He took his hands away, but I kept standing at attention.
He did make me seem so pretty; so very pretty.
After a moment, he added, "I gave up my Vanity for you, even though she's prettier and girlier than you. I wanted you more. You saw me put her aside and take you."
"What do you mean, 'girlier'?" I asked. The moment the comment left my mouth, I realized how bad it sounded. As if I were jealous, and competing for Gren-del's affections.
He laughed and put his hand around my elbow, a gentleman taking a milkmaid to a country fair. He gestured toward the door. We began walking across the shining gloom of the golden floor toward it.
As we walked, young Grendel seemed to absorb me with his eyes, drunk on the sight of me. His prize.
His possession. He said, "Well, she ain't much one for all that running around with sticks and balls and what-not."
"Sports," I said. "They're called sports."
"Well," he said, "they'll be no more of that."
That grim little comment brought home to me what was happening. A sea monster was about to marry me. And then he would be in control of my life until I escaped him, or died. If he wanted me to wear my hair up, I'd wear it up. If he wanted it loose, it would be loose. If he didn't like the way I talked, or walked, or thought, he'd whip me till I changed to please him. And then when he tired of me, I'd be left alone in some cell buried under the sea. Or he'd strangle me and throw my body to the crabs.
Unless he needed me alive to nurse the baby. Our baby. Sea monster junior.
There was a pressure in my eyes. I blinked, but nothing happened. I started to raise my hand to my face, but then he took my hand with grave and polite grace, raised it to his lips, and kissed it.
He said softly, "You're trying to cry. You cannot do it down here. This is all tears, all this salty ocean.
Your folk wept when they was driven out by Saturn, and all the seas turned salt. That's how sad they was. But you have no cause to be sad, darling. Darling girl. My darling. Undersea is a happy place, see?
There's no crying here, so it must be happy, get it? My mother told me that when she used to whup me.
Heh."
And then he said, "Come along," and he turned and stepped out from the golden doors.
I followed him. His palace was gloomy, a place of massive shadows and slow whale-like noises. I saw corridors and arches, and, dimly, jars and fences behind which luminous fish and glowing worms trembled and flickered.
When I saw myself shining in the panel of some polished wall of silver, or cut marble, I saw how filmy trails and tails of the dress swept over the darkly sparkling floor and remained all white and unstained.
The slippers shone brightly.
I said, "So much wealth…"
"Hmph. 'Tis of no worth to me, golden one. All the treasure of all the ships that ever sunk is gathered here, and when my mom wants for more, she sinks some ships and drowns some sailors more. But what's to buy with it, eh? There is no beam of golden sunlight here, nothing bright nor fair… till you."
Great gates like the baleen of a whale, set with gold and pearls, drew aside at our approach. We were outside.
The palace behind us was formed into the great shape of a dome, half-covered over with coral and slaked with mud. Pearls and ribs of gold and other shapes of great beauty reared up from the gates out from which I stepped, but the beauty was half-shrouded in the murky mud and twitching sea insects that formed dun clouds to every side.
The heavy water was black overhead. There was no sun.
We stood on a hillside, or, I suppose, one should call it the slope of a sea trough. The greatest light in the area came from a mound of coral and seashell cemented into a rough dome. There were joints and parallel strands of some phosphorescent material set into that coral as well, and round lumps of it. It seemed a fairy castle, laced with light. And yet, something in the shapes of those lights was odd. It looked like rib cages, skeletons, skulls, all the ivory of the dead lit up with Saint Elmo's fire.
In that dim light, I could see a few other scattered mounds, much smaller than the main dome. These were palaces like the one from which I had come, going away down slope. They were beautiful, but the lifeless light in them made them seem like graveyard things.
To my left was a cliff, rising sheer into the gloom. In the cliff was a crack. Gathered about the lower lip of the crack, and spilling down to the mud below, were heaps of gold and silver coins, the wreckage of a chariot, the skeletons of two horses, and the rusted remains of once-bright helmets. The loot of sunken ships, I supposed, left lying in the mud.
I turned to him. "Who promised Vanity to you?"
"Just a voice in the wood."
But there was something in the way he said it.
I said, "You recognized that voice, didn't you? You told Dr. Fell you did not, but why would you have heeded a voice you didn't know?"
He squinted at me, and frowned. "Sneaking and peeking, were we? Hiding and listening? I recall what I told Fell. He knew what I meaned, even if you didn't. I spoke of the voice, to make him know, in case he wanted to get in on it. To get in on divvying up the loot. Boggin were a sinking boat, see; and I was telling Fell it were time to jump ship. But did he listen? Gar! He says to me, he says, 'Go tell Boggin when you hear this voice, eh?' You listened, little princess, but you didn't hear what was being said."
"What was being said?"
"I was telling him Boggin is done for, and that I was going to get Vanity for my own, when my new friend came to step on Boggin and take his stuff. I were asking Fell if he wanted to get on the right side, and I were telling him he could get stuff, too. Sweet stuff, very sweet. I was offering you. He said no. Now, of course, I'm glad he turned me down."
"Who was this new friend?"
Young Grendel grinned. "I ain't saying. But it were one of the Big Ones, one of the Olympians. One of them what could make be so, what he said be so."
"Then it was not Boggin?"
Grendel laughed at that idea. "Har! Boggin? Offer to give me Vanity? Not no how. Wants her himself, that one does. He's all stiff in the trousers when she walks by, swaying her hips and with her shirt all open. But he ain't going to marry her, him. He ain't honest."
I pointed. "What's that?" I gestured toward the pile of gold coins and pins below the crack in the cliff wall.
Grendel said, "Folk throw coins and pins down. Half is Mother's; half is for the Fair Ones what built this well. They ain't never coming for it, but we daren't touch their half of it. The Fair Ones, they gets all the nice things. They are so fine and high and mighty, or they was. Like you. Fine and fair."
I said, "Is that the bottom of the Kissing Well?"
"Full of questions, aren't you? Aye, that it is."
"But I thought this was the sea. You said it was salt water. Well water is fresh."
"It gets fresher as you go up."
"How is that possible?"
He shrugged, clearly uninterested. "The Fair Folk do it. Dunno how it works. Come along."
I did not move. "Where are we going?"
He pointed to the huge rough dome made of glowing bones on the hillside. "Ma. That's her place. She's the one what dressed you."
I said, "She dressed me?"
Grendel's mouth gawped, and then he looked embarrassed. "You don't think it were me? Undressing a girl naked without someone there? An unmarried girl?"
He was flabbergasted at the concept.
He squinted at me and looked me in the eye, and that squint made him look so much more like the old, grizzled Mr. Glum I knew. He said, "Look'ee here, Melia! I'm a bad man, there's no denying it. A bad, bad man! I've stove in skulls of those who done me no harm, and bit off ears, too. I've drowned folk and eat their flesh cold, and drank their blood like soup. I've pinched things what weren't mine and lied about it after. I've promised to be a place, and then weren't nowhere near when the time came. But I ain't never cheated at no game of cards, and I never give no sass to my mom, and I ain't never diddled with no unwed girl, or brought no shame to her name."