Midrun suggested that we all swim away, and let the wizard relax his guard and restore his hearing. Then we could surprise him tomorrow evening and lure him overboard. But the rest of us objected strongly: how many innocent men might jump overboard along with the wizard?

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Not Beyond Conjecture

Part 3 of 3

by Trismegistus Shandy

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We ducked our heads below the water and sang to one another. Midrun suggested that we all swim away, and let the wizard relax his guard and restore his hearing. Then we could surprise him tomorrow evening and lure him overboard. But the rest of us objected strongly: how many innocent men might jump overboard along with the wizard? Even if our bloodthirsty instincts didn’t take over and we managed to help them rather than kill them, some might drown in spite of our efforts. And after hearing the wizard’s account of his actions, some of us were willing to forgive him, or at least to postpone vengeance until he had changed us back into men.

Others did not wish to become men again, at least not on the wizard’s terms. Tiram sang:

“Will you be a freakish wonder,
Hybrid fish for men to stare at?
I would rather be a siren
Than a man with webby fingers,
Or a woman’s voice and features.”

Midrun and several others agreed, but Fira and I, and two of the sailors, Gidra and Umiru, decided to take our chances with the reverse enchantment and life on shipboard. After a sorrowful farewell, Tiram and her followers swam away into the lightless depths, and we who remained surfaced again. We sang to the helmsman:

“We would change again to sailors.
Tell the wizard we’ll stay silent
While you haul us up and change us.”

For a few moments he struggled frantically to free himself from the chain that bound him to the helm, even after we fell silent; but then he came to his senses, and spoke to the wizard. The wizard shook his head and walked up to the helm, then leaned over to let the helmsman shout in his ear; only then did he nod to us, say “Wait a bit,” and go belowdecks.

Soon he came on deck again with several of the men who had surrendered or hid when the pirates attacked, talking to them as he approached the port rail. The men looked nervously at us, and we smiled reassuringly — or perhaps, given the sharpness of our teeth, not so reassuringly. They tossed ropes to us, and one by one we held them tightly as the men hauled us up out of the water and lifted us onto the deck. One of the men touched my left breast as he lifted me, and I restrained myself with difficulty from taking a bite out of his arm.

“Steady, Kadrim,” the wizard said. “I don’t think he meant to do that. — Come along, men; let’s stow her in the captain’s bunk and come back to haul up the others.”

They carried me, one man gripping me just above my fluke and another under my arms, into the cabin and laid me gently in the bed, which was filthy from the sweat and probably other body fluids of the pirate who had recently occupied it. For a moment I felt a qualm about becoming human again; but before I could say that I’d changed my mind, the wizard clapped a hand over my mouth.

“You swore to remain silent,” he bellowed. “Keep your mouth shut until the enchantment is reversed, or I can’t be responsible for what happens.”

I lay there alone, in the cabin dimly lit by the sunset light through the narrow porthole, for what seemed like hours. It was after dark when the wizard returned bearing a lamp.

“We hauled the last of the sirens aboard after we left you,” he said, “and I’ve started the reverse enchantment on the others. This won’t take long — starting the process, I mean. You’ll probably be bedridden for two or three days before your legs reform enough for you to walk on them, and you might be weak and unsteady for a day after that.”

I shook my head, but the wizard didn’t seem to notice; he made mystic gestures and spoke quietly in words I didn’t know, and then left me.

I lay there alone for most of the next few days. I heard commotion outside the cabin as the wizard freed the remaining slaves and they took charge of the ship. Not a single officer had survived, if I recalled correctly; I hoped some of the remaining men knew enough to navigate. The best navigator among us sirens had remained in the sea with Tiram.

Every few hours the cabin boy would bring me food and water, and make some attempt at cleaning up my messes; but he wasn’t strong enough to lift me and change the sheets. My gills closed up before I felt any other changes; then my fluke started to divide and reform human feet and legs. It hurt no more than the transformation into a siren, but it left me tired, sometimes too tired to sit up and feel my legs. The webbing under my arms and between my fingers receded, and my back row of teeth was reabsorbed, but my front teeth remained sharper than I remembered human teeth being. And my breasts, modest though they were, did not grow smaller.

The wizard came to see me once during my re-transformation, in the afternoon of the second day. He was drinking, but hadn’t drunk himself into a stupor yet.

“You’ll do,” he said. “Looks like it’s working well enough.”

“Why do I still have breasts?” I asked, and realized that the compulsion to sing everything I wanted to say was gone.

“Give it time, they’ll prob’ly go away,” he said. “Or not. I warned you there might be some siren charactis — characatris — some bits of you that still look like a siren when you’re done.”

I would be a freak, I thought bitterly; Tiram was right. It would have been better to be a whole siren than a half man.

I grew more worried still when the remaking of my legs reached the upper thighs. At this point in the original process, I’d still had a penis and testicles, though they were partly merged into my thighs and didn’t swing freely. Now, there was no sign of them re-forming. And my legs were not the legs I’d had before, either; they were smoother and less hairy than I remembered them. I began to hope, oddly enough, that I would look like a normal woman when I was finished; it was too late to hope for being a normal man, and I supposed it would be better to be a woman than an androgyne.

The cabin boy lingered longer and longer with me each time he brought me food and drink. On the third day, he asked me if I wanted him to bathe me. I mistrusted his motives, but I felt so filthy, in that bed so unlike the clean sea, that I let him. He ran a wet cloth over my face and neck, then, more gently than I would have expected, over my breasts; I suppressed a shiver. But when he scrubbed my lower belly and approached my still partly fused thighs, I said: “Stop.” I didn’t want him touching me there. I did roll over and let him scrub my bottom, which was the filthiest part of me.

“Thank you,” I whispered when he was done. I didn’t want to speak aloud yet; I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear my voice, or see the effect it might still have on him.

When I woke the next morning, I found that my thighs had fully separated. And, as I had first feared and then hoped, I seemed to have a woman’s normal complement of parts. I wasn’t sure how those parts had worked when I was a siren — obviously we must have had them, for Midrun at least had gotten some use out of them with one of the pirates before she killed him; but they seemed to be normally covered with a thick layer of protecting flesh. Not so now.

I sat up and swung my legs off the bunk, and tried to stand. I immediately collapsed, fortunately falling into the bunk instead of onto the deck. I tried again, keeping a steady grip on the rails, and managed to reach the chest at the foot of the bed, wherein I found some clothes that didn’t perfectly fit me, but at least covered my nakedness. After a few minutes' practice, I found I could stand, and even walk, though not steadily. I took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

The sailors on deck turned to look at me as I stepped out, gripping the door for support. One of them came running toward me. “You’re up!” he said unnecessarily.

“Yes,” I said, and heard my voice — much the same as it had been when I was a siren, though not so unnaturally alluring. “What about the others?”

“Gidra finished transforming a few hours ago — he walked the deck for a while but got tired and went to his bunk below. Umiru hasn’t been out of his bunk yet. I’m not sure about Fira; he’s still in his cabin, just there next to yours.” He pointed to the cabin which had been the first officer’s. I could tell he was trying not to stare at my breasts, and failing; his eyes kept darting back and forth from my face to my breasts, making eye contact more briefly each time.

“I’ll go in and see him,” I said, and stepped over to knock on the door. A voice I recognized but hadn’t heard in many days said: “Come in.”

I opened and entered. Fira was lying in the bunk, covered by a sheet from the neck down. From the shapes bulging under it, it seemed that he had not entirely lost his breasts, though they might have been smaller than before, and he had something further down that I didn’t have. His face was more masculine than it had been when he was a siren, but not quite what it had originally been — there was no stubble on his cheeks, and his chin was rounder than before, I thought.

“Hello, Kadrim,” he said, and his voice was masculine enough too, though less deep than it had been. “I’m not sure if you’re better off or worse off than me. Have you stopped changing?”

“I think so,” I said. “What about you?”

