"Assign another guide. What else?"
"Settling everyone into a cove tonight."
"Actually, think longer term. If the water turns sour on the dive, I want our people kept at a safe distance for more than the one night."
"They'll need feeding in the meantime,” argued Brost. “Fish will have to be herded for the Fishers to spear."
"That'll fall under your jurisdiction as Seaguard boss to coordinate with your replacement."
Brost's jaw dropped open with undisguised surprise.
"Better close your mouth, Captain, lest you start catching fishing flies."
"Sire, I—I'm not qualified,” Brost stammered in protest.
"That's arguable,” refuted Lasbow. “You've already displayed the necessary management qualities through admirably leading the scouts during the course of our flight from Bounty Reef. Transferring that authority of yours over to the Seaguardians is no big deal."
"Won't they resent my appointment, after expecting one of their own to be promoted?"
"They'll get over it ... eventually,” Lasbow predicted. He clapped a hand supportively on Brost's shoulder. “One thing I've learned lately is that transition, even when planned for, happens with shocking quickness. Take me. I went from captaining to kingliness faster than a speeding sailfish. My rapid rise is still sinking in. But take it in your stroke and you'll do fine."
The uncomfortable expression on Brost's face showed he thought otherwise.
Pushing him off with a gentle shove, King Lasbow enjoined Brost to go and perform his last duty as scout leader. “I'll announce your captaincy before the evening meal,” he added.
Smiling bravely as he numbly swam away, Brost mumbled disparagingly, “That titbit before eating won't help anyone's digestion."
"Wait up."
Brost halted on command as Lasbow caught up to him.
"I'm curious,” confessed the Merking. “The rock shelf you found our wreck of a merman sheltering under. What was the peculiarity which prompted you to investigate it?"
His chance to turn the tables and send his monarch reeling, Brost revealed, “The corners of the ledge had a distinctly unnatural feel to them. Even beneath the encrusting barnacles you could tell without sound-sight they weren't rounded but angular, the rock faces weirdly flat and slab sided."
Lasbow, his hopes soaring, dared to ask, “Atlantean in nature perhaps?"
Beaming happily this time, the impending Seaguard officer shrugged wryly. “They looked mermanmade, though not by Cetari hands. If it isn't connected to Atlantis, it's a clever hoax."
For the first time since the commencement of the ill-fated War of the Reefs and the resulting fallout, Lasbow saw a glimmer of hope lighting the otherwise dismal horizon and looked forward to a pleasanter dinner.
* * * *
Since donning the crown Lasbow had broken with bachelor custom and shunned eating with the merboys to dine every evening alone with Ahlegra. Spending quality time with the Merprincess was a rare and precious commodity that allowed the couple a daily respite from the stress and strain of headship, where both could momentarily forget their status and pretend to be ordinary, uncomplicated Cetari. That brief whimsy existed only if dinner talk remained light and casual, which was not the case tonight.
"You shouldn't lead the expedition yourself,” Ahlegra quietly clicked, finally broaching the subject matter of the Merking's worrying pronouncement made a quarter hour earlier that set tongues wagging while diners partook of the small shoal of rainbow smelt netted in an adjoining inlet and distributed fairly by the Fishers.
No such simple fare for the royals and their privileged bodyguards, who supped on the lucky find of an old man grouper spotted hovering on the edge of the continental shelf and speared before he could make an escaping run for deepwater. Cramming a fresh chunk of the salty white meat into his mouth, Lasbow mulled and masticated at the same time. Who said Mermen were incapable of multitasking!
"I've never been a backseat diver,” he casually answered between bouts of chewing.
Cutting herself a bite-sized piece off the kelp frond floating between them, Ahlegra daintily nibbled the edges of the tasteless oarweed. “You and Cerdic have that in common,” she rejoined.
Swallowing, he fixed her with a steady, defensive gaze. “And only that,” he stated. “I will do nothing to hurt you."
"Foolishly risking yourself grieves me."
"I am the Merking. I must lead by example."
"That doesn't wash with me. You don't have to personally take charge of every single undertaking. Delegate someone to go in your stead."
