Deeper (6 page)

We reached the tip of the long beam, bouncing on the dark water.  I stopped to stare at the white
moonlet, high up but not so high as the other.  It crossed my mind - if humans were so weak, how could they do these things that no mer could?  Put the moon on a rock, for instance. Were we mer really the clever ones?

I swam in place, listening to the
words of the waves.   I couldn’t bring you in on the rocks, you’d be cut to pieces and I’d be hurt too.  I’d have to swim round and listen for a beach.  We circled the island.  You were slack and heavy, my arms ached from dragging you.  It’d become very important to me that you not be dead.  Partly for your sake, partly because of everything I’d already invested in you.  A whole night away from home, the long weary swim across the black fearsome sea.  What a waste, if you were already dead.

I
saw the tiny silver strip, and heard the hiss of surf on sand.  The sea was warmer, too, as we came closer to land, rising shallow.  The Trapped Moon glanced down at the ocean, lit a path for us, and turned away.  A wall of rock stood behind, a few stubby green things growing from it at an angle. The tide was going out, which didn’t help me at all, pushing myself and you up the beach.  But I let the waves wash us as far as they could.

It was hard
work getting you up on the sand.  When it became too shallow to use my tail, I had to drag you with my arms, pushing myself, then you, further up onto the Dry. I didn’t want you to be sucked out again like flotsam.  It was like trying to move a rock, only you weren’t hard but soft and waterlogged.  I wriggled out of the water and pulled and slipped, and still you only moved inches at a time.  It took me a long time to get you to the shadow of the cliff, beyond the tide mark.

You were so still.  I turned you on your stomach and you spat out water, but still you didn’t wake.  I lay close to you, my head against your
wet, sea-forest chest, and listened to your heartbeat.  It was weak and not regular.  That wasn’t a good thing – I remembered from when my mother died in pup, and I cuddled up against her, how her heart also jumped, and limped, and then stopped.

With my fingers
I combed through your lovely human hair, so fine and thin, and put my warm lips against your eyelids, almost transparent and stuck together now with sand and salt.

I untied the swollen covering that had kept you up, and pulled it off you.  Underneath, you were bare like a merman, and not so different, to look at.  You were softer and leaner, though.  In curiosity, I ran my fingers over your skin, from the base of your throat where the hair began, down between your nipples, down to your navel framed with long
dark strands.  I felt how frail you were.  I could count every one of your ribs as I drew my hands over your body.  Below the navel, you were covered with some thin bright stuff, which clung close to your two solid legs. 

I remembered
a thing Azura had once said about the pink snakes humans have between their legs, and Suria wondering if humans had both sexes or just one.  I’d seen a female, knew they weren’t that different.  I pulled at the covering over your hips but it didn’t loosen easily.  I didn’t want to bite and tear, in case I hurt you.  I ran my hand over the outline between your legs, and here, you were different from mer.  Mer keep their balls within their bodies, like dolphin, and their penis in a sheath, close against their skin till it’s needed.  Yours were on the outside, slack under the wet covering.  I felt your shape, sniffed at you, thought of Che’s penis hard against my back when we found Dawii with Rilshe in the Squid Cave, and the feelings I’d had then.  I felt the beginnings of desire for you.  You were unlike any male I’d ever seen, full of mystery and dark spells.

You were drying out
now in the night heat, but you were still too cold.  I scooped the dry sand onto you to try to keep you warm, and moved up close beside you, my skin against yours.  I breathed warm breath on your neck, hoping it would help.  You shivered and twitched.

Lying beside you,
I drew my sea-cold lips and my warm wet tongue over your face, tasting your skin.  You smelled of sea now, all the smells of the Dry washed off, but you tasted of human too– a rich, strong, blood-warm taste.  I murmured, wake, human – wondering what I’d do if you opened your eyes, those dark-brown eyes with their big whites – but you just coughed out some more water, and lay sleeping.  I put my arms around you, as my mother used to around me, my tail over your limp legs, and felt your human-ness seep into me and infect me, as you slept.

Dawn was breaking when I
left you there and slipped back into the sea.  You were alive but limp as a corpse.  As the sun broke red over the sea, I started to feel frightened.  What if there were more humans high up on the rock?  What if they came down and found me, and grabbed me and took me away to be skin or food?  What if you woke up, and looked at me, and were disgusted by me, as Azura and Dayang and the rest would have been by you?

It was so much easier going back than it had been coming.  The water
welcomed me, smoothing over my cuts and bruises, and I sped through fast and free, relieved because I was able to use my shoulders and arms at last.  I swam for home as fast as I could, afraid and tired and thinking all the while of you.  How delicate you were, how beautiful.  How like mer and not mer.

Chapter 6

Maybe the worst thing about
coming home was that no one noticed. If Father had been angry and demanded to know where I’d been, I could have told them all what I’d been doing, and there would have been a storm, and bitings, and beatings, and then I could have swam away in a rage to go by myself – I don’t know where.  Back to Deep Sea, maybe, where else was there for me to go? 

