The Girl With No Name

The Girl With No Name.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who had no name.

She lived in a ramshackle house on a rugged cliff overlooking the sea with an old lady who was widely regarded as a witch. Of course, the old lady was not a witch, nor was she even, at a close glance, particularly old, but this is the way that stories are told; and women who live alone in ramshackle houses are always thought to be old; and often thought to be witches. But because of these whispers, the old lady had no friends, and she was very sad and lonely, until she found the little girl with no name.

People said that the old lady had been walking by the sea one day looking for bright shells and driftwood when she found a little baby girl, washed up on the shore. The baby had eyes as dark and as shiny as seaweed, and her skin was patterned with shimmering sea salt fresh from the ocean. The old lady had never seen such a creature, indeed; she had never seen another living thing that was like her, for she herself had sludge-black eyes and her skin was encrusted with the salt of the sea-spray; from having always lived by the ocean.
The old lady took the baby, wrapping her safely in the fishing net like a blanket and brought her home to the ramshackle little house, along with all the other debris she had found on the beach.
‘Bright shells for my dark home, a driftwood fire for my cold bones, and now a beautiful daughter for my lonely heart.’ The old lady sang in a sweet and joyful voice, for she had always longed for a child.

Years went by and the old lady and her new daughter lived, and were happy.  While the child was still very small, the old lady made a sling of the fishing net and carried the girl in it across her back as she went on her daily errands. When the child grew a little older, she walked beside the old lady on the beach and helped to look for bright shells and driftwood.
         Together they sat for hours in their little house, by the sea-green glow of a driftwood fire; making beautiful long strings from the many shells they found on the beach. It pleased the old lady to hang these about the house and outside the windows so that the breeze caught them and they chimed a soft, lovely sound.
And every night the old lady would thank the stars for all she had,
         ‘Bright shells for my dark home, a driftwood fire for my cold bones, and a beautiful daughter for my lonely heart.’

The only thing that pained the old lady was that the child she had found, this beautiful girl with her sea-weed eyes and salt-sparkle skin, had never once spoken a word. She played and smiled and laughed and cried but never a word did cross her little mouth.
         ‘I shall never give you a name, until you may speak it for yourself,’ the old lady warned, but the little girl only smiled and never spoke a word; and so she never had a name. But still, the bond between them was strong and they loved each other without words, and so were happy still.

As they child grew she grew more and more beautiful. Often people from the nearby villages would come to the old lady’s ramshackle house on the rugged cliff to admire the lovely shell chimes hung about the window frames, and sometimes, they would buy.
         When these people saw the little girl they would gasp and call her extraordinary, for her hair flowed like dark water and her smiles appeared like sunlight on the rippled ocean waves.
         ‘Is she your child?’ the people asked the old lady, as the nameless girl played.
         ‘She is mine,’ the old lady replied, although she felt as if a fishing net was tightening itself around her as she spoke, for she knew the child had come from the sea and not from her.
         ‘She is beautiful,’ one man said, ‘come child, tell us your name.’
         ‘She cannot speak, and so cannot speak her name; and so she has no name,’ the old lady admitted.

Then, when the little girl had been with the old lady for thirteen years, something terrible happened.
         One night, during a terrible storm, a ship dashed itself on the rocks below the rugged cliff top and all the sailors aboard were drowned but one man. He swam ashore and climbed the cliff, and when he reached the ramshackle house at the top he battered on the door with all his might.
         ‘Please! Help me, my ship has fallen on the rocks below and all my fellows have drowned! Please give me shelter for the night!’
         The old lady took him in at once and made him some fishbone soup and gave him thick blankets for the kitchen floor to sleep on. And all the while the sailor raved about a beautiful, haunting song that had called to him and his shipmates through the dark storm, drawing them against the rocks. But the old lady took his ravings for shock and so paid him no heed.
         The next day, people from the nearby villages came to help clear the wreckage of the ship, and many offered the surviving sailor food and shelter for his bravery. He thanked them all, and told everyone his tale of the beautiful song that had brought his ship to its doom, but no one paid him any heed.

