Deeper (7 page)

Chapter 7

The
worst day of my life – well no, maybe there were worse ones following, but it seemed as if it was the worst at the time, as it always does - was at the close of the rains, when the rock pools were full of fresh water and any island that was more than a sand bank was green with grasses and prickly salt bushes. 

Every year, at the turning of the
winds, Father and the other pod leaders come to a Meet.  Each pod has its own channels, and islands, and we don’t often swim out of territory, because that would be stealing another pod’s fish.  But when we mate, it’s usually out of pod.  I don’t know why, it just is so.

“This Meet, you’ll
take a mate, Melur.”

Father wasn’t asking
, he was ordering, as was his right as leading male.  He lay on the wet sand, chewing on an eel Casih had softened up for him by chewing it herself first.  He still had teeth, but they were yellowed and chipped like Grandmothers and he couldn’t tear and bite as he used to.  His great dark-skinned tail was covered with sea-growth, and his face pitted by sand and ocean and flea-bites.  He was still the hunt leader of our pod, though, twice as big as any of us, and heavy, like a big old rock stuck in a mud pool.

“I don’t want a mate.”

I trembled, defiant, and rolled away quickly to avoid a following claw.  I’d never had back-words with Father before, not directly.

“She’s still very young,”
Casih hurried to speak, pushing fresh water towards Father in an abalone shell.  “Maybe it could wait till the next Meet.”

Father swiped at the shell and sent it skittering.  His pale octopus-eyes glared up at me through
a mat of silver-grey hair tied with the cartilage of shark pup.  He flicked the end of his tail, sending Dayang, who was tending to it with the scraper, flying backwards.  He didn’t look to see where she’d landed. 

“She’ll
take a mate or leave the pod.  I don’t want any useless females.  Melur’s played around long enough, she’s not a pup any more.  She’ll obey me or go. ”

I bit back angry words, looked at his heavy, crusted bulk and hated every inch of him.  He was as cold and stupid as one of those dead-eyed creatures you sometimes see float up from the far depths,
who crawl about in the mud eating each other’s flesh in the dark.  I could see Grandmother’s cruelty in him – perhaps they were related after all.  But he was Father.  All my sisters were afraid of Father, even Mother had been afraid of him.  I remembered the claw marks and dark bruises on her shoulders and neck, back when Father’s teeth had been good and strong.

The day of the Meet came, and the channels were thick with mer,
all the pods swimming towards the central sand banks, where the females had set out fish and sea weed to eat.  The pups played together in the water, making the surface a froth of bubbles and sandstorms.  Any fish caught in the lagoon during a Meet would have thought themselves pretty unlucky.  The tiny ones crawled about on the bottom, eating sand and crabs and small worms they found there.

My sisters who had babies –
Dayang, and Dawii – and Casih too, whose newest one was a few months now – lay in the sand watching the pups – though no biters ever made it in here, it was too shallow for them and reefs barred the way.  But you never knew when a biter might make its way in, or a stinger, and many of the children were too young to have really learnt what harms, yet.

The
females who had no mates, and the young males, eyed each other nervously.  Azura pretended to be interested only in her hair, as usual, and sat preening it and combing it, and flipping her tail from side to side to show off the rainbow colours she’d embedded so carefully over the last season.  A few of the males stared at her appraisingly, and I could see she felt the looks, but she didn’t look back, except for a short glance just to see who was paying attention.  Stupid vain thing!

Che
was there too, somewhere between the young ones and the adults.  He sat in the shallows alone, playing with someone’s pup, a grown male but not one of them yet.  The adults chewed on sea pepper, dreamy-eyed, and talked about hunts they’d been on and the prey they’d killed.

“Remember the time we took down a
sperm whale,” said Father – it must have been twenty years ago, for I’ve never seen mer bring back a whale, how would we pull it? - but Father’s never forgotten it.  “My spear was the first in its eye, and it must have thrown ten of us up in the air with the thrash of its tail.  But I hung on with my teeth and my claws to its back, and I rode it all the way out to deep sea – yes and brought it back when it died there..”

“I remember that,” said one of the mer men from another island – Orgge
i I think his name was, a fat, smiling sea-slug of a mer with a round face and wisps of red beard, unusual in us and ugly.  “I hung on to his tail – that was a wild ride!  We must have gone many lengths into the Deep – it took me a day to swim back to the channels. “

“Yo
u weren’t there,” snorted my Father.  “You were waiting here with the females, to cut up the meat.”

