Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  I spooned up a bit and there it was in my mouth now, all my childhood, warm and free of worry, before the future came down out of its scratchy gray cloud and began to bother and itch me. Days of play and safety, our mothers laughing together, my mam and dad laughing, too, looking to each other, leaning arm to arm. I would do things; I would perform; I would stand on my hands against the wall so they would look at me again, include me with them. Always it was my fight when Dad was there, to have her eyes and her mind on me.

  Well, I got that, did I not. The curd sat cooling on my tongue; it slid down my throat, soaking my head with the sweet-saltness. Up sprang tears, but not so far as to fall.

  I saw what we had done to them, the mams and boys to the dads. It weren’t necessarily worse than what the dads done in the beginning. What a thing to weigh up: would you rather be born of redheads both, or would you be silky-dark and big-eyed? Would you prefer another mother? There is no way of trying that out. Maybe mainland children love their scour-haired mams just as fiercely as we love our silkies, maybe they learn to lose themselves in pale eye-depths whereas here with our mams’ darknesses beside them, our dads’ blues and greens revealed no more than blue-or-green-painted curves of china.

  Anyway we took all that away, the polish off the china, the shine of purpose and determination. I had not known what we were doing back then. I did not know, looking back now, whether we ought not to’ve, with Dad there across from me, head bent over the rubbish-looking heart, scooping up more orange.

  And once we’d gone, us and the mams, each man had a choice, either to go like Bannister into breakage and mourning, and slope around Potshead like a sprite lost between this world and the next, or to go rocklike with rage like Martyr or Green, and shout and rally everyone, and proclaim how things were all right, an improvement in fact, now that those sly enchantresses had loosed their holds on our hearts.

  But they had not, of course. They never would. You could not be free if you were born of them, and looking at our dads the husbanding of them was much the same: you thought you had caught and confined them, but really it was you as was tangled in the weed nets; you could not breathe properly either in air or in water, were the seal-women not there to encourage the life in and out of you.

  Raditch ran up, and stood all outlined in the sunny doorway. “Ho, Daniel. There looks to be another witch coming in.”

  “What do we want one for?” I did not stop sweeping. “Trudle is young yet, and when she goes there is all those daughters.” All wall-eyed skitterish four of them.

  “She’s here unaxed,” said Raditch. “Come down and watch. I’m going to.”

  “Someone told Trudle?”

  “Jakes and Wretch.” The names floated back to me through the empty doorway.

  Dad would be down there already; it was something the dads did, watch the unloading, some of them swap worldly words with the lumping-men. I propped the broom by the door and walked down through the sunshine.

  Between the cottages I could see the Fleet Fey cutting towards us, the spot of red hair at her prow. A very straight figure, I thought, not like our Trudle, who had hunched into Messkeletha’s old shape by now, taken over the posture as well as the witching, so as we should know it at a distance—know to turn and run, in good time, before she could enchant another daughter out of our loins.

  Everyone gathered to meet the boat, just about: such men as would leave their houses and most of us long-shanked boys, trickling down from the streets and the men already on their bench and bollards on the front. “What is this, then, eh? What is this?” said Grinny’s dad happily, taking up position against the warmed storehouse wall.

  Trudle came down out the town at the moment the gangway-end clacked to the cobbles. Her daughters preceded her wild in their grubby print frocklets, all of the same flowers; she carried the boy against her shoulder who anyone could tell would grow up simple, he stared so slack-mouthed.

  She met the visitor with the little suitcase at the plank-end, stood fast there so that the girl could not step off.

  “What do you think you are about, young miss?” At the sound all the daughters swilled in around her and stared.

  The girl looked Trudle over, and all the eyes around her. “Who are you,” she said, “that I should account to you?” She asked it plain, with no sneering. “Are you mayor or police or officialdom?”

  “What business has you in this place?” Trudle pointed her chin at her. “We’ve all the women we want here and no more.”

