Accosting the motionless Fisher and fearing the worst, Lasbow lifted the merman's chin and flinched when met by eyes glazed over not in death but abject terror. Passing his hand repeatedly before the vacant-faced explorer elicited no response whatsoever. The listless Seaguard was unmarked, apparently uninjured save for whatever mental trauma had stripped him of his senses.
"He does not react to any stimuli, not even offerings of food,” said a Fisher directly behind the debilitated mermale.
Waving for the speaker to come forward, Lasbow recognised the merman given the responsibility of scout leader swimming around to the head of the tiny group. “What's wrong with him, Brost? What befell him to make him like this?"
"Don't know, Sire. Your guess is as good as anyone's. It was pure chance we even drifted across him. One of the lads was checking out an oddly contoured rock shelf overlooking deepwater and bumped into him tucked away under an overhang, cowering on the ledge like an unhappy clownfish. Took him to be dead at first, till we noticed his faint, uncontrollable shakes. That trembling only stopped once we lifted him up into shallower seas."
Seeking truths, Lasbow shook the Fisher's shoulders rougher than he intended. “What happened to you, merman? Where's your partner? Did you find Atlantis?” When no replies came, he looked imploringly at Brost. “Can't he speak?"
"Not anything remotely coherent since we found him,” the ranking scout supplied. “And that was only babble about being assailed by some marine monstrosity. Whatever the sea creature that spooked him was, it made a mess of his trident.” Brost handed Lasbow a badly broken haft, in worse condition than its owner.
Examining the jagged ends where the pronged head had clearly been snapped off with horrendous force, fracturing the whalebone along half the length of the shaft, the Merking felt his hopes dashed. Whatever beast wrought this possessed horror enough to scare the assaulted merman witless. Was the sentry kraken, purported to guard the submerged city, real and his unknown attacker? If so, exactly where did the mauling take place? How far had the disgraced jailer swum to distance himself from the lurking nightmare? Most importantly, alleging Atlantis had been reached, could Cetari divers expect to survey the undersea ruins without risk of ambush and similar terror?
Left with more questions than answers, Lasbow consigned the traumatised Fisher to the care of mermaid healers. Perhaps their patient could be nursed back to mental health, but he doubted it. On the surface, the wrecked trident was simply a damaged tool. Underneath, the subtext was as clear as daylight. An extension of Cetari psyche, the ruined weapon symbolised the shattered spirit of its owner, his damaged soul just as irreparable as the smashed whalebone.
About to instruct Brost to return his staunchest scouts to where they fished up their enigma and delve into the mystery, an unsolicited observation from the front ranks of the bystanders crowding the rescued merman gave the king pause to reconsider.
"You'll get nothing out of him, Your Majesty. Not anything sensible, anyway. He's shell-shocked, severely so."
With a stern glance, Lasbow skimmed the nosy gathering for the faceless busybody, before asking outright, “Who makes such a bold evaluation?"
The presumptuous merman venturing his opinion raised his trident smartly, undaunted at becoming the new centre of attention.
Fixing him with a stare cooler than the chill that crept into the coastal water the further north they advanced, after exiting the channel three months earlier, the king of the drifters shook the shattered trident annoyingly at the anonymous Fisher. “I'm usually good with faces. I ought to know yours."
"There's no reason for you to remember me especially, King Lasbow. You were only a merboy when we were introduced and our acquaintanceship was brief."
Using the heel of his hand, Lasbow smacked his forehead after recognition came to him. “I've dredged up who you are! You train the whalebone divers."
The merman whose task it was to select candidates for the Retrievers sect, instruct the raw recruits in the nuances of deep sea diving, and weed out those hopefuls who proved unsuited to such a dangerous and daring profession, nodded.
"Your name is Erops,” Lasbow finished recalling. A few months younger than Durgay, the dive instructor looked fitter than most mermen half his age. The Merking pointed to the unseeing, uncomprehending voyager. “What was it you claimed he is suffering from?
