The original ballad begins with a woman lamenting to her infant son that she doesn't know who his father is, or where he's from. She's then visited by a silkie (in other folklores called a selkie), a magical creature who is a seal in the water and a human on land. The silkie tells her that he's the child's father, gives her a bag of gold as a "nurse's fee," and says that he'll be back in seven years to collect his son. The silkie also prophesies that after her son is taken the woman will marry a harpooner who, with his very first shot, will kill both the silkie and his son (presumably while they are in seal form).
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Seòlta and the Selkie King
by silverr
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"Amma, amma, tell us a story!" the grandchildren and great-grandchildren begged.
I waited until they had settled themselves on the floor around my chair, and then began. "The festival that begins today," I said, "the first of summer, we celebrate on the shore, and have for a hundred generations, because while inlanders have their fields of earth, we till the sea, reaping with net and harpoon. Tonight we will acknowledge our blessings, and pledge to each other, but, like the first of winter, tonight will also be a time when the realm of the Others is close enough to cross over into our world."
"Will the Others try to do bad things to us?" one child asked, her eyes were round with dread.
"Sometimes, yes, they may try to do us harm," I said, "but they are not always successful. Let me tell you a story about such a time, about my mother's mother's mother Seòlta.
"Just as this was her house, this is her story."
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Seòlta's mother and father passed when she was young, but as she was, even as a child, hardworking and kind, she had became the daughter of every hearth, and grew up strong and quick-witted.
Many there were who wished to wed her; but of those the one that pleased her most was Fleinn, a good man who had eyes as pale as sea ice and a warrior's strong arms. It was Fleinn's hand that Seòlta took during the choosing dance, and it was with Fleinn that she shared a betrothal-cup.
That night, after the sun had set and the full moon risen, Seòlta and Fleinn walked along the shore. Fleinn told Seòlta that he would be off to sea the next day to make his fortune. Seòlta said she would marry him before he left, but Fleinn shook his head. "I want you to be free to choose another," he said, "and not spend your years as a dry widow if I do not return." Seòlta vowed that she would wait for him nevertheless, and they sealed their pledge with a kiss.
Just then a heavy fog began to roll in from the sea. Fleinn offered to fetch a blanket for them to sit upon, and an ember from the bonfire, so Seòlta began to gather kindling and dry driftwood.
To her surprise, only a few heartbeats later Fleinn appeared behind her again, holding a bouquet of sea mayflowers. He handed them to her, and then, without speaking, took her by the hand and led her farther down the beach. When they were in the midst of the deepest fog, he stopped and embraced her, and Seòlta acquiesced to her husband to be.
From wild salt waves, through cold grey mist
The grey selkie king crawls from the sea
Steals a face the maiden will trust,
And thus woos her deceitfully.
No word speaks he, as he lays her down
On a bed of mayflowers strewn,
Ere night is gone, his seed is sown
'Neath the golden festival moon.
The next day Fleinn gave Seòlta his most valued possession, a dagger with a blade of polished black glass, then kissed her goodbye and promised to return to her. Although he had made no mention of their tryst, after he was gone Seòlta found a sprig of sea mayflower in her hair.
As summer faded into autumn, Seòlta began to hear the whisper of the waves wherever she went, and began to crave raw meat and fish. It was not until midwinter, when her belly finally began to swell, that she realized that she was with child. Despite the whispers and month-counting of the village busybody, Seòlta insisted that Fleinn was the father, for she had lain with no one else, before or since.
Seòlta gave birth almost a year after Fleinn left. The child, a boy, slipped from her easily, his head slick with downy white hair. After the birth Seòlta put him to her breast, and soon mother and child fell into contented slumber.
The sound of crashing surf and the smell of brine woke Seòlta just after moonrise.
Someone stood at the foot of her bed, in the pool of light from the moon. A man, wrapped in a dark green cloak that dripped water upon the floor. He was not young: white frosted his dark hair, and his pale skin bore many battle-scars.
"Who are you?" Seòlta asked, holding her sleeping infant closer.
"I am your child's father," the stranger said.
"No," Seòlta said. "You speak false. I have never seen you before."
In reply he drew a sprig of fresh mayflower from inside his cloak, and tossed it on the bed.
Seòlta shivered with dread. He was one of the Others. A shapeshifter, who had taken Fleinn's form to trick her…
He then brought forth a small weatherbeaten chest of damp wood, and poured out a heap of coins and jewelry. "I am the Great Grey King of Sule Skerry," he said. "A man upon the land, and a silkie in the sea. In seven years I shall return to claim my son." He waved his hand at the treasure. "This is payment for your time. Tend him well."
