Chapter Eight #2
a mako or a white, you stood a chance—a very remote one—if you
could catch the bastard a hard enough thump on the nose. Christ,
though—this felt more like a serpent, one of the giant eels that
got caught in the nets and passed into infamy as grandfather
stories, tales around a beach fire on Golowan night. A coil of it
slipped around Priddy’s waist and clamped tight. Bubbles and foam
rushed past him and he broke surface with a breaching dolphin’s
force. Whatever had caught him just as suddenly let him go. On
reflex he started to swim, coughing and trying to clear his vision.
There were the stars and the bright heavens, bisected like Merou’s
unmarred belly with the silvery brush of the galactic
rim.
Merou
was swimming beside him. Priddy sucked an astonished breath and
went under again. Again something caught him—coiled around
him—raised him with supple, irresistible force. Not Merou, who was
calmly treading water, smiling incandescently. “All right there,
then, blue-eyes?”
“Merou!” Priddy threw his arms around him, not caring if he
drowned them both. Merou burst into laughter, not a bit
inconvenienced by the attack: seized him joyously in return.
Priddy’s world turned upside-down once more, the Milky Way swooping
down into the depths and the glitter-filled water soaring to the
zenith. The eel, the serpent, was rolling him over and over,
laughing all the time, and Priddy couldn’t be afraid, because...
“It’s you,” he cried out, the next time he could breathe. “You’re
back. You’re alive. It’s you holding me, isn’t it, with your...
with your...”
“With my tail,” Merou finished for him, taking pity. “Keep
still, wriggly landling, or I’ll scratch you up. The scales are
very sharp when they first grow back.”
“Oh, man, what the fuck
are you talking about? I’ve lost it, haven’t I?
This is a fucking dream.”
“Feeling is believing, my handsome. Let go your stranglehold on
my neck. Go on! I won’t bite.”
Heaving
great lungfuls of air, Priddy forced himself to unlock one hand and
slide it down Merou’s back. The skin was warm as sin and toast,
normal enough if normal meant bloody perfect, all the way down the
groove of his spine to his waist, and then to the opening crease of
his arse, which began right on time but then... “Shit!” Priddy
snatched his hand back. “You’ve got scales. You really have got a
tail.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. And you’re sitting on part
of it, so don’t freak out too far.”
Priddy
gave a barking caw of laughter. Keeping one arm hooked safely
around Merou’s neck—the top end of him, the part that still made
sense—he tried again, and this time dared to feel the great muscled
curve that had swept behind the back of his thighs and was
supporting him there. “How are you... How are you holding us still
in the water like this?”
“Great big fluke on the end. Whale-style, not fish-style,
perpendicular to my tailbone and totally flexible. Treading water,
you could call it, only...”
“Only you don’t have feet. Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“Calm down, you infant. Even Jacques Cousteau wasn’t as
overwrought as this.”
“You really did know him? So—wait...” Priddy tried to catch his
breath and bring his voice down an octave or so. “What does that
make you—immortal, as well as a mermaid?”
“Not immortal, no. I’d have died tonight if not for you. A
change on land is one of the few ways to kill us. And... there’s
nothing maidenly about me, as you’ll find out soon
enough.”
Priddy
shivered hotly. “Sorry. I scarcely dare ask what’s become of John
Thomas.”
“Oh, he’s in there. Just tucked away behind an armoured wall of
muscle and scales, like any sensible penis ought to be. Can you
please pay attention? This has to be done in the proper, formal
way.”
“What has?”
“Just a short ceremony. Landlings can’t be allowed to know
about us, you see, not unless they’ve done us a great
service.”
“But... doesn’t my dad know about you now?”
“Not at all. I’m just a drunken vision that will haunt him the
rest of his life. But you, Jem Priddy... Wait. What’s Jem short
for, when it’s a boy?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes, it is. You’d better tell me, or you’ll go down in the
annals as Jemima.”
“Jeremy, then,” Priddy growled. “And don’t ever call me that.
What annals?”
“Never mind now.” Merou cleared his throat and raised his
voice, as if something in the water or the diamond-blazing sky was
bearing witness. “Jeremy Priddy, you have done a favour for a
spirit of the sea. In consideration of such, I can now, by the
powers of the Mer in Lyonesse, grant you a wish.”
Priddy settled more comfortably on the great coil of tail.
He’d been cold for a while, but now he too was sin-toasty warm.
Maybe he was drowning, or in end-stage hypothermia, and somebody
else’s life was flashing in front of him. “An actual
wish?”
“Yes. Just like in a fairytale, or...” The tail gave a teasing
jounce beneath him. “...or when you were a little lad on Santa’s
knee in Trago. Come on—make it a good one. You saved my
life.”
“Technically I saved it twice. Once just now, and the other
day—”
“Crikey, did you bargain with Santa like this? That one doesn’t
count. I only needed saving then because you turned me into a
biped.”
“I did? How is that supposed to have
happened?”
“I tried to tell you at the time. You touched me. If a landling lays a hand
on us, and if we like the hand enough, we can change. Sometimes,”
he said ruefully, tightening his grasp round Priddy’s waist, “we
like it so much, we don’t get any choice.”
