Deeper (5 page)

I looked at Grandmother’s long knife. 
She hit out at me again, but this time I bent in time and her hand passed over the top.  I thought she’d be angry and try again, but she just laughed.  If anything, that was worse.

“Questions, questions!”

She leaned back, grinning, her fingers stained with purple ink from the colouring stick. 

“Because we’ve always done it.
  Would you like to be the first one? The only one without a totem picture?  How would we recognise you, without your totem?”

“
But you knew me before.  Am I different now?”

I was scaring myself with my own insolence. 
Maybe it was the stuff she gave me to still the pain, which made me reckless.

“Humans don’t have totems
on their backs,” I said. “I’ve seen one and they don’t.”

“I’ll tell you a story,” said Grandmother, picking up the
inking stick again.  It still burned where she touched, but it was not so bad now.  I sat still.

“Once, when my great grandmother was a girl – yes, she was even uglier than me
– there was a mer woman who wasn’t satisfied.  Oh no, she wanted to see if things could be different.  So she went to Deep Sea, all on her own, and swam for days without stopping, and thought she was very clever.  She’d come up to the surface,”  (oh so she’s heard that story, I thought), “and stick her head up like a fool, and one day she even went to the sands near the Big Dry, watching for the humans to come out in their little boats.  Usually, when they saw her, they screamed and ran away.  But one day, a boat came out with some humans who didn’t run away.  The mer came to the top of the waves, and found she couldn’t look away from the human’s black eyes and his long thick legs.  She sang to him, asking him to come swim in the sea with her for a while.  She would have put him safely back in his boat, she didn’t mean any harm.  But the fisherman just stared, and then he threw a net out and caught the mer in it and dragged her into the boat, and took her away, all the way to the Dry. 

Nobody ever saw
her again after that – not alive - but my great grandmother’s uncle said he saw her bones lying in the sand, and her skin drying on the rocks, like kelp.”

Grandmother settled back, her story done. 
Her red eyes challenged me to answer back.

“
But how did your great grandmother’s uncle know?  I mean, he would have had to go to the Big Dry himself, and see?  Maybe she made friends with the human and he gave her fish to eat and she sang to him?”

Grandmother’s claws flexed.

“You think my great grandmother was lying, little fish?  Is that what you think?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head and watching out for her
claws when they came searching for me, to pinch and tear, “But what if she – what if she got it wrong.  What if the mer and the human lived together, happily ever after?”

My grandmother laughed until she was nearly sick, and then hawked a great gob of something grey
and sticky onto the floor of her cave. 

“
Where exactly?  Tell me where it is, where the mer can walk and the humans can swim?”

She had a point.  I relaxed, watching the yellow trail that ran from the corners of her eyes down the channels of her cheeks, and met the grey saliva there on its way
out to her chins.  I was full of pride and fright.  Nobody had ever dared to ask so many questions before and been answered.

“
There’s no stopping the young from believing what they want to believe, is there,” she said mildly.  She stretched out an arm, the flesh hanging from it like a curtain of seagrass, and pulled another bag from behind her.

“This is all that’s left of
her, that mer woman.  My great grandmother’s uncle went and collected her, at night, when the humans were sleeping.  She was his mate.  He took her away to show us what happens when the mer leave their mates to keep company with humans. Why don’t you open it and have a look.”

I opened the bag.  White bones, a skull dry as cuttle fish. 
Some rags of something that might once have been mer-skin, black and shrivelled with age – or might have just been some old dolphin skin.  I closed the bag quickly. 

Grandmother
pushed her knives towards me, the long thin one for the big cuts, the smaller one for the fine lines in between.

“Dip
those in the water, will you, my dear?”

She sometimes spoke to us with affection.  It was a warning sign.  I took the knives, my back a mess of
hardened blood and ink, and dipped them in the cold seawater.

“
So what am I, Grandmother?”

There are no mirrors in the sea, unless you want to try to see yourself among the crabs in a rock pool. 

“Ask your sisters.”

