Girl at the Bottom of the Sea (5 page)

“Oh this is so nice,” Sophie murmured, finding herself lying on a vent that bubbled soothing hot water all over her. “Like a spa.” Sophie had never been to a spa, but she had seen pictures in magazines of women looking impossibly relaxed, with mud on their faces and slices of cucumber on their eyes, soaking in a tub. And Sophie sure did have mud on her face—both she and Syrena were streaked with it.

“Are you comfortable, Sophie?” Syrena asked.

“Mmmm-hmmmm,” the girl mumbled.

“Very good. Then I will sing to you. Heal you, like my kind have done for generations.”

Hovering over Sophie, with her talisman floating down until it bumped gently into Sophie's own, Syrena began her song. It ricocheted off the mountain range, its power multiplying with echoes. It engulfed Sophie as completely as the water, becoming one with the water and soaking into the girl, streaming into her ears, her nose, her mouth.
Heaven
, Sophie thought.
This must be what heaven is.
The sound moved into her bones and made them whole again, turned them to song. Sophie was the song, the song was she and she was everything. What a gift it was, the mermaid's harmony. Sophie had thought that a mermaid's song was something that washed over you; now she understood it was something you
became
. Sophie was Syrena's song—and Sophie was healed.

“Oh!” Sophie cried when the last bit of echo had faded into the darkness. She flung her arms up around the mermaid's neck, buried her face in her hair, the source of her sustenance. It was as if Syrena were the ocean itself, and everything it had to give.

“Okay, okay, okay, now now,” Syrena peeled her charge off of her. “Not too fast, not too fast, okay? Your bones are whole, but they weak like baleen, okay?” The mermaid brought the brush back down across her teeth and flicked them with an opal fingernail. “They still weak. You will lie here and eat the minerals in the water, you will soak in the salt and I will sing and we will talk.
Dobrze
?”

“Dobrze,” Sophie agreed, effortlessly translating and speaking the mermaid's Polish. As she reclined upon the vent, Sophie became aware of the nutrients in the hot water, microscopic shrimps and algae, and it was as if she were lounging in a giant pot of stew. She drank from it sloppily, without baleen to strain the crunchy bits of cooled lava. Soon she began to enjoy the bite of the lava, the smash of glass and crystal beneath her teeth.

“Is good for you, too,” the mermaid nodded approvingly. “You have the intuition. Your body tell you what it wants. Lava is good medicine—iron, calcium.” She plucked a porous black crumb from the earth beneath her and popped it in her mouth, sucking on it like a candy. The molten lava above them glowing like candlelight, the two fell into a soft and salty slumber.

Chapter 5

T
hough Syrena's mother, whoever she might be—mermaids never knew what batch of eggs they'd hatched from, since they were raised and nurtured by the entire village—had had the run of the ocean for all her long life, Syrena was born into a world that was struggling with the idea of boundaries. Borders. For the first time there were places the mermaids could not go. Of course they'd learned to avoid the lairs of sharks and other unfriendly beasts, but this was different. As the humans above them carved out trade routes, highways that took them right into mermaid territory, so the mermaids' landscape shrank, carved by the wake of the great boats streaming above them, strange waves that came not from the moon but from the cleaving of the waters by those terrible vessels.

And terrible they were. With each passing season they had grown more majestic, their sails now big as clouds, their hulls built with the wood of a whole forest. No longer just a single cannon but a
row of them edged each boat's decks. With great caution the mermaids snuck above the waves and spied the great ships fearfully. By now they understood that the humans fought with one another frequently, and that the cannons were there for them to destroy each other, not the sea creatures. But the mermaids also knew that the humans would be as quick to fire at them, should any of them show their faces.

As the ships sailed past the edge of the mermaid village, their captains would order themselves tied tightly to their post with lengths of rope, lest the mermaids begin singing and drive them mad. The rest of the crews lingered by the cannons, itching to fire. And fixed to the bows of these boats were statues carved of wood in the image of the most beautiful mermaids, hair streaming and breasts perky, a long fishtail of many colors undulating beneath them. The mermaids were enchanted and baffled by these likenesses. Why, if the sailors meant them harm, would they decorate their precious ships with their image? It infuriated the elders, who took it as foolish disrespect, and they suggested that the villagers crawl upon the rocks and sing the ships to their doom. How dare they use the magic mermaid image to appease the sea, as if the mermaids were
not
the sea?

Many other mermaids agreed, and for a time a secret cadre of them would slip above the waves to torment the sailors who would create such things. In return, cannon fire crumbled the rocks they loved to lie upon to sun, and ships were torn into by the broken rocks and sunk below the surface. Then the mermaids, old and young alike, were left
with the spectacle of these ruined vessels crashed down in the middle of their village, heaped with drowned sailors.

The tenderest of them wept at the tragedy, and even the hardest could see how wrong it was to bring such destruction, whether to mermaids or to men. So the mermaids packed up their shells and spears, their instruments and hair combs, the costumes they wore for dancing and the tools they made for building. Heaping their things onto giant clamshells, they wove ropes from weeds and hair and lashed them to the shells, passing the reins to a pod of dolphins who had offered to help. With squeals of pleasure, the dolphins tugged the clam-sleighs through the waters, for dolphins see even the most tedious task as play; everything makes them happy. The mermaids swam alongside them, scanning for a home deep enough to elude the humans, yet not
too
deep. Living in the very depths of the ocean is not healthy; the darkness and pressure weigh heavily on the mermaid mind and bring about a great and creepy depression.

