Deeper (3 page)

I dived, with half an idea that I’d come up beneath
Che like a hammerhead and bump him in the backside.  I looked up at the pale shape of his body outlined against the shimmering grey light, and then caught an uneasy tremor, echoing through the water.  It was something big and slow and struggling.  I pulled at Che’s hair, and he turned one ear down towards the depths.  We exchanged looks. 

“
Something big. It’s injured.”

We listened to
the quick, panicked heartbeat fanning through the water around us, smelled a sharpness, wrinkling our nostrils.  It wasn’t far. Perhaps – we looked at one another – perhaps we could take it, all on our own, and bring it back for a trophy, our own kill.  Well, I’d let Che do it, he could use the kudos. 

Cautiously we circled and drew closer.  A
damaged creature, struggling in the ocean – whatever it was, it’d soon attract sharks.  We weren’t particularly afraid of sharks – they’d mostly leave you alone - but in a feeding frenzy we wouldn’t want to be too close, not on our own. 

As we circled, I could see
its shape, dolphin dark, but thinner and longer.  It didn’t move like dolphin, either – not even sick dolphin move like that, jerking and pawing at the surface.

I dived and looked
up from a mer length below. Above me, two twitching black tentacles and a black, thick-skinned body hung vertically, scrabbling at the surface.  It was such an odd creature that we both turned about and shot off to a safe distance – but then rolled about and looked back it, through the speckled green. 

We looked
at each other.  Human?  We’d never seen a black one like this, though, with fins on its feet and great goggle-rimmed eyes on the top of its head. 

“Where’s its floater?”

We poked our heads up and peered over the grey. 

“
Can’t see one. It’s all on its own.”

We dived again, a
flutter of fear tickling our bellies. 

“Do you think
we should..?” 

Che
made slashing motions.  I shook my head.

“
No, I don’t want to.  They taste bad, anyway.  Father told me so.” I turned my mouth down, made a puking face.

Father never said anything about it
, really.  But for some reason, I didn’t want to bring this human home to eat.  It felt wrong.

“How do you think it got here, then?”

I thought about that, while we kept out of sight under the kicking fins.  We were no more than an hour’s swim out from the channels.  But according to the old males, the Big Dry was days away– so they said, who’d seen it on long hunts.  If you wanted to see humans, you had to go close to the Big Dry, or to the far away places where their floaters patrolled the oceans, migrating on their own paths like the whales do in winter.  And yet here was a human – on its own, without a floater in sight – and drowning.

“I don’t know.  Maybe it fell in
and then kind of drifted!”

I
swam closer, to get a better look, but Che clutched at my waist.

“
What if there are more of them somewhere!”

“
Like where then?”

It’s true that Father always said that humans rarely come out on the sea alone.  But I didn’t see any others,
I didn’t see a floater, and I didn’t hear their noises, either, apart from this one.  Humans like to call to each other like quarrelling gulls.  You can hear them miles off.  You can smell them.

I stayed under, and stared up between its legs.

“What sort do you think it is?”

“
How do you mean what sort?”

Che
peered up from beside me.

“Is it male?”

I made the mer sign for a male, forefinger pointed, tucked in a fist.  “Or female?”

I could see no
penis-sheath like Che and the others have, holding their eel inside their body where it’s warm, until a mer woman brings it out to seed pups.  But it’s always hard to tell with humans, because of the coverings they wear. You never see their genitals.  Azura says they don’t have male and female, that they’re all the same or both, like some fish.  But Casih says no, the female ones have big teats that puff up in front of them like an old merman’s gut.  This one had lumps on its chest, under the thick dark skin which covered it from its neck to its feet like a seal. 

“It’s
coming down!”

We
hung back as the human sank slowly down through the layers of water.  When it reached its own height from the surface it began drifting up again.  Its long black legs flapped feebly.  Bubbles escaped the pinched pink nostrils, its face-eyes tight shut like a newborn, the eyes on the top of its head blank as a flatfish.   I’d never seen anything like it – four eyes, and two of them as big as clams. 

When it reached the surface it
paddled some more, coughing and spitting out water, then taking it in again as the ocean slapped it full in its open mouth, hard breathing with the struggle.  I could feel its weariness in the vibrations, like a big fish attacked by sharks and fighting still, but badly wounded. 

It sank again
.  Seawater flowed between the blunt white teeth.  Whales swallow water with their food, but I don’t think humans do.  Its face came level with me.  The face-eyes, fogged with coming death, saw me.  It saw me as a mer sees, not as a fish.  Its face could have been a mer face, starved and angular.  I understood then that its mind was like my mind.  It scrabbled weakly towards me, like a pup towards its mother.

“
What’s it doing?” Che asked, swimming up beside me, as we both stared.

“
Dying.“

I backed away.

“Perhaps it’ll try to bite..,” Che said nervously.

I smiled, and would’ve laughed, if a mer could laugh two lengths under water.
  We both came up for air.

“
Don’t be silly.  It can’t bite anyone.”  That much would have been true, wherever.  It didn’t have the teeth of a predator.  “I think it’s asking for help.”

“Don’t be stupid,
humans can’t speak.”

“It thinks like a mer. 
Look in its eyes.”

The drowning mouth gobbled towards us. 

“I’m not touching it.”

“Me neither.”

I’d seen creatures drown before.  Old mer sometimes swam out to the Deep, and let themselves fall into the dark, if they didn’t want to crawl out on the Dry for their end.  The sharks and other fish cleaned them up.  I’ve seen old whales, their tiny eyes glazed, sink to the bottom, too, to feed the creatures that live there.  Anything which breathes air, can drown.

