by Lisa Jensen
“And he allows it?” Stella marvels. “Peter? The Boy King.”
“The Neverland is the dreamworld of children,” Lazuli replies. “All manner of fey creatures make their home here, as well as the beasts in the wood, because children love us so. The Boy King is immensely proud to have such exotic and dangerous creatures in his world, to show off to the children who come here. Especially the girls. They fly overhead to view us, and we appear in the lagoon for that purpose, so he will trouble us no further. It’s a small enough price to pay, amusing the boy, chasing away his sorrows, to preserve our sanctuary here.”
“Sorrows?” I rumble. “This is his Paradise.”
Lazuli peers at me, surprised. “Life brings sorrow, Captain, and his life has endured for so many suns and moons. So many losses, so many children gone, leaving him alone. His losses haunt his dreams sometimes, in spite of all our singing, my sisters and I. It is a delicate thing, keeping him happy, protecting him from the memory of all he has lost. Preserving his innocence. Our bards sing of a time when this place was in fearful peril, when the Boy King nearly succumbed to his sorrows, but for the heroic chanting of our singers. Now harmony is restored.”
She sits up a little taller on her coiled tail. “Of course,” she adds delicately, “he does not guess what our true purpose is within this grotto. Indeed, our own men, who would gladly shed their last drop of blood to defend this place, do not like to come in here. They know perfectly well what we do here, play no small part themselves in the cycle that brings us here, and yet they prefer to keep off, to let us do our work in peace.” She lifts her blue shoulders in wistful resignation. “That is how men are.”
And her sapphire eyes shift again to me. “It’s a matter of no little concern to us, Captain, that you have found your way here.”
I set down my wine vessel abruptly. They are looking at me from all round the pool, as if awaiting judgment against the wayward man foolish enough to penetrate their sacred circle. The two warrior sirens who captured me loom nearer. I have very little desire to be flung back into the water like a disappointing fish; it’s a long, long way back to the surface of the Mermaid Lagoon. My fingers inch across the rock to where my expired air bladder still lies, which I lift to show Lazuli. “I was trying to bring this to Stella.”
“Thief!” hisses Mica.
“Why was it placed in my boat?” I ask them.
“For the journey, I was told,” Stella pipes up.
The blue merwife nods up at the ancient mer-dame I spied before, with the aureole of snowy white hair, perched up in a higher elevation of the shore. “Our sibyl throws sand collected from the shores of the seven seas into her water glass and reads the patterns,” says Lazuli. “She saw an image of your ship, and we knew we were meant to aid the land folk the only way we can—a safe passage through our element, the water.”
“But why aid your enemies?” Myself, I mean.
Lazuli smiles patiently. “Not enemies, Captain. Yours and mine were the same race, once upon a time. We knew not whose passage it was, nor for what purpose. Nor do we know what the journey is. The old songs tell us only that it begins with the signs.”
“Three signs,” Stella whispers, with an eager glance at me.
The old woman, their sibyl, wriggles up higher upon her shiny tail and mimes at what must be another, much smaller pool of water amid her spiky volcanic peaks. Her voice is soft with age, but it rumbles across the water with authority. “The journey has begun!”
* * *
The three elegant fish I saw before, with their jewel-box colors and silken fins, leap across the surface of the water glass. It seems an ordinary pool of dark water, the circumference of a large platter, formed within a circlet of coralline spires on this crag above the birthing pool. Lazuli worked her way up a terraced path hewn out of the black rock, kept moist by a trickle of water from some hidden spring, while Stella and I were obliged to claw our way up the rocky incline to this plateau, where the sibyl keeps watch over her oracle.
“The sign of Mother Sea,” the mer-sibyl announces, gesturing to the image of capering fish in her water glass.
“I saw them in the river,” I say to Stella, and feel every other pair of eyes in that vaporous cavern turn upon me. I turn again to Dame Lazuli. “They brought me here.”
“The blessings of two mothers smile on this journey,” the sibyl intones, bright-eyed under her tufted white hair.
“Mother Sea,” Stella murmurs at my elbow. “Mother Earth.”
