Three Times Chosen

by Alan J. Garner

  Afterwards they snuggled in restful silence within the perpetual nighttime, each fulfilled from their joint Rapture of the Deep. For Durgay, the pooled physicality of the moment was unforgettable. A jumbled outpouring of pent up emotions—fear of death, craving for love, lustful desires of the flesh—all coalesced to find hitherto undreamt of nirvana in that ephemeral, climatic release. Najoli found even deeper meaning from their animalistic coital passion. Hers went beyond emotional, touching the spiritual plane, a fusing of souls when for a fleeting instant the division of the sexes disappeared, the ecstasies of pain and pleasure merged, and the complexities of the universe transiently made sense.

  Durgay was first to break the blissful silence. “Was it ... was I ... okay?"

  Wishing to spare his feelings, knowing that given time his frantic clumsiness would mature into sensitive, prolonged lovemaking taking into consideration his partner's needs, she spiced her lie with a polyp of truth. “You were everything I imagined."

  He was thankful for her kindness. “How many mermen have you had?"

  His frank enquiry was understandable, if indelicately put. Najoli went on the defensive. “You make it sound like a luncheon. Are you angling to know if I was promiscuous back at Castle Rock?"

  Embarrassed, Durgay backstroked. “Forgive me, Najoli. I've no right to ask you that. It's none of my business."

  She made a clean breast of her sexual history anyway, to clear the water. “Counting you, I shared myself with one other. Blinkered by girlish infatuation, I thought he was the love of my life. Turned out I landed the wrong fish there."

  "What went wrong?"

  "Caught him tonguing another mergirl ... my older sister, in fact. Gave him the flick and turned my back on the family. I guess that's when I entered my rebellious phase. I got turned off the romantic notion of marriage after that."

  Quaintly old fashioned, Durgay clung rigidly to the whimsical ideals of courtship followed by wedded bliss. His partnering with Najoli, thrust on him unwanted, was prompting him to conduct an unforced rethink of traditional values. With no Merking to officiate royally and religiously blessed nuptials, could a de facto relationship, a common law marriage, work for a Cetari couple?

  Najoli was also subconsciously re-evaluating her standards. Always a relationship risk taker, fatally attracted to the bad merboys, she subliminally yearned for fidelity, and Durgay had reliable splashed all over him. Was he dashing? Hardly. Could he sweep a mergirl off her flukes? Only if given the correct prompts. Did he come without emotional baggage? No, but then who did. The appellation Dependable Durgay popped into her head. To most merwomen that spelt boring; Najoli found it relationally appealing. The stalwart old Fisher projected stability, security, and yes dependability. What more could a mermaid wish for? If thrills, then a jailbreak and shark attack, topped off by hiding out in an alien carcass, surely met and exceeded such criteria. Unexciting as Durgay was, life with him held the promise of never being dull.

  "Where do we go from here?"

  She addressed Durgay's question perkily, idly drawing circles in his chest with her fingertip. “We head north up the eastern seaboard, silly."

  "We're more than friends now, Najoli. That complicates matters."

  "This'll improve our rapport."

  "I'll worry more about you, second-guess my determinations, whether they'll affect us, you, adversely.” Lumped with even greater responsibility now that Najoli had grown from comrade into lover, uncertainty over the wisdom of current and future choices as yet unmade started gnawing at the plagued Fisher.

  The mergirl reassured him with a peck on the cheek. “Who can say, with any surety, that the decisions we make in life will turn out for the best. Enjoy here and now, Durgs. By all means consider tomorrow, only don't let it hamper living today."

  "No regrets, eh?"

  "Clicks to live by.” Her playful hand strayed toward his groin. “Are you rested enough?” she lowed suggestively.

  "I can't hear that megashark anymore. We ought to make a swim for it.” He jumped when she traced the line of his urogenital crack teasingly with her tongue. “Of course, it won't hurt to stay put a while longer to make sure he's really given up."

  Kissing Durgay hungrily, brazenly initiating foreplay, she started licking his earhole next, whistling auspiciously into it, “Practice makes perfect."

  Chapter Twelve

  Four long weeks elapsed. That travel time for the outcast couple was drearily divided into the routine pursuits endemic to the Cetari way of life: sleeping, fishing, and swimming. In little over a fortnight, Durgay and Najoli navigated the 3,000 leagues of shallow inshore waters fencing the coastline of the nameless continent that was conversely as both familiar and alien to the merfolk as the sun or moon. Drawing on every scrap of Fisher knowledge he could recall pertaining to regional continental currents reaped from centuries of sporadic explorations, the former Seaguard tutor steered a necessarily meandering course painstakingly northwards.

  Sea voyaging, whether submerged or sailing, depended enormously on the favourableness of winds and currents. Driven by powering airstreams, warm-water surface currents termed gyres formed large-scale, coarsely circular ocean flow patterns, rotating sluggishly with nascent energy like waterborne cyclonic storms. Mirror images of the gyratory hurricanes, these liquid reflections, often a fifty mile wide conveyor belt of moving seawater covering up to a hundred miles a day, revolved torpidly in opposite directions to their atmospheric counterparts, whirling in clockwise slowness in the Northern Hemisphere and reversing anticlockwise in southern latitudes.

  That presented benefits and problems for the undersea journeyers.

  Northeast of the southern cape they encountered their first submarine whirligig and ingeniously used its rotation to slingshot out of the vast bay serving to produce the mammoth, ponderous centrifugal force. Capitalising on elementary gyre physics, they entered the broader, lazier currents slowly edging the eastern fringe and allowed themselves to be swept around its asymmetrical curve, gathering momentum along the swifter narrow currents forming the western boundary, making their exit in order to resume their northern heading when the oval looped back on to the south-eastern track.

  Progress after that was steady, broken only by the need to feed or rest. Durgay periodically spyhopped to take his bearings, the wandering shoreline monotonously blistered by the eastward extension of the ocean of sand flooding the interior; a wavy continuation of the windblown dunes lining the sun-drenched, waterless west coast. Things turned to jellyfish when the yellowed coastal vista astoundingly changed to the sullied olive greenery staining a sprawling saltwater marsh replete with mangroves.

  Not long after sand muddied into swamp the exiled pair faced a second, vaster gyre. Immensurable and impassable, the subsurface wall of endlessly circling water blocked their route like a fluid avalanche. Braving the stronger flux shoreside, Durgay and Najoli methodically worked their way up the coast, hemmed in on their left by pebbled shallows, the mighty countercurrent to their right. Risking being beached or swept away, they spent a nerve-wracking four days doggedly making headway sandwiched between shoals and sea, unwittingly passing the peninsula Ochar gave them directions to, itself masked by an outflow of silted freshwater fanning outwards from a broad delta river mouth into a salty estuary, before finally reaching calmer, clearer water due east of a sizable, forested island.

  Taking their nightly respite in a sheltered cove, Durgay holding Najoli in his protective arms, their exhausted bodies lulled to sleep by the soothing lapping of wavelets on a gently sloping gravel beach, they awoke refreshed, ready to begin a new chapter in their shared lives, to make the idyllic inlet and outlying ribbon reef their home away from home.

  At least Durgay was prepared to. Najoli strangely had other ideas.

  "There may exist a way to salvage our merpeople, to recoup Castle Rock,” she proposed.

  Gearing up to scout the area in earnest, the mergirl's stunning claim weighted down Durgay's plans with
an anchor of doubt. He halted inventorying the contents of her holdall. “Najoli, get your mind on forging a new home here. I realise it'll be difficult for a while, but we have to put our old life completely behind us. Finding a sea cave is our utmost priority. We can't spend many more nights adrift out in the open. Storm season is almost upon us and we're on the windward side of the mainland. That's a bad position to be in."

  "Don't tell me you've stopped caring what happens on Bounty Reef. Your sense of duty can't be forsaken that easily."

  "Make your mind up, missy. You induce me to buck the system, to scarily start thinking for myself, of myself, and now expect me to go back to my old school of thought. What gives?"

  "You're still a member of the Seaguard, Durgs."

  "I can't ever remember not being a Seaguardian,” he agreed. “But take a look at where we are. There's no Rock, and no Merking. My fidelity lies with you now. Nothing can save the Cetari from the genocidal Landhoppers, so don't misuse precious time contemplating a liberation too impossible to carry out."