We both watched in
paralysed fascination as the human choked and jerked, gulping in the water that was poison to it.  Its skin paled and the dark eyes lost their focus and became fixed.  A mist of yellow warmth crept out into the water. 

When t
he sharpness of life had gone from its eyes, and the clawless hands had stopped their useless pawing, the body began to drift down, away from the light.  We followed it on either side, a cautious guard of honour.  It sank quite fast, its fine light hair streaming towards the surface still.

On impulse, I put my hand out and
grabbed the black stuff, around the long thin neck.  Che coiled himself beside me, shocked.

“
Yerch! Let it go down!”

Silly
Che, scared of a dead human.  I knew better than that.

I pulled it up by
the neck, up out of the dark.  It was heavy, reluctant, sodden, as if all the water it’d swallowed lay like sand inside it. Che rose alongside, at a safe distance.  We breached, and I pulled the head free of the water.  I peered into the slack face, which minutes before had recognised me, almost as another mer would.  It could have been the face of a mer.  It could have been me.  Browner, leaner, with large dangling ears and stringy hair and eyes white like the eggs of seagulls .A strange mer, without a tail, but not so different.

“What
do you think we should do with it?” I asked Che.  I was thinking, I guess, that we could drag it home, for a curiosity, to look at some more when we got to a safe place.

“Leave
it here for the fish to eat.” 

Che
pulled tentatively at one arm, flung out as if sleeping, and recoiled. 

“It’s
disgusting.  They won’t like it if you bring it back.”

They, meaning the pod.
  Especially my sisters, who’d probably squeal and pretend to retch, then make me shove it back out to sea for the sharks to fight over.

That was
a miscalculation.  Che of all people should’ve known that if the pod wouldn’t like it, so much the better.  I was at the age when I liked nothing more than to shock my sisters.  If the sea had sprung a big hole and swallowed my whole family, I would’ve cheered before I went to look for them, and maybe cried later. 

“I want to take it
back with us.” 

I grabbed
a wrist, felt the odd black skin shift under my grip, the cold limp hand following after, a gold band on one water-swollen finger.

“
What’re we going to do with it? A dead human!  You know they’ll just make you throw it away. It’s…it’ll make the spirits angry.”

Che
drew his brows together, thunderous.  It was always like that with us, when we fought.  One of us had to play Father.

“I’ll hide it in the
Squid Cave.”

I could stick it in there, I thought, and
I’d probably have a few days to examine it properly.  As I wondered, I swam towards home, towing the dead human female behind me by its hair.  I hoped the stuff wouldn’t come out by the roots.  Its hair was so thin I could see the pink scalp straight through. The strands flowed out from the centre, a white line between.

We
took twice as long to swim back as we’d taken to dawdle and play on the way there, because of the dead weight of the drowned creature trailing along behind.  Che wouldn’t help, he didn’t approve.  But he stayed with me, all the same, saying nothing much, but looking stern and adult.  I was cross with him too, for being a spoilsport, so neither of us were speaking much.  Mer have no curiosity, I thought.  When are we likely to ever catch another human, in the ocean, and dead?  Never, that’s when!  And he won’t even touch it!

It was dusk when we
reached the lagoon, and the pod had gone to harvest the fish that come up to eat the insects, just before the sun goes down.  The two of us pulled the human up on the sharp coral sand, tearing its soft dead skin.  I couldn’t have done it on my own, but Che was curious too, by now – and especially since no one was there to see.

We laid it out flat on its back and sat back to stare. I poked at the black skin.

“I didn’t know they were this colour.”

The ones on the boat were brown
ish or pink, not as black as this.  Besides, its face was a different colour and texture from the rest, though puffed with all the seawater.

“It’s not skin, it’s some kind of covering
,” Che suggested, and I remembered what Casih had said before about the shells they grew around them.  We pulled at the black stuff where it circled the neck.  When you pulled, you could see that there was more skin underneath, whiter than on the face, damp and very cold.

“
Let’s peel it off and see what’s underneath,” he said. 

We pulled at the black sheath.  It was stuck close as a snai
l shell.  But Che tore a hole with his teeth to begin, and we managed to open a jagged tear down the front of the black skin-stuff, and drag it down.  Underneath, the human was paler, soggy, and strangely still a little warm.  Its smell rose from the sheath, pungent and unfamiliar. 

“
It’s female.”

Che
touched the breasts flopping to either side of the narrow rib cage.  They were larger than anything you’d find on a mer woman.  If we’d had breasts like that we’d have had to drag them through the sea like bags full of sponges.  We’d never have been able to catch anything. 

“Humans are the weirdest thing
s,” he said, lifting a teat and letting it drop back, slack and flat-nippled.

We peeled
her till she lay bare, legs splayed on the sand.  Turning and rolling her body, we’d scraped the thin skin, and blood rose sluggish through the scratches, thick and deep red.  Like mine, I thought. 

I looked at the two
thick pillars she walked with, on the Dry.  They began wide and plump, with a round bone in the middle, then narrowed towards each end, until they splayed out again in wide feet like a wading bird.  I counted the toes, she had five on each foot.  No claws. It made her look pup-like, helpless.

Che
drew his finger over her flat, spongy belly, and gingerly touched the dark hair between her legs.  Under the hair, like a crevice among sea forest, her slit disappeared between white, damp thighs.  She was female, though it was differently placed than mine, between her two legs rather than at the base of her belly, where a genital slit should be.  I wondered how they managed to mate, hers being hidden.