Deeper (8 page)

Chapter 9

She didn’t look at me as I swam in, but turned her head blindly, like a white worm without eyes. 

“Who’s that?”

A long skein of webbing covered her tail.  While her nostrils twitched from side to side, searching for the source of the noise, her hands picked at the threads.

“It’s
Melur.”

She
snorted, and pushed a damp grey strand out of her cracked mouth.

“Hold the end of this for me
, little fish.”

I sat beside her, taking care not to touch her slimy sides, and took the end of the skein.

“What is it?”

“It’s a net.  Haven’t you seen a net before?”  She lifted it, wet-gold and diaphanous.
“A net for catching the littlest fish.”

She cackled.  I didn’t see the joke but laughed dutifully.  I wanted something from her, this time.

“But you don’t want that kind of net,” she added, blinking in my direction. “You want a net to catch humans.”

“We don’t catch humans,” I said flatly.  I wasn’t in the mood for her old woman antics.  I knew she put them on like a necklace, and could take them off just as easily.

“That’s just the point, little fish, they catch us.”

She bared her three remaining teeth,
green with old scum, and added, “But you already know that.”

She stuck her eel-like head out towards me, grinning.  I thought
, could this creature ever have been beautiful enough for anyone to mate with? Is this what I’ll become, one day, if I’m lucky and stay in the channels and do what Father wants?

“I want to
talk to the spirits.”

“And?”

“Ask them..something.”

“
What’s that then?  Want a nice strong male to put you in pup?  But you’ve already got one, I hear.”

“I want to
be with a human, and live on the Dry”

She
nodded.  So she already knew that too, of course.  Still, she doubled over, clutching her own withered, shrunken tail in faked hilarity.

“
Oh you do, do you?  How do you think you’ll mate? Do you think he’ll admire your long fishy tail? Or are you going to swim between his long pink legs and suck the seed out of him?”

She picked up the net she was weaving.  It
had strands of different colours – browns, black, gold, and dark blonde.

“What is it
made from, Grandmother?”

“Hair.
  What do you think!”

It was too fine for mer hair, too feathery.

“What kind of hair?”

“
What kind do you think?” 

She pulled a fishgut bag over, tipped the contents.  A
skull rolled out, two.  The hairless, white bone shells looked oddly like my grandmother’s balding head. 

“The best kind.
  Fine but strong as spider’s web.  Hard to get now, though.  Maybe you can bring me another one.”

I jerked my hands back from the net.

“You want to mate with a human? Pull one down, as the crocodiles do, wait till he’s stopped thrashing, and he’ll be all yours.”

She smiled again,
dry, rotten breath.  Bubbles from her wide nostrils were pale green and hung in beads from her nose until they fell into her lap.

“I don’t
want to mate with a dead human.”  My voice sounded sulky, even to me. “I want to live on the Dry.  Why shouldn’t I? I’m not a fish, who drowns out of water.”

We both knew the answer to that.  I could only drag myse
lf on my elbows, not even as graceful as a seal and that’s saying something.  How would I run after my human without legs!

“You want legs!
Of course, little fish!  Do you want wings as well, while we’re at it?  You think I can work magic?”

“They all say you can. 
Casih, and Suria, and Azura, and Che..”

“That lop-sided
dolphin.  You talk too much, for a fish.”  My grandmother’s voice scraped like surf over coral. “So you want me to ask the spirits to give you two nice pink legs, so you can fuck a human on the Dry?  Is that it?”

“Yes.”

I waited for Grandmother to tell me to go fuck one of my own kind instead, that there was no magic in the sea, that the spirits had much better things to do with their time.  I should go live in Deep Sea and maybe find a dolphin or a narwhal to mate with.

I waited a long time.  Grandmother sat coiled,
bony fingers working blindly on her net, wheezing a little with each intake of breath.  I smelled her farts hanging in the still dark air.  I tried not to breathe too deeply.

I thought how very old she was.  So old I couldn’t ever
imagine her being young.  It was as if she’d sat here, slimy, noxious, since the Sea and the sky parted ways.

At last she hissed through her remaining teeth, and started to speak, in the high, cracked voice she used for telling tales of long ago to us as child-mer.  Tales to frighten us into obedience and respect, full of all the terrible things that had happened to mer who left the pod, disobeyed the pod leader, came to close to humans, thought beyond the Channels
, got curious...

“
A long time ago,“ said Grandmother, in her story voice.

I thought
, I’ve heard this story. I didn’t dare say anything.

“
A long time ago, we all lived in the sea, human and mer, no difference.  Then we climbed out onto the Dry, grew legs, long hair, big heads, teats – all the things we both have, that make us different from the sea creatures – and legs too, yes, we had legs once.  You don’t have gills like a shark, do you!  You don’t have razor sharp teeth like the dolphins? We don’t dry out on the beach, like the whales?”

“No, grandmother.”

Actually I’d never thought about it before, any more than you’ve thought why you’re different from a horse.

“
You ever wanted to know why not? Because after we lived in the Dry for a while, we looked back at the shining sea, and we missed her.  So we came back down to the shore and we slipped back in, and we’ve been here ever since. But the stupid humans stayed on the Dry, and their females had pups, and they forgot how to swim and catch fish and live in the Deep - and there they’ve been ever since, too, walking around on their silly little legs.  And you wish you’d stayed with them, don’t you.”

Grandmother poked me in the chest,
hard enough to hurt, her eel’s face keen with malice.

“
So now you want legs.  You have legs.  We all have legs.  They’re hidden inside that lovely tail of yours that feels so strong and makes you so swift in the water.  Cut the tail open, and you can still find the weak little legs, all wrapped around one another.“

I looked down at my tail,
clear and shimmering like the water.

