Sea Woman

A Tale from the Shetland Islands

It was an empty, oyster-and-pearl afternoon. The water lapped at the sand and sorted the shingle and lapped round the rock where the girl was sitting.

Then she saw a seal, like a mass of seaweed almost, until she gazed into those eyes. It swam in quite close, just twenty or thirty water-steps away.

She looked at the seal; the seal looked at her. Then it barked. It cried out in a loud voice.

She stood up on her rock. She called out to the seal: not a word but a sound, the music words are made of.

The seal swan in a little closer. It looked at the girl. Then it cried. Oh! The moon's edge and a mother's ache were in that cry.

The girl jumped off the rock. Her eyes were sea-eyes, wide and flint-grey. "Seal!" she cried. "Sea-woman! What do you want?"

And what did the seal want but the girl's company? As she padded down the strand, it followed her, always keeping fifteen or twenty water-steps away, out in the dark swell. The girl turned back towards her rock, and the seal turned with her. Sometimes it huffed and puffed, sometimes it cried, it wailed as if it were lost, all at sea.

The girl bent down and picked up a curious shell, opaline and milky and intricate.

"Listen, listen!" sang the wind in the shell's mouth.

Then the girl raised the shell and pressed it to her right ear.

"One afternoon," sang the shell, "oyster-and-pearl, a man came back from fishing. He was so weary. He peeled off his salt-stiff clothing. He washed. For an hour or two hours he closed his eyes. And then, when the moon rose, he came strolling along this strand.

He listened to the little waves kissing in the rocks. He smelt earth on the breeze and knew it would soon rain. This is where he walked, rocking slightly from side to side, in no hurry at all for there was nowhere to go.

Then he stopped. Down the beach, no more than the distance of a shout, he saw a group of sea-people dancing. They were singing and swaying; they danced like the waves of the sea.

Then the sea-people saw him. At once they stopped singing and broke their bright ring. As the fisherman began to run towards them, they turned towards a pile of sealskins--in the moonlight they looked like a wet rock--and picked them up and pulled them on and plunged into the water.

One young woman was not so quick, though. She was so caught up in the dance that the fisherman reached her skin before she did. He snatched it up and tucked it under one arm. Then he turned to face the sea-woman, and he was grinning.

"Please," she said. Her voice was high as a handbell and flecked with silver. "Please."

The fisherman shook his head.

"My skin," said the sea-woman. There she stood, dressed moonlight, reaching out towards him with her white arms; and he stood between her and the sea.

"I've landed some catches," breathed the fisherman, "but never anything like this..."

Then the young woman began to sob. "I cannot," she cried. "I cannot go back without my skin."

...and this catch I'll keep, thought the fisherman.

"My home and my family and my friends" said the sea-woman.

Now she wept and the moon picked up her salt tears and turned them into pearls. How lovely she was, and lovely in more ways than one; a young woman lithe as young women are, a sea-child, a sister of the moon. For all her tears, the fisherman had not the least intention of giving her back her skin.

"You'll come with me," he said.

The sea-woman shuddered.

Then the man stepped forward and took her by the wrist. "Home with me," he said.

The sea-woman neither moved towards the man nor pulled away from him. "Please," she said, her voice sweet and ringing. "The sea is my home, the shouting waves, the green light and the darkening."

But the fisherman had set his heart against it. He led the sea-woman along the strand and into the silent village and back to his home.

Then the fisherman shut the door on the sea-woman and went out into the night again to hide the skin. He ran up to the haystack in the field behind his house, and loosened one of the haybricks and hid the skin behind it. Within ten minutes, he was back on his own doorstep.

The sea-woman was still there; without her skin, there was nowhere for her to go. She looked at the man. With her flint-grey eyes she looked at him.

For a moment the girl lowered the shell from her ear. She gazed at the emptiness around her, no one on the beach or on the hillslope leading down to it, no one between her and the north pole. The little waves were at their kissing and the seal still kept her company, bobbing up and down in the welling water.

"Listen, listen!" sang the wind in the shell's mouth.

The girl raised the shell again and pressed it to her right ear.

"Time passed," sang the shell, and the sea-woman stayed with the fisherman. Without her skin, she was unable to go back to the sea, and the fisherman was no worse than the next man.

For his part, the fisherman fell in love. He had spent half his life on the ocean. he knew all her moods and movements and colours, and he saw them in the sea-woman.

Before long the man and the woman married, and they had one daughter and then two sons. The sea-woman loved them dearly and was a good mother to them. They were no different from other children except in one way: there was a thin, half-transparent web between their fingers and their toes.

Often the woman came walking along the stand, where the fisherman had caught her. She sat on a rock; she sang sad songs about a happier time; and at times a large seal came swimming in towards her, calling out to her. But what could she do? She talked to the seal in the language they shared; she stayed here for hours; but always, in the end, she turned away and slowly walked back to the village.

Late one summer afternoon, the sea-woman's three children were larking around on the haystack behind their house. One of the little boys gave his sister a push from behind, and the girl grabbed wildly at the wall of the haystack.

One haybrick came away. And the skin, the sealskin that the fisherman had hidden in one stack after another as the years passed, fell to the ground.

The children stopped playing. They fingered the skin; they buried their faces in its softness; they took it back to show their mother.

The sea-woman pulled her children to her. She dragged them to her and squeezed them. She hugged and kissed each of them. Then she turned and ran out of the house with her skin.

The children were afraid. They followed her. They saw her pull on the skin, cry a great cry, and dive off a rock. Then a large seal rose to meet her and the two seals leaped and dipped through the water.

When their father came back from the fishing, his children were standing at the stone jetty.

"You go home," said the man. "I'll come back in and hour."

Slowly the man waded in his salt-stiff clothing along this strand. He kept rubbing his pale blue eyes and looking out across the dancing water.

She rose out of the waves. She was no more than a few water-steps away.

"Husband!" she cried, "Husband! Look after our children! Take care of our children!" Her voice carried over the water. "You've loved me and looked after me, and I've loved you. But for as long as I lived with you, I always loved my first husband better."

Then the sea-woman, the seal-woman, slipped under the shallow waves once more. One moment she was there; the next, she was not there...

The girl took the opaline shell away from her ear, and set it down on the sand. For a long time she sat there. The seal had gone; it had deserted her and the dark water shivered.