"I woke up and you weren’t there, Mam," I told her. "And I came out and saw the seals and I was watching them." I pointed at the old bull and the seals gathered around him on the rock. I laughed. "They sound like they’re talking to each other, Mam."
"They are talking," she said, laughing with me.
She had a voice like purest crystal, and she seemed entirely comfortable in her nudity, which made me comfortable with it also. "You just have to know their language."
"Do you know the language?" I asked her wonderingly, and she nod-ded, laughing again.
"I do. Would you like me to teach you sometime?"
"Aye, Mam, I would," I told her, wide-eyed.
"Then I will. Now, let's get you inside and back into bed. It's cold out here." She lifted me up, but I struggled to stay.
"I'm not cold at all. Mam, what were you doing out here?" I asked her, staring up at her face, her hair all stringy and still dripping water from the ends, a bit of seaweed stuck near her ear. "Aren't you cold?"
"No, Ennis. I was. . swimming."
"With the seals?"
She nodded. "With the seals. Maybe, someday, you can swim with them, too, if. ." She stopped then, and a smile curled her lip. She rubbed my hair. "Come now. Back to bed." She led me back to the cottage door and stopped there. "Go on in," she said. "I'm going to swim a bit more. ."
She kept her promise. She taught me how to understand the language of the blue seals. And, once or twice a year, she would leave our house late at night to "go swimming with the seals." I don't think my siblings ever noticed, but I did. I would see her slip out of bed and follow her. I think she probably knew that I was watching her, but she didn't seem to care and never paid any attention to me at all.
She would stand at the water's edge and take off her night robe, standing naked under the moon with the seals all wailing and moaning and calling to her.
She'd run toward the water, diving into the surf. Somehow, though I looked, I never saw my mam after that-she would vanish among the bodies of the seals and emerge hours later as light began to touch the sky, dripping wet but some-how not cold. If I were still there asleep on the beach, she would wake me and take me back to the cottage with her.
I asked her, the first time, why I never could see her after she went into the water and she told me I might understand one day. She also told me about the blue seals-that there was but one small group of them left in all the world here at Inish Thuaidh, but that soon a time would come when they would return in greater numbers, and that she hoped I would be part of those days…
Aye, my da knew. He seemed troubled by his wife's occasional forays into the ocean, but did
nothing about them, or perhaps it was just that he'd learned over the years that this was simply part of her-he didn't speak to her about the seals, or her 'swimming' at night, or mention any of it to us.
"Your mam must do what she must," was all he would say the one time I dared to bring up the subject with him. "And if you're lucky, you won't share her curse and find yourself out there swimming in the moonlight." Then he turned his back to me as he mended his fishing net.
I didn't think of my mam as cursed, though. I saw the joy in her face as she came from the water. I saw the cavorting of the seals and the way they flew through the water and thought that it must be wonderful to be able to do that. I listened to their talk and sometimes tried to speak with them, though our throats aren't made to speak their words, and they would laugh at my poor attempts and answer.
And, one day after my body had started to grow hair and my voice had gone deeper, I did swim with them…
You're…?" Jenna breathed, and O'Deoradhain nodded solemnly. "I thought… I mean I've heard of changelings and such, but I'd always believed they were only tales."
"Not only tales. And not only me. Wasn't your grandmother mysteriously rescued by seals? — or maybe she unconsciously, under the stress of nearly drowning, tapped a part of herself she didn't know was there."
The fire O'Deoradhain had built while he told his tale crackled, and Jenna snuggled close to the flames, letting the welcome heat sink into her still-damp clothes. She glanced back at the waters of the lough half-expecting to see the seal again, but it was gone. "Are all the blue seals. .?"
O'Deoradhain shrugged. "Some of them are changelings, aye, but not all and almost none can change at will. Most of those who can change are water-snared, nearly always a seal but changing for a few short hours a year into human shape. Somewhere, back in my family's past, a many times great-mam must have met a bull in his human form and loved him, and that blood manifested itself in my mam-she said that her sisters and brothers weren't that way, just as my siblings also weren't affected. But the blood occasionally shows to create the few Earth-snared ones like me or my mam, who feel the call of the water-part of us only rarely."
Jenna didn’t know what to say. She looked up the sloping bank of the lough to where the horses stood, to the pack on her mare where her father’s carved seal was hidden, and she remembered the blue paint he’d used to paint it and she wondered.
"They’ve followed me, as well as they can, since I left Inish," O’Deoradhain was saying. "They haven’t told me why, just that ’the Water-Mother’s voice tells them that they must.’ The WaterMother is their god, like our Mother-Creator. The ’voice,’ I think, is a euphemism, a feeling they have or perhaps part of an old song-tale-all their history is passed down in songs since they don’t write at all, and there are thousands of them. Their-I suppose I should say ’our’-memories are very good, and they pass the songs down generation to generation. I don’t know them all yet, only a few hundred."
Jenna remembered the seal who watched them when they talked at Deer Creek, and the shapes in the water that had pushed their boat away after they’d crossed Lough Lar. . "What was the thing that attacked me?
O’Deoradhain shrugged again. He took a stick from the ground and pushed at the logs in the fire; sparks and smoke went whirling upward. "I don’t know. Garrentha-that’s the name of the seal who came to your rescue-didn’t either. There are things that live in hidden places that we don’t know, and more and more of them are waking as the mage-lights grow stronger. It’s not only humans who want to hold the magic." He rose to his feet. "If you’re dry and warm enough, we should go. I think we be safer in the village at night than out here."
Jenna glanced back at the lough. She nodded. "Are there other secrets you’re keeping from me, O’Deoradhain? You ought to trot them out now, before we go farther."
He grinned at that, but the expression turned oddly serious when his dark eyes found hers. "I only have one," he answered. "I suspect you already know what it is."
She found herself blushing under his gaze, and she turned away rather than say more.
Chapter 36: Ambush and Offer
THE folk of the village of Banshaigh had a name for the creature: "Uisce Taibhse," it was: the water ghost. "No one fishes at the eastern end of Lough Glas now," one grizzled old man told Jenna and O’Deoradhain. "At least not if you care about coming back. Too many boats have been mysteriously sunk there-in broad daylight and calm water-and many of those aboard lost. The Uisce Taibhse is an evil creature-or creatures, since there is more than one of them, and they don’t like us. We’ve caught one ourselves, snagged in our nets; it died out of the water like a fish, but it fought like a mad, cornered dog to its last breath. Why, if I had one of those clochs na thintri the Riocha are wearing now, I’d just kill them all. ."