Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

Jorge Felipe grinned out of the cabin. “Having a good time there, Niko? You wanna go visit Dad, go splashy splashy?” He wiggled his fingers at Niko.

  “Don’t say that!” I said. “Don’t listen to him, Niko.”

  Something flapped in the water behind us and we all turned. A huge mermaid, half out of the water, pulling itself onto the trash’s mass. I couldn’t tell what it was trying to do—grab something? Mate with it?

  The gun went off. The mermaid fell back as Niko yelled like he’d been shot. I turned, seeing the gun leveling on Niko, unable to do anything as it barked. He jerked, falling backward into the cargo net’s morass.

  His hands beat the water like dying birds. Something pulled him under, maybe the mermaids, maybe just the net’s drag.

  I tried to grab him, but Jorge Felipe’s hand was in my collar pulling me back with a painful blow to my throat. The hurt doubled me over, grabbing for breath through the bruise’s blaze.

  “Too bad about Niko,” Jorge Felipe said. “But I need you to keep piloting. Go inside and stay out of trouble.” He pushed me towards the cabin and I stumbled into it, out of the wind and the sound of the water.

  I stood, trying to catch my breath, my hands on the panels. I wondered if Niko had drowned quickly. I wondered if that was how Jorge Felipe intended to kill me. All around, the boat hummed and growled, mechanical sounds that had once felt as safe as being inside my mother’s womb.

  I waited for her to say something, anything. Was she waiting for me to ask her help? Or did she know there was nothing she could do?

  Underneath the hum, I could hear the mermaids singing, a whine that echoed through the metal, crept into the Mary Magdalena’s habitual drone.

  When I said, “How much farther?” she didn’t pretend she didn’t understand the question.

  “Fifteen hours, twenty minutes.”

  “Any weapons on board I don’t know about?” I pictured my uncle having something, anything. A harpoon gun or a shark knife. Something wicked and deadly and masculine.

  But she answered, “No.” The same flat voice she always used.

  I could have wept then, but that was girlish. I was beyond that. I was the master of the Mary Magdalena. I would kill Jorge Felipe somehow, and avenge my friend.

  How, I didn’t know.

  Outside splashing, something caught in the netting. I pushed my way out the door as Jorge Felipe stared down into the water. I shoved my way past him, unsure for a moment whether or not he’d hinder me. Then his hands were beside me, helping me pull a gasping Niko onto the boat.

  “Welcome back, man,” he said as Niko doubled over on hands and knees, spewing water and bile across the decking.

  For a moment I thought, of course, everything would be fine. He’d reconsidered killing us. We’d pull into port, sell the cargo, give him the money and go our separate ways.

  I saw him guessing at my thoughts. All he did was rest his hand on his gun and smile at me. He could see the fear come back, and it made him smile harder.

  Behind me, Niko gasped and sputtered. There was another sound beside the hiss and slap of the waves. Mary Magdalena, whispering, whispering. What was she saying to him? What was going on in his head, what had he seen in his time underwater? Had the mermaids come and stared in his face, their eyes as blank as winter, his father there, driven mad by solipsism and sea song, looking at his son with no thoughts in his head at all?

  I stood, Jorge Felipe looking at me. If I locked myself in the cabin, how long would it take him to break in? But he gestured me away as I stepped towards the door.

  “Not now,” he said, and the regret in his tone was, I thought, for the time he’d have to spend at the wheel, awake, more than anything else.

  She was whispering, still whispering, to Niko. Why hadn’t she warned me? She must have known what was brewing like a storm beneath the horizon. I couldn’t have been the first.

  I started to turn to Jorge Felipe, Mary Magdalena’s voice buzzing under my nerves like a bad light bulb. Then weight shifting on the deck, Niko’s footprints squelching forward as he grabbed at Jorge Felipe, backpedaling until they fell together over the side in a boil of netting and mermaids.

