Secrets of Carrick: Merrow

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  All my body was impatient. There was a life being made for me somewhere and all I had to do was get there. The path ahead wavered like water as I rushed and clattered along it. Then I heard music.

  It was just Scully. His fiddle has its own scratchy voice. It doesn’t sound like anything but itself. I snuck up on him to see. He was leaning against a hawthorn with his tune sobbing and hiccoughing all around him. At once, my eyes filled with the tears they carried. He stopped playing.

  ‘Neen Marrey!’ he said, smiling into the air. ‘Weren’t you taught it’s rude to eavesdrop?’ He laid his fiddle on the grass. ‘What are you doing up here?’

  I came out from behind the tree and waved the bucket at him. Then I remembered he couldn’t see it.

  ‘Honey,’ I told him. ‘What tune was that?’

  ‘Not sure as yet. Perhaps I’ll call it after this place. What about “Go Tell The Bees”?’ He stood up. ‘I’ll help you,’ he said and reached out his hand. ‘Net?’

  ‘I forgot them.’ I laughed. ‘Accidentally-on-purpose. It was stupid.’

  Scully didn’t laugh. ‘Well,’ he said, leaning toward my voice. ‘We’ll just have to sing sweetly to them…and put them under a chant.’

  I confess to wanting to see him do that, and to believing he could. I leant forward and waited.

  ‘You know, you must always come up here and tell the bees your family’s news; when somebody’s born or wed, and particularly if they die.

  If you don’t, they’ll up and leave your hives,’ he said.

  ‘They’re not our hives.’ I gave him the bucket.

  ‘Yes, they are.’ He sounded surprised. ‘They’ve been Marrey bees for generations.’ His voice grew high and soft. ‘Don’t let their old king hear you say that. They’re easily offended.’ He moved toward a hive built low into an old stump where the bees were busy in the heat, and he spoke to them in his whispering sing-song. I was silent. ‘Now then. Listen to meee. Youse bees sing bee-ooo-ti-fully. All that hummming is the very thing, but where are the words? A song needs words.’

  I swear I heard the buzzing in the grove grow stronger. Scully began to sing to the bees. I couldn’t hear his words but as he sang he stuck his hand into their hollow and felt all around for the honeycomb. I had expected him to charm the bees straightways into just giving up their honey to us, perhaps bringing it out in little buckets and tipping it into my big one — but all he did was jump back with a yell holding onto his dripping hand and biting his lip.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you just the wild and mystic man, now.’ He was shaking his hand and cursing. ‘A real chanter of beasts.’ I looked around and saw what I was looking for. ‘Wrap this around it.’ I handed him the ribwort and he sat down clutching it in his wounded palm. ‘I would’ve thought you’d have seen that coming. What with the Othersight and everything.’

  He rolled his eyes and smiled broadly, showing all his teeth. I looked at him closely. He didn’t have any shyness at all; there was no part of him that was hidden. He just grinned into the air like there was nothing to be troubled about.

  His eyes were like the sea in one of its foaming humours. I leant forward to look more closely and he said, ‘Heishan, who raised you? Didn’t your aunt teach you it’s rude to stare?’

  ‘What else am I going to do with you?’ I told him, backing off. ‘It’s not like we can stare at things together. How’s your hand now?’

  ‘Better.’ He had dropped most of the ribwort. I took his hand. It was red and swollen. He thought for a moment. ‘Well, it’s a day for going slugabout in shady parts, isn’t it? I could tell you the story of your ancestor Doolish Marrey and the merrow-wife.’

  Right then I would’ve given my own hand to the bees to carry off, to hear the real story of my merrow grandmother.

  ‘Oh, all right, I might as well,’ is all I said, though. I didn’t like folk knowing my deepest feelings. They were mine, and people’s feelings are even more personal than their bodies. ‘Wrap your hand again first.’ I handed him fresh wort and some parsley too. ‘Talking will stop you interfering with my work.’

  He lay down on the grass and closed his eyes. ‘Well, if you’re not interested, a nap will stop me doing that just as well.’

