All around him, he could hear the muffled thrum of the merman’s booming voice filtered through the water. He couldn’t make out the words, but it was clear he was repeating the same words again and again.
A tiny, itchy sensation prickled at his skin. Flickering points of light crept over him like ants on a log. Then, all at once, his lungs burned for breath. He struggled and tugged, desperate for air, but Eddy held firm. Finally, chest heaving and eyes wild, he released the air and took a raking breath of the sea water.
The burning in his lungs eased. He took another tentative breath. It wasn’t the same. The water felt heavier, thicker. But a lungful of sea now did the work of a lungful of air.”
“Wow…” he uttered, his voice oddly deep and subdued as expressed through the water rather than the air.
“There, you see? It is good,” Eddy said.
“Can you let me go, please?” Rustle said calmly.
“Yes, of course. You are my new fairyman friend.”
The fingers holding Rustle loosened. He darted as quickly as the combined flutter of his over-worked wings and kicking of his tiny legs could manage. When he was level with Eddy’s face in the dim light, he reared back and punched him in the nose as hard as his tiny arms could manage. It wasn’t hard enough to do any damage, but it certainly got his point across.
“You could have warned me it would feel like I was drowning,” Rustle snapped.
Eddy rubbed his nose. “What you mean? It feels how a merperson always feels when leaving the water or coming back. Until they are better at water-for-air and air-for-water.”
Rustle scratched his head. “Really? Well… Now you know… Us people who breathe air don’t like it when we have to take a breath under water.”
Eddy nodded. “Yes. Yes, good! You see! Already I learn! We will do so much together, Rustle the fairyman.” He snatched the spell book from the surface and tucked it under his arm. “Come. We will learn and do many things. But I was almost out of time to do this when I found you. I have to go back to my village. You come! But when I say hide, you hide. You can hide, yes?”
“Fairies are very good at hiding,” Rustle said with a nod.
“Great! Then we go now!”
Eddy thrust with his tail and darted off. Rustle tried to keep up, but he was certainly no match for the merman’s speed beneath the waves. Fortunately, Eddy realized and looped back, snatching Rustle and holding him up so the fairy could grip his hair. Once he was holding tight, he darted off again, and Rustle watched with anticipation as the distant lights that could only be an undersea village slowly approached.
This was going to be amazing.
Chapter 2
Eddy swept downward, mindful of the tiny form clinging to his flowing hair. He’d awoken and begun his routine the way he had so many times before. He’d never imagined that this would be the day he would finally find someone from the surface to talk to. The last thing he wanted was to spoil it any worse than he already had. There were so many things to think about. So many little things that air-breathers might have trouble with that his fellow merfolk wouldn’t.
As the pressure upon him began to return to what he was accustomed to, he paused and gently untangled his new friend Rustle from his perch. They’d traveled far enough from the surface that there wasn’t quite enough light from the sky for even his sensitive eyes, so the fairy would not be able to see anything at all. With one hand lightly clutching Rustle’s legs, Eddy rattled his bracelet of shells to conjure a bit of light. The little shells, harvested from snails along the sea floor, took on a blueish glow. He chuckled at the sight it revealed.
Rustle’s eyes were wide and searching, almost transfixed by the glow of Eddy’s bracelet. His hair was an utter mess, and his clothes were twisted as though he’d been tossing and turning in bed.
“Are you well, fairyman friend?” Eddy asked, holding Rustle close to his face.
“You move too fast!” Rustle said. “The water is so thick compared to the wind. I can barely hold tight enough to not be swept free.”
“I am sorry for that, Rustle. But we have far to go, and not much time to get there. I have many things to do. I will be missed if I don’t go to the places and do the things. But I worry for you. I know, when sometimes mermaids come close to where I work, they have to go slow, or the deep starts to hurt.”
“The deep starts to hurt?” Rustle said.
“Yes! In the head, sometimes. It presses harder when you are deeper. For me it is the other way. I feel wrong when I go shallow. And very wrong when I go above the water.”
Rustle twisted a finger in his ear. “I do feel a strange ache.”
Eddy nodded. “This is the deep. The water-for-air magic should help with it, but it needs more time maybe. We can wait here some until the ache stops. It should not take long.”
“That is good.” He rubbed his head. “So, it hurts for you to go up to the surface?”
“If I go too fast. And without magic, I almost cannot go at all.” He shrugged. “Like mermaids, only up instead of down.”
“I wonder why it happens?”
“More water pushes harder.”
“Why doesn’t air do it?”
“Air doesn’t do it? I did not know! I thought the high things, like the fairies and the… sky fish—”
“Birds.”
“Yes, the birds. I thought they had to stay high, and the bottom things with the land swimmers, they had to stay low. Why else would they stay so low all the time?”
“Most things can’t fly.”
“Fly. Fly is like air swim?”
“Yes.”
“Ooh. So land swimmers are like crabs and snails and things. Always on the bottom. I learn so much so fast!”
Rustle gazed down into the murky depths. “What are those lights down there?”
“That is my home! It is still far to go, though. If I go fast, and don’t stop, we will get there in an hour.”