  In a fairytale, the mermaids would have brought Niko back to the surface while they held Jorge Felipe down below, gnawing at him with their sharp parrot beaks. In some stories, dolphins rescued drowning sailors, back when dolphins were still alive. And whales spoke to the fishing boats they swam beside, underneath clear-skied stars, in waters where no mermaids sang.

  But instead no one surfaced. I turned the boat in great circles, spinning the cargo net over and over again. Finally I told the Mary Magdalena to take us home. It had started to rain, the sullen sodden rain that means winter is at elbow’s length.

  I took the yellow ducks out of my pocket and put them on the console. What did Jorge Felipe think I’d found? I stared at the display and the slow shift and fuzz of the earth’s bones, far below the cold water.

  “What did you tell Niko?” I asked.

  “I told him that his father would be killed if he didn’t defend him from Jorge Felipe. And I activated my ultrasonics. They acted on his nervous system.”

  I shuddered. “That’s what I felt as well?”

  “There should be no lasting effects.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I stirred three sugar packets and powdered cream into my coffee. It was almost too hot to drink when it came out of the microwave, but I cupped it in my fingers, grateful for its heat.

  I could have slept. But every time I laid down in the hammock, I smelled Jorge Felipe, and thought I heard him climbing out of the water.

  Finally I went out and watched the water behind us. The Mary Magdalena played the radio for me, a soft salsa beat with no words I could understand. It began to rain, and I heard the sound of raindrops on the decking beside me, pattering on the plastic sheeting I drew over my head.

  By the time I arrived back in port, the mermaids had plucked away all but a few tangles of seawrack from the netting. I’d be lucky to net the cost of a cup of coffee, let alone cover the fuel I’d used. Never mind. A few more seasons and I’d have the money I needed, if I was careful. If there were no disasters.

  Neither body was there in the net. Perhaps Niko’s father had reclaimed him.

  The wind and rain almost knocked me off the deck as I stared into the water. The green netting writhed like barely visible guilt in the darkness.

  The Mary Magdalena called after me, as she had not dared in years. “Sleep well, Lolo. My regards to Grandma Fig.”

  I stopped and half turned. I could barely see her lines through the driving rain.

  Sometimes I used to imagine setting her on fire. Sometimes I used to imagine taking her out to a rift and drilling holes in the hull. Sometimes I used to imagine her smashed by waves, or an earthquake, or a great red bull stamping through the streets.

  But the winter was long, and it would be lonely sitting at home with my grandmother. Lonelier than time at sea with her, haunted by the mermaids’ music.

  “Good night, Mary Magdalena,” I said.

  Rusalka

  Anna Taborska

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  I always loved Shakespeare at school. Never went on to college. I guess the possibility just didn’t figure on anybody’s radar. Once I turned sixteen and school was over, I went straight back to work on my parents’ farm. But I didn’t stop reading. The number of times my father caught me stretched out under the oak tree at the far end of the north field with a copy of Macbeth or King Lear . . . Once, in a fit of rage, he swore he’d cut the old tree down, and he did too. But don’t think that my father was a bad man—not at all. He just worried that he would die an
d leave my mother with no one to take care of her. He loved my mother, you see—loved her like a man possessed. He wouldn’t let her sew at night lest she strain her eyes; he wouldn’t let her help in the fields so she wouldn’t become all hunched over and sore-backed like the other women in the village. He wouldn’t even let her milk the cow in case she got cow pox and her dainty little hands grew blistered and calloused. Very delicate she was—my mother. Pale-skinned and raven-haired, with haunted green eyes. My father always said that she’d married beneath her, and that he was the luckiest man in the world.

