Alison Fell is a Scottish poet and novelist who lives in London. Her novels include Every Move You Make, The Bad Box, and Mer de Glace; her poetry collections are Kisses for Mayakovsky and The Crystal Owl. She also edited and contributed to the women’s collections The Seven Deadly Sins and The Seven Cardinal Virtues.
“Queen Christina and the Windsurfer” is a fresh and contemporary re-working of the European “Undine” folk legends—the same legends that inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic “Little Mermaid” (bearing slight resemblance to the cheery Disney movie version) and Charles de Lint’s urban mermaid story elsewhere in this volume. Fell’s sparkling fantasy tale comes from the Winters Tales annual, edited by Robin Baird-Smith.
—T.W.
The big ferry steamed past the mouth of the bay, stately, discoing, lit up like a castle. In the broad white wake Poseidon’s daughter lurked unseen, as one by one coke cans plopped into the waves around her. She watched a pretty German girl stretch out her long brown neck to be kissed; watched how the German boy lifted the glossy sheet of hair and twisted it up on to the crown of her head while he touched his lips to her nape. The hair was toffee-dark with the wheaty sheen of sun, and straight as the farthest horizon.
Swamped with envy, Poseidon’s daughter rolled on to her back, and sighed, and sank. Down in the green deeps of the palace nothing was straight, and everything was uncertain and wavered: or so thought Poseidon's daughter as she combed out her tough black curls in the mirror, and glowered her thick brows, and blew small rainbow bubbles of disgust.
Presently she swam up to her mother and circled hopefully, waiting for an opening.
‘Am I pretty, Mother?’ she demanded at last, with as much petulance as she dared, for Amphitrite was harassed and crusty and had little patience with such energetic despairs.
Amphitrite glanced up from her housework and frowned. It was the holiday season again: six million tourists to shit and piss in the sea. From strayed missiles to ham sandwiches, everything fell from the air and the water rotted it, and try as she might to sweep and sort, to recycle and dispose, the Mediterranean was fast becoming a garbage bin. Amphitrite hurled three thonged sandals and a Daytona Beach T-shirt into a large cockle-shell, and for a moment thought rancorously of Aphrodite—she who rose from the foam and never did a day’s work thereafter.
'Any young girl with clean hair is pretty,’ she said testily, thrusting a broom at her daughter, and her daughter, silenced, took it and the two women set to work in concert, sighing, as women do.
On the beach of Plati Yialos, in Nicos’ Taverna, Hanni the windsurfer was watching television. Hanni the windsurfer was salt-streaked and golden; his jeans were cut off at the knee and the snakelets of his hair were crystalline blond. At night Hanni camped on the beach and ate water-melons filled with rum, and each morning early he would run to the shore and mount his surfboard in one bold bound, and the sail would take the wind and the light board leave the surface and skip from wave-crest to wave-crest until it was virtually flying.
Poseidon’s daughter had watched all this, daily, from the first flush of summer to the harsh height of it, had watched Hanni’s mouth taste the wind and the wind trickle through his hair, watched also the slim girls with cigarettes in their mouths who on the sunburned beach shielded their eyes with their hands and gazed out to sea, waiting for his return . . . had slipped, finally—in love and frustration— under the keel of his board where, clinging on by the tips of her fingers, she had flown beneath him for mile upon ardent mile, all green and unseen in the dappled shadow of the sail.
Down in the deeps Poseidon’s daughter swept and swept and the white sand flew in clouds and the startled inkfish scuttled off to safety.
‘Am I as pretty as . . . ?’ she brooded, frowning so fiercely that she was no longer pretty at all. 'Am I as pretty as . . . ?’
At last the question weighed so heavily that she threw down her broom and entered the throne-room and asked without preamble, 'Who is the most perfect woman in the world, Father?’
From the uncomfortable heights of his throne Poseidon listened unwillingly, tapping his foot on a ramp of seaweed. Above the waves a new moon was rising and at the palace gates his golden sea-horses pranced and whinnied, eager to be off.
‘Why, Aphrodite,’ he said absently, and then, with a guilty glance over his shoulder, he corrected himself. ‘I mean Amphitrite, of course.’
‘But apart from her?’ said his daughter crossly.
Poseidon stroked his long beard for a moment, considering. ‘Helen?’ he pondered, but in truth he had hardly given the matter a thought for the last few centuries. ‘Why don’t you ask your uncle,’ he suggested at last. ‘Zeus always did have an eye for the ladies.’ Then, relieved to have discharged his fatherly duty, he bade his daughter a quick good night and, jumping into his waiting chariot, drove at full speed around the curve of the coast. At the flat rock of Krissopigi Poseidon slithered out of the sea and trained his telescope on the farthest moons of Uranus: Miranda, where blue snows of nitrogen arched and plumed from furious geysers; Triton, with its sheer cliffs of ice more than twenty miles high. As his eye strained to pick out the lovely details, his thoughts strayed to his brother, and he let out an involuntary sigh which stirred the waves to a tumult and spattered the lens of his telescope with spray. For, try as he might to accept his destiny, he could not help feeling that his own inheritance was in every way inferior. However you looked at it, water was simply not as virile an element as earth or time, as fire or air. Down in the green gloom it was easy to become dispirited, whereas out here the air was sharp and the stars so still and clear you could have cut them out with scissors and pinned them to your breast for all eternity.
Back at the palace there was the habitual fuss and bother as Amphitrite made ready for the night. Libations had to be offered up; potions had to be ground and bound and mixed with ambergris and applied to her face and hands; silver hairpins fell from her hair and had to be retrieved from the soft white sand. Restraining her vast impatience, Poseidon s daughter did her duty, combing and soothing, until at last her mother’s head drooped on the pillow. Then with a flick of her tail she fled the bedroom and swam fast towards the shore.
With her nose just above the wooden landing-stage of Nicos’ Taverna, she could easily spy on Hanni in the lit interior. A television blared from a high shelf above the bar. The film was black and white and old, and accompanied by the scratchings of an invisible orchestra, but Hanni s full brooding attention was fixed on it. From her secret vantage-point Poseidon’s daughter watched two ringleted young men make merry swordplay in more snow than she had ever seen, even on the highest summit of Mount Olympus. Later, one of the two young men was revealed as a woman, and then the old men in the cafe slapped their thighs and all the small ouzo bottles romped and rolled on the cafe tables, and when Poseidon’s daughter whispered Hanni s name to the lapping waves it was a small sound, quite drowned in the uproar of wolf-whistles. ’
