Deeper (17 page)

Chapter 25

I would have held you until we both sank to the
green darkness for good, but Che came, and prised you out of my arms, and pulled me up to the surface and held me there, For once I was very cold – maybe I’d turned into more of a human than I ever asked for – so he swam with me back to the beach and lay there with his arms around me, where I’d first lain with you, on the sand.  Where you were now, I didn’t know.

At first I wanted to swim out into the Deep Sea until I got tired, and then let the water and the fish take me.  But whenever I tried to slide away,
Che held on to me with strong merman arms.  He’d come into his full size in the months that I’d been with you, and lost his teenage awkwardness.  He still swam oddly, though – that’d be with him for life.  As you would be with me, I thought.

We didn’t eat much, either of us, what with
Che watching me, and me with my face to the sand.  After the fourth day, we were both very hungry.  Che hunted off the rocks and caught a fat whisker-face.  He ate it in front of me and didn’t offer me any, and that made me angry.  Just feeling something other than despair helped.  The next fish he caught, I grabbed off him and bit into.  We ate it together.

On the fifth day,
Caz came in her boat.  She’d been expecting you, on the mainland, and you hadn’t come, or answered her messages.  Che and I hid in the water off the rocks, on the far side from the boat.  She climbed up onto the cliff and stood staring around, shading her eyes, but she couldn’t see us lying just underneath the grey waves. 

Humans with more boats came, and a flying thing, scanning for signs of you.  I thought perhaps by this time they might find you, cast up on the rocks, your beautiful turtle eyes eaten
out by sea creatures.  I felt an urge to wave my hands in the air and cry out and bring the flying thing down on us.  If humans had been kind before, they wouldn’t be this time.  Maybe they really would skin me and hang me out for the seabirds to peck at.  I deserved it, this time. 

But
Che, again, pulled me under the water where the light was dim, and wouldn’t let me go till they’d passed out of sight. 

“
Where were you?  Were you here, all this time?”

“
There’s nowhere else.”

“But the channels..?”

“The channels are gone now”, said Che, “and the pods with them.  The water rose and covered us in the last storm, and now only a few islands are above the sea.  Our fresh water turned salty.  So the pods had to swim away.”

He pointed east.  I remembered that storm.  I’d watched it with you, out of the glass of the Trapped Moon, and felt not a drop of rain, though the wind shook the windows.

“What about Grandmother? “

“
Drowned, I suppose. Nobody knows.  The cave was flooded out before anyone thought the water would come so high.”

“
I’m glad.”

Che
agreed.

“
So then?”

“
So then I came here, to see what’d happened to you.  I hid on the cliff side of the Light.  I saw you on the beach sometimes.”

“
Did you see me when..”

Che
shook his head – something about the way I looked at him, I guess.  I’d become dangerous.

“
But suppose..”

I was going to say, suppose I’d mated with
Daniel, and we’d had mer-human pups, and lived together on the Trapped Moon till we were old.  It could have been.  If you were different, and not so..  Anyway, if it had happened like that, would you have waited forever, Che?

Che
dived, and came up behind me, his lips to my ear.

“
I knew you’d come back to the sea some time.  Mer can’t mate with humans, it’s not natural.”

So nobody expected anything good to come of it, in the end, but me, and I was wrong.  If only I was a stone, and could sink without effort out of the light.  Then being wrong wouldn’t hurt so much.

The flying thing flew away and didn’t come back, and the boats disappeared too.  We had the Trapped Moon to ourselves.  You’d said that another human would be along soon – but all during the rain, we were alone, and then when the sun came again, still no one came.  It was just as well, because neither of us could live in Deep Sea with nowhere to make landfall.  Che had found a cave on the cliff side of the island, but we much preferred to sleep on the soft sand, where the sun came up and warmed us in the morning.

In the
new year, we had our first pup, a girl, with a perfect tail and brown eyes.  I don’t know how that came to be, but maybe the spirits of the air took pity on us at last.  Bearing her was more painful than anything Grandmother ever did to me, and more beautiful.  Che taught our daughter to hunt, down in the bay, while I crawled up to the Trapped Moon and made marks on paper, just as you had.  I used the last of the paint, too, and finished my picture of the channels, and stood it up by the door to your sleeping room, so your totem could see it, maybe.  It’s been ten wet seasons since you left and no one’s been here.

Che
is much kinder than any other mer male I’ve known – maybe it’s being away from the pod and their endless tussles to see who’s the biggest and fiercest.  He doesn’t have to prove much, to me.  I love him dearly.

I’m happy. And you, you’
re dead and the sea has crushed your bones, so I guess we mer won, in the end.  Perhaps Grandmother would call it revenge.

Acknowledgements

First of all I’d like to say a big thank you to
my dear friend Melissa Cryder, who paints and draws beautifully
.  Second, to those who read my book in draft and gave me feedback - it’s a boring and thankless task, but I really really really appreciate it.  You know who you are - Mark, Hugh, Michael, Darla and others.  Third, to everyone who puts up with me droning on and on about my latest effort.  I notice, and I love you.

Thanks a million, all!