“It feels like some stuff’s still moving around down there,” he said. “But not as much as before. My legs still haven’t quite separated completely, but I’ve got my manhood back, even if I’ve still got these too,” gesturing at his breasts and glancing away from me for a moment. “You look — from the waist up you’ve hardly changed, except for your hands.”

That told me something I hadn’t been sure of yet, that my face was feminine enough to match my body. “Yes — I lost the extra row of teeth, but my other teeth feel like they’re are still siren-sharp. And before you ask, the lower half matches the top half.”

“Damn... I’m sorry, Kadrim.”

“I’ll get used to it, I suppose. Have your breasts been shrinking? Maybe they’ll go away before you finish changing...”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “They did shrink a little, but they stopped before I had separate knees. My voice might be still getting deeper, but I’m not sure.”

I sat and talked with him for a few minutes, and then said I wanted to go see the others. I found them in neighboring bunks belowdecks; the cabin boy was bringing Umiru his breakfast when I arrived. He had almost completely reverted to his original manly self, and already had a noticeable beard on his chin; but his feet — from the ankle down, they looked like a siren’s fluke, split in half. He couldn’t walk, of course. Eventually, we got him fitted up with customized boots that fasten to his legs at the knee, and let him walk without putting weight on his half-flukes, but he gets tired easily, and can’t walk far at a time. Gidra had regained a more masculine appearance than Fira — her face was what it originally was, except that she still had siren teeth like mine, and her breasts were gone and some hair was growing back on her chest. But — I found out later; she wasn’t ready to talk about it when I visited her just then, with other sailors within earshot — she was still a woman where it mattered most. And she still had a high, feminine voice.

I was tired by the time I had sat talking with Umiru and Gidra for half an hour, and I went back to bed after that. I inspected myself again when I woke up later in the day, but I hadn’t changed any more. It was another day before I saw the wizard again, and two days after that before I regained my usual energy; Fira and Gidra were up and about by then. I asked Kasrigan why we were so long recovering our strength, and whether he could do anything about our imperfect return to our original forms.

“It’s the effect of doing two major transformations on you in less than half a month,” he said. “The first time was easy — easy on you, I mean; doing such a complex working on so many men when I was as hung over as I was that day was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The second one wore you out more partly because your bodies had gotten to depend on the water for support, and partly because the second transformation had to fight, so to speak, with the magic from the first one lingering in your flesh and bones. Ideally I’d have waited six or eight months before transforming you again — in that case you probably would have returned to your original selves, and you’d have regained your strength as soon as the change was complete. But in six months, of course, I would have lost track of you, and your siren nature would have taken over completely; none of you would have wanted to change back.”

“Can you fix us, then, six months from now? Change me and Gidra back into men, and get rid of Fira’s breasts and fix Umiru’s feet?”

“Not so soon — two transformations in a short time makes you bad candidates for a third, at least for a couple of years. If I tried to transform you again too soon I’d have even more unpredictable side effects than last time.”

There was no telling if I could find Kasrigan again in two years, or if I could afford any other wizard’s services at that time. And even if I could, I’d still have to be a woman for at least two years; I should start getting used to it.

We spent days searching for the derelict pirate ship. By the time we found it, several of the enslaved sailors from the West Wind who’d been chained in its hold had died of thirst. We rescued the others, and debated putting a prize crew in charge of the pirate ship to bring it into port; but we had lost too many men in the pirate attack, plus the sirens who chose not to become human again, and the surviving men from the other ship would take days to recover before they could work again. We couldn’t man both ships, and besides we had only one halfway decent navigator left. So we set the pirate ship adrift, and set a course for what we thought was the nearest port. The chief navigator had died in the pirates' attack, and his apprentice had chosen to remain with the sirens; our navigator now had little training and wasn’t very good, but we did eventually get back to the mainland before our provisions ran out. After buying some provisions in the first fishing village we came to with money we’d found in the pirate ship, we sailed along the coast to Bapram.

