Friday, August 26, 2005

On the Rising Wave

First, a whine:

The short story market in SFF sucks just now, in my humble opinion. There's about five markets worth submitting to, and they're perpetually overbooked, and anyway (sniff) they keep rejecting me. It'd be nice if someone would create a pro market for mythopoeic fiction. If I win the lottery, I'll do it myself.

In the meantime, here's my selkie story, ON THE RISING WAVE. It's based on a ballad. Of course, it's copyrighted to me, Kyri Freeman, as of 2005.


He came out of the sea as she was walking on the rocks of Inis Mor, mussel-gathering, wind-tossed skirts. She fell in a slide of wet sand and broken shells. He ramped over her, his thick scarred neck, his bloodshot eyes, his vicious tusks.

Selkie.

He could have shifted to a man to bring her down, but he did not.

King of the beach, he had a hundred mates. Cow-eyed, sleek and gentle, they rolled in the dunes, calling to their young. She huddled among them, wet and torn. When she tried to leave he drove her back, his humping bearlike gallop too fast for her, his teeth too cruel.

He came with a raw fish for her and offered it in a human hand, a broad hand, flipperlike, scarred. Starving, she tore it apart. Mouth full of cold quivering meat, she said, “My brother is a gunner in the King’s army. Look to yourself when he comes home.”

The selkie laughed. In man form his eyes were still a seal’s, whiteless, deep. “Then let him shoot me. Not till you bear my son.”

He shifted back -- convulsion, contorted muscle, snapping bone -- and went away. On his way to the ocean he crushed a pup under his bulk.

She ate cold fish and seaweed. The seal-cows tolerated her, let her huddle between them for sleek warmth. They were not selkies. Only the king.

The thing inside her thrashed as if it were trying to swim.

In time, it was born on a bloodtide, hot salty gore, born already swimming, shaped like a seal pup. It bit her breast and nursed on blood. The selkie stood over them, crooning deep in his massive throat. Perhaps in response, the thing shifted to the form of a newborn babe. She was not fooled.

More quickly than a human babe, it grew. In boy’s form, it would speak. “Dirty cow whale-shit stink of a dead fish.” It tore the spines out of fish with its sharp teeth. It cowed its seal-siblings, pinning them down in the choking surf.

“Go,” the selkie said one day. “I have done with you.” He tossed something at her. It hit her leg and fell. She stooped to pick it up. A jingling bag. She had always suspected that he plundered seawrecks.

“The Sidhe keep bargains,” he said, though she had not agreed to wet starving months, had not made her illiterate mark on any parchment allowing herself to be raped. “Begone, wench!”

Then she snatched up her repayment and she ran.

In the village, she told them she had been held and raped by masterless men. The times were such that no one questioned this to her face.

While she was gone, her brother had come home. He sat in the sun outside the tavern. Both of his arms ended at the elbow. She did not ask how it had befallen. Something in the war, of course. She held a glass of peat-reeking whiskey to his lips and asked him about guns.

“Fire on the rising wave,” he said, “not in the trough.”

The village maintained a little boat, called a revenue-cutter for courtesy, with one swivel-gun in its bows. When she asked its crew, who were fishermen and peat cutters most of the time, to take her to sea, they called her daft. She had money, though. She showed a gold coin, worth enough to keep them all in drink for a year. They decided she had been whoring, all the time she had been gone. But there wasn’t much excitement on Inis Mor, so they took her out in the revenue-cutter. Showing her the gun was only a small step farther, men loving to shoot things, firing at patches of seaweed, at porpoises that plunged away.

She could not ask to shoot it herself. She could only watch, attentive to the fuse, the heavy lead shot, the careful elevation of the aim.

When they returned to the island she stood for a moment on the shore, and the wind tore her hair, and she smiled.

Then she had to wait. Seals came to the island in spring. She waited all winter long, feeding her brother and listening to his nightmares under the dripping cottage thatch. She would not let herself fear that the selkies might not come back.

In the long winter dark, she lay on her strawtick mattress and felt the scarred infertility inside her and clenched her fists till blood wet her palms.

“Take me out in the cutter again,” she pleaded when the drifting ice was out of the sea and the first flowers were poking through the turf. Coquettishly. “Please?”

The crew had been stuck in cottages all winter with their wives, their children, and their sheep. They practically ran to make ready the boat.

Out onto the green sea, the bow lifting, and she said, “But we can fire a round. Oh, it was so exciting. We should light the slow fuse. Oh, let me put in the shot.” They smiled, indulgent. She could lift the shot only with effort, in both hands.

Around Inis Mor’s curving coast, and she stood by the rail, looking at the beach. Seals there. She squinted for the black bulk of the king.

He rose from the water roaring, crashing hard into the hull. Scars mapped his hide. The men swore and shouted. She ran to the swivel-gun and turned it, staring with spray-stung eyes. The selkie leaped half into the boat. It bucked under his weight. One of the men started to pray. Others attacked. An oar splintered between the selkie’s jaws.

She looked away. Stared out across the water. A mocking head popped up through the foam. It was laughing. She could hear. “Rotten egg-swollen crab. Skull face. Shark meat soon.”

The gun’s wet metal froze her hands. The boat heeled down into a trough, began to rise again. Behind her, a man screamed.

On the rising wave, she fired.

The wind caught a spray of blood and fanned it on the air. The head was gone.

The selkie howled from his bull-throat. A man stood there by the broken gunwales, slimed and bloody, cursing her in wordless screams.

“Yours for mine,” she shouted, because she did not have time to reload. “Your blood for mine and our bargain is done. Go, beast, take your pay, and never trouble me again!”

A ring of bloody foam marked where he dove.

In later years they sang a song about the woman and the selkie but, as usual with such things, they got the truth entirely wrong.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Rider on a Narrow Way

With my computer replaced, I'm starting to work on Rider again.

Morgan

Define me by my scars. The unloved
heart. The stroke
that fell awry.
Glass-slippered in a mold
that cut me off. But how else
find love? My hand
is not a hero's hand. And yet
It will suffice for burning at the end.