  But my father shouldn’t have worried; it was my mother who died first. Cancer, the doctors said. Her cheeks grew gaunt and her whole face appeared to recede until her huge frightened eyes seemed to be all that was left, like a pair of emerald moons shining brightest before their eclipse. Her slender body shriveled away to nothing. And her raven locks became streaked with white, then fell from her scalp after the hospital treatment—like discarded angel-hair once the festive season is over and Christmas trees are thrown on the compost heap to rot. My father’s cries were pitiful to hear. His violent episodes became more frequent as his drinking increased; my mother—the only thing that had stood between him and his baser nature—was gone. He didn’t hit me—as even through the veil of cheap whiskey he must have remembered my mother’s screams the one time he’d laid a hand on me—but he found my books and burned them. Coriolanus, Hamlet, As You Like It, all the tattered copies of the histories and tragedies I had acquired from second-hand bookstores in the nearest town with the pennies my mother had slipped me out of her housekeeping money. All gone up in smoke. Only The Tempest escaped annihilation. I think my father simply hadn’t seen it—for there is no other explanation as to its survival. It was as if Prospero had come out of retirement and conjured up a supernatural mist—shrouding the small volume and rendering it invisible for five long minutes while my father rampaged through my tiny room. Or some such thing. When my father finally fell asleep on the kitchen table, tears in his eyes and an empty whiskey bottle in his hand, I picked up The Tempest and left. I never saw my father again.

  Four years later, aged twenty-two now and having worked my way across Europe doing odd jobs, I found myself in Eastern Poland. I’d wanted to come here for some time, as my mother had mentioned that her mother came from a village in this part of the world. I hadn’t pushed her on the subject, as it always seemed to make her sad; I gather that the family had fled some pogrom or other when the Russians occupied the region. But I regretted not having asked exactly which village it was. . . .

  The country was beginning to recover from forty-five years of communism, but nobody had told the peasants in its easternmost areas. Here people still scratched a meager living from the difficult soil.

  I’d saved some money working as a hotel receptionist in Lublin, and I knocked around the countryside, half-heartedly looking for my grandmother’s village, and whole-heartedly enjoying the exotic landscape of ramshackle settlements and unspoiled forests.

  I fell in love with the little village of Switeziec at once, and took up temporary residence with an old lady who let rooms and cooked a great breakfast. To my delight, her grandson Piotr—a friendly young man of eighteen or so—knew a little English; and what he didn’t know, he made up for in enthusiasm, expansive gestures and an easy laugh, which the world around him seemed unable to suppress for long.

  “They start to teach English in school as soon as compulsory Russian was kicked out,” laughed Piotr when I expressed my surprise at his linguistic skills. I couldn’t help but think that he made a nice change from the serious, somewhat gloomy majority of young Polish men I’d come across so far. Young men who reminded me too much of . . . well . . . me. Yes, I realized that laughter was something that didn’t come easily to me, and I often chided myself for my inability to kick back and have fun.

  “You come to Switeziec at good time,” Piotr flashed a full set of healthy-looking teeth at me. “We have big party tonight.” I waited for Piotr to continue, then realized that he was awaiting my response.

  “Oh, I see. Well. Thanks for mentioning it, Piotr, but I’ve got to get an early start tomorrow if I’m going to get to the next village . . . ” Piotr blinked uncomprehendingly. “You remember what we spoke about?—I’m trying to find the village my grandmother’s family came from?”

  “Oh, I see.” Piotr looked crestfallen for a moment, but the teeth were out again soon enough. “But tonight is very special night. It’s . . . longest day. Very special.”

  “Oh. Midsummer’s Eve? . . . So it is.”

  “Yes. We have very special party. It’s tradition. We have fire and the girls make . . . out of flowers . . . and light candles . . . and put them on river, and the boys have to catch them.”

  “What?”

  “I not explain well . . . ” Piotr’s frustration was painful to watch. “It’s tradition . . . You will like . . . Please, you come with me.” Whether it was a chance to practice his English, or to show off his foreign friend to the other villagers, or just his innate friendliness and desire to be a great host that rendered my presence so seemingly important to him, I don’t know, but when Piotr’s smile started to waver, I gave in. And so later that evening I found myself following him and a group of his friends to the Swita River, which flowed west of the village.

  Twilight had been slow in coming. Beyond the various shades of gray, an orange glow emanated from the riverbank. As we got closer, the sounds of singing and laughter steadily grew. There was a large bonfire on the nearside. Young men sat around, drinking beer and talking excitedly. On the far bank, and about fifty meters upriver, was another bonfire.

  “The girls are making . . . erm . . . out of flowers,” Piotr tried to explain, following my gaze. “Like this.” He used both hands to draw a circle in the air.

  “Wreaths?” I suggested.

  “Yes, wreaths . . . Normally you put on head, like this,” Piotr demonstrated by lifting the invisible circle and placing it on his head, “but today they put candles in them and put them on river.” I nodded, doing my best to understand.

  “The boys catch the . . . wreaths. And when a boy catch the wreath, he can kiss the girl who made it.”

  “I see . . . But how do you know whose wreath you’ve fished out?”

  “Oh, I think the boys—they just kiss the girl they like.”

  “That sounds like cheating to me,” I quipped. Piotr looked at me, worked out that I was joking, and chuckled.

  There was a flurry of giggling and excited shrieks from the far side of the river.

  “Look!” cried Piotr, “Girls put wreaths on water!” And sure enough, a dozen or so little lights came floating in our direction. Some went out almost immediately, others sank without a trace, but a few continued to float and burn, carried downriver by the strong current.

  Piotr’s friends giggled no less than the girls, and rushed down the bank with the other youths.

  “Come on!” Piotr called out as he hurried after the others, who were braving the freezing water to intercept those wreaths that hadn’t already drowned.

  I followed cautiously, afraid of slipping and falling in. I’d always been scared of water, even before the time when my father had tried to teach me to swim. He’d used the same method his father had used on him: he’d rowed us out to the middle of the lake near our farm, and pushed me out of the boat. I don’t remember much after that, except that he’d had to fish me out himself; his anger at having to get wet tempered by the fear that he’d actually drowned me and that the shock would kill my mother. He never gave me another swimming lesson; evidently deciding that having a pathetic runt of a son was better than having a dead one.

  The mirth on the riverbank was infectious, and I couldn’t help but smile as Piotr beat his friend to a wreath and pulled it out of the water, waving it in the air and whooping in triumph. Then I saw something that stopped the breath in my lungs.

  She was standing between the willows on th
e far bank, a little aside from the other girls. The light from the bonfire seemed to die before it reached her, and she was bathed in shadow. At first I thought that one of the willows had moved, and I felt startled and disorientated. As I peered into the gloom, my eyes adjusted, and then I saw her quite plainly . . . no, “plainly” is the wrong word—for there was nothing plain about her at all. The bonfire, the singing, the shouts and laughter—everything subsided and disappeared for a moment. All I was aware of was the girl on the other side of the river. She was tall and slender, her dress as pale as her delicate features. Her waist-long hair was so fair it seemed to glow blue in the twilight. As I stared, the girl turned to face me, and I finally understood what people meant when they said that their heart had skipped a beat. I paused, steadying myself, and inhaled deeply. She smiled at me and, despite the distance and the scant light, I could tell that her lips were the color of coral. Every detail of her form was etched into my memory from that moment on, forever. The only strange thing was—perhaps because she tilted her head down shyly, perhaps because a strand of flaxen hair fell across her face—I couldn’t see her eyes.

  The girl waved at me; her hand small, with long, tapering fingers. I looked around to see whether she could be waving at someone else, but there was no one behind or next to me. Hesitantly, I waved back, and she waved again, beckoning me to join her on the far bank. My heart beat so fast I could hardly breathe.

  “Piotr!” I ran up to the boy and grabbed his arm.

  “Hey,” he turned towards me and grinned. “Look! I have a wreath.”

  “Where can I cross the river?”

  “Huh?”

  “Where’s the nearest place I can cross the river?” I slowed my words down, articulating each one as clearly as I could.

  “Just there, to the right,” Piotr’s confusion was replaced by mere surprise, and he pointed downriver. I peered into the darkness, but saw nothing.

  “There are logs put on river. About twenty meters that way,” continued Piotr, adding: “Hey, why do you want to go to girls’ side anyway?” Then he grinned, “It’s cheating!”