Months passed, and the old lady and the little girl were visited more and more frequently by the people of the villages who had heard more of the shell chimes, and the beautiful girl whose face was like a spell, and were anxious to see for themselves. Everyone was stunned by the dark-eyed child; as unfathomable and as breathtaking as the ocean itself, and soon men began to visit, hoping to see her and to bargain with the old lady.
         ‘I will give you more money than you have ever dreamed of if you let me marry your girl.’ One young man promised.
‘I have all that I want in the world already;’ the old lady replied, ‘bright shells for my dark home, a driftwood fire for my cold bones and a beautiful daughter for my lonely heart.’
         Many offers were made the old lady, but none of them were taken, for she thought her girl was far too young to marry, and she did not want to be parted from her.
         ‘Are you happy that I do not want to give you away, my child?’ the old lady asked her daughter afterwards, with tears in her eyes. The girl nodded feverishly, and threw her arms around the old lady’s neck and both held fast like that for what seemed like hours until they each fell asleep.
         That night, a storm raged around the ramshackle house and filled the air with wind and rain. In the morning the old lady woke to find that another ship had come to ruin on the rocks below her cliff.
         ‘Are there any still alive?’ she called down to the villagers who were crowded on the beach.
         ‘I, madam, survived,’ a young man called back. ‘It was a terrible and beautiful music; a song that drew us to it, and brought us to ruin upon the rocks.’
         As he spoke, the girl; who had heard commotion; ran to the old lady’s side, and watched with her shifting dark eyes the ocean before her, and the wreckage that now bobbed on its waves in the morning light.

As more months went by, these terrible wrecks happened again and again, and every time there was but a single survivor, who every time told the tale of a beautiful, alluring song, that sung the ships to their awful fate. As time passed, the song that was spoken of began to be heard by the people in the nearby villages. The old lady herself soon heard it while she slept; it would wake her, a strange and piercing yet lovely and heartbreaking sound, that was not quite like anything human, nor any creature she had ever heard before. When the sound woke her, the old lady would creep out of her little house down to the cliff edge, even though the rain drove through her like pins and the wind threatened to whisk her into the sea. She would peer through the raging night, but saw nothing of where the song was coming from, and despairing, crept back into her house.
More wrecks. More survivors, more talk of that same, eerie tune. The villagers began to whisper about the old lady and the girl who lived with her, for it was always on the rocks below their house that the ships met their doom.
         ‘That child must be inhuman,’ the people said, ‘she was not born of the old lady, she is surely a terrible changeling come to bring ruin to those at sea.’

The old lady heard their talk and wept, for she knew it was not her girl, who could not speak and had never sung in her whole life. But now at night she could barely sleep for fear of hearing the deadly song again and so she often lay awake in tears until she could stand it no longer, and when it came again one night, she decided to creep into her daughter’s room to see if it was her. But when she peered around the bedroom door, she saw the girl’s bed was empty. Fearfully the old lady searched, but the girl was nowhere to be found anywhere in the house.

‘My child, is it you who makes the song that causes such terrible things to happen?’ The old lady asked the next day, when the girl returned from collecting driftwood. The girl shook her head, but her eyes were filled with tears, and the old lady feared the worst.

In the fifteenth year since the old lady had found the girl without a name, a stranger came wandering to the rugged cliff top and found the ramshackle house. The stranger came from none of the surrounding villages, and knew nothing of the mysterious shipwrecks or the old lady and her daughter. As he walked, the sand behind him swirled and made itself into sky-born patterns, and in his hat he wore a pack of cards covered in strange symbols, and he had a star painted on his cheek.
         When he came upon the cottage he admired the old lady’s shell chimes, as they made music with the sea breeze, and when he saw the girl of the sea walking back from the beach with her net full of new shells he was bewitched.
         ‘Is this your child?’ he asked the old lady, who nodded sadly and said that she was.
         ‘And what do you call her?’
         ‘I call her my daughter; my sorrow and my joy; the comfort and the breaking of my heart. For she has no voice to speak a name; and so she has no name.’
         ‘Why does she bring such sorrow and yet bring so much joy?’ the stranger asked, but the old lady merely smiled and shook her head.
         ‘I can give her a voice,’ the stranger said, ‘I have magic in me and in my cards that can make it so, and she will speak if you wish, and you may ask her all the things you wish to know, and she may have a name. I will give her a voice, if you let her come away with me to be my wife.’
         The old lady was torn, for she loved the girl with all her poor heart but had suspected with sorrow for some time that the villagers were right, and that somehow her silent girl was the one bringing ships onto the rocks. The whispers from the village were growing fierce, and the old lady worried for the girls’ safety. The stranger, with his weird painted face and his pack of cards, seemed kind somehow, and the old lady thought him handsome; he promised a voice for the girl, and if he took her away then perhaps no more harm could come.
         ‘I will ask her what she wishes,’ the old lady said with sadness, ‘and if you come this way again tomorrow I will give you her answer.’
         And so the stranger went away.
         ‘My dearest,’ the old lady asked the girl, ‘are you happy that I do not want to give you away?’ The girl nodded, but her large eyes glistened full with tears, and the old lady knew she was unhappy.
         ‘My dearest, is it you who makes that terrible song that causes such terrible things to happen?’ the old lady asked again. The girl shook her head, and more tears filled her unhappy eyes, and the old lady knew that she was being true.
         ‘I believe you my child. But the people form the village do not, and soon I think they will come for you. I think I must send you away.’ 
         Then the pair clung to each other and cried; one silent, one sobbing; and they both knew that it was almost the end of their life together.