I had
an uneasy feeling. What if Grandmother had given me something stupid – a prawn for example, a mollusc, or even one of the humans we talked so much about.  I liked to imagine being a human, sometimes – I didn’t want one on my back.

Flipping back into the water, the salt stung my wounds
again and I could barely swim.  But it would do them good.  I had to move, to stay in the water till they became scars, rainbow coloured and beautiful.

When I wriggled out into the lagoon, m
y sisters crowded around me, their tails turning the water into froth.

“
Let’s see what you’ve got?” Azura turned me around towards her for a better look.  “Ewww, it’s got legs.”

Oh no.  She’s
given me a human!  I could’ve gone back in there and killed the evil old woman.  I could still see her grinning as I left.

“It’s got four legs,
” Dawii added, poking me.  She hadn’t forgotten the incident in the cave.

Four?
No human has four legs. What has four legs.  Nothing has four legs.

“And a body like a sea horse,
only not curled up,” said Cik, my fourth sister, puzzling.

“Or
maybe an eel – no, it isn’t that,” added Casih, turning me round again, so that I felt like a strange piece of flotsam, being examined from all angles.

I arched my neck but there was no way I could see what Grandmother had etched into my skin.  Besides, it hurt too much to try.

My sisters had brought fresh meat, and sweet kelp, and a coconut Casih had found on the sand.  The females of Che’s pod came to share and to celebrate.  We ate, and they talked and sang, and I was morose.

At dusk the pod females went to fish, but I lay staring into the place where the sea meets the sky.

“It stings like crazy, doesn’t it,” said Dayang, taking my hand. She’d always been like a mother to me, since ours pulled herself up on the beach to give birth for the last time.  “Come and sit by me for a while.”

She sat beside me, stroking my head
and singing, of silly things like the sardine that thought it was a whale, and a song about the old mother of the sea which I remembered from when I was very little.

“
Dayang, how does Grandmother know where to cut, when she can’t even see where her food is? “

“I don’t know.
  The spirits guide her, I suppose.” Dayang gazed out over the lagoon, sky-reflecting.  “There, you can see a picture in the clouds.  A sky-mer looking down on us.”

I looked up.  In the blue, the sky mer stretched out her tail, her fins wisps of white. 

“Her head’s coming off,” I said, as the wind blew the sky-mer across to Deep Sea.  Dayang said nothing.

“How old is Grandmother?”

Dayang laughed.

“Nobody knows. 
Maybe she’s been here since the first mer was born in the sea.”

“She’s just a
dirty old seal!”  I sneezed at something in the sand, and then wished I hadn’t, as my back muscles drew tight.

Dayang
put her hands over her ears, a sign for when you don’t want others to hear what’s been said. 

“You shouldn’t speak like that.  She
can hear you, wherever you are.  She’s stronger than you think, Melur.  She can call up a storm and make the whales drive themselves onto the sand and die there, she can make you drown, or me – if she wants. “

I looked away, ashamed of having
frightened her, and she pulled my hair gently to take the sting out.

“Or s
he could turn you into a bottom-feeder or, let’s see, a porpoise maybe?”

That was
Dayang’s idea of a joke.

“How about a human?”

“If you were very bad, maybe……why don’t you sleep.  I’ll lie beside you for a while.”

“
Dayang, did you scream and try to run away, when Grandmother gave you your totem?”

She
nodded, and ran her fingers through my black hair.

“She had to tie me down
with fish gut.  I screeched so loud the roof nearly fell in.”

I didn’t really believe her, but it was kind to say so.  So I lay down
, on my stomach on the soft wet sand, with my eldest sister sitting beside me, stroking my face - and dreamt of a four legged human on my back, eating me from the outside in, till I became a dark mess, a placenta staining the sea.   Then I was caught in a net and dragged onto the Big Dry – a place of unending sands, with no water as far as you could look, burning with heat and littered with the skins of mer.  A human came to cut the net open with a big knife just like Grandmother’s.  A human with dark blonde hair, like yours, and dark, narrow, human eyes, just like you.  I woke up in a fright, and Dayang put both her arms around me, carefully so as not to touch the cuts, and held me close to her, just like Mother when I was tiny and she was still here.

