Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She heard her voice again, rising against the mermaid’s voice. “Why him? Why Jonah? He always had his face in a book or a cliff.”

  “He turned his back to the sea,” Adam answered, out of some configuration of light.

  “So? Why didn’t she take somebody off one of those floating factory ships that can take an entire whale apart and package it before lunch?”

  “Maybe she tried. Maybe they could never hear her singing.”

  Megan was silent. They were spinning near the edge of the funnel; she could see one part of its narrowing wall, things flashing through it too fast to recognize. She said, “I’m going to die.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t survive that.”

  “Give me your wrist,” he said, and wrapped a kelp-leaf hand around it. They skimmed the edge of the mermaid’s song. And then they dropped, whirling so fast down one long note that Megan could barely separate water from light, or her body from her terror, except for the kelp wrapped around what she assumed was a piece of her.

  The world drained into a dark and silent sea.

  Megan, drifting, hit bottom and found her body again. She raised her head, stared through the murky waters. Something crawled here; something thrashed there; a dozen derelict ships bled swamp-gas colors into the water. She felt a touch, found herself eye to eye with a giant crab. Its shell was so thin she could see through it.

  She whispered, “Adam.” The crab veered nervously. There were people in the distance, naked, faceless, their skin glowing odd, sickly colors. They seemed to sense her, but, like the crab, shifted uneasily away from her attention, withdrew behind the oddly shaped mounds rising all around them. Something crawling near the top of one of the mounds near her lost its hold, came down in a wild slide of incongruous and familiar shapes. She watched, motionless, incredulous, as a Formica table with no legs careened to a halt against what looked like an enormous flattened bubble with a broken shell inside. She almost recognized it, decided not to. Coral skeletons, hard and bare, shimmered ghostly white in the eerie light; the stunted kelp, the few blades of sea grass alive in the deadly water, were colorless as the coral.

  Her throat constricted; she heard herself make a little whimpering noise of fear and bewilderment. “What is this place? What is this terrible place? Where did all the bright fish go? Where are all the colors?”

  Nothing answered her but the great thrashing shadow, a deep, tuneless mourning that sounded to her ears like the last voice left in the sea. Turning toward the only sound, she saw the tower beyond it, a delicate spiraling thing, luminous and perfect, all the beauty in the waste.

  She heard the mermaid’s song.

  She felt her eyes grow wide, aching and heavy with pearls. It was the pure voice of the nautilus shell, the sound of limpid water wandering from chamber to glistening chamber. It sang to Jonah, that voice, lovely, husky, haunted with storm and spindrift, but quiet now, the ebb tide, or the full tide idling a moment, at rest before it turned, dragging hard across the sand, flooding back into foam. It was singing to Jonah now, from within the tower, where he listened, in that private world, safe from the dark and ruined sea around him, safe from any human eyes.

  The pearls slid down her face at last; she felt the dark, lifeless waters seep into her heart, into her blood. She brushed the pearls away; more fell. Jonah was inside the narwhal’s horn, among the glinting lights inside the bottle. He had locked her out, left her stranded in a dead sea with only a dying whale to sing to her. She heard her own voice making human noises of grief and desolation. She couldn’t move except to brush at pearls, which drifted slowly to her feet. She would root herself there, she thought, become a skeleton of coral, because there was no path out of this waste; she would carry it in her heart wherever she went, on land or in sea, so it did not matter anymore what she did, where she went…

  The whale stopped singing.

  The heartbeats of silence were so unexpected that she lifted her head, shaking away pearls, to stare at it. It moved again, finally, and made its ratcheting noise, but more weakly. She watched it shudder from fins to flukes, and then call again. There was no blood, that she could see, no reason for its agony. But something made it cry sorrow, or perhaps for help in that bleak water. She moved finally toward it, feeling that if it died of sorrow so would she; alone in this waste, she would dwindle into something pallid and stunted and unrecognizable. Around her, the crabs were feeding on what looked like enormous, decaying plankton. Some circled the whale. Its flukes, driving down hard, scattered them; so did Megan, moving among them on what felt like a layer of broken glass. They were shell fragments, she realized: the broken crabs the whale had crushed in its thrashing. And then she saw the net.

  One corner was torn; the rest was tangled securely around the whale, tightening as it struggled. The whale was huge and had teeth; that much she could make out in the dim sea. It raised clouds of sand as it struggled, but, as far as she could tell, not blood. She edged past its flukes, her hands sliding over broken shell. She nicked her finger on a piece, lifted her head sharply, still, as if her silence could hide what a drop of blood revealed of her presence in the water. But no mutant, glowing shark nosed her out. She tugged at the net; it might as well have been wrapped around a submarine. She picked among the shell fragments, found a razor-edged shard, and began to cut.

