Deeper (2 page)

“They’re so
clumsy and strange looking. And all dried out like old coconuts. I’ve seen better looking old-man eels.”

The ones I’d seen
weren’t dry.  They were soaked through, you could see the water streaming off them like storm-rain.  But strange looking – yes.  Their skin had all the colours of the sea forest and flapped about them as if it didn’t fit properly.  And those legs! How high they stood on them, squinting out over the water – I wondered if I could balance on my tail like that, and tried it, and flopped on the flat rock with a splat and an ouch.

“
That’s not their real skin,” said Casih, drawing the long gutting knife along the belly of the first bluefin, so that the flesh began to ooze red juice onto the slate dark stone.  “They cover themselves up.”

“But w
hy do they?  Are they trying to trick each other?” I asked, scraping up damp sand over my tail to make two lumpish human legs.  I should have been helping, I know.

“
It’s because they’re so disgusting, they can’t even bear to look at themselves,” Dawii said, pulling the guts away from the spine. Dawii thinks she knows everything, because she once found a cave on the outer edge of the lagoon that nobody else had ever been in, or so she said.  She showed it to us, and we called it the Squid Cave, because it had a squid in it (although we pulled him out and ate him, so perhaps it doesn’t now).   She was cruising about on the reef looking for things to eat in the long weeds and she pulled at a piece of bubble weed stuck to a rock, and the rock rolled off, and there it was.  Now, you can swim into the cave through a dark hole under the sea, and inside, the water is thick and almost lightless, at first. Nobody went there before she found it – or so she says – and nobody goes there now either, and why should they?

Dark
Suria began braiding Azura’ silver hair into eight thick strands, like octopus legs. She looked down complacently at her own pearl white skin. 

“
I wouldn’t like to either, if I were them.  I can’t think of anything worse than being a human.  I’d rather be an oyster.”

“
That’s not what the elders say.” 

Sensible
Dayang pushed the guts to one side, for later.  She was always a hard worker, when the rest of us sat around and gossiped. 

“It’s becaus
e their skins are weak and they have to hide themselves from the sun and the sea.  Humans are like crabs, they have to go about in shells otherwise they’ll damage their soft bodies.”

“
If I caught one, I’d scoop him out of his shell and knock his ugly head open with a rock.” 

Azura
sniffed, and popped a piece of fresh cut meat into her mouth.  Dayang slapped her hand, but not hard.  We were supposed to give Father and the other males the best of the meat first, before we took our own food.  If we were lucky, they’d leave us more than just the guts.  That’s the way it was.

“
They’re prettier than you are, Azura stumpy-tail,”  I said, being mean in my turn - because Azura had a short, fat tail with stubby fronds at the end of it, not like my shining long one, and she was sensitive about it.

It’s not that I thought
humans were particularly nice to look at – I hadn’t even seen one for long enough to have an opinion, not then.  I just wanted to argue.  More than anything, I didn’t want to be like Azura and the others- obedient, incurious, vain.

“
I don’t see what’s so scary about humans, anyway.  They’re all soft and squashy, they can’t even swim, they’ve got no tails! I don’t see what creatures like that can ever do to us!”

Azura
stuck a claw up, making a rude face.

“I’ve seen
one in a shark’s belly once,” Suria put in, thoughtfully. “Just part of one.”

“What did it look like? Which bit?” 
Azura stopped polishing the tiny blue and salmon pink pebbles she’d grown into the skin of her upper arm.

“
Part of a leg, I think.  I didn’t want to touch it.  It was white and puffed up and smelled bad.”

“Humans smell
like rotten fish,” Azura went back to polishing.

“Everything smells ro
tten when it’s dead.  Even you,” I said.  “That’s no reason to have jelly-trembles.”

Gentle Casih laid the law down.

“Humans aren’t safe.  That’s just how it is.  You wouldn’t go to sleep with a pack of old bull sharks, would you?” 

She stood
in place of Mother, and had to be obeyed, when Father wasn’t near.  But she didn’t have the heart for authority, really.

