Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  “So, when there’s a mention of mermaids or people from the sea? Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream? That’s one of you?”

  “Yup.”

  “Keats?”

  “Exactly.” She nodded, brightening. “That was my Great-aunt Taessa.”

  “Really? What about Tennyson . . . a mermaid fair, sitting alone, combing her hair?”

  Klearistis nodded gravely. “One of us.”

  “Matthew Arnold. The New Sirens?”

  She thought about it. “Perhaps.”

  “Hans Christian Andersen?”

  “Of course.” She motioned for him to continue.

  “Selkies, sirens, naiads, la Sirene.” He wiggled his fingers, prying memories loose. “Djullanar from One Thousand and One Nights?”

  “Most of them can be traced back to someone from my family.”

  “What about the mermaids not having souls thing?”

  “What about it?”

  “Part of the game?”

  She gestured to the side of her head, tapping lightly at her temple, then pointed at him with the same finger. “You’re good at this. And it does make a compelling story.”

  He leaned away, studied her for a moment, looking down the length of her body. “You don’t have a tail.”

  She stretched her legs on the rocks along Odiorne Point. “You want me to have one?”

  “No, I just thought . . . ”

  “Yeah, mermaids in stories sometimes have tails. Many don’t. I figured you more for a leg man. And it would be more of a challenge without it—think of it as stakes in the game, as a way for the players to get more points. Because I’ve convinced you.” She gave him a half-hearted smile, kicking her feet in the air. “Therefore, no tail. Not even if I take a bath.”

  The waves rolled in, slow thunder against the rocks and sand, cool Atlantic gusts brushing by them.

  After a few minutes she said, “Julia told me about you.”

  He looked worried for a moment, a wave of confusion over the things Klearistis had told him two years ago—and now all of it seemed like another life, memories stolen from someone else. “That’s why you’re doing all of this for me?” He waved toward the Atlantic, toward her home, her family, the game, the wired-together bodies of drowned surfacers gathered into a collection.

  “Because Julia was different—from what I am used to, but mostly because you tell stories, you write books. Your words are important to me. Your tales about espionage and murder and government intrigue—these do not come out of thin air. Your experiences, your memories feed those stories. And you have memories that must not be lost. Some of those memories have Julia in them—even if she’s never there in person.” After a pause and a deep breath, she said, “All of them have pain. But now it is pain you can pour into the story, not pain that locks up your words.”

  He was quiet for a while, listening to the softness of her breathing, the draw of air timed with the draw of the tide, releasing one long breath with the roll of the sea against the shore.

  “Why are you telling me this? Did the others—” He waved a hand back through history. “—tell the pawns in the game? Did your Great-aunt Taessa let Keats know it was all a game?”

  “What do you think?” Quicker than he could react, she reached over and grabbed his wrist in ocean-cold fingers. With her other hand she wrote something up his forearm, something in saltwater, letters strung together, reflecting a cold sky against his skin. He didn’t try to decipher it. He just stared at the webbing between her fingers.

  “You are not a pawn, Andy Kavanagh. You are my prize, the windfall, maybe the jackpot.”

  She let him go, and then got up, stepping lightly to the water’s edge, kneeling to run the sea through her hair before standing and walking into the waves. She went under the first roll of surf, surfacing on the other side.

  Andy levered himself off the rocks, and walked into the water until the Atlantic swirled around his knees. He still had questions. “What did she take from Keats?”

  “My Great-aunt Taessa? Just the pain. But then the words and stories flowed, just as they have from you.”

  He nodded. He was already plotting out the next book. “One more question? Why me? I mean where did it start with me? With your collection on the ocean floor?”

  “I met Julia first, but I didn’t begin playing until the dead told me you refused to forget about her. They told me you no longer wrote books.”

  He shook his head, trying to throw off a thought so wrong. “How could I ever forget Julia?”