But they didn’t even ask, they thought I’d just spent the night sulking somewhere. 
All my sisters had heard I’d quarrelled with Che, and they all thought it was a good thing. Because who was Che anyway but a half-male, and why would Father’s daughter hang around with a deformed dolphin.

The only person who asked me where I’d been was
Che himself.  I came on him, moodily eating shrimps in a mud pool, left behind by the channels and gone stagnant.  He sat in the sun-hot water, digging them out of their little burrows and crunching them one by one, spitting out the hard bits.

A
t first he still wouldn’t speak to me.  He’d never looked less appealing, his long hair matted and greenish, his skin pitted as if small fish had nibbled away bits of skin while he was sleeping.  Like you, mermen can be ugly and awkward before they’re grown.

“Where’d you go? I looked for you.” 
Che stuffed a shrimp, and some mud too, into his mouth, then spat out the mud, making a little dark cloud in the water.  It suited his mood.

“I
found a human,” I blurted, because really I was dying for someone to tell.  “I touched him.”

Even
Che was shocked.  He spat out the mouthful, and goggled at me.

“A
nother dead one?”

We both remembered the drowned female. 

“A live one.”  I remembered my arm across your chest, your beating heart next to my teats.

“What happened to
it? You didn’t go bringing it back here..”

Che
looked around, as if he expected to see me pull the human from behind my back and exhibit him.

“I saved him.  He was drowning, and I held him up and took him to the Dry?”

Che made a sceptical face.

“The Dry?
You did not, you couldn’t swim that far.  Not even your Father goes that far.”

“Alright,
not to the Dry, just the Trapped Moon.  I swam there with him and put him on the beach.” 

And other things.

Che stared at me coldly, stirring the scum with his finger.

“
You’re a liar.  You’re just making it up.  You went out to Deep Sea and got lost and made up a big story.”

He slid
sourly away from me, stirring up the black mud as he went.  It stank of rotting weed and dead sea creatures.  I squelched after him, not minding much.  After all we could wash it off after.

“I’m not lying. It was a real
human male.  I kept him alive and left him on the sand.”

I could hardly believe it myself.

“Of course, I don’t know if he’s still alive.”  I remembered his skin, pale for a human, and his closed eyes.  The breathing was regular though, by the end of the night, and the heartbeat strong.  “But I think he is.”

“Why
would you do that?”  Che stared suspiciously.

I could hardly understand it myself
.  We’re not in the habit of rescuing things, we mer.  There’s not so much to eat, that we can afford to go around saving our meals.  So I was annoyed with Che for asking, naturally.

“Why
shouldn’t I? They’re not so different from us.  You’d save me if I was drowning, wouldn’t you?”

Che
gave me a look as if he wouldn’t even think of it.

“Not so different!” 
Che looked me up and down, from my round, pale green eyes without whites to my flat face and silvery, translucent tail.  “Melur, they’re human. They live on the Dry!  They have legs.”

“And ears, and noses, and lips, and faces.”

And penises. I thought about how I’d kissed you, and felt as if a tiny school of fish had fluttered through my veins.

“
Anyway, remember what Grandmother always says, about –“

“Being skinned and chopped up and
everything. I bet it’s just crap.”

Could my human do such a thing? 
Maybe. His face looked gentle, in sleep.

“
She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she’s senile!“ 

I kept going. “
Have YOU ever seen a skinned mer?”

Che
’s skin turned pink in confusion and annoyance.

“No, but –“

“Well then don’t talk about what you don’t know.  How could they skin us and eat us? They can’t even see us.  They don’t even know we’re here, and even if they did, they couldn’t catch us. You’ve seen how a human is when they fall in the water.  They’re useless.”

We were well on the verge of quarrelling again, but something kept
Che from flouncing away.

“
Yes but everyone knows how they pull in fish with their nets, even dolphins, and throw the insides back in the water.  People say they’ve seen big sharks floating without their fins, the humans have cut them off and left them there.  I’ve heard they can even catch whales and pull them onto their floaters to eat.  Anyway, they can swim.  I’ve seen one swimming.”

              He meant the female in the black sheath.

I
fell on my back and made stupid paddling motions, kicking feebly and gasping.  Che threw a glop of mud, which hit me on the ear.

“
It was tired, that’s all.”

“So?
We eat fish.  So do they.  We’re not fish though.”

“
And they
can
see us, too.  I saw that female staring at us when it went down.  The drowned one.”

Che
made a gobbling expression with his mouth, like a human swallowing water, and bugged his eyes.

“
That’s different.”

“No it’s not.” 

Che came close, put out a hand green with warm slime.

“
Humans are bad luck.  Evil spirits thrown back by the sea.  All the elders say so.”

“Who cares what all the old
crabs say.”

He watched me, frowning.

“What is it with this one?  Why’d you stay out so long? You could have just left him up on the beach and come back.”

