John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

His eyes traveled up and down my image in the mirror, drinking in the sight. He touched my elbow gently.

"Besides. I'm not going to tie up no girl in her wedding dress, not on her wedding day. What kind of man you think I am, eh?"

I jerked my hand in front to cover myself again. He tilted his head to stare in wonder and admiration at my bottom, which was about as well-clad as it would have been had a very short cigarette smoker blown a smoke ring toward my hips. He said in a sharper tone of voice, "I didn't say to move. Put down your hands. I'd like to look at you."

"I'm embarrassed," I said in a wretched tone of voice.

"That's fine. Girl should be shy on her wedding day. But once we're wed, and I am your master and your lord, you'll do just what I say, when I say, or I'll take a rod to you."

I looked over my options again. Fight. Argue. Run. Scream. Cry. Defy him. Find out if he meant a heavy bone-breaking sort of rod or a light birch-whip kind of rod. None of those options really leaped out at me.

Well, we had already established that I was not exactly Joan of Arc. I put my hands down at my sides, my fingers curled into fists. In the mirror, my fists looked so small. Like a child's fists.

He touched my chin with his finger. I raised my head slightly, to get away from the touch. Once I was standing nice and straight and tall, he took his hand away.

"There we are," he said.

"If Quentin is dead, Mavors will kill you," I said.

"Och, don't worry your pretty head about that. Don't you know what he is, that one? Quentin be one of the Gray Folk. The Fallen. They can't die. They shuck off their bodies like you and I change clothes, and wear somewhat new, fat or tall, fair or foul, whatever they please."

I said, "If you marry me, Boreas will kill you."

"Maybe so, pretty one, may be so. But he has a hornet's nest around his head, once the Big Ones find out he's let you all slip through his fingers. And his power up yonder is great, for he is the captain of all the winds what served his dad. But, look you, down hither, there ain't no air here, eh? Here's the water, black water and deep. What need have I to fear the wind down here?"

He stepped behind me and reached his hand over my shoulders to take my cheeks, one in each palm. It was an odd yet intimate gesture, and very gentle. This made me stand slightly straighter, on tiptoe, and something about how lovingly he spoke frightened me. "But lookit yourself in the glass. I look, and I see you're worth dying for. I ain't afraid of nothing when I look at you, if I make you be mine."

He took his hands away, but I kept standing at attention.

He did make me seem so pretty; so very pretty.

After a moment, he added, "I gave up my Vanity for you, even though she's prettier and girlier than you. I wanted you more. You saw me put her aside and take you."

"What do you mean, 'girlier'?" I asked. The moment the comment left my mouth, I realized how bad it sounded. As if I were jealous, and competing for Gren-del's affections.

He laughed and put his hand around my elbow, a gentleman taking a milkmaid to a country fair. He gestured toward the door. We began walking across the shining gloom of the golden floor toward it.

As we walked, young Grendel seemed to absorb me with his eyes, drunk on the sight of me. His prize.

His possession. He said, "Well, she ain't much one for all that running around with sticks and balls and what-not."

"Sports," I said. "They're called sports."

"Well," he said, "they'll be no more of that."

That grim little comment brought home to me what was happening. A sea monster was about to marry me. And then he would be in control of my life until I escaped him, or died. If he wanted me to wear my hair up, I'd wear it up. If he wanted it loose, it would be loose. If he didn't like the way I talked, or walked, or thought, he'd whip me till I changed to please him. And then when he tired of me, I'd be left alone in some cell buried under the sea. Or he'd strangle me and throw my body to the crabs.

Unless he needed me alive to nurse the baby. Our baby. Sea monster junior.

There was a pressure in my eyes. I blinked, but nothing happened. I started to raise my hand to my face, but then he took my hand with grave and polite grace, raised it to his lips, and kissed it.

He said softly, "You're trying to cry. You cannot do it down here. This is all tears, all this salty ocean.

Your folk wept when they was driven out by Saturn, and all the seas turned salt. That's how sad they was. But you have no cause to be sad, darling. Darling girl. My darling. Undersea is a happy place, see?

There's no crying here, so it must be happy, get it? My mother told me that when she used to whup me.

Heh."

And then he said, "Come along," and he turned and stepped out from the golden doors.

I followed him. His palace was gloomy, a place of massive shadows and slow whale-like noises. I saw corridors and arches, and, dimly, jars and fences behind which luminous fish and glowing worms trembled and flickered.

When I saw myself shining in the panel of some polished wall of silver, or cut marble, I saw how filmy trails and tails of the dress swept over the darkly sparkling floor and remained all white and unstained.

The slippers shone brightly.

I said, "So much wealth…"

"Hmph. 'Tis of no worth to me, golden one. All the treasure of all the ships that ever sunk is gathered here, and when my mom wants for more, she sinks some ships and drowns some sailors more. But what's to buy with it, eh? There is no beam of golden sunlight here, nothing bright nor fair… till you."

Great gates like the baleen of a whale, set with gold and pearls, drew aside at our approach. We were outside.

The palace behind us was formed into the great shape of a dome, half-covered over with coral and slaked with mud. Pearls and ribs of gold and other shapes of great beauty reared up from the gates out from which I stepped, but the beauty was half-shrouded in the murky mud and twitching sea insects that formed dun clouds to every side.

The heavy water was black overhead. There was no sun.

We stood on a hillside, or, I suppose, one should call it the slope of a sea trough. The greatest light in the area came from a mound of coral and seashell cemented into a rough dome. There were joints and parallel strands of some phosphorescent material set into that coral as well, and round lumps of it. It seemed a fairy castle, laced with light. And yet, something in the shapes of those lights was odd. It looked like rib cages, skeletons, skulls, all the ivory of the dead lit up with Saint Elmo's fire.

In that dim light, I could see a few other scattered mounds, much smaller than the main dome. These were palaces like the one from which I had come, going away down slope. They were beautiful, but the lifeless light in them made them seem like graveyard things.

To my left was a cliff, rising sheer into the gloom. In the cliff was a crack. Gathered about the lower lip of the crack, and spilling down to the mud below, were heaps of gold and silver coins, the wreckage of a chariot, the skeletons of two horses, and the rusted remains of once-bright helmets. The loot of sunken ships, I supposed, left lying in the mud.

I turned to him. "Who promised Vanity to you?"

"Just a voice in the wood."

But there was something in the way he said it.

I said, "You recognized that voice, didn't you? You told Dr. Fell you did not, but why would you have heeded a voice you didn't know?"

He squinted at me, and frowned. "Sneaking and peeking, were we? Hiding and listening? I recall what I told Fell. He knew what I meaned, even if you didn't. I spoke of the voice, to make him know, in case he wanted to get in on it. To get in on divvying up the loot. Boggin were a sinking boat, see; and I was telling Fell it were time to jump ship. But did he listen? Gar! He says to me, he says, 'Go tell Boggin when you hear this voice, eh?' You listened, little princess, but you didn't hear what was being said."