“It must have been something Taika did,” Sabrina continued.
“Can I speak to her?” asked Maya.
Sabrina shook her head. “No, I don’t think Taika will be back,” she replied, looking at the exit of the cave. “Ever”
Maya nodded. “OK.” She looked at me and smiled encouragingly. “Shall we try to wake him?”
I nodded, trembling.
We both closed our eyes as I tried to imagine Merrick vital and whole again, but I was so afraid I’d lost him that all I could picture was Brent, unmoving in death.
Maya squeezed my hand and my eyes sprang open.
“Stop,” she told me gently, “this talent works both ways. If you can’t see him healthy in your mind’s eye, rather don’t work on him.”
“Sorry,” I whispered, moving away from him.
She placed her hands on either side of his head and closed her eyes. I was shocked to watch her skin pale and her hair lose colour and shine in the few moments she spent with Merrick.
She released him, panting and shaking as she did so.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “that’s all I’ve got available to help him.”
I hugged her now frail-looking shoulders. “Thank you,” I said, smiling as Merrick’s eyes fluttered open.
Chapter 29
Peace
Merrick popped his head into the aven I was sitting in, interrupting the croaking voice of the old man who’d been telling me how he’d rescued his entire pod by carrying them all to safety, going again and again into the poison to get them all out.
“Ahh, this one is a good one,” he croaked, pointing a shaking hand at Merrick. “Although I’ve never seen him quite so excited to see anyone before.” He patted my hand, leaning over to me conspiratorially. “He likes you very much, my dear, in fact like is a little too weak a word, he…”
“Thank you, Livius, I’ll take it from here,” laughed Merrick, taking my hand, and leading me outside of the cave.
“How are you feeling today?” I asked him, searching his face for any sign of whatever had ailed him the night before.
“Great!” he replied. “Slight headache,” he admitted when he saw my sceptical glare, “but otherwise great.”
We’d slept in separate avens the night before, as I’d insisted that he have his own hammock for the night.
Sabrina’s aven was just as comfortable, but I’d slept badly, waking every hour or so with a fright and plagued by vague and mistily elusive nightmares.
When we reached the fever tree, I stopped him to wrap my arms around his waist, tears threatening in my eyes as I listened relieved to the steady beating of his heart.
He laughed, squeezing me closer to him as he did so.
“You OK?” he asked me, releasing one of his arms and tenderly tucking a wayward strand of hair back into place.
I nodded, smiling at him. “I am now.”
He grinned as I pulled away from him.
“Merrick, I want to figure out what else I can do,” I told him seriously.
He cocked his head to one side.
“No,” he replied, his face enigmatic.
“No?”
“I have a better idea, a more important idea I think.” He helped me to climb the rock face that exited the cave, turning in the opposite direction from where we’d left the cave the day before, walking into the darkness.
I edged my way up the path after him, bumping into him in the darkness.
He took my hand and pulled me in front of him.
“Let’s swim,” he said, a smile in his voice.
I shuddered a little at the thought. The last time he’d suggested this I’d nearly drowned again.
“Together,” he amended.
Sabrina had taught me to wrap the pale green robe I wore today, informing me that if she ever saw me treat the fabric with the disrespect of winding it into shorts again, she would personally hunt me down.
“This pool is instantly deep,” he said before releasing me and diving in a perfect arc into the centre of the pool. I sat and edged into the water, fascinated by the texture of my robe against my skin. It swirled eagerly, glowing faintly as soon as it touched the water, before settling around my legs snugly.
Merrick met me in the centre, pulling me into his arms before flipping us around into the now faintly lit gloom.
Breathing with him, we sped through the dark water, spiralling as we went. Rock squeezed in on us, narrowing the water channel and pushing the current ever faster.
A short while later we surfaced in cool water and fresh air, surrounded by moss-covered rocks, and an auburn tumble of tree roots as they soaked up the water.
A series of miniature waterfalls bubbled crystal-clear water over smooth rocks at one end of the pool, occasionally washing dried leaves or bits of bark with it. At the other end of the pool, the river resumed the frantic pace of a newly formed stream, rushing its way energetically to the sea.
Merrick and I climbed out of the pool, our clothing drying instantly as if the cloth that had so loved the water moments ago was suddenly tired of it, releasing it in a torrent. Merrick smoothed his hair away from his face, twisting it in his hands before flicking it over his shoulder as he led me into the forest.
We walked in silence for a while, the soft pad of our moccasined feet the only human sound to break the excited murmur of the waking forest around us.
The valley drew to a close, before merging through a narrow cliff-lined passageway onto a narrow mountain ridge.
As I gazed in awe at the beautiful patchwork view, it occurred to me that I had no idea where we were. If Josh, Luke and I wanted to leave, we would have a tough time finding our way home. With Merrick’s hand encasing mine though, the thought seemed almost bizarre. Why would I ever want to leave him, and the beauty of the mountains? The idea shocked me, because for the first time I realised that the idea of staying with him for much longer than the planned five days had somehow permeated my initial horror at the idea.
