Click on image to enlarge.
|
Song of Healing [MultiFormat]
eBook by D. H. Parker
| |
Regular |
|
 |
|
Club |
| You Pay: |
$6.00 |
|
|
|
$5.10 |
eBook Category: Romance/Fantasy
eBook Description: The Man from the Sea is in the legend, in the prophesy, in little Sarah Macneill's heart--until the traumatic reality of growing up buries her beloved fantasy. Will the unexpected and unwanted resurrection of things past lead the adult Sarah to destruction or to her Song of Healing?
eBook Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc, Published: 2006, 2006
Fictionwise Release Date: December 2006
1 Reader Ratings:
|
|
|
|
|
| Great |
Good |
OK |
Poor |
|
| |
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [653 KB], eReader (PDB) [230 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [214 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [192 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [238 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [238 KB], hiebook (KML) [509 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [261 KB], iSilo (PDB) [176 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [221 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [277 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [295 KB]
Words: 66222
Reading time: 189-264 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
ISBN: 1-59705-006-7
 
They could be magic words. They could be the mysterious, powerful words of a fine incantation. But they aren't. Halichoerus grypus is no more than the scientific name for Atlantic grey seals. Our seals. Dull, ugly beasts, some say. Ill-tempered and smelly. No magic in them, never mind what superstitious folk believed in years past. All right. Maybe there is no magic in the scientific name halichoerus grypus, but other names the seals have in plenty among our islands, and older names: Silkie, selkie, Sea-trow, Roane, the People of the Sea. Those are better names with which to conjure. Those are names in which it is much easier to catch the glint and glimmer of deep magic. Of course, the realists assure us there was no magic, that the legends were mere fiction. The humans cursed to live most of their lives as seals never existed, they say. They were no more than imagination, spoken into being by our ancestors as they sat before their smoldering peat fires during the never-ending nights of winter. Maybe the realists, with their solid, earth-bound thinking, are right. We know that the ancient Celts and Norsemen, whose blood flows in our veins, existed in the Hebrides alongside forces and events far beyond their comprehension. We know that what they lacked in scientific knowledge, they made up with dreaming and mythic, mystic explanations. But we also know that the People of the Sea fascinated them from the beginning. Observing the seal's weeping, they saw the sorrowing soul of royalty cursed by black magic. Listening to his eerie song, they heard voices from another world. They gifted the Selkie with power denied to themselves. Power over storm. Power over sea. Power to grant a heart's dearest wish. The love of the Seal-folk, the fear of them, the very life of them entwined with the life of the old islanders. So bewitched was the human population that some among them even counted the seals flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood. Wonderful, magical histories they wove for us, histories that were believed in remote areas into the twentieth century. Silkie, Selkie, Sea-trow, Roane, the People of the Sea. In our shrunken world and our enlightened age most of us have put the old beliefs, as well as the old names, behind us. They are dusty, discarded relics of another era, a mere curiosity. Science has provided meteorology to explain away the storms and marine biology to show us there is no enchanted human beneath the seal's sleek fur and tearful eyes. They never existed, these People of the Sea, except in the hearts and on the tongues of our ancestors. Halichoerus grypus we have with us still. The Selkie--with all their magic--are, of course, pure myth. Or they are not. * * * * OneI pounded on the door, still not able to quell the urge to keep glancing over my shoulder. There was no reason for it. The ghostly ribbon of crushed shell down which I had driven to reach Libby's beach-front cottage was empty and innocent in the moonlight. The docile surf of the Gulf of Mexico murmured and slapped peacefully against the fine white sand that contained it. In the warm, moist, wisteria-scented air, even the Spanish moss draping the oaks hung motionless. Nothing moved but the sea. And my hammering heart. That was where the real threat lay. In this silken, southern spring night, my heart was full of winter storm and darkness and a People for which there is no modern name. Never mind that I was twenty years beyond my last North Atlantic winter; that I was a wide ocean and part of a continent away from any Hebridean island. I was possessed by an anguish of home-hunger as fierce as the yearning of the mythical selkie folk for the sea. Mythical. What did that word mean, anyway? Was Andrew myth? Andrew, who had claimed outright to be one of the seal people? And what about that other man? The one I hadn't yet seen in the flesh, if he existed in the flesh. He made no such outlandish claims, but how could he waltz in and out of my mind as if it were his own? How could I explain him with all his demands and his promises? Was he myth? Imagination? Madness? Tugging my jacket closer, more for the illusion of security it gave than for any need of its warmth, I tried to close my ears to the whispering Gulf water beyond the cottage. Even here the sea gave off faint echoes of the old, eerie, half-formed melody that had haunted me for so many years. Calum Macneill was to blame for that haunting. He had taught me Eileanron's song. Song of Healing he called it, though there had been no healing in it for me, nor ever could be now. I pounded at the door again and leaned on the doorbell. Further along the beach a dog barked. Or a seal? My heart shied, plunged on. It couldn't be a seal. Seals had better sense than to come into tame, semi-tropical settings like this ... But he had sent me here. He had promised to come. He. The voice in my head. Who was he that I should even listen to him, let alone obey his decree? As much as I wanted to trust my instincts, as much as I longed to resurrect my belief in the comforting fantasies of my childhood, I was terrified to do it. In spite of what I had seen and heard and felt in the last few hours, the whole thing had to be impossible. So why had I come, straight and true as a homing pigeon, to Libby? Why had I done exactly what the voice in my head had commanded? Was I crazy? Absolutely, fatally crazy? Oh, Libby, hurry!
|
)
