Deeper

by Jane Thomson

  Dawn was breaking when I left you there and slipped back into the sea. You were alive but limp as a corpse. As the sun broke red over the sea, I started to feel frightened. What if there were more humans high up on the rock? What if they came down and found me, and grabbed me and took me away to be skin or food? What if you woke up, and looked at me, and were disgusted by me, as Azura and Dayang and the rest would have been by you?

  It was so much easier going back than it had been coming. The water welcomed me, smoothing over my cuts and bruises, and I sped through fast and free, relieved because I was able to use my shoulders and arms at last. I swam for home as fast as I could, afraid and tired and thinking all the while of you. How delicate you were, how beautiful. How like mer and not mer.

  Chapter 6

  Maybe the worst thing about coming home was that no one noticed. If Father had been angry and demanded to know where I’d been, I could have told them all what I’d been doing, and there would have been a storm, and bitings, and beatings, and then I could have swam away in a rage to go by myself – I don’t know where. Back to Deep Sea, maybe, where else was there for me to go?

  But they didn’t even ask, they thought I’d just spent the night sulking somewhere. All my sisters had heard I’d quarrelled with Che, and they all thought it was a good thing. Because who was Che anyway but a half-male, and why would Father’s daughter hang around with a deformed dolphin.

  The only person who asked me where I’d been was Che himself. I came on him, moodily eating shrimps in a mud pool, left behind by the channels and gone stagnant. He sat in the sun-hot water, digging them out of their little burrows and crunching them one by one, spitting out the hard bits.

  At first he still wouldn’t speak to me. He’d never looked less appealing, his long hair matted and greenish, his skin pitted as if small fish had nibbled away bits of skin while he was sleeping. Like you, mermen can be ugly and awkward before they’re grown.

  “Where’d you go? I looked for you.” Che stuffed a shrimp, and some mud too, into his mouth, then spat out the mud, making a little dark cloud in the water. It suited his mood.

  “I found a human,” I blurted, because really I was dying for someone to tell. “I touched him.”

  Even Che was shocked. He spat out the mouthful, and goggled at me.

  “Another dead one?”

  We both remembered the drowned female.

  “A live one.” I remembered my arm across your chest, your beating heart next to my teats.

  “What happened to it? You didn’t go bringing it back here..”

  Che looked around, as if he expected to see me pull the human from behind my back and exhibit him.

  “I saved him. He was drowning, and I held him up and took him to the Dry?”

  Che made a sceptical face.

  “The Dry? You did not, you couldn’t swim that far. Not even your Father goes that far.”

  “Alright, not to the Dry, just the Trapped Moon. I swam there with him and put him on the beach.”

  And other things.

  Che stared at me coldly, stirring the scum with his finger.

  “You’re a liar. You’re just making it up. You went out to Deep Sea and got lost and made up a big story.”

  He slid sourly away from me, stirring up the black mud as he went. It stank of rotting weed and dead sea creatures. I squelched after him, not minding much. After all we could wash it off after.

  “I’m not lying. It was a real human male. I kept him alive and left him on the sand.”

  I could hardly believe it myself.

  “Of course, I don’t know if he’s still alive.” I remembered his skin, pale for a human, and his closed eyes. The breathing was regular though, by the end of the night, and the heartbeat strong. “But I think he is.”

  “Why would you do that?” Che stared suspiciously.

  I could hardly understand it myself. We’re not in the habit of rescuing things, we mer. There’s not so much to eat, that we can afford to go around saving our meals. So I was annoyed with Che for asking, naturally.

  “Why shouldn’t I? They’re not so different from us. You’d save me if I was drowning, wouldn’t you?”

  Che gave me a look as if he wouldn’t even think of it.

  “Not so different!” Che looked me up and down, from my round, pale green eyes without whites to my flat face and silvery, translucent tail. “Melur, they’re human. They live on the Dry! They have legs.”

  “And ears, and noses, and lips, and faces.”