  She shrugged. “People have the wrong idea about memory and time, Andy Kavanagh. Memories fade, and are lost—with every living moment that passes, and people’s lives and warmth and creativity fade with them. The pain I can endure. The sadness and loss of memories I cannot. That is why we play. That is why I collect them. They do not let me down.”

  He was about to ask who “they” were, and then he suddenly understood. “The dead?”

  Klearistis nodded. “The dead do not forget. The living do.”

  She slipped under the next wave.

  The Nebraskan and the Nereid

  Gene Wolfe

  The Nebraskan was walking near the sea, when he saw her. Two dark eyes, a rounded shoulder with a hint of breast, and a flash of thigh; then she was gone. A moment later he heard a faint splash—or perhaps it was only the fabled seventh wave, the wave that is stronger than the rest, breaking on the rocks.

  Almost running, he strode to the edge of the little bluff and looked east across the sea. The blue waters of the Saronikos Kolpos showed whitecaps, but nothing else.

  “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,” he muttered to himself, “When a new planet swims into his ken; or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific and all his men . . . ” He groped for a moment for the final two lines, as he studied the bluff. “Looked at each other with a wild surmise—silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

  “Stout Cortez” chuckled as he clambered down the bluff with his tape recorder bumping his side. He was no rock climber, but the slope was neither high enough nor sheer enough to require one. He imagined himself describing his adventure in the faculty lounge. It was nothing.

  Nothing too was the evidence he found on the beach, in some places hardly wider than a footpath that wound along the base of the bluff. There were a few seashells and a rusty tin that had once held British cigarettes, but that was all. No cast-off bikini, no abandoned beach towel, no footprints, nothing.

  He looked up to see a tall and rather angular woman with a canteen at her hip walking silently toward him along the strip of damp sand. He greeted her in his halting Greek, and she extended her right hand in a regal gesture, saying in English, “’And a good morning to you, Doctor. I am Doctor Thoe Papamarkos. I am of the University of Athens. You are Doctor Cooper, and you are of an American university, but they do not know to tell me which.”

  “The University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Pleased to meet you, Doctor Papamarkos.” The Nebraskan was Lincolnesque himself, tall and pleasantly ugly.

  “And you are a folklorist. You must be, from what they report of you, that you walk about all day, ask questions of old people, make recordings of their stories.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “And you?”

  She laughed softly. “Oh, no. I am not the competition, as you fear.”

  “Good!” He smiled.

  She touched the third button of her khaki shirt. “An archaeologist, I am. Do you know of Saros?”

  He shook his head, “I know this is the Saronic Gulf,” he said, “and I suppose it must be named after something. Is it an island?”

  “No. It was a city, a city so long ago that even in the time of Socrates there was nothing left but ruins and a temple for Poseidon. Think on it, please, Doctor. You and I, we think of that time, the Age of Pericles, as ruins. But to them, to Pericles and Plato, Themistocles and Aristides the Just, Saros was ancient, Saros was archaeology. Now I d
ig, with three men from the village to work for me. About five kilometers that way. There I hear of you; stories of the folklorist, and I think we should know of each other, probably we are the only truly educated people on this part of the coast, perhaps someday we may even help each other. No?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Certainly.” He discovered that he liked her. She was an old-maid schoolteacher, no doubt about it, with her graying hair tightly knotted in a bun. She could be Miss Twiddle from The Katzenjammer Kids or the Miss Minerva of Miss Minerva and William Green Hill. And yet—

  “And you,” she said. “Folklore is so interesting. What is it that you do?”

  He cleared his throat as he tried to think of some way to explain. “I’m trying to trace the history of the Nereids.”

  “Truly?” She looked at him sidelong. “You believe they were real?”

  “No, no.” He shook his head. “But do you know about them, Doctor Papamarkos? Do you know who they were?”

  “I, who search for the temple of Poseidon? Of course. They were the ladies, the maids in waiting at his court, under the Aegean. He was one of the oldest of all the old Greek gods. They were old too, very old, the Greek—what do you call them in English? Mermaids? Sea fairies? Tell me.” She hesitated, as though embarrassed. “I understand your English much better than I speak it, you must believe me. I was three years, studying at Princeton.” She unhooked the canteen from her belt and unscrewed the top.

