Song of the Sea Maid

by Rebecca Mascull

  One day I tire of my viewer and wish to see a broader area without it; thus I need to lean over from my boat and place my face close to the surface. But I stretch too far and fall in. I am submerged and weighed down dangerously by my ridiculous clothes, simple as they are. So I peel off most of them and discard them in the boat. I wear only my shift, feel my hair floating all around me on the surface of the water like a mermaid’s; I tip my head back, spread out my arms and float on the surface of the cerulean sea, close my eyes and float, my bare arms caressed by the playful water. This is the kind of liberation I had not the wit to dream of in smoky, dirty London, trussed up in stiff clothes and hemmed in by walls, streets and custom. The water soothes and holds me like a mother washes her child, like the babe in the watery womb. I wonder if my mother knew me long enough to bathe me, I wonder if she held me even. There are no answers to such questions.

  I turn and dip below the surface, open my eyes and through the blur consider the riotous beauty of the coral reef and how it came to be. This is a question I can contemplate. These gardens are so exquisite that it seems as if they must have been devised by a hand, created in order to be pleasing to the eye; the whole swathe of them in all their stunning variety across the reef seems designed by Capability Brown or some such landscape magician, to provide the most harmonious aspect. It may sound as if I am referring to the Almighty as the architect of this undersea garden. But I am not; I have an inkling that a human gardener created these displays, but an ancient one, from our distant past. Perhaps the kind of human who left their bones in those caves hereabouts. But what kind of being could have produced such intricate beauty as a coral garden, so long ago? And surely it would have to be a human who inhabited the shore, or islands, if not the sea itself; what, then, an aquatic human? I think of our smooth hairless skin, our layer of fat, even the curious webbing we all possess between forefinger and thumb …

  Sometimes I believe the conjecture of the natural philosopher rests uncomfortably between enlightenment and lunacy. I consider removing my shift to experience the water’s embrace on every part of my body, but I fear it would be my misfortune to be spotted by a patrolling soldier who would cite my outrageous behaviour as evidence of madness and I would be removed from the island. Swimming in a shift is bad enough and I scramble back into the boat, spreading out my sodden clothes and lying beside them in the sun to dry off, the gentle waves rocking me as I drift along the ridge of the reef. I could float out to sea and never be found. There are worse fates.

  That evening, clothed once more, somewhat damp with bare feet and the tangled hair of a siren, I tramp up the grassed path from the shore to the hillock on which sits my hut. A movement catches my eye and I glance down to the mooring-place below. There is a sailing boat there, one I have not seen before. In it, a man is collecting his bag and stepping out, met by a soldier from the garrison. They salute each other and the soldier points upwards, towards my hut. The man turns and shields his eyes from the golden light low on the horizon. He looks up and sees me, barefoot and wild-haired in the dying sun.

  15

  I am so astonished to see Captain Alex striding up to me – smiling broadly, hatless, wigless, a bulky knapsack over his shoulder, ruddy-cheeked and windswept from his sailing boat trip – that I guess there must be very bad news to bring him all this way. The brief contemplation of this – or something – causes a prickly sensation to sweep from the top of my head to my toes.

  ‘Is Mr Woods very ill?’

  ‘Oh no, Miss Price, not at all,’ he assures me. ‘I fear I have distressed you.’

  ‘I am so relieved.’

  He places his bag on the ground and says, ‘In fact, I come on an errand. I bring your colours. And paper. From Lisbon. For your work. And post from England. And some food, fine food you have perhaps not tasted in some time in your humble surroundings here … And I bring wine.’

  Never was I so glad to receive a gift, and to have a friend to bring it.

  ‘Well, