The Undrowned Child (12 page)

It was as if the voices had fingers and that they pulled at Teo’s shoulders and feet. She was so sorry for them, but the power of their misery terrified her, and she was afraid, more than anything, that they would claim her for their own.

“Put your hands over your ears,” whispered Renzo.

The keening of the ghosts grew dimmer when she did that, but she could not quite block out their cries. The last thing she heard was, “No, do not go down there, never down the-e-e-re.… Stay with us.…”

Teo and Renzo shuffled into an old chapel, covered with dim frescoes of a stormy, foggy sea, which were illuminated by the moon reflected in the water. For although the garden outside was perfectly dry, inside the chapel the floor was covered with water and seaweed that wrapped around their feet and threatened to trip them up at every step. The Key to the Secret City started to vibrate wildly in Teo’s bodice until she exclaimed, “I was definitely planning to open you sometime very soon!”

As soon as she did so, a great silver key jumped out. Teo, clumsy as ever, missed it. Dappled moonlight lit up the key as it arched and dropped into the water, to be immediately hidden among the dense seaweeds. Renzo sighed.

Teo thrust the book back into the top of her bodice. The children knelt down in the water, combing their fingers through the soft fronds, trying to find the key. All the while the singing voice grew more and more urgent. The strangest thing was that it seemed to be rising up from underneath them. Eventually Teo’s hand closed around the key, just as pain tore through her knee. She cried out, feeling her skin open up in a deep cut. The moon must have emerged from behind a cloud, for suddenly the chapel became clear as day and the water grew transparent.

Teo could see her own blood wafting out around the dark green seaweed. She had shuffled straight onto the sharp hinge of a great lock.

“Blood,” she thought in a daze of pain and shock. “Do ghosts bleed?”

Renzo and Teo saw a beautifully carved door shimmering beneath the shallow water, placed flat in the floor, as if it opened straight down into the sea. Teo pushed the key into the lock and pulled at the door with all her might. It gave a little, just enough to let her know that it might possibly open.

Renzo had put his hand on her shoulder. She could feel him trembling. Clearly, he shared her own fear, that they would be sucked into some kind of deep pool below the lagoon. If even the ghosts were afraid of what was down there …

“I’m not …” Renzo struggled to admit it.… “not really a good swimmer. You see, we don’t always learn to swim in Venice. It’s an old superstition we have here: ‘What the sea wants, the sea will have.…’ ”

“Don’t worry, I am.” Teo was a surprisingly good swimmer, happily in her element and graceful as a ballerina underwater. Her adoptive mother sometimes called her “my water-baby.”

Renzo intoned, “A drowning man should not be helped, for the sea will only claim another victim in his place. It is considered by some scholars that this belief dates back to pagan times, when the gods of the sea had to be appeased by occasional human sacrifice.…”

“What nonsense!” Teo said briskly. “Now, we need to pull this door up together.”

Embarrassed, Renzo knelt down in the water beside her and took hold of the other half of the handle. Teo held her breath, closed her eyes and wrenched. She waited for the big wave, the swell of cold water, the blackness pulling them down.

When she opened her eyes, instead of darkness and sea there was light and music and a dry stone staircase that descended steeply to what distant echoes told her was a vast chamber far below. The walls of the staircase were covered in frescoes of underwater scenes and lit up with candles in sconces made of scallop shells that had been dipped in gold. The perfumed salt smell wafted around them, as did snatches of song, both stronger than ever. There was no doubt that they were coming from wherever the stairs ended, somewhere deep below the garden of the House of the Spirits. The children hesitated at the top stair.

“Renzo!” urged Teo. “We’ve come this far.…”

The stairs wound down and down. The frescoes were replaced by gilded shields, each showing a mortar-and-pestle, and the scallop sconces by exquisite candelabra decorated with all kinds of sea creatures made from glass, glittering in the light and tinkling slightly as the children passed. Teo’s injured knee throbbed with every step, and the blood straggled down her leg. The smell of perfumed salt had given way to something else, something warm and spicy, something that didn’t really seem at all possible.

“Can you smell … curry?” asked Renzo.

“Well, something very like it.”

“What do you think it is?”

“Well, it’s definitely not a curry house, not down here.”

“Seriously, do you think The Key would take us anywhere dangerous?”

“Everywhere is dangerous in Venice now.”

