by Michelle Tea
When she lived in the village, Griet hadn’t needed to be everything. No single mermaid had: each could do what came to her naturally, braiding or singing or helping build houses. Griet didn’t like to fight or hunt, and though she was elegant with the instruments the mermaids built from fish bones and seashells and seal leather and coral, she was not elegant with a weapon. She was clumsy. In the village, it hadn’t mattered. Whatever she couldn’t do, another mermaid could, and they all worked together to have what they required. But here, alone with her sister, the ocean required her to be everything—hunter and butcher and explorer and builder. She looked at her sister with hurt and amazement. “Even if I had a narwhal horn I couldn’t do what you do, Syrena.”
“Well, you can do something,” Syrena insisted. “And you’ve got to have something to defend yourself with. Here.” Syrena handed her sister the knife she’d just fashioned.
Griet handled it gingerly, as if it were not an object but a living thing, an unpredictable eel likely to strike out at her. “I’ll probably only hurt myself with it,” she mumbled, shakily bringing the blade to her long tangles and cutting into one. With nimble fingers she pulled apart the knot, then went to work weaving the strands into a holster to carry it. The knife was so sharp she had to weave it thicker and thicker, as it kept cutting through her knitwork. Griet tied the knife to her waist and looked sheepishly at her sister.
“Great!” Syrena said proudly, and Griet allowed herself a smile. Scavengers had come and surrounded the dead shark in a flickering cloud. It was time for them to move on.
“That was relaxing,” Syrena said, sliding her horn back into its sheath.
“Relaxing!” Griet burst into laughter at her sister. “Only you would find it relaxing to slay a shark!”
Syrena shrugged. “We’re mermaids. We do what needs to be done.”
The pair continued their swim, not quite sure what they were looking for. Were they meant to find a hiding place and remain there, alone? Would the elders come for them when the war was over? How would they know when it was safe to return home? They coasted through the strait, dining on cod so plentiful all they needed was to stretch out their hands and grab them.
Eventually the Skagerrak released the mermaids into Kattegat Bay, and slowly the channel began to narrow. With the land closing in, the mermaids became nervous. Were they swimming down a dead end? With land came humans, and mermaids did not like to be so close to their settlements. But the pair had already swum so long and so hard. The thought of turning back was exhausting. And so the sisters pressed forward. Soon the roof of their world, the water’s surface, grew very close. Though perhaps it was deep to humans, the bay was shallow to mermaids, and the sisters lay on their backs, floating, gazing upward. The sun warmed the water of the bay and they felt the chill leaving their skin.
“Perhaps we should peek?” Griet suggested. “Gather where it is we are?”
Syrena nodded. Her narwhal tusk was still lashed to her back, and she placed a hand on it absently, a new habit. With her other hand she reached out for Griet, and with the slightest fluttering of their tails, the mermaids rose until their heads broke the surface.
They were shocked to see how close the land was, and that among the scattered rocks and lush greenery there were tiny, colorful houses. Human houses. Fishing boats bobbed in the distance, their sails puckering in the light wind. Enchantment lit up Griet’s face. She’d never seen a human settlement, and she certainly hadn’t expected it to be so like a mermaid village. The scale of the houses, the way they sat alongside each other—it swelled her heart with longing for her own home. Without thinking, she began to swim toward the rocky shore.
“Griet!” Syrena gasped. “Don’t!”
“Just a little closer. Look at the colors!” A mermaid village was beautiful in its own way, fashioned of the pale shells and bones of sea creatures, furred here and there with a neon burst of algae, but mostly it was a pale and fragile construction. These little houses were boldly colored, red as shark blood and yellow as the sun, blue as the sea! Colors that looked so different outside the waters that it was as if Griet had never seen them before.
Syrena followed her sister with darkness in her heart. It was true that the settlement was charming, but Syrena could not help but be wary of the humans that dwelled there. Humans had rarely shown mermaids kindness. Their once-friendly exchanges had happened so long ago they seemed to Syrena nothing more than fairy stories. It was because of the humans that the sisters were here, lost and alone, bobbing in a bay far from their home sea. Syrena unsheathed her tusk and kept it at the ready as she paddled through the shallow waters, joining Griet at the banks.
