A few hours later we both huddled around a fire that leapt with blue, green and yellow as the flames consumed the salt-soaked driftwood.
Pelagius had explained how he’d chosen the mountain caves and worked with the Oceanids who had followed him from the sea to build the first rudimentary avens they’d lived in. He’d described his knowledge of the mass of humans that crowded into the beautiful valley and how he’d been monitoring them for several days.
He’d spoken of the first moment he set eyes on Sabine, describing her as the moon to his sun, the music to his song, the water to his earth.
He spoke of the amazing changes and improvements she’d made to the pod, how she’d introduced them to human inventions and shown them how compassionate and smart and wonderful humans really were.
He’d explained the cultural rules they’d broken in finding a way for the Oceanids to thrive on land, a first in Oceanid history as they’d always remained loyal to the sea.
“Often when something is different, when it challenges what everyone has always done, the group will try to break it before they accept it. In our case they eventually succeeded by removing the source of the change. Sabine.”
“They killed her?”
He didn’t need to answer the question, the horror and devastation of it was etched deep into the bitter twist of his mouth and the spark of rage that burned in his eyes.
“So many of them were involved, this people I supposedly loved. Their roles were purposeful in some cases and horribly accidental in others. I would have killed every last one of them if she hadn’t made me promise with her dying breath to look after them, to fight for them.”
He shook his head wryly before gazing up at the star-bejewelled heavens.
“I first found her by listening to the voices in the water. Human voices and motives are somewhat muted in the water, but when she fell into the pool in the cave, I knew, in that instant, that she was everything I needed. After she passed, I avoided the water at all costs, until one day last winter I accidently brushed the surface of a pool. Timing is everything, my dear, and that day, Neith happened to be communicating with his many followers, and what I heard—” He shuddered. “It will be the abomination of an age if it is allowed to take place.
“I have been listening to every skin-crawling motive of Neith and his followers for some time now. I have been monitoring as much as possible.”
“You mean Neith was planning something like this before I came along?”
Pelagius chuckled. “The self-orientation of youth,” he murmured shaking his head. “Yes, my dear, Neith has been planning this for a long time. You posed a frustrating obstacle when you first arrived at the pod and it took all of your young Merrick’s considerable skills to keep you from his clutches. His current plan of action has only been accelerated by your exceptional talents.”
“Was accelerated,” I cut in. “I’m not accessible to him any more.”Pelagius’s expression was anything but comforting.
“From what I’ve heard, Neith’s not about to give up because you refused him, I suspect he will continue to hunt you but only as a secondary act to the war he is constructing. He will go ahead with or without you.”
“And if I try to stop him he’ll kill Merrick.”
Pelagius was quiet for a while.“Does that mean you will not fight him?” he asked.
“I want to get Merrick back,” I replied stubbornly.
“Does that mean you are willing to sacrifice human lives?”
I stood and began to pace the beach. “No…I mean I obviously don’t want Neith killing humans.”
“So you are willing to sacrifice Oceanid lives to get Merrick back?”
I scowled at him, turning his question over in my head.
“No,” I replied eventually. “Why does anyone’s life have to be sacrificed? Surely we can work this out…” Even as the words left my lips I knew that that outcome was an impossibility.
I sank into the sand. “Why do I have to choose? No matter which way I turn someone will be getting hurt…I hate this…”
“And it is that hatred for violence that you must cling to and at the same time overcome. Cling to it so that you remain hesitant to send any innocent soul into the ugliness of battle and overcome it with the knowledge that before this adventure is concluded many will die.”
“You don’t know that,” I snapped.
He smiled. “How are you planning to get Merrick out…are you planning to go into Ferengren alone again?”
“No…I don’t know, Pelagius, all I do know is that I can’t sacrifice Merrick…I won’t. Truth be told, I need an army to get to him.” I sighed, running my hands through my hair as a I stared at the fire.
He smiled.
“If you had an army how would you get Merrick back?”
I’d been turning that exact question over and over in my head for the past couple of hours and had already eliminated a few strategies.
“I can’t play by any rules Neith’s used to. The attack needs to catch him completely by surprise.”
Pelagius nodded encouragingly.
“I was thinking if I could somehow ambush him, I might be able to get past the squid he has patrolling Ferengren and the hundreds of soldiers that live there…”I sighed, shaking my head again. “Who am I kidding, Pelagius, this is impossible. I don’t have an army, I have no fighting skills, I have no weapons and Neith…he has all of these things…”
“Do you know what is the greatest common denominator of those who do not achieve their goals?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“They believe the fear instead of the hope. Both are imaginations of what the future might bring, there is no substance in either fear or hope is there?”
I shrugged. “I guess not.”