“
Oh but Melur loves humans. She wants to swim right up to one and say ‘Eat me, oh please eat me, beautiful pink human! I’d make SUCH a delicious dinner for you! Really I would!”

Azura
sniggered, and took another bite of blue fin meat, because Casih wasn’t looking, but feeding her pup instead, while she waved away a gull in search of easy food.  Then she slid back into the sea to chew it, the inlay of her long pale arms throwing back the light of the last sun as she dived.

I stared after her. 

“I do not.”

I hated my sisters, all of them. 
Stuck up, vain, ignorant know nothings!

I decided then and there that I’d see a human up close
one day, even if they did skin me.  Though that was probably just one of Grandmother’s stories. They might frighten little pups but they wouldn’t frighten fast, clever, badass Melur.

Chapter 3

Still, t
he first time I saw a real human, up close, it was dying.

Che
and I were trolling. It’s a game human teenagers play too, so you told me.  This is how it goes.

You pick a target.
Someone minding their own business.  Maybe a lazy, heavy adult sleeping on the swell, or someone intent on something which needs lots of quiet concentration – picking out lice, for instance, or stalking a shoal.  You creep up behind them, hardly shifting the current.  At just the right time, you pick up speed and barrel past, tipping them face first, turning the water into a storm of sand and bubbles.  Then you shoot off as quick as you can, laughing and hoping they’re too flustered to follow you.

That’s what we were doing,
that afternoon, months ago.  It was a hot day, the top layer of the water in the lagoon was warm as pee.  We’d swum out from the channels, where we’d flipped a biter onto some cousin of Che’s who’d been sleeping in a tide pool.  Then we’d had to make a run for it – but he was fat and sleepy and hadn’t bothered to swim after us far – but just went back to his pool to snore.  Now we were bored with ourselves and the world.  We were floating in the mid depths of the lagoon, watching the motes eddy by, when Che said,

“Guess what. Y
our sister makes out with Rilshe.  They’re fucking down in the Squid Cave.”

Che
was – is - my very best friend.  It’s Che I shared my thoughts with, not my dull, beach bound sisters. Che had a pod of his own, sisters and brothers and cousins and little ones, and their territory was on the westward side of the lagoon.  But we’d been friends since I beat his elder brother up for teasing him and left claw marks on his back that took months to fade. I went round for weeks puffed up with the victory – over a mer boy, at that! 

“
What sister?” I asked, not very interested.  Mating’s not a big thing with us, you see adults doing it all the time, on the sand, in the mid-depths, sometimes on the surface if they can stay in place long enough. They don’t hide it.  Why should they?

“The
one with the ray on her back.”

“
You mean Dawii.”

Che
had nothing much to do with my sisters.  I was secretly pleased when he couldn’t tell one from the other.  Or pretended that he couldn’t.  Mer boys who wanted to hunt with the men didn’t hang around with the women – but I was an exception, and so was Che.

He narrowed his green eyes at me, trying to look tough, and I remembered that last year,
Che wanted to mate with Dawii, because she has long silver hair like Azura and isn’t so mean.  But she said no.  Actually what she said was,

“Get away from me you deformed
thing!  Find someone as ugly as you are to mate with.”

I forgot to mention,
Che has a piece out of his tail.  The story goes that his father bit it off when he was hungry, thinking Che was a little sardine.  It makes him swim funny, in little uneven jerks instead of smoothly like the rest of us.  The others in his pod follow him sometimes, jerking around like a fish that’s jumped onto the sand, just to make fun of him.  Che pretends he doesn’t care.

“How do you know
, anyway?”

Che
looked sly.

“Because
I’ve seen them heading out there most days about now, as if they’re just going to scout for dolphin, and she goes first, and he goes after, like they’re not going together.  And then after a while they come back, just like that. One at a time.”

“So?”  I started doing loops, just out of boredom. 
Che rolled around and around, keeping his eyes on me.  Nothing anything my sisters did seemed remotely interesting to me.

“So let’s go and see if we can catch them.”

