Chantress Fury

by Amy Butler Greenfield

  I could’ve asked the question of any of them. But it was Nat I was looking at.

  Even in the dim light I saw his face change. When he answered, his voice was guarded, almost steely. “She isn’t a woman, Chantress. She’s a mermaid. And she’s gagged because she tried to kill us.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  ONDINE

  I stared at Nat, my anger spent, but the pinnace shifted, and we were forced apart. By the time we came alongside the Dorset again, there was no going back to that hopeful moment when he and I had first laid eyes on each other. Nat was no longer near the rail but stood some distance away, speaking with a member of the crew. He didn’t look in my direction at all.

  A wave of sorrow, almost of grief, went through me. You really must speak to him, Sybil had said. And now we’d met, and it had all gone horribly wrong.

  Giving in to my emotions would accomplish nothing, however. Instead I concentrated on getting us all over onto the Dorset—especially Sir Barnaby, whose gouty leg proved troublesome.

  Once everyone was on board, the King made introductions. I was already acquainted with the Lord High Admiral, a bluff man of forty or so, with skin like leather. Standing next to him was my old friend Sir Samuel Deeps—King’s councilor, dandy-about-town, and current Secretary of the Navy. This was the first time, however, that I’d met bull-necked Captain Ellis and frail Dr. Verney, both of the Dorset.

  Once courtesies had been exchanged, we gathered around the barrel, which was sloshing with seawater.

  Seeing herself surrounded, the creature submerged, retreating in the only way left to her. Her long silvery-green hair floated on the surface, partially obscuring our view. Still, you could see that she had a woman’s head and a fish’s tail, and that tight ropes bound her arms and torso. In the light of the lantern, her skin was luminous; the scales near the surface glowed.

  She wasn’t human. But when I saw the rope cutting into her skin, I bit my lip.

  She’s dangerous, I reminded myself. A killer, from what Nat had said. And the rope and the gag didn’t seem to bother anyone else. They were watching the mermaid with dispassionate eyes—all except Penebrygg, who looked upon her with something close to reverence.

  “Miraculous,” he breathed. “A true ondine.”

  Ondine? I looked up at Nat, who was standing across from me. “I thought you said she was a mermaid?”

  “That’s the layman’s term,” Gabriel cut in. “Those of us who have read the great Paracelsus would more properly term her a water elemental—that is, an ondine.”

  “Or undine,” Sir Barnaby said.

  “Or nymph.” Sir Samuel flourished his cape. “My edition translates the term that way.”

  Captain Ellis and the ship’s doctor looked confused. So did the King and the Lord High Admiral.

  “Or we might just use the old English term ‘mermaid,’ ” Nat said calmly, “whether or not we’ve read our Paracelsus. Then everyone will understand what we mean.”

  “There’s much to be said for that,” Penebrygg agreed, but even in the dim light I could see Gabriel looked a little annoyed. There had never been any love lost between him and Nat.

  “I prefer the terminology of Paracelsus,” Gabriel said in his best aristocratic manner. “After all, he was the first one to look at the matter scientifically, to understand that each of the four great elements has its own associated spirits—”

  “Ondines for water, salamanders for fire, gnomes for earth, and sylphs for air,” Nat said.

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow in surprise. “So you have read him.”

  “Yes. An interesting theory,” Nat said. “But short on evidence.”

  Gabriel looked as if he were about to argue some more, but Sir Barnaby cut in with a question for the ship’s doctor. “Tell me, how long can she stay down like that?”

  “Much longer than a human can.” A slight man with a scholar’s stoop, Dr. Verney consulted his memorandum book. “We’ve clocked her at a maximum of seventeen minutes and twenty seconds. But that was earlier in the day. The periods are noticeably shorter now.”

  “Yes.” Deeps had his own timepiece in hand. “The last one was only four minutes and thirty-six seconds.”

  “Interesting.” Sir Barnaby leaned forward on his cane to get a better view of the creature. “You think she’s weakening, then?”

  When I’d first met Sir Barnaby and his colleagues, they had looked at me in just such a way—as a curiosity, an oddity to be tested. Resentment flickered in me at the memory.