“That’s a comfort. Thank you for that. Oh, can you hear something?”

A thumping noise grew louder and louder as they descended.

Finally, the roof gaped open into a great archway, from which they could see a larger space blazing with light.

At the bottom of the steps was a broad stone balcony that rimmed a vast pool, which resembled a Turkish bath. It was tiled all over with tiny gold mosaics like the Basilica of San Marco. Arches opened in all directions to more golden caverns and canals. The golden walls were lined with airy shelves hung with garlands of flowering seaweed thick with pearls. Above the garlands, in neat rows, glittered hundreds of golden mortars-and-pestles. The cavern was lit by enormously thick and tall candles dripping white wax tears, which every few seconds floated away as discs of light in the still, clear water.

The chamber was not empty. It was full of clattering life and song. Rainbow-colored parrots squawked in gilded cages. And someone was exceedingly busy down there.

Those someones were mermaids.

just past midnight, June 8, 1899

Teo had heard the words “coral lips” many times. Now, for the first time, she understood that such a description could actually be true. The lips of all the mermaids were a most exquisite moist red, and completely smooth, just like coral. The mermaids’ sea-green eyes slanted slightly upwards, fringed by luxuriant lashes. When they looked down, their eyelids resembled white cowrie shells. Their long curly hair was fluffy and tousled. Each wore a single gold earring in her left ear, like a sailor. None looked more than sixteen years old.

Teo and Renzo cowered in the darkness of the stairs, too dazed to exchange even a whisper. Renzo gaped at the lovely creatures with a mixture of fear and admiration. Teo noted with approval that these mermaids showed no sign at all of sitting around gazing at themselves in mirrors like the mermaids in children’s stories. Instead, they were all busy with a complicated, highly technical task that was extremely familiar to Teo.

The mermaids were printing.

Different mermaids worked in teams to perform all the functions of the press. But this was not printing as Gutenberg once did it, nor printing like Teo had done in her classroom at school. No, this was a different manner of printing entirely.

Some mermaids were halving oysters and flicking out the pearls. Others were grinding those pearls in mortars-and-pestles. Some were making paper, pressing down molds on the pulp of pearls crushed together with silky white seaweed. More carried the damp newborn paper to the drying racks arranged over neat little fires; then others ferried dried sheets to the printing press, which had its own little island in the middle of the submerged cavern. The printing press itself was a beautiful device, more like a giant jewel box than a machine. It was studded with carved oyster shells and pearls. The levers were the bleached bones of some vast ancient sea creature.

And the ink? Teo heard a splashing noise and turned around to see the ink being gently tickled from squid by some mermaids wearing black-splotched aprons, using gloved hands inside a tank. After their ink was milked, the mermaids released the soft fleshy squid back into the water of the cavern. The squid swam away fast, looking over their pink shoulders rather anxiously, but unhurt.

The printing press swooped down on the paper, and sent out large sheets that were laid on a table where yet more mermaids deftly cut them up into small squares, using scalpels made of sharpened stems of coral. Other mermaids stacked the squares into bundles and tied them with twine made of dried seaweed tendrils. The bundles were loaded onto miniature rafts.

The mermaids sang as they worked, those same jaunty sea shanties that Teo had been hearing for days. And the parrots squawked along too, cheerfully out of tune and full of gusto. There was an atmosphere of intense urgency throughout the whole extraordinary operation.

Renzo shook his head slightly, as if there was something in his ear. He looked at Teo for a moment, and tried to open his mouth, but his eyes were instantly drawn back to the scene in the cavern.

Some mermaids called out instructions to each other, using a strange sort of language, which sounded as if it came from some old sailor’s locker. “Rouse out, rouse out, rouse out. Lash and carry, lash and carry, show a leg!” they shouted.

“Show a leg!” screeched the parrots.

This last was particularly odd, as the mermaids had not a leg between them. Their language was not always easy to understand, but it was very pleasing to listen to; a kind of rude poetry.

“If you love me, move your dome,” one called, when she wanted her companion to bend her head in order to avoid collision with a spoke of the press.

Teo saw those words written in a fine, free handwriting, in deep blue ink.