  I pushed him until he rolled over on his face. ‘Tell me, then,’ I said. He snored into the grass. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘All right.’ He rolled over, opened his eyes and raised them to the treetops. The honeybees droned in the hawthorn grove, wood-shadows moved upon his face and slowly, the quiet fell around us. And Scully spoke. He was different. Like he knew things.

  ‘There is a world under the waves where the people live in houses of shell, bone and coral held together by spit. The beds are giant clams that close at night, protecting the sleepers from the shock-eel and the shark. The people of that world are the merrows, and they come in both types: male and female, just as we do. They are born, they grow, and they grow old and then they die. In these ways they resemble us, and you may think this gives them a fellow-feeling for mortals. It is not so.

  ‘Our world is like a dream to them, as theirs is to us. Our ships are just so much floating wood and iron, and our men as beasts or ghosts. They watch us as we watch the bees or the clouds. They don’t sing to draw sailors to themselves but only to sing, as we do. And their singing is not beautiful, at least not in any mortal way. When you hear it, lonely and proud and more real in your ears than your own voice, though, it drags you toward itself. It finds caves in your body and fills them with its wild calls.

  ‘Whales are more real to them, and congers more their kind. They swim with all the creatures of the cold depths, and they run herds and schools for their meat. A sealskin cloak is their only cover. Both types of merrow are mottled and scaled, each to the pattern of their family, and they are fatter than in our stories to keep the chill out. They light themselves in the pitchy-deep with glowing stripes along their sides, or lanterns growing from their brows, and grow meadows of glimmer-weed around their houses.

  ‘The men of that undersea place are of unimaginable and legendary ugliness. They are small next to their women and covered in rough and disordered scales. Their arms are fin-like, and their black eye-pits are set in an enormous bald head, knobbled all over like a wild-pig, of which they are uncommonly proud. Those with the hugest, knobbliest domes adorn them with gardens of starfish and glass-eels and suchlike — in fact, their king has a crown of pearly sea-dragons, all alive and grazing on his head upon which he plants small, sweet grasses. He goes nowhere without an under-gardener or two.

  ‘They do have long tails like their females, but it’s not a tail split like a fish. It’s more serpent-like, more like an eel. They swim by wig-wagging it side-to-side, and what with their great webbed hands and feet a merrow-man can cut through the water like a blade. Add to this rigmarole the green teeth, the weedy ear-holes, and the reek of the low tide — well, you can imagine.

  ‘Their females are human-like from the waist up, but they have a fish’s split tail and their ears hang in webbed curtains around their shoulders. Not that you’d notice as they always have hair down to their middles, at least, and it grows like sea-grass, thick and waving and the colour of almond buds. They are webbed at the fingers with something between silk and skin. Their eyes are changeable and they smell of good, fresh things like salmon or salt. All this changes if they ever come ashore for good, though. The green hair turns yellow in the sun, the sea-mist eyes blacken, and the silver tail slowly turns into a pair of very wide, very flat feet.

  ‘Some of those merrows wind up matched to mortal men, but it’s never through love, in spite of men’s tales about it. It’s always a story of theft and deception and I’ll tell you why. The secret is, if a man can but steal and hide her sealskin cloak, the poor slippery thing can never go home again. She can’t descend without the cloak, and she will agree to stay with you if she thinks there’s any chance of getting it back.’ Scully looked sad. ‘They know as much about a lie as a
fish.’ Then he laughed. ‘Then they come ashore and begin to change. Their mortal husbands are always gutted by the loss of all that Otherworldly beauty. It turns out not very pretty, after all, to steal affection from a free creature.’ He turned his head to me and his voice softened.

  ‘But this is where the story becomes yours.

  ‘Your great-great-grandfather, Doolish, in the time of the Great Hunger was one of the Marreys of Merton, when it was a much smaller place and in the manner of the ancient freeholds. They had a small portion just outside of the settlement and this, along with the sea, had to feed all ten of them; that is, until three died. Then it still had to feed seven. None of the young Marreys could think of marrying until the Hunger was done, for their parents needed them to work the plots and to churn and brew and bake — and to fish.