  And penises. I thought about how I’d kissed you, and felt as if a tiny school of fish had fluttered through my veins.

  “Anyway, remember what Grandmother always says, about –“

  “Being skinned and chopped up and everything. I bet it’s just crap.”

  Could my human do such a thing? Maybe. His face looked gentle, in sleep.

  “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she’s senile!“

  I kept going. “Have YOU ever seen a skinned mer?”

  Che’s skin turned pink in confusion and annoyance.

  “No, but –“

  “Well then don’t talk about what you don’t know. How could they skin us and eat us? They can’t even see us. They don’t even know we’re here, and even if they did, they couldn’t catch us. You’ve seen how a human is when they fall in the water. They’re useless.”

  We were well on the verge of quarrelling again, but something kept Che from flouncing away.

  “Yes but everyone knows how they pull in fish with their nets, even dolphins, and throw the insides back in the water. People say they’ve seen big sharks floating without their fins, the humans have cut them off and left them there. I’ve heard they can even catch whales and pull them onto their floaters to eat. Anyway, they can swim. I’ve seen one swimming.”

  He meant the female in the black sheath.

  I fell on my back and made stupid paddling motions, kicking feebly and gasping. Che threw a glop of mud, which hit me on the ear.

  “It was tired, that’s all.”

  “So? We eat fish. So do they. We’re not fish though.”

  “And they can see us, too. I saw that female staring at us when it went down. The drowned one.”

  Che made a gobbling expression with his mouth, like a human swallowing water, and bugged his eyes.

  “That’s different.”

  “No it’s not.”

  Che came close, put out a hand green with warm slime.

  “Humans are bad luck. Evil spirits thrown back by the sea. All the elders say so.”

  “Who cares what all the old crabs say.”

  He watched me, frowning.

  “What is it with this one? Why’d you stay out so long? You could have just left him up on the beach and come back.”

  “He might have died,” I said, turning away from his reaching eyes, swirling a finger in the sand.

  “I was waiting for you.” Che stuck out a lip. He put a heavy, uncertain hand on the back of my neck. Possession.

  “Perhaps,“ I added, turning away so that Che couldn’t see me say it, “I mated with him. Perhaps I’ll have a little human pup, before long.”

  Che stared at me as if I’d confessed to eating Dayang’s newborn. Part of me was ashamed of the lie, of making him feel that way, and another part was very pleased to have got a proper reaction, at last. He was angry now. His tail drummed the shallow water, sending up thick green spray which dribbled back down over us both like smelly rain. His skin reddened. He was really very ugly when he was cross, I thought. No wonder no one wanted to mate with him.

  “You’re just saying that. Liar. You can’t mate with a human any more than you could with a...with a seal!”

  “Yes you can. They have eels just like you do. They put them inside just like you want to do it. You’re just jealous.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding! Jealous of a no-tailed human? You’re a liar, Melur!”

  He slapped me with a muddy palm, quicker
than I would’ve expected from him, and hard. I went to claw at his face but he caught both my hands. He was just Che – but he was almost twice as big as me. I’d never thought of him as an adult mer before. I didn’t like the idea. I’d had enough bites and swipes from Father to know what being an adult male meant.

  I struggled, spitting, and found myself pulled close against his thickset body, on top of him in the muck. We glared into each other’s faces. I put my hands against his throat and pushed as hard as I could. He let go suddenly, and I fell over beside him with a sickly squelch.

  Che sat up first.

  “I’m not jealous, I’m scared.”

  I looked at him. This was serious Che, a leader, if only of females. This wasn’t the mer pup I’d played with all through the seasons, but a different creature, strong and sure.

  “You’re going too far now, I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. A dead human’s one thing but a live one! Even you know -”

  I was still angry.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me. That’s the problem. Nothing ever happens here. You and me, we’re going to live our whole lives, stuck in these channels, having pups, catching fish, drying weed, knowing nothing, dying. What’s the point of that?”

  “I don’t want you to leave the channels,” Che said, reaching out. I thought he was going to pinch me and drew back, but he only stroked my cheek, leaving a stripe of white in the green.

