Her tone became girlishly happy.
"They drown just all by themselves!"
Jim shuddered inside.
"The fishes are so grateful," the girl went on. "They find a lot to eat in one of those dragons. You'd be surprised. It's one reason they all love me so much. And of course they do. I mean—they'd love me anyway, because they have to. But they love me all the more because I give them nice dead dragons to eat all the time."
She paused.
"Well, perhaps not all the time. But every so often I give them a dragon."
They had reached the bottom of the lake and were descending into a sort of underwater castle, which, however, was wide rather than high. Its walls seemed made of shells and shiny gemlike stones, and many panels of what seemed to be pure mother-of-pearl, that gleamed iridescently underwater. A school of small blue fish shot toward them through the water, or air, or whatever it was that surrounded them, and went into a sort of elaborate dance around the golden-haired girl.
"Oh, you!" said the girl to them playfully, "you knew I'd be right back. I've brought the most beautiful man in the world. And he's going to stay with us forever and ever. Won't that be wonderful?"
It occurred to Jim that it might have been nice if she had stopped to consult him about staying down where he was now, forever and ever. He could see drawbacks that could make this far from the most wonderful thing to happen to him.
Aside from everything else he had things to do up on land. Not that the girl wasn't breathtakingly lovely. Jim had thought once upon a time that Danielle was possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. But this little creature radiated something beyond ordinary beauty. He could no more keep himself from being attracted to her than he could release her grip on his wrist that had brought him down here.
The girl was still talking to her small fish.
"I would never leave you for any real length of time, you know that," she was telling them. "Leave my dear little ones? Never! You know I love you and everything in this lake and the lake itself. It's just that I couldn't resist this magnificent man I found up on the bank. You can't blame me for that, can you?"
By this time they were well within the palace-like structure, entering a room walled with mother-of-pearl and draped, padded, and furnished with gossamerlike fabrics in all shades of blue and green, that seemed to shimmer in the underwater light. The chairs were not chairs so much as large, soft, multicolored lounging platforms. But the central piece of furniture in the room—if it could be called furniture—was a great, opulent structure, like a round bed with no head- or footboard, but with mounds of fluffy pillows piled high at one point on the edge of it.
It was to these pillows that the girl towed Jim. He could not be sure whether they were actually walking now, or floating, swimming, or simply skimming through this strange, water-colored, breathable atmosphere. At any rate they came eventually to rest against the pillow piles. Here she released Jim, so that he sank into the pillows. They were softer than anything he had ever touched before, so that he went half out of sight into them, in a semi-propped up, stretched-out position.
"Now," said the golden-haired girl, sitting down cross-legged on the surface of the bed—or perhaps just a few inches above it—it was hard for Jim to tell. Although the water-air atmosphere that surrounded them seemed transparent, there was a sort of shimmer to everything that made exact details uncertain. "What would my dearest love like first?"
"Well, er, if you don't mind," said Jim, "some explanations."
She looked at him, her mouth in a perfect O of astonishment.
"Explanations?"
"Yes," said Jim, "I mean, it's nice of you to call me the handsomest man in the world. But anybody knows I'm not. In fact if anything I'm one of the…"
He searched for a word.
"One of the most unhandsomest you're likely to meet."
"Why, you are not!" said the girl. "But, even if you were, I'd still love you just the same, with the same great passion. I am a person of great passions, you know."
"I see," said Jim.
"Indeed, yes," said the girl earnestly. "All we elementals—actually there's only just a few of us but all of us, in any case—are beings of great, great passion!"
"Oh, I believe you," said Jim.
"Yes." She sighed softly. "Foolish people call us water fairies. But that's just because they don't understand the difference between a mere water fairy and an elemental. An elemental is something far, far finer than a mere water fairy. Water fairies are merely fairies that live in the water. They have a little magic, it's true. They are immortal, that's true. But they have no great capacities. They have no ability to have the great passions elementals have; and of all elementals, if I do say it myself, I'm capable of the greatest passion. I always have been and I always will be."
She looked at Jim curiously.
"What's your name, my beloved?"
"Well—it's James," said Jim.
"James…" She tried the name out on her tongue. "An odd name but it has its charm. James. It does not sing the way some names do; but nonetheless it's a good name. James …"
"If you don't mind, I'd like to know your name too," said Jim.
"My name?" She looked astonished. "I thought everyone knew my name. I'm Melusine. How could you not know it? After all, I'm the only one there is. There are no other Melusines."
"Well, you see," said Jim, "I’m English."
"Ah, English!" said Melusine. "I've heard of England and the English. So you're one of those. You don't seem too different—except for that strange name. But enough about names."
She gazed into Jim's eyes with her own deep blue ones, turning the wattage of her attractiveness up from what seemed to Jim some five hundred watts to about a thousand watts.