Orgge
i laughed.  He never minded Father’s slurs, I don’t think he even understood he’d been shamed – he was too stupid and dazed with the pepper. “Remember when we swam days out and saw the giant floater? As big as a blue whale, bigger maybe – and all lighted up with stars, and humans crawling on top of it like sand fleas.”

“
Humans and their floaters!”  Father flapped at the sand, which blew up into Orggei’s face.  “If we could take a whale, we could take a floater full of weak humans, if we wanted to, stars and all.  Their wooden islands are strong but once they’re in the sea they’re like wide-tails, ripe for picking.”

“I’ve taken a few, in my time.” 
Guntur spat a chunk of pepper into the sand, then scooped it back in again to chew again.  Guntur was Father’s long-time friend, gristled as he was himself, and his chest inlaid with pearl that his seven mates had collected over many years.  He had twenty two daughters now, and as many sons, and the last mate just dead and sanded.   “And got this, once.”

He pointed to a scar on his hip, just where the tail
fins began.  “They can bite when they have to.  I pulled him down though, and ate him just the same.”

Ate a human? I felt sick.  Eating a human would be like eating a mer, but with legs.  I was furiously glad that the human had bitten
Guntur – or whatever he’d done to him.  I wish he’d eaten him instead, or chopped him in pieces like Grandmother was always saying. 

“That yours?”

Guntur looked over at me.  I was too close to the males.  If I wasn’t careful one would lean across and slap me flat-handed, or growl in warning.  Mer females were meant to keep to their side of the beach, or mingle with the young males, eyeing one another up like shy sea turtles. 

“Get back to
your place, Melur.”  My father glared at me. 

“Don’t send her back yet
.” 

Guntur
stroked his sheath, and he and Father exchanged glances, the glances of old males who’d known each other half a century, and believed each other’s tales.  “My mate beached three months ago, and I’m lonely.  Maybe your girl could keep me company.”

He reached out his arm towards me, beckoning. 
Father jerked his head, and I wriggled over the sand towards him.  We don’t move much on the land, we can’t walk on flippers like seals, or legs like the turtles.  But we have strong arms, and can use our tails for pushing.  I didn’t want to.

“
Melur needs a mate.  She needs pups, she’s got far too much time on her hands.”

I knew he was talking about the last
while, when I’d messed up so many hunts, and unbraided my sister’s hair, and put a crab in my brother’s ear hole when he was sleeping, and gone down to the caves by myself – yes and out to the Deep, too.  I saw that Father knew that too, though he hadn’t bothered to say anything to me.  He’d just planned – this.

“What is she?”

Guntur fingered my back.  I shivered and shrank.

“Who
knows!  It’s nothing I’ve ever seen.  Some fuck up Dry creature.  She’s a handful.  I’d be well rid of her.”

They looked me over. 
Guntur smiled and stroked himself.  His penis grew out of his sheath and stood up at the base of his tail, like the tall tree on your floater.  Around the base of his sheath, green algae sucked and clung.  I don’t think Guntur scraped himself, or had his daughters do it.  He opened his mouth in a yawn, and inside I saw four sharp teeth, pointed but slimed with grey.  He didn’t use a tooth stick either.

“I’d rather mate with a
…. groper!”  I burst out, and then shrank and rolled to get away, because Father suddenly uncoiled himself and reached long arms towards me, snapping.  It was only his heaviness and age that stopped him catching me right then – I think I slithered as fast as I ever had, that day, while I could hear Orggei cawing uncomprehendingly behind me.  I jack knifed into the water, scattering pups on either side, and made for the open channels. 

I was young and fast, but Father was old and cunning and
angry.  He met me as I rode the current out towards the lagoon.  He took me by the back of the neck and bared his teeth in my face, and I thought he was going to kill me, and then perhaps eat me, for good measure.  His breath stank.  The yellow pools of his eyes burned in the sunlight. 