  Najoli cannily appealed to her lover's spiritual side. “Nupterus could do it."

  He stared bewilderingly at her. In the short time Durgay had known his youthful love interest, Najoli at best exhibited indifference to religious talk, at worst dismissed godly belief entirely as wasteful. “I've missed something here. When did you go all righteous on me?"

  "Admittedly, I've never been a great advocate of religion,” she confessed. “All those commandments are quite inhibiting. But Grammy always did cling devoutly to her faith."

  "What has Ochar's piety got to do with anything?"

  "Before we left her place, she reminded me of a bedtime story that was my all-time favourite: the Ice Merman."

  "Never had no use for fairytales,” Durgay gruffly clicked, repacking the travel-battered carryall, the frayed and holey seagrass weaving in need of minor repairs as he stuffed nautical odds and ends into it. Merboys, immersed in learning and honing vital Fisher skills, had spare time only for listening to grand sagas of adventure, not insipidly dry holy recitations.

  Najoli persevered. “You should've. It's an interesting fable, if on the lengthy side. I'll give you the abridged version.

  "Once upon a time, long after He populated the twin blue voids of His making with fish and flying things, Immortal Nupterus took flight through the sky-ocean above the water-ocean, marvelling at the wondrousness of His creations.

  "On and on He flew, flapping His majestically green and blue veined wings, soaring farther and farther, higher and higher, until He brushed against the black abyss, the frosty contact whitening His wingtips with coldness.

  "Down, down, His Divine Self glided, alighting at the top of the seaworld, His folding wings turning the polar ocean to ice when they touched the sea's surface. Thus was born frigid Icesand in the Far North. Thus was birthed the warmer lands."

  Cause and Effect was the mainstay of Cetari theology. When Nupterus divinely fashioned the seas, the backlash of that considerable expenditure of cosmic energy threw up into being the skies. For every whitecap formed, the wave's aerial counterpart, a simple cloud, puffed into existence in the cerulean ceiling. Prevailing global wind bands arose patterned on oceanic currents, collaborating climatological forces influencing weather conditions worldwide. Creation of the polar ice cap triggered in response the tumultuous uplifting of the continents and islands from out of the mothering sea. Basic Newtonian law in motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tit for tat, you might say.

  Causation applied similarly to populating the briny womb with precious life. When a fish popped into existence undersea, a bird winged through the virgin sky. Likewise, sea turtles inadvertently gave rise to tortoises on land, sea cows contributing tusked elephants to the expanding terrestrial gene pool, wolves and tigers owing their materialisation to barracuda and shark respectively, the saltwater dolphins linked to their riverine cousins. Not a single marine creature plying the world's seas was without its earthbound, airborne, subterranean, arboreal, or freshwater equivalent. Just cataloguing His creative repercussions occupied Nupterus for centuries.

  Needless to say the emergence of the Cetari was a hugely consequential event itself, as the surfacing of the primordial merfolk sparked the spawning of the original Piawro. Castle Rock kingly theologians concluded at that exact moment of corresponding naissance Evilness reared its ugly head alongside the questing hands of Goodness. An imbalanced universe was intrinsically unsound, doomed to implode from its volatile instability. Hence the contradictory affiliations of black and white, chalk and cheese, good and bad. Without that equilibrium stitching the very fabric of the cosmos together, the seams of space would tear, galaxies tatter and fray. The whole of Creation would unravel, all life everywhere snuffed out in the blink of a god's eye.

  Impatience caused Durgay to be rudely blunt. “Does this tale of yours have a point, Najoli?"

  "I'm just about to make it,” she huffed, irritated by his interruption. “But before I do, I'll remind you that a verse in the Sacred Songline Scriptures authenticates the Sea God's unintentional formation of the ice lands up north.” She nodded showily, stressing her point. Corroboration between the sacrosanct hymnody and marine legends was a rare occurrence worth accentuating.

  Boredom was fast eroding Durgay's dwindling attention span as Najoli finally delivered the crux of her yarn. “The story ends with Nupterus taking up permanent residence in the Far North."

