His reaction, after his first mouthful, had not been immediate. He’d expected it to be magical … a quick ripple, perhaps, and his body would be transformed.
But the transformation was more Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. With each beat of his heart, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, he felt his body temperature rise. As the sweat began to bead across his forehead, his skin began to prickle with goose bumps in every direction. He tried to follow the metamorphosis with his doctor’s mind and keep that last tiny tear drop of fear at bay.
Halder stood there, naked and vulnerable, yet feeling pure in his love for Miranda and destined for what was now taking place inside him on the most basic cellular level. He felt the fire coursing through him—not with pain, but with a hot tide of cleansing change. His blood was warming to a purifying heat, feeding his cells, and forcing them to endure a million years of evolution in seconds.
How those cells trembled and strained to resist, but in his heart and in his mind, there was no resistance to this miraculous transformation. Suddenly, the instinctive barrier was down, and the tide of change swept through him like a wave spreading out across the sand and sinking deep down into it. Standing there, waist deep in seawater on the ledge of the grotto lagoon, he held Miranda’s hand as she hovered in the water, waiting before him in her full mermaid glory.
The muscles along both sides of his neck, from beneath his ear lobes to the top of his collarbone, stretched up into a firm ridge of flesh and then split apart and collapsed back down. All the air from his lungs vented out with a rush that left him gasping.
Next, the same type of ridges swirled down around his shoulder blades along either side of his spine, and curved across the back of his ribcage. They continued up along his lateral muscles, ending just beneath the breastplate on either side. They also swelled and split open. Unlike the first series of slits that expelled the air from his lungs, this new pattern drank in the air with a ravenous hunger, but the air was not enough.
As all four sets of gills contracted again, searching for the missing element he craved, Miranda pulled him gently
forward off the ledge and into the welcoming water. With euphoria, he felt the wetness of the sea surge through his gills, filling his lungs with oxygen as a flap or valve seemed to form and seal off his lungs from his esophagus.
He was breathing water and taking in oxygen! His upper chest had swelled until it was a third larger, giving his already-muscular frame a Titanesque physique. But more than just oxygen was being drawn from the water. He felt somehow fortified in the way he was able to sense his own body and how it worked. He could feel the water caress every inch of him, creating a micro-thin layer of static energy between his skin and the water. Energy was pouring into him from the sea!
Next, his vision swam for a moment and then cleared as his forehead became slightly more pronounced and a v-shaped ridge like a widow’s peak formed. A whole new range of audio sounds clicked online in his head. He could hear the whales singing now, and he could feel Miranda in his head, and sense the flow of blood pumping through her hand that he clutched so tightly.
“If this is what it feels like to be a merman, I like it!” he shouted with exhilaration as he spun himself around in the water. “I really like it!”
Then he noticed the fingers on his hand had grown longer and stronger and webbing had formed between each one. His feet had gone through the same metamorphosis, but the lower half of his legs, from the knees down, had also stretched in length. They had not grown together in a single tail like Miranda’s. From his loins down, he was covered with the same thick, supple skin of a dolphin, only it was a rich, kelp-green color.
“Wow! Look at my feet, Miranda. Is the old adage about the size of a man’s feet the same for mermen?” He winked. Then he checked the rest of himself to see, which made Miranda laugh and hug him fiercely.
“I’ve always known someday I would find a man to love, but I never knew I would love a man so deeply!” Then she kissed him, and for a moment, or an hour, or perhaps a day, they kept kissing and swimming … kissing and swimming.
They left a few days later after Miranda called the family advocate. Electricity and a telephone were the only touches of modern convenience that Helmi had allowed down in the grotto, and only at Miranda’s insistence. Helmi had gone out to gather some fresh sea ingredients for whale medicines while Halder and Miranda finished a typical Danish brunch of fresh rolls with butter, cheese, ham, and pickled herring. The phone rang, and Miranda snatched it up, since only she and one other living being had that number.
