An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant (22 page)

***

Shifting
her buttocks a little, Tamarind shoved her feet against the stones in front of
her and lifted her face into the breeze, her eyes closed. The fan-leafed palms
and tamarind trees lining the beach’s edge whispered as the breeze tickled
their leaves and the ocean
shush-shushed
them; otherwise, the reverent
night was silent beneath the moon overhead. She felt the strength of the trees
rooting down into the ground and she leaned into their strength, wanting to
draw it into herself and keep it there.

“So. I
find you here.” A raspy voice and the scent of cloves came from behind her.

Tamarind
didn’t answer; she only closed her eyes.

“T’won’t
do you any good to sit here and moon over that idiot.”

“What
business is it of yours what I’m doing?” She didn’t look at the old woman.

For a
moment she heard nothing; then she felt Ana’s presence next to her on the stones.

“None of
my business, that’s what. I’m neither kin nor friend to you. But I speak from
experience, young one.” She paused. “I was once a mermaid like you and also
fell in love with a human man.”

Tamarind
stared at Ana. “What happened?”

Ana
shrugged and sucked hard on her clove cigarette without looking from the
distant horizon. The sound of burning paper and her harsh exhale mingled with the
rich scent of clove. “Not important what happened. All you need to know is I
put off my tail for love. Long after I left this island behind, I found myself
alone. Came back here and begged the island midwife to undo what she’d done, to
send me back to the waves. She said it was impossible for me. I was no longer
the same person; I might die trying to put a tail on again. I insisted anyway,
saying I was as likely to die from grief.”

She
turned to look at Tamarind. Both opaque eyes appeared blind in the starlight.

“Obviously
didn’t work. But it wasn’t a complete failure. Instead of dying, I lost only
the sight in my eye. If you’d been paying attention, you’d’ve seen the
mer
in me. I still hear
mer
speech, though not like I once did. Along my
flanks are pores for sensing movement underwater.” She smoothed the side of her
shirt. “Mine no longer work. Only give the Culebrenses something to gossip
about.”

Tamarind
studied Ana in the brilliant moonlight. She thought that she must always have
known. Signs of the
mer
showed clearly on the old woman: she had a bit
of webbing between her fingers, almost indiscernible now from the loose skin of
old age, and her eye, piercing as it was, was the changeable blue of Mother
Sea.

“Why are
you telling me all this?”

“Because,
unlike you, I didn’t really have a choice. I tried to force my way back, but it
wasn’t my fate. You gotta choice.”

“What
choice? When the rainy season ends, I’ll revert back to being
mer
. You
said I couldn’t remain human unless I consummated my love with John.”

“Yeah, I
did say that. But you can keep your legs if you copulate with any human male
while you’re transformed.”

Tamarind
started to speak, but Ana cut her off. “I’m getting old and need an apprentice,
Tamarind. There’s always been a midwife. She tells the
dragos
what she
can about the humans on her island. She casts and keeps glamours. Sometimes she
helps a
mer
put off a tail. Took me a while to see I’d been chosen, but
I came to accept my fate.”

Her last
words hung, heavy as ripe tamarind pods on slender branches, over them.

“You’re
offering me the choice of becoming a midwife, like you? To remain human?”
Tamarind paused, shaking her head. “I don’t want to be human if I can’t be with
John.”

Ana
squinted her eye before pushing the stub of her clove cigarette into the stones
at her side. She exhaled smoke in twin streams from her nostrils. It writhed
and expanded in front of her face. “Don’t have to decide now. You still have
time before the rains end. Think over my offer. That’s all I ask, young one.”

Tamarind
noticed the book that lay on the ground near Ana like a dark smudge in the
moonlight. Thick, with a dirty cloth cover that was torn and water-stained, its
yellowed pages exuded age—and
power
. She’d seen Ana consulting this book
numerous times, but Ana had always guarded it and said that it was for no one’s
eyes but her own.

“You
can’t read,” Ana said the first time that Tamarind asked about it. “What’s the
point in looking at a book when you don’t have any idea what it says?”

At the
time, Tamarind shrugged and said nothing. Now it lay between them like a
promise. Ana saw where her gaze fell and she put withered fingers on it.

“Intrigued
by my book?”

Tamarind
looked at the old woman’s face. Ana gazed back at her with a mild expression.
So she picked the book up with reverent fingers and pulled it into her lap. Her
eyes, used to the dimmer underwater world, had no difficulty distinguishing
details, faint as they were. Turning pages as fragile as dried seaweed, she
glimpsed lists of herbs, spices, sea creatures and underwater plants—many items
were words that she didn’t recognize from her short reading experience.
Underneath the lists, she saw directions for preparing the items and
instructions for keeping and administering the final preparations. In the
margins, there were handwritten notes and occasional drawings.

“I’ll
teach you to read it.”

Tamarind
nearly responded that she already knew how to read before something stopped her
short; she blinked instead and recalled that Ana had tempted her a long time
with the key to human learning.

“Why
should I believe that you’d teach me how to read?”

“Because
it’s the midwife’s book. If you’re gonna take my place one day, you have to be
able to read it.”

Tamarind
bit her lower lip. “I haven’t said I’ll take your place.”

“True.”
Ana nodded, the clove cigarette clamped between her first two fingers where it
dangled in front of her. “When you do, you’ll find many, many useful recipes
and spells. The method for helping a
mer
put off her tail—and the method
for putting it on again—to name a few. Become my apprentice and I’ll show you
how to do lots of amazing things.”

Tamarind
continued to turn the pages and to run her fingertips over the contents. On a
page two-thirds of the way through the book she squinted at instructions for
transforming someone into a temporary copy of another, living or dead. As long
as the caster had some item that belonged to the person being copied, something
taken from the body, then an elaborate potion could be brewed and distilled
that transformed the caster for one turn of the day. She frowned.

