The Sea Hag Read online

  "It is in the next room that we must look, Dennis," the little robot said nonchalantly as he led the way through an open doorway decorated with crystal arabesques.

  The walls and ceiling were swathed in black velvet so that even now, at mid-morning, the sun penetrated only through the door. A further drape, pinned back at the moment, could be swung to close that opening as well.

  The circumference of the room was filled with machines—things of metal and glass and dull ceramic. Dennis couldn't imagine a use for any of them.

  The velvet was solid black, as nighttime in Emath never was. The darkness pressed in on Dennis and added to the discomfort he'd felt since pushing open the black pearl doorpanel.

  The air within the wizard's quarters was as musty as the atmosphere of a deep cave. It wasn't poisonous or even actively unpleasant; it just hadn't moved very much in all the time Emath existed. The anteroom smelled of hot oil; around the glass bubbles hung a chlorine tang vaguely reminiscent of the sea.

  In this third room, the odor of velvet slowly decaying struggled against a sharpness that was less a smell than a rasp at the back of Dennis' throat.

  It reminded him of the night lightning had struck a dozen times on the highest towers of Emath. After the last stroke, a hissing orange globe had floated down a corridor and into the center of the throne room before exploding. The ball of lightning left behind a miasma like the one which emanated from the wizard's machines.

  "Chester," Dennis said.

  He took a deep breath and looked around with a haughty expression that protected him from the fear that would otherwise make him shiver. "Well, get on with it. Are we going to stay here until Parol gets back?"

  Chester leaned his egg-shaped body back at an angle and said, "The man whose good character makes him gentle, creates his own fate, Dennis."

  The boy's nostrils flared in anger—and he caught himself. "Little friend," he said, smiling and reaching for the tentacle which the robot raised to meet the offered hand. "I don't like it here. Forgive me my irritability."

  "One does not know a friend's heart until one sees him anxious," Chester said with approval. Even as he gripped Dennis' hand, three more of his limbs were playing over the case of the nearest machine.

  The device had a broad, flat surface like that of a draftsman's easel. For the moment it was tilted up at 45 degrees, but the slender arms supporting the easel seemed to be as capable of movement as Chester's own limbs.

  When they'd entered the room, the pedestal and easel were of the same dull black material. At the robot's touch, faint colors—too angry to be called pastels; the shades that metal takes as it heats and cools in a forge—began to streak what had seemed the pedestal's solid interior.

  The room began to quiver at a frequency too low for sound. There was a fresh whiff of lightning-born harshness.

  "What is it that you wish to know, Dennis?" the robot asked.

  "I—" the boy said. "I—Chester, ask it what it was that my father did in the storm the night—the storm Ramos told us about."

  Instead of speaking, Chester shifted the delicate tips of three tentacles. Colors richened and merged with one another. Dennis leaned over the flat surface, wondering if he would see letters form there. The blackness of the easel was a palpable thing that sucked in the dim light. It had no reflection.

  The illumination within the chamber increased and changed quality with a suddenness that made Dennis whirl. He expected to see the drapes sliding back and someone—Parol, rationally; but momentary terror filled his mind with a vision of the corpse of Serdic—standing in the door that was the only way to escape from this complex of rooms.

  Instead, he didn't see the room at all.

  Where the velvet and squatting machines had been, the sea tossed under a sky of terrifying gray-green translucence. Lightning spat from point to point on the wall of encircling clouds; waves shot straight upward from the sea's surface, although there was no wind.

  Dennis had never been permitted to board a ship, but he was looking from the deck of one now: an open fishing boat, single-masted and tiny against the lowering circle of clouds. Chester had vanished. Dennis' own body had vanished.

  His father clung with corded muscles, the tiller in one hand and a mast stay in the other. Rags of sailcloth snapped from the spar every time the open boat pitched.

  Hale's hair was black and his face younger than that of the father Dennis knew in life. His mouth was open, but he was no longer trying to shout against the tumult.

  The sea became as still as the dead air within the eye of the storm. The water began to change color beside the boat's starboard rail. Streaks of brown, waving in sinuous ripples; coalescing, spreading wider and sharpening into burnished purple...

  The ripples of color formed a circle forty feet across. A living thing rose in the center of the tendrils that were the fringe of its body.

  "A sea hag..." Dennis whispered to Chester; but the boy had no companion to hear him in this place of storm.

  The sea hag had the face of a beautiful woman floating in the swirl of her lustrous hair, but the skin was gray and the expression was as still as marble. Beneath the face and seeming hair was a greasy hugeness over which the ocean shimmered like the surface of a wading pool. The fishing boat steadied.

  Nothing moved but the sea hag's hair and the wall of storm beyond.

  "What is it that you want?" Hale shouted at the creature which gripped the keel of his boat. His voice was clear and strong; fear had raised it an octave above its normal pitch.

  Dennis had heard of the sea hag as he had heard of a score of other bogeys from his nurse's imagination or the ancient past of Earth before men came here from the stars. Imagination surely, but—

  The thing floating in the water opened a mouth that split the woman-face and crossed the "hair" floating a yard to either side. The creature's gullet was arched with bone and otherwise as red as heart's blood. From corner to corner, the mouth was wider than Dennis was tall.

  The sea hag said in a cavernous voice, "King Hale, I would bargain with you."

  The huge lips closed and their edges merged. The female features reformed as if they had never been split and distorted across the head of a monster as great as the boat beside which it floated. The ridges of brown and purple scales that counterfeited hair trembled again to complete the illusion.

  "Let me go!" Hale cried. "You have the wrong man. I'm no king!"

  "Would you be a king, Fisherman Hale?" rumbled the sea hag, smearing its human countenance again.

  Dennis would have closed his eyes, but he had no eyes in this time, and no sound came when he tried to scream.

  "Or would you be a drowned corpse that my sea casts up when the fish are done with it?"

  The white-red throat growled like the storm. The lightning-shot circle squeezed closer to the motionless boat.

  "What will you bargain, sea hag?" Hale demanded with shrill courage that calmed his son to hear. Hale was frightened, facing death and a monster more shocking than death; but he was facing them as best he could.

  Dennis, safe behind a veil of time and magic, had his father as a model of how a man should act in the final crisis. Hale's son could do no less than control his feelings now, when he was only a phantom of sense and feelings.

  "I will make you king of this shore, fisherman," the sea hag said. "King of Emath."

  "Dead man on dead rocks, is that what you mean?" Hale cried. "Begone, sea-bitch—the storm will bargain me that."

  "I will make you king in a crystal palace if you bargain with me, fisherman," said the sea hag. "I will raise a harbor safe in any storm, and all who use the harbor will be yours to command under our bargain. All this... or the rocks and the fish and the birds to peck your bones."

  "You're toying with me," Hale said, no longer shouting or angry. He let go of the tiller and stay; the boat was as firm as if were dragged its length onto shore. "Why do you talk of bargains, sea hag? I haven't anything but my clothes and this boat�
��and only a half share in the boat."

  The sea hag closed its lips. Its woman-face smiled at Hale with the icy visage of a castle courtesan.

  "Give me your firstborn son, King Hale," said the terrible real mouth.

  "I haven't a wife, I haven't a son," said Hale, wringing his hands at the false hope. "I haven't a son!"

  "Give me your firstborn son when he is a year of age, King Hale," said the sea hag. "And I will give you Emath and your life."

  "You can't really do that," Hale said. "You can't make me king..."

  His voice had fallen almost to a whisper. Dennis heard it, and the woman-face smiled again.

  The wrack of storm clouds was clearing, blowing away in tatters in every direction. The sun was low in the west. Its light streamed in crimson fingers through the remnants of the storm.

  "Bargain with me, King Hale," said the sea hag.

  Hale closed his eyes. His hands gripped one another so harshly that the blunt nails drew blood.

  "Have your bargain then!" he shouted to the creature.

  "I have your word, King Hale," said the sea hag. "And when the time comes, I will have our bargain."