"Let's talk of more immediate things," she purred. "Oh my dear one, what is it you desire most in the world right now?"
And she turned the wattage up another five hundred watts.
Jim closed his eyes desperately.
No, he thought! I mustn't. I don't want to stay here forever and ever and make love to an elemental. I want to go home to my own castle, to Angie, and every so often kill an ogre or rescue a Prince or something… what am I thinking? Anyway I mustn't. If I give in just once, I'll give in again; then I might get to like it. Then I might want to stay here forever at the bottom of the lake. And what then? What happens if she gets tired of me, as she must get tired of the men she falls in love with from time to time? She probably does something unspeakable to them. I've got to get out of this. Angie, help me!
"I've got a headache," Jim said feebly.
Chapter Nineteen
He had not expected it to work; but it had. Melusine had turned overwhelmingly solicitous at his mention of a headache; and insisted that he rest and sleep. There would be all the time in the world for other things later on.
It might be, thought Jim, that her attraction-magic worked even on her; so that when she thought she was in love, she was really and actually in love, and ready to sacrifice herself for the good of the loved object. In this world where he had discovered that an individual could be tremendously gentle and caring one moment and literally vicious the next, and those around him or her would not see anything the slightest bit contradictory about it, he would believe anything. She had left him alone and he had slept.
When he woke up, she was still not there. However, within a few minutes of his waking, some of the little fish that had done acrobatics around Melusine, showed up. They swam in to surround him in midair and bring him things. Some brought badly cut but good-sized jewels in their mouths. One brought a large bunch of grapes depending from one stem, heavy enough so that it had to labor with its tins to swim (or fly) its way to him.
"I don't like grapes," Jim told it.
It was quite true. He had never really cared for grapes; and, as a matter of fact, as a human he did not even care too much for wine. It was only as a dragon that he had discovered an e
njoyability in the latter.
The fish dropped the grapes on the bed, as if in exhaustion, and swam off. But it returned a moment later with a second bunch.
The same determination seemed to operate with all the rest of the fish. They might listen to Melusine, but they certainly did not listen to him. They only kept piling unwanted gifts on him. Eventually, a whole school of them labored toward him with flailing fins, carrying some iridescent green clothing.
That was followed by a ridiculous hat that looked halfway between a chef's cap and a rather angular top hat.
As this piled up around him, he was grateful that Melusine was not around, so that he had freedom to think without that magical attractiveness of hers beaming at him with the power of an oversized sun lamp.
His reaction when she had tried to entice him into sexual congress with her had been purely instinctive; but with a cool head, he realized how sensible he had been. Even if she was willing to keep him forever as she had said—and he really did not believe that for a second—someone like her must fall in love afresh, the minute a new male face showed up on the horizon. But even if she did intend to keep him around forever, the fact of the matter was he did not want to stay around forever. For many, many reasons.
The chief of these was Angie. There was a great deal of difference between being sexually attracted to someone like Melusine and the deep emotional response—the love—he had for Angie.
He actually could not imagine life without Angie. It would be like having half of himself amputated down the middle, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. Angie had something that Melusine would never have. He did not know exactly what it was; but it made life entirely different for him, knowing she was there. Even when he was off like this in France, the fact that he knew she was at Malencontri and that he would be getting back to her eventually—for he had no intention of letting anything happen to him along the way—made his response to living entirely different.
He had to get out of here. Out of this lake and away from Melusine. His mind chased frantically after reasons he could give her for taking him back up onto the shore of the lake.
It was true, she had exerted that magical pull on him, even when he was on the bank and she was in the water. But it had been nowhere near as strong as what he had felt down here on the bottom of the lake.
He had a feeling that once he got up on dry land, he might be able to grit his teeth, turn around, and walk away from her until the magic no longer affected him. He assumed someone like her would not follow him. But if she did, something seemed to tell him that she would not have the kind of power she had while in the lake.
He had reached this point in his thinking when it suddenly came back to him, like the eruption of a grenade in the back of his mind, that he was at least an apprentice practitioner of magic, himself. If her advantage over him lay in the area of her magic; then he ought to be able to counter it with magic of his own, if he only knew what magic, and how to apply it.
That last, was the tricky part. The information he wanted was no doubt buried in the Encyclopedie Necromantick, but he had already learned that he could not simply reach in and get it simply because he wanted to.
First, he had to have a clear definition of what he wanted. Then he had to go after it by the route he had already figured out for himself. For all he knew every other magician used every other possible method, each to his own, but for him the method seemed to be the one he had worked out of imagination, conceptualization, and visualization.
All right then, he told himself. He sat up cross-legged on the bed; and tried to apply his method to his problem.
First question: What was the magic he needed to get out of here?
No, on second thought that was the second question. The first question was: What was the magic that was keeping him here?