Chapter
5

After I
got my totem I was even more quarrelsome. Maybe, I thought, the spirits had given me some evil, curious creature from faraway to guide me, something that snapped all about itself and ate its own kind.  Until they told me, I could do what I liked, and be what I liked.  I liked nothing.

I even quarrelled with
Che, and called him a stupid, useless cripple, when he tried to play the games we’d played before.  I was too old now for those games, too angry.  Even friendship seemed like a trap.  Nothing was right, nothing had any point.  Often, I swam alone into Deep Sea and came back in darkness, daring anyone to ask where I’d been.   It was a kind of freedom, anyway – not that I enjoyed it.  I hated it. I was in a dangerous, stubborn mood.

It didn’t go unnoticed. 
Casih tried to steer me away from the punishment that would be coming, if Father turned his yellow eyes my way.

“It’s not safe
in Deep Sea by yourself. Stay here, where the pod can look after you. Grandmother says…”

“I hate Grandmother.  I’m not going near the old hag
anymore.”

Azura
said, “If Father hears you’re not taking your turn he’ll beat you.  Anyway why would you want to go out of the channels, there’s nothing there, just ocean and more ocean and more...  It’s boring.”

“Maybe my totem lives in Deep Sea. Maybe she’s waiting for me there
, how will I know if I don’t go out and look?”

Azura
sniffed.

“More likely
she’s under a rock somewhere, eating mud.”

I turned my back.
I won’t listen to any of them, I thought.  What do they know!  Troubled, without knowing why, I let the tide take me out to the ocean side of our archipelago, where the surf growled and spat.  Their grey quarrelling comforted me.  When I reached dark green, I rolled over, lashing the sea with my tail to send sprays of clear water up towards the darkening sky.  Soon I was tired out, and turned on my back, letting the swell lift me like a drifting gull.  I let the current take me, and didn’t look back as the long sands sank towards the sun.

With the snarling of thunder,
I opened my eyes on an angry sky.  The water beneath me was as grey as my heart, the colour of stone and shark skin.  The sea tipped and fell in on itself, and I let it throw me from wave to wave and drop me to the cloud dark depths between.  I was glad that it seemed to be as furious as I was and with no better reason.

L
ight ripped across the water, burning the sea blue white as it went, and then the sky crashed down on the ocean, a tearing, tumbling noise like the surf on coral, but louder.  I pushed high, standing on my tail to look over the white clawed, storm-driven peaks and then swooping down into the black deep beneath.  The waves in their fighting pushed me up and tossed me almost clear of the water, and leaping with them I felt strong and powerful as a great spirit, chief of the storm pod.  This is where I belong, I told myself, in danger and struggle.  I am mer, I’m not afraid of anything. And then it came to me how it would feel to be human, trapped in the boundless sea– weak and struggling and out of its element.  No wonder they cling to their little floating islands. No wonder they drown without them.

Why
did it come into my mind then to think about humans? I’ve often wondered since.  Was it my totem calling me? Was it yours? I looked across the battle field at the top of a peak, and saw a floater.  It was small, frail.  Even I could see it was much too small to fight in this ocean war.  I saw at once that it was as useful here as a broken off piece of bubble-weed to a drowning pup.  It would climb one side of a wave and then smash down on the other, nose first, water pouring over the wooden topside and over the head of the human who stood there, struggling to hold on to something inside this fragile shell of an island. 

You
could have been a merman, you were so sea-soaked.  I could tell by your white face and hard-set teeth that you were beyond afraid, you were too busy struggling for life itself.  You were losing the fight, too, and you knew it.  Such a tiny thing, this floater.  You’d almost have been better off without it – but suppose you let go, I thought, and then it came crashing down on you like an upended turtle? I couldn’t believe it hadn’t already broken to bits - it must be made of something very strong.