“It’s odd you know a word like hour, but not legs.”
Eddy shrugged. “I cast the spell bad. Big missing pieces in the talking.”
“If it’s so far away, how can we see the light? We’re not an hour from the surface, and we can’t see the sun. Even on a cloudy day I’d expect the sun to be brighter than just about anything.”
“Here and above, the water is cloudy. Has many things in it. The things the big fish eat. Further down it is very clear. You can see light for a long way.”
“But where does the light come from?”
Eddy held up his bracelet. “There are many things. Things down deep, they make their own light. Even me!”
“You make light?”
“When down deep enough, I do! Eyes and fins. No way to see, otherwise. Unless you bring shells or other glow things. Do things not glow in the air?”
“Some things do. Fireflies. And when we stir up our magic, fairies glow. But we usually keep our glow subdued if there might be someone else to see.”
“Why?”
“Because if we don’t, they might catch us.” Rustle crossed his arms. “Like you caught me.”
“Didn’t need glow to find you though.”
“I wasn’t being as careful as I should have been. Still, I suppose getting caught by something else isn’t something you need to worry about. There aren’t any frogs or birds or fish big enough to eat something as big as you.”
“No birds or frogs, no. But very much fish.”
Rustle blinked. “There are fish big enough to eat you?”
Eddy nodded, his long hair billowing about. “Big enough to eat me, and others big enough to eat them. There are many big things here.”
The fairy glanced nervously about. “My head feels better now. Maybe we should go.”
“Good! I will move fast, get there soon as I can.”
Rustle tried to flit back to his place atop Eddy’s flowing locks. The motion showed a considerable improvement in his navigation of the water compared to earlier, but it was still a
little more sluggish and imprecise than Eddy supposed was his intension.
“You are getting better, little fairyman. Soon you will be as good in the water as in the air.”
“I hope so. I am a water fairy. I thought I’d gotten good enough. But I was only just starting to get the feel for water.”
“You stay with me, Rustle. You’ll get the feel for the water in a way no fairy ever has.” Eddy briefly rummaged in a small bag slung behind him. “Good. The book is safe. Come, we go!”
#
Rustle held tight and folded his wings flat as the powerful, wave-like paddling of Eddy’s tail thrust them effortlessly through the water. He tried to shut his eyes and feel what the water told him. Though he was no longer trapped within that little pocket of air, the terrible feeling of closeness and isolation never truly left. The wind that covered the world was, for the most part, one continuous blanket. This part or that could be as different as night and day, but it was still a seamless whole. Being trapped, unable to flow with it, was bad enough. But here, beneath the waves, he had lost contact entirely. It made him feel so terribly alone. The older water fairies, those he was to someday join and even replace as the teachers of the young ones, said the water had the same flow, the same connection. But he’d only ever had to feel for it in his little pond, where there wasn’t much to feel at all. Here in the sea, it was at once too much and not enough. The motion was subdued and heavy, but the scope, when he could get a sense of it, was nearly as dizzying and immense as the wind and sky above. And it was far more full.
Not having to worry about knowing where he was going and, until Eddy’s recent comments, the lack of concern about large predators had left Rustle to observe what little there was to see around him. Now that he knew there could be things lurking in the darkness that might make a meal of even something as large and powerful as a merman added an extra level of intensity to his gaze.
Here and there, felt more than seen, a massive form would slide beneath them or over them. Sometimes the glow of Eddy’s bracelet would catch the silvery sheen of a darting shape that was gone before he could fix his eyes upon it. Eddy casually rolled and bobbed around something truly massive, dragging his fingers along its slippery hide before chuckling and quickening his pace.
“What was that!?” Rustle yelped.
“A whale. A small one.”
“Would that eat you?”
“Not that whale. Things that big only eat things smaller than you.”
“There isn’t much smaller than me, back up on the surface.”
“Here there is more of everything. More of the very big. More of the very small. We are close now. Look,” Eddy said.
Rustle hauled himself forward. What had not so long ago been little more than some half-seen lights in the indistinct distance now revealed itself to be something much more interesting. It was a city, but it seemed to have more in common with the pond and trees where the fairies made their home than the stories the fairies told of human villages. The light came from a variety of sources, but most were sea creatures either living or dead. Finely woven nets held wobbly, translucent blobs that cast warm, torch-like illumination. Elsewhere, spongy bundles gleamed with the green glow Eddy had used to light the air pocket where he’d first spoken to Rustle. Little shells like the ones on Eddy’s bracelet were embedded in the ground and around openings, tracing out what would have been paths in a more earthbound race.
The homes were elegant structures of bright pink and yellow. They looked like they’d been grown rather than built, though the way heavy stones had been embedded in the colorful tissue connecting them suggested their form had at least been guided, if not outright designed by the merfolk. The shapes reached high into the open water, openings scattered irregularly about and glowing with more of the warm light from within. Near to the sea floor they ran together into a complex formation. Higher up they separated into what looked like the stout, inverted roots of a massive tree.
