Their first hurdle on this, the newest leg of their epic journey, comprised swimming the 100 nautical miles of funnelled saltwater forming the strait separating the hemispheric continents. Accomplishing that crossing without incident, they proceeded up the eastern seaboard at a rapid pace, aided by a fast flowing northern equatorial current, making up a little lost time. That boost petered out after depositing the freeloading Cetari in a deep, slow churning channel bisecting a forest-capped island from an arid desert mainland broadly comparable to that desiccating the southern landmass, though markedly smaller. Sandy wilderness seemed to be the prevalent coastal ecosystem for the twinning continents in this age, at least to merfolk perception. Such was the laughable incongruity of undrinkable seawater clashing with uninhabitable property.
Spyhopping more frequently now, Durgay's increasingly screwball behaviour disturbed Najoli. There was no motive for his risking surfacing other than eccentric curiosity. She found him early one morning wallowing on a millpond sea unruffled by wind or tide, floating carelessly on his back enthralled by a dawn-pink firmament slashed with wispy gold and underlined by a bank of purpled clouds sitting low on the horizon like a distant forest.
"What are you looking at?” she softly whistled, her emergence silently rippling the glassy water beside him.
"Looking for.” His rejoining click was slurred with indolence. As Najoli's owlish eyes took in the splendidly painted heavens, the sleepy sun yet to make its blinding ascension, Durgay enlightened her with a solitary word. “Seabirds."
The Fisher's elucidation made absolutely no sense to her. “They're the souls of the damned. What's the attraction?"
"My dead father glides with them."
Durgay straightaway rolled and submerged, leaving Najoli's disjointed head afloat on the sheet of crystal liquid smeared with filmy daubs of rose, ochre, and lilac, her mind filling with questions gone unanswered.
Their northward continuation earned the meridional travellers escalating change. Traversing the invisible equatorial line circumscribing the globe brought unavoidable temperature variation. Northern waters cooled noticeably even at this extreme distance from the impressing polar ice cap. The weather topside became fickle, sporadic squalls of sunshine and rain. Even the wind, already erratically changeable, completely reversed direction and began blowing seaward off the climate-altering continent in south-easterly fits and starts.
Cetari diet, however, suffered no drastic alteration. So far variance between southern and northern fish species was nonexistent. Fishes familiar to them both abounded in the nutrient rich cool waters; plump grouper, laidback stingray, inflatable puffer fish, shoaling herring, dread hammerheads, snappy reef, and slothful basking sharks. When running near the surface, flying fish provided the paired merfolk with an aerial escort, the arm-length gliders spreading their outsized pectoral fins after clearing the waves to sail airborne, garnering lift from the extensile pinions, for up to thirty feet before smoothing plopping back into the sea and waggling their tails furiously, repeating their stupendous feat of airmanship. The finned fliers were also a tasty snack if you were fleet enough to catch them.
Najoli fretted over Durgay. The already taciturn merman had retreated into himself, uncommunicative except for necessary exchanges regarding food decisions and course corrections. She thought him withdrawn over the undisclosed business with his deceased father, but there was more to his reclusion than unresolved angst. He deliberately neglected to remember how the underhand quest to recover the Grohial ended in failure, ergo the existence of the fabled artefact remained unproven. What if Nupterus Himself proved just as unverifiable? This insane exodus to Icesand could very well turn out to be a one-way trip, achieving nothing in the end except their meaningless demise. Durgay barely survived his visitation to Lunder Atoll. There would be no escaping a frozen death in icy northern waters. He had agreed to accompany Najoli to their doom.
Her feeling isolated grew deeper with each nautical mile travelled. Durgay became as frosty toward her as the chill ocean, his aloofness nourished by the steady decline in temperature. It was as if the cooling seawater infused his spirit with its nippiness, stimulating his depression, freezing his heart against any warming hope and fellowship. Correspondingly, their connexion was adversely affected. Their passion, hot and breathless at the start (that memorable, opening stage of all relationships) quickly waned into a lukewarm parody of lust (that forgettable closure to decades of comfy togetherness). Kisses shrivelled into forced pecks, more in the nature of brotherly and sisterly affectations than the intense lip locking relished by lovers. Hugs turned into embarrassingly awkward clinches soon abandoned altogether. Sex was out of the question entirely.
