Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

They have beautiful faces, too, not like dad faces all pinched and pale and suspicious. Mams’ faces are open, the eyes wide and all-seeing, the mouths ready always to kiss you, their salty kisses. My baby, they call you, even if you are someone else’s. They gather up anyone little and kiss them better, they encircle them in their strong arms, the skin so cool, the flesh beneath so warm. Strands of their loose hair catch in their lips, and in yours, and their eyes blink over you, and their mouths smile. They love children, mams. It doesn’t matter whose; they love all of us.

  I found Toddy Martyr the far side the northern mole, where you can see forever and not be seen, where the town might not exist, for all you can see or hear of it.

  I saw him because I looked up from my moody walking, from my plodding boots, and in among the mole-rocks one of those rocks lifted an arm and dropped it again. Then I worked out a head, with hair flopping about on it in the wind a bit of black, a bit of shine, and a pale boy-face. I didn’t care who it was; it was someone out here with me not a mam or a dad, not a witch, and greeting this someone would provide me a path away from my thoughts.

  By his swaying and by his singing which I now separated out of the wind’s other strings as I clambered, Toddy was off in his own land, or his own private ocean and swimming. Then he wrenched something up and lifted—ah, it was a spirit-bottle—and drank from it. He was headed for trouble, wasn’t he? That bottle was quite full, the way he had to heft it.

  “Dan’l Mallett!” he cried as he distinguished me from all the other rocks climbing towards him. “What brings you here this fine morning, sirrah?” And he bonked the cork back in and held out his hand like an old gaffer from the village seat.

  I shook it, cold frog that it was. “Your dad will give you a thrashing, no mistake.”

  “Rather me than my mam. And this here is the fuel of his thrash-motor, so I am doubly saving her.’”

  “You could’ve only emptied it, into the sea or otherwise,” I said.

  “That’s what I intended. But then I got seated here and I thought what a waste. And here, have a slosh of it, Dan’l; it is like carrying hot coals in your stomach. It warms all of you, right out to the toenails.” He twisted out the cork and offered me the bottle.

  “There’s a quantity,” I said in wonder. I lifted and tipped. The air off the stuff rushed out the neck and nipped my nose; the spirit itself ran cold and evil and stinging across my tongue; a little ran out the side and dripped to my collar, leaving a line of cold burning. “Who-hoah.” I gave it back to him, and wiped my chin, and crouched in the cavity next to him.

  “How is this, Dan’l? It is in-suff’rable the way things are, do you not think?”

  “With the mams, you mean?” I was still negotiating the spirit into myself; it felt as if it were eating my gullet lining to lacework.

  “With the mams, with the dads, with all the people of our world.” He spread his arms extravagantly, as if the people were out there seaward, not behind us.

  “None of us is happy any more,” I conceded.

  “Happy!” He shook his head, pointed his face to the wind to clear it of hair. “I hate my dad. I could kill my dad, had I stren’th. And he hates me. And he hates my mam so wild, he’s like a madman at her. He can. Not. Let. Up. And the only reason she don’t hate him is, she’s so dispirited. She hardly have life to lift her head, let alone raise a good temper.”

  I sat my bottom to the wet sand among the rocks and hugged my knees and nodded miserable.

  “I don’t see why everyone’s fussing so,” said Toddy. “Who wants girls anyway? What are they good for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I han’t ever known any.” Except that red girl at Knocknee, her hair fizzing and flaming, her inquisitive eyes looking me up and down.

  “And babies. Gawd, that last one! Yawped all day and night until Mam took her down. He was glad to be rid of it as much as I was, the racketing. We could all get some sleep.”

  We listened to his cruel words in our shelter there. Then doik!, he pulled out the cork again, thrust the bottle at me, as much apologizing as daring me to drink more.

  The second pull of it was gentler; it soothed the damages caused by the first. Watching Toddy’s throat jump around his next swallow, I told myself I must not do this again too soon. It was far too pleasant, too warming against the weather. Enough of it, and I should be agreeing Toddy Martyr; I should be agreeing all the Toddy Martyrs of this town; I should be loosing everything about my own mam and how she lived alone in her room under her weed, and about Trumbells opposite—though the town knew most of that already.