“I’m sorry.” Priddy didn’t mean it: he was overwhelmed with
pride, to have been the catalyst for such a transformation. “It
didn’t seem to hurt you then, though. Not much, anyway.”
“It’s fine if it happens in the sea. It just feels like
being... unzipped, or zipped up again, if I’m going the other way.
Did you think of your wish yet? Would you like a speedboat? Your
father’s heart, liver and lungs served up to you on a silver
plate?”
“Jesus, Merou.” Priddy pulled a face, but the thought of old
Vigo’s entrails didn’t really disturb him. What scared him was the
power of his wish. I wish you’d stay with
me forever, with your magic and your laughter, and your sweetness
that makes everything else I’ve discovered in this world so far
seem hollow and bitter and dry. But that
wish wasn’t fair. It involved someone else, and what if Merou
didn’t want to stay? If by some insane chance all of this was real,
and the wish had binding force, he’d be trapped.
Priddy
could only ask for something for himself. “I wish,” he said
faintly, leaning his brow against Merou’s, “that I’d never taken
those damn pills.”
Merou
became very still. Somewhere in the waters below, the great fluke
was sculling, place-holding them against the tide, but he stopped
stroking Priddy’s hair and tipped his head a little, as if
listening. “Ah,” he said regretfully after a moment. “Can’t be
done. Would involve swimming in time with an unqualified person,
and the inevitable paradox. If you hadn’t taken the pills, you’d
never have ended up here, so we’d never have met, and I couldn’t be
here granting your wish, or trying to. You see?”
“I do, but so far you’re a pretty crap Santa, if you don’t mind
my saying so.” And where would you have
got the speedboat from—whipped it out from under some innocent
family of five, three of them under eighteen and one a baby?
The thought glanced through Priddy’s mind then
flew away. He laid his head on Merou’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. That
was a stupid thing to ask.”
“Not at all. And I do have an alternative. Come with
me.”
“Where?”
“Not topside. Not back to your lighthouse.” Merou stroked his
hair, and after a momentary shiver at the feel of the webbing
against his neck, Priddy pushed back to find the touch. “I can
breathe for both of us, Priddy. Listen to me. My kind can store and
share a lungful of air for hours. We worship the air, just like a
desert-dweller would worship water. It was so hard for you, turning
down that dope. I can cleanse you. I can take all that pain out of
your bones forever, wipe away the addictive pathways in your
brain.”
Not an
alternative. The true essence of Priddy’s wish laid bare. “This is
crazy. How?”
“We live between the worlds. We make things change. Will you
come?”
It was a
matter of trust. If Priddy asked any more questions now, Merou
would vanish. Priddy knew enough about folklore and fairytales to
be sure of that. “Yes. I will.”
“Don’t you have any questions, you feckless boy?”
“I thought maybe I wasn’t meant to ask.”
“You should always ask, when a strange man’s proposing to drown
you.”
Priddy’s
pulse leapt. Was that what it meant, to have the pain and the
cravings taken away? “No,” he whispered. “I don’t have any
questions.”
Merou’s
embrace tightened, and it felt less like the grasp of a
supernatural sea-creature than a hug from a friend who’d found him
sitting desolate at home, and somehow knew everything and wanted to
fix it. “It was bad, wasn’t it? Worse than you ever tell anyone,
even yourself—life with Vigo, then life on your own. I’m glad you
didn’t die.”
“So am I. I’m glad I waited for you to come along and drown
me.”
“Not quite that bad. Have you ever scuba-dived?”
“No.”
“Good, because it’s nothing like that, and you’d just have
expectations. I need compression—lots of it—to trigger the
saturation of oxygen in my lungs. We’ll have to dive deep and fast,
and you won’t have time to equalise. So, to stop your inner ear
from exploding—trust me, lovely landling—I just need
to...”
Priddy
yelled and tried to jerk away. Something cold had stung his neck
just below the earlobe. He writhed in Merou’s grasp. A chilly
needle slid beneath his tendon, up and indescribably up towards the
delicate mechanics of his hearing, where surely it would pierce
something crucial, puncture and destroy him...
The pain
stopped. Something deep in his skull popped and eased, a profound
pressure vanishing, as if he’d had a head cold all his life without
knowing it and his sinuses had finally cleared. He sneezed noisily
and clapped one hand to the exit wound as Merou withdrew. “What the
bloody hell did you do?”
“I put a little hole in you with this creepy spike on my hand.
It’ll heal within a few hours, or...”
“Or what?”
“Never mind. Do you want to see the spike?”
“Shit, no. Yes.” Priddy grabbed Merou’s wrist and gave a wail
of fright. “Oh, my God, man. What are you?”
“Why is that more scary than the tail? It’s just a carpal
extension for humanely dispatching fish, and dealing with the
occasional odd job like you. It retracts—look.” Priddy stared in
horror as the thin, barbed spine withdrew. “There you go. You can
hold my hand in safety now, and believe me, you’d better hold on
tight. It’s time to go.”