“So why not hope? Besides, I think your plan is a very good one. If we can ambush him, spring an attack he doesn’t expect, with elements he doesn’t expect, you could completely derail his plans… that way you can save Merrick and stop Neith.”
“Do you have any idea when he’s planning his attack on the humans?”
Pelagius shook his head. “Timing is critical, Alexandra. If you do not stop him not only will thousands of humans pay the price, but Merrick will be of no strategic use to him any more either. More than that, Oceanids will be hunted down by vengeful humans without mercy. There are no winners if you fail, only death on all sides.”
“Thanks for the pep talk,” I muttered.
Silence fell for a while before I spoke again. “Qinn was taking me to a place where I was going to meet the other Oceanids. If you can help me get there then I’ll at least have some Oceanids loyal to my cause. From there I can hopefully start convincing others to join me.”
Pelagius scratched his chin thoughtfully. “There used to be a wonderful place not too far from here. I was great friends with their leader and it held a great many Oceanids. Perhaps we should start there and invite the cave Oceanids to join us. You don’t have time to be traipsing all over the sea talking to pods. I’m sure we could convince them to join our cause…” He looked a little doubtful but I was willing to take even a half enthusiastic army over none at all.
I stood. “Let’s go then.”
He smiled and nodded, standing and gazing at the night-cloaked land before wading with me into the ocean.
10. Abomination
We had been swimming for several hours, Pelagius delighting in the sea as we went. His delight was marred though as we came across several dying reefs of coral, the exuberant colourful life stripped to a horrid bone white that shone starkly in the moonlit ocean.
As we left one of the reefs, Pelagius focused the conversation on the challenge to come.
“You will have a difficult time convincing the Oceanids to fight for humans, particularly when the humans have been so awfully careless with their home.” He pointed at the half-dead coral reef.
“Yeah I know. I’ve had a tough time remembering why we should fight for
them myself when I look at the damage they’ve created.”
“Talk me through your thinking.”
“Most humans are…stupid when it comes to the sea. We hardly know anything about it and so we take what is useful to us without really thinking I guess. Most people I know would be horrified if they knew what the pollution and fishing trawlers are really up to.”
“They don’t?”
I shook my head. “How would they? It’s not like many witness these things for themselves. Those who do try and do something are often labelled as fanatics who are out of touch with reality, which is another way of saying that they are putting ocean life and health ahead of money. Even those ordering the oil wells to be dug and those in charge of the fishing fleets don’t have any sense of the reality of what they are doing, I don’t think.”
“You’re not making a great case for the Oceanids to help them.”
“But isn’t their ignorance also a great strength?”
Pelagius shook his head. “How so?”
“Pelagius, humans live now without a great sense of community. They live separate, virtually unconnected lives until there is something to fight for. When there is a great evil or a great tragedy they’ve shown incredible courage in banding together and working for good. I mean just look at the natural disasters they’ve endured and worked through and helped each other with…
I guess what I’m trying to say is that when the humans find out about the tragedy in the ocean, they have the potential to turn this whole thing around. They have the potential to innovate and change the way the world works to save the sea and everything in it…They just need to know about it first. They need to be shown why they should care about it. They need to be given a chance.”
“Neith and many of the other Oceanids are not patient, Alexandra. How long do we wait?”
“I guess as long as it takes?” I answered lamely.
He shook his head. “That is most certainly not good enough…”
We’d reached a wall of green that stretched as far as I could see on either side and from the sea floor to the surface.
“What is that?” I asked, glad to be able to change the subject.
“That is the great forest that surrounds The Haven.”
“We’re going into that?” The murky almost yellowish water was ominously dark in the light of the rising sun.
“Stay close,” Pelagius warned as he slipped between the wavering fronds.
We swam in an uncomfortable weave for at least an hour with no sign of life anywhere until Pelagius pulled up short, a horrified expression on his face.
“What is it?”
“Listen,” he whispered, his voice strained.
An awful keening shuddered through the water, singular at first but joined by other notes as it grated to a halt.
“What is that?”
Pelagius was turning around and around, his eyes searching desperately for the source of the sound. When it started up again he shot off to the left as I struggled to keep up with him as he frantically zig-zagged between the kelp fronds.
I rammed into him a few seconds later as he hovered stock still in the murky water, his eyes huge.
At first, I couldn’t quite make out what he was looking at.
Then I saw. At least a dozen brightly coloured creatures were darting around in a tiny finely woven net. One of them stopped when it saw Pelagius and little perfectly formed fingers wove through the net stretching towards us.
Pelagius came out of his stunned frozen state with a vengeance as he rushed to take the little hand.
“Quickly, Alexandra,” he hissed, “help me free them,”
“What are they?” I asked as I rushed to obey him, pulling at the intricate mechanism that had enfolded them into the steel-mesh trap.