"No." Seòlta shrank from him. "I'll not take your gold, and you'll not have my son."
"Whether you take the treasure or not, the child is bound to me," the Grey King said. He pointed. "Witness the proof."
Seòlta looked down, and saw a plaited necklace of seaweed around her infant son's neck. "What is this?" she cried, pulling at it.
"It is the symbol of our pact, and cannot be broken," the king said, "nor cut by any blade. You can sooner slice through the moon, or sever the waves from the shore. He will wear it until I return for him."
"I will not let you take him!"
"You cannot prevent it. The sea will draw him to me."
"Then we will go far from here, past the mountains, and hide from you!" she said.
The king's face twisted in anger. "Deny me, mortal, and the necklace will tighten until it has choked the life from him!"
"You would do that to your own son?"
"One way or another," the Grey King said as he left, "you will not keep from me that which is mine."
After the Grey King was gone Seòlta stared at the treasure. Coins of gold and blackened silver frosted with salt, and clumps of barnacle-crusted jewelry.
Afraid to touch it, lest it bind the silkie even tighter to her son, she used a long iron spoon to scoop the treasure back into the chest, then used a piece of firewood to close the lid and push the chest across the room into a corner. She piled rags on it to keep it out of sight, and vowed that she would never spend any of the gold, no matter how hungry she became. Better to be free than a servant of the Others.
She turned to the plait of seaweed around her son's neck. It had no clasp, and fit so close she could only slip two fingers beneath. Seòlta carefully took up Fleinn's dagger of dark glass, which was so sharp that it could cut a falling feather, and tried to cut the necklace, but the blade made not even the slightest mark.
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As the years went by, and the child grew, the cursed necklace grew apace, a constant reminder of the grief to come. Seòlta borrowed knives and scissors and files from everyone she knew, but neither iron nor steel nor bronze could sever the cursed strand.
Every year, on the eve of summer, she went to the shore at high tide and begged the silkie king not to take her son, but if he heard her he never showed himself.
Seòlta longed for Fleinn to return. She would not speak his name near the shore, for fear that the Grey King, could harm him once he knew his name, but neither did she forget Fleinn. He was ever in her thoughts, and whenever her son asked where his father was, Seòlta would say, "Your father is among the waves."
The night before her son's seventh birthday, Seòlta stood on the shore and called out yet again to the Grey King.
This time he answered her. "Why have you summoned me, mortal?" he asked as he rose from the water, wrapped in a cloak of kelp and crowned with dulse. "My son must return to me tomorrow, at high tide; it is useless to plead otherwise."
"Great king," Seòlta said, "do you not owe me recompense for the service I have rendered you?"
"Other than the treasure you have already received?"
"I have not so much as touched your treasure these seven years," she said. "I would return it to you, and fain receive something else."
"What would you have in its stead?"
"Take me with you under the sea," Seòlta said. "I am young and strong, and can give you as many sons as you wish." She knew the King would not agree to this, but having refused, he would think what she asked for next was of lesser value to her.
"I have no further need of you, except that you give my son to me," the king said. "Now, either name another price, or go from this place."
Seòlta pretended to think, then said, "Answer three questions, honestly."
The king considered for a moment, then inclined his head. "I give my word, if you swear to return to me what is mine."
"I swear on the bones of those who came before," she said, "to return your gold tomorrow at high tide."
"Ask your questions, then."
If she could not keep her son on land, and if the king would not willingly take her to his underwater realm, perhaps she could force his hand. "First, if you are truly a king, and the father of my child, does that not make my son a prince, and myself, as the mother of a prince, a queen?"
The king laughed, a cruel, mocking sound. "In the sea my sons have no mothers."
"As on land they have no fathers," Seòlta said angrily.
"Two questions left," the king said.
It was known that a silkie took human form only when they cast off their enchanted seal-skin; if that skin was taken from them, they were nearly powerless, unable to return to the sea. The Grey King, however, stood among the waves as if he had no need of such an enchantment to transform. Should she ask if he had such a skin, and where it was hidden? If she could steal it, surely she could trade it for her son's safety.
She was still considering what question to ask next when the king asked, "Your sailor — he of the pale eyes and steady arm — shall I bring him hence to you?"
It was a trick to make her waste a question, but Seòlta was not fooled. "You do not have the power to fetch him home," she said.
