A Little Sacrifice 6

VI

‘Geralt,’ Dandelion said, looking around and sniffing like a hound. ‘It stinks terribly here, don’t you think?’ ‘Does it?’ the Witcher sniffed. ‘I’ve been in places where it smelled worse. It’s only the smell of the sea.’ The bard turned his head away and spat between two rocks. The water bubbled in the rocky clefts, foaming and soughing, exposing gorges full of sea-worn pebbles.

‘Look how nicely it’s dried out, Geralt. Where has the water gone? What is it with those bloody tides? Where do they come from? Haven’t you ever thought about it?’ ‘No. I’ve had other concerns.’

‘I think,’ Dandelion said, trembling slightly, ‘that down there in the depths, at the very bottom of this bloody ocean, crouches a huge monster, a fat, scaly beast, a toad with horns on its vile head. And from time to time it draws water into its belly, and with the water everything that lives and can be eaten: fish, seals, turtles–everything. And then, having devoured its prey, it pukes up the water and we have the tide. What do you think about that?’ ‘I think you’re a fool. Yennefer once told me that the moon causes the tides.’

Dandelion cackled.

‘What bloody rubbish! What does the moon have to do with the sea? Only dogs howl at the moon. She was having you on, Geralt, that little liar of yours, she put one over on you. Not for the first time either, I’d say.’ The Witcher did not comment. He looked at the boulders glistening with water in the ravines exposed by the tide. The water was still exploding and foaming in them, but it looked as though they would get through.

‘Very well, let’s get to work,’ he said, standing and adjusting his sword on his back. ‘We can’t wait any longer, or we won’t make it back before the tide comes in. Do you still insist on coming with me?’ ‘Yes. Subjects for ballads aren’t fir cones, you don’t find them under a tree. Aside from that, it’s Poppet’s birthday tomorrow.’ ‘I don’t see the link.’

‘Pity. There exists the custom among we–normal–people of giving one another presents on birthdays. I can’t afford to buy her anything. So I shall find something for her on the seabed.’ ‘A herring? Or a cuttlefish?’

‘Dolt. I’ll find some amber, perhaps a seahorse, or maybe a pretty conch. The point is it’s a symbol, a sign of concern and affection. I like Little Eye and I want to please her. Don’t you understand? I thought not. Let’s go. You first, because there might be a monster down there.’ ‘Right.’ The Witcher slid down from the cliff onto the slippery rocks, covered with algae. ‘I’ll go first, in order to protect you if needs be. As a sign of my concern and affection. Just remember, if I shout, run like hell and don’t get tangled up in my sword. We aren’t going to gather seahorses. We’re going to deal with a monster that murders people.’ They set off downwards, into the rifts of the exposed seabed, in some places wading through the water still swirling in the rocky vents. They splashed around in hollows lined with sand and bladder wrack. To make matters worse it began to rain, so they were soon soaked from head to foot. Dandelion kept stopping and digging around in the pebbles and tangles of seaweed.

‘Oh, look, Geralt, a little fish. It’s all red, by the Devil. And here, look, a little eel. And this? What is it? It looks like a great big, transparent flea. And this… Oh, mother! Geraaalt!’ The Witcher turned around at once, with his hand on his sword.

It was a human skull, white, worn smooth by the rocks, jammed into a rocky crevice, full of sand. But not only sand. Dandelion, seeing a lugworm writhing in the eye socket, shuddered and made an unpleasant noise. The Witcher shrugged and headed towards the rocky plain exposed by the sea, in the direction of the two jagged reefs, known as the Dragons Fangs, which now looked like mountains. He moved cautiously. The seabed was strewn with sea cucumbers, shells and piles of bladder wrack. Large jellyfish swayed and brittle stars whirled in the rock pools and hollows. Small crabs, as colourful as hummingbirds, fled from them, creeping sideways, their legs scurrying busily.