Griet clutched at the rocks with her hands, her pearly fingertips shining in the light. Her smile was so wide Syrena couldn’t even see her fangs; they blended in with the rest of her teeth. The tip of her baleen poked out from under her lip.
“Oh, don’t you wish you could go there!” It wasn’t a question, it was pure desire. Griet didn’t even turn to her sister to see what Syrena thought; she tilted her head back to the mild sun, enjoying its rays on her bluish-white skin. Her nose flared as she inhaled the special smell of the place—the salt in the water as it dried upon the rocks, the sea plants lying stiff on the shore, kicked up by the tides. Griet reached as far as she could and plucked one from the land, brought it to her mouth with a crunch.
“Awwwwwwhhf!” She mumbled a loud, happy sound, her mouth full of seaweed. “Taste this!” she thrust it to her sister. “Have you ever tasted something like this before?”
Reluctantly, Syrena took the food. No, she hadn’t ever tasted anything like it before. The heat of the sun and the dryness of the air had transformed the plant to something altogether different than it was underwater. The salt of the bay had crystallized upon it, and it crunched pleasingly between her teeth.
“When we get back to the village, I’m going to make this!” Griet cried, inspired. “We can find a rock and leave the plant in the sun! The others will love it!”
The mention of the village and the thought of feeding the others made both mermaids quiet with sadness. But as Syrena’s thoughts drifted homeward, Griet tipped her head back and continued sniffing the air as if sampling food from a banquet.
“I can smell the pines over there,” she said, pointing toward the cluster of deep green trees far back on the shore. “And the wood the people used for their homes. And the wood they burn, that dark smoke leaving their homes.” She closed her eyes and kept breathing. And that was why she didn’t see the man approaching the shore, why she was so startled to find her sister with her narwhal horn drawn as if to strike.
Chapter 11
The waters of the North Sea were cold and thick with salt. They seemed to take more effort to move through, like switching gears on a bicycle. Sophie could feel her body adjusting to the new conditions as she pushed through, water streaming around her. At first she had been cold, but like a walrus, like something that belonged down there, her body had started to adjust, and she was fine. The goose bumps that covered her arms and legs were probably permanent, but Sophie had ceased to notice them. What she did notice was the new creatures popping up in the dusky waters—the glittering spirals that shimmered up from a clump of dowdy algae, looking like the fizzing sparklers Sophie and Ella had lit on the Fourth of July.
“Clavelina lepadiformis,” Syrena offered, noticing the girl noticing the creature. “Sea squirts. Very tasty. Tingle on the tongue.”
A jellyfish red as a clown’s nose pulsed by, trailing long, crimson tendrils, looking like a tropical flower. When a school of cod passed by, Syrena reached out and snagged one, her long nails puncturing its scales.
“When I girl, schools of cod so great, mermaid get lost in them! Once me and Griet separated by cod and took minutes to find one another. So many fish! Not now. Too many humans, and ocean so dirty.” She took a vicious bite from the side of the fish, spitting out bones. “Not as good,” she shook her head. “Don
’t taste like what cod used to taste.”
Syrena could be so jaded, Sophie thought. The North Sea, to Sophie, was perfect and full of magic. Up ahead she spied a gang of spotted seals playing together, swimming and swirling, diving and tumbling, their whiskery noses making them look like undersea puppies.
Syrena noted the wonder on Sophie’s face, and in her mermaid way, she went about killing it. “Ya, they cute,” she said coldly, “Unless you so little they try to eat you.”
“Syrena!” Sophie whined. “I like them.”
“I like them, too. Wrapped in seaweed, cooking by a vent in the seafloor. Delicious.”
They passed over a forest of sea pens, their feathery polyps outstretched and glowing, like a stage full of burlesque dancers bearing fans and sequins. Lobsters scampered below, gazing up at the pair with eyes as blue as the sea that was their home.
“Wish I hadn’t filled up on that cod,” Syrena said regretfully. “I’ll be back for you.” The lobster rushed to hide among the coral. A minke whale, its skin elegantly ridged, its mouth impossibly long, coasted by, creating a wake that Sophie and Syrena bounced upon.