Into the North Sea swam the mermaids, eventually coming upon a raised bed littered with boulders and rocks, the debris left behind by a long-ago glacier. “Oh!” The most enthusiastic among them clapped their hands and beat their tails, imagining what they could build from such raw materials. Forts and caves, crooks to lounge in, jumbles to hide the ephemeral castles of mermaid foam that held the eggs of their offspring.

“It's too high,” grumbled the elders.

“And so the ships will avoid it,” another countered.

“It is made for us!” cried most of them. “A gift of the sea!”

Finally, it was decided: the mermaids would claim as their home the sprawling Dogger Bank, as the humans called it, but as a precaution against ships and their blood-hungry humans they would dig a great valley of trenches nearby, a place for them to flee should trouble come to the village.

A new chapter of industry began for this pod of mermaids. The tougher among them, the ones who enjoyed wrestling sharks and getting into tangles with giant squids, swam out to deeper sea, and with shovels fashioned from shell and bone they began to dig deep furrows into the ocean floor. Flipping piles of mud from their tails, they watched the walls of earth rise around them as they dug deeper and deeper.

“How do you feel?” the mermaids would inquire of one another on their lunch and snack breaks. Munching on mackerel and cod, cracking open shellfish with their sharpened canines, they considered the question.

“Quite well,” one might murmur, “but I can feel a sort of flat doom coming on like a sneeze.”

“Me as well,” another mermaid would nod. And so after they fed, they pushed silt and mud from the banks, raising the trenches to a happier level.

“This is perfect!” a worker affirmed at last, wriggling around in the lush, wet mud, sifting the nutrients in the silt through her baleen happily. “This will be a great place to hide if we must!”

It also proved to be a great place for the mermaids to find food.
The humans had begun to hang nets from their boats, allowing them to drag in the wake of their vessels, scooping up a bounty of creatures. But as they passed over the trenches their nets would catch and pull, sticking in the ditches until the sailors were forced to cut them loose. The mermaids would find wonderful bundles of fish waiting for them, as if dropped by a benevolent sea goddess. “Devil's Hole,” the fishermen came to call it, and worked to avoid the mermaids' hiding place. But such a wide spot was hard to avoid, and so it became a regular mermaid task to journey out to the trenches and gather up what the fishermen had dropped.

LIKE A HUMAN
child, Syrena had no memory of her life as a tadpole, no idea how she had escaped being gobbled up by a mackerel or trapped in the mouth of a clam. She may have been a wily baby, or she may have only been lucky. All she knew is she made it to the village, led by that mysterious instinct that had always led baby mermaids to their village.

Syrena's first clear recollection was of a village meeting during which the passions of the mermaids ran high enough that it seemed they began to produce their own currents and raise the water's temperature. The issue was whether or not the mermaids would stop laying their eggs and creating more mermaids.
“Preposterous!” many cried. Laying eggs was simply what mermaids
did
, like singing and building villages, like riding dolphins and shedding their tarnished scales for the beautiful, gleaming ones beneath.

“How can we
stop
laying our eggs?” one mermaid asked, baffled. It was like asking their gills to stop filtering oxygen from the waters, asking their hearts to stop beating, their hair to stop growing.

“We will leave them to the sea,” an elder spoke grimly.

There was a gasp from the shocked, and stoic nodding and mumbles from those who believed they must freeze the growth of their village.

One of the warrior mermaids rose up from the clamshell on which she'd lounged. “I have traveled, and I have seen many things and spoken to many other mermaids,” she began. She was tough and fearsome, with great scars lacing her tail. Her hair was wound around her head and knotted like a turban, and her eyes flashed. A jagged shell dagger topped with a sea-monster fang was bound to her muscled arm with shark leather. The village grew silent with respect, for this mermaid had saved many of them from the attacks of sea beasts. She had helped to build the structure they were gathered under, she had helped to dig the trenches and harvested the fish, and she had ventured far into the sea, even during this treacherous time, to monitor the travels of the humans, their movements across the oceans.

“I have swum south and seen the most terrible of ships,” she continued. “They are great floating villages, filled with people the humans have stolen. They take their own kind from their homelands and shackle them in the bowels of these ships and sail them across our
oceans, far away from their homes. The ships are full of misery and disease. They trade their own kind the way we trade pearls or bone. They beat and torture them and make them work like animals.”

“Their own kind?” the mermaids repeated, looking about, confused. “Other humans? You are certain?”

“Men and women, even children. Chained to the boats as if they were cannons, not living creatures.”

“If they do such things to one another, what would they do to us?” an elder exclaimed, and the warrior turned to address her.

“I can tell you,” she said. “In the east, the fishermen are hunting our sisters like whales. For food.”

“Food!”

“They think they can eat our magic,” she said. “In the south, the mermaids who try to free the captured humans have been slaughtered, their tails nailed to the ships as a warning.”

At this news, the tenderest among them began to cry, while the toughest grew even harder against the humans.

“Closest to us, in the west, mermaids have been captured and put to terrible purpose. The men try to keep us as wives—”

“Out of the water?”

“Yes, on the land. Kept in a house, like a human wife. Or kept in a filthy tank, shown at fairs like beasts.”