The sibyl beams at her and stretches knobby fingers into a large, upturned clamshell full of sands of every hue: black, white, red, honey-gold. She sprinkles a handful over her water glass, peers into it again. “One journey ends, another begins.”
“There are more than one?” I frown.
“It may be like a birth,” the blue merwife suggests. “A change from one condition to another.”
“But whose?” Stella asks softly.
“Whoever earns it,” Lazuli replies. “So our bards sing. But if all three signs are not seen, the chance to take this journey will never come again. Never, ever.”
“So you called Stella here?” I venture. “To placate this oracle?”
But Lazuli gives an adamant shake of her head. “We are very distressed that you are here at all,” she says to Stella. “None of us would ever call you. It is much too dangerous for you.”
“I’ve no wish to cause any more distress,” Stella sighs, shoving back an unruly wisp of her own hair. “Ma’am, the route you spoke of, the one that leads to the great sea. Can you show us where it is?”
A conflagration of feeling crashes against my ribs. But Dame Lazuli sighs, shakes her head again. “It’s a very long way under the sea. Our air bladders would be no use; your human lungs could never endure it. We of the mer-race have sea lungs. They serve us much like yours when we are in the open air, but they extract the air we breathe out of our blood and muscles when we are long underwater. As senior midwife here, I know how our bodies function,” she adds, as if we might disbelieve her.
“Yes, I’m a nurse,” says Stella.
“Then you understand that the distance is too far and the pressure of the sea too great,” rejoins Lazuli. “But if you are skilled at nursing, we might make a place for you here with us.”
“Why…” Stella falters, “that is … a very great honor, Ma’am.”
“She is exceptionally skilled at healing herbs and the like,” I offer eagerly. A refuge from the boy!
“It is calm just now, but at some seasons we have great activity here,” Lazuli tells her. “Another pair of hands would be useful.”
“But … my experience has mostly been with male patients,” Stella confesses. “I have little knowledge of … birthing.”
I hear the sadness she tries to mask in her voice. How might it affect her, all these females birthing healthy young?
“We can teach you what you need to know,” says Lazuli. She tosses back her explosive curls, wriggles a little closer to Stella. “I would prefer to have you here with us than to leave you above and vulnerable to the Boy King.”
Stella looks at me. I nod heartily.
“I regret,” murmurs Lazuli smoothly, “that I cannot offer the same hospitality to you, Captain. You are a legman, an object of great wonder to us, but disturbing to my women at this delicate moment in their cycles. As it is beyond our power to send you anywhere else, you must return.”
“Return? To where?” Stella demands.
“To his ship,” says Lazuli patiently. “Back to the Neverland.”
Back to my eternal torment. Stella will be useful here, the thing she most craves, and safe. But there is no mercy for Hook.
“So be it, Madam,” I say, coolly enough. I step out to the edge of the plateau and gaze down at the water in the pool, darker now, less green and friendly. If Stella’s journey ends here, let her at least remember that I’d not stood in the way of her good fortune.
But Stella rustles to my
side. “Then I’ll go with you.”
Thus she makes hash of my attempt to accomplish one honorable thing in my life. “But you’re safe here,” I tell her. “You’ve nothing to fear from Pan if he believes you dead.”
“And what about you?” she counters.
“He can’t hurt me,” I say grimly. “But if you return to the Neverland now, you will be an outlaw. He’ll believe himself justified in hunting you down like an animal with his wild pack of boys.”
“We can do nothing at all for you, my dear,” Lazuli speaks up, “beyond the protection of this grotto.”
“You honor me with your offer,” Stella tells the blue merwife. “I wish I could accept. But I don’t believe that is why I’m here.” She turns again to me. “The signs appeared to you. You had the Dream Vision. It must be your journey, Captain. This must be the chance your witch told you about.”
“This is no game, Parrish—”
“But what if I’m part of the journey somehow?” she goes on eagerly. “What else can I possibly be doing here? Suppose we’re on this journey together?”
Something long dormant stirs inside me. Dare I call it hope? It is a reckless thing.
