Girl at the Bottom of the Sea (11 page)

God, her grandmother tasted terrible! The juices of this beast—blood or bile or evil itself, whatever it was, it stung and sickened Sophie, and try as she might she had to pull back. She clamped shut her great jaw as she did, tearing a chunk of the beast and spitting it into the waters. As the monster twisted away from her, strands of its torn flesh spinning around its body, Sophie went in again, this new instinct powerful inside her. As fast as a bullet she dove, and with a chomp of her massive jaw she severed the head of the beast from its undulating tail.

More sharks had come, real ones, Sophie could tell, not teenage girls pretending to be sharks. But was it pretend? Sophie could feel her body, thick as a tank but weightless in the water. And the instinct for blood was inside her, a reflex, always ready. Sophie watched the feeding frenzy as the sharks lit upon the sinking tail. And the head, the terrible, disembodied head turned to face Sophie, and for a moment it was not the head of a sea-dragon but the decapitated head of an old woman, her grandmother.

“Now you've done it,” Kishka spoke, with a grimace that tore at Sophie's still-human heart.

“Oh!” she cried, and tried to swim toward her grandmother. But the head again became a dragon's, and its tentacle caressed her face, and Sophie screamed a zawolanie thick with surprise and pain and anger. Sophie's zawolanie burst through her jaw, exiting her mouth
in an explosion of shark teeth. It rippled outward all around her in a blast, and somewhere on the northernmost edge of the Atlantic Ocean a rogue wave rose and smashed back into the waters.

Chapter 10

A
roar of sound woke Syrena, and she opened her eyes to a current so strong she could
see
it, the movement of the water rushing toward her, scooping her up and carrying her away in its rocketing velocity. For a mile or so the mermaid fought the water, tumbling and scratching in a manner alien to her species. Syrena had lived in the ocean for hundreds of years, and rarely had she felt out of sorts within its waters. It was more like her skin than her home, and she knew all its secrets. It felt like a rogue wave was building on the surface above.

At last Syrena was able to swim out from the current, and she turned back toward her charge, her great tail slamming the waters. Schools of fish divided themselves at the sight of her, giving her space to speed through. She finally came upon the girl hunched over by a bed of giant clams, retching. A pile of half-digested periwinkles sat in the mud by her feet, picked at by small, scavenging fish.

“Gross,” Sophie mumbled, turning away from her mess. When she saw Syrena, she waved her hands wildly through the water. “Did you see all that?”

Syrena shook her head. “No, but a terrible current woke me.”

“You
slept
through that? You slept through me becoming a
shark
and biting my grandmother's head off?” Sophie cracked up, disturbing the mermaid with her cackle. She sounded mad. Syrena surveyed the reef.

“I see nothing,” she said. “Just strange girl and upchucked sea snail. You eat bad mollusk, have bad dreams?”

“Oh yeah, it was a bad dream all right.” Sophie kicked sand onto the periwinkle pile, scattering the tiny fishes. “The worst. I wound up trapped inside a giant fake oyster with my grandmother, who was
smoking
this endless
cigarette
, and the oyster was, like, this
thing
that was trying to steal my talisman so I'd
drown
, and so I became a shark and bit her head off, and then got freaked out and then she was this, like, sea monster and her whisker hit me, and look—” Sophie turned her cheek to the mermaid. She didn't know what it looked like, but the throb of it was hot and constant upon her face. Syrena peered at the wound.

“Look like jellyfish sting,” she said. “I see worse.”

“Yeah, well, it was the whiskers of this water dragon or whatever my grandmother was. And it hurt so bad I let out a zawolanie I wasn't even expecting, and all my shark teeth blew out of my mouth and now my jaw totally hurts. Do I have all my teeth?” She opened her mouth wide for the mermaid.

“Not get too close,” the mermaid put her hands up to stop Sophie's advance. “Smell pukey, can smell from here. You dream you puke shark teeth, wake up to upchuck?”

“God, Syrena, it was Kishka! You know how crazy and powerful she is. You know she's out to get me. She was trying to kill me.”

“I know, I know. Shhhhhhhhh.” Syrena made a low hissing noise and reached out and petted Sophie's head. Sophie was immediately comforted, lulled by the noise and the gentle, electric touch of the mermaid's fingers on her scalp. The tension that had clenched her body into one too-tight, girl-sized muscle began to relax, but her body was still vibrating with the shock of her zawolanie, her face still stung from her beastly grandmother, and her jaw ached with the effort of shifting from girl teeth to shark teeth to exploded teeth, and then back to girl.

Sophie closed her eyes. “You're putting me to sleep,” she murmured, drifting in the water like a sea fan.

“You in bit of shock. Too much for you, all of it. My sound good, relaxing sound. Good tones.”

“Mermaid magic,” Sophie said. Syrena laughed.

“Magic just science. Just science not discovered by men in silly jackets yet.”

“No,” Sophie insisted gently. “Mermaids are magic.”

“Humans think so, but stupid. You find new lemur in jungle, you think magic lemur? No. Just a hiding lemur. Mermaids hiding creatures. Natural, like you or lemur, or dolphin. We just secret animal.”

“But you talk about magic, mermaid magic—”

“Ya, but not like you think. All creatures have their magic. Again, is science.”

“So, magic isn't magic, it's science?” A conversation that at any other time would have frustrated and confused Sophie was turned into a sweet riddle by the humming of the mermaid and the feel of her head massage.

“Ya, just another thing, like sound, like gravity.”

“Okay,” Sophie said.