Che made fucking motions, holding onto my waist and twitching his newly furred body about behind me.  I pushed him away.  He was only fifteen and shy as I was.  He hadn’t fucked anyone yet.  Nobody would let him.  Nobody wanted to have pups with a piece out of their tails.

“Wh
at for?”

“Just because.”

Che
flipped out backwards, letting the light catch the silver inlaid scales of his chest, that he’d spent the whole of last season growing in, thinking it looked cool.  His notched tail passed within a finger length of my face.  

“Oh yeah.
  Impressive!  Not.”

“Come on
, I’m bored.”

The
Squid Cave was on the outside rim of the lagoon, facing onto Deep Sea.  We weren’t really supposed to be there on our own, and neither was Dawii.  Rilshe wasn’t her mate.  Mer can fuck where they like, and the males often seed babies with as many females as they can catch, but if a mer female strays away from the one she’s mated with, there can be fights.  Most males carry scars – a scored tail, a ripped shoulder – and the females do too. Dawii was under promise to Luun.  Father had given her and the mating would be soon, probably at the next Meet – then Luun would come to help with the hunt, sometimes, when the males were after big game, and our males would help his pod, too.  Luun wouldn’t be happy if she was pregnant already, and Father – I’d rather not think about it.  He’d almost ripped her shoulder open when she was only four, for some cheek or other, and she still carried a long ridged scar.  Now when he was near, she was silent and scurrying.  We all had bite marks here and there, and bruises that faded and healed in the salt.

We shot the current out
from the channels, and headed out towards Deep Sea.  If you kept to the centre of the streams, and it was the right time, you could ride the current out faster than you could swim, face down, watching the rippled white sand and dark weed racing underneath you as if it was moving and not you.

Where the
lagoon met ocean and turned a darker, colder blue, Che slid down with the slope of the sea floor and I followed him.  We came to a drop-off, and dived down beside the rock face till the light was dim and filtered dark green.   His eyes grew round and pale to see better in the half light. Halfway down was a hole, the size of two round mer heads and part-covered with sponge and urchin. We looked at the clear bubbles finding their way out to the surface, and listened to the sound of live warm blood hearts signalling from far inside.

I went
first, since Dawii had shown me how, more fool her.  You had to squeeze through a mer length of old bleached coral, feeling your way in the darkness - then it widened out into a funnel of sharp reef rock and tiny striped darters hiding from the dangers outside.  If you kept feeling your way in, you’d see a beam of green light from far above, striking down through the shadows, and you could follow it to a wide dim space, six mer lengths from the entrance or maybe more, with room to come up for air but not to climb out.  There must have been an exit somewhere above the water, for the light to get in, but I never found it from the other end. 

We followed the funnel, our tails nudging us forward
carefully so they wouldn’t hear us coming.  We needn’t have worried.  I could see the twin streams of bubbles drifting up to the misted air, and silver sand motes swirling in the current of two idly undulating, blue fringed tails.  They were on the cave floor, locked together in a tangled mist of dark hair and reaching pale arms, and we could have been two tiger sharks looking for our dinner, for all they would have cared.  If they’d looked they would have seen our own bubbles following theirs to the light, but they were blind to us.

We peered side by side into the blue green, strangely interested. 
Dawii’s back was to me, and I saw the winged shape outlined on her back in purple and dark green, flying over her skin.  Rilshe lay inside her, their hair swaying above them, and they moved together in a slow rhythm, weed tossed on the sand at the turning of the tide.  His pale fingers clasped at the base of her spine guided her towards him and away. 

I felt arousal
slither through me.  If they’d been mating out in the sunlight, openly, I’d have passed them by without even looking – but here, in the secret dark, it moved me.  With us, casual matings were usually unasked for by the female, and soon over anyway, in case something came on you when you were occupied.  This was more than that, slower and deeper.  I wondered if this was what they called love.  The elders warned against love, as something to be avoided, but it happened now and again, like depth cramps.

