THE SEA HAG(13)

His father clung with corded muscles, the tiller in one hand and a mast stay in the other. Rags of sailcloth snapped from the spar every time the open boat pitched.

Hale's hair was black and his face younger than that of the father Dennis knew in life. His mouth was open, but he was no longer trying to shout against the tumult.

The sea became as still as the dead air within the eye of the storm. The water began to change color beside the boat's starboard rail. Streaks of brown, waving in sinuous ripples; coalescing, spreading wider and sharpening into burnished purple...

The ripples of color formed a circle forty feet across. A living thing rose in the center of the tendrils that were the fringe of its body.

"A sea hag..." Dennis whispered to Chester; but the boy had no companion to hear him in this place of storm.

The sea hag had the face of a beautiful woman floating in the swirl of her lustrous hair, but the skin was gray and the expression was as still as marble. Beneath the face and seeming hair was a greasy hugeness over which the ocean shimmered like the surface of a wading pool. The fishing boat steadied.

Nothing moved but the sea hag's hair and the wall of storm beyond.

"What is it that you want?" Hale shouted at the creature which gripped the keel of his boat. His voice was clear and strong; fear had raised it an octave above its normal pitch.

Dennis had heard of the sea hag as he had heard of a score of other bogeys from his nurse's imagination or the ancient past of Earth before men came here from the stars. Imagination surely, but—

The thing floating in the water opened a mouth that split the woman-face and crossed the "hair" floating a yard to either side. The creature's gullet was arched with bone and otherwise as red as heart's blood. From corner to corner, the mouth was wider than Dennis was tall.

The sea hag said in a cavernous voice, "King Hale, I would bargain with you."

The huge lips closed and their edges merged. The female features reformed as if they had never been split and distorted across the head of a monster as great as the boat beside which it floated. The ridges of brown and purple scales that counterfeited hair trembled again to complete the illusion.

"Let me go!" Hale cried. "You have the wrong man. I'm no king!"

"Would you be a king, Fisherman Hale?" rumbled the sea hag, smearing its human countenance again.

Dennis would have closed his eyes, but he had no eyes in this time, and no sound came when he tried to scream.

"Or would you be a drowned corpse that my sea casts up when the fish are done with it?"

The white-red throat growled like the storm. The lightning-shot circle squeezed closer to the motionless boat.

"What will you bargain, sea hag?" Hale demanded with shrill courage that calmed his son to hear. Hale was frightened, facing death and a monster more shocking than death; but he was facing them as best he could.

Dennis, safe behind a veil of time and magic, had his father as a model of how a man should act in the final crisis. Hale's son could do no less than control his feelings now, when he was only a phantom of sense and feelings.

"I will make you king of this shore, fisherman," the sea hag said. "King of Emath."

"Dead man on dead rocks, is that what you mean?" Hale cried. "Begone, sea-bitch—the storm will bargain me that."

"I will make you king in a crystal palace if you bargain with me, fisherman," said the sea hag. "I will raise a harbor safe in any storm, and all who use the harbor will be yours to command under our bargain. All this... or the rocks and the fish and the birds to peck your bones."

"You're toying with me," Hale said, no longer shouting or angry. He let go of the tiller and stay; the boat was as firm as if were dragged its length onto shore. "Why do you talk of bargains, sea hag? I haven't anything but my clothes and this boat—and only a half share in the boat."

The sea hag closed its lips. Its woman-face smiled at Hale with the icy visage of a castle courtesan.

"Give me your firstborn son, King Hale," said the terrible real mouth.

"I haven't a wife, I haven't a son," said Hale, wringing his hands at the false hope. "I haven't a son!"

"Give me your firstborn son when he is a year of age, King Hale," said the sea hag. "And I will give you Emath and your life."

"You can't really do that," Hale said. "You can't make me king..."

His voice had fallen almost to a whisper. Dennis heard it, and the woman-face smiled again.

The wrack of storm clouds was clearing, blowing away in tatters in every direction. The sun was low in the west. Its light streamed in crimson fingers through the remnants of the storm.

"Bargain with me, King Hale," said the sea hag.