  The girl’s gaze traveled from one end the crew of us behind the witch to the other. “Are you sure? It seems a touch unwomaned to me. But I have property here,” she said, “if you must know my business, though it is none of yours, as far as I know you yet.” She stepped neatly around Trudle and the daughters in her skirts.

  “Property? What property?” Trudle swung and followed her, as if she were attached with string.

  The girl crossed half the dock and stood there surveying us. “This is the way you welcome strangers, then?” she said, not loud but we could hear her, every syllable. “Let them be harassed and harridaned even before they’ve set foot?”

  “What property would a mainland girl have here?” said Trudle at the girl’s elbow and fear all over her.

  “Quieten, woman,” said old Baker.

  Trudle bristled and chin-poked at him, drew herself up as much as she might.

  But he went on, to the visitor, “Now I see you, you must be Dully Winch’s girl, of his wife Mary.”

  “You have it,” she said. “Lory Winch, I am.”

  “Lory, that’s right.” The woman-name was uncertain in his mouth.

  “My mother died in the winter.” No one looked or offered anything, so she went on. “She has left me a cottage here,” she said.

  And straightway I saw it in my mind, the house called Winch’s, a boarded-up box on the road out to the Hill. It was the first time I realized it belonged to anyone, and was not there just to say out beyond Winch’s with, a landmark only.

  We followed them up, Lory Winch and Baker, with Trudle there too, in close, still suspicious, and the daughters flowing around, and the boy staring dumbly at us over Trudle’s shoulder. Up the sunshiny lanes we went, after those red hairs—for all the witch’s girls had piles of it too, flags of it, bunches of it haphazardly pinned. The visitor’s was all tied in, two plaits clambering back over her head from her temples and joining to one down her back. I had seen such plaiting on mams’ dark heads, but theirs had lain obedient, while this seemed on the point of bursting its bindings did it but get half the chance.

  Winch’s stopped where it always had, only I saw it for the first time in a long time. It was black boards; it seemed to lean, the slope threw your eyes off so much, to lean back into the hill, for a better hold, maybe. The yard was thick angelweed up to the fencetop, up to the windows, like a bowl of wild salads, and sea pinks clumped and sea rocket trailed off through the pickets into Asham’s fields around.

  I thought she would be disappointed, a town girl like her. I had seen Knocknee houses. But “Yes,” she said into our silences. “It is exactly as Mam said. I could have found my way alone with her directions, and a little black house is what she said.”

  We stood in the road and watched the creature encounter the gate. Raditch stepped forward to help. “No, I have it,” she said. She opened it to the extent it could be opened, by which she could sidle onto the broken path, and then she waded up to the door. She took a key from her belt that was all the bigger and blacker for being in her small white hand, and she slid it into the keyhole and turned it, and we heard from the sound of that the house had insides, as well as the outsides we knew.

  And we saw them, when she pushed the door wide into an upcurl of dust: papered walls, with pictures, and beyond the far door some furniture-back looming, shadow on shadow.

  The miss put her case on the floor, a little way into the hall. She looked at us all out there with our stares on.

 
“Thank you for your help, gentlemen,” she said, and it was hard to say how much she was laughing at us. “Let me settle myself here awhile, and then I’ll out with a thousand questions, I’m sure.”

  “Did you want them battens taken off your winders, miss?” said Raditch. “I can fetch a claw and have it done soon as looking.”

  “Maybe in a while,’ she said. “For now, I need the place to myself, if you don’t mind.”

  She turned her back on us and darkened away down the hall, an upright young woman. We were not used to seeing that type of figure.

  “Well,” said Grinny as we walked slow away, hoping rather she would call us back for some question or favor. “That has livened up our morning.”

  “What’s she want here?” fretted Trudle among us. “Who would want a-coming to this place?”

  “You heard. She inherited. She wanted to see what she had,” said Baker’s dad. “I don’t reckon she means to take your place, Trudle. She isn’t got a spelling look about her.”

  “Why did her mam go, though? The widder?” This was Cawdron, gormless still. I didn’t know the answer, but I knew it was one of those questions no one wanted asked.