For the first time it occurred to him that it might be a different kind of magic than the kind he would use. Melusine had called herself an elemental. She might be an elemental in the same sense that Giles was a selkie. So that what was magic about her was something inborn, not something that she had learned.
If that was the case, the question became: What exactly was this innate magic of hers?
Well, it seemed to be divided into two areas. One was that which gave her power over any other beings in or near water. The other was her ability to make water and breathable air interchangeable.
Apparently, it was immaterial whether Jim was breathing water right now and getting away with it; or whether the water right around him had turned into air and he was breathing that.
He had it!
Melusine's primary control over people like himself was the fact that she could choose to make it possible for them to breathe underwater or not. Apparently, she had it in for dragons. She clearly preferred that they be stuck with breathing water once they were under the surface. On the other hand, in his case, she had preferred that he breathe water as if it were air, or water that had been turned into air. That meant that all he had to do—
"Ouch!" cried Jim.
He rubbed the right side of his skull. A dozen laboring little fish had just dropped a small ingot of gold on his head. He glared at them.
"I don't want this!" he shouted at them. "I don't want any gold, or jewels, or grapes, or all this other stuff you're bringing me. I don't want it, do you understand me? I do not want it!"
The fish went off again in a body—judging from past performance, to find something else to bring him. He rubbed his head again and tried to recapture the thought that had been interrupted by the gold brick.
He had the first step of his system. He had something to imagine. He must imagine that there was a way he could walk, underwater, out of here and up the side of the lake into the air—with the water around him staying as breathable as air until he got out in the open and could breathe the real atmosphere.
He concentrated on the image of his doing just that. Here am I, he thought, strolling along the lake bed, breathing water perfectly well, even though I am escaping from Melusine. My own magic turns the water around me into the most breathable possible air. I have as much air as I want. I can breathe deep into my lungs. I could even run as fast as I wanted to, and there would still be plenty of air with plenty of oxygen in it for my lungs to pump into my body and keep it going. Here I am, running along the floor of the lake, beginning to climb up the side, breathing nicely—
Now, what do I write on the inside of my forehead to make myself be able to breathe water this way? I know I have the answer inside me, in the Encyclopedie Necromantick; but I just can't seem to bring the exact thing to mind that I need.
"Oh! You're awake," said the voice of Melusine behind him. She bounced onto the bed beside him, landing on her knees. "Shoo!"
The last word was addressed to a small school of fish which was now laboring up with what looked like a crown made entirely out of mother-of-pearl.
They turned about and swam away with it again.
"I'm so glad to have you awake, my dearest," purred Melusine. "Are you feeling all better now?"
"Yes," said Jim; and then decided that he ought to put some enthusiasm into it, "Yes, yes indeed. Very much better indeed."
"Well, that's just fine," said Melusine. "Now, perhaps—"
"And how was your day?" asked Jim.
She looked at him, startled.
"My day?" she said.
"Well, day or night, whatever time you've been away from me while I was sleeping," said Jim.
"You want to know how things have been with me since you fell asleep?" said Melusine, staring at him. "Nobody ever—I mean, usually nobody ever asks me that kind of question."
"Well, you see," said Jim, "when two people, like you and I—"
"Oh, yes," sighed Melusine.
"When two people like you and I," said Jim, "are attracted to each other as we are, it makes their love a bigger, finer thing if they're interested in each other's doings, even when they aren't together."
>
Melusine looked at him in extreme puzzlement and shook her head.
"This is most strange of you, James," she said. "Does it come of being English?"
"Oh yes," said Jim, "we all feel this way in England. That's why people are so much in love with each other there."
"Ugly, brutal savages, with dragons all over the place, are very much in love with each other, in England?" said Melusine unbelievingly.
"Oh yes. Very, very much in love. Take my word for it," said Jim.
"Of course, I'll take your word for anything, my dearest heart," said Melusine. "It's just a little hard to accept, that's all. Ugly, brutal… why do they think that knowing about what they've done when they're apart makes their love stronger?"
"Oh it does much more than make their love stronger," said Jim. "It adds an entirely new dimension to their love. Anyone who hasn't experienced it can't imagine what a difference it makes. But to answer your question, the reason it improves their love is because it means that they're thinking about each other, even when they're apart and longing to be together again. Because of that they want to know everything there is to know about each other, even what the other does when they're not around."
"It is a most strange notion, James," said Melusine earnestly. "I begin to see, however, that there might be something to it. I'm just terribly surprised that if there's something like that, it didn't occur to me before this."
"It's because your ability to love is so large," Jim assured her. "It's so large that it never occurred to you to look beyond it for anything that would make it larger."
"That's true," said Melusine, "at least the part about my love being so large is true, so I suppose the other could be true too."
She put her hands together in her lap.
"Well," she said, "I assume I know how your time went since I last saw you. You've been asleep until just recently, haven't you?"