Chapter 2
A short stretch out from the Red Bay, across from the sunset, there was a wake. Joannes Furlanus was the leader and sole participant; he sat in solitude on a rowing dinghy and plied himself with awful liquor and old cheese from his sister’s goat. He accompanied two corpses, fat, fraying and in parts, that lay at the bottom of the ocean – fairly nearby. Joannes could not see them, but they were roughly beneath the boat. They were his friends.
Joannes watched black bleed into the water as the sunlight faded. He was a fat, companionable man, accustomed to ease, and unsettled by grief. Having waited for the majority of the evening on the water, he considered his vigil ended and decided to pack away, slightly numb and probably still more coherent than he wanted. He burped quietly to himself, dabbed under his eyes with an over-loved handkerchief, and raised his bottle to the ocean in a final salutation.
The water he waved at rippled, and Joannes realized he wasn’t alone. An unsettling fear gripped him; he rationalized it and shook it off. A seal was swimming at the surface of the ocean. The black sheen from its back and the V-shaped trail it left were the only things disturbing the calm water.
The seal headed straight to the shore. Joannes, having been surprised, stopped preparing to leave and followed it with his eyes.
The seal swam all the way to the beach, where as the light faded, the shoreline and the sea were watering together under one darkness. When the seal was only several feet from the water’s edge, it pushed hard and reared back to lift its chest out of the sea.
The water around the seal coagulated and thrust up, as if moved by the beat of a heavy drum under the water. The animal’s skin clearly loosened, starting to fall away from its host and back into the water as if the unfortunate thing had been slit down the belly. The seal kept rising, the skin was left behind, the flesh uncovered beneath was white as bone and the animal stretched and lengthened until it was 5 or 6 feet tall and almost upright. The skin slid down limply, until it was hitched up at the sides and drawn up around the woman that the seal had become. As she walked out of the sea and onto the beach, her footsteps matched and became the drumbeat that Joannes could hear around his head. Joannes was choking on that drumbeat, which seemed to hum throughout the whole clear night.
The woman had hair so black it seemed to be nothing; an absence of matter. Her black hair ran in coarse waves over her seal-skin coat, which was so heavily peppered with black spots that it was solidly black everywhere except at the edges where the skin would have stretched over the animal’s front. Several paces across the sand, she stopped suddenly, and the air around Joannes grew still.
The woman bowed her head and gave the heavy, controlled sigh of someone who has not paused for breath in a very long time. Then, without a glance back, she walked straight ahead into the night.
Joannes Furlanus blinked stupidly, staring after her. I am drunk, he realised, wiping his brow with the back of his hand.
He shook his head and rowed carefully to shore.
Lady Fárbauti cut across the earth like a knife. She knew the route - as the crow flies - by heart up the knoll which saw the edges of the town settled at its foot, which was, higher up, the stoic host to the human house. From cypress and stone pine emerged the house on a curved path, humble villa of a merchant's father's father - styled with the same muted, cracking hues of the very earth it had been written onto.
All across the Mediterranean the lady had encountered burial sites that had not been there before; new and with a shuddering wrongness to them. The whole ocean reeked of blood to her. And so she could not help the fear that walked by her side as she ascended. She could not escape the wretched nakedness, the feeling of having been split which she shouldn’t have expected for another four years. But chiefly, Fárbauti was angry that someone would dare to bring harm to her family.
Fárbauti was enraged.
Soon it became apparent that in the little villa four lights were on; one in the reception room, and then three for the bedrooms; that of the owner, Laufey, that of their daughter and that of her son. They were all three in the house, which meant they were carrying on to some degree at least and all, most importantly, alive. This reassured the furious selkie.
The door opened silently when she was only a few paces away; she swept in and briefly embraced her lover, apologizing immediately for having been delayed. Skadi had been watching her mother while perched in the window with her fist pressed against her mouth, concern and agitation warring across her features. She quickly jumped up and squeezed Fárbauti through the rolls of her cloak, and her mother returned the gesture, gripping tight with her chin on her daughter's head.
Loki had remained seated on the divan. The anxiety in his countenance betrayed his very nature – Loki was half a creature of myth - and she saw that his arms were layered with horrendous scars.
“I think I’ve made a mistake,” Loki told Fárbauti, candidly, to which she made no reply.
