Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  First the mainland was a black fingernail’s-edge between the pale sea and the pale sky. I pulled Dad’s sleeve as he talked to Mr. Fisher, who was coming over to buy some tins and vegetables for the store.

  “There, yes,” Dad said to me, and gazed at it a little, first to satisfy me and then because some thought had caught him about it.

  “Don’t you be fooled, young Dan’l,” Fisher said around Dad’s front. “It may look like the land of promise, but Killy’s best, home is best.”

  Dad squeezed my shoulder, invisibly to Fisher. I didn’t know whether he meant me to listen carefully to Fisher or ignore him and flee to mainland as soon as I ever could. Mam had combed my hair—I had watched in the mirror—so that it was two slick curves either side of a raw white parting. My whole head still felt scraped and chilled.

  Slowly the land grew; slowly it rose and unrolled out of the horizon: two main rounded hills with others either side like attendants. The sea slopped and danced below us. The sky blued as the sun got up higher, and we began to see shapes on the land, forested parts and fielded, and the glint of roofs and roads, and the black cliffs with the dazzling break between them, where we would chug in and find safe harbor.

  “We will catch the bus in to Knocknee,” said Dad. “It goes right from the pier.”

  “So we’ll not see this town, so much?” I said, disappointed because it seemed so rich, with its warehouses along the front like a wall, with its several steeples, with its shining vehicles gliding along by the water.

  “Can you not let the lad at the fleshpots of Cordlin Harbor, Mallet?” laughed Fisher. “Even to the ’stent of a raspberry lollipop at Mrs. Hedly’s shop?’

  “We’ve business.” My Dad shook his head and smiled. “Knocknee Market will have to be excitement enough for the boy.”

  I did not see how anything could be more exciting than motoring in between the heads. Cordlin Harbor spread and spread out, serene and glossy after the tumbled sea, after the beating of the waves at the cliffs’ feet. Rank after rank of boats was moored here, alongside the piers and also punctuating the more open water, each little pleasure motor, each ketch and trawler, kissing its morning reflection. Cordlin Town lay as if spilled in the valley, thickening towards us in the bottom, thinning away to skerricks, a cottage here, a barn there, higher up the hills like drops of milk around porridge in a bowl. Windows winked at us and the great granaries and woolstores stood all barred windows and red-and-white brickwork, and I saw for the first time the humbleness of my home island, in contrast to this center of wealth and commerce.

  “There’s our bus,” said Dad, and I noticed the marvelous thing, painted and polished, a crest on the side of it and a number-plate behind, and with people, Cordlin people, people who did this every day, already in it waiting, for our boat to come alongside, for Dad and me to walk up the gangplank with the other islanders, for us to climb on to the little glinting box of the bus, and pay our fares, and sit.

  I held fast to Dad’s hand. Mr. Fisher clapped my shoulder, and the surprise of the blow made my heart jump hard in my chest, and ran across my scalp like a wind-gust through damp grass.

  The trip to Knocknee was all events, one piled on the next so that my telling of them, which at first I tried to rehearse to Mam in my head, fast became garbled and then fell to silence. I hung onto the windowsill, grateful that Dad looked over me, and would see the important things, would collect any details that I might miss. Presently the overwhelming town with its too-many faces, its too many curtains and gates and window boxes, sank away and we were in fields, flying among fields on the back of our grinding, squashy-wheeled monster, and this I could bear more easily, fields being more like the sea in their emptiness, in their roundness and billowyness, Cordlin fields being very much like Killy fields, such as those were.

  I turned to Dad: “Such a noisy way to get about.” I thought the engine must be right below our seat, it juddered at our bums so.

  “It is indeed,” he said. “Noisier than a boat, and certainly noisier than a man’s own legs. But fast,” he added. “And fast is what we’re wanting, to reach inland and back in a day.”

  And to see numerous people, not all of them friendly, and to ask them questions that made their eyes slide aside, made them shake their heads and turn away. I ran about after my striding dad, and the running, and the ways of people, eventually tired me. He put me on a sunny bench in the market square and bid me wait while he searched on.

