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       PROLOGUE

       The Mermaid

      The mermaid rose out of deep water into the stormheart. Being a creature with no soul, she was without fear of the elements which had engendered her. She rode the giant waves like a child on a switchback, sucked laughing into terrible black chasms of water, then hurled skywards towards the plunging clouds, riding the sea-crests with her hair lashing in the wind. Lightning illumined her for an instant, an efreet of the ocean, face a-scream with glee, slanting bones and elongated eyes sloping back from the pointed nose and tapering chin. It was a misshapen imitation of a human visage, formed perhaps by some pagan Creator who had caught only the briefest glimpse of Man. Her storm-tossed body was almost androgynous, flat-breasted, fish-pale, the ectopic nether limb glistening steel-silver with scales, each jagged fin shot with the needle-glint of poisonous spines. Above her, thunderhead clouds were piled into toppling cliffs of airborne water; the wind came roaring from the throat of the sky. More lightning-flashes, almost incessant now, picked her out in every motion of her wild play, leaping, diving, tumbling, amidst the heaving mountains and rocking valleys of the ocean. She could not remember another such storm, never in all her uncounted years on earth. Always alone, alienated both from Man and beast, a careless elemental for whom the waters were mother and lover, lifeblood and home.

      She saw the barque ahead of her through a cleft between rearing waves, broken and desperate, clinging precariously to the skirts of the tempest. Drums rolled from the chasing clouds; storm-fires flashlit the ragged sail streaming like torn skin from a skeletal wreck of mast and spar. She was a small boat, sturdily built; the last remnants of her crew had secured themselves to tilting deck and sides with frayed rigging. Spume-capped ridges lifted her skyward, spun her round, then sent her plummeting nose-first into liquid ravines; but she was in her element even as the mermaid, and each time she would right herself and battle onward.

      Strong arms gripped the useless wheel, not to steer but for an anchor against the greedy undertow that would have sucked the sailor from the deck. Lightning gleamed on a sea-glossed interplay of muscle in forearm and shoulder. The mermaid saw him as she drew astern, her hand on the gunwale, cold fingers touching the boat’s skin with the chill of the uttermost deep, weed-green hair crackling with secret electricity. He glanced round, some instinct warning him of the deadly gaze on his back. She saw the brine-blackened locks webbing his face, the narrowing of eyes both dark and bright. He saw he knew not what: a mirage of fear, a phantom of the storm, gone too swiftly for his mind to compass it, leaving only the impression of a wild white face and unhuman eyes depthless as glass. Yet moments later when his ears picked up the sound, a single distinctive note within the howling chorus of wave and tempest, he knew what it must be. He knew it in the marrow that froze in his bones and the hairs that stirred on his nape: a recognition beyond memory. It was a high thin keening—a call without words—a piercing thread of sound that sang even in the waves’ roaring. It swelled with the wind, until the fragile timbers of the boat shook with it, and he could imagine it penetrating even to the still deep places far below. One of the other sailors shouted a question but he shook his head and turned away. Still grasping the ruptured helm, he whispered to the boat a lover’s encouragement—his greatheart, his brave one, his dearling, his dear—though he knew it was all in vain. Behind him the siren-call had done its work: the hunt was up.

      Orca and octopus, giant eel and electric serpent, countless sharks—sharks tiger-striped and leopard-spotted, ghost-pale and shadow-black—all gathered in their wake. In the coral-groves beneath, nameless creatures waited with glittering antennae and sharpened pincers, knowing it would not be long now. A mottled flank heaved out of the waves to starboard, many times the length of the boat; Crawling tentacles twined the boom, thick as a man’s arm: the water became opaque with a writhing flood of ink. And in the midst of the chase rode the mermaid, mounted on the back of an enormous shark—she whom the beasts of the sea had often hunted, never caught, now summoning them to her need with the feckless arrogance that was her most human characteristic. At the helm, the young man heard his companions’ cry of warning, but he did not look back again. The storm had ripped the shirt from his chest; salt clogged his lashes and stung his lips. The wind pricked his eyes into tears that evaporated on his cheek. Something which hung on a chain about his neck glinted against his breast with its own light, but the flicker of power was lost in the raging of the elements, helpless as a firefly in a hurricane.

      The end came suddenly. A glassy cavern yawned behind the boat, rushing forward to swallow it; the sweep of a monstrous tail cracked the hull. The crew were borne away between tooth and tentacle, into the gullet of the sea. The young man found himself clutching a wheel without helm or vessel, see-sawing between peaks of water, holding on, not in hope or fear, but because survival is Man’s first and last instinct. Then he saw the face again, rising from the surge less than a yard away, its flat eyes aglow, its hair uncoiling like a nest of snakes in the wind. The pale lips were parted as if to suck his last breath. The fantasies of imminent death seized his mind, and the alien face became one more familiar, and the din of thunder was blotted out by the sea-surge in his head. He murmured something—a word, a name—and the mermaid, hearing, though she understood neither language nor affection, knew it was the name of his mortal love, whose spectre had driven her from his sight. Then she wound her arms around him, and drew him down and down into the deep.

      * * *

      In a murky grotto a few fathoms below she hid him, weighting СКАЧАТЬ