Fisher's Wife

Rain crackled onto the roof, and she looked up from her row of stitches. A strong one, she thought, and the twinge of worry was as routine to her as drawing the next breath. She paid it no mind. Her hands never stilled over the knitting. It was a double-cable sweater tonight, even though summer's heat had baked the life from the dooryard. Sweaters with this much stitching took months to complete, and she was thinking as far ahead as she dared.

She looped a strand around her finger, watched as the deep blue formed precise line after line. She had married this man whose moods were as the sea he sailed. When the sun opened the sky to cathedral heights, his heart was light and full. When squalls had ruined the trip, and his mood was black as the crashing waves delivering shells and kelp to ageless beaches, she held him close, felt his distance. The first time she'd looked in his eyes, she'd felt time slope dizzyingly away from her, reminding her of standing in the surf. Waves lapping her feet with deceptive gentleness. Sand crumbling from under her curled toes.

Her fingers trembled.

She drew a breath. The ocean, so vast, so outwardly placid. Older than time. It had formed the planet, she thought, made it what it was. She wondered if every wife of the sea had felt as a planet to her husband's ocean.

The wind picked up. A spiteful howl, she thought. Anger in this storm. That in itself was not unusual.

Then why was her hand shaking?

She sipped from her glass. Rarely did it hold anything stronger than water, as she knew how simple it would be to accept wine's deceptive calm. Tonight the tasteless wet filled her mouth but did nothing to slake her thirst.

Terror had dried her out.

She started at that thought. Terrified? She was merely sitting in her living room, knitting, as she had before, and would do again. There was nothing to terrify her in this storm. Her husband had returned from every one of them. Only once had he been injured, and that a mere scratch across his arm. He had not even taken stitches. Other fisher's wives had told of terrors their husbands moaned against in the night. Sleep stripped them of taciturnity. Sometimes they wept. But her husband—either he had never seen such things as the other men, or he was stronger of will than they.

It would be impossible to tell.

Her shoulders were tensed, her feet tapping. No music played. She thought that might be part of the problem. She set the sweater aside and moved to address that issue when the door blew open.

She screamed without breath. She saw nothing but driving rain outside the doorway, heard the howl of wind, but swore something watched.

She slammed the door closed, shot every bolt on its oaken face, jammed the prop in place. Panting, she leaned her forehead against the door, struggling against sobs that wanted to rise. She would not let them. Her dinner sat heavy in the pit of her stomach and would sit no more lightly if she gave in to her fear.

The public house was open, and it offered warmth, light, friends. The walk down would be unpleasant, to be sure, but she found it mattered little to her.

What did matter was her sudden certitude that something in this storm waited for her.

Electricity split the sky, and she gasped. Silly, she scolded herself. Nothing but lightning, and would be followed by thunder. She began to count, hoping to place the storm's center.

She got to seventeen before she realized no thunder would follow that bolt.

A small cry escaped her throat. She ran to each window, closed curtains behind panes already shuttered. She dashed to the fire, built it up enough to choke the chimney with smoke. The embers bore her a sullen wrath. She ignored it. She found her hands gripping her broom handle, sweeping the already-clean stone floor. Rugs were pushed aside, furniture lifted. She would clean and clean until this driving need to have all chaos in its proper order had passed.

She heard, just then, a squawk.

She stopped. Froze. It could have been any number of things. A neighbor's cat, mad about being caught in the wet. A bird of prey triumphant with a night's kill. But she knew it was not.

And it had come from just outside her window.

She stepped away from the kitchen, backing toward the light and sanity of the hearth fire. Her knitting still sat in its pool of heavy blue, but she knew she'd never be able to calm herself enough to pick it up. She reached instead for the book she had hoped she would never need. The one her husband had gifted her with on their wedding night. The one he had given to her with one hand, while his other clasped hers. Even before they had consummated their union, he had given it to her, and bade her breathe one word to him.

Promise.

She remembered now how flustered she'd been. A week's festivities had left her drained, happy, eagerly awaiting what she'd been told was the best aspect of marriage. Union. Her husband of seven hours had led her to the marriage bed, silent, his eyes wide and blank on hers. She'd taken the book, promised, then asked--”What am I promising?”

He had smiled, a smile that aged him into oblivion. That was the first moment she realized what she had done in marrying a man of the sea. He would forever be more of the sea than of her. The enormity of that slammed into her, and she began to cry.

“No,” he said, and touched her face. “The time for tears is not now. When that time comes, you must have this, my love, my dear. This book will be all you need to guard against what will come.”