  He nodded. “I’m the same way with Greek. I understand it well enough; I couldn’t do what I do if I didn’t. But sometimes I can’t think of the right word, or remember how it should be pronounced.”

  “You do not want a drink of my water, I hope. This is so very warm now, but I have a nose disease. Is that what you call it? I must take my medicine to breathe, and my medicine makes me thirsty. Do you wish for some?”

  “No thanks,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “And did I say it correctly? Mermaids?”

  “Yes, mermaids. Specifically, they were a class of nymphs, the sea nymphs, the fifty daughters of Nereus. There were mountain nymphs too, the Oreads; and there were Dryads and Meliae in the trees, Epipotamides in the rivers, and so forth. And old people, rural people particularly . . . ”

  She laughed again. “Still credit such things. I know, Doctor, and I am not embarrassed for my country. You have these too, but with you it is the flying saucers, the little green men. Why should not my Greece have its little green women?”

  “But the fascinating part,” he said, warming to his subject, “is that they’ve forgotten all the names except one. Modern Greeks no longer talk about nymphs, or Oreads, Dryads, or Naiades. Only of Nereids, whether they’re supposed to have been seen in springs, or caves, or whatever. I’m trying to find out just how that happened.”

  She smiled. “Have you thought, perhaps only they still live?”

  When the Nebraskan got back to his tiny inn in Nemos, he stopped its dumpy little maid of all work and mustered his uncertain Greek to ask her about Dr. Papamarkos.

  “She does not live here,” the maid informed him, staring at the toes of his boots. “Over there. She has a tent “ She ducked through a doorway and vanished; it was not until some time afterwards that it occurred to him that the Greek word for a tent also meant stage scenery.

  On the stairs, he wondered again if it might be possible.

  Dr. Papamarkos taking off her heavy belt, the soldierish pants and shirt. Flitting naked through the woods. He chuckled.

  No. The woman he had seen—and he had seen a woman, he told himself—had been younger, smaller, and um—rounder. He suddenly recalled that Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, had married a Greek girl of nineteen at the age of forty-seven. He himself was still years short of that.

  The thought returned the next time he saw her. It was at almost the same spot. (He had been frequenting that spot too much, as he kept telling himself.) He heard a noise and turned, but not quickly enough. The faint splash came again. Once more he hurried, actually running this time, to the edge of the little bluff; and this time he was rewarded. A laughing face bobbed in the waves fifty yards out, a face circled by dark and floating hair. An arm rose from the sea, waved once, and was gone.

  He waited five minutes, occasionally glancing at his watch. Ten. The face did not reappear, and at last he scrambled down the bluff to stand upon the beach, staring out to sea.

  “Doctor! Doctor!”

  He looked around. “Hello, Doctor Papamarkos. What a pleasure to meet you again.” She was coming from the other direction this time, the direction of Nemos and his inn, and she was waving something above her head. It really was a pleasure, he realized. A sympathetic ear, an older woman, no doubt with a certain amount of experience, who knew the country . . . “Good to see you!”

  “And to see you, my friend. Oh, Doctor, my friend, look! Just look and see what we have found under the water.” She held it out to him, and after a moment he saw it was a glazed cup, still somewhat encrusted with marine growths.

  “And it is to you that I owe, oh, everything!’”

  The background was red, the man’s head black, his curling beard and wide, fierce eye traced in a lighter color that might originally have been white. A fish, small and crude, swam before his face.

  “And on the back! See, beside the trident, the two straight scratches, the bar at the top? It is our letter π, for Poseidon. They have finer cups, oh, yes, much finer, at the museum in Athens. But this is so old! This is Mycenaean, early Mycenaean, from when we were yet copying, and badly, things from Crete.”

  The Nebraskan was still staring at the bearded face. It was crude, hardly more than a carton; and yet it burned with a deft energy, so that he felt the bearded sea god watched him, and might at any instant roar with laughter and slap him on the back. “It’s wonderful,” he said.