And yet you
hung on, and clung to a tiny stick in one end of the thing, tatters of white straggling out into the wind, while the tall pointed tree that held them shook and strained.  They were the nets the other humans we’d seen used to catch the wind and push their floaters along, but yours had been ripped off by the storm, and all that seemed to hold the pointed thing from crashing into the sea and taking your floater with it was a few strings of wet rope.  It was still pushing its way through, by some human magic - I could feel a low growl undersea as it crawled bravely into the wind.  I let myself rise on the crests and I stared boldly at you, waiting to see if the boat would tip and shatter and send you flying into the hungry open mouth of deep sea.

You
seemed to see me there.  You stared in shock and disbelief and I stared back.  The lightning tore at the sky and lit your face in electric-white, dark storm-wet eyes, long brows drawn down over them like the wings of gliding gulls.  Your hair hung in tangled strands over your face.  The sheen of your skin was like wet sand, your lips black as blood. 

The dark shape almost lifted me right out of the water.  I slipped off and fell down a rough slope – a
great old humpback coming up to spout or check the weather.  I dived underneath him, and when I came back up, there was no sign of you.  Your boat I could see, thrown on its side with its pointed wind tree slicing uselessly through the waves.

I craned about, remembering the drowned woman, how she’d struggled, sunk, rose, sunk again, died recognising
me and asking for help.  I wondered what had happened to her - if she’d swelled and floated up fat with gas, right out of the Squid cave where I’d stowed her.  She would have made a good long meal for the fish, tall as she was.  I didn’t want you to be meat for fish.  You were too beautiful.

I
stood on my tail and looked around, but the waves were many times the height of the tallest mer, and whirled and leapt all about me, here and there, so that I might as well have been looking for a grain of sand in a blowhole.  Now I couldn’t even see the floater.  I hoped it wouldn’t suddenly crash down the side of a wave and knock me out.  Now that
would
be bad luck, just as Grandmother had predicted for a too curious mer.

It came to me that I was
searching in the wrong way. If you want to find anything in Deep Sea, you have to listen and feel. I dived, and skimmed silently under the turbulent surface, feeling out for the tell-tale vibrations that all living creatures make, and especially the warm-blooded ones – the beat of your blood through your body, the shock waves of your hands and legs as you paw at the water, the smell of your sweat, urine, shit, unfamiliar land smells.  The storm spirits’ quarrelling drowned out any other sound on the surface – but underneath, I could hear your heart beat, faintly, and followed the sound, circling as sharks do and letting the vibrations guide me in.

When I felt myself close, I leapt, with the full upthrust of my tail, and
saw you.  You were on the surface, arms and legs flung to the winds, tossed as if in a game, but you weren’t struggling any more.  Your head rested on a bright half circle of orange, buoyant, tied around your body: that was what kept you up.  Your face was turned to the sky and your eyes closed.  Blood ran from a cut on your forehead.  Soon it would bring sharks – that and your strong heartbeat, which I could still hear like a call through the water.

I thought about leaving you
to them.  I knew already what a human looked like, no need to drag home another one.  Anyway Che wasn’t there to help and it’d be a long pull.  You’d drown soon enough, before even the sharks got to you.  You might be dead already, for all I knew.  I watched you for a moment.  Your beautiful anemone mouth hung open, seawater sloshing inside like the tide into a cave.  Your Dry Land lungs weren’t meant for this.

I thought of Father, and what
would happen to us both, if I brought back a human, dead or even worse, still alive.  They’d have to kill you and I’d have to let them. 

I remembered what Grandmother had told me, about the mer woman who tried to
help a human, and ended up skinned on the Dry.  But what could you do to me, out here, your little floater upturned and broken?  I dived up under you and lifted you up with my right arm, keeping afloat with just my tail and the other arm.  Your head lolled on my shoulder, as if we were in a tide pool sleeping.  I touched you, and could hardly believe it.  Not because it was strange to me, but because it wasn’t.

