Chapter 4
Lorn
“Father!” I called, finding him in the quarry below where he was harnessing one of the giant sea snails.
I swam down over the edge of the rock face, a school of fish that were sheltering near the edge darting off in every direction as I passed.
My tail twinged a bit as I worked to keep my movements as natural as possible so that my father wouldn’t spot how I still favored the wound.
It was a fruitless effort. I could see the way he pursed his lips from the far side of the quarry as he watched me approach.
Thankfully, the children playing on a nearby snail grabbed his attention, sparing me from whatever he was going to say to me as I approached.
“Amata! Marlen!” he called to the children. “Stay away from the shell openings!”
Marlen’s squeals as he swam up over the snail’s massive shell to get away from the lower opening only caused my father to narrow his eyes at him.
The snails were gentle but massive—their shells alone were taller than a fully grown merman—and the beautiful colors we’d been breeding into them for centuries made them a favorite of every merchild I’d ever known.
We used them for heavy labor, like moving rocks or hauling large cargo, because even though they were slow, they were incredibly strong.
When they were startled or felt threatened, however, they could close themselves up in their shells with surprising speed, and anything that was near their opening could get caught—and potentially severed—in the trap door of their shell.
“Give her some algae to keep her in place,” he instructed me, patting the shell of Teeny, the enormous blue and yellow snail he had harnessed before skulking off to give the children further instructions about safe behavior around the livestock.
I retrieved an armful of the string-like algae they preferred from a crevice in the rock face where we stockpiled it nearby and dumped it on the sand in front of Teeny’s face.
She’d had another blue and yellow sister named Tiny who had been part of our herd before she passed away a few years ago.
Their bright yellow eyes weren’t useful for much more than telling light from shadow, but the stalk-like tentacles that grew from below them sniffed out the pile of food immediately and she was happily munching away by the time my father returned to check the straps on her shell.
“What did you need?” he asked curiously as he worked, glancing over his shoulder to watch that the children were giving treats of seaweed to the magenta-colored snail named Bubbles that was resting behind him instead of climbing on her shell again.
Satisfied that they were obeying, he turned his full attention to me.
“Erwin asked me to tell you that they want the net for inspection,” I told him, knowing full well the protest he would give before he even uttered it.
“The company seal had been removed,” he grumbled, as if I wasn’t already aware of that.
Fishing equipment used by the landwalkers was meant to have an ownership mark on it so that if it were abandoned or if they were caught using it to poach, it could be traced back to the perpetrators.
It was one of the concessions their governments had made when negotiating the ability to fish in our waters at all.
But the net we’d captured a few days ago had no identifying information on it, something we were all angry about, including my father.
“The port authority wants to inspect it anyway,” I responded with a shrug. At least they cared enough to look at it, even if it wasn’t traceable.
“Fine,” he replied, turning again to check on the children.
The great magenta snail slurped an entire clump of seaweed from their hands into the fold of her mouth where she could shred it with her rasping tongue.
They erupted into fits of squealing giggles.
“Can you stay with the snails and mind the children until their fathers get here to direct the hauling?”
I gave him my best ‘begging grouper’ eyes.
“What?” he asked.
“I want to go with you.”
“Ocean’s depths,” he cursed on a sigh. “Fine, ask Erwin to come mind the quarry.”
The port authority on duty was a stern man of few words who stood at the end of a dock in the nearby boat harbor and wrote on a pad of paper with a pencil as my father gave an account with halting mouth-words of what had happened the night the fishermen came.
I’d always wondered what the symbols meant that the landwalkers wrote, and what it would feel like to write on dry paper.
Paper didn’t last long underwater, and even though we could use grease pencils to write on leather or oilcloth or chisel into stone for more permanent signage, most mer didn’t bother with reading or writing much.
Cloth and leathers rotted quickly, and algae and barnacles were a constant nuisance on stone, so unless it was enchanted runes, writing was simply too ephemeral to be much use underwater.
Obviously that made it fascinating to me.
“Every being aboard was a swamp goblin?” the landwalker on the dock asked, pausing his scribbling to look over his notepad at my father.
The two of us floated in the water at the end of the dock, bobbing in the low waves that made it past the breakers, my father with his head and shoulders above the water.
I exposed as little as possible in the glaring sunlight, keeping only my eyes and ears above water to see and hear the discussion.
“Yes,” my father verified.
“Yes,” I mouthed silently beside him, trying to mimic the way he formed his lips as he spoke, though my mouth was still below the water.
They conversed for several more minutes, discussing exact locations and times while I practiced shaping words without sound until the port authority lowered a basket into the water and my father loaded the ruined net for him to retrieve.
“Was there something you wanted to purchase?” my father asked me in our own language, after the man on the dock bid us goodbye and thanked us for our time.
He nodded toward the busy end of the harbor with boats coming and going and dockworkers yelling instructions to boats as they unloaded cargo onto large wooden cranes.
Even though I’d always watched the dockworkers and traders with curiosity growing up, the noise and activity of the harbor had usually overwhelmed me when he brought me with him in the past, but I was determined to endure it today.
I pulled out the three ugly pearls he’d patiently waited for me to dig out of my collection of goods before we came.
A bell was located at the heart of the shipyard, at the end of one of the numerous docks that held a bevy of market stalls.
There was a long rope that hung down to the water so that the oceanic peoples could get the attention of one of the runners for the market.