The next day the stranger returned; they saw him coming up the beach with the sand dancing behind him in strange patterns, and with the pack of cards tucked in his hat. When he reached the house, the old lady gave him his answer.
         ‘Tonight, for one last time, she will remain with me so that we may share our last hours together in our little house, and I shall make her wedding veil. Then you may come for her tomorrow, and she will then be yours, and you will give her the voice she never could give me to hear.’
         And though it broke the old lady’s heart, she saw the stranger was kind, and she saw that he was magical, and he went away again so that the old lady and her girl could spend their last hours together.

As evening drew in they lit a sea-green driftwood fire that caught the bright coloured seashells hung around their little house, and made them glow and shine. And the old lady took up the fishing net that she had found the child wrapped in so many years ago, washed up on the shore; and she sewed it with tiny pieces of mother of pearl and tiny glimmering shells to make a wedding veil. Long into the night she worked while the girl watched with her seaweed eyes, and said not a word. And when the veil was finished, the old lady arranged it around the girl’s lovely face and cried at how beautiful she was, and the girl smiled sadly, and stroked the old ladies hair, until they fell asleep by the fireside.

In the night, the old lady awoke to a piercing sound; a song that seemed to weep through the house; crying like a sea bird, rushing like the music inside a sea shell. As she woke, she saw with horror that the girl was nowhere to be seen. Desperately, the old lady hurried from the house out onto the cliff top and into the night. A howling storm nearly thrust her into the ocean below, the winds picked up the song so that it bellowed all around her, and the rain cut her poor skin as she searched high and low for the girl.
         Suddenly she saw through her old eyes and the bleak night, a strange, glowing light in the near distance; that spread in a long beam out to sea. It seemed to be coming from a little figure, poised on the edge of the cliff, unmoved by the buffeting winds and rain. When she crept closer to it, she heard the dangerous and beautiful song growing wilder and louder, so that it was almost unbearable, but as she drew nearer she saw that the little figure was that of her daughter.
         ‘My child!’ the old lady called desperately. On hearing the old lady’s voice, the girl turned for a moment, and the old lady gasped at what she saw. The girl’s face was white as sea-foam, but it was her eyes; huge and ghostly through the storm, that raised the hair on the old lady’s skin. The strange, glowing, silvery-green light seemed to be pouring from the girl’s eyes, which were very large and round, like burning lamps in the darkness, and did not seem to see the old lady at all. The girl turned this extraordinary gaze back out over the cliff top, casting the beam over the sea below.
         And then the old lady realized that the music, the song, did not come from her daughter at all but came from the sea itself as it raged down beneath them; and down in the tumultuous water below she could see a ship being tossed around ferociously, coming in to the rocks. The light from her daughter’s eyes fell upon the danger, and presently, the old lady saw the little ship was trying to turn itself, straining against the tide, moving slowly but certainly into a safer part of the beach.
         By and by, the storm grew still, and the ship moved out of sight of the rocks, but the terrible, melancholy song continued, and the girl and her glowing eyes grew faint, and sank to her knees and fell still also.

Finally, the old lady knew what she had always longed to know. She carried the girl back into the little house and fetched the bridal veil she had made of the fishing net.
         ‘Now I know your name; I have heard it many nights since you came to me, for the sea has been calling you all the while.’
         And the old lady wrapped the netted veil about her beloved girl, and with all the strength in her body she carried the sea child down to the beach where the ocean lapped and cried.
         ‘It has called you and called you, a name I can never know how to speak; and it has taken lives for every night I have kept you from it.’  And as the old lady spoke she laid the girl down on the sand. The girl opened her seaweed coloured eyes, which no longer glowed, and the old lady saw they were full of happiness at last. The old lady wept for the girl, and for herself, and for the sea, and kissing the child’s brow, she tasted the sea salt that had never really worn away from her skin, and presently the waves took the child from her and carried her away as she had been left, wrapped in a fishing net that was now a bridal veil. 

In the morning, the stranger, with the star painted on his cheek, called again, expecting his bride to be. The old lady told him of what had happened, and he smiled and went down to the beach, and wrote something in the sand. It washed away before any of the villagers had time to read it, or even the old lady herself, for when she rushed down onto the beach to find out, the lapping tide had sponged it away, and the stranger had disappeared, as if he had vanished into the sand with it. But that night, a light appeared on the cliff top, a glowing, silvery green light that never died away. And no ships came to wreck below that rugged cliff top, nor anywhere else along that shoreline, ever more
And the next morning, and every morning after, when the old lady went down to the beach, she found the most beautiful shells she had ever seen, like rows of shining jewels, washed up on the shore.