“Tell
me, young one. Where is it your father thinks you’ve been all this time?”

Tamarind’s
frown deepened. “I let him think that I went to the Hidden Caves of Camuy for
training with the
mer
elders.”

“Ah.” Ana
rummaged in the small pouch she wore on a long strap around her neck. After a
moment, she pulled out another clove cigarette and a small object that
glistened in the moonlight. Muttering something that might have been a spell,
she raised the disc to one end of the cigarette and sucked on the other until a
thin plume of smoke appeared near the disc. “So your father intends for you to
be a
dragos
. He sees the same qualities in you I do. We just don’t have
the same ideas about how best to help the
mer
.”

She smoked
the cigarette in silence while Tamarind continued turning pages in the book. A
laughing gull flew over their heads, a dark speck that spiraled around them
until it had descended low enough to land on Ana’s shoulder. Tamarind had never
seen a bird flying at this time of night before. She watched the bird nuzzle
Ana’s cheek and appear to whisper in her ear. When the laughing gull cocked its
head and turned a bright eye on Tamarind, she thought it studied her coldly. It
again whispered in Ana’s ear and the old woman laughed. Tamarind ignored them
and struggled to read more spells in the waning moonlight.

“What’s
he gonna think when he finds out you spent the rainy season with me?”

“I don’t
know.”

“Yes you
do. You just don’t know why he hates humans so much. I do. It’s because of your
mother.”

Tamarind
sat up straighter. “What do you know about my mother?”

“Enough.
She was the first mermaid I tried to help put off her tail.”

“What?
What lie are you telling me, old woman?” She’d never spoken to Ana so rudely
before; she’d caught a residue of thought from the former
mer
and
responded to its flash of visceral ugliness.

“No
lie.” The gull laughed at them and launched itself into the air above their
heads. “Just like you, she mooned about wherever she could see humans: beaches,
boats, cays. And, just like you, she fixated on one, a boat captain. And one
day, she came to me and asked me to help her put off her tail.”

“But how
did she know you could help her? I didn’t know about you before we met. I
certainly didn’t know
mer
could put off their tails.”

“Ah,
that’s because your father drowned the knowledge among your community. If any
remember, he’s forbidden them from sharing it among the others.”

“But—but
Mother was a mermaid! I was very young, it’s true, but I still remember her. If
she’d been human, how could she and my father have mated, let alone had six
daughters?”

“Yeah,
she was a mermaid when she died.” Ana picked up a clove cigarette. Her lined
face seemed to shrivel even more and her eye no longer blazed. “Her tail never
came off. I remember the sound she made when I eased her out of the ground.
Like a baby seal mewing. Her tail bruised and bloodied, one tip broken and
limp—it still haunts me.

“Something
in her mind died that day. Her thoughts frothed and foamed. Your father loved
her before she came to me, though she never returned his love. He took her,
poor wounded thing, and mated with her. His strength kept her safe for a while
and you and your sisters were born. But she couldn’t stay away from humans and
kept wandering toward them.”

Here Ana
stopped and sucked on her cigarette so long that Tamarind thought that the
story must be done. She was about to ask Ana why she had told her all this
about her mother, when Ana began to speak again.

“I’ve
thought about that spell of transforming over and over. I just can’t be sure it
wasn’t my fault it failed.”

Tamarind
hesitated a moment. “Is that why Father kept us from knowing about your
powers?”

“No.”
Ana looked away. “Putting off the tail has always been dangerous for
mer
.
He didn’t blame me for that. No, he didn’t want any of you to know how to
become human because he despises humans.”

“Because
Mother was so fascinated by them?”

“That’s
partly why, young one.” Ana brought her eye to Tamarind’s face with visible effort.
“But it has more to do with the fact a human killed her and very nearly killed
him, too.”

Ana studied the smoking stub
between her fingers without
meeting Tamarind’s eyes. After it had burned almost to her fingertips, she
leaned forward and sunk it into the seawater caressing the stones around their
feet. It hissed briefly. She flicked the remains into the tree line behind
them. Time to wield the truth like a shark’s tooth.

“It’s more
than ten rainy seasons since I found your father on Luís Peña. Back then I
could still swim. Swam over there to look for birds’ eggs. That day, I finished
gathering all the eggs I could carry and went up to the beach to look for
seaweed. That’s when I came across your father, bleeding his life into the
sand.

“Took
all my strength to wrestle him onto his back so I could clean his wound and get
a better look. Can’t tell you, young one, how scary that terrible hole in his
shoulder was—never seen anything like it! Worse, I never cared for anyone so
badly hurt. Whatever had done it was still in him and I had to get it out, and
get it out quick. But everything was on Culebra, all my healing salves, all my
infusions and tinctures, all my tools—not to mention my book.

 “Fear
turned me into rigid coral. I couldn’t act. My thoughts swam. I cried out to
Mother Sea but blood pounded in my head. Breath stuck in my throat. Couldn’t
hear Her answer. Then I remembered what my teacher had told me: listen to the
sound of the waves and breathe with them. I closed my eyes until I had their
rhythm, until I
became
their rhythm.

“I knew
what to do when I opened my eyes. Couldn’t swim over here and back in time, let
alone bring everything. Had to bring him around, no matter how dazed he’d be,
and then reach into his mind and direct it. Your father has a very strong mind—
very
strong
. I knew it would take everything I had to save him. I reached into
my pouch for the eggs, cracked them with my thumb and forefinger like so”—Ana
demonstrated with a quick motion of her hand—“and sucked them all down.