  “If she is,” I found myself saying, “maybe it’s because the ropes are tied too tight.”

  “Too tight?” The King frowned. “Do you think that’s so, Captain Ellis?”

  The captain’s jowly face reddened at the mere idea. “If we loosen them, she’ll thrash herself right out of that barrel and into the sea, and then we’ll all be at her mercy again. She’s a killer.”

  “How exactly did she attack you?” I asked.

  “She tried to wreck us,” Captain Ellis. “She and her kin. And if Lord Walbrook hadn’t been so quick-witted, they would’ve succeeded.”

  “Kin? You mean you saw more than one mermaid?” Penebrygg asked.

  “Three by my count,” volunteered Dr. Verney.

  “By mine, too,” Captain Ellis said.

  “And this was near the mouth of the Thames, was it not?” the Lord High Admiral put in. “A treacherous place at the best of times, with sandbars and strange currents. A man must know what he is doing to get by them.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Turning to me, Captain Ellis said, “I can show you the place later on the map, if you like.”

  “And when did it happen?” I asked.

  “This morning, just after dawn.” The captain’s voice turned grim. “I was steering the ship myself, with my best hands to help me. That’s when we heard the singing.”

  “I heard it too,” the ship’s doctor said. “Such exquisite music—I have never heard the like.” He glanced shyly at me. “Though I have never heard a Chantress sing.”

  “They’re nothing alike,” Nat assured him. “Chantress songs sound rather uncanny to our ears.”

  Norrie had always said they sounded eerie. I’d never known before what Nat thought.

  “But the mermaids’ song was beautiful beyond words,” Nat went on. “Beautiful enough to drive men mad, in fact. Which is exactly what it started to do to us.”

  “To you, too?” Penebrygg asked.

  “Luckily, I was below deck when it began, so I could barely hear it,” Nat said. “It was only when someone in the cabin next to me shouted something about mermaids that I looked out through the porthole. When I saw them, I remembered the story of Ulysses and the sirens, the one in that dog-eared book you used to teach me Latin.”

  “Did you indeed?” Penebrygg seemed pleased.

  Nat nodded. “And it’s just as well I did. I didn’t have any wax to hand, as Ulysses’s men did, but the wool stuffing in my bolster served almost as well, once I tore it up. I shouted to the others below deck that they should plug their ears too, and then I ran up to the deck and plugged the ears of our captain here, and as many of the men as I could reach. Most of them recovered their senses quite quickly—and while they turned the ship, I went after the mermaids, with the help of Dr. Verney and a few others.”

  “One of the creatures was by the shore, but the other two were just off the bow,” Dr. Verney said. “We threw some fishing spears and hit one of them. The other we caught with a net.”

  “Once we got her on board, we gagged her,” Captain Ellis said. “And then we had to figure out where to keep her.”

  “We wanted you to see her,” Nat said to the King, “but I was afraid she would die if we kept her out of the water much longer. So we filled a barrel with seawater.”

  “A good thought,” said Penebrygg.

  “But she knocked it over the first time with her thrashing, so we had to tie her in—”

  “And very slippery work
it was too,” Dr. Verney added. “Like an eel, she was . . .”

  While they were talking, the mermaid came up for air. Her eyes were downcast, and the lids were red and puffy, as if she had been crying.

  A trick or an illusion, perhaps. But the other thing I saw was most definitely not an illusion: the gray, wadded gag in her mouth, and the tiny spots of bright red blood where the water-soaked rope chafed against her cheeks.

  So mermaids bled as we did.

  “Three minutes and forty-eight seconds.” Deeps clicked his timepiece closed.

  “Fascinating,” Sir Barnaby said. The ship’s doctor made a note in his memorandum book.

  No one else seemed to notice the bleeding.

  Across from me, Nat said, “Some of the crew were all for killing her, but of course we didn’t let them.”

  “Quite right,” said Sir Barnaby. “Much better to study her while we can. Think of all we can learn. No one’s ever had a chance to experiment with a live mermaid before.”