"This won't be a pleasure cruise, Ahlegra. I'll need to captain the survey team myself."
"Why not task the Fisher you named tonight as the new Seaguard commander with the job?"
"Brost is needed here, in case..."
"What? The unthinkable happens and you don't return.” The indignant Merprincess let the kelp drift away as a visual metaphor of potentially lost chances. “I bet the Sea Witch put you up to this craziness."
"Ochar helped me see things more clearly,” was all Lasbow conceded. “You told me to trust my instincts,” he argued, throwing Ahlegra's advice back in her face like a returning wave. “My heart is telling me to follow through on this."
"By diving headlong into the unknown."
"Don't mistake bravery for recklessness. I'll conduct the exploration with the necessary amount of caution."
Knowing Lasbow was a meticulous planner did not allay Ahlegra's concerns. She sighed petulantly, cross with herself for sounding like a nagging fishwife even before they tied the reef knot. “I guess I can't sway you from this."
"I'm monarch. I have the final say on everything."
Impulsively, she swept the floating foodstuffs aside and lunged at Lasbow, shedding her shyness, clutching him to her breast. Not at all minding the closeness of her bosom, he distractedly felt anxiety trembling her body. “Swear you'll come back to me,” she pleaded.
"I intend to,” he promised.
"Even with that giant squid roaming about."
He stared up into her imploring eyes.
"I've heard the whispered whistles,” she said, the fear creeping into her voice.
Lasbow hugged his upcoming queen back. “If it's real, the kraken will be dealt with like every danger that has gone before threatening the Cetari. I'll hack it up myself into squid rings if need be. Meanwhile, you'd better start planning your wedding."
Resting her head against his chest, Ahlegra teased him. “Aren't you jumping the trident? You can't be sure if it is Atlantis down there."
"Tomorrow's dive ought to dredge up the reality, one way or the other,” Lasbow stated aloud, privately thinking afterwards, The indicators are certainly there. It can't be anything but Atlantis. Yet I have to see it for myself, to be sure before committing my people. To have come this far, sacrificed so much—failure is unthinkable, unbearable. But I can't deny that this whole venture may just be folly. It is, after all, a case of hit and myth.
"At the first sign of trouble, you'll hightail it out of there, won't you?” Ahlegra suddenly prompted him.
Even though it went against the grain, his mermale pride reckoning he could handle anything that swum his way, Lasbow nodded his assent. Of the two hazards, a riled mermaid was infinitely scarier than a gigantic squid.
Consuming the rest of their cold and soggy meal in meaningless silence, each contemplating what fates tomorrow might bring, they turned in early for the evening uttering forced, clipped words of goodnight.
Too restless for sleep, Lasbow glided unobtrusively amongst the settling merfolk. Huddling for reassurance as much as safety, adversity only strengthened their unity. Underpinning Cetari society, interdependence was the binding that glued them together. Individually weak, collectively they presented a united front, much like a coral colony. On their own, polyps were vulnerable and insignificant. When fused together to form the outwardly single reef entity, the community could
solidly weather whatever wildness a stormy Mother Nature hurled at them, were able to withstand even the ravages of Time.
But unlike the sedentary coral the Cetari were thinking, feeling organisms, banding together not from the mindless driving force of instinct but out of a shared desire for closeness which began within the bounds of family ties. Nurturing their precious children, the vital next generation crucial to the survival of any species, the farming merwomenfolk, the foundation stones anchoring Cetari citizenry, were themselves fed and protected by their armed mermen, all in turn governed by royal benevolence, itself directed by the guiding linchpin. It was an indissoluble network of love and labour, a Pyramid of Life in which the Merking occupied the zenith. It then struck Lasbow that he was top dogfish in so much more than name. His decisions, his actions, exerted the influences that directly affected the fortunes of that string of interconnected merpeople. The kingship therefore existed as both the strongest and weakest link in the chain. A wise, selfless monarch cultured prosperity and peace; a sovereign gripped by conceit only brought ruination.