And then the image of my mother’s face popped into my mind. Her golden hair was fluffed around her in its normal disobedient way. She was smiling at me, her green eyes still holding the hint of sadness that had been an ever-present reminder of Brent’s death for the last three years.
How could I abandon her? How could I leave her to face a life completely alone? With the divorce recently finalised, Dad was bound to move on. But would she?
I struggled to picture my mother coping alone in Johannesburg. Coming home to an empty house, eating dinner alone, watching TV alone…
If only I could say goodbye to her, just spend a few weeks making sure she would be OK, then all of this would be so much easier.
And then the threat the Miengu and every other hostile Oceanid posed pushed its way into my wavering conviction. If it meant keeping my mother alive, then I would leave her. I just wished I had more time, a bubble of frustration forming at Dad’s protective behaviour. If he’d introduced me to my heritage sooner, if he’d allowed the Oceanids to train me…
But I knew why he hadn’t. Brent’s death had changed me, made me into a shadow of my previous self, and it was only now that I’d been forced into this strange new exciting world, that I was beginning to rediscover who I was. I didn’t think I would have coped with this any earlier.
Remembering how I’d felt in the last summer holidays, how alienated and small and helpless, I doubted I would have been able to cope with any of the things I’d experienced or seen so far.
Merrick squeezed my hand companionably, forcing me to focus on why I was out of time.
How could I leave the Oceanids I’d met, even for six months, while I tried to say goodbye to my mother and my life? They needed my help right now. I didn’t know how I could help them yet, but I knew I would. There was no way I could go back to being the teenager I’d been when we started the trip. No way I wanted to go back to being that person.
I was happy with the Oceanids, happier than I’d been in over three
years.
I’d made girl-friends, Sabrina, Maya, Undine, and found mentors in Nanami, Talita and Livius, not to mention the dozens of others I’d met and really wanted to get to know better.
I watched the muscles bunch in Merrick’s back as he pulled himself over a boulder before turning to help me up.
And then there was Merrick. Wonderful, kind, gorgeous Merrick. How could I leave him? How could I deny the love that squeezed my heart, almost painfully every time I looked at him? How could I survive even a day without him?
I frowned, trying to catch the kernel of the idea that the “gardening” discussion had sparked the night before, determined to develop a plan that would help me to save the Oceanids and my family.
“Merrick.” He turned and smiled at me briefly before continuing to walk along the faint path we’d been following. “What did you think about the story Llyr told us last night, the one about the king and his daughter?”
Merrick shrugged. “It’s not an unusual tactic for us,” he replied.
I was surprised. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve seen paintings and heard about mermaids’ ability to lure sailors into the sea with their beauty and their singing?”
I had seen paintings exactly like that.
“Most of the time the Oceanids use the power of suggestion and persuasion. It’s not a sport I personally engage in but it has been a sort of revenge that Oceanids have taken over the years.”
“If Oceanids are so good at manipulating humans to do as they wish, why haven’t they changed human behaviour?”
“It only works on humans that are in direct contact with the Oceanids and even then only very weak humans are easily influenced. Take Luke and Josh for instance, Indra is not having nearly as much fun as Aerowen, because Josh is a much stronger character than Luke.”
“It still looks like it’s pretty easy for Oceanids to affect humans though,” I replied.
He shook his head. “The reason it’s so tough is because we don’t think the same way humans do. We’re wired differently, what motivates us and drives us and angers us is so different from the way humans think, that attempts at influencing human thought have mostly gone astray.”
“Then how is it working with Josh and Luke?”
“What Aerowen and Indra are doing is very specific and quite finite in terms of time and motives and it’s only with two people.”
“So inspiring humans to stop using fossil fuel and finding different ways of eliminating pollution is too complex?”
He nodded. “Yes, the use of oil to drive industry is very deep seated, it’s across many different nations and used for a myriad of different things. Your reaction to the idea of stopping the use of fossil fuels was that you thought you’d have to go back to the dark ages. Other people react similarly. Intermingled with that is the added issue of money. Oil, or rather the ownership of oil, makes certain countries very rich. Money is not something humans let go of easily.”
“And pollution?”
“That’s an interesting issue too. Most humans, once they’re educated about it – which is a completely different discussion altogether – don’t like the idea of killing the animals in the ocean. The problem is that they can’t link the death of the sea to how they live their own lives. Anything that takes more time, or is an inconvenience, is set aside. Changing the way people think about rubbish is just as difficult as changing their use of oil. It’s something they’ve done their whole lives, something their parents have done. There is sort of a pollution heritage that is infinitely difficult to break.”
We rounded the side of a valley. I’d been so involved in thinking through what he was telling me that I walked into his back, not noticing that he’d stopped, probably because he moved so quietly. My hands flew instinctively up to his back, shielding my face from the unexpected obstacle he created.
His skin was smooth and warm beneath my palms, my senses coming instantly, alive at the contact. I kept one hand on his back as I ducked beneath his arm to stand next to him, relishing how he pulled me protectively into his side, tucking a stray tendril of my hair behind my ear as he did so.
“What is it?”
