Tales from the Greenhouse 1 - The Sea Witch

The Greenhouse
Slowly Susan opened the door to the greenhouse. Tähti had sent her down there to ask for some special flowers, the old gardener had promised to bring, but they had not arrived. She held tight to the handle, so as not to slam the door. Those loud, metallic sounds were not welcome when old Tom worked. She wound her way through the raised beds of small sproutlings and larger tables with plants in every imaginable colour and form, many in pots as tall as Susan and even more in tiny ones, some not larger than a thimble. All the plants had a sign telling their name in Latin and Icelandic put into the earth or stuck underneath the pots of the very tiny ones. A huge tree stump overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle and many other climbing and saprophytic plants stood in the very centre of the greenhouse. And then she saw Tom, he stooped over a small bed on a table, artificially lighted with purplish-red light.
"Oh yes, he said, turning down the magical glow of the lightening with a slight move of his hand.
"Flowers for Tähti?" Susan nodded.  "I forgot. Come here."
Tom was not his real name, But because he always spoke in very short sentences nobody, not even himself, could combine the very long name he was given long ago with the old man he had become. Susan could never stop wondering if he was born like this, slow, gentle and mild. His real name always made Susan think of the Ents something like Reynir-Röskvi Rósmundarson.
Susan was brought back to reality as Tom turned right and stopped.
"Here!" he said, picking some very fragrant vine flowers, that each gave off a flash of gently coloured light as he snapped the stems.
"They are best fresh." he added. The longest sentence Susan had ever heard him utter.
"Return tomorrow?" he asked Susan. "I'll show you?" Susan nodded agreement and thanked the old gardener. Then carefully holding on to the flowers, and remembering to close the door carefully on her way out, she retraced her steps to the alchemy room on the second floor.

***

Next day Susan returned to the greenhouse in the long lunch break. She found Tom eating his lunch in an artificially lighted cubicle adjoining the greenhouse.
   "Don't you ever eat in the Barn with the rest of us?" Susan asked without thinking. Tom only shook his head. Susan looked despondently to the floor.
  "Sorry. I did not mean to pry ... only ... well the Nisser are cooking for us, and it's so tasty. I would like you to have ... " She stopped and looked at the tiny table. "Oh, they bring some over to you! How very good," Her face lit up in a mile and Tom had to smile as well. He realised that Susan really was not nosy or rude, only impulsive and very young still.
   He pointed at a stool, and Susan sat down, patiently and without a word waiting for Tom to finish. She was really quiet, and thought to herself: 'The quiet here, together with Tom is a good quiet, a full quiet. Not like the awkward quiet in the school back home when no-one but me knows the answer, or even worse the impatient, waiting quiet in the mornings, when I wait for Dad to go to work. How come quiet can be so many things?' She would have liked to ask Tom, but she did not know which words to use, or how he would reach to such a question. And then the time for asking was past, Tom stacked the plate, shortly bowed his head as in thanks or prayer and stood. Susan also stood and followed him into the damp, musty smelling greenhouse.
   He walked ahead of her to the furthest corner, and stopped at a basin filled with water and stones.
   "Sea water," he said. "Look into it." Susan bent close to the surface and looked into the depths. It was as if the basin was deeper and larger as could be possible. The smell of brine was in her nostrils and the sound of rolling waves in her ears. She looked and looked, and suddenly she saw several of yesterdays flowers floating on the water. Thy were called sjóblóm (Sea flowers) she looked closer and saw small clusters of eggs clinging to the stems that were underwater.
   Now she realized that Täthi never really told much about the flowers yesterday. and she pulled out of the mild spell she was under without noticing.
   "Yesterday, I brought the sjóblóm to Täthi, she told us almost nothing about them, but used them in a potion against drowning. She even did not teach us how to make this potion. Are sjóblóm dangerous?"
   Tom looked at her, surprised, like a man awakened from a dream: "You are wise. Sjóblóm are dangerous. Did you feel it? The spell?"
   "You mean the smell of the sea, the sound of waves and the feeling like I was standing at the shore of a giant ocean. Yes, I felt it. Now the basin looks small and normal again. You would not have let me fall into it, would you?" Susan realised that she was all alone in a far off corner of the farthest building of the Farm, with a man several times older and stronger than herself. And nobody even knew where she was.
   "I take care of you. You will come to no harm. At least of my making!" Tom protested. He looked straight at her. "Trust me?" And Susan did. Together they bent over the basin, and again Susan smelled the sea, hard the waves and felt the ocean stretching in front of her. She felt the spray engulf her and she felt Tom's hand in her own. Together they dived in and swam towards the deep sea.