"Shell-shock,” Erops repeated. “Worst case I've ever seen. It afflicts divers who descend beyond the margin of safety. The term is coined from the chamber snail my boys habitually carry with them on every dive. If the shell begins to crack from the pressure, they've exceeded their length of stay in deepwater and need to ascend on the double."
Not even Cetari Retrievers could fully escape the physical effects of prolonged exposure to the mind-boggling pressures and numbing coldness of the sunless abyss. The deepest sounding of the extinct great whales, the blunt-headed sperm, had been limited in dive duration by how long an adult could last underwater on a single breath. Remaining submerged for anywhere up to two hours, the champion diving mammal had to consciously return to the surface to breathe. Unhampered by such a constraint, the specially trained mermen nonetheless were subject to limitations peculiar to their own physiology. While certainly burly in build, not even their robust skeletons could withstand indefinitely the enormous stresses which regular plunges to depths of 2,000 feet and more imposed on the body.
"The telltale indicators of shell-shock are disorientation, plus hand and tail tremors,” Erops expounded for the uninitiated Merking's benefit. “Another less visible, but more potent, symptom are hallucinations."
Lasbow dwelt on the implications of the last statement. “Are you suggesting that his mention of a monster may be the imaginings of a rattled mind?"
"We can't ignore that likelihood, Sire."
"Brost, what is your take on this matter? Did you find any physical evidence to support the allegation of an attacking sea monster?"
Shaking his head, the scout relayed, “Other than the busted trident, there was no trace. A swift search of the surrounding sea was conducted. We found nothing. Either the monster was long gone, or..."
"It was never there to begin with,” sighed Lasbow, completing Brost's thought. His steady gaze shifted from the scout commander to the diving tutor, before returning to Erops, foretelling the obvious decision that was coming. “A more thorough search of the area is called for to establish what exactly transpired,” the Merking decided.
"By thorough, don't you mean deeper?” Erops construed.
"The scouting party will be kept necessarily small, to reduce the risk factor. A trident just doesn't break apart on its own. Something snapped it in two.” The Merking's impossibly black eyes rested back upon the trainer. “An experienced Retriever is needed to go along."
"What for? This is no dive in search of whalebone."
"The object of the hunt will be to retrieve the truth, Erops. Are you up to the challenge?"
"Are you volunteering me, Sire?"
"As instructor, you are obviously the best qualified for the task. I could always command you to go.” Lasbow held off ordering Erops, sensing the stubbornness in the merman's character. His time as leading officer in the Seaguard had taught Lasbow the value of not forcing an unpleasant order on a junior. Imposing one's will on another generally caused a backwash of resentment. As king he could override any reluctance on the part of an unwilling subject, but he preferred that obedience be voluntary, not forced. “The choice remains yours. I'll not compel you to take part in something you have qualms about."
"I'd be only too glad to participate, Merking, but for this.” Erops grudgingly held up his left arm and dumfounded Lasbow with the pitiable stump where his hand should have been. “I do not teach of my own choosing,” he said, bitterness inflecting his glum whistle.
Constrained by Cetari etiquette from asking Erops outright how he suffered his amputation did not preclude Lasbow from wondering. Later that day he would make discree
t enquiries and piece together, from snippets of personal information reluctantly divulged by colleagues, the tragedy behind the mishap that had cost the dive instructor his hand.
A victim of his own foolish mermale pride, a year ago Erops stupidly stuck his arm into the yawning gape of a giant clam in response to a challenge set by his cheeky pupils.
A prerequisite for the mermen who risked the many perils that came with the territory of diving into the abyss on a semi-regular basis, bravado turned out to be a serious character flaw when hazards were taken lightly. Boldness and incaution existed as fickle bedfellows. Retriever audacity extended to the frequent games of bluff they played, pushing the boundaries of luck and sensibility to ridiculous limits. But those games carried an underlying purpose, casually testing trainees and tutors alike, charting the depths of their courage. A deep-sea diver who lacked gumption was as useful as a seagrass net with a hole in it.