  I drank myself hot-faced, though—that didn’t take much. And I kept Toddy company while he sickened himself. When next he could anyway stand I helped him up and along to Fishers, because he wouldn’t be taken to his home. Then I went hill-walking, not wanting to present myself at my house with spirit on my breath. Right to the top of Watch-Out I went and down and across the Spine and to Windaway Peak, all that way, and stood in the rain there and listened to the chattering of my teeth. The drink was gone from me by then, and it was a trudge home, and more of a trudge. I thought I would never get there.

  I woke warm in the morning knowing what I must do. I ached all over, from my hair-ends in to my heart. I sat up and looked around at the ordinariness of my room, at the spills of light across the wall around my window-blind, and at all sides of my proposition to myself.

  That night I walked up home from Wholeman’s hearth with the first part, the main part, accomplished. Dad had stayed behind, with his pipe and pals awhile, to talk that special make of eldermen’s talk that makes no sense to young ones with its boringness, but seems to gratify dads so.

  Into our little house I broke, the seaweedy silence of it. I hummed, a twiddling tune such as Jerrolt Harding had been whistling up in the snug, but without so much direction as he.

  I went in to her. She was a great dark dune there. She was awake, though, because you couldn’t hear her breathing.

  I sat at her pillow edge and tried to distinguish the tear-salted hair from the knitted weed. A scooped sea-heart lay beginning rancid in a saucer on the sill; the spoon was licked clean, almost polished in its shine.

  “Mam,” I said, “I have some news for you.’

  She burrowed a little deeper into the blanket.

  “Your son,” I said, “has got himself a position, as bottlewash at Wholeman’s.”

  I had thought her still before, but now she was all listening; not a leaf of seaweed moved.

  “I’m a good lad, says Mister Wholeman. He says they can trust me. Cannot they.”

  The dune quaked and her white face rolled up from under. There was not much light. “Did they bully you?”

  “A little,” I said. “I had to weep some and show proper remorse for that day last winter.” I thought perhaps she could hear my smile, if she could not see it.

  She crawled up to me. Powerful out from under the blanket came her warmth and the smell of the warmed weed. “They would kill you, Daniel, even for thinking this.”

  “Yes,” I said, with an odd satisfaction. “It’s different, though, when you are our mams. Mams is different from wives.”

  She swayed there on her hands and knees, accustoming herself to the thought. Fears and realizations stopped and started her breath. Even with their little window-shine her eyes were indistinct; holes in her floating pale face through which her attention poured and poured at me.

  “I know I don’t need to tell you,” she said low. And then she whispered, half-strangled, “You must not say a word.”

  “Not to anyone,” I said to her, as earnest as she could wish. “Don’t you worry. Not even to myself.”

  She laughed suddenly, and knocked me to the bed, and squashed the breath out of me the way we had always liked to fight. She was still the stronger yet, though I might be bottle-boy, but I was beginning to see that I might soon have a chance against her. It was all darkness and strain and struggle a little while, and stifled
laughter and threats.

  She pinned and then released me, sprang back onto her haunches and the fight was over. “They will know it was you, Daniel,” she said. “And no other.”

  “I don’t care,” I said panting. “You will be home by then.”

  “Foolish boy,” she said fondly, and her thin hand reached through the dark, pushed my hair behind my ear, tickled down my neck and along the shelf of my collarbone. Then she slapped my cheek twice, lightly. “Let me think on this. Out of here, laddy-lad. Just a glance at us and he’ll know we were plotting and scheming. Go.”

  I went to bed happy. I washed and undressed and lay down untroubled, and my sleep closed over me like sun-warmed water.

  Things fast went out of my control, of course, as they will when you tell a secret. First, it was that Kit’s mam must come too, and then all the mams. Then, Kit’s mam must bring Kit, and then, yes, all the other mams must bring their boys too. “Particularly you, Daniel,” said Mam, “who is up for the greatest punishment. The only way I can protect you is have you with me.”