“He might have died,” I said, turning away from his reaching eyes, swirling a finger in the sand.

“I was waiting for you.”  Che stuck out a lip. He put a heavy, uncertain hand on the back of my neck.  Possession.

“
Perhaps,“ I added, turning away so that Che couldn’t see me say it, “I mated with him. Perhaps I’ll have a little human pup, before long.”

Che
stared at me as if I’d confessed to eating Dayang’s newborn.  Part of me was ashamed of the lie, of making him feel that way, and another part was very pleased to have got a proper reaction, at last.  He was angry now.  His tail drummed the shallow water, sending up thick green spray which dribbled back down over us both like smelly rain. His skin reddened.  He was really very ugly when he was cross, I thought.  No wonder no one wanted to mate with
him
.

“You’re just saying that.
Liar. You can’t mate with a human any more than you could with a...with a seal!”

“
Yes you can.  They have eels just like you do.  They put them inside just like you want to do it.  You’re just jealous.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!
Jealous of a no-tailed human?  You’re a liar, Melur!”

He
slapped me with a muddy palm, quicker than I would’ve expected from him, and hard. I went to claw at his face but he caught both my hands.  He was just Che – but he was almost twice as big as me.  I’d never thought of him as an adult mer before.  I didn’t like the idea.  I’d had enough bites and swipes from Father to know what being an adult male meant.

I struggled, spitting
, and found myself pulled close against his thickset body, on top of him in the muck.  We glared into each other’s faces.  I put my hands against his throat and pushed as hard as I could.  He let go suddenly, and I fell over beside him with a sickly squelch. 

Che
sat up first.

“I’m not jealous, I’m scared.”

I looked at him.  This was serious Che, a leader, if only of females.  This wasn’t the mer pup I’d played with all through the seasons, but a different creature, strong and sure.

“
You’re going too far now, I don’t know what’s going to happen to you.  A dead human’s one thing but a live one! Even
you
know -”

I was still angry.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me.  That’s the problem. Nothing ever happens here.  You and me, we’re going to live our whole lives, stuck in these channels, having pups, catching fish, drying weed, knowing nothing, dying.  What’s the point of that?”

“
I don’t want you to leave the channels,” Che said, reaching out.  I thought he was going to pinch me and drew back, but he only stroked my cheek, leaving a stripe of white in the green.

“Leave
the channels? Who said anything about leaving?”

I honestly hadn’t thought about it.  Leave?
Where would I go? Of course I could go out to Deep Sea, maybe find more humans, ride the storms…but I’d always come back, where the pod was.  How not?

“
To be with this....this human you’ve found,” Che wrinkled his wide, fight-scarred nose.  “I mean, on the Dry.”

“Be with
the human? Why should I?”

“If
you want to be his mate.”

I hadn’t thought that far.  If you tell one lie you have to tell a lot more lies to go around it, so you’d better be ready to tell them.

“Whatever.”

“If you
disobey they’ll make you leave the pod.”

I turned away, pointedly.  Behind me, I heard
Che slide away on his belly, over the sandbank that separated us from the channel, and into clear water.  I didn’t follow him, not till I’d got my story straight in my own head.  I hoped he wouldn’t tell anyone the lies I’d told him.  Then I’d be in real trouble.  But then Che was my best friend, even if he was my enemy.  He wouldn’t tell anyone. 

I rolled slowly over,
enjoying the mud in my hair, and thought about the Big Dry.  Could a mer really live on the Dry?  Of course we spend part of our lives out of the water, we’re not fish that gasp and die if they’re flung on a rock.  But to live away from the water, in one of those Caves-that-are-made which Grandmother told us about – that would be unthinkable. 

Suppose I’d
really mated with the beautiful human.  Could such a thing really be done? I touched my slit, at the base of my belly, and thought about your night-silver skin, and the soft, wet snake under your coverings, and wriggled. 

Could we?
I saw myself, lying against your long-haired, lean chest, diving into your coral mouth and you into mine, your hands on my teats, your tongue on my salty nipples.  Joining quickly and then rolling away, the way I’d seen my sisters joined with their mates, in the mid depths – but no, that’s not how humans mate, they don’t make pups when they swim, but on the Dry somewhere.  On the Dry then, perhaps on the soft sand, lying beside each other – thinking of it made me wish for it, and I touched again to try to chase the feeling in me.  I’d reached that age then when I wanted to mate, but wouldn’t. Mer females don’t live so long after they mate, curious or not.  Bearing pups is more dangerous than hunting.

But then, h
e wouldn’t mate with me anyway, I told myself.  You need legs to mate with a human, legs to wrap around him, legs to walk with him on the sand, legs so that you can pretend to be a human too, so that he won’t eat you instead of fucking you.  You’re only a fish to him, I reminded myself – if he’d only seen you, he would have screamed and run away on his strong human legs.  He wouldn’t have let you kiss him and sleep next to him and feel his soft tender body under the human coverings.  You’re just a fish, a stupid, ugly fish!