“Canute! Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.” She saw Halder lift a querying eyebrow and turned to him as she covered the phone and whispered, “Canute Bruun is our family advocate. I left an urgent message for him to call me.”
“Canute Bruun,” Halder mused as he listened to her side of the conversation. Miranda seemed to be very fond of and familiar with him. She shared the news of her marriage and explained Vasili’s attempt on Halder’s life—an event that meant that Vasili was watching her closely.
She insisted that her advocate maintain absolute secrecy about the nuptials and the fact that Halder was still alive. “We need to be very cautious until certain safeguards can be put into effect, Canute dear,” she said. “The time has come to bring Vasili to justice for all his crimes. After all these centuries, I need a couple of your knights in shining armor to come to my rescue.”
“We live to serve, Miranda,” Canute replied, “and I can’t tell you how happy I am that you have finally found your prince. I know my grandfather would be happy for you too.”
“Yes, I think Frederick would have been very fond of Halder. Who knew I would wind up with a nice Danish boy?” Miranda laughed. “I’m taking him to the family’s private condo in England,” she continued. “You know the one?”
“You’ve always had a ‘Rye’ sense of humor.” Canute answered her with a chuckle.
“Yes! But make sure they don’t mention anything about the Duchess of Egeskov. Let them know that Hans and Christine Anderson will be arriving within the next ten days, please. Also, I think it’s best to have the harbor connection waiting for us.”
“It will all be done, Mira.” He used the nickname he had given her as a small boy when Miranda was too hard for his young Danish tongue. His grandfather, then a dashing widower, had introduced him to the beautiful duchess. Miranda had been like a mother to his father, Jorn, and a grandmother to Canute. He called her MorMor, and she had always doted on him and his family too.
“Bless you, Canute. I always feel as safe in your hands as I did in your grandfather’s care.” Miranda smiled sadly. “It is high time Vasili paid for that too.”
“Leave all such things to me.”
“Thank you, and give my love to Andria and to Edgar.”
“I will. Edgar will be looking forward to having a new uncle!” He laughed. “You might want to warn poor Halder about the family soccer games. Enjoy your trip, Mira. I will see you in ten days.” And he hung up.
“You seem on good terms with your advocate,” Halder remarked with a quizzical smile.
“Their firm has been taking care of our family’s affairs since 1189, dear, ever since Father abdicated his throne and came to Mother in the sea. Of course then Bruun & Gottorp were merely known as the Knights Templar.” Miranda winked.
“The Knights Templar are your lawyers?” He blinked in shock.
“A division of them, yes. We’ve kept a family vault on Bornhold Island for the past eight hundred years, although I’ve only known the Bruun family for less than four hundred. Remember, I’m still quite young, and father didn’t really start teaching me about financial affairs until I was nearly a hundred.”
“And to think when I first saw you, I thought I was about to rob the cradle,” he said with a chuckle.
“Well, thirty for a human is like seven hundred for a mermaid, so for all intents and purposes, ‘old man,’ you have!” She snickered.
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br /> “Old man?” He glared at her. “I’ll show you who’s no old man!” And he picked her up out of the chair by the phone, threw her into the lagoon, then dove in after her.
Death by Krakatau
Holger slept, but his dreams exhausted him. He was with her, but deep in the sea. He was astride a giant whale shark, and she was stretched out across the back of a mighty narwhal. Back to back they swam, desperately fighting a fierce-looking monster. Her battle harness, constructed of what looked like braided kelp, held her in place on the whale, freeing her hands to wield the Trident in one hand and a spear tipped with a narwhal horn in the other.
Blood swirled around the tip of Holger’s spear as he yanked it free from the belly of a shark-like monster, watching its one glowing red eye grow dim. The sea around them shook as waves of heat radiated up from the bottom of the ocean floor. She used the Trident to focus her powers and cool the water around them, to protect their army of whale sharks and narwhals.