  “I can protect myself,” I said, as stoutly as I could, but truth to tell a mad hope had been lit in me when she said that Kit was to be coming. Was that possible, then? For us to go under and be seals with our happy mams?

  It turned out there was work involved, much secret work, difficultly organized because the mams could not have with each other, and must send coded and sometimes garbled messages along of their boys, house to house under the guise of playing. This work involved witchery of a kind, though not Trudle-spells nor Messkeletha, and skins, fish skins and sheep-skins and any kind of skins that could be got. The stories we span about skins, to our dads, when they happened on our hoards! The only way to get over the terror of it was to pretend it were all a great game, a great secret costume-play for the dads, and some of them were entirely silly with it, conducting false rehearsals of carefully crafted song-and-dances so as on purpose to be discovered and scramble to hidings in their skin patchworks.

  “Stand still, Daniel.” Mam’s hands were at my face, pinching, pinning. “Or I’ll have your eye out.”

  “It’s tight as tight,” I said. “A boy cannot breathe in it.”

  “Not here,” she agreed. “But once you touch water, it will all soften, and you’ll grow great underwater lungs, for to swim full minutes on a single breath. You’ve seen us.”

  “I have. And will my nose work the same, close-and-openable on top of my snout?”

  “Exactly that way, my sweet.”

  I tried it within the hood. She tut-tutted. “Wretched boy.’” She sounded quite fond all the same.

  “There,” she said eventually. “Now, don’t dislodge my pins, getting it off. It must be sewn aright if it’s to fit and form you.”

  Time came for the thefts from the coat-room. I don’t know what they had planned for the red-witches; some things they kept from me, so as I could not confess them if pressured by the men. Down at Wholeman’s I was bottlewash and guard and keeper-at-bay of our dads, stopping them going the pisser while the coats were taken out the back, between elf-fifteen and elf-thirty by the snug clock, which had a chime that could be heard in the hall. Grinny and Batton had been locked in the room all afternoon, taking down the coats and tying them, and the whole operation went like a game of fire-buckets along a chain of children to Lonna Trumbell, who only had to sniff one coming to say whose it was and where to send the runner. I pictured it all happening as Jerrolt held the men steady and somnolent in the snug with the tunes I had requested, which were all the slow and funereal ones it would be rude to get up and piss through: “The Night My Mother Died” and “Low Lay the Boat in the Harbor” and “The Fiercest Storm.”

  “I could just about hear the thunder in that,” said Baker to my horror as Jerrolt finished and the snug clock chimed. Straightaway Fernly Asham and Michael Cleft got up and went out. I hurried to the scullery with my tray of bottles and began to wash and wash, waiting for the fiercest storm to break over our heads.

  Which it did not. Thank heaven, I thought, something has got in the way of it and we must wait another several nights. I have been sweating on nothing; the coats are still in their rows, the hall and yard are empty and cold as always.

  But no, the key was where I had told Grinny to leave it. And walking up home, the town was different. The secrets gusted about the streets with the leaves and litter, thick enough in the air to choke me.

  Run along home, Wholeman had said. No, lad—when I’d protested—you done a fine night’s work. Like some kind of little steam engine you are, getting through them bottles. The rest can wait’ll tomorrow.

  But no one will be here tomorrow to do them, I almost said, then went obedient home.

  There I found my mam pacing. She scooped me up and squeezed me. “While I have arms to do this,” she said.

  “Did it all happen, then?” I said, hardly believing, into her black hair. “Did you all do?”

  Out from under the table she pulled the bag, and from it she tugged a coat-edge, very thick and smooth, dark, with not a lot of freckle. She unslid the whole skin and held it up beside herself by the hood, the exact height, though the ragged face-holes were nothing like my pretty mam. The closed air of our front room soured and went salty.

  “Do you remember it, from back then?” I held the slithery skin to my lips; it seemed to defy my bottlewashed fingers to purchase on it and feel it properly.

  “No,” she said. “but it smells of me and mine, very distinct. Let’s get on, then.” She fell to whispering. “Everyone else is gone, Daniel, hours ago.”

