Melanie Jackson - The Selkie

The water was cold and choppy, with a heavy tide starting to run. The sea had her moods, so she did, but they were no worry to a man who understood them. Ian wasnt concerned with the thick dark or the strong tide. He had a deep keel on his boat, and a good sail as well as oars. It would take a full gale, or a whale, to overturn him.

He helped himself to another modest dram of whiskey, shuddering with pleasure as it went down. The fiery peat always tasted best when drunk at sea on a cold wintry day. Or night. Hed probably had a bit more of the drink than he should have, but it was difficult to maintain a rosy glow on a windy night in the northern isles. And he needed to stop the violent shivering or he couldnt man the oars, could he? And he needed the bloody oars to hold his place in the water.

At last! Something was glimmering down there in the inky sea. Ian quickly shipped the oars and leaned over the gunwale, hand extended.

The first time hed seen her hed thought she was a giant seaworm come to attack him. But he couldnt have been more wrong. Her name was Syr. She was a finwoman and she was unbelievably bonnie. Her name was a bit heathenish, but after they were married hed call her Sarah after his grandmother. His father would like that.

Ian smiled his welcome with blue-tinged lips and plunged his hand into the sea. But the face that rose out of the water was not his beloveds. It was dark and saturnine, and half-hidden in a tangle of wild black hair. It also had something very wrong with its mouth and jaws, which seemed to have splinters of jagged bone embedded therein.

Finman!

Ian jerked back and gave a small gasp, which turned into a yell as the black thing crawled into the boat after him. It knelt over Ians prone and paralyzed body, and with what might have been a laugh it grabbed the gunwales with impossibly long arms and tipped them both into the sea.

The one sometimes called Ruairidh OUruisg came up onto the land and clambered up on the stone above the tides highest reach. It was the ninth day, so he could easily leave his subaqueous home and walk upon the land as a man with no fear of lunar interference. He could remain here for a year and a day, or for however long he did not eat of land salt or run afoul of the tidal moon.

He did not plan on this being a long visit, though his extended pilgrimage ashore would come on May Day, as it traditionally did for his people; after Beltane, when the door to their oceanic abode would be opened to the world and the young men of his kind would go forth to find mates. His father said that he and his brother were ready to travel far inland and begin this most important of searches now, but Ruairidh preferred to honor tradition and wait. Anyway, being on land was uncomfortable for him. He would begin the annual search for a mate next Beltane eve, just as he had always done. It didnt seem wise to break with tradition in a time when the People were disappearing.

For they were disappearing. One clan at a time, they were dying out; first the women, then the men. The People of Avocamor would emerge after the Season in Inundation, and word would come that another clan was gone. It was not surprising; with no females of their own they were left with problematic unions with human women, which were unproductive as often as not. And those human females that had babes had to have their children taken from them and brought to the sea or else they would die when the change came upon them.

Carefully, Ruairidh blew a straight line in his fur from chest to navel and then slipped out of his skin. He laid it carefully aside and then, opening a bladder bag, took up the somewhat wet clothing he had brought with him and set about shaking it out. The dripping plaid was not a garment he cared for; it smelled of sheep instead of proper fur, and it was confoundedly heavy when wet. Which was often, as it always seemed to rain when he was ashore. Still, he could not walk the land of men naked in the light of day, so the covering was necessary.

He was bound for the home of one John of Taigh an Crot Callow. The old man had apparently forgotten his ancestors blood vow, taken after a father and two sons were spared drowning one stormy night when their boat overturned in the firth. The vow was that the fisherman, and all of his children and the childrens children who would live because of this act of mercy, would each swear on their eleventh birthday that they would forever refrain from hunting the People, or making a living from trading in their skins.

For four hundred seasons, a hundred years, the pact had held.

But now something had happened. Though he had sworn the oath himself, John had attempted to kidnap a selkie pup the week before, possibly to hold it for ransom, or mayhap so that he could steal its skin. The young male had been injured almost unto death before he escaped.

The People had striven to be sympathetic and resisted acting in haste. The poor man had gone quite mad with the recent death of his son, often standing at the seas edge, calling for the People to let his sons soul free that it might go on to heaven. But, of course, that was impossible; the People did not have the boys soul.

Perhaps they had erred in returning Johns sons body to land after the storm had taken him. It had seemed a kindness at the time; but many humans still believed that a drowned man who died with a red nose was the victim of water spirits, like the sorcerous finmen of the north, who were supposed to be able to suck a soul out of a mans body and then keep it forever in a state of torment under an inverted urn inside a secret undersea cave.