A giant, bloated, crone-like figure, clothed in tattered rags—or weeds—hovered down at the bottom of the trench as close as possible to the lava vent. Somehow he knew she was the enemy. She was the source of the conflict, using her abominable army to work her treachery.
Something told him where he was. A name chanted or whispered in fear over and over—Krakatau, the mighty volcano. The mountain that rose before him, that soared up to the surface and beyond, was about to explode.
The enemy carried a strange staff. It was topped with a large pulsating jewel, and she somehow used this relic to exacerbate the energy in the deep faults in the ocean floor. He heard himself curse her as “the Hag” as he watched her use her staff to rip open a lava vent all the way to the earth’s core. Her deadly action destabilized the basin of the volcano.
“The Hag will succeed in freeing Cronos if we don’t seal the vent, my king,” he heard her call to him. “We must seal the vent or all will be lost!”
Then Holger woke with a jerk. He was gasping for breath, drenched in sweat, and the signet ring on his hand was hot and throbbing.
The Mermaid Inn
Miranda shared the wonders of her world with Halder as they swam through the Arctic Sea toward England. She deliberately detoured through a flotilla of Arctic jellyfish, whose buoyant, gelatinous, clear, umbrella-shaped bells stretched eight to ten feet across.
The tendrils that extended down from them, like streamers from a New Year’s celebration, undulated and spiraled out and down to a depth well over a hundred feet beneath them. This particular flotilla was almost a mile across, drifting over the abyssal plain between the Faeroe Islands and the coast of Norway.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Miranda sighed as she stopped to draw Halder’s arms around her and gaze at the mass of streaming colors.
“Yes,” he agreed. “But don’t get too close. They can be very deadly.”
“Not to us, dear,” she said, and he heard her laugh in his mind. “There is nothing in the entire ocean that is deadly to a mermaid or her mate. Only man can kill us, and only when we are out of water.”
“Are you serious?” He gave a mental gasp.
“Very,” she said, nodding. “In fact, jellyfish are like cotton candy to us. They are sweet and fluffy, being almost all water, and the only thing they do to us is tickle, which is more fun than you can imagine.” She gave him a swift shove and darted off toward the jellyfish.
To Halder’s surprise, Miranda somersaulted into the midst of the tendrils and laughed as she spun around among them, giggling hysterically. He stared at her for a moment in utter shock, and then muttered, “Here goes nothing,” and did a somersault in after her.
It was like being attacked with a feather duster all over his body, all at once. The tendrils lashed at him and stroked him, trying to make him succumb to their venom, which only acted like a caffeine rush.
They swam into each others’ arms in a euphoric daze, swirling, spinning, and embracing within a sea of ten thousand tickling feathers. Eventually the jellyfish abandoned their noncompliant pray and drifted off, leaving them spent, yet still clinging to each other, drifting in the current as if it were a gentle swaying hammock.
They awoke famished and feasted on a rising school of shrimp, then swam onward hand in hand toward their first destination, the Palace of Aegir off the east coast of Denmark. The next day they reached the deep kelp beds. The wavy emerald stalks spiraled up over five hundred feet from the ocean floor, teeming with all sorts of life and laden with young tender pods. The bulbs tasted sweet and nutty to Halder.
Word of their travels had spread, and hundreds of belugas, dolphins, seals, and killer whales had gathered to greet them along their way. Halder, to his never-ending wonder, could converse with all these creatures through the new powers of his mind.
Dolphins were playful and daring, belugas romantic and affectionate, and the killer whales were showoffs with a tendency to bully, yet ready to fight for a cause. All this he learned in moments. These were facts he could have spent his lifetime investigating as a marine biologist.
Even with the most expensive equipment in the world, he might never have learned what he was learning now every day. The whales swam along with them, singing songs about their lives and their families, sharing a rich oral history with Halder, like a group of storytellers at a fair. He was enraptured.
Finally they reached the entrance to the Palace of Aegir. It lay off the coast of Hlesey Island in Kattegat Bay off the east coast of Denmark. Deep within a kelp forest inside an underwater mountain, was the secret cave that led up into the summer palace.