Geralt noticed a corpse some way off, wedged between the rocks. The drowned man’s chest could be seen moving beneath his shirt and the seaweed, though in principle there was no longer anything to move it. It was teeming with crabs, outside and inside. The body could not have been in the water longer than a day, but the crabs had picked it so clean it was pointless examining it closer. The Witcher changed direction without a word, giving the corpse a wide berth. Dandelion did not notice anything.

‘Why, but it stinks of rot here,’ he swore, trying to catch up with Geralt. He spat and shook water from his bonnet. ‘And it’s tipping down and I’m cold. I’ll catch a chill and lose my bloody voice…’ ‘Stop moaning. If you want to go back you know the way.’

Right beyond the base of the Dragons Fangs stretched out a flat, rocky shelf, and beyond it was deep water, the calmly rippling sea. The limit of the tide.

‘Ha, Geralt,’ Dandelion said, looking around. ‘I think that monster of yours had enough sense to withdraw to the high sea with the tide. And I guess you thought it’d be lazing about here somewhere, waiting for you to hack it to pieces?’ ‘Be quiet.’

The Witcher approached the edge of the shelf and knelt down, cautiously resting his hands on the sharp shells clinging to the rocks. He could not see anything. The water was dark, and the surface was cloudy, dulled by the drizzle.

Dandelion searched the recesses of the reefs, kicking the more aggressive crabs from his legs, examining and feeling the dripping rocks bearded with sagging seaweed and specked with coarse colonies of crustaceans and molluscs.

‘Hey, Geralt!’

‘What?’

‘Look at those shells. They’re pearl oysters, aren’t they?’

‘No.’

‘Know anything about them?’

‘No.’

‘So keep your opinions to yourself until you do know something. They are pearl oysters, I’m certain. I’ll start collecting pearls, at least there’ll be some profit from this expedition, not just a cold. Shall I begin, Geralt?’ ‘Go ahead. The monster attacks pearl divers. Pearl collectors probably fall into the same category.’ ‘Am I to be bait?’

‘Start collecting. Take the bigger ones, because if you don’t find any pearls we can make soup out of them.’ ‘Forget it. I’ll just collect pearls; fuck the shells. Dammit… Bitch… How do you… bloody… open it? Do you have a knife, Geralt?’ ‘Haven’t you even brought a knife?’

‘I’m a poet, not some knifer. Oh, to hell with it, I’ll put them in a bag and we’ll get the pearls out later. Hey, you! Scram!’ He kicked off a crab, which flew over Geralt’s head and splashed into the water. The Witcher walked slowly along the edge of the shelf, eyes fixed on the black, impenetrable water. He heard the rhythmic tapping of the stone Dandelion was using to dislodge the shells from the rock.

‘Dandelion! Come and look!’

The jagged, cracked shelf suddenly ended in a level, sharp edge, which fell downwards at an acute angle. Immense, angular, regular blocks of white marble, overgrown with seaweed, molluscs and sea anemones swaying in the water like flowers in the breeze, could clearly be seen beneath the surface of the water.

‘What is it? They look like–like steps.’

‘Because they are steps,’ Dandelion whispered in awe. ‘Ooo, they’re steps leading to an underwater city. To the legendary Ys, which was swallowed up by the sea. Have you heard the legend of the city of the chasm, about Ys-Beneath-The-Waves? I shall write such a ballad the competition won’t know what’s hit them. I have to see it up close… Look, there’s some kind of mosaic, something is engraved or carved there… Some kind of writing? Move away, Geralt.’ ‘Dandelion! That’s a trench! You’ll slip off…’

‘Never mind. I’m wet anyway. See, it’s shallow here, barely waist-deep on this first step. And as wide as a ballroom. Oh, bloody hell…’ Geralt jumped very quickly into the water and grabbed the bard, who had fallen in up to his neck.

‘I tripped on that shit,’ Dandelion said, gasping for air, recovering himself and lifting a large, flat mollusc dripping water from its cobalt blue shell, overgrown with threads of algae. ‘There’s loads of these on the steps. It’s a pretty colour, don’t you think? Grab it and shove it into your bag, mine’s already full.’ ‘Get out of there,’ the Witcher snapped, annoyed. ‘Get back on the shelf this minute, Dandelion. This isn’t a game.’ ‘Quiet. Did you hear that? What was it?’