  Close she came and folded the coat, the ragged-faced floppy person, down to bag size. “Slippery thing,” she said flusteredly, as the sleeves misbehaved. Surely that smell would be smelt, out in the street where we carried it? Surely someone would stop us: Neme Mallett, what are you out for, this time of night? And what do you think you have there, that can only be one thing? And pluck the bag from my fingers, open it and bring the trouble down on our heads.

  “There, done.” She met my eyes and huffed. “Let us shut up and follow, then.”

  Off we went, coated but unbuttoned. She took my hand once we were out on the street, and hers was cold and tight.

  “I do love him,” she said to the cobbles, to the passing front steps. “I am breaking his heart.”

  “He ought never have caught you, Mam,” I said severely. I didn’t want to think of Dad. “None of them ought. They should have left you in your home.”

  I thought she smiled down on me out of the stars, but the light was not good and her hair shadowed her face, she might have winced just as easy.

  Down slippy-slop we went, the wind skirling and twiddling around us, caught in the narrow ways. Every now and again a strong breath from the sea would push at our faces, smelling green and live and massive. When that happened, Mam would almost run a few steps, as if the sea were summoning her more peremptory.

  The water was rucked-up and difficult looking between the moles. I thought I saw seal-heads awaiting, a couple, but when I looked again they were not there. They may have been only wave-shadows, mistakes of my eyes, wishings perhaps if I but knew what I wished.

  “Come-come.” Mam let go my hand and preceded me down the steps to the beach. I hurried after her, frightened and not knowing why but needing to be right by her for my own peace.

  We ran out from the wall, the town hunkering behind us, its eyes tightening the skin of my back. Out across the scraping pebbles we went, impatient water smashing its hands at the edge of them, the wind frothing and flapping our hairs at our ears.

  Let us run home, I would have said, and all go on as before. But she knelt before me and her face in the moonlight was clear—alight as the moon, it was—and I was too busy admiring the clean arches of her eyebrows to voice my doubts.

  “Step in,” she said and then I was preoccupied, wasn’t I, with fitting myself—for truth, I had grown a tiny bit since she sewed the thing—into the sh
eepskin suit. I gasped but did not complain as she tied and tied me into it, and then she pulled the ragged hood-mask down over my face and it was as if she sewed my mouth shut and my chin to my chest. I stood there with my neck pulled into an ache behind, my little sounds nothing against the sea’s impatience.

  Through the eyeholes I watched her as well as I could, for though she was being indecent there was such joy in it, such spirit, I could not but follow her every move, privileged to see. White she emerged out of her scratchy land-clothing, out of its wrinkles and seams.

  “Ah!” She flung her drawers up on the pebbles, and she was animal within, all flesh and fur uncluttered by all those trappings.

  Next she took up the coat-bag, drew out the coat, wrestled it open and slid it on. All of a sudden the air was cold and thick as water. I gasped inside my dry leather mask, and my flatted hair crawled.

  She did not don the coat like any man-garment; rather, she began, and then the thing sank upon and encompassed her, clung on close, clung to its own edges around her. Clap and clop and zip, it went, and snick, and then she fell, from standing foot-fins together, straight into the wavelets, where she was now seal, and flang herself down towards the deeper water.

  She turned and there was enough of her left that I could not refuse to follow, so I too fell and floundered through the curdled cold air and into the sea through its foamy edge. There the water, and the magic, overtook me, and what was seal of me supplanted what was boy, and I ceased to think and to intend or decide, in any way that makes sense in a story, but only followed my mam, crying after her into our dark world, all alive to the tides now and temperatures, to the bubbling trail of her that I sought and followed with my whiskers, to the depths and wonders and fellows and foes disposed on all sides of us, and before us, and below.

  I will not tell you much about that time. It is not the kind of thing that can be caught in words, human words out of our subtle mouths: sunlight shafting into the green; the mirrory roof; the women racing ahead through the halls of the sea, the cathedrals; boat bellies, and the mumble and splash of man-business disturbing the water above; the seal-men, the sea-men, spun light as wooden tops by the delicate tail, pressing out the water behind them, impelling their bulk forward, upward, outward—It is very much like flying, through a green air flocking with tiny sunlit flecks of life.