Chapter Nine
Priddy
had fallen off a cliff once. He’d ridden the Death Drop roller
coaster at Newquay once, too, and been dragged to the bottom of
Rosewarne harbour when one of Vigo’s stolen boats had
capsized.
This was
worse. This was impossible: he would die. Merou had bound their
hands with the weird blue-green filament—delicate as seaweed, tough
as steel—that grew from his wrists. His arm around Priddy’s waist
was a cable. They were going down.
So fast,
so hard. The great tail propelled them, surge after surge from the
fluke. Darkness extinguished the starlight. Priddy’s last vision
before absolute green-black night was the whip of bubbles back
towards the surface—his last breath, the one he’d instinctively
snatched as Merou dived. Blind panic ate him whole. His lungs would
burst. His skull must surely already have exploded, but for the
hole in his neck, somehow allowing passage of pressure from his
pounding brain to the water. He struggled in Merou’s grip, a final
fight-or-flight seizure even though without him he’d be lost,
tumbling forever in the lightless abyss. A howl built up in him,
the scream in whose aftermath he’d be forced to suck in water. Down
again, so fast, so hard...
Merou
spun him round. The tail ceased its propulsion and coiled around
him, holding him still. They helixed downward together on momentum
for five heartbeats more, and then they stopped—Merou stopped them,
gently, absolutely, and Priddy must have been already dead because
the water was full of lights, blue-gold orbs like a hundred aquatic
suns. They hung in the dazzling drift of them, suspended, and Merou
drew Priddy’s fringe out of his eyes, cupped his face firmly
between his hands and kissed him.
Breathed into him. Priddy took the sweet, clean inrush like
parched ground soaking up rain. He stiffened with the joy and
relief of it, clutching Merou’s shoulders, arching his spine. Merou
drew back. His eyes were wide, clear of their protective membrane
and full of the reflected suns—questioning, bright with amusement
and hope. Yes? Yes?
Priddy nodded. Oh, God, yes.
Tentatively he reached for Merou again, and this
time the kiss was different, raw need rising from the near-death
fear. Priddy could give something back.
Merou
shivered in astonishment. Sound couldn’t carry this deep but Priddy
heard his laughter anyway, felt it in the back of his throat. They
drew apart lingeringly, Priddy still clinging to his
hand.
He didn’t need to breathe. The one compulsion that had shaped
his existence from the moment of his birth was gone, switched off,
erased. His heart had slowed from its syncopating gallop and was
beating easily, his limbs warm and loose in the water, as if every
tissue in his body had been flooded with oxygen, enough to hold him
forever. Merou surveyed him in wonder, dark hair floating in a
corona against the lights. He stretched out the hand Priddy wasn’t
holding and gestured down again. Come with
me?
Oh yes. Yes.
There
was a city down here. That was what Priddy’s eyes tried to convey
to him, in the glimmer of a thousand drifting stars. He was
drifting himself, flying, lightly tethered to Merou’s hand. Elation
was blazing through him still. Released from gravity and the
demands of his lungs, the unceasing in-out that brought humans down
here with a tank on their back and a wedge of rubber thrust into
their mouths, he was insanely, dizzyingly free. Hallucinating too,
no doubt of it, but that was all part of the matrix, and he let the
barriers fall. That rock was a gold-plated dome. Beneath it dropped
a sheer cliff of basalt, too polished and perfect to be real, so he
allowed the dome to be part of a cathedral, perched on its
black-mirror cliff above other rocks that morphed as he looked at
them into towers, spires, a vast branching fractal of opalescent
roads. Beautiful archways sprang out of nowhere, bridges that
connected nothing to nowhere and served no purpose except the grace
of their architecture. Kelp groves became forests, dancing in the
current, the floating suns catching in their branches...
Too
much. He turned to grin at Merou, who smiled back at him and
released his hand. He turned a somersault in the water and took a
first strong swimming stroke of his own. The power of his own kick
astonished him. Tail or no tail, he could keep up with Merou here.
To prove it he thrust ahead, then whipped round in fright at the
thought of losing him. Oh, and he hadn’t seen him yet, not properly
in his merman form, not as he was seeing now! He was beautiful,
tapered from the waist into that majestic sheath of muscle and fin,
the scales—like scallops or shingling, seal-blue and bright copper
green—overlapping and shifting as he moved. Priddy swam back to
him, arms outstretched. Together they tumbled off the edge of the
basalt cliff, spiralling down towards the swaying seaweed
groves.
