If I live long enough, I will drag myself down to the still water, and look down, and see myself.
As I should be.
[Author’s Note: This is a “Loathly Lady” story, which were more common in medieval literature than they are now. The only popular version that I know from recent times is Steeleye Span’s “King Henry” on the album Below the Salt.]
The Sea Witch Sets the Record Straight
I didn’t take her voice for myself. I want to set the record straight on that, right up front. People got a lot of crazy notions in their heads, the way the story got around, and that was one of them. I’m not saying I never did an evil deed — anyone who says they haven’t is lying through their teeth — but I didn’t take her voice for myself. I didn’t need it. I’ve got a perfectly fine voice, thank you, trained by whale divas, and it’s mine.
Seriously, you start stealing people’s voices and using them yourself and pretty soon you don’t know which voice is yours and which one’s an echo and then you’re mad and howling and people are standing around in caves during low tide asking where the screaming’s coming from and someone else is saying “Oh, it’s just some trick of the acoustics.”
Go ahead, laugh. That trick of the acoustics is my Great-Aunt Meryl and you don’t want to wait for high tide. I’ve seen her tear the head off an elephant seal. With her nails.
Best not to start down that channel at all, really.
No, I took her voice for two simple reasons — she was a twit and she was in love. I took one look at her and knew that she’d spill everything she knew in the pretty human boy’s ear, and then where would we be?
It doesn’t go so well when humans know about us, have you noticed? Ask one selkie if she’s feeling happier now that she spent a decade on shore with some jerk who stole her hide off the rocks. (Sure, some of them think it’ll be romantic — bull selkies aren’t anybody’s notion of charming, though they do have a certain over-muscled appeal — but it’s not so romantic when you’re spending your youth cooking and cleaning for an illiterate fisherman and bearing his brats through a pelvis that isn’t nearly so accommodating as it used to be.)
I’d say “ask a Stellar’s sea cow” but you can’t, because they’re all dead. And just try to find a sea mink. I was very fond of sea mink. They were inquisitive little devils and they made chirpy noises when you stroked them. I haven’t forgiven humans for the sea mink. Or the sea cows, for that matter.
Do not get me started on the great auk.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that the minute somebody in a position of authority — like, oh, I don’t know, a prince — figures out that there’s a whole underwater civilization, we’re in the deep muck. It might start out civilized at first, but it won’t stay that way. somebody’s bound to figure out that there’s a lot of very useful things in the ocean.
Rare things. Hidden things. Things of power.
You want to hide something from the prying hands of mortals, you drop it in the sea. It’s been going on for years. I’ve got things in my pantry that could unmake continents if you could find them and get them into the right hands. Or wrong hands, as the case may be.
And it doesn’t even have to be the magic rings and the enchanted swords and the world-breakers and the leftover ansible. Let the humans start mucking about with our people on a purely practical level and it still won’t end well.
Hell, they could keep sirens in cages on whaling ships to call the whales in — fish-speakers to drive the king-of-herring’s subjects into the nets — and you don’t even want to know what they’ll do for mineral rights. Gold’s the least of it. There’s a place down around the edge of the cape where you can find diamonds the size of an eel’s skull. Pray the humans never find out about it.
Plus, of course, there’s our women. No, not me. I’m not saying I’m not attractive, but at my age, I’m more interested in a good meal and a good nap. You find me a man who wants both those things, maybe with a conversation about the finer points of mantis shrimp breeding thrown in, then we’ll talk.
But you have two cultures breaking against each other, it’s the young women who are going to come out the losers. Any two cultures. Pick two. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. Some things don’t change.
I’ve got nieces, you know.
So yes, I did take the little fool’s voice. Her prince wasn’t going to find about us on my watch.
(But Ursula, you say, she could just have written it all down! Taking her voice wouldn’t stop that! To which I say — did you ever meet her? It took her three tries to write her own name. Our contract was a verbal agreement because otherwise she’d still be reading it and the prince would be dead of old age.)
Anyway I gave her voice to an albatross, if you must know. She was tired of endless gliding, had ambitions to be an opera singer. I made her dream come true.
Made the poor fool of a mermaid’s dream come true too, for that matter. Gave her legs and brought her to the prince’s attention. That last was included free of charge and was never part of the original contract.
It’s not my fault the prince wasn’t much interested. I imagine you meet a lot of beautiful women when you’re a prince.
He wasn’t a bad sort, really. He was very