As they rose up into the palace lagoon, Halder saw gold coins strewn across the cavern floor and treasure chests burgeoning with coins, jewels, and precious works of art scattered everywhere. There were marvelous statues, carved marble benches, and solid-gold, gem-encrusted divans.
An enormous alabaster fountain stood in the center of the cavern, featuring a marvelous sculpture of Poseidon on a gigantic seahorse, leading a band of leaping dolphins. The water that gushed forth was sweet water that Miranda said came from a natural spring that rose up through the cavern floor.
There was a special area where numerous ships’ figureheads from various periods in history were displayed. There were several from the earliest Sumerian sailing ships and one from a royal Egyptian barge that belonged to Cleopatra. There were many more from earlier Egyptian dynasties as well as from other cultures.
In one glance Halder compared the evolution of the art as he examined the finest examples cut from the prows of Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Viking ships, casually stretched out a like a gallery exhibit, all in archeological order. The oldest one was two-thirds buried beneath the gold coins on the floor, while the most recent one was covered by only a few inches. Halder’s mind suddenly spun at the thought of how much gold he was treading on.
Then he saw the majestic sculpture of Poseidon. His stony frame appeared to be ruffled with gold, almost as if he was covered in the Golden Fleece itself, but it was the golden lichen with its citrus-and-mint scent permeating the cavern. It grew only on this statue of Poseidon.
“Miranda, we have to harvest all this lichen and take it with us,” Halder said.
“Why? We have more than enough for your brother when he’s ready.”
“Because we could transform a few hundred people with this much of it,” he exclaimed as the plan welled up in his mind. “Didn’t your mother say that it was Poseidon’s dream to create a new race of merfolk?”
“Yes, but—”
“We can do that! We can do that now! I’m sure I could find hundreds of the greatest oceanographic scientists, marine biologists, and scuba divers who would give their lives to live in the sea as a part of it—to be a merman or mermaid.”
“But the lichen won’t make a woman a mermaid. Her legs would look like yours but be covered with scales. A mermaid has to have the genes of the Olympians. They couldn’t command the water or the wind, become invisible, or control the a
nimals like Mother and I can, and like our children will be able to do. And the men’s fins would also be covered with scales. Because you wore the ring of Atlantis before you transformed, you bear the physical traits of a mermaid, with the skin of a dolphin, and can communicate with all sea life.”
“That’s even better. I don’t think we want hundreds of people being able to do all that. But the world up above is getting crazier and crazier. We might wind up saving mankind by creating a new sea race. It might make the Manor House a little crowded though,” he said, laughing.
“There are nine sea palaces throughout the oceans, and an entire city built by the corylians for my grandfather, Poseidon, which is just sitting and waiting for the day when merfolk will walk down its avenues and streets.”
“Where is it?” he asked.
“I’ll show it to you. Come over here,” she said, guiding him to a niche in the cavern wall. “This pearl is the Orb of Nerus.”
“That’s a pearl?” He stared in amazement at the round object the size of a basketball.
“It was formed at the birth of Venus. Mother said she was a real pain, and apparently, the oyster felt the same way.” Miranda giggled.
“So all those mythological beings were … real?” He stared at her.
Miranda nodded. “Most of them were my relatives! I’ve seen a lot of them through the memory crystals in the library at Oceanus.”
“What’s a memory crystal?”
“It’s like an ancient video tape, except it’s a living crystal that retains everything it sees and replays it each time you uncover it.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Originally they came from the womb of Gaia, but that was turned into Tartarus. So before they sealed the Titans in, Athena harvested thousands of them and took them to Delphi, to a secret cave beneath her sanctuary. It’s a hollow space within the hills with no natural entrance. She used a portal to travel into and out of the mountain, like the one we now use to go to Oceanus. There, she somehow altered the crystals from Gaia’s womb. She recreated them as a special peace offering to Poseidon when he lost the contest of Athens to her.
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