  “Leave the channels? Who said anything about leaving?”

  I honestly hadn’t thought about it. Leave? Where would I go? Of course I could go out to Deep Sea, maybe find more humans, ride the storms…but I’d always come back, where the pod was. How not?

  “To be with this....this human you’ve found,” Che wrinkled his wide, fight-scarred nose. “I mean, on the Dry.”

  “Be with the human? Why should I?”

  “If you want to be his mate.”

  I hadn’t thought that far. If you tell one lie you have to tell a lot more lies to go around it, so you’d better be ready to tell them.

  “Whatever.”

  “If you disobey they’ll make you leave the pod.”

  I turned away, pointedly. Behind me, I heard Che slide away on his belly, over the sandbank that separated us from the channel, and into clear water. I didn’t follow him, not till I’d got my story straight in my own head. I hoped he wouldn’t tell anyone the lies I’d told him. Then I’d be in real trouble. But then Che was my best friend, even if he was my enemy. He wouldn’t tell anyone.

  I rolled slowly over, enjoying the mud in my hair, and thought about the Big Dry. Could a mer really live on the Dry? Of course we spend part of our lives out of the water, we’re not fish that gasp and die if they’re flung on a rock. But to live away from the water, in one of those Caves-that-are-made which Grandmother told us about – that would be unthinkable.

  Suppose I’d really mated with the beautiful human. Could such a thing really be done? I touched my slit, at the base of my belly, and thought about your night-silver skin, and the soft, wet snake under your coverings, and wriggled.

  Could we? I saw myself, lying against your long-haired, lean chest, diving into your coral mouth and you into mine, your hands on my teats, your tongue on my salty nipples. Joining quickly and then rolling away, the way I’d seen my sisters joined with their mates, in the mid depths – but no, that’s not how humans mate, they don’t make pups when they swim, but on the Dry somewhere. On the Dry then, perhaps on the soft sand, lying beside each other – thinking of it made me wish for it, and I touched again to try to chase the feeling in me. I’d reached that age then when I wanted to mate, but wouldn’t. Mer females don’t live so long after they mate, curious or not. Bearing pups is more dangerous than hunting.

  But then, he wouldn’t mate with me anyway, I told myself. You need legs to mate with a human, legs to wrap around him, legs to walk with him on the sand, legs so that you can pretend to be a human too, so that he won’t eat you instead of fucking you. You’re only a fish to him, I reminded myself – if he’d only seen you, he would have screamed and run away on his strong human legs. He wouldn’t have let you kiss him and sleep next to him and feel his soft tender body under the human coverings. You’re just a fish, a stupid, ugly fish!

  Chapter 7

  The worst day of my life – well no, maybe there were worse ones following, but it seemed as if it was the worst at the time, as it always does - was at the close of the rains, when the rock pools were full of fresh water and any island that was more than a sand bank was green with grasses and prickly salt bushes.

  Every year, at the turning of the winds, Father and the other pod leaders come to a Meet. Each pod has its own channels, and islands, and we don’t often swim out of territory, because that would be stealing another pod’s fish. But when we mate, it’s usually out of pod. I don’t know why, it just is so.

  “This Meet, you’ll take a mate, Melur.”

  Father wasn’t asking, he was ordering, as was his right as leading male. He lay on the wet sand, chewing on an eel Casih had softened up for him by chewing it herself first. He still had teeth, but they were yellowed and chipped like Grandmothers and he couldn’t tear and bite as he used to. His great dark-skinned tail was covered with sea-growth, and his face pitted by sand and ocean and flea-bites. He was still the hunt leader of our pod, though, twice as big as any of us, and heavy, like a big old rock stuck in a mud pool.

  “I don’t want a mate.”

  I trembled, defiant, and rolled away quickly to avoid a following claw. I’d never had back-words with Father before, not directly.

  “She’s still very young,” Casih hurried to speak, pushing fresh water towards Father in an abalone shell. “Maybe it could wait till the next Meet.”