Geralt heard it. The sound was coming from below, from under the water. Dull and deep, although simultaneously faint, soft, brief, broken off. The sound of a bell.

‘It’s a bloody bell,’ Dandelion whispered, clambering out onto the shelf. ‘I was right, Geralt. It’s the bell of the sunken Ys, the bell of the city of monsters muffled by the weight of the depths. It’s the damned reminding us…’ ‘Will you shut up?’

The sound repeated. Considerably closer. ‘… reminding us,’ the bard continued, squeezing out the soaking tail of his jerkin, ‘of its dreadful fate. That bell is a warning…’ The Witcher stopped paying attention to Dandelion’s voice and concentrated on his other senses. He sensed. He sensed something.

‘It’s a warning,’ Dandelion said, sticking the tip of his tongue out, as was his custom when he was concentrating. ‘A warning, because… hmm… So we would not forget… hmm… hmmm… I’ve got it!

‘The heart of the bell sounds softly, it sings a song of death

Of death, which can be born more easily than oblivion…’

The water right next to the Witcher exploded. Dandelion screamed. The goggle-eyed monster emerging from the foam aimed a broad, serrated, scythe-like blade at Geralt. Geralt’s sword was already in his hand, from the moment the water had begun to swell, so now he merely twisted confidently at the hips and slashed the monster across its drooping, scaly dewlap. He immediately turned the other way, where another creature was churning up the water. It was wearing a bizarre helmet and something resembling a suit of armour made of tarnished copper. The Witcher parried the blade of the short spear being thrust towards him with a broad sweep of his sword and with the momentum the parry gave him struck across the ichthyoid-reptilian toothy muzzle. He leapt aside towards the edge of the shelf, splashing water.

‘Fly, Dandelion!’

‘Give me your hand!’

‘Fly, dammit!’

Another creature emerged from the water, the curved sword whistling in its rough green hands. The Witcher thrust his back against the edge of the shellfish-covered rock, assumed a fighting position, but the fish-eyed creature did not approach. It was the same height as Geralt. The water also reached to its waist, but the impressively puffed-up comb on its head and its dilated gills gave the impression of greater size. The grimace distorting the broad maw armed with teeth was deceptively similar to a cruel smile.

The creature, paying no attention to the two twitching bodies floating in the red water, raised its sword, gripping the long hilt without a cross guard in both hands. Puffing up its comb and gills even more, it deftly spun the blade in the air. Geralt heard the light blade hiss and whirr.

The creature took a pace forward, sending a wave towards the Witcher. Geralt took a swing and whirled his sword in response. And also took a step, taking up the challenge.

The fish-eyed creature deftly twisted its long clawed fingers on the hilt and slowly lowered its arms, which were protected by tortoiseshell and copper, and plunged them up to its elbows, concealing the weapon beneath the water. The Witcher grasped his sword in both hands; his right hand just below the cross guard, his left by the pommel, and lifted the weapon up and a little to the side, above his right shoulder. He looked into the monster’s eyes, but they were the iridescent eyes of a fish, eyes with spherical irises, glistening coldly and metallically. Eyes which neither expressed nor betrayed anything. Nothing that might warn of an attack.

From the depths at the bottom of the steps, disappearing into the black chasm, came the sound of a bell. Closer and closer, more and more distinct.

The fish-eyed creature lunged forward, pulling its blade from under the water, attacking as swiftly as a thought, with a montante thrust. Geralt was simply lucky; he had expected the blow to be dealt from the right. He parried with his blade directed downwards, powerfully twisting his body, and rotated his sword, meeting the monster’s sword flat. Now everything depended on which of them would twist their fingers more quickly on the hilt, who would be first to move from the flat, static impasse of the blades to a blow, a blow whose force was now being generated by both of them, by shifting their bodyweight to the appropriate leg. Geralt already knew they were as fast as each other.

But the fish-eyed creature had longer fingers.