  My hands clenched. She tried to drown the ship, I reminded myself. She tried to kill them all. But killer or not, I felt ill. What kind of experiments did Sir Barnaby have in mind?

  “That wasn’t what I meant, Sir Barnaby,” Nat said.

  I was relieved to hear it, but my relief diminished as Nat continued speaking.

  “I wanted to try to communicate with her.” He looked at me over the top of the mermaid’s head, his manner carefully impersonal. “Perhaps you can find out what her motives were, and if she and her kind have more attacks planned.”

  “An excellent idea,” the King said.

  I stared at the mermaid’s bleeding face. “You mean you want me to interrogate her?”

  “Yes,” said Nat.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SISTERS UNDER THE SKIN

  The mermaid raised her head and fastened her pale sea eyes on me. Could she understand what we were saying?

  “I wouldn’t know how to begin,” I told Nat and the King. “Even without the gag—”

  “The gag stays on.” Captain Ellis crossed his bulky arms. “She’s done enough damage already. Two of my crew still haven’t recovered their senses. I’m not taking any chances with the rest.”

  “It seems the wool stuffing worked better for some than others,” Dr. Verney explained. “Or perhaps they were just more vulnerable to begin with. Either way, we can’t afford to let the mermaid sing again.”

  “Not on the ship, no,” Nat said. “I propose we move her barrel to the Greenwich cellars. She shouldn’t be able to do much damage there, even when the gag comes off.”

  The wind was picking up. I felt the Dorset rocking beneath me. The mermaid felt it too, I think. She turned her wan head in the direction of the breeze, and her tail fin swirled limply in the water.

  “Are you sure she could tolerate the move?” I asked doubtfully. “She looks quite unwell to me.”

  “To me, too.” Dr. Verney looked down at his memorandum book. “Judging from the evidence we’ve collected so far, she’s weakening quickly. The strain of the move might kill her.”

  “Well, we can’t have that,” said Sir Samuel. “If she dies, we won’t learn anything.”

  “True, true,” the King said worriedly. “Chantress, can you suggest another course? Is there any other way we could learn her intentions?”

  The mermaid was still watching me. Just looking into those sea-washed eyes was enough to make me feel that I knew her somehow, that we were sisters under the skin. . . .

  But that was pure imagination.

  “I can’t read her mind without moonbriar,” I said. “And we don’t have any.” The last vial had been destroyed in full sight of the King’s Council last year.

  Penebrygg said consolingly, “Never mind, my dear. There must be another way of approaching the problem.”

  “Yes, indeed.” Sir Barnaby gave the mermaid a speculative glance. “If we could engineer it so that she could talk but not sing, we might be able to get something out of her. Perhaps if we experimented with her vocal cords . . .”

  My own throat convulsed.

  “No.” The word flew out of me. Everyone turned to stare at me, and I realized my fists were clenched again.

  “Chantress?” the King said.

  “There must be another way.” As I looked into the mermaid’s eyes, I felt her fear almost as if it were my own. Her fear, and her longing for the sea.

  “You’re not going to take the gag off, are you?” Captain Ellis said, a little suspiciously.

  “We’ve already settled that point, I believe,” the King said. “Tell me, Chantress. What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “I want to listen.” Now, where had that idea come from? Never mind. It was worth pursuing. “To listen to the mermaid the way I listen to water.”

  Nat looked intrigued, and so did Penebrygg. Everyone else looked confused.

  “But with that gag on, she can’t make a sound,” the Lord High Admiral protested.

  “Not to your ears, no. But I can hear things in water that no one else does. I can sense what it wants and needs, and what tricks it might play—all without it speaking a word.” I nodded at the mermaid. “The same might be true of her. She’s a creature of the water, after all. And if Paracelsus is right, you could even call her the spirit of water.”

  Gabriel nodded at the mention of Paracelsus. “An interesting idea.”

  “Interesting, yes—but will it work?” Sir Barnaby questioned. “If you were going to hear something, Chantress, wouldn’t you have heard it already?”