Loki peered calculatedly at his mother, and a slow smiled crept across his face as he did. His nerves dissipated. He nodded in acknowledgement, suddenly recalling the greeting she was owed, which wasn’t enough for her – she practically leaped to him and took his face in her hands, resting her lips at Loki’s hairline, then quickly peppering him with kisses as she reaching around his back to slowly pet him. Proud Loki sighed and relaxed into her hold. Over the top of Loki’s head Fárbauti gave Laufey a pointed look, which was addressed not at him per se, but at the situation at hand.
Fárbauti drew back as Laufey approached with a bottle, and she removed from her coat a chalice inlayed with mother of pearl. She reclined on the low table across from her son and watched with a blank, distracted face as Laufey poured the rare and revered wine for her; black in the low light. Laufey set the bottle aside and sat by Fárbauti, who took a slow drink and faced Loki.
Lady Fárbauti cleared her throat.
The selkie’s soft voice was pitched low, and had a slight rasp. “Please disclose to me,” she asked, addressing the whole room, “what has occurred.”
Loki explained the story of his sunken ship and unlikely aid, with Laufey’s help. Both accounts were befittingly accompanied by the despondent gazes of Skadi.
The selkie’s eyes, surely the blackest things about her, were fixed on Loki the whole time he spoke, lips set in grim thought as she stared. As soon as he was finished she announced without pause that she would be staying for a while. Laufey was shocked and protested that it wouldn’t be good for her health, citing the climate, and the inquisitive nature of their neighbors in the town, among other things. Fárbauti finally turned from Loki to argue quietly with her husband; she insisted these things were irrelevant. They were overridden by her duty as a mother.
Lady Fárbauti suddenly decided she was hungry and excused herself to the well-stocked pantry in order to put together an abhorrent excuse for a meal as she spoke. She arranged it on a dish she procured, once again from her coat, a plate made from one huge curved shell, ornamented with fossilized bone. Loki couldn’t help but trail behind her and blink in disgusted fascination at what she ate.
The selkie carried fat in peculiar places, but altogether, she was slim beneath her coat, and cut a stark silhouette with a candle behind her. Loki found it hard to understand how her frame could sustain her diet.
Fárbauti theorized to the family that the best way to proceed would be, logically, to open peace talks with King Odin, who lead what was not only the closest but one of the most powerful underwater kingdoms in the Mediterranean. The people of Asgard were most likely responsible for the deaths in La Baia Rossa. Sicily, Fárbauti haughtily declaimed, paled in comparison to Asgard in terms of culture and manpower both.
As she spoke she shoveled down handfuls of dry, uncooked beans coated in Laufey’ prized Indian spices, of cinnamon, garlic, and vanilla mixed together, of fish that she’d found hanging – these she spat out straight onto the floor. She got into the cured meat and ate it only after flipping both sides in ground red chilli and cumin. She ate until her nose ran and she started to cry, she wiped her face with the back of her arm or her glorious coat which she refused to part with and then continued to eat. Eventually the smell got so bad that Loki took Skadi back into the living room and continued agreeing with his mother through the wall.
“They’ll have to listen to us if they know you’ve got Jotunheim behind you… yes…” Fárbauti mumbled through the food. “By my gods, it’s unacceptable.” Wipe. “I’m sure we can get away with making them believe they’ve exposed themselves with this absurdity… let them know you’re all coming armed with pitchforks… and you pray to your God and get a few storms on the way… or does that not work, I don’t know. I’ve never quite comprehended Catholicism. Of course the king is not directly responsible but he’ll be turning a blind eye, that old incompetent… they don’t care, none of them care, but they will now, oho, they’ve got half the North sea on their backs, and if it's a war they want then it's a war they'll get... well, actually, I suppose, hopefully not… Loki, you would be an ambassador of course… the we could- oh, is that so, my dear? We’ll see about that… and-”
“And what do we do then, after I’ve lied about representing the bay as some sort of diplomat for humanity, come back and let everyone know some angry mermaids told us to stop sailing anywhere, ever, and to find some other way to make a living?” Loki inquired sensibly into the stone wall.
His mother smiled to herself and burped. “They’re terrified, my heart, I’m sure we can rustle something up to make them change their trade routes to here or stop fishing there. Some scary stories. These people adore sea monsters. I can do that – look at me, I’m horrifying.”
“You’re a naked woman giving herself indigestion… stop that, dear,” Laufey ordered at last, worried equally for his wife and his pantry. “Go sit down and have another drink and I’ll get some crackers."