  Before long someone else was put there, at the other end of the bench, someone in skirts, with hair. I had got my breath by then, and when we had caught each other glancing several times, “I know what you are,” I said to her.

  She stopped swinging her legs. She looked at me and narrowed her eyes, which were pale like a dad’s looking blue in this light but possibly green, possibly gray. “Well, what?”

  “You are a girl-child,” I said.

  She gave a small hiccup of a laugh. “No joking!” she said. “Good thing that you told me.” And she swung her legs some more and looked about at the legs and bums and baskets and bustle.

  “You are, aren’t you,” I said.

  She looked me up and down. Her breath was white on the cold air. “Are you touched, or what?”

  “I ant never seen one before,” I said.

  She snorted.

  “It’s true,” I said. “We don’t have them on Killy.”

  Her face got more startled, and prettier. “You’re from Killy Isle?’

  “I am,” I said. “My dad brang me over this morning.”

  “For the first-ever time?” Now I was interesting, and she seemed to have stopped disliking me, which was good.

  “First ever,” I said.

  “You been on that one island all your life?”

  “I’ve been to St. Mark’s, and Ogben also. And on lots of sea.”

  “I never seen the sea yet,” she said. “My mam and dad won’t take me. Say it sends men potty. Is your dad potty?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, not sure what she meant, and not sure about Dad. None of these legs were recognizable as his, none of these hats, fuzzy-outlined against the sunshine.

  “Are you potty?” said the girl. What a lot of hair she had, and it was not straight and silky like a mam’s. It looked as if, you take that band off, undo that ribbon, loose it from those plaits, it would stand straight out from her head, or possibly get up and walk right off her, or flame up and away, burn away in the sunlight, from the heat in its wires, from the combination of so many hot red strands together.

  “I’m not potty.” I knew that much.

  She laughed at me, but not all unkindly. “You might be anything,” she said, “you look so strange, with your great eyes.”

  I turned my face from her embarrassed, and again she laughed. These girl-children were certainly unsettling.

  “What brings you, then?” she said as if she had a perfect right to know. “You and your dad, to Knocknee?”

  “I ant sure,” I said. “He has business here, he said.” Again I searched the crowd, for I rather wished he would burst out now, perhaps with something for me to eat, some mainland fancy.

  “Cloth, mebbe?”

  “I don’t think so. He said he had to talk to someone.”

  “Hmm,” she said considering. “Private, like, then, if he put you here. Was it a woman?”

  “I think so,” I said, knowing for certain so, but not liking, somehow, to confirm what this girl might be thinking.

  “Don’t you have womens there, on Killy? Is it all potty boys and men?”

  “We have women,” I said, stung. “We have very beautiful women, all our mams.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me again, and breathed more breath-smoke. “Ye-es,” she said and frowned. “That is your specialty out there, is it?”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to remember. I’ve heard mams talking. There’s something about those Killy women, isn’t there?”

  “Maybe
,” I said. “But they’re our mams, so don’t you say anything that might get you popped on the snout.”

  “Well, they must be unusual, to’ve got an unusual like you,” she said commonsensically, looking me up and down again.

  I turned back to the crowd, to the sun, not knowing what to say to that. They’re usual for our town, I wanted to assert. Perfectly usual. But I could not say it. She would not find that convincing, and I did not want to feel more foreign than she had already made me.

  We had come to bring home a girl, but not the girl from the market. This other girl we fetched from a smelly part of the town; there was some kind of offal piled and straggling in the drain outside her family’s house.

  I thought her mam was her grandma, she had so few teeth and was so weathered. All the time they talked the woman watched my dad as if he might snap at and bite her, as if he were there to trick her and she ought to be very careful.

  The girl herself was orange-haired like all of them, but not so clean as the market girl, and she had something of the twitchiness of the mam about her, and something a little sneaky, I thought. She sat there all pursed lips, her glance flicking from Dad to the mam to Dad, listening close and clearly understanding everything they exchanged, although to my ears it made no more sense than murmurings in someone’s sleep.