“Don't be so—how to say—bummed out. Magic still what it is, no matter what.”

“I feel like you're sort of taking the fun out of it,” Sophie said.

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Syrena sounded another tone.

It's her zawolanie
, Sophie thought.
Mermaid magic is all zawolanie, they're zawolanie creatures, hurting and healing with sound.

“I think you maybe traumatized.” Syrena curled her tail around the girl in a rare gesture of sympathy. “And your pretty face hurt now.”

“I think I almost died!” A surge of feeling came up inside her, and Sophie burst into unexpected tears. “She almost took this.” She clutched her talisman, the blue glowing out from between her fingers. “I would have drowned.”

The mermaid considered the talisman, petting her own. “I can breathe fine without talisman.”

“Well, you're a mermaid.”

“Ya, but you part Odmieńce. You become shark, you can figure to breathe underwater.”

“How?”

“Don't ask me,” Syrena shrugged. “But you command the waters, ya? You have them carry you? They do what you ask. Ask them for oxygen.”

“Oh, hey, water, can you give me some oxygen?” Sophie called out into the deep. She paused, yawned. “Hmmm, don't really see any oxygen coming my way.”

“I believe you do it,” Syrena said simply. “You be brat, fine. But I believe you take oxygen from the water. Is your magic, your science, what you wish to call it.”

And with that, Syrena removed the comfort of her tail from the girl and beat it gently in the waters. “Come now. We must visit Swilkie. We not on—what you call—vacation down here.”

“Yeah, trust me, I know,” Sophie said, already missing Syrena's soothing touch. “Almost getting murdered by my grandmother in a disgusting oyster shell is not exactly a trip to Disney.”

“What is ‘Disney'?” Syrena asked.

“Oh, god, it's—it's too much to explain. It's like a big fun park kids go on vacation to. Plus they make movies and stuff. Actually, they have a movie about a mermaid—” Sophie stopped talking as some of Syrena's words about Griet floated through her head. “Oh geez,” she said out loud in a sickened voice.

“Oh, what, they make bad mermaid movie, ya?” Syrena saw the answer in Sophie's downturned face. “Let me guess,” she said in a hard voice. “They make movie about my sister?”

Sophie nodded. Syrena sighed, releasing a column of shimmering air bubbles, but Sophie could see her face behind it, the sadness visible in her eyes, the lines around her mouth. “Griet even more famous mermaid than me. Griet most famous. The small mermaid, they call her. But Griet not even very little! Griet normal mermaid size. Oh well. That is life. Stories get confused, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by mistake. I know truth of Griet. And I tell the truth to you. So as long as you and me alive, Griet's truth alive, ya?”

“I guess so,” Sophie said, but at that moment, at the bottom of the sea, still shell-shocked from the run-in with her grandmother, it didn't seem like enough. To be charged with keeping someone's story seemed like a big responsibility. And if Sophie couldn't even handle one person's story, how was she going to handle saving the world?

“Come on,” Syrena said, jolting Sophie from her worries. “I see my calming spell already going away, your face look like this”—the mermaid arranged her face in a parody of Sophie's, all bulging eyes and chewed lip. “This whole trip taking too long. You must understand, longer I am away from river, longer the Boginki have chance to destroy it. More mess for me to clean when I return. Not to mention, longer we down here, less time you have in castle, to train.”

“Can't you train me down here?” Sophie asked. “While we're swimming?”

The mermaid looked deeply at her charge. “I am training you. I train you in ways you don't even know. I train your heart. Now, command the waters, and I will continue my story.”

*   *   *

SYRENA AND GRIET
held their hands so tightly they thought perhaps they would meld together into an entirely new sea creature. Swimming in unison, each beat of their tails in perfect sync, Griet thought how wonderful it would be if she and her sister
did
become one, how much stronger they would be in this treacherous sea! Too grown to be eaten by sunfish, they were still at the mercy of sharks and some of the bigger seals. Griet imagined herself and Syrena as a two-headed sea beast, double the tail to smack and swim with and sporting starfish appendages that dropped away when trapped. She shared her dreams with her sister, who laughed, but there was a tinge of sadness to her happiness. They were cut off from their village, alone, and still so young. Their gratitude for each other was tangled up with loneliness for the other mermaids.

“You have to stop dreaming,” Syrena chastised Griet. “We need to find you a weapon, too.”

Syrena had spotted the narwhal horn lodged in the seafloor, its tip driven deep into the sand, the hilt of it unmistakable. Her heart had leapt in her chest. Narwhal horns were rare, and only the bravest of the warrior mermaids carried one. They came to the most powerful mermaids, the ones destined to be leaders of their kind. The narwhal had not swum in the mermaids' waters for centuries, and so to find a horn was unlikely, a sign that the mermaid was meant for great things.

“Do you know what this means?” Syrena asked her sister breathlessly. Together they studied the hollow, spiraling tusk. It was too long, unwieldy and awkward, but Syrena would master it, she was sure she would. The narwhal tusk was
hers
, just as surely as if someone had given it to her or left it there, at the tip of Skagerrak Strait, for her and only her to find. The horn was sharp as a sword and almost as long as her tail. Syrena experimented with different ways of clutching it. She swirled around the waters, jabbing and slashing at an imaginary foe. Using her own and Griet's hair, Syrena wove a long sheath to carry the weapon and slung it across her back. Before the day's end she had used it to spear a shark that had menaced the mermaids, bringing it down in a bloody heap on the seafloor, its monstrous mouth agape.