The voice of the shell was unlike that of other conchs blown in this fashion. Not booming but sweet, it both hummed like a mother’s voice soft above the cradle, as well as sang with that high, piping call of a whale sounding. William listened to it echoing over the water and shivered.
Waiting.
Waiting.
He watched the moon’s rising—a moon past three-quarters and coming to full—and sounded the shell again, wondering if tonight she would be there to answer. Part of his heart hoped she would not come, hoped that she was too far out at sea, or long gone from this place. But the other part of his heart, the better part, the part that was true, prayed otherwise.
He sounded the shell a third time.
Waiting.
Who is this, thought Shülna, gazing up at the young man through the wavering darkness where she swam. She slipped to his left and landward, skimming beneath the swell for a time. After a moment she let her head lift just above the surface of the water so that she might see him clearly without herself being seen.
The boy, for to her he was little more than that, despite his tarred ponytail and officer’s greatcoat, held the conch between his hands, letting his thumbs caress the spiraled horns of the shell. His face was pleasant and new to her. Here and there though it was touched with traces of the familiar, so that after a time she surmised that he must be the grown son of the boy she had known when she herself was young.
Shülna eased herself further down the jetty until she was fully at his back. Then slipping from her sealskin robe and hiding it in a cleft in the rocks, the selkie pulled herself from the sea to stand naked upon the land. Her tangled black hair decorated with pearl strands, silver coins and tiny trinkets plucked from the sea’s bottom, tumbled past her shoulders to hang about her hips, while her pale skin bloomed with the quickening blush of a rose.
“You would be Joseph’s son,” she said. Her voice was low, quiet and rich, flowing with an accent like that of the Hebrides and yet the manner of it was wholly particular unto her.
Out of modesty and out of fear William did not turn. He knew from his father’s stories that if the selkie were to stand upon the shore and speak to him, she would be bare as a newborn and perilously beautiful to look upon. “Yes,” he answered, “I’ve come in his place.”
He felt her draw up closer and felt her warm breath at his collar as she sniffed about his neck and hair.
This is his smell, she thought, and old memories filled her heart with tenderness. She closed her eyes and brushed his cheek with the back of her fingers and she almost could have kissed the young man and pulled him to herself, but she did not.
William felt his ears grow hot. “My father sent me … to call for you,” he said, stumbling a little over the half-truth of it.
The selkie sat down upon the stone beside him and took his right hand. It was a long-fingered, strong, workingman’s hand, coarse and stained with pitch, scarred and black under the nails—a sailor’s hand. She measured his palm against her own. “Joe must have grown into a fine, tall man to have a son like you,” she said. “Lean and strong against the breakers he was as a boy, and sweet to look at. And kind. He was always exceptionally kind.”
“Will you not take my coat?” asked William.
Shülna cocked her head to one side and smiled. “Why? I am not the least bit cold.” She leaned forward and twisted in so that she could look into his eyes. “Ach,” she said. “Your eyes are very blue. They must be your mother’s eyes.”
“Yes,” said Will, “I’m told that I favor her and that I have her eyes.”
“That shade of blue is best I think,” said the selkie. “Your mother must be a rare beauty for a sod woman. Fair, I wager, and with red hair and white skin, like milk and strawberries. My Joe must love her so.”
“He did,” said William haltingly. “But he always said she was his second love and the sea his third. She died when I was born. I have no idea what she truly looked like.”
“Sad,” said the selkie, a crease breaking between her brows. “And hard. That’s the meat of loneliness, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” shrugged William. “I have never been alone. My father raised me at sea and I shipped with him everywhere till he was paid out. Then he set me on my own when I was twelve, and I’ve lived aboard crowded ships ever since. That’s when he came back home—back to the house up there.” William jerked his chin toward the cliffs.
“How long ’as he been back?” asked Shülna, thinking she could not have heard correctly.
“Five years,” he said, “or almost six.”
The selkie’s fist clamped tight about the young man’s hand.
Six years he’s been back, she thought, and nary a word?
Shülna chewed on her lower lip and said nothing for a long while. She turned about and looked up to the cliff face and past the fallow slope above. Beyond that, she picked out the old cottage that she had visited as a girl. In her mind, the selkie could still hear the sound of the lark singing from the roof’s peak and taste the buttered biscuits and stolen bacon she had eaten there in secret with Joe. That had been many years ago, but the house was still there, tucked amidst the crooked pines, looking out toward the dark Atlantic. She saw the yellow glow of lamplight shining from a brace of smeared windowpanes, and Shülna lifted her left hand to her hair, laying hold of it as if to pull it from its roots.
William thought she would begin to cry, but no tears fell.
“My father never forgot you,” he said. “Even after he came back. He wanted to see you, but he just couldn’t come down here. He isn’t able.”
“Why not?” asked the selkie.
“He … is …” said William, his throat becoming thick as he remembered the word that had been scribbled by the Admiralty upon his father’s papers. “He is invalid.”
“Invalid?” Shülna repeated, not understanding its meaning.