Something nagged at Sophie as she slunk through these rich, new waters. Her body still felt worn from her latest magic—her teeth loose in her mouth, her throat scorched from the fire of her zawolanie. Her stomach felt unsettled; she hadn’t been able to ingest anything but a few bites of seaweed and some algae sucked from her hair. But all in all, she was okay. She had tangled with Kishka, and it seemed that she had won.
“Syrena?” Sophie called to the mermaid. “You know everything that just happened to me? With Kishka?”
“How you turn to shark and bite head off? Ya. You tell me. I wish I had seen. To see you bite Kishka! I would have cheered!”
“Well, I feel pretty good, you know? I don’t feel that sick. I mean, I need to take a nap—”
“After the Swilkie, the Ogress will give you nap.”
“Yeah, but I mean, my point is, how come I’m okay? Why aren’t I more hurt? It was Kishka.”
“You in ocean,” the mermaid said. “You soaking in salt. You are salt, almost. You strongest here. You bathe in it, swallow it. You constantly getting salt. It heal you before you even hurt.”
“Hmph.” It was true that Sophie could barely taste the salt anymore. The salt had become everything, her whole world.
“You no try to look into Kishka, right?” Syrena asked. “Peek into her heart, or whatever she has? No heart, I don’t think.”
“No,” Sophie said with a shudder. “I never, ever want to see that. Not after what you showed me.” Sophie recalled the night at the creek, back in Chelsea, a million years ago it seemed. How the mermaid had given her a glimpse of all the world’s pain, the deep, dark core of her grandmother. How it had knocked her straight out, scrambled her part-human, part-mortal body. She had come to puking fish and creek water and scared Ella right out of their best-friendship.
“I show you that because you need to know it,” Syrena said, “And to see it direct from Kishka herself, it kill you.”
“Kill me?” Sophie marveled.
“Yeah, kill you dead. You with no training, no salt, no nothing, just a girl, don’t even know pigeons talk yet? You see Kishka’s insides, you just—poof. Dead.”
“What about now?” Sophie asked. “Now that I’m in the ocean all this time? Now that I can control the water?”
“Well, ya,” Syrena nodded. “Probably not kill you. Probably just make you like seaweed for rest of your life. You know, you just lie there forever, nothing.”
“Ugh, that’s even worse!”
“Ya, ya. No worry, Sophie. We are going to make you strong as narwhal horn! Look.”
In the distance before them was a white column. It even resembled the horn the mermaid had talked about, a giant, ivory spiral. But as they crept closer, Sophie slowing the waters, she saw it was more like a tornado. An underwater tornado, spinning, frothing, sucking water from the surface in a controlled frenzy.
“The Swilkie,” Sophie said.
“Ya, ya, the Swilkie,” Syrena nodded. “So powerful. We will swim inside.”
Sophie opened her mouth to speak. “Swim inside?” she was going to say. “What are you talking about, swim inside!” The twisting tower looked violent as a swarm of sharks. But she bit her tongue. She had fought Kishka and won. Every day the ocean made her stronger, without her even knowing about it. The very waters responded to her, doing her bidding as if she were their queen. And maybe she was! Maybe she was Sophie Swankowski, Queen of the Waters. Then it was time for her to act like it. She was about to meet the Ogresses, the giant women who had dug for her the best chunk of salt the sea had to offer, a giant cube of salt that had melted down to a beautiful pearl and had saved Sophie when she was so sick. She would not act like a child. Not to them, and not to Syrena.
“How do we do it?” she asked the mermaid. Her voice was steady, and her eyes were stuck on the Swilkie. How majestic it was. Sophie wished she could linger by the storm of it and watch it twirl. Like a terrible ballet, elegant but brutal, too. Sophie did not understand how she could swim into such a thing without being torn apart. But she didn’t understand how she had made herself into a shark, either. Not understanding didn’t mean anything anymore. It only mattered that she was ready to learn.
“I think you make easy for us,” Syrena said, “if you tell water to help. Normal, we just swim into it. And it bang us around like this and that, oh! You think periwinkles hurt your stomach! You stay caught in Swilkie for a couple days, your whole body feel like one bad stomach!”