  ‘It is said a more brawling, scrawny, goat-footed lot weren’t to be found even in the anteroom to the Christian’s hell. The girls were all besoms and the boys were scarecrows with grog-blossoms. It’s remarkable how the starving still manage to find drink!’ Scully lowered his head for a moment. ‘I’m sorry for the shame of it to you.’

  I felt shame that I hadn’t been bothered. ‘That’s all right,’ I said and tried to look disapproving.

  ‘Well…’ he carried on. ‘At that time the Marreys were at a very low ebb. Maybe that should give us a soft heart for Doolish himself, and what he did. He must have been a lonely and desperate man by then, turning twenty-six as he was and unwifed, and it unlikely as fish breath that any mortal woman would have him.

  ‘During the Great Hunger of the great-great-grandparents’ time, the men had taken to fishing further offshore, or to following the shoals and schools all around Carrick. Doolish had taken to sailing north and spending days and nights among the rocks, living on grog and limpets, and scouring the shore for wrecked goods but all he found was more grog smuggled into the caves for the Little Brothers.

  ‘He spent a week out there, fishing and drinking and singing at the moon.

  ‘On this particular day Doolish had been at sea for hours and was full of bubbles and heavings himself, when he saw something sizeable and silver flashing in the sun ahead of him. As he breasted the high point of the swell he discerned a stand of low rocks in the green water and among them, curling back into his view, a huge fish tail.

  ‘Not knowing whether the tail was still alive or dead, he approached the rocks from behind. He anchored the boat. He crept up the rocks which hid the main body of the fish, and no doubt spent some time anticipating the feast, and the goodwill, to come. What he found was not to bring him either of those things.

  ‘He knew at once what it was. On the tall, barnacle-crusted rock, with her back to him, sat a merrow. Wild-eyed and long-eared, she sat combing her green hair and the gleaming, silver tail curved with grace around the base of the rock. She didn’t notice him at all and instantly he wanted her for his own. Her skin seemed to him as the palest of anemones and the tiny crabs in her hair were to him the luckiest creatures on earth.

  ‘Behind her, in a gap of the rock, was her spotted sealskin cloak. It was within easy reach and from all the stories Doolish knew just what to do. At the very moment his mortal hand touched the cloak, the merrow turned. Her eyes were as twin looking glasses brimming with slatey seas. She gazed at him indifferently for a moment, as though he were an interesting beetle. Then the sun came out, the sea shone blue and her eyes also. It was as though she was filled with the sea’s humours.

  ‘She looked right through him with deep disinterest. Doolish backed away holding the sealskin behind his back. Step-by-step he closed in on his rocking boat. His heart hammered under his ribs and his mouth was dry, not because he was frighted (merrows are smaller than mortal women and have no magic powers; all they do is natural to them) but because he was excited by what was to happen next.

  ‘Back at home he hid the sealskin inside the wall and sat back to wait. He had a small grog. The sun began to set. He had another small grog. His insides and his nose began to glow. Then there came a scratchy tap at the door.

  ‘He opened it. The merrow was on the threshold, weeping. Her soft new feet were bleeding. “Give it back to me,” she said and her voice was deep and mournful.

  ‘But Doolish Marrey told her that he’d doted on her from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her and he wasn’t going to give her sealskin back because she would go away, and if she went away he would die a broken man. He said she might as well agree to wed with him, as she couldn’t go home without her sealskin anyway, and after a time, if she was good to him, he would give it back and she could go on a visit. He told her he just wanted her to stay so he could pet her and make her happy. She made him promise to honour his word and she moved into the Marrey house. Over the following weeks, the men of Merton made excuses to drop in as often as they could, and all were envious of that lucky dog, Doolish Marrey.

  ‘As the months passed, though, the merrow’s eyes darkened to the colours of the earth; clay, loam, stone, and finally the black of the blackest peat. By the time they were wed, in the Old way for no decent merrow would enter a church, her ears had shrunk, her hair grown yellow and her feet, flat. As the next year passed, she forgot who she had been and grew into the quiet and hard-working wife of Doolish Marrey. They had seven offspring, and to the four that survived being born she was a loving and careful mother.