* * *
“Take this,” Dame Lazuli bids Stella, emerging again from the mouth of her cave. She hands Stella a small spiral of pink shell strung on a seaweed thong. “Our sisters are posted in every island waterway, conveying information on currents, tides, and boy activity, for the protection of our grotto. If you change your mind, blow a note on this shell over any body of water in the Neverland, and we will come for you.”
Stella wears the little shell round her neck. It floats above her nightdress as we make our ascent through black water back to the Mermaid Lagoon. The merwife gave us fresh air bladders, puffed up like pastries when properly filled with air; a ready supply is kept for the mer-babes’ first long migrations underwater to rejoin their colonies. Mica, the shark-wrestler, escorts us, although I’m not at all certain she has our best interests at heart. At least not mine. But Stella guides me through the water even when we lose sight of our escort.
Stars scatter like diamonds across the black sky when we finally break the surface of the lagoon. All is still but for a lazy chittering of insects. Stella and I grope for hand-holds in the volcanic mass of Marooner’s Rock, gulping air before swimming for the shore, as Mica disappears again beneath the water.
“Let’s get out of this lagoon, in case there are any spies about,” I suggest.
Stella wrapped her gown with sea vines in the loreleis’ cavern to prevent it filling with water, and she strokes ahead for the shore as I paddle behind. She pulls herself out by a tangle of roots at the water’s edge, the wet skin of her gown clinging to every curve of her breasts and rump—pear-shaped, I notice, now that she’s out of those damned trousers. I was lately surrounded by exotic, bare-breasted sirens of the ripest carnality, the private dream of every sailor, however much he fears them, but none excited in me the same quickening as the sight of Stella sprawling on the bank in such artless abandon. In my day, women of her matronly years took pains to conduct themselves with dignity, real or imagined. But Stella flops over, flushed and giddy, without an atom of self-consciousness. And why not? There’s no one to see her but me.
I splash in closer to the shore, stretching for something solid to grasp onto. “You might lend a hand,” I carp.
“Sorry, Captain. You’re so full of surprises tonight, I thought you might walk on the water,” she blasphemes merrily.
But my clever rejoinder dies as a distant percussion I’d taken for insect clacking becomes louder, more insistent, a steady rhythm like a heartbeat. Like a ticking clock.
He sent a spy, all right.
Chapter Twenty
CROCODILE
“Captain, what is it?” Stella is staring at me.
“Listen!” Above my desperate paddling, I hear the squishing of wet leaves and grasses beneath its lumbering weight. The ticking grows louder. “It’s coming closer!”
Stella scrambles to her feet in confusion, peering about. When she sees it, her whole body jolts.
“The crocodile!” she gasps. “But I thought that was just a … a metaphor!”
My phantom hand already burns with remembered pain. I see it now, low to the ground, its massive gray-green head and snout aloft, black eyes agleam, crashing through the scrub and into the wetlands of the bank. But Stella freezes, crouching, her wet skirts gathered in her hands, watching the vile monster plowing toward her. “For Christ’s sake, woman, run!” I bellow.
She rises up a little higher on her haunches, but every move she makes to feint to one side or the other is mirrored by the beast. Yet the crocodile slows its advance, making for Stella with unusual caution. Possibly fear.
With sudden inspiration, I plunge my hook into the thick muddy bank, drag myself halfway out, grasp Stella by the elbow, and fall back into the water with her. The splash breaks over our heads, we both come up spitting and spluttering and I catch her by the waist and pull her farther out into the water.
“You call this running?” Stella cries, kicking furiously for her bearings.
“Look!” I gasp, flailing beside her. The great beast plows to where Stella was on the bank, swings its head from side to side, snapping its jaws at the empty air. But it does not pursue us.
“It’s Pan’s creature,” I exult to Stella. “It won’t come into the water here, see? The power of the loreleis is too strong.”
The monster puts its snout right down to the water, lifts its head, and turns one glaring eye toward us. But it stays onshore.
“Did you know that for a fact?”