  The creature began to sink. The boat trembled as a fresh breeze shook its mast and furled sail.

  When the cloud curtain rose, it displayed the shore half a mile to leeward. The rocks of the corniche were dulled by the horizon's shadow, but sunlight still lit the jungle canopy and the rare bright flowers there.

  Hale muttered a thankful curse. He slipped a loop of rope over the tiller preparatory to shaking out enough sail to tack clear of the cliffs.

  It was as if neither storm nor sea hag had ever existed. Dennis was suddenly sure that he was a wraith in a time that had never existed: that his father would sail off into a future of fish and—

  Water began to surge at the shoreline.

  First a rumble, then a double spout that threw mist high into rainbow diffraction. The breeze that had followed the storm now failed, but the boat began to pitch with the violence of the sea roaring in the near distance.

  Ropes of glowing rock lifted high enough above the sea that the steam of creation no longer hid the angry glare. The lava was fiercely orange at the moment it appeared, black the instant it cooled below liquescence. As the double headlands rose into a firm barrier against the might of any storm, their sea-washed roots took on the same dull red as the corniche from which they now extended.

  A vagrant puff of air blew from the land. It felt hot and smelled of sulphur. Fish floated belly-up on the surface of the sea. Dennis' father held a shroud reeved through the three-fall block at the masthead, ready to raise the sail; but he hadn't moved since the shore began to boil into a harbor.

  For a moment it looked as though steam and mineral-rich vapors were growing thicker over the south headland. Something like a vortex reached out of the clouded land, climbing higher—

  And exploding into brilliant crystalline radiance as it rose into the plane of the sunset. Emath Palace was growing while Hale and his unseen son watched and wondered and thought about the bargain which the sea hag had sealed in crystal.

  For a moment, the light on the sprouting towers was as dazzling as the heart of a ruby. Then the light faded; the world faded; and Dennis stood in a dim, musty room, looking at Chester and shivering.

  Dennis started to speak and found he had to cough to clear his throat of dust from the velvet. "Did it really happen?" he asked quietly.

  When Dennis entered the wizard's chamber, he'd thought he was a man whose father treated him like a boy. Now that he'd seen what it might mean to be a man, he was no longer sure what he was.

  But he knew what he would try to be.

  "The device shows only what has happened, Dennis," Chester said, waggling a tentacle over the machine that was again cold and dark. "It shows that or nothing."

  "Then—" Dennis' mind struggled out of the memories that enmeshed it like tendrils of brown and purple hair gaping into red terror.

  "Then," he repeated firmly, "did I have an elder brother who was traded for the kingship?"

  "I do not know if you had an elder brother."

  Dennis grimaced toward the doorway, steeling himself for what he must do next. He had to demand an explanation from his mother, despite the tears and waves of guilt with which she would flood him.

  "But," the little robot volunteered unexpectedly, "you became my master at your birth, Dennis; and that was a year to the day from when the sea hag bargained with your father, as we saw."

  Dennis found that his hands were stiff because he'd been clenching them since... he wasn't sure how long he'd been doing that, trying to control his emotions by keeping a tight grip on all his muscles. He stretched deliberately, knowing that he couldn't relax but he could keep his tension from hurting him.

  "Chester," he said, "you showed me how my father became king. Can you show me what happened wh-wh-when his son grew to a year old?"

  "I will show you, Dennis," said the robot, his tentacles waking the pedestal to colored life again. Their motion paused.

  "Dennis," he said, "the man who does not resent his fate has a good life."

  "I..." said Dennis. "Please show me how Hale met his bargain, friend."

  "I will show you, Dennis."

  There were rooms beyond this one in the wizard's suite—a bedchamber; surely a library; and whatever else only gods or devils knew, and Dennis had no desire to learn. The youth rubbed his palms together to work off nervousness without clenching them again.

  The room faded into a sky as thick as velvet and almost as black.