  ‘Of course, Doolish quickly grew unhappy in his merrow-wife. She had forgotten entirely her own marvellous self, and grown as ordinary as mortal women. In the south, men now ignored her and the women started to cut her for her dumb obedience to Doolish, which put them on the spot with their own husbands, and for not attending their church or their pot-lucks. She’d lost herself and found nothing but spite.

  ‘As evening changes into night, and night becomes morning, however, her sea-blood flowed into their offspring. Her children displayed Otherworldly tics that, now they were all newly Christian and knew better, the people of Merton couldn’t tolerate. The town gathered to drink and earwig, and fell sullen when the merrow-wife passed. Trouble was brewing along with the ale.

  ‘The descendents were only really at home among seagulls, puffins, crabs and wrack. Among that first generation one of the sons had been able to speak with the puffins, and another had been a great reader of the wrigglework codes left in wet sand by the night-crabs. Another had scales and drank only salt-water until she died, which was very young as it happened.

  ‘Doolish Marrey couldn’t forgive his wife for not being special after all and they say he died of the disappointment. Of course, all the grog didn’t help.

  ‘After the death of their father, the Marrey offspring moved themselves and their mother, now a little grey-haired woman with an air of having forgotten something important, up to the northern cove. They built a stone house in the Old way, using this and that and they settled in up there.

  ‘There are plenty of folk trying to outrun a secret in their bloodline. Over the years, this type was drawn into the family, and you might say they’ve greatly added to the story. Your great-grandfather, Monty Marrey, married a woman widely known to become a white moth at moonrise. Your great-aunt Roisin, who could swim the length of the cove without stopping for breath married a man cursed by his own shape-shifting. He was caught in his own rabbit-trap one night and killed while stealing his own greens.

  ‘Too many of the Marrey babies died before even an hour was up. Poor scaly mites, they drowned in the very air. Others, driven by their merrow-natures tried to go home and were drowned by water in the regular way. It’s a lucky thing that the merrow-blood thins out with time. It leaves folk in-between and altogether disowned. Eventually, the tendency to scales bred itself out, leaving most of the Marreys just dry-skinned and a bit Otherwise but…’ He stopped speaking.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  He smiled up into the sky. ‘I’m afraid the tendency to sons of legendary ugliness remains.’

  Honour Bright, all my thoughts
had been chased away. The story explained everything about me, and my skin, and my mother, and why we lived where we did and why the town talked so. Scully’s story was plainly true with all its knowledge of family things, and all its lifelike details. I was mute.

  I turned to a hive and busied myself there. The bees were easily stunned by my smoke-bundle and I pulled at the bung of twigs I’d left last time Ushag and I had come. I cut out a sizeable lump of comb and put it dripping into the bucket, studded with sleepy bees, and carefully replaced the bung. The honeycomb leaked golden and sweet into my bucket. I watched it flowing.

  ‘All right?’ asked Scully.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. I wanted to be by myself. ‘Thank-you.’

  I couldn’t sleep that night. The sun going down made no difference. For a long while there wasn’t enough air to breathe. The weird blood swarmed in my chest, and I longed for morning. Not only that, the story stuck to every part of me; to my body with its scales, my mind with its waves and silver-flashes, and my soul with its homesickness.

  Scully Slevin is a true seer, and a honey-tongue with it. He has a word-hoard bigger than any wrecker’s haul and he sees things nobody else does. That needs no proof. You only have to see and hear him to know what he says is true.

  Proof is for those with no eyes or ears in their heads.

  Chapter Five

  Gorge

  MY NEW KNOWLEDGE BUBBLED in my chest, busting to be told, and my heart itched to be right. In the morning Ushag was nowhere to be found, though, and so I couldn’t tell her. The barley-meal hardened in the pot, the threshold was unswept and Breck lowed pitifully down at the byre. Shuffling through the yard it was again already too hot. There was not a sigh of wind. At the byre, I let Bo into her mother and watched awhile. Then I went and sat in the water-barrel to think about the rest of the day.