“He can’t walk. He has no legs.”
“How is that possible?” she asked, her eyes now even more sad.
“Bad luck and foul weather.” William’s words came slow and deliberate. “We were off the Carolinas when a squall broke upon us. Too much canvas and too much wind. A yard from the main topgallant gave way and her lines snapped. She fell straight upon him. I’ll never forget the sound of it.” William stopped for a moment and sucked in a long breath between his teeth. “Our surgeon,” he continued, “a good man who was well skilled with a saw took the legs to save his life. But I think it was the wrong choice and not that of my Da’s choosing. And now … he’s … dying.”
Shülna released William’s hand, stood up and walked a few paces back down the spit. There she stopped. Her long hair eddied about her in the wind, very black and beautiful, and for the first time Will gazed upon the selkie as he would a woman and understood how a beauty like that could be truly dangerous. He wanted to look away, but found he could not.
“You’ve come to take me to him, haven’t you?” she said over her shoulder.
The young man rose to his feet and took a half step forward. “I did,” he answered.
“And what is it you want me do?” she asked, turning to face him.
William made no reply, but his eyes were clear for her to read.
“And this would be your idea?” she said.
“It is,” said William. “He can’t ask for himself, but I know his mind.”
Shülna walked back to him and cupped his face between her palms. She peered still deeper into the young man’s eyes, as though to gaze straight into his soul. After a moment, she sighed and drew him close, embracing him.
“What’s your name?” she asked, whispering against his collar.
“My name is William. But I’m usually called Will.”
“Will?” she said, surprised. “Not Liam?”
“No. They call me Will.”
&nb
sp; “Well, Will-not-Liam,” she said, “You may have your mother’s eyes, but you’ve your father’s heart, and that is dear to me.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me. I think you’re right with what needs doing,” she said. “But you will grieve over it later. It is a terrible thing.”
“I know,” he said, nodding.
“You’re sure?” she asked again.
“I am,” said William.
But Shülna shook her head. “You think you are, but you aren’t. You can’t be. You can’t know.”
“I know,” insisted William.
“Then, I will need your coat,” said Shülna, and William stripped it off and draped it upon her shoulders.
The wool was coarse against her soft skin, warm with the man’s own heat and smelled of lime, sweat, tar and far-off places. She felt Will’s memories within the coat pressing in against her skin and she pulled it closer still.
“Now, dear Will,” said Shülna, “take me to your father, while the moon is yet up.”
They followed the rocks back to the cliffs and climbed the trail up to the main road. There they turned their steps left and hugged to the wooded side of the lane, keeping to its shadows until they came to the gate of his father’s cottage. Shülna paused there, listening. Then spoke quietly in a language that William did not recognize. It had a lilting quality, but was made of unfamiliar words, strung together in an oddly musical way. “Iem vietoba an adelom newelyn do nobriimune,” she said, a little above a whisper.
William watched and listened as she spoke, and it seemed that he could almost understand the feelings of those words if not their actual meaning. They pulled at him and hung suspended in the air between them like bits of old sorrows.
Clearing his throat, he pushed open the gate and led her up the path to the doorstep.
“He’s alone,” said William as he opened the door and eased her over the threshold. “I sent the priest and the surgeon away this morning.”
The room in which Joseph lay was rough-planked and painted white. It was sparsely decorated, mostly with nautical instruments and the like, so that it looked and felt much like a ship’s cabin. Indeed a barometer had been hung near the window and a sextant and compass rested with a thick, black book and unrolled chart on the table near the head of the bed. Shülna could smell the scent of slow dying and the room was ripe with pain and longing and sadness. She moved closer to the bed and touched its frame. Joseph’s breathing came as the weak, wet sound of drowning. Every now and again, his breath would catch and stop. There would be a moment of silence until his breathing would return to its broken rhythm. Each pause held a little longer than the one before, and Shülna knew that maybe in another day—or maybe even less—it would be over. His suffering however would increase as he came nearer the end.
William edged past her, going to the table. He looked older than seventeen in the low lamplight. The sudden hollows of his face seemed to hold onto every shadow thrown by the yellow light, and the selkie marked that there were stains upon his cheeks from crying. William lifted the book from the table and held it out to Shülna.
“This is his log, his personal log. He kept it always.”
Shülna came around from the foot of the bed and received the book. She opened it and let her finger trace the black lines of Joseph’s writing on the dry pages. It was a neat hand, written with clean precision, but it was also easy, with pleasant curls and waves and tails so that there was a kind of friendliness about it as well.
“What’re these marks?” asked the selkie.
“It’s called writing.”
“I know what writing is,” said Shülna. “But these marks and numbers, what do they mean?”
“Dates, degrees latitude and longitude,” said William. “It’s a record. All the places from his travels where he had looked for more of your kind.”
