Page 2 of The Merman's Kiss
Lorn
Thelandchildwasbackagain, calling to the world with the song I thought might be her practicing for an eventual territorial battle. I wondered if she was very young for a landwalker, both because of her size and the inconsistencies in the pitch of her notes as she sang. I was young too, but she reminded me of the clumsy newborn fawn I’d seen last summer. The baby deer had fallen into the water and thrashed about as much as the girl had when I tried to guide it back to shore. It was so frightened that it had flopped around on dry ground once I delivered it to its mother, unable to find its footing for several long moments while the doe chuffed at it in distress.
This landchild’s song confused me though, because itseemedlike something I should understand—so similar to my own language that it pricked at my brain in a familiar way but there was no meaning in the pattern of notes that I could discern. It was like a baby bird first practicing its parent’s songs over and over again until one day it was strong enough to stake its own claim on the sky. Our own females—the sirens—sang often asthey were maturing, but only our youngest merling’s babbled notes weren’t correctly pitched.
I followed the landchild’s song through the water, abandoning the sea urchin I’d been trying to dislodge from the ledge it had wedged itself into, and tried to focus on enjoying her song for what it was instead of listening for meaning in it. My instincts made that difficult for me. Enjoying the song of a female from my own people was only for the lovesick or crazed. The marbled grouper that hovered nearby in hopes of making a meal of my urchin followed me for a short distance before turning back to the rocks where he resided. Perhaps he could retrieve the spiky creature that had ventured too close to our seaweed beds on his own.
Excitement at getting to see the landwalker up close again warred with my fear of their people, making my heart pound as I propelled myself ever faster toward her song. Why did she sing?
Her voice itself had no magic in it that I could tell, no siren’s lure like the females of my people, and yet I found myself entranced by it anyway. The simple, primitive tune and occasional off-key notes seemed to be sung for joy more than anything. For herself.
And that utterly charmed me.
I tried to stay unnoticed as I entered the shallow cove, but it seemed, as with last time, that she was watching for me, because she cut off her song as soon as she spotted me and partially surfaced above the water as though waiting for me to approach. She held no weapons and seemed unbalanced in the gentle waves, as vulnerable as a newborn merling. I considered swimming away, but eventually surfaced too—squinting in the blinding light and scrunching my face momentarily against the oppressively dry air—to find her watching me with a bright, happy smile. Her teeth were short and blunt, the same as her claws, and as far as I knew these people had no venom ofany kind. I didn’t know how long the legs of these drylanders weresupposedto be, as I’d only observed them from a careful distance before, but compared to my tail, her lower limbs were very small. Harmless.
Even so… she was a landwalker, and my people’s interactions with them were sometimes violent, depending on what their intentions were. More than that, she was female. That fact alone gave me no small amount of trepidation.
But she didn’tseemdangerous.
She spoke a few words with her mouth in that oddly flat tone of hers, but I didn’t recognize any of them. I’d tried this mouth-speaking in the past after watching the shore traders do it, but I wasn’t any good at it. What I wanted was to hear hersingagain.
Pressing air from some of the air sacs in my chest through my vocal cords and back again, I began to mimic the song she had been singing, only to cut my song off and drop below the surface again when she flinched.
Too loud.
I surfaced again, farther away from her this time, my heart racing, and began to repeat the notes more quietly, earning a flash of a confused smile and more strange mouth-words but no song. I almost smiled back at her, but then I remembered how she had reacted to my sharper teeth last time so I didn’t. She had liked my tiny carved landwalker figurine, though, so maybe more of my treasures would make her smile. I fished around on my necklace where I kept some of my trinkets and pulled out my current favorite—a small, round, flattened disk of metal that opened on the front to reveal a white plate inside—well, it used to be white—covered over in cracked glass. The plate had two metal lines above it, one longer than the other, that crossed in the center and pointed at strange symbols placed evenly around the outside of the circle. The metal was rusting, but underneath the corrosion on the outside were engravings that looked likevines and leaves. I held it up to show her and opened the metal door on the front, water pouring out of the crack in the glass. I didn’t know what it was, but I loved it.
The landchild looked at the object in my hand and squinted her eyes, the confused smile returning to her face. I offered my bauble to her, and she took it as gently as she had the carving before and made more mouth-words at me. She paused before switching to a different-sounding kind of mouth-words that reminded me of the ones that landwalkers on the shore used when we brought them special fish and shells to trade for goods. Some words I could pick out! But I didn’t understand the context. She pointed at the sky where the sun was and traced the arc of the sun with her hand while making words at me, but I didn’t know what “owrs” were, or a “pokket-wotch”, something about a ”tyme”. She seemed pleased though, and that made my heart happy. I would show her all my treasures.
She pressed the bauble—perhaps it was called atyme?—back into my hand, and I finally gave in to my nerves and bolted for the safety of deeper water, already planning what to bring her next time. I needed to spend more time listening to her mouth-words. Maybe she would sing more for me if I could ask her to with the mouth-words.