  It was as though she could read his thoughts. “He was the sea god,” she said. “Sailors prayed to him, and captains. Also to Nereus, the old sea-man who knew the future. Now it is to Saint Peter and Saint Mark. But it is not so different, perhaps. The fish, the beard, they are still there.”

  “You say you found this because of me, Dr. Papamarkos?”

  “Yes! I meet with you, and we talk of the Nereids, remember? Then I walk back to my dig.” She opened her canteen and took a healthy swallow. “And I kept thinking of them, girls frisking in the waves, I could almost see them. I say, ‘What are you trying to tell me? Come, I am a woman like you, speak out.’

  “And they wave, come, Thoe, come! Then I think, yes, Saros was a seaport, so long ago. But was the coast the same? What if the sea is higher now, what if the place where I dig was a kilometer inland then? They called it a city, a polis. But to us it would be only a little town—the theater open to the sky, the temple, the agora where one went to buy fish and wine, and a few hundred houses.”

  She paused, gasping for breath; and he remembered what she had said about having a “nose disease.”

  “I have no diving equipment, nothing. But we make a big strainer—you understand? From a fishing net. I tell my men, walk out until the sea is at your belts. Shovel sand so gently into the net. And today we find this!”

  Carefully, he handed back the cup. “Congratulations. It’s wonderful, and it couldn’t have come to a nicer person. I mean that.”

  She smiled. “I knew you would be happy for me, just as I would be so happy for you, should you find—I do not know, perhaps some wondrous old story never written down.”

  “May I walk you back to your camp? I’d like to see it.”

  “Oh, no. It is so far, and the day is hot. Wait until I have something there to show you. This is all I have worth showing now.” She gave him her sidelong look; and when he said nothing, she asked, “But what of you? Surely you progress. Have you nothing to tell me?”

  He took a deep breath, thinking how foolish his wild surmise would sound. “I’ve seen a Nereid, Thoe—or somebody’s trying to make me think I have.”
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  She put her hand on his shoulder, and he could not believe her soft laugh other than friendly. “But how wonderful for you! With this, you may rate the stories you collect by their accuracy. That, I imagine, has never been done. Now tell me everything.”

  He did—the glimpse in the woods, the waving figure that had disappeared into the sea. “And so, when you said the Nereids you imagined had waved to you, I wondered . . . ”

  “Whether I did not know more. I understand. But I think really it is only one of our girls fooling you. We Greeks, we swim like fish, all of us. Do you know of the Battle of Salamis? The Persians lost many ships, and their crews drowned. We Greeks lost some ships too, but very few men, because when the ships were sunk, the men swam to shore. You are from America, Doctor, where some swim well and many not at all. What of you? Do you swim?”

  “Pretty well,” he said. “I was on the team in college. I’m a little out of practice now”

  “Then you may wish to practice, and it is so hot. When we part, go back to the place where you saw this girl vanish. There are many caves along this coast with entrances that are under the water. Those who live here know of them. Possibly the Nereids know of them too.” She smiled, then grew somber. “There are many currents, also. It is they who make the caves. If you are truly a good swimmer, you know a swimmer must be wary.”

  The Nebraskan was used to fresh water, and it was some time before he could bring himself to hold his eyes open in the stinging surge of the Saronic Gulf. When he did, he saw the cave almost at once, a dark circle in the sharply shelving bottom. He rose to the surface, took several deep breaths, swallowed and held the last, and dove; as he entered the cave’s mouth, he wondered whether it held an octopus—small ones were offered in the market at Nemos every Saturday.

  Twice he panicked and turned back. On the third attempt he reached the air, just when he felt he could go no farther.

  It was dark—a little light conveyed by the water from the brilliant sunshine on its waves, a little more that filtered down from chinks in the bluff. It was damp too, and full of the spumy reek of rotting seaweed. As he climbed from the water, two small arms encircled him.