  Father swiped at the shell and sent it skittering. His pale octopus-eyes glared up at me through a mat of silver-grey hair tied with the cartilage of shark pup. He flicked the end of his tail, sending Dayang, who was tending to it with the scraper, flying backwards. He didn’t look to see where she’d landed.

  “She’ll take a mate or leave the pod. I don’t want any useless females. Melur’s played around long enough, she’s not a pup any more. She’ll obey me or go. ”

  I bit back angry words, looked at his heavy, crusted bulk and hated every inch of him. He was as cold and stupid as one of those dead-eyed creatures you sometimes see float up from the far depths, who crawl about in the mud eating each other’s flesh in the dark. I could see Grandmother’s cruelty in him – perhaps they were related after all. But he was Father. All my sisters were afraid of Father, even Mother had been afraid of him. I remembered the claw marks and dark bruises on her shoulders and neck, back when Father’s teeth had been good and strong.

  The day of the Meet came, and the channels were thick with mer, all the pods swimming towards the central sand banks, where the females had set out fish and sea weed to eat. The pups played together in the water, making the surface a froth of bubbles and sandstorms. Any fish caught in the lagoon during a Meet would have thought themselves pretty unlucky. The tiny ones crawled about on the bottom, eating sand and crabs and small worms they found there.

  My sisters who had babies – Dayang, and Dawii – and Casih too, whose newest one was a few months now – lay in the sand watching the pups – though no biters ever made it in here, it was too shallow for them and reefs barred the way. But you never knew when a biter might make its way in, or a stinger, and many of the children were too young to have really learnt what harms, yet.

  The females who had no mates, and the young males, eyed each other nervously. Azura pretended to be interested only in her hair, as usual, and sat preening it and combing it, and flipping her tail from side to side to show off the rainbow colours she’d embedded so carefully over the last season. A few of the males stared at her appraisingly, and I could see she felt the looks, but she didn’t look back, except for a short glance just to see who was paying attention. Stupid vain thing!
>
  Che was there too, somewhere between the young ones and the adults. He sat in the shallows alone, playing with someone’s pup, a grown male but not one of them yet. The adults chewed on sea pepper, dreamy-eyed, and talked about hunts they’d been on and the prey they’d killed.

  “Remember the time we took down a sperm whale,” said Father – it must have been twenty years ago, for I’ve never seen mer bring back a whale, how would we pull it? - but Father’s never forgotten it. “My spear was the first in its eye, and it must have thrown ten of us up in the air with the thrash of its tail. But I hung on with my teeth and my claws to its back, and I rode it all the way out to deep sea – yes and brought it back when it died there..”

  “I remember that,” said one of the mer men from another island – Orggei I think his name was, a fat, smiling sea-slug of a mer with a round face and wisps of red beard, unusual in us and ugly. “I hung on to his tail – that was a wild ride! We must have gone many lengths into the Deep – it took me a day to swim back to the channels. “

  “You weren’t there,” snorted my Father. “You were waiting here with the females, to cut up the meat.”

  Orggei laughed. He never minded Father’s slurs, I don’t think he even understood he’d been shamed – he was too stupid and dazed with the pepper. “Remember when we swam days out and saw the giant floater? As big as a blue whale, bigger maybe – and all lighted up with stars, and humans crawling on top of it like sand fleas.”

  “Humans and their floaters!” Father flapped at the sand, which blew up into Orggei’s face. “If we could take a whale, we could take a floater full of weak humans, if we wanted to, stars and all. Their wooden islands are strong but once they’re in the sea they’re like wide-tails, ripe for picking.”

  “I’ve taken a few, in my time.” Guntur spat a chunk of pepper into the sand, then scooped it back in again to chew again. Guntur was Father’s long-time friend, gristled as he was himself, and his chest inlaid with pearl that his seven mates had collected over many years. He had twenty two daughters now, and as many sons, and the last mate just dead and sanded. “And got this, once.”