Che
felt it too.  His penis left its sheath and pressed up against the base of my spine, while his hands crept round in front.  I pinched hard, digging in my long nails, and he jerked away with a choked roar and hit the back of his skull on the rock.  I felt a rush of satisfaction.  He wasn’t the first mer boy who’d tried, and I was getting skilled at this.  It’d be a while yet before they got me with pup, I thought – even Che. Especially crippled Che.

You would have thought they’d have felt us then, but no. 
Che signed circles in the water, let’s stir them up.  We looked around for something to use – a loose rock maybe, but there were none.  I thought about swimming in quietly and attaching a crab to Dawii’s undulating backside, but I couldn’t see a single one of those either.  You never can find anything when you need it!

But
then, skulking under the lip of the hole, in a cranny the size of my fist, I saw a small octopus, one of its tentacles hanging out over the rough rock.  I grabbed it behind the head before it could backfire, and shoved it in towards the two of them.  We blew a stream of bubbles after and snapped our teeth – but the octopus kept trying to dig itself back into the rock wall, trailing ink wherever it went. Then it tried to shoot itself past us backwards, out into the sea. I grabbed it round the middle, squeezed it viciously, and stuffed it in again.

The octopus
wriggled down towards the bottom of the cave, where it probably thought it’d be safe.  At last, Dawii opened one eye, wide and dazed, to clouds of acrid darkness.

“Now what?”
signed Che, spreading his hands.

“Go
, go, go!”

S
omehow we scuffled out, with Dawii following, teeth bared through the black.  We were lucky both of them couldn’t come after us at once in the small space, but still I felt something sharp close on my tail fin, and flicked, and lost it.  We shot out into the lagoon in a confusion of thrashing arms and tails and long hair.  Dawii wasn’t pleased.  Neither was Rilshe.

They
were already grabbing at us, herding us in between them, but they were sleepy with sex and we had the speed of fright.  Even Che managed to put on a good spurt, and we headed out, and further out, until at last we found ourselves alone in the swell, the clear water deep beneath us.

“Are they
still coming?”

We circled and breached. 

“Doesn’t look like it.”

Fright turned to snickers as we
turned loops in the depths.  Dawii was obedient and timid and probably wouldn’t chase us on her own.  Anyway she’d think twice about it, because we could tell tales too.  She was supposed to be mating with Luun, not Rilshe.  Quiet little Dawii, I’d never have thought it of her.  Still, I knew she’d save something up for me for later.

We
played catch and swim till we were both out of breath, and looked back, and saw only the ocean in all directions, shark-blue.  We weren’t lost – no matter how far we went, we could always feel our way home through the warm currents – but the ocean felt silent and empty, just the two of us.  Che rose to the surface, flipped over to rest on his back.  I lay beside him, tipping in the swell, and we both looked up at the clouds forming shapes above us.

“It wasn’t
me,” said Che.

“Who you talking to?
The sky?”

I rolled over and splashed him.  He lay still, like a piece of driftwood rising and falling. 

“Air spirits.” 

Our name for them is erisse
, a hiss of wind over white sand.

“Do you see them?”

More to annoy Che than anything, I said, “I don’t believe in air spirits, do you?”

Che
rolled towards me, surprised.

“Yeah!”

“How come you never see them, then? How come only Grandmother ever sees them?”

“
Well you wouldn’t. They’re spirits.  They’re in…they’re in…everything.”

Che
waved towards the whitecaps, the sea mist, the white gulls flying low and curious. 

“But suppose they’re not.  Suppose there’s only, I don’t know, wind and water and
things we know.  And no spirits?”

Of course I
believed in spirits.  I still do.  Air spirits watch over us.  At night, they hiss through the air with their tails flying out behind them, drying your skin as you lie sleeping on the sand.  Run your hand through water in the darkness and you can see their wings of white fire.  When the sun’s up, they dance and shimmer in the sea spray.  If you squint up through the waters of the lagoon for long enough, you can see them sometimes, laughing at you.  Or go blind for looking.  So our mothers said. 

But
then, I’d squinted and peered, and waited, and never seen a single one.  Could all the things that adults tell us really be lies?