  “It’s hard to listen when there’s so much chatter,” I said. “We’ve hardly been silent a moment.”

  “Then from now on we’ll be as quiet as monks,” Nat said.

  The others followed his lead, even the King. Captain Ellis sent an order down to the crew to keep still belowdecks. A few minutes later, all you could hear was the wind in the rigging and the quiet lap of the Thames against the sides of the frigate.

  I looked at the mermaid, and she looked at me—and I gave myself over to listening.

  At first I heard only the water in the barrel and its vexation at being contained. Round and round it went, an endless circling melody. But then I caught a glimmer of something else, a chilling music that told me that something in the barrel felt hunted; something felt afraid. And it wasn’t the water.

  Sir Barnaby leaned forward again, as if he wanted a closer look at the mermaid.

  With a splash, she submerged, trailing a line of bubbles. The music came for me again, more powerful this time, panicked beyond reason.

  “Back,” I said. “Everyone needs to step as far back as you can.”

  Sir Barnaby looked annoyed, and so did the Lord High Admiral and Captain Ellis. But Nat and the King motioned for everyone to step well away from the barrel.

  Safe, I tried to communicate to the mermaid. It’s safe. But I’d lost all connection with her.

  Frustrated, I wrapped my fingers around the edge of the barrel. She was right there in front of me, but I couldn’t reach her, and I didn’t dare touch her, not when she was so frightened already.

  The water in the barrel bobbled. As it washed over my fingertips, a wave of feeling washed over me too, a bath of remorse so strong that it made me pull my hand from the water in shock.

  The mermaid was sorry?

  With a twist of her fins, she broke the surface again. Liquid streamed from her hair and down over her skin. It took me a few moments to see that it wasn’t just seawater but tears.

  I touched the water again, and again the tide of remorse washed over me—remorse and pain and fear.

  She hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. I knew that now, without a doubt. And I knew something else as well. She was dying.

  The gag wasn’t just cutting into her skin, and it wasn’t just stopping her from singing. It was suffocating her. The wadding had wound around her tongue, and now it was trailing down her throat, a little farther with every swallow . . .

&n
bsp; Her panic felt like mine. I wanted to rip the gag off, then and there. But I knew there were reasons to be cautious. Besides, if I tried, I’d have to fight Captain Ellis, and likely most of the others, too—and though I could win that battle if I put enough of myself into it, there were better ways to save the mermaid’s life. The gag was wet, after all. Could I find a way to compel the water in it to do my bidding?

  Again I listened, this time not only to the mermaid but to the water all around her and especially in the wadding and the rope. The next time the mermaid submerged, I sang to the water, persuading it to float the wadding back up the mermaid’s throat. Then I used the weight of the water to stretch the rope fibers and slightly loosen the gag.

  “Hold on there!” Captain Ellis started forward. “What’s she singing?”

  Nat and Gabriel pulled him back.

  “She knows what she’s doing,” Nat said. “Give her the chance she’s asked for.”

  His confidence surprised and warmed me. Distracted, I sang a moment too long, loosening the ropes more than I’d intended. Even as I drew breath to fix my mistake, the gag dropped.

  “Stop her!” screamed the captain.

  Nat lunged toward the barrel. And then he halted, dazed. They all did, every one of them.

  The mermaid was singing.

  The ship’s doctor had spoken the truth: the song was exquisite, beyond anything I’d ever dreamed. Like the others, I was paralyzed by its beauty. Even as the mermaid wriggled out of the rest of the ropes that I’d so kindly—and so mistakenly—loosened for her, all I could think about was her music.

  Unlike the others on the Dorset, however, I’d had long practice in dealing with bewitching tunes, and I had learned how to withstand some of their wiles. The best way was to go deep inside myself, to focus on my own heartbeat and not on external sounds. When I did this, the mermaid’s song lost some of its power. I found I could move again, although it took tremendous effort.

  Singing magic, however, was beyond me. For that, I would have to open myself up and listen to the music around me again—and who knew where that would lead? I might end up singing the mermaid’s song with her. Better to plug the ears of the men near me and get their help.