  The net, rotten with brine, parted easily. She walked along the whale’s side, slicing her hand sometimes, and the whale’s scarred back at other times, feeling its dull roaring vibrating through her bones. She still dropped pearls, but she didn’t notice them; instead of making the scratchy, reedy sound that had come out of her at first, she whispered, hardly hearing herself, “This can’t be real. Is it the future? Where will you go if I free you? Is there any sea left beyond this place? It’s so dark. So terrible. So dark…”

  She climbed the net up to the whale’s back, to cut above its thrashing flippers. It heaved, feeling the net give; she lost her balance and fell, caught herself in the net. She worked her way back up, kept cutting, clinging to one side of the tearing net so that when the whale broke loose, she might be thrown free. It lay quietly for a few moments. It’s dead, she thought starkly. It finally ran out of air. And then it arched up, tearing at the net, a frenzy that made her lose everything—balance, shell—except her hold of the net. It tore further under her weight. She hung on, her face pushed against the whale’s side, not daring to fall so near its heavy, rolling body. And then she fell, down into a roil of collapsing net.

  There was something softer than crab shell under her. She opened her eyes and found Adam, head and flukes still caught in the net, his face pearl white, his skin grazed by her shell. He opened his eyes. She stared at him, pearls falling silently down her face. He lifted his hand to catch one. And then, as his arms slid gently around her, and she eased against him, she knew that she had lost her heart to the sea.

  Jonah stood inside the mermaid’s song.

  It was wild and bitter and desolate, a song without words, of spindrift whipped from heaving water washed with colors not even Megan would use; of the cries of battered seals, wind-battered birds screaming over great schools of fish, blind and still, sliding like leaves across the surface of the storm; of the voices of whales and porpoises as they fled the relentless stalking shadows above them that tracked their every move. Brine lashed his eyes, his mouth; kelp torn from the sea bottom tangled around his hands; barnacles and starfish struck him, clung. An empty moon shell, tumbled through the water, caught painfully over his ear; even in its pale, lovely hollows he heard the mermaid’s storm.

  He had no idea where he was; now and then he glimpsed, behind a wash of green and foam, the tower’s white wall curving around him, and knew he still stood in the mermaid’s eye. And then the sea would change around him, so that he saw it from the fierce and hungry gull’s eye, as it swooped over the sickly waters, or he would be tossed among the frantic whales, buffeted by their voices. Every fish he saw, dead and alive, see
med to have the mermaid’s eyes.

  He began to hear her speak, perhaps out of the moon shell, or perhaps she stood in front of him, in the tower, while the storm raged through his head.

  “You saw what had killed me. You could have buried it before it killed again.”

  A sea turtle slowly sank through the turbulent waters, a plastic bag twisted around its head. He could not see its eyes, but he knew they would be hers. He whispered to it, “I’m sorry.”

  “You saw what mangled me.”

  The manatee, with its torn flippers, pushed by every wild current, struggled for balance with its tail. He saw the crosshatched scars of propeller blades on its back. It looked at him as it passed, not with the patient, wistful gaze he remembered, but with the sea’s icy foam-washed green.

  “I’m sorry.” His hands were clasped in front of him, bound with kelp; he bowed his head, a prisoner of the storm, the moon shell still caught against one ear. A barnacle clung to one lens in his glasses; he dared not lift a finger to move it.

  “You gave the manatee a human face for centuries, and yet when you finally see its true face, you have no pity for it.”

  “It was your face we gave it,” he whispered, remembering her from another life.

  She answered sharply, “Its face is my face. And this was my song.”

  He heard the whale again, crying for help as it struggled in the net. His head sank; the sound reverberated through the moon shell. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. All I thought—all I heard—you put such beauty in front of me, you told me to find you; you were all I could see.”

  “Yes! All!” He glimpsed a curve of wall behind a wave, and then a dark glittering whirling away from him. He watched it numbly until it changed into a fish’s receding tail. “The dead coral, the crabs with their shells grown thin and fragile in those waters, the poisoned grasses and kelp, the jellyfish that died because you kill everything you touch—I am all that you see here, and I am that dark and barren sea.”

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat, found his voice again. “I’m sorry. It was—I didn’t recognize you.”

  “No. Nor did you recognize yourself reflected in the waste.”

  “How could I? I wasn’t looking for myself. I was only looking for you.” He saw her face briefly then, foam white and wild, and beautiful as the secret, inward turnings of a shell. The image turned to foam and swirled away. “Your singing was so beautiful,” he said helplessly. “It made me blind, it made me stupid. You made me hunger for you, and told me how to reach you. How could I have stopped to listen to any other song? I’m no different from all the ancient sailors who flung themselves into the sea, following your song, and drowned. I didn’t drown, and I did find you, but I didn’t know that I was never what you wanted.”

  “Yes, you are.” Her fierceness startled him. “You loved me. You loved my past. But how else could I draw your eyes to my living and endangered sea except to show you what you expected to see? You saw this face. You felt these hands. These you wanted.”

  “Want,” he said without hope. He shook his head a little; the barnacle floated free. “I’m only human.”

  “You must be more than human.”

  “How?”

  “You must be part of me. You owe me. I want your life.”

  He swallowed nothing, felt the blood beat in the back of his throat. For a turtle? he wondered blankly. For a whale’s life? He moved finally, reached up to touch his glasses. “Yes,” he said with an effort. “Alive down here? Or do you just want me dead?”