Shülna’s gaze slipped from the book to look down upon Joseph’s face for the first time since entering the room. His skin was the color of ash, crisscrossed and seamed with deep wrinkles. One side of his face—the left—sagged lifelessly like an empty sack, with all the whiskers on that half of his beard gone altogether white. Shülna knew that a palsy had done only a fraction of this damage—knew that it was life at sea and war and time itself which had so mutilated this once-beautiful man. The greater half of his spirit was already gone, sunk by death, and the weight of it was hauling down the rest.
If the selkie had possessed tears, she would have spilt them then, but being what she was she had none. All Shülna could do was look upon this wreck and search for some flotsam of the boy she had once taught to swim and kiss beneath the waves.
“He kept his promise,” said William watching her. “Everywhere he went, he never stopped looking.”
“But he did not find them,” said Shülna.
From the pocket of his vest, William drew the comb and set it between the open pages of the book. It gleamed in the lamplight, silver and green and shot with an iridescent fire. “He found stories and he found this, but he never saw anyone like you.”
Shülna closed the book upon the comb and returned it to William.
“I have never drowned a man,” she said without meeting William’s eyes. “My cousins from the south used to do that, not us here in the north. But now we are all famous for it. Sing to man and lure him out to deep waters. Kiss him as a lover. Then hold him close and drag him under to his death so that he can never leave us to pine and to mourn. That’s the way of it in songs, isn’t it?”
She stroked Joseph’s silver hair and caressed his brow. “I found Joe one night, walking on the strand when he was just a boy. He was crying and when I asked him why, he told me that he was the son of a seal hunter and that he was sad for all the seals his father had killed. I looked at him closely and wiped his tears. He had a sweet face, innocent and gentle. I asked if he could swim and he shook his head saying that he couldn’t. I offered to teach him, and he became very happy. So, leading him by the hand, I took him out into the surf. At first, the water was not so deep, since the tide was low, but there was enough still for a drowning. Yet I bided my time, pulling him along, making circles with him and singing a soft tune. He laughed and splashed as I towed him further and further out, till the water was well above his head.
“After a bit I told him my name was Shülna—told him what I was and said that I would repay his father for the killing of my family and kin. He didn’t cry. He didn’t say anything—not a word. He just held tight to my hand and watched me with those lovely eyes of his—the same eyes that had been crying for my family when I had found him on the beach. I remembered his tears then and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“A little after that I led him back to shore. In the darkness on the beach, he told me his name and thanked me for teaching him to swim and asked if we could do it again sometime. I said yes, thinking I might finish him the next time we met. I would sink him deep as a stone and then return him dead upon his father’s doorstep. That was my plan. But we swam many times together after that first night, and each time I would sing and lead Joe out to the place where I could drown him, only to look into his eyes and put it off again and again and again. Years went by like that, and when he was older and almost a man I finally took him under the water and kissed him long and sweetly, but still I could not drown him. Not my Joe. Never my Joe. So I put it from my mind. Until tonight.”
She knelt beside Joseph’s bed and laid her head upon the pillow next to his. “Give us a moment,” she said. So, William set the book back on the table and left the room.
Alone now with her friend, Shülna spoke again in the old language, as she had before entering the cottage. This time there were more words and the flavor of them was bitter. She let herself tell him all the things she had held back those many years before. She whispered into his ear and placed her hand about his, squeezi
ng gingerly. Then she sang his favorite song, a lullaby used by her people to soothe their young to sleep in times of storm. She sang of gulls and seal mothers and the wide places where no wooden ship had sailed. But toward the end, her voice broke and she let it go unfinished.
Shülna apologized and stretched her neck to press her lips against his eyelids. As she kissed him, she felt him stir and his hand closed about her fingers—for a moment only—and then he relaxed again.
Outside in the distance, she heard the voice of the tide’s returning. Moonlight was no longer bright upon the windowsill and night was quickly passing. She called for William and as he entered the room, the selkie told to him to gather up his father. “It’s time to do this thing,” she said.
They returned by the lane and down again along the narrow track which led to the shore, but they were three now instead of only two. William carried his father, wrapped in the old man’s own greatcoat, saying nothing as he walked behind the selkie. Shülna too remained silent. She was nearly invisible in the darkness, except for the white soles of her feet, flashing as each foot lifted in step with the other.
When they had reached the Widow’s Seat, Shülna set aside William’s coat and lowered herself into the sea. She waited as Will stood upon the rock holding his father for the last time.
William marveled at how light and still the old man had become. It seemed impossible to believe that his father could have grown so fragile, so small and but an abbreviation of what he used to be. It would have pained him all the more if it were not for the new serenity manifested in Joseph’s face—the peace that had been laid there by the selkie. He watched his Da for a time in a wordless farewell and felt the kind of love that only comes between son and father at the very end of life. And though he regretted the years that had separated them, he also cherished those times that they had shared more than ever.
“Will he feel pain?” asked the young man.
Shülna shook her head. “I’ll hold close and keep him warm. There’ll be no pain, no fear. I promise.”
Then William felt his eyes well up. “Damn,” he said, wiping his face with the back of his hand. But it was no good, and the tears came nonetheless.