***

The pressure of water against Susan's chest was overwhelming and her need to breathe could not be ignored much longer. Her ears were singing, not any longer with the waves of the ocean, but with the high pitched humming, that precedes fainting.
Tom looked at her: "Sorry! I forgot. It's not quite enough to hold my hand. Take this!" he said and pressed a Sjóblóm into Susan's hand. As she grasped the stem, she felt her body tingling from head to toe, and she opened her mouth wide open. After the first laboured breath, she drank in the water as were it pure, clean air.
"Sjóblóm!" Tom said, bubbles floating upwards from his mouth. "I'm surprised Tähti did not tell you more of the magical properties of this flower."
"She did not, or she might have told the others while I was getting the flowers, but I doubt it." Susan felt the bubbles tickling her cheek as they floated upwards.

Together they swam, surely further by far than the width and depth of the basin tit the greenhouse. Enormous sea weeds drifted slowly in the current of their making. sheets of green laver, forests of saw wrack and bladder wrack interspersed with stretches of green eelgrass rolled past them, then the water slowly grew darker and the larger seaweeds gave way to pillows of Irish moss and small colonies of corals in all the colours of the rainbow. Shortly after passing between two peculiar red clumps of corals, Tom stopped. Suddenly they were surrounded by a swarm of pipefish and seahorses. The pipefish all gave off high, shrilling notes. Susan felt like holding her ears. The biggest of the seahorses swam up to Tom, and Susan was surprised to see, that it was taller than Tom. The giant seahorse was covered in tiny platelets, Thousands and thousands of tiny platelets like an armour covered its body. And it had spines. Spines everywhere and of every conceivable colour. Susan knew that seahorses grew all their life. This seahorse had to be ancient beyond measure to be this big and spine-clad.
It spoke to Tom in shrill tones, more articulate than the pipefishes' piping, but still not a language Susan could hope to understand. Tom answered, listened, and answered again; then he asked something as far as she could hear. The big seahorse answered with a small, but piercing note.

"What was all that about?" Susan asked Tom, as he returned.
"The seahorse people need our help. I do not understand Littoral very well. I just hope I'm good enough to be of any help."
"You haven't forgotten that I'm a witch?" Susan asked. "I can cast a spell to make almost any language understandable. It is the very same Gilvi casts over the Farm every morning." She stopped talking "... but this means that we're outside Unicorn Farm here ... or that Littoral is not affected by the spell." She fell silent again. The big seahorse emitted some shrill sounds, and even without understanding the language, Susan understood the urgency and looked smilingly at the seahorse.