“Children…our kind,” Pelagius panted as he strained with all his might to release them.
“Children?” I gazed through the fine meshing of the trap, catching glimpses of brilliantly coloured torsos, arms and faces. They were extraordinary in the extreme, beautifully proportioned and as colourful as flowers.
“It’s no use, we’ll need to go and get help,” Pelagius gasped as he stopped pulling on the trap door and came to float beside me again.
The children seemed to sense that we were about to leave them and stretched more urgently through the net, their little fingers clinging to me.
“We can’t leave them here.”
Pelagius nodded. “I’ll stay to protect them and you go ahead to The Haven.”
“No, I’ll stay and you go,” I insisted, reminding him that I couldn’t speak the Oceanid language, I didn’t know the way and I had far more offensive weapons than he did.
He swam quickly into the water leaving me in the ever-shifting murk.
The children seemed relieved to have me there, their little fingers clutching at mine through the netting as they discussed me in the liquid language of the sea.
There seemed to be a bit of an argument going on between some of the bigger and obviously older ones and very littlest one. She was swirling around the net talking rapidly and waving her arms in an explosion of bubbles. I watched them in fascination as after a few moments it appeared she had won.
She approached me with a very pleased expression on her face, wriggling her little fingers through the net and calling me forwards. She seemed to want to touch me, and so I offered her my hands, but she shook her green locks and touched her face.
I felt silly pressing my face up to the net, but she stretched her fingers until the tips touched either side of my face.
Instantly a river of language sprung into my mind and I found I could perfectly understand what the others were saying. The cacophony of elaborately worded protests gave me such a fright that I jerked away from her, fully expecting the understanding to dissipate as I lost contact with her.
“Why are we in this trap?” she asked.
“I…I don’t know.”
“Where is my mom and dad?”
“I don’t know that either…” I stumbled.“How can I understand you?”
“I gave you our language and you took it.” She cocked her head to one side, looking puzzled. “That is what you can do isn’t it? Accept talents.”
“I don’t know if that’s how it works...”
She shook her head, a little frown developing between her eyes. “We all carry the talents but you are the only one who can accept all of them.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Can you accept all of them?”
“No,” she replied.
“What is your name?”
“Nessa,” she answered soberly. The name seemed quite normal until I repeated it, my tongue twisting around the strange word.
A couple of the other children joined her, all jostling for position as they bobbed at different heights within the net.
“How did you get here?” I asked distracting them from the panic I could see rising in their eyes.
“We were on our way to greet the whales, they were arriving back from the cold, when my parents pushed me to the sea floor and covered me in sand telling me to wait there until they came back…but they didn’t come back.” Her voice caught on a little sob. “So I followed the currents until they brought me here.”
Another one of the children answered, “The Miengu took them, but none that I’d seen before. I am of that pod but the way they forced my parents was not how we behave. They were angry and struck my mother when she tried to protest. They told them that they must fight the humans.”
“Are you a human?” a brilliant blue little boy asked me.
I shook my head. “No I am a halfling, half Oceanid and half human.”
“Which half is which?”
I laughed. “I don’t know and that’s half the problem.”
They giggled.
“The ones that came to my home, came for me, not for my parents,” another little boy told me, cutting through the light-heartedness, his little face creased
in worry. “They said I had an important job to do but they wouldn’t tell daddy what it was, so he told them I was visiting a friend while mommy got me out and showed me how to find the current that brought me here.”
“Why would they want you?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it’s because I was naughty, maybe because I didn’t listen to mommy?”
I shook my head. “No, sweetheart, they wouldn’t be looking for you because you were naughty, it must be because of something you can do. What talents do you have?”
He put his palms together and produced between them a smaller, but perfect replica of the energy ball I could create.
I stared at him in astonishment. Something Merrick had told me about the Oceanid children started my heart beating faster.
“Are Oceanid children very good at their talents?”
The looked at each other, giggling like I had embarrassed myself terribly. “Oceanids are strongest when they are young, as they grow older their talents become more and more difficult to access. Is this not something you have experienced?”
I shook my head absently. “No, I only learned I had talents about two weeks ago.”
“Really?” The astonished muttering as they discussed this acted as a backdrop to my spinning thoughts.
If Oceanid children were that talented, it made sense…sick sense…that Neith would be capturing them and using them in his army. It also made sense that he took their parents too, either as motivation or as a threat over them.
My stomach churned at the implications of this. No Oceanid would willingly attack a group of children, even if those children were bent on destroying them. The Oceanids put too much value on their young to destroy them.
The babble of voices behind me went suddenly quiet and, as I looked up, I thought I could see movement in the kelp. The relief that flooded through me as I assumed the rescue party had arrived was almost instantly negated by the terror on the children’s faces.
Fire (The Mermaid Legacy - Book 2) Page 7