  Dennis was on/in/over a vessel again on a stormy sea, but this time the boat was even smaller than The Partners. It was an open net-tending skiff like the one—perhaps the very one—in which Hale had rowed to sea these three weeks past.

  Hale sat on the midships thwart, resting his oars on the gunwales and looking toward the horizon with a face as grim as the encircling storm.

  Hale was not yet the man Dennis remembered as his father, but neither was he quite the fisherman standing transfixed by horror on the deck of The Partners. Instead of homespun linen, Hale wore a silk tunic next to his body and covered that with blue-black wool from the Islands of Hispalia.

  Around Hale's neck was a triple chain of heavy gold. Though the chain's lower curve was hidden beneath the garments, Dennis knew that the royal seal of Emath hung there as it always did when his father was awake.

  Hale's face was fleshier than it had been when he was a fisherman, but emotions pulled it into a rictus almost as inhuman as the visage of the little creature next door in a bubble of glass.

  The storm was a brutal thing, as savage as any tempest that lashed the seas of Hell; but Hale rode in the eye of it, where the sky shone green and grim and the leaping water was disorienting but not dangerous.

  No vessel could have survived the wall of wind and lightning which encircled the boat. Even the greatest of the trading ships which anchored in Emath Harbor during Dennis' present would have been torn to bits by the ravaging weather. Hale was alone except for his boat, his son's wraith, and the gelatinous shape of the sea hag, rising from the deep as the sea stilled.

  The human head broke the calm surface, smiling and making enticing gestures with the arms that lay in the circle of hair. Hale stared at the creature fiercely without speaking.

  The sea hag's real mouth gaped open. The arms deformed into barbels at either corner of the jaw. The smile smeared itself unrecognizably into scaly horror.

  "Welcome, King Hale," said the sea hag. Dennis could hear the amusement in the booming voice. "Have you brought me the price of our bargain two years past?"

  When the creature spoke, the air stank of fish and death.

  "Make me another bargain," Hale blurted. His hands clenched together, releasing the oars. The blades slipped only an inch or two into the sea, where they rested on something beneath the surface. "I'll give you anything you want. Anything!"

  "You're a rich man,
King Hale," chuckled the sea hag. "You have everything that trade and power can bring a man... and everything you have is a thing that I have given you—except one. Pay me the price of our bargain, King Hale."

  "Take my life, damn you!" shouted Dennis' father as he lurched upright in the boat. "Take me!"

  "The storm had your life two years past, fisherman," said the creature. "As I saved you then, so I will have our bargain now. Bring me your firstborn."

  "Oh god," said Hale as he sank back onto the thwart. It was prayer or curse or a despairing ejaculation, and perhaps all three at once in his voice. Though he sat down heavily, the boat barely shuddered.

  "What would you have, King Hale?" said the sea hag in a voice that rumbled like the bellies of the dragons—but much louder.

  "He's so..." Hale tried to say between the net of fingers with which he covered his face. By an effort of will, he jerked his hands down and looked at the monster which taunted him. Tears were dripping down his weathered cheeks.

  Dennis reached out to put his arm around his father's shoulders. He touched nothing, because he had no body in this place.

  "I can't let you have Dennis," Hale said simply. "When his mother holds him, she looks... looks like an angel, sea hag. Are you woman enough to understand that? Take me. I can't give you my son."

  No one could doubt the quiet determination behind the words. Hale's tears continued to stream down his face. He didn't bother to brush them away.

  Dennis tried again to clasp him. If he'd had eyes, Dennis would have been crying also.

  The sea hag laughed. "You think you love your son because he is still an infant," the creature said. "Shall I give you until his fourth birthday, King Hale? Would you find that merciful?"

  Its laughter boomed and stank around the boat as Hale gaped at the creature's shuddering maw.

  "Do you mean that?" he pleaded.

  "I will keep my bargain, Hale," said the sea hag. Its mouth closed so that the woman-face smiled momentarily once again.

  The sea hag seemed to be sinking. Hale relaxed, and Dennis looked out over the sea to note the storm breaking as the magical image of an earlier storm had broken minutes before.