It spoke again in the strident, sibilant Littoral. But Tom slowly shook his head and said some words in the strange language. He turned to Susan. "Try your spell. He is using a lot of words I do not understand."
Susan drew her wand and concentrated. Clearly she spoke the Icelandic words and swished her wand. It did not work. "It's the water," Susan said. "It hampers my movements, and makes the swish into a slow movement instead."
The big seahorse came closer and said something. It was obvious to Susan that it spoke slowly, one word at a time. Tom answered. The seahorse looked at him and repeated the same three sounds over again. Susan tried the spell once more: "Mál sameinast!" she said loudly, as if trying to make up for the sluggishness of the water by being louder. It worked, partially at least. Suddenly she understood what the seahorse meant. She turned to Tom. "I think it wants us to eat the Sjóblóm."
"Yesss!" the seahorse said clearly. "Yessss ... Eat ... Bloom".
"No!" Tom said. "If we eat the flowers we grow. When we grasp the sjóblóm by the stem and dive into the water, we turn small, smaller than a seahorse, and we can breathe the sea water. If we eat the flowers, we keep our normal size, and can breathe the seawater for a limited time only." He turned to the sea horse: "No good. We grow too big!" and he added some words in Littoral as well.
The seahorse nodded slowly. Then it went over to Susan and looked her in the eyes. It spoke to her, a mixture of Littoral and Danish streamed from it. It repeated over and over until Susan understood and repeated slowly "I crush the flower, keep the stem in my hand and put the crushed flower on my wand. Yes?" "Yes!" The seahorse nodded emphatically. "Flower Crush ... Wand Move!" Susan did not linger. Quickly she stripped the flower from the stem, crushed the petals in her hand and drew her wand back and forth through the mashed flower. "Now. Spell!" the seahorse said. Susan clenched the stem in one hand while she swished the wand through the language spell. "Mál sameinast!" she said as her wand swished unimpaired through the water. And the usual mosquito sound was in her ears. The seahorse spoke again, and now it sounded like ordinary words, even if Susan still if she tried could hear the sibilant tones of Littoral behind them.
"Thank you." it said and turned to Tom: "Do you know how many timess I've watched you sswimming thesse waterss?" Tom shook his head. "And how many timess have you spoken to my people before today," the Seahorse continued. "But today you finally brought another one with you, a female even. Will you help us?"
"If we can and may." Tom answered, "We cannot help you against our conscience. What is your need?"
"It'ss the Sea Mother. She iss dying, or rather fading. She iss, or was, human like you once. She needss to ssee humans now and then to remember what it'ss like to be human. She needss the sservice of her own kind."
Susan thought back to the Christmas party and asked: "Is it like the old tales from Greenland? The tales of the Sea Mother with all the animals of the sea bound in her hair. And the young heroes that swim down and comb her hair to let the fishes and seals and whales out of her hair?"
"Yess," the seahorse said. "Ssomething very like thiss iss what I want to assk you."
"Do we have to comb her hair?" Susan asked.
"No," the seahorse said. "It'ss something both eassier and harder I have to demand from you. You, little girl, you need to sstand naked in front of the Sea Mother. Only thuss can her memory and ssanity be restored."

Susan swallowed. "Is she ... , no, that's not what I mean. ... Please tell me a little more."
"There'ss little to no rissk in it for you," the seahorse said. "But for uss it's a question of life and death. Tom here has kept us alive by throwing sjóblóm into the basin for a long time."
She looked at Tom. "Did you know about this?" she asked.
"No, I did not. I did not know about the Sea Mother at all. I ... have felt like something or someone looked at me. Sometimes. When I was swimming in here. But my stays in this water have always been a pleasure. I have always returned a wiser man. I never dreamt .." his voice faded. "I promise to turn my back and not look. I won't make this any harder for you, Susan. Please forgive me for bringing you here." He turned away, but not before Susan saw his face turn all red.
Strangely touched and assured by Tom's obvious confusion and plight, Susan looked at the Seahorse. "I will do it," she said. "Please lead the way to the Sea Mother."

The seahorse turned around and spoke to the pipefish in Littoral, so fast that only a few of the words were intelligible for the two humans.
The pipefish rearranged themselves, making it clear which route they should take. And they followed the giant seahorse between two rows of noisy, softly jubilant pipefish.

They swam into a clearing, bordered by white and red patterned corals and big globules of Irish moss in intricate patterns. Suddenly Susan realized that most of the red and white corals were not corals at all, but camouflaged seahorses. Then her eyes fell on the giant Sea Mother and she forgot about all the other wonders of this underwater world.