Weheardthemwhilewe were sleeping. These types of landwalkers always thought to come in the night, as if the darkness could hide them, but with the brightness of the moon tonight it may as well have been broad daylight to our eyes. More than that, their large boat wasloud. Wood creaking, anchors banging, sailors shouting…
My father reached out in silence to touch my shoulder, but I was already angrily unwrapping my tail from the seaweed thatheld me in place as I slept. The two elders were awake too, gathering the little ones from their fathers and securing the merlings with seaweed in neat clusters to keep them safe. A small handful of us left the shelter of the kelp grove together—five adult men, the two other boys in my shoal who were close to my age, Elias and Leo, and myself—each of us clutching our knives. Leo was three years younger than me and probably shouldn’t have been allowed to come, but he refused to stay behind, following his father stubbornly even though his face showed his fear.
I wasn’t afraid. I was mad… and maybe a little afraid.
My father gave a low call, telling me and the other boys to stay to the back of the group and well away from the surface and the sailors’ weapons, just before the splash of nets and cacophony of their weights dragging across the rocks on the bottom made it impossible to understand any more of his whistled notes.
When we gather our food, we can see how much we should take. If there is a cluster of oysters or a school of fish, we harvest only enough so that the population can still replenish itself—that is thewisething to do. If we collect too much, it won’t be there next time we are hungry. But these drylanders don’t bother to look beneath the surface of the water from their boats. They just take everything they can pull from the water, never knowing if it’s a little or a lot compared to what is left behind. We no longer allow them to fish in our waters, which is why they come at night. Their own government says they must go farther out from shore to gather their fish, or they can trade for them in the markets like everybody else. But loss of trade barely even ranks among our concerns.
When they pull in their nets, the landwalkers always use spears to subdue the largest fish so that the nets are easier to raise, and so much blood in the water draws predators we don’twant near our homes. Sharks and other largeeaterslearn there is food here—where our little merlings are kept.
We approached the landwalkers’ bulging net just as they began the process of hauling it up and grabbed hold of it in our claws, pulling and swimming downward with it as one, driving it toward the bottom of the sea with such strong thrusts of our tails that the boat above began to tilt. Shouts echoed from above, and the other boys and I released our hold and set to work on the braided strands with our razor-sharp knives, rushing to cut through the netting. The first fish began to slip through the holes we made and the rest started to thrash wildly as more space opened up inside the net, and then it was chaos as hundreds of fish fought for freedom in the small openings with our hands—each trying to break free as we tried to cut ever wider holes for them. They broke out the net as quickly as they could, a small trickle at first and then streaming out as we continued to work and suddenly the weight of it began to lessen, making it easier for the sailors to fight against our own pulling, and before long we were all at the surface, the boys and I still cutting netting and the older men still pulling and everyone shouting angrily back and forth with the landwalkers.
My father and the other men argued with mouth-words that their own landwalker laws forbade them from fishing here, that they were damaging fragile spawning grounds, and were spilling blood too close to our home. I didn’t understand the mouth-words of the drylanders because their accent wasn’t the same as the shore traders, but they wereenragedand jabbed at us with their spears. These weren’t the same kind of landwalkers as the girl on the beach or even the various types of shore traders I had seen, but much smaller people called swamp goblins with bald, round heads and bulbous eyes, and teeth more jagged than ours. They had ropes attached to the butts of their spears so that they could retrieve them from the water after they’d been thrown, butwe caught the ones they aimed at us and pulled them free from the boat rigging, which made them even angrier.
They had no idea how foolish it was to fish here or how lucky they were that we had discovered them and not the sirens. The sirens from the nearby islands would have no qualms about sinking this ship and everyone aboard if they threatened our people.
And sometimes, even if they didn’t.
A pulse of electricity in my fingertips and face told me something big was approaching fast, but between the frenzy of fish fleeing the nets and watching for spears splashing down around us, it caught me by surprise when I felt a sharp, slicing pain on my tail. A short-finned shark darted back into the darkness below me, leaving a shallow, bloody gash in my scales just above my largest fins. I gritted my teeth in pain and gave a shrill, whistled warning call to alert the shoal of his presence.
The rest of the group acknowledged my call and began casting quick glances to the perimeters to keep an eye out for the predator, but not my father. Even with all the fish blood in the water, he almost immediately tasted my own. His gaze flicked to me with anger and confusion written on his features. He looked me up and down, quickly spotting the wound marring my scales. Superficial injury or not, his rage increased tenfold in an instant, and drops of venom bloomed on the delicate fins that covered his head and sprouted from the spikes at the backs of his arms. He called instructions to the other men to finish gathering up the ruined netting and grabbed me by the wrist, pulling me away from the fray.
“I’m fine,” I protested with a low-pitched note, still wanting to help, but it didn’t matter. Merfolk have a reputation for being protective of our young for a reason. “I know the way to the witch doctor,” I conceded with a glum, water-filled sigh when it became clear I wouldn’t be allowed to stay.
“And if another shark comes,” he answered in frustrated, staccato notes, “can you fight it off alone?”