  They were talking about money; the mam wanted some, and Dad was saying how he oughtn’t to have to pay, giving board and accommodations to this girl as he would. He seemed to be buying her, buying something she could do. Truth tell, she didn’t look capable of a lot, so skinny and gray-fleshed. Looked more like the sort to skip quick smart out of any job going.

  Dad sighed. “You have eleven of her, missis. Ain’t you glad to get the burden of even the one of them off your shoulder?”

  “This one eats mouse-rations,” snapped the mam. “Why don’t you take one of the big girls, my Gert or my Lowie, great heffers that they are?”

  “You know why, Mrs. Callisher. This is the one with the touch on her. As can be taught up useful by our Messkeletha.” Ah, that was what he wanted. For when the oul witch died, of her awful coughing, or perhaps just the strength of her own evil.

  “Useful for what? Useful for living on Killy, is what. Useful for catching and keeping mermaids. And stuck in that God-hole for the rest of her life, the amount she’ll be useful elsewhere.” She slid a glance at me. “I don’t want grandsons with tails,” she said. “Granddaughters with fins.”

  “We will pay her a yearly journey here, how about that? Boat and carriage to visit you every spring.”

  The mam sucked at the inside of her discontented face. “And no one to marry.”

  “She might well meet a man here, one of her visits. I don’t know, missis. These terms is reasonable. I’m sure Trudle would be very content, a room of her own built special onto the oul-woman’s, and a livelihood.”

  The girl Trudle gave a kind of a whinny, and were no prettier for laughing. If anything she looked more weaselish or rattish, creased up like that.

  Her mam looked at her and shook her head. “She’d be happy on a dungheap, that one. She’s touched more ways than the one.”

  “Ask Fan Dowser how touched I am,” said Trudle in a rasping voice.

  Swiftly the mam stepped over and smacked Trudle’s head. The girl rubbed the spot and glared up at her through her eyebrows.

  “Very well, take her,” said the mam with great carelessness. “Don’t come blubbing back to me, though, what she gets up to with your pretty lads.” She spared me something of a sneer, but there was fear in it, too. “As I say, there’s not a lot up her top. Why a person cannot have magic and intelligence I do not know.”

  “’Tis straightforward enough work,” said Dad.

  “Hmph. Nothing of this nature is straight. Go fetch your box, girl.”

  I did not like traveling with this girl. We were an odd little couple, her and me, her in some ancient hand-me-down ruffles and a big dark-blue bonnet, her weasely face in the middle looking everywhere. She walked in a funny rocking way, her legs wide as if she had discovered herself wet. People glanced at us going by, and glanced away when they saw me watching. My dad preceded us, Trudle’s box on his shoulder, her best-dress pillowing up at the top. He was walking quite fast, making Trudle rocky-rock along ridiculous. It was a nightmare, this big town and the hurrying, people’s eyes and opinions peppering us as we walked, and the sun lost behind the flare-edged house rows. Trudle did not speak to me nor I to her; we only struggled along separate and together, both after Dad.

  Then the crowds cleared, and the bus was there waiting for us alongside its shelter. The door was just hissing shut, but my dad hoyed and waved and ran, and it opened for us again.

  Trudle got up first very bustling. She chose a seat halfway down and sat very straight and pleased there, sparing Dad a glare when he made to sit by her, so that he came with me to the seat behind her instead.

  “That was close,” he said as the bus threw him back into his seat. “Any more bargaining with that mam and we’d have been stuck here the night.”

  I could smell Trudle Callisher; I could smell the oldness of her clothes, and the fact that she had not bathed in a while.

  “I seen you got talking to a maid?” says my dad politely when we had got our breaths.

  I nodded, watching the last of Knocknee town whirl by: a cottage with a yard full of rubbish, a dog with a plume-y tail, water shining in bootprinted mud.

  “What was that like?” he said.