Playing Russian roulette with a loaded 600 lb clam was their preferred game of chance. The dare was to see how long a Retriever could stand to bear leaving his hand in the jaws of the five-foot long mollusc before his nerve failed. The trick to triumphing lay in precisely judging when to yank the limb out of harms way. The dorsally hinged shells of the enormous bivalve closed with measured solemnity, deceptively slow until near the end, when the organically powerful adductor muscle contracted sharply and snapped shut the corrugated halves with violent abruptness.
Winning the dare had been easy enough for Erops. He outlasted his disgusted fellow gamers by a wide margin, due to the fact he had no recourse but to win. The teacher losing out to a pupil did not set a good precedent. Extricating his arm did pose a harder problem to overcome afterwards, as in his excitation he misjudged the timing and pulled back a fraction too late. The shells clamped securely shut about his wrist and locked tight, crushing bone and blood vessels, trapping the darer. Rushing to his aid, his pupils” efforts at levering open the monster mussel by wedging their tridents in the gape came to naught. Erops would have to wait for the clam to reopen of its own accord.
Cruelly, time was not on his side that tragic day.
Attracted by the unusual commotion in the clam beds, a megashark swept in from the outer reef and cruised past, panicking the grouped merman. Courage fled each and every one them and they hastened after it, ensuring them flunking the diving course. Except for the brave soul who stayed. He was guaranteed a pass mark from his trapped tutor. Of course, that depended on dissuading the giant fish from making a meal out of them.
Switching from fighting to free Erops to fighting for both their lives, the merman found himself caught between a dock and a hard plaice. Armed only with determination and his woefully undersized harpoon, deterring the megashark was an unrealistic objective. In two lethal bites, master and apprentice would be rendered into fish food.
The heroic Retriever had then made the snap decision to lop off his trainer's hand at the wrist. There was no alternative. When viewed in the context of the larger picture, that sacrifice was a small price to pay for saving two lives. The irony of it all was black humour at its darkest; the surgical instrument of choice was a megashark tooth.
Gritting his teeth in readiness, Erops mercifully passed out from the blinding pain when the serrated teeth of the knife sliced through steely blue skin into his pinked flesh. Unflinching, his rescuer carved through muscle and tendons, arteries and veins, calmly cutting as if he were dicing up a tuna. The diver worked exceptionally well under pressure. Tasting blood in the water, the megashark made another pass, terrifyingly close, its wash buffeting the mermen. Hitting bone, the amateur sawbones worked faster, ripping through the skeletal forearm and remaining strips of skin. Using his seagrass belt and the hilt of his knife to fashion a tourniquet, the audacious Retriever staunched the flow of arterial blood pumping from the stump. The natural salinity of the saltwater irrigated and cleansed the messy amputation, eliminating the chance of infection. Finished applying his makeshift first aid, he dragged his insensate tutor by the tail back to Castle Rock, shadowed the entire way by the nosy megashark, which inexplicably did not carry out its threatened attack.
Erops obviously lived through the brutal trauma and substantial blood loss of the drastic rescue measure. Expectedly, his recovery was slow and painful. Even now, he suffered days when the stump throbbed unpleasantly with the taunting sensation that his severed hand was still attached, the aptly titled “phantom limb” feeling and an intermittent reminder of his brush with death.
His hurt extended beneath the surface of his roughly healed injury. Erops's diving career lamentably came to an end, severed with the same finality that removed his hand. The pressures the Deep exerted on his stump pained him beyond normal levels of tolerance, and his disability relegated him to an inevitable and permanent teaching role, coaching from the sidelines. Affected by his indignity, Erops covered that shame by inventing the story of his hand having been bitten off by a giant shark, omitting the part of getting it lodged in a correspondingly giant clam. For reasons of graciousness and camaraderie, his rescuer did not contradict the story, sparing his victim's feelings by perpetuating the lie.