“A couple days?” Sophie asked in exactly the frightened, whiny tone she was trying to avoid. She cleared her throat, hoping she could clear away some panic in the process. “I mean—so, we’ll spin in the Swilkie for how long? How many days?”
“Long as take to reach center. Center of Swilkie calm, like long, calm tunnel. We swim right down to Ogresses. Very easy. But not easy to swim into center, because water push and pull you very hard, like trying to eat you.”
“Huh.” Sophie looked at the spinning Swilkie. Twisting, twisting, twisting, they both could feel its power, its pull. Sophie knew that all they had to do was swim a little bit closer and then the Swilkie would do the work, sucking them right in.
“But I think you maybe just ask the water to open for us,” Syrena suggested. “Like, make path right to center? You try, ya?”
“How?” Sophie asked, and the mermaid gave her a look. “Okay, give me a second.” Sophie focused on the water. It felt, in some strange way, like doing a math puzzle. There were patterns at work and Sophie could manipulate them. Part of it was that the water was alive, and her asking did the work. But the water was also information, streams and streams of it, and Sophie could change what it was saying, rewrite it. Her tinkering was also her asking.
If Sophie paused to think about it too clearly, she knew it wouldn’t work. With her mind and with something else, her intuition perhaps, Sophie dug into the structure of the water and she divided it with a plea. In just a breath she felt what she had done. Her talisman allowed her to breathe beneath the water, but it wasn’t the same. Sophie had created a pocket of oxygen. The sudden breath of it shot straight to her head, making her giddy.
“Syrena, look!” she cried. Before them was a tunnel, a strange space that cut through the water—but Sophie could see, too, that it seemed to be killing everything in its path. Sophie smacked her hand to her mouth as she watched a small school of silvery fish twitch and then, en masse, flutter to the ground like torn paper. On either side of the oxygen tunnel, swaying strips of sea grass grew brittle and brown, then crumbled. But still, they needed to make it through the Swilkie.
“Sophie, what are you doing?” Syrena cried.
Whatever it was, Sophie did it harder. She pried and unlocked the water all the way up to the Swilkie’s wild column, and a gap appeared in its side.
“It’s oxygen!” Sophie cried.
&
nbsp; “You’re killing the creatures!” the mermaid hollered back, as a pair of cod swam haplessly into the airy space and began to gasp, seizing and falling. Some that had lagged behind seemed to explode in a burst of silvery rain.
“Quickly, quickly, go, so I can stop it!” She pushed the mermaid in the direction of the space in the Swilkie, and the mermaid, entering the oxygen chamber, fumbled.
“I can’t swim!” she cried. “There is nothing to swim in!” Like the sea creatures before her, she fumbled and flailed. She took deep breaths of oxygen and stumbled forward, Sophie pushing from behind, keeping the gate open. They were swimming clumsily upon air, Sophie holding the whole unnatural situation together with her mind, and it was exhausting. Go, go go go go, she thought, pushing herself forward, willing the mermaid through the portal in the Swilkie’s rushing waters. All around them, the living ocean died as it encountered a combustible cloud of oxygen where seawater once flowed.
Syrena pushed into the hole in the Swilkie, and Sophie reached out and grabbed her tail, pulling herself in. The sound of the water roaring around them was deafening, like being trapped in a waterfall. As Syrena curved her body into the eye of the Swilkie, Sophie relaxed her grip on the water—and felt the Swilkie’s churning wall crash down on her.
Sophie saw Syrena’s face as the mermaid turned inside the serenity of the eye; watched her expression morph from relief to horror. Sophie had let go of the water too soon. She had seen the mermaid enter the eye and thought they had both arrived. She was wrong.
It was as if the sea had taken its muscular arm and wrangled the girl into a headlock, then proceeded to whip her around in a circle at a velocity she could barely comprehend. Probably she was tumbling, but it happened so fast she could not even register it. Her body felt beyond her, held in the many fists of the Swilkie. She spun and spun until her brain felt scrambled, until space and time were pounded away.