  She was silent; finally he saw all of her, the pearls in her sea-tossed hair, the flowing, tide-swirled garment that constantly shifted, revealing, concealing. He watched, mute, while she considered. “If I let you choose,” she said at last, “which would you choose? A life in this waste, cleaning my sea with a shell, or death?”

  He started to speak, stopped. She watched him, her face as hard and cold as Adam’s, while the sea showed him a quarter moon of breast, a slender knee. “Was what I did that terrible?” he asked helplessly. “Just following your song? We have always loved the sea. We leave ourselves in you constantly. A sunken galleon, an amphora, a billion barrels of oil, our bones. We can’t separate ourselves from you. You still flow in our blood. You feed us. You rage at us, wreck our cities, drown our children, and still we come past safety to stand at the edge of your fury to watch all your deadly beauty. Without you, we will die.”

  “You are killing me.”

  “Then we will die. And I will,” he added on a breath, “here, now, if you want. Or I will clean up the waste with a snail shell if you promise me—”

  “I will not bargain.”

  “No. But I can ask. If you will sing to me. The way you sang in the cave. As if the world had begun in that place, and I was listening to the first song ever heard. As long as I can listen to you, I would choose to live.”

  Something happened to her face, and to his: he felt it, a tear that was not a pearl, and saw on her face the faint suggestion that it was not carved of stone. He began to hear the song again, faint, mingling with the currents within the moon shell. He met her eyes, saw the storm in them, as ancient and as new as tide, as her song, as all her intricate faces. He whispered, “You choose my fate. It seems fair. We have shown you yours.”

  “Yes,” she said, and turned her head, as at the touch of an unexpected current moving through the sad, dark waters.

  Megan walked into the chamber.

  Eight

  Her eyes were red, her hair was full of pearls, she wore gleaming fish scales and thin slippers of scale. She cast an eye at Jonah almost as cold as the mermaid’s; her glance snagged on the moon shell, on the kelp rope around his wrists. She tried to turn away from him, then saw the expression in his own eyes. A tear fell from him, and then a pearl. He whispered, stunned, “Megan?”

  She stopped. He saw her swallow, saw the red deepen around her eyes. Then she shook her hair over her face, and turned away from him to the sea queen.

  She had vanished, leaving only a dozen bright butterflyfish that had been clinging to her hair startling through the water. Jonah said again, “Megan?”

  She folded her arms tightly, showed him a white, set profile, and then three quarters of her face. Then she showed him her full face, for nothing about him had the look she expected, of a man fed oysters and pearls from the sea queen’s fingers, who could barely remember the unenchanted world. “You look awful,” she said abruptly. “You look as though you drowned. You’re growing moss in your beard. You’re growing a beard.”

  “I should have used a razor clam,” he said weakly, feeling human tears sting again. “You look beautiful. You should always wear pearls in your hair.”

  “They’re tears,” she said stonily, and twitched behind her hair again. He watched her, wanting her familiar thin, secretive face, the blue-gray eyes, lovely and easily startled, behind her glasses. She came out finally, frowning at the kelp.

  “What’s that for? And why are you wearing that shell on your ear?”

  He lifted his hands, removed it finally. “There was a storm—”

  Her eyes widened a little. “I know. I saw it. Adam said it was her doing it. She.” Her hands tightened a little on her arms. “Your mermaid.”

  “Adam.”

  “He showed me how to get down here.”

  He blinked, aware suddenly of some shark-shadow of danger. “He did.” Her eyes challenged him; he drew breath, asked anyway, “How did you get here?”

  “I walked,” she said stiffly.

  “What do you mean, you walked?”

  “I drew the stairs into the sea and walked down them. Adam told me to do it that way.”

  “In return for what?” he demanded. “He doesn’t hand out things for free.”

  “You have some nerve asking. Walking is not how you got down here.”

  He was silent, remembering: a kiss, a pearl. “No,” he said softly. “I followed the siren’s song. I’m sorry.”


  “For what? That you followed it? Or for me?”

  “I couldn’t help it,” he pleaded. “That’s why it’s called a siren’s song.”

  She was silent then, feeling the blood gather again behind her eyes. She whispered finally, “I know. I heard it.”

  “You—”

  “Out there. In that terrible sea. I was out there, alone, and you were in the white tower with the sea queen singing to you, and you didn’t know I was out there, and I knew you wouldn’t have cared.”

  “Oh, Megan.” He held out his hands, trailing kelp leaves and yellow bladders. “Look at me! What does this look like?”

  “Something kinky,” she muttered darkly. But she frowned at him uncertainly, more puzzled now than angry. “If—” she said finally, “if it wasn’t for that, then what? What did she want you for? Didn’t you make love to her? Isn’t that what mermaids do? They drag you under, into the magic sea, and trap you there, if they don’t kill you first.” Her face smoothed suddenly, froze; she took a step toward him. “Jonah?”

  “Yes. That’s pretty much how it goes.”

  “Wait—” She stared at him, breathing quickly. “Wait. She trapped you in this tower? She can’t want to kill you. That doesn’t make sense. Adam said—”

  “Adam,” he said between his teeth.

  “He said I had to ask permission from the sea queen to take you back with me. If I still want you. He wouldn’t have said that unless there were a way.”

  “Do you?”