A young lorelai boy—one of the semi-aquatic cousins of my people who’d mixed with orcs—climbed down the ladder on the side of the dock when we summoned him with a loud clang of the bell.
My pearls were lumpy and dull, but they could be honed into something decent by someone with the right tools.
I set my expectations accordingly as the boy asked my father which of the merchants he wanted to trade with.
When my father turned to look at me, I’m sure he expected me to answer him in our language so he could translate, but I knew the common-tongue word for what I wanted.
I’d been practicing and was excited to try, so I released all of the water from my gills and inflated my lungs, fighting through the momentary feeling that I was suffocating from lack of water in my gills.
The air felt too hot and dry compared to the air we kept in sacs in our chest cavity, and forcing it through my vocal cords as I formed the words “a knife” felt as though I had that very object pierced through my throat.
The boy turned and climbed the ladder to go and find the knife seller, as if I had spoken perfectly and my throat wasn’t burning enough to cause my own water to leak from my eyes.
I coughed and gasped because my throat felt raw, like I’d swallowed a sharp shard of glass, and my father reached over to push me down into the cool water so that it soothed my delicate gills.
The annoyed press of his lips was only slightly gentled by him telling me, “That was well-spoken, but let me translate for you, Lorn,” in our own language.
My heart sank as I let myself drift to the rocky bottom of the harbor, stunned by what I had just felt.
I knew it was difficult, even uncomfortable, for us to speak mouth-words when we were young, but I never thought it would hurt that much.
Several moments passed while I gathered my bearings, and then I left, navigating out of the harbor and swimming along the coast. I turned toward the split where the ocean had reclaimed some of the shoreline and then the landwalkers had built a jetty of rocks to stop further erosion.
My father could speak for me to the lorelai boy. The knife he selected would be fine.
As I swam past the rocks that marked the entrance to the small cove the landchild played in, the tiny fish that lived in the crevices darted back into their homes, and I knew without having to break the surface that she wasn’t here today.
There was no song or splashing in the water, and the nearby fish hadn’t already been in hiding. It was too quiet here.
It was hard to understand why I felt so disappointed at the thought of not being able to speak with the landchild girl who sang to herself on the beach and placed flowers in my hair.
She was so expressive and interesting, and even though I could only understand some of the words she spoke to me, the fact that she tried felt meaningful, somehow, to me.
Even though the beach was empty today and all there was to listen to was the rolling waves and the chatter of songbirds, I dragged my body up into the surf and imagined that she sat next to me in the sand as I tried to piece through feelings that I could barely make sense of.
She had sung to me the last time I had visited, even though I hadn’t been able to ask with mouth-words, so it wasn’t only that I wanted to ask her to sing because she gave that to me freely.
Maybe it was simply what she represented—a land so foreign that I only knew rumors about its people and their way of life—and I couldn’t ask my many questions about the treasures I found that sank from above.
But I didn’t think that was it. I wanted to know who she was.
I didn’t even know her name. She’d placed flowers in my hair the way the sirens do, placing a wreath of flowers or coral on the venomous head-fins of the males they claim as their own for a time when they catch a mate.
My hair was seen as a strange feature by my people.
The siren who birthed me, my mother, was the only other mer that I’d ever seen with hair.
She was a formidable siren even though she was of mixed blood with some kind of landwalker, perhaps even the same kind as this girl.
Her long hair was even paler than mine, nearly the color of bones that had been bleached by the sun, just like the girl.
It made me feel the slightest kinship with the landchild who sang, like maybe she didn't find my appearance so odd, like the other children I’d played with did.
They were never mean about it, but their questions made it clear that I was different. Other.
The girl’s skin was very dark compared to mine, similar to the people who lived in the deeper parts of the ocean, but solidly colored throughout instead of the lighter undersides that the deep dwellers bore.
We had many differences… her teeth and claws were blunt instead of sharp, and she had legs, obviously.
She swam in a way that made me concerned for her safety in the water.
And she seemed strangely… soft. Or gentle.
I didn’t understand her, but I felt drawn to her.
Perhaps her songs were enchanted after all.
I shook my head. Who was this landchild, and why did she sing?
Was she trying to catch a mate as the sirens did?
She seemed too young for that. And why did her singing make me feel wistful, sparking memories that felt more like barely remembered dreams of being held by the softness of feminine arms and sung to every night by a voice with an enchantment so powerful that I could still remember it today?
If I closed my eyes, I could still see my mother’s long, fair hair drifting in the water, close enough to reach out and grab with small fingers, but I wondered if any of it was real.
Sirens kept to themselves, except for mating purposes, and only stayed with their merlings for as long as they were nursing.
They weren’t soft or nurturing. They didn’t sing to their babies.
Their song was a weapon and a lure, made for securing a bond-mate until their offspring were weaned or baiting intruders they decided had traveled too close to their territories.
I’d seen my mother from a distance many times, and her gaze always lingered on me for longer than the other children, but other than that, we had no interaction. Maybe my mind created these odd memories.
Either way, there was something strangely comforting about laying in the surf while this soft landwalker girl sat with me, singing tunes I couldn’t understand with her sweet, lilting voice, and watching the wind sift through the ends of her hair as it blew gently across her face.
I tried to swallow carefully, but the pain in my throat set off convulsive spasms as more water leaked from my eyes.