"Of course I do," the king replied. "I have dominion over all the seas. It is a small task to send his ship to this shore." He paused. "Or to the bottom of the sea."
Seòlta hid her fear, and shrugged. "Do what you will."
The king regarded her for a moment, then said, "Mortal, because you have dared to vex me, I here decree that any harpoon your husband throws after you are wed that ends my life will also end the life of my son. Thus you are now bound to me, for as long as you shall live: to preserve your child's life you must neither wed nor allow any man to do me harm.
"Remember that well, before you think to send your beloved to hunt me."
The silkie king, his geas did place
And left her weeping on the sand;
But others wait, to dry her face
And vengeance put into her hand.
And she will find, in shell and bone,
The courage the grey king to defy,
And when her strength is to him shown
On Sule Skerry he'll ne'er again lie.
When Seòlta at last lifted her head, the Grey King was gone, and the sky was growing lighter with the faint color of the approaching dawn.
All around her, the sand was covered with broken pieces of coral, layered so thickly that it would be impossible to stand and walk without stepping on it and cutting herself. Was this a last petty cruelty from the Grey King?
It was then she noticed dark shapes bobbing on the rose-silver surface of the sea, beyond the shallows of the receding tide. Mother-seals with their pups.
Several of the larger seals were swimming toward the shore, and as they clambered onto the shore Seòlta saw that each held something white in their mouth, which they dropped on the sand above the waterline.
Shells.
Wonderingly, Seòlta picked one up. As large as her palm, the inside iridescent with nacre, the shell's edge was as sharp as any knife. "What cuts, but is not a blade?" she said slowly, and then, as the seals barked and hurried back to the sea, she collected as many of the shells as she could carry and hurried home.
A man sat outside her door, a ruddy-faced, shaggy-haired stranger in outlandish clothes.
As he lifted his head Seòlta's heart leapt to see that it was Fleinn.
"I am returned to you, as I promised," he said, standing to embrace her, "though the tale of my returning is strange indeed."
"I will want to hear every word," Seòlta said, "but for now, the story must wait." She put her hand on the door-handle. "Softly now; my son still sleeps."
As Fleinn looked down at the child, Seòlta said, "He was born a year after our last night together. The silkie king means to claim him at today's high tide."
There were questions in Fleinn's eyes, but he did not ask them. "I will kill the king," he said, reaching for his harpoon, "to stop him from taking the boy."
"You cannot," Seòlta said. "He has cast a geas; his death at your hands will kill the child as well." She placed the shells on the table. "But the mothers of the sea may have given us a way… "
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It was a somber procession that made its way to the shore later that day.
Fleinn, a harpoon on his back, carried the king's treasure chest. Seòlta led her son, whose neck was wrapped in a scarf.
As Fleinn set the chest down on a rock above the high-water mark, Seòlta called out, "Grey King! See now, I am here with my son, and with your fee."
The king rose from the deepest water near the shore.
"I yet have two questions," Seòlta said, "and I shall ask them. First, I ask one last time: will you forego your claim on my son, and lift the geas you have placed on myself and my husband-to-be?"
"I will not," the king said.
"So you still demand to receive what is yours?" Seòlta asked.
"Of course."
Seòlta turned toward the boy and put one hand on his shoulder, but with the other she took the harpoon from Fleinn's back and threw it at the king with all her strength. "Then I return it!"
The king roared as the harpoon flew true and pierced his chest. "Fool! Your son's life is now mine!"
In answer Seòlta took the scarf from around her son's neck, showing it to be uninjured and bare of adornment. "No, it is not. Your curse can no longer harm him."
"Impossible!" the king gasped. "No blade could sever it!"
Seòlta held up a shell. "It was not severed with a blade."
"And then she wrapped your cursed strand 'round my harpoon," Fleinn added, "so that she, and not I, might return it to you."
The king thrashed in agony as he sank.
When he was gone, Seòlta and Fleinn opened the chest and scattered the Grey King's fee upon the blood-dark water, and when that was done, they took their son by the hand and went off to be wed.
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"And what happened after that, amma?" the children asked.
"After that? Well," I said, "Seòlta and Fleinn's wedding feast lasted three days, and they lived long, happy lives, and were loved by all who knew them."
"Did the Grey King die?" a great-grandson asked.
"What do you think?" I replied. "I do know it is said that he has never been seen on our shores again."
After that the children ran outside to play, and I smiled and tapped my feet on the ancient fur rug that made Seòlta's floor look like stippled water on a rainy day.
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~ The End ~
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first post 5 June 2019; revised 5 June 2019