“Sabine’s kingdom,” he replied, turning his face upward and gazing out over the valley. I followed his gaze, searching for any sort of familiar shape.
“Are we going to carry on walking?” I asked.
He shook his head, his hair still a little damp from the morning’s swim, flicking tiny droplets of water around him in a haze.
“Is this it?” I asked incredulous, seeing only trees and moth-eaten rock face.
He chuckled and nodded.
I gazed at the unremarkable valley. Below where we were standing water glinted between the leaves of massive trees.
“Uh, what is supposed to be here, Merrick?” I asked, feeling a little lost.
“Sabine’s tribe built a complex society here,” he replied. “Her ingenuity meant that they could live in the sun, protected from prying eyes, unlike us.”
I kept quiet, still struggling to see the ruins he spoke of.
“Could you point out what’s left?” I asked. “I can’t see it.”
He pulled me around until I was standing in front of him facing the valley. One hand cupped around my cheek as he directed my gaze, while the other pointed to specific details.
His whispered voice in my ear and the unexpected sharpening of my senses was utterly delicious. I struggled to concentrate on what he was showing me as I marvelled at the vivid colours and detail of the forest.
I was amazed at how much of Sabine’s Kingdom remained. A spiral of stairs cleverly carved into the natural shape of the cliff face. The entrance to the “great hall” as Merrick called it, marked by two tall green-skinned fever trees, and some carefully placed rocks, which he informed me were delicately carved into pictures depicting the species history.
Set into the cliff face, and only visible at specific angles, the landings of dozens of avens, a shift to the left or the right would turn what had been an obviously man-made structure into a natural-looking rocky outcrop, boulder or contour of the cliff.
He led me to an overhang, and we sat dangling our legs over the edge as he continued to point out bits and pieces of the ruins.
“How many people lived here?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. It was a very long time ago from what I’ve seen, though at least ten thousand.”
I tried to imagine a community of ten thousand people living in this valley.
“It doesn’t look big enough to house that many of them,” I replied, gazing down the length of the valley.
“It wasn’t,” he replied. “The other valleys we’ve walked through today are all part of the same community. Sabine and Pelagius were smart enough to split up opposing factions. This valley was reserved for the families of all of the human women who came with Sabine when she jumped into the pool.”
“I didn’t know the tension between different groupings of your kind went back that far.”
He laughed, and shook his head. “There is always division. Sabine and Pelagius dealt with it by creating physical separation of the groups, Talita…” He smiled. “Well, Talita tries to placate them as best she can – not always successfully.”
“When are the violent ones looking to attack?” I asked, a tremor of nervousness running through me.
He frowned worriedly. “There hasn’t been a specific date or timing so far, but I think your appearance and the information Maya shared with them last night is going to rapidly speed up any plans they might have.”
“You’re worried.” It was a statement not a question.
He nodded. “It’s one of the reasons we’d like you to try to swim again today. Your talents are beginning to surface, but they won’t be of much help to us if you can’t swim to the disaster areas to help us fix them.”
“You have a plan?”
He nodded, still looking worried. “For now it’s a short
-term plan to clean up some of the pollution and buy us some time. There are some massive fissures in the earth’s crust that we could bury the pollution in, and there are some strategies for the oil spills too.”
“But?” I voiced the obvious concerns.
“But it requires you to be able to swim to them and to be a lot stronger than you are now. Most of our talents develop over time. As we grow and learn and practise with them, they become stronger. You don’t have the luxury of time. You are also not fully Oceanid so I don’t know how your body will cope with the development of your talents or with the swimming.”
He’d turned to face me and lifted his hand to cup my cheek. “Is it wrong for me to want your safety more than the survival of my species?” he whispered, his eyes skimming my face hungrily, resting momentarily on my mouth before returning to my eyes.
I blushed at the intensity of his gaze, and shrugged.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I do understand what you mean.”
He smiled, dropping his hand and springing to his feet lightly before helping me up and continuing down a faint pathway that led us towards the centre of the valley.
“So what is the long-term plan then?” I asked.
“Well, that’s where most of the arguments are coming from. Some want to try to change the humans with education and information, and others want to kill all of them.”
“Have you already started with the diplomatic approach?” I asked him as we slid down a steep section of pathway.
He nodded. “Yes. For the last one hundred and twenty odd years we’ve been trying to influence government policy and humans’ view of the ocean.”
“That long?”
“Yes, who do you think introduced the idea that killing all of the oceans’ whales was a bad idea? That’s what your Dad has been trying to do in Namibia. They’ve just found a new source of oil and he’s been fighting for the marine life their drilling will affect.”
“Has he been successful?”
Merrick shrugged. “Not really I’m afraid.”
“What about moving onto the land and living with humans?”
“In theory we could, but any Oceanid child under sixteen years old would be left to suffer and die the most horrific death you can imagine. The ocean is a dangerous place and we aren’t the top of the food chain, so I can’t imagine any parents leaving their children to the sharks and orcas. I also don’t think the rest of our species would be able to endure the call of that much innocent blood without acting in some way.”
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