The Changeling Sea by Patricia A McKillip

Author:Patricia A McKillip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

THEN THE SEA, missing its gold, perhaps, began to play tricks on the fishers. Enin told the first tale, coming in late on a spring evening with Tull Olney dragging behind him. Enin was soaking wet, his face pale, his eyes bloodshot from salt water. He stood at the bar, dripping on the floor, downing beer as if to wash salt out of his throat. Tull, as bedraggled as Enin, looked, Mare said later, as if he had been slapped silly by a dead cod. Peri, coming up from the kitchens with a warm loaf of bread wrapped in her skirt, stopped short on the top of the stairs when Tull said, “There is something going on in the sea.”

“There’s something going on in your head,” Enin said brusquely. “I’ll have another beer.”

“You heard the singing!”

“I heard somebody blowing a conch. That’s all.” He turned to the fishers and the innkeeper, and Mare, who had slipped in at the sound of his voice. “Tull and I were fishing close by each other. He says he heard singing, I say a conch shell. It was near sundown, the sea was milky-blue under a sweet south wind. I heard a conch—”

“Singing,” Tull muttered into his beer.

“It was that deep, foggy sound. A conch, like they use up in the north villages to call all the fishers together. I heard a splash, and there was Tull, leaping out of his boat to swim with his boots on after a seal!”

“It wasn’t a seal!”

“I called out to him, he never answered, just swam on. Then the seal dove under, and Tull was left floundering in the water with his fishing boots filling up. So guess who got to leap in after him?” He downed half his second glass and glared at Tull. Peri, watching him with her mouth open, saw something frightened behind the glower. Tull banged his own glass onto the bar.

“It was singing! And it was a woman!”

“It was a seal! A white seal—”

“It was a white-haired woman, with—”

“With brown eyes.”

“With brown eyes.” Tull looked around the silent room, his own eyes round, stunned. “She sang. She was a small, pretty thing, white as shell, playing in the water as if she had been born in it. She flicked water at me, laughing, and then…there I was. Like Enin said. Jumping into the deep sea as careless as if I were a seal myself.” He shuddered. “She vanished, left me hanging there in the empty ocean. Her singing…it was like singing out of a dream I wanted to find my way into. I started trying to drink the sea, then, and Enin pulled me out.”

The fishers stared at him, lamplight washing over their still faces. Somebody snickered. Ami dropped her face in her arms, whimpering with laughter.

“A seal. You prawn-eyed loon, leaping into the deep sea to frolic with a seal!”

“It wasn’t a seal!”

“Next it’ll be the King of the Sea himself blowing his conch in your ear.”

“I almost drowned,” Tull said indignantly, but by then everyone was laughing too hard to listen to him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.