There we former sirens left the ship. Many of our shipmates were more or less sympathetic for our misfortunes, but most regarded us as freaks. In a large city like Bapram, we would not stand out quite so much, as there were many other people who had suffered from enemy magic in the war and no longer looked quite human. And I, at least, had lost too much strength to continue in my former profession, and Umiru could no longer walk; we needed to look for less strenuous work on land, and Fira and Gidra chose to stay with us. We felt like family, after the ordeal we had been through, and didn’t wish to part.

We have lived here for a year and a half now, in common lodgings in the quarter marked as “Lighthouse Hill” on the maps, but now called Freaktown. Many of our neighbors are people who were transformed or cursed by enemy magic in the war, so Fira’s breasts or Gidra’s voice scarcely merit comment, still less my shark-like teeth. Umiru rarely leaves our rooms, and at least one of us stays in at all times to keep him company — usually me, as my work of clothes-mending can be done largely at home, or Gidra, who became Umiru’s lover within a month after we settled here. I resisted the idea of loving a man for a long while after my transformation; it didn’t help that the first two or three men to take an interest in me were crude and clearly interested only in casual sex. I had, I admit, been not entirely unlike them during my time as a soldier; there was no time for long courtships or subtlety in flirting when one might only see a woman once before being ordered to march away and never return. One had to make one’s interest clear and unmistakable in the first few minutes of conversation, and one couldn’t promise to stay with her forever, or even for a month. But it seemed that many of us had carried that bad habit, a necessary evil in war, into peacetime.

I rejected their offers, and then those of several men perhaps more worthy of my notice, during the better part of a year. Then I met Taprikar, a widower a few years older than myself, when I was knocking on doors in the neighboring Rowan Hill district and asking if the residents had clothes to be mended. Taprikar gave me a pair of trousers with holes in the knees, and I returned with them patched and mended a couple of days later; he gave me more clothes to mend, and we saw each other fairly often for a while. He was unfailingly courteous; it was the fourth time we saw each other before he asked me any personal questions about my history. I told him briefly that I lived nearby with my sister and brothers. He told me his own history; he had been lame in one leg since childhood, and so had not been conscripted until near the end of the war, when Bapram was under siege and blockade, and every man not absolutely immobile was mobilized. His wife had died of cholera during that siege, and he had lived alone since then.

The sixth time we met, he asked me to stay for dinner. I refused, saying I was expected at home, but said — surprising myself — that he might treat me to dinner at a public establishment the next time I called, one that served fish. He did, then and on several subsequent occasions. He told me more of his history, and I let my guard down a little more, giving him a true but very incomplete account of how I got my shark-teeth, and admitting that my brothers and sister had more obvious deformities, and that we lived in Freaktown.

Soon after that, I discovered that he had been borrowing torn and worn clothes from his poorer neighbors and hiring me to mend them, so as to have more frequent pretexts to see me. I was amused and flattered, and didn’t let on that I had figured it out. The fourteenth time we met, I spent the night with him.

He has just asked me to marry him, and I think I may accept. I asked for a couple of days to consider his offer. His home is not so far from our lodgings in Freaktown that I could not go to see Umiru, Fira and Gidra almost every day. But I think I must tell him my full history before I accept; it is only fair to him, and to marry him with such a secret between us would be to endanger our relationship if he were someday to find out from someone else.

I sometimes go up to the cliff by the lighthouse and look out to sea. I think about Midrun and Tiram and my other siren-sisters. Where in the vast ocean are they? Have they confined their predations to pirates, or do they sometimes attack innocent merchant sailors? Or have they retreated to the lightless depths, preying on fish and stranger creatures of the deep places, rarely surfacing at least in the shipping lanes? We hear no definite news of them. But Gidra, who works on the docks as a stevedore, hears sailors saying that piracy has declined noticeably in the last year or so. The captains and shipping companies take credit for staffing their ships with mercenaries and wizards, and indeed a few pirates have gone to the bottom after a wizard blasted a hole in their keel. And some pirate captains have apparently been killing their rivals. But I like to think that my sisters deserve at least some of the credit.

The End

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When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format and from Smashwords in EPUB format. See here for more information.