Resolved not to let them down, to rule decisively without the intolerance Cerdic showed his subjects, Lasbow's mind wandered along with his body to the outskirts of the slumbering Cetari close to the mouth of the small bay. Warded on three sides by the mountainous submarine roots of immovable cliffs garlanded with lush cedar forests, sentries bearing light-fish lanterns guarded the shallow inlet's narrow entrance, Lasbow extending Seaguard duties to protect the commoners, as well as the royals, for the duration of their exodus.
Bothered by more than the risk of coming face to face with the legendary kraken, he dwelt on the private audience Queen Minoh had sought straight after his necessarily rushed investiture as Merking.
In the normal scheme of things a retiring monarch would give to his named successor—typically a son, not necessarily the eldest but the ablest—the reins of the regency in an unhurried manner, imparting over the course of a year or so generations of accumulated advice and wisdom to the apprentice king, before lastly revealing the portentous secrets privy only to the royals; information deemed too sensitive and damaging to be made public knowledge. Cerdic's abrupt demise had forestalled that gradual handover period and left gaping holes in the new sovereign's lore, necessitating his widow to swim into the breach and fill in the blanks for Lasbow.
Some of what she revealed was hardly news to the virgin king. Common knowledge to all mermen over the age of five, the retellings of the legend of the Grohial were surprisingly free of additives and adhered to the traditional storyline. Understandably, Minoh's embellishment rocked Lasbow's understanding of the seaworld. Not only did the Grohial actually exist, the coveted talisman lay someplace inland on the dreaded Landhopper atoll. Certainly giving him pause to rethink his beliefs, her divulgence offered him a lure of much needed expectation. If the Grohial was more than fantasy, perhaps genuinely physical as the Merqueen outlandishly claimed, how many more Cetari myths were actualities?
Minoh put his supposition to the test with another revelation of hand-me-down information the secretive royals had jealously guarded down the untold centuries. Making him swear never to reveal to a commoner or discuss this confidential knowledge outside the royal circle, Minoh divulged to the perpetually wide-eyed Merking a final disclosure so astounding, so seabed quaking, that Lasbow could scarcely take it in, let alone process it. Pertaining to the murky waters dimming the Cetari past, that bombshell rattled the very core of Cetari religious belief, making a mockery of merfolk mysticism. No proponent of spirituality, finding in fact the concept of God as foreign and frightening as any alien Landhopper, in his guise as kingly advocate of theology Lasbow felt weirdly and profoundly disconcerted when the wrappings of falsities were ripped away, the naked truth stranded on the sands of reality like a beached whale.
Remembered by but a few, the Grait Migratus from the icy northern latitudes to the tropics by the ancestral Cetari was steeped in fable more than fact. That the great migration took place was incontestable. Even the most farfetched of myths has interwoven in its fabric an essence of truth lending it credence. In olden times predating the merfolk, when a millions strong race of now vanished landlubbers plied the seas in creaky windjammers, myopic sailors mistook sea cows for humanlike seamaidens. Jungle explorers returning from the deepest, darkest subcontinent brought home tales of a fabulous one-horned beast that grew with each retelling from the factual rhinoceros into the fabled unicorn, proving that legends were grounded in realness.
Flimsily grasping that concept, Lasbow's astonishment quadrupled after Minoh completed his membership to the exclusive royal club by destabilising the longest lasting myth of all. That Nupterus, God of Seas and Skies, pillar of the Cetari commune, did not exist.
His indifference to religion notwithstanding, Lasbow doubted his own conviction, never questioning the popular belief that Nupterus, though acceptably a spiritual entity, was real. If such an avowal reached the earholes of the general population, their faith would dry out and shrivel up like a jellyfish exposed on the inshore rocks by a low tide.
By way of explanation Minoh had said, “Some long since forgotten ancestor of the kingship fabricated the Sea God's existence, simply to give the merfolk a focal point from which our oneness was constructed. You must realise, Lasbow, we weren't always unified. In the beginning, the Cetari used to be tribal. From what little we know those were volatile times during which infighting threatened to destroy us as a race. Then along came a merman, his name now unremembered, who propagated a belief in a deity that watched over the merpeople and whose spokesperson would eventually be titled Merking. The ruse worked at treat and, instead of feuding, the Cetari actually pulled together for the common good to please their newfound god and cultivate His blessings."