“Legs?
Inside my tail?”

“Oh, not legs like the humans have them.  They’re just bones, stuck together like oysters on a rock.  But we peel the oysters off the rock, and then we can see them, those puny, wretched human legs you have inside that beautiful tail.  You want to see?”

I stared at her.  It was as if her malice turned the air around her a deeper shade of clear, like the faint shadow of a shark circling above.

Grandmother
groped around her. 

“Here.  See the legs
on this one?”

It was something
shrivelled and tiny, with a big head and two curled claws below.  Its eyes were black like a prawn’s. 

“What is it?”

It smelled of dried fish.

“
Dawii’s pup.  You remember she went on the sands last month and came back with nothing to show for it?  It was too early, it should have been born next season, but it’s just as well, it would never have lived.”

She threw it towards me.

“See the legs.”

What I’d thought were little claws, four of them, but two were longer than the others, and already twisting about one another in a fusion of flesh and bone.  A little human,
Dawii’s little human.

“
And this one.”

She pulled out a small skeleton.  She’d had this one longer, and the bones were fused together, two columns running side by side and a pair of stubby fin-bones sitting out from the bottom.  A mer skeleton, I’d seen them sometimes.

“You want legs? I’ll find you legs.  With this.”

She took out the long knife she used for
making totems, and ran it over her thick-skinned thumb.

“It’s sharp enough.  Here, put your tail on the rock here beside me, where I can feel it, and I’ll cut you some beautiful human legs.”

By instinct I coiled my long, shining tail away from her.  She heard the movement, laughed.

“You can’t bear the pain – is that it? You don’t want
to suffer for your desire.  Not much of a wish then, is it, that you can’t stand a few little cuts!  You’d better mate with Guntur, little fish, and forget these human dreams of yours.”

Blindly, she felt out for me with the tip of the knife, grinning.  I slid away, knowing she couldn’t see me, afraid she’d hear me and reach for me anyway.

She hissed and spat, foamy yellow bubbles which sat on the dirty sand beside her.

I twisted round on myself and thrust out from the cave.  The sea felt clean and
salt-clear.  I turned and turned again, trying to wash the smell of Grandmother and her words off my body, taking pleasure in the power of my strong tail pushing back the water.  I would’ve liked to go back in and take that knife and slice her shrunken tail from fin to navel.  I was so consumed with hatred and anger that I almost barrelled into Che as he caught my arm and pulled me back.

“What did she say? Did
she speak to the spirits?”

I bit him hard on the shoulder, drawing blood, and spat. 

“Keep away from me, I never want to see you again.  I never want to see ANYONE again.”

I swatted the water as hard as I could
with my tail fins, to keep him off me, and felt the cold rush over my sides as I raced away.  This time it didn’t take me so long.  The sun had hardly started to dip before I saw the white sand, and the line of green, and the cliffs with the Trapped Moon perched on top.  I came within sight of the rocks, and swam in place, squinting up at the island.

I didn’t expect to see
much.  This wasn’t the Big Dry – this was just an island, the same as the hundreds of islets in the Channels.  Humans didn’t often come out this far from the Dry – and yet, up on the cliff, there was a cave-made-by-humans, its eyes reflecting the sun.  I lay on my back, and looked at the cave on the rock, till the sun almost met the edge of the sea, and the hard water glowed red in the dying light.  It was dusk and I was hungry, and then you came.

You came out of
a hole in the cave, and stood on the cliff top, drinking something, your chin tipped towards the sunset.  Your legs were wrapped in red, which flapped in the evening breeze, and your chest was bare and brown.  You stood out there and looked at the sunset, right over the top of me, as if I wasn’t there – I wasn’t, to you.  You fiddled with something and there was a glow.  Then you put something in your mouth and I could see a streak of mist wisping up from your breath to join the pink clouds in the darkening sky.   I’d never seen fire before.  I thought you were magical, able to call the sunset down and eat it – but it seemed like a good magic, far from Grandmother’s skulls and slime and dark stories to frighten children.

You walked slowly down the cliff
, picking your way, towards the beach, towards me.  Your legs worked perfectly, first one, then the other, I was amazed at the power and gracefulness of you, thinking of how even dragging myself a few lengths over sand or rock was clumsy and effortful.  You balanced perfectly on those two beautiful pillars of yours, you didn’t fall even once, you didn’t really even look at your feet as they found holds in the path.  Instead you looked out to sea, out towards me.  From the distance, your eyes were warm dark holes in your face, and your mouth a stain.

You stood with your feet in the wet sand
of the tiny half-moon bay, letting the wavelets run over them, and I could have swum and touched you, reminded you of how we came together from Deep Sea and I left you almost right there, sleeping on the sand.  I remembered that night and how we both almost sank with tiredness.  I could have let you go easily enough but I chose not to.  I remembered the warm salty tang of your lips when I kissed them, licked them clean of sand with mine, explored your frail eyelids. I held my breath.

I
watched you.  You held the mist-stick in your mouth, blew out more cloud over the still water, scratched behind your ear and said something to yourself in your strange deep human words – I guess there wasn’t anyone else to talk to.  Then you leaned and slapped your leg, near the foot, and said the same word, and turned, and walked back up the cliff, to your white cave.  I watched you as you walked inside, and suddenly the cave-that-humans-made lit up, as if you’d brought down the midday sun to sit inside it, just for you.  I could see your long, lean shape lit up in the entrance hole, a shadow against the light, and then you walked further in, until I couldn’t see you any more.