One of the sheets flew off the press and onto the floor near Teo. She bent down to pick it up, and handed it to the transfixed Renzo without a word. It looked familiar. And it smelt of fish! Angry warnings filled the page. Venetians, watch that mayor of yours. Something’s come over him like a pig falling from the sky. Remember the Butcher Biasio and the skin of Marcantonio Bragadin!

Suddenly everything became remarkably clear. The mermaids were Signor Rioba!

All this while the mermaids had shown no sign of having noticed their visitors. Renzo and Teo stood in the shadows of the great chamber, their hearts thumping like the press itself, not knowing whether they would be welcome visitors or if they had stumbled in on a secret that could cost them their lives.

They did not need to wonder long. Teo’s clumsiness betrayed them. Signor Rioba’s sheet slipped from her shaking hand and sailed out of their hiding place, coming to rest on the head of a mermaid who was sweeping small torn pieces of paper into a vast clamshell. She turned and pointed to the children, her finger quivering in the air like an arrow. A little cry escaped from her lips, but nothing more.

One by one, the mermaids noticed the intruders, and each stopped short in her task. In seconds, the printing press had ground to a halt, and hundreds of mermaids were erect, still and silent, each clutching the tools of her particular trade, and staring at Teo and Renzo.

“Human children!” gasped one of the mermaids. “Blood for breakfast!”

The parrots echoed happily, “Blood for breakfast, blood for breakfast, blood for—”

“Avast heaving, there!” shouted the mermaid’s colleague, who was still too busy counting sheets of paper to look up. This seemed to mean, “Stop teasing me!”

A third mermaid, who had also caught sight of the children, insisted, “My gib was atwitch, I might of knowed it. Human childer smell most peculiar, I do declare freely.”

The other mermaids immediately chipped in to declare that their gibs—noses, it seemed—had also detected something odd. “But I dint like to air it, ye know.”

“And now dey have crippen up upon us, bless my owld soul!”

Renzo and Teo felt exceedingly uncomfortable. So many pairs of wide green eyes fixed on them, with so much commentary and without a great deal of approval.

But then the atmosphere changed dramatically, and much for the better.

“You have come, Children,” said a low, graceful voice. “At Last.”

Teo recognized the owner of that voice at once—for she had the same face as the beautiful, sad girl on the cover of The Key to the Secret City.

“It’s you!” she gasped.

“Yes indeed. You are most welcome, Teodora & Lorenzo,” purred the mermaid, who sat on a half-submerged throne. They had not noticed her before because she had been quite still while the other mermaids were a blur of activity. Her azure tail was mostly underwater, its shimmering scales visible in the candlelight.

There was a hubbub among the other mermaids. Amidst their chattering, Teo thought someone exclaimed, “Avast! ’Tis Teodora! ’Tis the Undrowned Child!”

The Undrowned Child? Where had Teo heard that before?

There was a general splashing as one mermaid rushed forward to lay her hands on Teo’s feet, shouting, “Gangway! Let me touch her for luck!”

“Let me! I saw her first!” clamored another. “Who’d a thunk the little maid would look so natural?”

“D’ye think she could do the Hopscotch for us? D’ye have a notion of how the Hopscotch works, Undrowned Child?”

Renzo took a step backwards as the mermaids stroked and groomed as much of Teo as they could get their hands on.

“Now, Pretty Ladies!” reproved the mermaid on the throne. She calmed them with words that seemed familiar, but in unusual combinations. The lettering Teo saw when this mermaid spoke was elegant and quaintly old-fashioned, using the symbol “&” for “and” in the way of old books she had seen in the library.

The mermaid smiled at Teo. “I am Lussa. This”—she gestured at the gilded cavern—“is my Queendom. And these Pretty Ladies”—she pointed to the assembled mermaids—“are my Subjects.”

Teo noticed that only Lussa among the mermaids spoke with capital letters at the beginnings of her words. It must be a royal prerogative, she guessed.

Lussa added sympathetically, “My Speech is Strange to You? My Race learnt to speak in Humantongue by eavesdropping upon Sailors who came to these Waters from the Indies & Beyond. I fear this Primitive Education has left its Mark: We oftimes speak as Rough as Guts. Your Shore Parlance is indubitably Difficult for Us too. About the Hopscotch, ’Tis a Mythical Pursuit among Us. The Ladies are a little Infatuated with the Notion of It, being a Game We ourselves shall never be able to play.” Lussa pointed to her tail.