With his great arms he
pushed me down under the shallow water.  I thrashed my tail and twisted under him, trying to come up.  Compared to him, I was thin and tiny and weak.  I breathed in the sand that rose from the bottom, spat, turned my head to the light.  His bulk settled into me, pressing down.  Time passed.  I thought, now I’ll find out what it’s like to drown, like a human.  I didn’t need to breathe yet, but I soon would.  But so would he.  I lay very still under him, waiting for a chance to slip out.  If only I stayed very still, maybe he’d think I was already drowned, or, at least, submissive.  My lungs became tight.  I struggled and jerked.  My mouth opened to the water and his hands closed like the bite of a moray, clamped to my throat.  I flipped and scrabbled, and thought, now’s my time to die.

At last, when I became limp and blind to the light
, he rolled off and I floated up, and gasped at the burning air.

“You’ll do as you’re told,
daughter.  Don’t think I won’t drown you, next time.  You should think yourself lucky anyone’s interested in mating with you, with that thing on your back.  Couldn’t even get yourself a proper totem, could you.”

His wide, dark shape flowed away.  I lay there,
too weak to swim, drawing painful breaths.  I wished at that moment that I had been drowned.  I thought, soon, I’ll swim away to Deep Sea, and never come back. Never. I’d rather die out there.

Chapter 8

It was only Che that I stopped for.  I somehow knew that if I left the pod, I wouldn’t be back.  Not for Casih, not for any of my sisters.  Not even for Che.

I didn’t like the idea of going
away without saying goodbye.  Tell the truth, I didn’t much like the idea at all, but the line that bound me to home was weak and fraying.  Once, when I told you this story, Daniel my lover, you thought it was about being forced to mate with an old man I didn’t love. But love is rare among mer, despised even, and no mer female expects it.  When it happens, it brings destruction, jealousy, and fights between pods.  We don’t look for love or welcome it, like you do.

In your human world, the sea is the great freedom, where humans go to be away from the rules of the Dry.  To me the sea was bruises, and rules, and dying in pup while
Guntur looked about for his ninth mate and Grandmother dribbled over her spirits.  To me, you were freedom.

I’d made it too hard to stay, anyway
.  I’d questioned Father in front of grown males, and for that, I’d have to obey or leave.  If one mer, and that a female, insulted the leader of the pod and got away with it, who would follow?  Father wouldn’t have been the leader if he hadn’t known how to stay on top.

So I went to find
Che, to tell him I wouldn’t be back.  He was lying on the sand, a little separated from the others of his pod.  In the moonlight he looked like a lonely bird who’s forgotten to migrate with the others.

“You’re really going to Deep Sea?  You c
an’t live out there on your own!”.

“I’ll be alright,” I lied. “I’ll swim to the
Trapped Moon and my human will look after me.”  As if I’d rely on you, who didn’t even know I existed.

Che
just looked at me.  I don’t know what he was thinking, but it must have been hard for him.  He put an arm around my shoulders and we looked out towards the dark.  Mer don’t like to swim in the night, when you can’t see what’s circling underneath.

“
Sometimes I wonder if you want to be one, really.  Ever since you saw them you’ve been different.”

That was a thought I’d had before
. 

“I don’t belong here really.  Maybe
I’m a human in mer shape.  Maybe some humans are born in the sea and all they want to do is be human but they’ve got their tails and so they’re just stuck – like this.”

Che
laughed shortly.  “And maybe some poor mer are born in the Dry and all they want is to get back to the sea and be with their own kind.”

I liked that idea.  Maybe you were really a mer.  Maybe that’s why I
wanted to be near you, why I desired you.  It made a sort of sense.  Or no sense at all, really.

“You should ask Grandmother.  She could speak with the spirits, maybe ask them
..”

His voice trailed.  I smiled
crookedly.  For almost as long as I could remember, I’d sneered at Grandmother and her spirits.  I’d never seen a spirit or heard one or had one pull my hair.  And yet our world was crowded with them.  The Rain Spirit, of course – where else would the life giving rain come from – and the spirits of the Air, that called storms and then flattened the winds on the surface of the sea – and the Crusher – Father’s guiding spirit, who chewed up rocks and spat them out as sand, and crushed the bones of mer among the bones of fish and the shells of little soft things. 

“Ask them what?”

“Ask for help,” said Che. Maybe he hoped they’d help me become an obedient, dull witted mer female.  If so, he was dead wrong. “The spirits know things that we don’t.  If you ask, maybe..maybe..”

I think
Che’s maybe was different from my maybe.  But he got his wish in the end.