Still she wandered, through cities great and small, through ruins and wreckages. Until at last she came to tiny village by the sea where the waves broke over a reef. And she wandered further still, to an even tinier place, where only a few shacks and cottages stood. She walked to the edge of the promontory and stared out. She watched forms duck and dive in the waters below, and after some time watching, she took the switchback path down to the pebbled shingle at the base of the cliffs.
She found a rock and sat, kicked off her boots and dipped her feet into the salt water, and sighed. The sounds of the sea, of the waves and their shifting and plaint, summoned in her a sense of peace such as she had never known. Then she took the harp of bone from her back and began to play. She played and she sang and soon the very waves were dancing to her tune, as if in turn for their enchanting her, she had bewitched them in return. And in those waves were forms, the forms she’d seen from the promontory.
Merfolk, male and female, came to listen; not delicate tiny things, not frail gems, but great muscular beings, proud and arrogant, with shining skin, flowing locks and eyes dark as the bottom of the ocean. After a time, when she was sure she’d gotten their attention, she ceased to play. Then, when all but one had drifted away she began to play once more for one was all she needed.
The male, for male it was, was pale as if the moon lived a little beneath his skin, his long hair the brown-green of seaweed, his eyes the green-black of a storm. The woman could see the tears of gills in his muscular throat, the light patina of scales across his flesh, the green-scaled armour of his long thick tail almost an entity on its own as it flicked behind him. At last he beached himself and lay sprawled in the shallows, untroubled by the cold of the winds, watching her intently.
After a little more time, she set aside the harp and went to sit by his side. She sat and they spoke, and they spoke and she sat, until at last he told her of a sea cave at the other end of the shingle, not so far away, somewhere they could be alone and not beneath the eyes of his brethren. And she went in through the spilt in the rock that looked as though the hands of a god had pulled the stone up like a drapery; and he swam up from the depths, into the pool that took up half the cavern, lit as it was with blue-green algae. And there they met and there they mated.
They met there day after day, and she did not need to sing him to her, not after that first time. He was enthralled and she was fond of him in her own way.
He was no prince of the sea, but a commoner (and only a commoner could have avoided his duties for long), yet he knew the secrets of his kind. He knew how the bounty of the oceans might be harvested. He told her all these things in the sanctity of the lovers’ confessional; he told her for lovers think that in sharing what is secret, they tie the beloved to them. Yet the untruth of this is only ever uncovered in the aftermath, and thus are covenants broken and hearts soon after.
He did not think she would find a use for the knowledge.
Yet he did not know her, he could not know how she hungered, how it had driven her across continents. He could not know how vaunting her ambition, how all-consuming. He could not know that even though she had found a place she loved, the promontory, the sea, that it was not entirely enough.
A place, she thought, to stay and to build. And a challenge, she believed, would be enough for her, were she to achieve it.
The village of Breakwater was so small, so far away, no one had laid claim to the land on the promontory, so she took it for her own. She employed men to make her a tower home, a square thing of no great magnificence but it kept the elements at bay, gave her a place to lay her head those days and nights when she did not choose a sandy pillow. And she had them dig a well, a strange deep thing, a strange wide thing, in the middle of the tower’s cellar, so deep that it went down into the waters below the rock, to where all the waters in the world are joined, and she had a master craftsman fashion a hinged gate whose bars were engraved with spells of entrapment, that could be hidden in the walls of the well, then sprung shut like jaws when the time was right. And a fine strong net hung beneath and a chute there was too, a mechanism that would catch anything that fell from above, then scooped into a channel that could be accessed by a small vertical tunnel beside the well itself. A means to harvest.
Her lover had told her of the ones who ruled the oceans, the sea-queens, how few there were, how powerful, how shoals came at their command, how the waters disgorged their treasure, how their tails were scaled with the truest silver, purer than anything dug of the earth. He told her how they might be called and caught, of the words and songs that might summon them to the singer. And she had listened.
And every day she asked him to tell her more and she scribbled those tales onto parchments, some she made into songs, some she burned as offerings. And at last she grew gravid and her belly swelled; she worried, a little, what this