Accepting Erops's right to privacy, the Merking asked if he would nominate a substitute. The coach did not even stop to think and stunned Lasbow for a second time with his choice. “I'm handicapped, unable to go diving into black water ever again. But Dribben is not."
Overcoming his shock, Lasbow clicked, “I wasn't aware he qualified as a Retriever."
"Luckily, not every merman is cut out for the Seaguard,” Erops rejoined somewhat hostilely. An unfriendly rivalry existed between the divers and bodyguards, sourced in professional jealousy.
"Name another,” the Merking commanded Erops. “My admittedly limited experience of Dribben is that he is at times glummer than a shark turned vegetarian. The dive will likely be gruelling, but you've guessed that. A diver with confidence and optimism is wanted, not a cynic who'll lose hope at the first obstacle."
"On the contrary, King Lasbow, Dribben's moroseness works to his favour. He has a fatalistic approach to life that makes him less susceptible to fear. That leads him to take appreciably greater, but to his mind sufferable, risks."
"I don't want to be encumbered by a diver with a death wish."
"You won't. Dribben accepts, not embraces, his mortality. It's not that he wants to die any more than anyone else does. He's just not afraid to."
Lasbow needed further convincing. Fathoming the depths of a fable required a confidence motivated by belief. To go looking for a legend, and tackle the nightmarish monster allegedly associated with it, without a shield of hopefulness to buffer against the dark fears of the bleak times courted disaster.
"You won't find a better merman than Dribben at free-diving,” Erops reaffirmed. He held aloft his stump once more. “Also, he is clearly handier than me."
Lasbow consented curtly with a grunt. “On your say-so, Dribben will do."
A progressive darkening of the sea matched the twilight purpling of the sky above water as evening embraced the mirror realms. Flying fish ceased their aerial jaunts, plopping back into the unsafe seas where nocturnal terrors hungrily waited, even as wheeling seabirds squawked farewell to the ocean larder and returned to the security of their cliff-face roosts before darkness blackened land and sea.
"Night-rise is coming,” observed the Merking. “Diving in the dark won't present a problem, but I'd prefer to wait until day-fall. We could all do with a good night's sleep after today's drama. Everyone will be better off rested before coping with whatever excitement tomorrow brings. Brost, find us a sheltered bay in which to spend the night."
"Got one already in mind, Sire,” the head scout reported.
"Good. Erops, you'll notify Dribben about tomorrow's dive. He needs to be ready to depart promptly at day-fall."
"Who should I tell him to report to?"
"Me directly."
Erops rigidly performed a half-bow and swam off to locate his master d
iver without further comment.
Brost cleared his throat awkwardly. Lasbow looked at him expectantly, his glance giving the scout permission to speak freely. “Sire, if I might be so bold as to query. Am I to infer that you intend to oversee the dive to find Atlantis yourself?"
"That and more,” Lasbow confirmed. “I'll be heading the expedition."
"Is that wise?"
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Brost. You doubt that I'm capable of handling myself down there?"
"Of course not, my king,” the scout hurriedly clicked, tripping over his tongue in his haste to apologise for his presumptive forwardness. “Only, why put yourself at needless risk? The Cetari have lost one Merking already. Losing another might well cripple us entirely."
Lasbow looked Brost over carefully, measuring his worth. “How long have you acted as a fish finder?” Cetari scouts worked chiefly to locate schools for the Fishers. Theirs was a symbiotic efficiency that fed the merpeople.
"Since adulthood, Sire."
"And you never once, in all that time, considered applying to join the Seaguard ranks?"
Shrugging, Brost said, “Never had cause to."
"Consider it now."
Puzzlement silted the scout's face. “I am happy in my chosen profession and have no desire for a career change.” He paused, sensing his monarch's insistence firming the water between them. “Unless it is your will,” he construed.
"More than that, it's going to be my command,” Lasbow avowed.
Forgetting his place again, Brost blurted errantly, “But I have scouting duties pending."
The Merking folded his arms. “Such as?"
"Directing your search party to the dive site, for one."
Three Times Chosen Page 34