Laufey was in the habit of sweeping his wife away and off to a moonlit picnic or lovers’ siesta whenever his good fortune saw her cross his threshold – he felt slightly guilty to be upset that Loki and his mysterious friend were delaying them with this war business. Laufey was back and forth across the underwater kingdoms God knew how many times a year with his textiles, and never had a problem, because he didn’t have a tendency to stick pikes onto his hull or spirit away mer-women from rocks or other such things. He felt that it all would have been avoidable… Loki was right, though, none of them would believe the family – already pointedly labeled as ‘individual’ – if they started ranting about people with tails in the ocean whose feelings were being hurt.
“We’d have more information to go on if you’d make contact with your friend, elskling,” Fárbauti told Loki as she stumbled back onto the divan.
“I’ll get around to that soon… If he’s not run off,” Loki told her, his eyes flicking conspicuously to Laufey and back. Loki’s father wasn’t pleased.
“Is that really wise?” he wondered. “We don’t want a repeat of what happened last time…”
Fárbauti loved her husband but she ignored his opinion almost exclusively. “Our ally was most likely not responsible for that tragic wreck,” she said. “Even if he wasn’t just an innocent passerby – which he might well have been, given his apparent tendency to shadow Loki - he clearly had a change of heart – and let me tell you, my love, when they work themselves up, that is hard to do. And you don’t have to get back in a sailboat if you don’t want to, darling. He might even be waiting for you at the beach.”
“That’s highly unlikely,” Loki said. “Look,-“
“If he’s inquisitive…”
“I wouldn’t count on it. He’s not a complete fool.” Loki was suddenly overcome with melancholy and slumped. “Ah, but mother, what if it made him some sort of... outcast, what he did? What if something’s happened to him?”
Fárbauti inclined her head to one side and sipped. “I genuinely don’t know,” she explained, “things work very differently down here. None of this seems particularly organized, however, so I wouldn’t worry. That is to say, I expect there was no official decree, ‘attack the ship’, which is to say, he wouldn’t have been committing a crime. I also don’t expect many people to have noticed. They do work themselves into awful frenzies, like I said... I-”
“Alright, well, either way… I’ll go tomorrow.”
Laufey was leaning against a wall and frowning. Skadi had imitated him, and they exchanged a glance. Loki’s father cleared his throat. “Are you sure,” he began, knowing that he was wasting breath anyways. Loki tended to make his mind up about matters early on and then still pretend he was considering two options, in order to flatter people. At least Fárbauti, Laufey thought, had the decency to openly ignore a man.
“Father, please,” Loki said. “It’s fine.”
“It’s just if you’re getting dragged into something you’re not comfortable with… I know you have a tendency… this is all a bit much…"
But Loki’s ego was too stoked by the fire in his cabalistic mother to continue to please Laufey (without the promise of some reward). He suddenly clapped his hands, once and loudly. “It’s settled!” he announced, even though it was not, thus finishing the argument. “I’ll go tomorrow. The family is reunited and mother is still hungry, so instead of blowing air around, please let’s just eat.”
At that, Fárbauti leapt from the divan again. Loki followed her into the kitchen where he shadowed her at the half-set table, flipping meat around in chilli with forced determination.
And so Laufey was left pouting with his daughter back where they’d started.
“My dear,” the merchant confided unhappily to Skadi, “I am a stepping stone to this family.”
Skadi, who was tired of trailing around after others and not getting a say despite being elder than her brother, and who recognised that Fárbauti and her son were possessed of a fatal arrogance, and who had been made to feel inferior enough of late, nodded in agreement. “And," she said, "by God, I do not like the thought of him back on the sea. The only way- Ha! I’ve just had a thought.” She covered her smile with the back of her hand.
“The only way I’m comfortable having Loki see this merman again is in our own house, with our guest heaped into a bathtub.”
This made Laufey laugh.
The couple started to cackle loudly enough to draw Loki, eyes full of regret and watering, too, from the spices, from the kitchen. Fárbauti stumbled behind him, fat, drunk and confused. She didn’t know what was going on but she started laughing too, clear and sharp, like a witch. Only Loki was left with a frown on his face, and he started to blush, but when he asked what was so funny all he could get was – from either Laufey or Skadi – “-a bathtub! Oh, God…”