Amazed such fraudulence had been perpetuated so well for so long a time, his incredulity was stretched even further by the Merqueen's footnote.
"These northern waters you're apparently steering us into are saturated with more than cold. Infusing the depths is a terrible shame darker than the abyss itself. This disgrace provided the impetus behind our migrating west."
"Whatever it is can't be that bad,” imagined Lasbow.
"Take your worst nightmare, compound it with the crush pressures of the Deep, and you still wouldn't come close to the overwhelming humiliation we royals have endured in order to preserve Cetari integrity."
Out with it! Lasbow silently implored her, curiosity pushing aside unrest.
Gathering her thoughts and fortitude, Minoh's mournfully black eyes met his enquiring gaze. “Ages ago, before the oceans increased in volume,” she began, “a breed of landwalkers roamed the waterless giant islands."
"Surely you mean Landhoppers,” questioned Lasbow.
She smiled at the naiveté of his interruption. To the commoners, the only sentient creatures that lounged upright on strengthened “fins” were the feared Piawro.
"I meant exactly what I said. The race of hopping terrestrials who are the crown of thorns starfish in our side came into being soon after the creatures that walked the dry sands became bones. As hard as that piece of fishtory is to accept, that is only the half of it. Understand, our past compares to silted water, with only snatches of clarity showing in the swirling murk. The truthfulness of those flashes is always doubtful, but the implications are there nonetheless. Don't reject this notion out of hand, but in all probability the Cetari were birthed from the landwalkers. We are likely their indirect descendants."
Not expecting that, Lasbow felt he had been torpedoed in the back. “How can this be?” he wondered in a pitiful voice. “We've always swum the seas...” Glancing down the length of his tail, he could not simply comprehend owning legs. Denial tautened his face. “Have you proof to back up your claim?"
"There was once,” she asserted, “but it is gone, long since destroyed to keep it from ruining our religion."
"Yet you know its form."
Minoh heaved a sigh, the a
ct titillating her bosom. “I try to keep abreast of things,” she professed. “Before our ancestors undertook the westward migration, a Retriever dove into the abyss and ascended, bearing not whalebone but a curiously flattened and polished shell engraved with alien likenesses. Though in parts badly bleached by the seawater, the oddity was plainly a family portrait, picturing parents poised behind a son and daughter each. Queer as the artefact was, queerer still were the beings depicted. Admittedly, I have only hearsay to go on, but I believe it valid. Their forms were peculiarly both alike and unlike ours. Tailless, they sported arms tipped with unwebbed hands. Oh, but their faces, it is told, were uncannily similar, their eyes eerily so. Our kinship to the landwalkers is as clear as mud."
"Where was this damning shard of evidence found?"
"That is the greatest mystery of our times, King Lasbow. Due to his unforeseen death, Anwhorl never had the chance to reveal that information to his successor, and Cerdic never confided in me before his own equally untimely demise."
Wrestling with his conscience, Lasbow decided to reveal Cerdic's admission to his widow. She deserved to know the terrible truth, no matter how damaging, and it permitted Lasbow to clear his conscience. “Before Cerdic died, he confessed to murdering Anwhorl."
Minoh looked unsurprised. “Back then grief clouded my intuition, but afterwards I harboured suspicions. There were also the furtive whisperings amongst the bodyguards, of which I'm sure you were aware."
Lasbow refused to be drawn into that past maelstrom, accusing her instead. “Yet you didn't act on them."
"Without proof, how could I challenge Anwhorl's brother? It's not your fault, Lasbow, but due to your gender you've probably not noticed that mermen dominate our society."
"You still married him, your husband's murderer."
"A lapse in judgment on my part I'll regret until my dying day. But what choice was left me? I had to remarry. Cerdic was next in line to the throne and the surest way to secure a future for my daughters. Born and raised Merprincesses, they knew no other life. I sacrificed my own personal happiness for their sakes. I could not foresee that by doing so, to my everlasting shame, I allowed Cerdic to rob Lorea of her innocence."
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