Now she thought of that night and felt the impact of his words all over again. The years between might have been finger-snaps. She withdrew the green leather volume from its hiding place, under skein after skein of yarn in her knitting basket. Once again she saw the quiet wink of semi-precious gems, felt the gilt-edged pages. A single tear fell. That was all she would allow herself for now.

She prayed to whatever deity was listening, for strength.

She opened the cover, watched with no real surprise as the text began to glow red. She began to read aloud in a language she had never before spoken—a language that had not been voiced for a thousand years.

The sea has a memory longer than any other.

Her entire voice rolled into pronunciation of every word. Her throat opened, voice drew from the bottom of her lungs. Energy curled into her, crafty, and she curved her fingers around the next page. The next. Then the next. Her grief for the man she loved clawed out of her heart and into her throat, struggled, found purchase, and bled out into every word she read. The syllables that followed no grammar seen by modern humanity throbbed with her pain, her horror, her anguish. The lilt in her voice took on a keening edge.

Her voice rose.

The wind began to calm.

She continued, now nearing the halfway point in the ancient tome. Her hands no longer shook. So much strength now flowed through her, she wondered that she did not rip the very fabric of reality.

Then she ceased to wonder at all.

Her fingertips began to glow, gold and blue against the green and red of the book. Still she read. The tone of her voice was joined by others, and others, until a chorus of rolling voices churned out of her throat. Smoke poured from her eyes, her hair curled into vicious tendrils around her face. Her clothes melted from her body in a molten flood of homespun wool and cotton. She rose from the little chair by the now-roaring fire, squared off as for battle, and turned to face the door.

It opened again, not with a bang this time, but with a slow reveal intended to terrify. The time for her terror was over, now. She met the wild war of elements with a calm eye, and the voice of everyone taken by every millennium of devastation wrought by the creature outside.

The book in her hands, she wasn't even looking at it anymore. With a shimmer of light and reality, it began to shift into a long metal sword, its haft of onyx, its blade of cold iron. The stones that had decorated its covers now wound themselves into the leather binding of the haft itself. She continued to speak as if she read from its pages, and perhaps she did.

One long leg extended through the doorway, followed by another, and another. Several more entered before the thing's monstrous body could fold itself against the ceiling. She stood, fire behind her, sword before her, incantations flowing from her. The beast roared, a mewling howl that came from nowhere so much as within her own mind. Still the words flowed from her, through her, toward the being whose presence would have driven her to madness mere moments before.

It roared again. She felt her joints go liquid, fluid, ready for attack, ready to defend, ready to avenge.

Its eyes were a purple more noxious than swamp gas. They assessed her as she assessed it. Coolly her mind ticked off points of vulnerability. The monster had many. Probably the creature had existed as long as it had thanks to its tendency to instantly render men to gibbering madness.

But now it was dealing with the woman of one of those men, and all the fury of hell would not be penetrated by his insectoid form.

Her voice rose again.

The monster screamed again, this time in pain.

Her mouth twitched into a smile.

The words still fell from her lips, faster now. The monster began to cringe, to shake, and finally it charged. She dodged, deft, and sliced one of the monster's legs at the knee. It ripped, dangled, attached by stretching skin. Its scream was one of wretched fury, and worse, of surprise. She thought, detached, that the monster had not been surprised in some time. If ever.

She punched upward with the blade, its point digging into the thing's hairy stomach. It howled, and she heard the wind pick up. Lightning crashed. Rain foamed in the streets. She paid it no mind. A tree branch crashed against the side of her house. It might have never happened. She rose her voice still higher, louder, with all the aid she could take.

The smile never left her face as she sank the sword into the beast again and again. Once she pounded the sword in far enough that her wrist tasted its blood. Still the beast's ridiculous fangs did not touch her, his sense-hairs on his legs (what's the word for those???) did not score her with their venom. She thought he was more of a show than a horror, but still she fought, madly, balancing on the edge of her endurance as she dodged, faked, stabbed.

She howled, then.

The storm blew itself silent.

The monster's orange ichor gushed onto the fresh-swept floor.

Its legs curled underneath, and after one great shudder that wracked her rafters, it was still.

Triumph filled her, and the chorus of voices rang out in a crescendo of joy. Finally, the ravage of the sea would destroy no more.

She plunged the bloodied blade into the air, laughed once, twice, then felt her humanity return. Divinity ebbed from her, edging first out of the blade, then out of her arms, her legs, and finally her heart.

She fell to the floor, clutching her sides, her grief crashing into her harder than any wave. The book clattered to the floor beside her, its cover now a brilliant red, its pages scribed in her husband's hand, the words every one a murmur of his love for her.