You weren’t dead yet.  I could still feel your warmth,
the life blood pumping through the tiny channels of your body.  Water spurted out of your mouth, your chest constricted by my grip.  Your eyes didn’t open, though.  To live, you’d need to get to the Dry.  Your skin was thin, the salt and the water and the wind would eat it away.

I knew where it was
– the Big Dry.  Not only because the males boasted about it, but because the great current led there. You only had to follow its pull towards the setting sun.  Some of the elders said that you could see a line of white, green stuff like the forests in the water, only reaching up into the sky, great cliffs and sometimes – so the elders said – stone buildings where the humans took shelter from rain and wind and sun.  The humans were very weak and easily harmed, and needed to hide themselves from anything that could damage them, some mer said – even the good rain and the kind sun.  Others said they hid from the spirits, being so wicked and dirty.

But the Dry was too far for me to swim with this human weighing me down, despite his floating
orange sack.  I trod water, and remembered that before you got to the Dry, there was the Trapped Moon.  You swam in the same direction, the males said, and at night you could see a light casting its long beam out over the sea.  Humans lived there, sometimes.  It wasn’t so far as the Dry – maybe half a day’s swim.  I could carry you there, maybe. And yet if anyone found out, I’d never be allowed out of the lagoon again.  It was forbidden to swim out so far towards the Dry, especially for a mer female, alone.  It was forbidden to look at a human, go near one, touch one.  It was forbidden to be too curious.  I don’t know how many times Father had told us, while Casih picked sea lice from under his arms and dodged an irritable snap of yellowed teeth.

“
Females stay within sight of home.  They don’t go out to Deep Sea alone.  Hear me and obey.  If the humans don’t chop you into a thousand pieces I’ll do it myself. And hang your tail out as a warning.” 

And he’d bare his
long fangs in a smile which had no humour in it.

And Grandmother would point
to her fish-skin sacks and say,

“
You’ll end up in one of those, in the places where the humans live.  I’m sure they’ll think you’re a delicious morsel, little fishes.”

You had begun to feel very cold in my arms. 
I could feel your delicate bones through the skin at your arms and the hollow under your rib cage.  You didn’t have the layer of thick protective fat that we mer have.  Even so, we get cold in the wet sometimes, if we stay in one place for too long.  It must be like that, for you.  You should be in the Dry, in your warm human cave.

I swam holding your head up as high as I could
, my fingers wrapped in the coverings around your thin neck.  I swam with my tail alone, and it was hard work, even for me.  At first it was like swimming through sand – the sea threw itself at us from all directions, and when we fell from the top of each wave, I had to struggle to keep your face from going under.  If I’d been on my own, I would have swum under the storm, where it was always calm and green.  With you in my arms, I couldn’t do that.  At last I saw your floater, tossing past.  I thrust towards it and held on to the wind-tree with one arm, and you with the other.  It helped, a little.  I could see why you humans stayed on your floaters – even up-ended it refused to sink.

After a while, t
he clouds cleared to the west, and the wind began to fade.  The storm spirits, racing each other through black clouds above and casting their spears of white lightning into the sea, put down their weapons and went to rest.  The sky glowed sunset-blue.  The water calmed.  As I swam with you, easier now, I could see the moon rise, a thin broken shell at the horizon.  I felt the great current guiding us both towards the Dry. 

It became night.  It
was hard now to tell if we were above or below the surface, grey-black both – but I made sure that your head was always in the air.  Even we mer need to breathe the air.  Your bleeding had stopped long since.  That was just as well, because I didn’t think I could fight off a shark for you, now.  I was dead tired.

I heard the
Trapped Moon, and felt it, before I saw it.  Around us the waves of Deep Sea rolled for long hours, uninterrupted, but in the distance I heard them strike rock and roar in spray.  They don’t like to be slowed and thwarted in their travels: it makes them angry and stubborn, as it does me.  They strike out and spit and claw at anything which gets in their way.