Free Elementals by A.S. Byatt

watercolour and gouache. He went out and stared and the pool was empty.
    For several days he neither saw nor felt the snake. He tried to remember it, and to trace its markings into his pool-paintings, which became very tentative and watery. He swam even more than usual, invoking the creature from time to time. ‘Come back,’ he said to the pleasant blue depths, to the twisting coiling lines of rainbow light. ‘Come back, I need you.’
    And then, one day, when a thunderstorm was gathering behind the crest of the mountains, when the sky loured and the pool was unreflective, he felt the alien tug of the other current again, and looked round quick, quick, to catch it. And there was a head, urging itself sinuously through the water beside his own, and there below his body coiled the miraculous black velvet rope or tube with its shimmering moons and stars, its peacock eyes, its crimson bands.
    The head was a snake-head, diamond-shaped, half the size of his own head, swarthy and scaled, with a strange little crown of pale lights hanging above it like its own rainbow. He turned cautiously to look at it and saw that it had large eyes with fringed eyelashes, human eyes, very lustrous, very liquid, very black. He opened his mouth, swallowed water by accident, coughed. The creature watched him, and then opened its mouth, in turn, which was full of small, even, pearly human teeth. Between these protruded a flickering dark forked tongue, entirely serpentine. Bernard felt a prick of recognition. The creature sighed. It spoke. It spoke in Cévenol French, very sibilant, but comprehensible.
    ‘I am so unhappy,’ it said.
    ‘I am sorry,’ said Bernard stupidly, treading water. He felt the black coils slide against his naked legs, a tail-tip across his private parts.
    ‘You are a very beautiful man,’ said the snake in a languishing voice.
    ‘You are a very beautiful snake,’ replied Bernard courteously, watching the absurd eyelashes dip and lift.
    ‘I am not entirely a snake. I am an enchanted spirit, a Lamia. If you will kiss my mouth, I will become a most beautiful woman, and if you will marry me, I will be eternally faithful and gain an immortal soul. I will also bring you power, and riches, and knowledge you never dreamed of. But you must have faith in me.’
    Bernard turned over on his side, and floated, disentangling his brown legs from the twining coloured coils. The snake sighed.
    ‘You do not believe me. You find my present form too loathsome to touch. I love you. I have watched you for months and I love and worship your every movement, your powerful body, your formidable brow, the movements of your hands when you paint. Never in all my thousands of years have I seen so perfect a male being. I will do anything for you – ’
    ‘Anything?’
    ‘Oh,
anything
. Ask. Do not reject me.’
    ‘What I want,’ said Bernard, swimming towards the craggy end of the pool, with the snake stretched out behind him, ‘what I want, is to be able to paint your portrait,
as you are
, for certain reasons of my own, and because I find you very beautiful – if you would consent to remain here for a little time, as a snake – with all these amazing colours and lights – if I could paint you
in my pool
– just for a little time – ’
    ‘And then you will kiss me, and we will be married, and I shall have an immortal soul.’
    ‘Nobody nowadays believes in immortal souls,’ said Bernard.
    ‘It does not matter if you believe in them or not,’ said the snake. ‘You have one and it will be horribly tormented if you break your pact with me.’
    Bernard did not point out that he had not made a pact, not having answered her request yes or no. He wanted quite desperately that she should remain in his pool, in her present form, until he had solved the colours, and was almost prepared for a Faustian damnation.
    There followed a few weeks of hectic activity. The Lamia lingered agreeably in the pool, disposing herself wherever she was asked,