I shake my head, trying not to actually pant with relief that I guessed correctly. We’re both paddling upright now. With a low rumbling noise, the beast onshore lowers its belly placidly to the muddy bank. To wait. The wretched ticking goes on and on.
“Now what?” Stella whispers.
“This way.” I point about a quarter of the circle of the lagoon away from where the crocodile lies, then breast the water with a mustering of strength born of desperation. With Stella close behind, I listen for the sigh of moving water, paddle to the bank in that direction and pull myself along by slimy vegetation. At last my outstretched hook lands on something solid. Not mud, not weeds. Wood. The prow of my boat, still rocking patiently at anchor at the river mouth, hidden in the tunnel of drooping branches.
“Captain!” Stella cries behind me. The ticking thunders along the bank above us. For its size and girth, the damned thing is as nimble as a snake along the muddy shore.
“The river!” I rasp to Stella. “I have a boat.”
Stella sees it now, the tip of the bows poking out of the underbrush where the river flows into the lagoon. She paddles to it, feels for the painter like an old sea hand, but I fastened it to some jutting portion of the rock on the other side of the bend.
“We’ll have to swim for it, Captain,” she pants, sounding for all the world like one of my old crew.
“Under the hull and up by the stern,” I agree. “Can you see?”
Stella dives for the boat, a ghostly glimmer of white in the dark water. A rustling of bramble answers almost directly above me, and I look up to see the crocodile’s mighty jaws gape open in silhouette against the pattern of stars, as if it were sucking in every scent, every taste, every sound that might lead to its prey. I thrash out to the bows, gulp one last breath, force myself under the water.
The keel jerks against my hand, the boat lowers in the water, and I know Stella is aboard. Hand over hook, I pull for the stern, and out to the larboard quarter farthest from the bank. I poke out my head, and ticking as urgent as hailstones assails my ears, then a splash, and the water rocks around me.
Stella’s frantic voice shrills as I clutch at timber, the monster rushing toward me on the water’s surface; it’s entered from the river side, rounding on the boat, coming for me with the speed of an arrow. I throw my hook up over the gunwale,
but there’s nowhere for my flailing feet to get a purchase, no time to swing up a leg. In a frenzy of ticking, the beast’s jaws yaw open behind me as my fingers close on the gunwale. Struggling to drag myself up, I see the underside of its giant mouth pocked with scabs and sores, feel a gust of its nauseating breath. The boat rocks and I brace my flesh for the piercing of razor teeth.
Something solid shoots past my cheek, and the beast jerks violently in the water and falls away behind me. Reprieved for an instant, I clamber up over the wales, Stella’s hands clawing at my shoulders, my back, dragging me in. Looking back out over the gunwale, I see the monster paddling its short, stout legs in the water and thrashing its head wildly from side to side, its jaws still half open, gagging on some stick-like thing protruding from its mouth: the flat paddle end of an oar thrust shaft-first down its throat.
Stella crouches in the stern beside me, glaring out at the creature, her gown befouled with muck, her hair a wet, tangled mop, her expression fierce, her body alert as her fingers inch backward for the other oar.
“Wait,” I rasp. “We still have to row.” Her searching hand pauses. “Besides, I believe you’ve done for him, Madam.”
Thrashing vigorously, its scabrous body still shuddering, the monster sinks below the surface to spit out the rest of the oar or choke on it. The ticking has ceased; the rippling water stills.
“You’re an excellent harpooner,” I pant, crawling onto the thwart. “Let’s see how you fare as a coxswain.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” she responds smartly.
I go forward to cast off the line. Stella passes me the oar and I use it like a barge-pole, thrusting the boat off the bank beneath the high canopy of branches. When we’ve backed into open water again, I manipulate my oar Indian-fashion, this way and that, nosing us into the tidal current, flowing now away from the lagoon. No phantom tributaries confound me in this direction, although I glimpse the vapors closing in around the lagoon again behind our departure. The coat I discarded earlier tonight is still in the bottom, and I hook it up and toss it to Stella; she’s shivering now in her flimsy gown, while I’m actually sweating from my labors.