  “Sem reason they all went,” snapped Martyr, Toddy’s dad that had beat his wife, and to whom Toddy had not returned.

  And what was that? Cawdron’s face said it, but he didn’t allow it out of his mouth. All of a sudden the older men found the spirit to walk, and closed their faces down, and went preoccupied with important and worrisome thoughts, so that they did not have to answer him.

  “And so she is up there now, settling herself.” I laughed. “Like a little red hen.”

  My dad had not come up to Winch’s with the crowd. He bit into his breakfast bread and dealt with it, nodding and nodding to keep me quiet.

  But she’d done something, that little hen; she’d pushed something over in my brain that now was falling, stone by stone. “They used to be all red, didn’t they?”

  He nodded towards the door.

  “Why did they go? Widow Winch? Everyone?”

  I saw him realize that I would not be put off. “There were no prospects here for them.”

  “Prospects?”

  “Norn to wed, boy,” he said crossly, and bit the bread again.

  “Ha, there is nothing but men here. Was there such a crowd of red girls, then? Too many to go round? Couldn’t some of them have stayed?”

  But he was shaking his head and chewing.

  “How did it happen, then? You tell. Then I’ll not bother you by guessing wrong over and over.”

  He dabbed his bread at his plate. He chewed as long as he could and then swallowed, and did not bite again, only sat there dabbing, picking up crumbs with the damp bread-edge.

  Stubborn old coot, he would not say, all that morning. I did not sit and badger him; now and then in passing I would say. “You are going to have to tell me some day. Well, it may as well be today, no?” or the like. But all he would do was chew at his teeth and look as if I had smacked him.

  I know what you need, I thought, and after our dinner I went down to Fisher’s and got us a bottle of spirit.

  “Cold nights, these,” said Doby Fisher just as his dad would, cold weather or hot, to anyone who bought such a bottle. “Man needs a tot.”

  I carried it up home. Dad watched me cross to the hall with it.

  “I know what you’re at,” he said after me.

  “Good,” I threw back. “I should not like to deceive you.”

  “Impertinent.”

  Well, it took that night a bit of hoo-ing and hawing, and a long disquisition on whiskies the land over, but we reached a time after all the nonsense, late in the night, when all lamps outside were gone excepting the sky’s own, when anything could be said between a son and his father; we’d taken on the perfect amount of liquoring to make the tongue loose but not yet the tears.

  “Oh, Daniel,” he began, out of nothing, out of my questioning way back this morning, “she were so beautiful. You know it,” he said. “You remember. She come out the skin and none of our misery had touched her yet; none of the cruelties of this world had marked her. She was sad, yes, she was desperate to go home, but you could distract her from that, you could fascinate her with any small thing—the way an auger worked, maybe, or a swallow-nest in the eaves. And when she laughed—well, you remember, don’t you? You made her laugh enough. We were all envious of our sons, that could make their mams laugh just by breathing, or playing stones, or asking where the sky ended, or eating up a fresh bowl of porridge. None of us husbands could do that, not so readily. We were always their imprisoners as well as the men they loved, and the fathers of their children.”

  He put out his glass, and I filled it for him, with candlelight and the sweet-woody smell of truth-telling. He slid it back to himself and looked into its dark-gold eye.

  “I’ve had a plenty of time to go over this. While she was here I did not think it, but when she went, and you with her—why, then we all had time, didn’t we? Years we had, to meditate upon it. There were some men all afire to fetch up more women from the sea, but with their few tries they had no luck, and the rest of us, we wanted the wives we’d had and no other; we wanted our own lads back that we knew.

  “I remember when Jon Fisher brought the very first one in, and we all went down the storehouse to see her. Tricked up in Lucy Fisher’s dress, she was, and my, wasn’t she uncomfortable. She stared, one way and another; she would not look at you. She had been crying, all botched about the eyes, you could see. Jon Fisher’s mam sat by her, looking so fierce, no one was bold enough to say a word, to ask the seal-girl anything.”