A gregarious stranger to aloneness, Najoli, forlorn and friendless, had never before felt so lonesome.
The days unhappily dragged on for the extroversive mergirl, excluded from all but the basics of Durgay's life. Her expectations of their out-of-wedlock bond were not unrealistic. She was no starfish-eyed, lovesick sea cow dreamily seduced by the romanticism of being in love. Theirs was a union born out of necessity, consensual and sensible. Conversely, Dependable Durgay degenerated into Depressed Durgay. She felt as if an ocean had welled up between them, enlarging ever more, widening their personal rift to the point where the gulf could not be bridged.
Najoli contemplated ditching him, going solo on this potentially crucial undertaking. Cutting her merman loose scared her more than continuing onwards unaccompanied. Faced with a tough choice, Najoli preferred not seeing him so inexplicably down in the dumps. Talking him out of his glumness was an improbable solution, mainly because Durgay was muter than a clam. Obviously soured, the unspeaking Fisher was better off giving up on the trip and heading back to the secluded cove, there to wait and prepare for her return. Maybe the break would give the troubled merman the solitude needed to sort himself out.
Najoli never got the chance to suggest they split. Outside influence intervened with bizarre unexpectedness.
It happened late one night. Tonight, in fact. Sleeping slightly apart as they had lately come to do, the estranged couple napped in fifteen fathoms of night-blackened shallows, rocked to sleep by the comforting inshore swell. Having no ties to the land, the Cetari nonetheless soaked up the calming solidity exuded by undersea rock, a primordial need for permanence fulfilled. Just the nearness of the seabed acted as an organic relaxant.
Durgay was gurgling, the Cetari equivalent of snoring. Dozing fitfully, drowsy senses attuned to any changes, however minor, in the ocean's biorhythm that might spell danger, Najoli came to with a mental jolt and unkindly jabbed him awake with a sharp elbow to the ribs. He grudgingly stirred, cranky and confused, spluttering indignantly. She curtly shushed him to silence, instructing, “Listen to that, Durgs. Do you hear it?"
Straining his ears, he eventually picked up the faint echo she was referring to. Male Cetari possessed acuter hearing, as well as sharper eyesight, than the merwomenfolk, due to a need for heightened senses from those whose principle pursuit was spearfishing. The dulcet noise was a faraway murmur, a blurred whisper that maddeningly rose and fell as if borne on a fluctuating current. Largely unintelligible, Durgay somehow managed to hear beyond the muddling resound, filtering out the distortion until the core noise, muffled still by distance, became a tad more discernable.
"That's Cerat!” he exclaimed with certainty.
Najoli expressed disbelief. “How can you be sure? All I can make out is garble."
"I'd know Merspeech anywhere,” Durgay claimed.
"That's impossible,” she refuted. “There isn't another living merperson within two oceans of us, Durgs. You must be hearing wrong."
The perplexing chortle he gave back staggered her. Not that the immediate improvement in Durgay's gloomy disposition was unwelcome. It simply perturbed her being unable to fathom the impulse behind his abrupt cheeriness.
Enlightenment came with easy suddenness for the Fisher. He had undergone an epiphany, a profound revel
ation sufficient to pull him out of his crippling doldrums.
Of late Durgay had, by circumstance of change, begun to have serious reservations concerning what role he played in his merry-go-round life. His former, safer existence seemed like a dream out of which he was wantonly shaken from, rudely thrust into a wakefulness where survival meant reinventing himself. Thinking he at last had a handle on who Destiny had reshaped him into, Najoli's newest stunt utterly capsized his ordered world again.
This recent upheaval caused him to doubt his faith.
He once thought his religious convictions unshakeable as a seamount. Yet even the grandest submerged volcano trembled from the roots up when warring tectonic plates, those endlessly grating segments of crust on the backs of which the continents grindingly rode, produced fallout in the form of dismantling seaquakes.