  It was a disappointing anticlimax for the uninterested Fisher. “That's it?” he commented laconically.

  "No, that's not entirely it!” retorted the mergirl. She might as well be banging her head against a block of coral. “Before he settled down for all eternity, Nupterus was so pleased with the appearance of His Cetari that, in appreciation of His own genius, He adopted the form of a merman.” Gods” invented and embodied vanity.

  Durgay recalled the holy lyrics. "Sea God copied Merman for His own image". Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. “So?” was all he could remark.

  Close to losing her temper, Najoli seethed with frustration. Durgay was a lovely merman, but so obtuse at times! “I'll condense it for you, Durgs. Sea God flies north. Sea God makes ice. Sea God builds home. Sea God changes into merman."

  "I still don't get it."

  "Accessibility, Durgay! Nupterus is reachable and approachable in that guise. He can be entreated to save His merpeople direct. Don't bother with convoluted, time-wasting prayers. We can beseech Him face-to-face. We can converse with the Sea God Himself! All we have to do is make the swim up to Icesand."

  The seagrass bag slipped from Durgay's grasp along with his receptivity. Najoli made a grab for the sinking carryall and, seeing his bewilderment, did not bother handing it back to him. “Say something, Durgs,” she prompted.

  He did, after gulping a few mouthfuls of revitalising seawater. “Let me get this straight. You're proposing we embark on a wild goosefish chase to go looking for our revered Sea Lord someplace in waters chill enough to freeze the segmented tail off a sea mouse."

  "Give the merman a pipefish!"

  He snatched back the bag.

  "Does this mean we're northbound?” Najoli hoped.

  "I'll need more convincing than what proof a fable, even one seemingly backed up by the Songlines, provides."

  Najoli took the refusal in her stroke. “I'm a little hazy on the ending of the last verse in the scriptures. Suffice to say, I never paid much attention to religious instruction when I was schooling as a mergirl. Durgs, be a good disciple and refresh my memory."

  Wracking his fuddled, middle-aged brain, he mumbled, “Something along the line, “Frozen white boils liquid blue, setting ocean watered anew"...” Durgay faltered, the implication of his recall mind-boggling. “It's prophesising the end of the seaworld!” he gasped horrifically.

  "Or possibly its rebirth,” disputed Najoli. “At least that's what Grams interpreted it to mean."

  "Ochar truly im
agines that?"

  "So she reckons."

  "It's too farfetched for even the faithful to believe."

  "Either you take my word at face value or dismiss Grammy's assertion as daft. If so, that makes you a hypocrite because then you're saying the Sea God isn't real, that Nupterus is just a product of Cetari wishfulness, that your belief and the faith of others is a baseless lie. Are you that atheist, Durgay?"

  Poor Durgay started to despair that all young merwoman were dominatrixes. Cowed by Najoli's judgmatical browbeating, compelled to again question his own core beliefs, awash in doubt, he typically simplified his confused thinking when in the grips of a moral dilemma. If the Grohial could leap out of the waters of myth and legend, only the faithless prevented Nupterus, Lord of Seas and Skies, Creator of Winds and Waves, from existing in his icy domain.

  "Don't take this the wrong way, Najoli, but you had best fatten up. We'll need a thicker layer of blubber to be better insulated against the colder water."

  She hugged her merman impulsively before aiding him in trawling for food.

  All that happened a fortnight ago, with a lot more transpiring since then.

  Plotting a new course, Durgay steered them to an unmarked point offshore from the northernmost spit of territory crowning the southern landmass. It was there his mnemonic marine chart ran dry. Neither the Seaguard nor the Fishers possessed topical information of the oceanography beyond. Those unfrequented waters remained consigned to times long past, an ancient history forgotten by all but the eldest merfolk. But every fish has a silver lining and Durgay luckily had Ochar's great granddaughter to act as guide.

  Working from sketchy reminiscences hurriedly imparted by the old merwoman in those rushed minutes the escaping couple snatched to farewell their previous life, memories themselves drawn from an antediluvian legend which held to the core belief of the ancestral Cetari migrating into the southern ocean from polar waters, Najoli took the lead as navigator, Durgay contributing practical advice on how to best swim the seaways.