  He sipped his drink. “I thought she would die if she stayed here, and she must have thought the same, for she made herself bleed breaking into the cupboard where the skin was that night, and fighting her way out of Fishers’. In the morning she was just footprints across the wharf, blood-prints. I was glad for her, and I was blistering angry with Fishers the same, for not locking her up better, or setting any kind of guard on her, so’s we could look some more in the morning.

  “We know Martyr is not an admirable fellow, and we knew he wasn’t then, yet when he showed at market with his new girl on his arm, that he called Ivy, just as if she belonged on dry land among us, the thing we wanted most to know was how he had come by and kept her. And one by one from him and each other we found out, and one by one we went and had a sea-blanket knitted up. Some went by water and netted their wives there. Some waited until the seals come up for sunbasking in Crescent Corner. And some went well away and took theirs from icebergs up north or other islands. There was no stopping us. Even the women threatening to go did not stop us.”

  “But I always thought the women went first, and left the men in need.”

  “Oh no, lad. They were here all the time. They saw it all. They said and said: You don’t stop this, you will lose all the real-wives of the town, and then you will see what it’s like, being married to magic. Which they did, and which we did. Which we are seeing still.”

  He took almost a bite of the spirit, to bring himself back to me and this room a moment.

  “Anyway, I did same as all of them—I was no stronger nor better at the sight of those lovely women. You know the story from there.”

  “I do not,” I said. “Did you go down Crescent Corner or what, for instance?”

  “No, I was not brave enough. Crescent was for lads who could do it alone, and I wanted others around me. You always had to have Messkeletha there, of course, but I wanted fellows, too. Make me feel I was on the right path, that it was not against nature, what I was doing.” He snorted and looked at the window. “Yes, so I just went out on our boats, with the wife-net the witch had spelled for us and that first blanket she had knitted me from seaweed and a good portion of my money, and up come your mam.” He gave this last an end-of-story flourish.

  I did not let up with my eyes, though. He paused and added a little water to the spirit, then shot m
e a glance. Then—it was a relief, I could tell. He fell into the next part, and his face flowered open. He had never told it before, and he knew he was doing right by telling me, and I saw expressions on him he had never worn before, except when my mam herself were in this very room with the two of us.

  “Then the seal would be fighting trapped in the blanket, and most unladylike noises it would make. Messkeletha was at your elbow muttering: Keep her covered, keep her covered. But even through the knitted weed you could see the split in the seal-flesh, the crimson that did not bleed, the whiteness of the woman that came out clean, not touched or at all smudged or smelling of seal from inside. Clean as a peeled onion she came out, and soon you had all whiteness bucking in there like a mad maggot and you thought, Whoa, Messkeletha’s got me a bent one; how will I get my money back?

  “But then she told me: Right, my work is done now. I am going for sleep before I throw my stomach—for she was always on border of seasick, out there on the boat with us doing this work. All our money in the world could not settle her stomach.

  “And she’s gone, and it’s only you—all the other lads are up beyond the deckhouse so as not to catch the silky’s first eye and become her master instead of you.

  “I found which end was her head and I held her down and I whispered her calm. Her eyes through the netting, through the blanket—I had seen enough seal-women by then to know them, yet this was a new beast, of course, among us, and I was her first close person.

  “All the time whispering, I drew back the blanket, just from her face first and then her hair, untangling as I went. One white shoulder.

  “What have you done? she said to me, at a pause in my whispering. Why have you taken me from my home? Her voice grew stronger later, and clearer, but that first utterance it was rusty and bubbly, and did not know how to pitch itself.

  “To take care of you, I told her, the best you have ever been cared for. To make you my wife.

  “By now we had run out of girl-clothing left to us by our own mams and sisters. But Grinny and Ewart had proved themselves neat at stitching up shifts that covered a woman decent, and I had me one of these, which I gave to her: Here, put this on. It’s kinder than that rough blanket.