Trekking in search of divinity is a classic journey of self-discovery. Most individuals, at some time or other in their lives, undertake that noble exodus, seeking to contact from within that omnipotent force guiding their lives behind the scenes, craving spiritual awakening and follow-on contentment. Many fall by the wayside, disillusioned by the reality they perceive as desires rarely live up to expectation. Belief does not automatically end suffering or halt injustices, nor can faith outwardly move mountains. Religion explains how everyday pain and grief is part of a celestial master plan mapped out on a case by case basis; it in no way eliminates the hurt which shapes us piecemeal, the way the tapped chisel of a stonecutter sculpts a formless granite block into a recognisable, worthwhile identity. Some impatiently conclude that a Higher Being is a figment of group imagination wistfully attempting to make sense out of a chaotic world by childishly heaping common fears and frailties on to an iconic godhead. Indulging in financial pursuits instead, money converts into the deity of those impenitent profiteers, riches their good deeds, insolvency a mortal sin. Few complete the ascension to a diviner plane, satisfied and at peace with themselves for leaving behind material trappings.
Durgay belonged to the steadfast believers; an unremarkable religious clique noteworthy only for its mundanity, made up of those faithful who worshipped regularly without fully understanding the why of their devotion, comfortable with conforming to ascribed religious observances without needing to be briefed on the mechanics of their piety. Blind faith best describes them.
And now the devout Fisher quested for Holy Nupterus, not in the sanctum of his private thoughts, but in the flesh. He harboured no rushing desire to prove or disprove the existence of the Sea God, and was afraid of the outcome. Incontestable faith affixed Durgay to his religiousness. What if they found their idol and learnt the eradication of the Cetari was His immutable whim, punishment for some ethnic transgression? Worse yet, what if they found nothing at all to give their spirituality credence?
To believe or not believe. Is that the question or the answer?
Crazy as it sounds, the far-off vocals haunting the nocturnal waters actually allayed Durgay's misgivings. He saw, or more accurately heard, that remote articulation as a heavenly sign.
Logic could rationalise it away, of course. Marine statistics make an impressive read. 97% of the planet's water floated in a global ocean spanning nearly three-quarters of the biosphere, ‘drowning two-thirds of the surface land beneath, on average, two and a half miles of brine. Arks of stone, continental and island-sized, cobbled that blue-green immensity, the foundational bedrock refusing to wholly bow down to the smothering saltwater tide. In a bizarre geological twist the movable landmasses dictated the extent of the oceans and seas, the expanding and contracting bodies of seawater themselves delineating the contouring coastlines. It was a constantly rearranging jigsaw on a planetary scale.
Oceanic acoustics were proportionally impressive. Sound transmits through water a zippy four times faster than air, so that a whale's low-pitched fart can be heard from 1,300 miles away! Deductively speaking, the unseen Cerat orator could be little more than a month's leisurely swim from the astonished listeners.
Merfolk were often illogical thinkers. That stemmed from superimposing their cultural advancements over an essentially primitive society not so far removed from prehistoric tribalism. Rudimentary superstitions lingered, one of them being the erroneous notion of the world's connected seaways acting as a global sound-shell forever resonating with noises both present and past.
The dominant hemisphere of Durgay's brain, specifically his left frontal lobe, began functioning at the basest level, cranking up mothballed neural pathways to reactivate the archaic thought processes which consigned the far-flung sound to ancient perceptions. Therefore, to the involuntarily primal-minded Fisher, the tantalising mumblings of Cerat were not viewed from a modern standpoint, but in an historical context. He registered them as echoes from the past, ghostly whisperings potentially ten, a hundred, even one thousand years old! More significantly, Durgay took the disturbance on board as a personal endorsement from Nupterus to seek out his earthly lair. What better form could the Sea God's stamp of approval manifest itself as but ancestral voices dredged up out of antiquity.
Devotees to any creed miraculously pick out divine signposts redirecting their way at the crossroads of their lives in even the most dispiriting of scenarios. They can infer guidance from the unlikeliest of markers. In that way, faith can be conveniently manipulated.
Finished chuckling, the muted utterance fading to be lost amid the background clutter of fish burble, Durgay started making noises which sounded suspiciously to Najoli as if he was preparing to travel. “It's the middle of the night,” she said.
"Time's a wasting."
The brevity of the Fisher's statement rivalled its import.
Bashfully reaching out to him, Najoli was rewarded by Durgay patting her outstretched hand stroking his iron hard shoulder. Her merman was back on deck. The dividing, emotionless sea had gone down the plughole!