The Sea Mother was not a human being, or rather she was more than a human being. Her skin was pale silver, shimmering like fish scales, because it was scales. Thousands and other thousands of tiny scales close together covered her skin. Her hair was made out of filaments of red and green seaweeds and swayed and drifted slowly in the current. She was clothed in scales, or maybe it was her skin. Susan could not see where her skin-scales ended and the dress-scales began, but a dress, kind of anyway, fell from her middle, silver shining in all the colours of a broken rainbow whenever she moved. Her face was beautiful and ugly at the same time, the scales gave it a strange, inhuman look, but the sea green eyes looked like ordinary eyes only now empty and old. Her upper appendages, or arms were like the arms of a squid, yet with human elbows and wrists, She held a long, straight rod of pure white corals in one hand.

The giant seahorse bowed, and Tom and Susan did the same, carefully so as not to get off balance in the water. Then Tom sat down on a boulder turning the back to the Sea Mother and Susan, while Susan took off her skirt and her green tunic and folded them nicely, a task made difficult by the water and currents. Then she pulled off her undergarments as well and placed them on the skirt. She put a stone on top of it all to keep it in place and then she waited for the Seahorse to do his bit.
"Dear Sea Mother." he said. "I am here today to bring you a guest from the surface world from whence you came."
"Did I?" she asked. Her voice was sweet and ancient, yet strong and clear. "I do not remember. Who are you?"
The seahorse said its name - a hissing, sibilant string of tones and sounds in Littoral, that the spell did nothing to translate. And satisfied the Sea Mother turned her green eyes to Susan: "What is your name, strange being?" she asked in a friendly voice.
"My name is Susan." she answered truthfully.
"Are you a female of your species?"
"Yes I am," Susan answered a bit surprised.
"I once was like you," the Sea witch said dreamingly, her eyes turning darker, sadder, but more present. "I was a girl like you. I lived in a small village, and I was an apprentice to the witch there. I was on my way to ... somewhere, when I came here .... Those are some of my last memories."
"What is your name?" Susan asked.
"That is one of the things, I have forgotten." The Sea Mother answered. "And each morning I awaken with more holes in my memory. I need to shed many years' worth of sea-growth."
"All right your Majesty," Susan said, but the Sea Mother interrupted her: "Don't call me that! I'm not a queen or some such. I am a witch like you. Only one living under the sea."
"All right, Sea Mother. Look at me and heal." Susan said, as the seahorse had instructed her.

The Sea Mother looked at Susan, and as she looked, her arms grew more arm-like, the billowing skirt became more like a skirt and less like an extra skin. Shortly the Sea Mother looked like an older, more grown up version of what Susan always had imagined mermaids to look like. Not with split fish tails, but humans with fish scales for skin. Her hair was still seaweedy, but now browner and coarser than the red and green strands earlier. "My name is Adele," she said. "Now I remember. I was a witch-apprentice in the town of Borse. I was on my way home from my last exam. Then I ate a Sjóblóm on the day of the blue moon and I turned into a Sea witch, a Sea Mother if you like. Over 400 years ago.
During alll those years my body had changed. It happened gradually. I grew gills to breathe, scales to protect my skin, appendages covered my arms. And so on, and so on. I turned into the thing you saw when you arrived. But I had grown too far from my original form. I did no longer remember how it was to be human. And I have to remember to be the Mother of the sea; to hinder the storms from blowing too violently and to let the fish grow for the fishermen to catch."
"Thank you, my child. Thank you for giving me back myself and my humanity. You may dress again." Susan pulled on the wet clothes, it was hard work as anyone ever trying to put on wet clothes will know, and she was happy to be wearing the school uniform of Unicorn Farm, and not trousers.

When she was done, and Tom had once again turned around, the Sea Mother gave each of them a small coral from the biggest cluster. "Before you return to the surface, I have this tiny gift for you. This is a special form of marine life," she continued. "It cannot do much, but it has some protective properties, and I foresee that you will need those in times to come. And Susan, keep that stone of yours in your pocket always. It might be even better than my gift. And one last thing. If you ever desperately need help from the sea, throw that little piece of coral into the waters. It will be recognized by sea people everywhere."