Though Rustle wouldn’t have called the town bustling, there were perhaps a half-dozen merfolk out and about. Two of them seemed to be arguing about small bundle of fish that one of them held. Others were idly chatting. The water carried their voices much farther and more clearly than the air would have. Another was smearing a thick paste of some kind onto one of a handful of fractures running along the surface of their reef-like homes.
“We call it Barnacle. Other villages would not still be there, but we are still there,” Eddy explained.
“Why would other towns be gone?” Rustle asked.
“The ground shakes sometimes here. Breaks our homes a little. It shakes more now than before.”
“Why not leave?”
“Because this is home! My farm and mine are near here. My family was born here. My family will be born here. But we talk later. You should hide now. People shouldn’t see you,” Eddy said in a hushed tone.
“Are your people dangerous?” Rustle asked, huddling a little lower in the billowing thicket of Eddy’s hair.
“No. But I didn’t ask about taking the spell book. My sister would get mad if she saw I used it. She thinks it was lost. I’ll say when it is safe. My sister, when she yells, yells hard. Come, though. I am already late.”
#
Eddy pumped his tail a bit more furiously as he approached the edge of Barnacle. Merfolk were not beholden to the rising and falling of the sun, not directly. The moon, however, and the tides that followed it, dictated their schedule in a similar but far more rigid way. As useful as it was to wake at the break of dawn, few things truly required one to be precise about it. When it came to tides, some places may not be accessible if one waited too long. His sister was thus justified in the stern look she gave as he darted through the narrow doorway of their home.
“Eddy, really,” she snapped.
Her arms were crossed against her shimmery bodice, and her thin eyebrows were drawn into a withering glare. Like all mermaids, her skin and features—at least those of her upper body, were much more like the land-dwellers than those of the males. That was useful, as the men who served upon the boats and the docks seemed far more willing to interact with someone they considered beautiful than otherwise. Her hair was a deep brown, in contrast to the more aquatic coloration of Eddy’s. She’d decorated it, oddly enough, with the skull of some sort of rodent. On another creature it would have looked grim or morbid, but she managed to make the intricate, bleached white artifact look positively artful. Her skin had the deep tan of a mermaid who spent a good deal of her time in the sun, a sign of just how much of a hard worker she was.
“I know, Mira, I know,” he said quickly. “I have the things you asked for. And more besides. Truly exceptional specimens.”
It was nice to be speaking his own language again, without having to rely upon a translation spell of questionable quality. From the way Rustle responded at times, he worried he might not sound as coherent as he would like.
He reached into his bag, careful not to reveal the book hidden within, and fetched a small mesh sack of brightly colored orbs.
“Here you are! Good ones today,” he said, holding it up to her. “Some very fine pearls. I was worried it would be another year before this batch would be ready, but I think it will be an excellent harvest.”
Eddy held out the sack, but Mira reached past it and instead touched his face. There was concern in her eyes as her thumb rubbed his cheek. He knew what she’d found, even before she said it.
“You’ve got some blossoms… And look at your eyes,” she said, tugging at his eyelid. “You’re bloodshot. You’ve been heading toward the surface again, haven’t you? Is that why you’re late?”
“I only went upward briefly,” Eddy defended.
“Eddy, briefly is still too long. It is bad for you. I’ve told you a hundred times. And mother told you a hundred more! If you need something from above, ask me. Just as I ask you for things below.”
“I know…” Eddy said, looking away.
“What were
you doing up there?”
“I was just… testing myself is all. A merman who can stand a bit more of the surface than the rest can get a lot more jobs.” His eyes darted to a fracture that had split the curved roof of their entryway. “Maybe then we could afford a place that didn’t need to be patched every time the ground shook.”
“No amount of money is going to find us a place like that in Barnacle. But these will fetch us more than enough to afford a proper patch and plenty left over besides. Oh, but I’ve got to be going or the tide will take the trade ships with it!”
She gave him a hug—causing the hidden form of his fairy friend to scurry in a panic to avoid being found out.
“Now you be careful. And no more going up, you hear me! You remember what happened to Father.”
“I know. I know. I’ll see you at dinner.”
Mira dropped the mesh satchel into her bag and hurried out. Eddy watched her go, and when he was certain she was too far to turn back and surprise him, he put his mind to the spell again and spoke to his friend.
“It is clear now, Rustle. You can see the place I live if you wish.”
The fairy untangled himself from Eddy’s hair and swam out in front of him.
“Who was that you were talking to?” Rustle asked.
“That was sister Mira. She is older. Still I am a child to her. Even though she is only a year more old than me.”
“Why couldn’t I understand either of you while you were speaking?”
“The spell is between me and you. There is better spell for more easy speaking, but I do not know it so much yet.”
“Maybe we can work on it. It might be nice to know what people are saying to you.”
“We can! This we can do, yes! Oh! But not soon. I must go to my farm, and after that my mine. If I do not go now, the current will be against me. I bring with me the book. The work is not all day. Plenty of time for you and me to do things, and lots of talking and things for you to see the whole time! But I need to be ready. Please look around my home, if it can teach you things you wish to know. It is not much, but we are proud we have it.”
The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy Page 2