"Get ready to move out,” he ordered his mergirl.
Swimming nocturnally presented no challenge to submariners gifted with biosonar. Complying, she gauged, “If Grams's reckoning is dead on, we still have half an ocean to cross, as the flying fish flies, to reach the icy water encircling Icesand."
"Then we'll gab on the way. I have some nets to mend.” Durgay admitted to his bad behaviour by way of analogy, setting off with a buoyancy to his stroke.
Matching his alacrity, Najoli commended her merboyfriend. “I'm so glad you've ditched your standoffishness, Durgs.” She improperly laughed herself, after adding, “Frigidity does suit you though."
"Considering we're headed directly into a freezer, that's just as well.” He sighed, a measure of his natural defeatism trickling through. “I only hope we don't wind up frozen stiffs. Merfolk-flavoured ice blocks sound unappetising."
Chapter Thirteen
The tadpoles hatched that afternoon. Playing the proud father, Ryops squatted chuffed on the shingled incline of the lakeshore, overseeing the nourishing of his spawn. His concubines, mothers to the horde of unintelligent younglings energetically flitting about their birthing cauldron that was Crater Lake, took great delight in their primary parenting task. Overcasting thunderheads did nothing to dampen the chieftain's elevated spirits, as insofar their dry rumblings only hinted at the breezy downpours soon to batter the tropics. The first feeding uplifted his heart as always, the acceptance and affirmation of life by newborn innocents a humbling event he unswervingly attended.
Amounting to just six breeders specially selected by the Dokran Teh biannually from the divisional castes, the sextet, in every sense of the word, worked cooperatively to introduce their mingled offspring to their initial taste of food. One representative of the upper echelon Leapers, plus a pair taken from the creative Climbers, joined lastly by a trio of female Diggers, these predetermined numbers maintained class proportionality. Kept small by design to preserve their elitism, the weakly positioned regime of the ruling social group was bolstered by ensuring the brainlessly loyal serfs politically outnumbered the cra
ftsmanly militants.
Standing knee-deep in the tepid shallows crowded by ravening infants, the mothering amphibs sprinkled tender young bamboo shoots from intricately woven cane baskets onto the lake's steamy surface, slicked by yellowing sulphur patches. Their offerings whipped the translucently bodied fledglings into a feeding flurry, the greenish waters churned into a bubbling mass far surpassing the periodic gaseous aerations belched by the volcanic heating vent trenching the lakebed.
Those erratic exhalations regulated the lake bottom directly above the vulcanian spring, preventing a poisonous accrual of carbon dioxide in the oxygen-deficient stratum at that water depth. Without such a natural release valve in operation, the continual expansion of carbonated water would eventually reach boiling point, the incompatible layers mixing with calamitous results. Gushing upwards like the fizzing contents of a shaken soft drink, a geyser of expelled gas would spout from the roiled lake, the denser-than-air fumes spilling down the sides of Mont Plaas, gassing birds and beasts, its vaporous rolling weight mashing small plants into fibrous pulp. The Piawro in the vicinity would not have escaped suffocation either, killed by the mortifying gas leak.
As there is no use fussing over disasters that have never befallen you, the only worrying aspect about Crater Lake was the hazardous rise in water acidity which made the giant spa unsafe to swim, let alone spawn, in. Luckily for the amphibs that happened only once in a blue moon, and during his tenure Dokran Ryops had only ever looked up at a yellow moon.
The swarming tadpoles competed frantically for the leafy morsels, their artlessness as transparent as their see-through bodies. “That's it. Eat up all your greens to grow up big and jumpy,” beamed one of the Digger mothers, her uncultured fellow caste members trilling agreeably.
Amphib maturation would fast take care of that, and how! Developing at triple the rate Cetari tots grew at, tadpoles rapidly metamorphosed into froglets following relocation to the riverine nursery. Hind and forelegs sprouted, budding lungs replaced infantile external gill filaments, and the babyish tail shrank into nothingness all within the space of four speedy months. At that point Piawro class division came into play, the blended gene pool of youth permanently rifted by the segregation the adults imposed.
Three Times Chosen Page 20