Legenda Maris Read Online Free PDF Page A

if he breathed in molten bronze.
    When at last he fell out among the
reeds, he coughed and choked and hawked and spat away the spell and the water.
And then he lay a time under the sun, until he was able to get up and go on his
way.
     
    Elrahn
did not walk towards the inn, nor did he really recognize the place where he
had beached, to find that inn. He walked away from the reedlands, and up into
the hills, and everything he saw was a great marvel to him, from the tall trees
to the little sparrows, and the grey hares that sprang along in the fields. As
for the sky, he could hardly bear to look at it, it was so mighty and so
lighted up, so blue . When night came on, the stars made him weep. It
seemed, even by starshine, he had never seen such colours.
    How long had he been in the lake? A week
or two, a month or two. But he might have been gone a lifetime.
    And he resolved he would tell no one the
story of what had befallen him, for who would believe it but for the people of
the inn, or the people from the wagons who would blame him for the death of
their master?
    Last of all he thought he might not
sleep, but keep himself awake, and he was hungry enough he fancied that would
not be so difficult. Truth to tell, he was frightened now by what she had said
to him, the mermaid, about the dream and that something would be left between
them, and he must care for it and show her, in thirteen years, he had, or be
cursed. He was afraid at last, if all the truth be told, of everything
that had happened.
    But in the end, sitting up staring under
the burning stars, he slept.
    And he dreamed what many a man would,
things being as they were. He dreamed of Trisaphee, and that he lay in the
reeds above the lake with her, and she had wrapped him in her reedy hair and
her fish’s tail, caressing him while he caressed her, and without possessing
her, yet he possessed her. And so vast was the pleasure that he cried
out loud. And in a while he looked her in her fiery eyes, and he said, “Yes,
there is one other joy, under heaven, that I know.”
    But waking a second later, he was aware
that he had not possessed her in any way, but only given his seed to the
grass. And with a bitter sigh, he moved his sleeping place. And after that he
slumbered dreamless till the morning.
    The
sun was over the trees by the time he roused again. The birds were singing, and
he lay in rapture to hear them, after all those shadow days of the mournful,
heartless songs of the mermaid kind.
    When he got up, he saw how in parts the
dew still sparkled on the grass. And then he saw that one bead of dew was
larger than all the rest. And when he went to see, he found a big gleaming
pearl that lay in the lap of the earth. But even as he stood there watching it,
the pearl swelled larger and greater and soon it was the size of a thumbnail,
and then the head of a spoon and then of a cup and then of a plate, and then it
cracked open, and out fell a tiny child, white and translucent as an asphodel.
    This child, a girl, lay in the grass
with her dreamy eyes gazing at him. Next she seemed to harden over, her flesh
losing its fairy look of flowers. Soon she was opaque, and big nearly as a baby
two months old. She breathed, and she hiccupped, and then she cried.
    “What on God’s earth shall I do with
this?” said Elrahn. But anyway he picked her up, and took her where they could
both find food and shelter. And here he told the people a tale not the facts.
Such fact he told to her alone, to the child from the pearl, that in a while he
called Elaidh, his daughter, through a kind of birth, by the mermaid Trisaphee.
     
    Now,
as they sat on the shore of the morning lake, to which they had come back in
her thirteenth spring, Elaidh looked up when again her father spoke.
    “These have been good years together,
child.”
    “Yes, dadda.”
    “I have loved you, Elaidh. But you were
never more than half mine, and this I have told you often, from as soon as you
might hear.”
    “I am a