The Witcher struck it in the side, above the hips, twisted into a half-turn, smote, pressing down on the blade, and easily dodged a wide, chaotic, desperate and clumsy blow. The monster, noiselessly opening its ichthyoid mouth, disappeared beneath the water, which was pulsating with crimson clouds.

‘Give me your hand! Quickly!’ Dandelion yelled. ‘They’re coming, a whole gang of them! I can see them!’ The Witcher seized the bard’s right hand and hauled him out of the water onto the rocky shelf. A broad wave splashed behind him.

The tide had turned.

They fled swiftly, pursued by the swelling wave. Geralt looked back and saw numerous other fish-like creatures bursting from the water, saw them giving chase, leaping nimbly on their muscular legs. Without a word he speeded up.

Dandelion was panting, running heavily and splashing around the now knee-high water. He suddenly stumbled and fell, sloshing among the bladder wrack, supporting himself on trembling arms. Geralt caught him by the belt and hauled him out of the foam, now seething all around them.

‘Run!’ he cried. ‘I’ll hold them back!’

‘Geralt—’

‘Run, Dandelion! The water’s about to fill the rift and then we won’t get out of here! Run for your life!’ Dandelion groaned and ran. The Witcher ran after him, hoping the monsters would become strung out in the chase. He knew he had no chance taking on the entire group.

They chased him just beside the rift, because the water there was deep enough for them to swim, while he was clambering the slippery rocks with difficulty, wallowing in the foam. In the rift, however, it was too tight for them to assail him from all sides. He stopped in the basin where Dandelion had found the skull.

He stopped and turned around. And calmed down.

He struck the first with the very tip of his sword, where the temple would have been on a man. He split open the belly of the next one, which was armed with something resembling a short battle-axe. A third fled.

The Witcher rushed up the gorge, but at the same time a surging wave boomed, erupting in foam, seethed in an eddy in the vent, tore him off the rocks and dragged him downwards, into the boiling water. He collided with a fishy creature flapping about in the eddy, and thrust it away with a kick. Something caught him by his legs and pulled him down, towards the seafloor. He hit the rock on his back, opened his eyes just in time to see the dark shapes of the creatures, two swift blurs. He parried the first blur with his sword, and instinctively protected himself from the second by raising his left arm. He felt a blow, pain, and immediately afterwards the sharp sting of salt. He pushed off from the bottom with his feet, splashed upwards towards the surface, formed his fingers together and released a Sign. The explosion was dull and stabbed his ears with a brief paroxysm of pain. If I get out of this, he thought, beating the water with his arms and legs, if I get out of this, I’ll ride to Yen in Vengerberg and I’ll try again… If I get out of this… He thought he could hear the booming of a trumpet. Or a horn.

The tidal wave, exploding again in the chimney, lifted him up and tossed him out on his belly onto a large rock. Now he could clearly hear a booming horn and Dandelion’s cries, seemingly coming from all sides at once. He snorted the saltwater from his nose and looked around, tossing his wet hair from his face.

He was on the shore, right where they had set out from. He was lying belly-down on the rocks, and a breaker was seething white foam around him.

Behind him, in the gorge–now a narrow bay–a large grey dolphin danced on the waves. On its back, tossing her wet, willow-green hair, sat the mermaid. She still had beautiful breasts.

‘White Hair!’ she sang, waving a hand which was holding a large, conical, spirally twisting conch. ‘Are you in one piece?’ ‘Yes,’ the Witcher said in amazement. The foam around him had become pink. His left arm had stiffened and was stinging from the salt. His jacket sleeve was cut, straight and evenly, and blood was gushing from the cut. I got out of it, he thought, I pulled it off again. But no, I’m not going anywhere.

He saw Dandelion, who was running towards him, stumbling over the wet pebbles.

‘I’ve held them back!’ the mermaid sang, and sounded the conch again. ‘But not for long! Flee and return here no more, White Hair! The sea… is not for you!’ ‘I know!’ he shouted back. ‘I know. Thank you, Sh’eenaz!’