  I shrugged—it had not been like anything, and I did not know what to think of it, what to say.

  “Did you like her?”

  I slid my bottom back, to sit straighter in the seat. Cows flew by, some of them watching us with their great heads raised. “She was fine, I suppose.” Did I have the right to like or dislike such a stranger? Today I was just a big empty trawler-hold, with the world’s fish and sea-worms tumbling into me. “We only talked a little while.”

  There’s something about those Killy women, isn’t there? I saw the girl’s narrow eyes, her hair-wires around her head as she asked. Those Killy women. I wished I was among those Killy women suddenly, sharply; I was sick of this adventure. I wished I was tiny again, and curled in Mam’s lap with her singing buzzing and burring around me in the quiet room, Dad gone to fish or to Wholeman’s. Or among the mams on their sea-washed stones, their blankets trailing and pulling at their legs as they called to each other, as they laughed, grown-up jokes that we didn’t need to understand, and me with my fellows at play.

  Trudle watched everything out the window across the mainland countryside. She boarded the boat ahead of us as if she owned it, and kept similar straightness and cheer all across the Bite.

  When we reached Killy my dad sent me up home, and I did not see what happened then and nor did I mind. I went home with a lemon for my mam, given me by Mr. Fisher. I dug my fingernail in the rind a little and sniffed lemon all the way up the town, to clear the Trudle-smell out of my head.

  From what I gathered she were given over to Messkeletha just as promised and no fussing. And after that the two of them went about a pair, like a flour-caddy and a tea. They both wore witch-dresses, tight to their tops to the waist, then springing out like flower-bells, nearly to the ground. Cages and flowers, like all those women at Knocknee and at Cordlin Harbortown wore, so presenting of themselves, so insisting on your looking.

  The one’s hair was dirty orange in the sunlight, the other’s mostly frost, only a few reddish stains in it to hint what it once was. And Messkeletha’s was thin in places; as Trudle stayed longer, she grew her hair, as if to make the point that she alone had such color, and could bear it about in such quantity.

  Messkeletha never was polite, never greeted you even did she meet your eye, and this one learned the same ways quite fast, or at least towards mams and children. For men she would raise what might be called a smile if it were not so sly and ambiguous. “Mister Paige,” she would say, but it would come
out Pay-eesh, too lingering, and Paige would seem to dodge and weave without taking a step in any direction, would seem to bow and tug a forelock without taking his hands from his pockets. In all her interactions with our men Trudle got herself this chopped-about reaction, and enjoyed herself with the getting, anyone could see.

  But, as I say, she followed her mistress about the town and there was something powerful in there being the two of them, the small caddy tripping after the big one, taking on and giving new notes to the oul-witch’s herbaceous, privy-aceous smell. Two bells on feet, they were, ringing unpleasant thoughts out the men’s memories. Two ragged flower shadows, they crept along the sky on Watch-Out Hill. Messkeletha would stand peering to sea and town on the south mole while Trudle bent bum-up collecting fish-scales for their magics. Or the two of them would be horrors together on Marksman Road, glowering ahead, pretending not to see us boys as we hugged the hedge opposite, greeting them feebly.

  You stand there against the boat rail with your small warmth hugged to you inside the stiff coat. The seals break out of the endlessness of the sea, they make all that space less anguishing, all that drowned world beneath. Their round head-tops, their whiskery-ness, the humdrummery of their rough breath, the shiver of ripples around the landforms of their heads, their seeming to smile—you cannot help but love them.

  And the eyes, oh the eyes. The eyes are the magic of them, seals and mams: deep as night but starless, starless and kind—or at least not calculating the way pale eyes are. They are dark and glossy as any sea-washed stone, still magic while wetted, still live.

  Water flowing over a rock, over a seal, curves and curls to the rock’s shape—or the seal’s—clinging. The skirts around mams’ thighs are like that, the curves of them, the cloth. Follow a mam down the town and you cannot keep your eyes off her beskirted bum, what it does with that skirt, shaking and shuddering it, turning it almost to liquid.