder.

* * *

And it was during that very treatment, what Cosmo had said would be the first serious attempt, that the miracle occurred for the first time.

Black Pearl’s body, already awakened sensually by the magician’s caresses even before the change he wrought had come fully upon it—her body found itself suddenly, entirely human. Completely and wholly that of a woman. Utterly female.

And Cosmo, responding to her sobs of joy with certain rather similiar sounds of his own, was right at her side when the change came. Right there to draw Black Pearl from the water, cradling her two lithe, gently kicking legs in his left arm, his right arm under her shoulders. There to swing her round with a swift motion of strong arms to the soft bed only two meters distant, where, as he said, he sometimes slept.

A quarter of an hour later, when the expected return change overtook Black Pearl, her new lover, despite all of his cautions that such a relapse was bound to happen, looked disappointed. But not for long. And she, absorbed in her new happiness, accepted the situation, too.

* * *

The sessions of magic, lovemaking, and magic again, went on. There were many such sessions, one every few days, extending over several months. Sometimes the periods of two-legged normalcy were a little prolonged—once almost to half an hour—but still the final, permanent cure eluded the researcher and his patient lover.

Each time Black Pearl swam into the grotto to meet him, Cosmo questioned her sternly as to whether she was continuing to keep their secret.

“We are not so deeply into this that everything—your own fate as well as mine—depends upon your sharing the knowledge of what we do with no one. If you fail, the powers of magic will, I fear, doom you forever to keep your mermaid shape. Indeed—I have no wish to frighten you, my darling, but I must say this—they might warp you into something truly hideous.”

So Black Pearl continued to keep the secret faithfully. She would have done anything, that the burning joy of her meetings with her lover might be made permanent.

* * *

Autumn was yielding to the onset of this land’s brief winter when a night came that changed everyone’s life. A riverboat, whose origin Black Pearl was never to discover, came plunging down the Tungri from upstream, hurtling through the series of rapids and cascades known as the Second Cataract. The passage was extremely difficult even in bright daylight, even for an experienced crew. In wind and rain and clouds and fading daylight, the crew of this ship probably never had a chance. The bits and pieces of their upriver craft that later washed ashore were of no familiar make.