A palace
soared from the midst of them, or a sea-sculpted formation of
serpentine rocks. It didn’t matter which. Merou let Priddy choose
the way, between spires and outcrops and through the arch of a
window into a prince’s chamber. Ancient tapestries on the walls, or
just shifting colours of rock? Priddy could see both, then neither,
as he closed his eyes and drew Merou after him onto a great tilted
monolith, a fallen pillar covered with rich blankets or sea
moss.
What is this place?
Nowhere. Just the sea floor.
Priddy’s eyes flew open. He’d heard Merou speak inside his
head before, but this was different, not to be lain at the door of
imagination. Direct answer to a question, so Priddy was speaking
inside Merou’s head as well. You can hear
me?
Yes. It isn’t usually the way. They can hear me,
but...
They can’t answer back? Must be handy for you.
Priddy grinned. He should have wondered who
they were, how many
landlings Merou had borne off to his undersea lair. All he cared
about was the lithe strength enfolding him as he lay back against
the pillar, the arm behind his head, the immobilising sweep of the
tail. I see more than sea
floor.
What... What do you see?
It mattered. Merou was watching him intently.
Buildings. Bridges and towers—a whole city. Then
when I look again, there’s just stone.
It’s called Lyonesse. And none of your kind has ever seen it
before, unless... The strange dark gaze
opened hungrily. Oh, Priddy, stay here
with me.
He wanted to. He wanted to shed all the trappings of the upper
world. Suddenly it seemed impossible that he was still dressed in
his T-shirt and jeans. The storm of their arrival here should have
stripped his clothes off him and taken a layer of his landling skin
with them too. He could barely send words to Merou anymore—only
images, desires. Naked. Held fast in the
coils of your tail. Opened like an oyster shell and fucked, only
how...
Merou burst into laughter. He twisted: moved fast as a minnow
and peeled Priddy’s jeans off him, webbed hands supernaturally
deft. The T-shirt next, shucking him out of it like a bean from a
pod, and then, with a gesture so domestic that Priddy began to
laugh too, folding the garments and weighing them down with a
stone. Don’t want them to float
off.
Will I need them again?
Oh, fine man, don’t tempt me. Don’t...
He pushed Priddy back against the rock, encouraging the
instinctive lift of his thighs to clasp round his waist. Drew back
a little, caressing him: Look. See how I’m
different to you, and see how I’m the same. Don’t be
scared.
I’m not.
Well, you ought to be. You oughtn’t to believe me when I say
that our blood—the blood of the Mer—isn’t capable of bearing
disease. That you’re safe with me.
But I do believe you. Priddy rubbed
his face against Merou’s neck, fearlessly kissing the place where
the skin parted in a fronded slit. He chuckled, making Merou
jump. It’s not like you’re spinning me
some pickup line in a bar. Show me how you’re the same as me. Show
me how you’re different.
Differences first. Merou edged back far enough for Priddy to
see. The pattern of the scales across his belly wasn’t uniform. At
the pit of his abdomen, the place where his upperworld legs had
once begun, the mesh became intricate, like interlaced fingers or
feathers. He took hold of Priddy’s shoulders: arched his head back
in a spasm of pain, deep-laid joy and release. The mesh blossomed
open, a sea-anemone burst, and there he was: human, the same, long
thick cock fully erect and ready. Priddy reached down in
welcome. Look at you!
Strong lads have been known to faint at the sight of
that.
Oh, you’re a handful. Not a record-breaker,
though.
Not the size of it, you idiot! The arrangement.
Seems perfectly sensible to me. And
yet when Priddy took hold, he too had to fight a wash of vertigo:
Merou was warm and shapely down there, but slick with some kind of
oil. You’re... slippery.
Well, what do you expect? I’m excited. We don’t leave all the
work of lubing up to our women, you know—not like you
lot.
Your women... Merou, am I gonna meet your enraged missus on
the harbourside some day? Or a crowd of them?
Listen to me. Merou cupped his face
once more, offered him another of the life-rich kisses that sent
sparks flying to the tips of his fingers and toes.
I’ve taken you under the sea with me and breathed
for you. I can change from a fish into a man. Why do you assume our
reproduction is anything like yours? My closest contact with a
female is a brief explosion of my sperm over the eggs she’s just
left behind.
Priddy tried to absorb this. Don’t
you...
Yes, all the time, but it’s not connected to the way we make
our children. We only fuck for love.
Priddy surrendered. His white flag went up at the same time as
his answering erection—a total capitulation to this fantasy, to
Merou in all his sweet strangeness. A merman’s tail was pushing
between his legs, the fluke playfully enclosing and caressing his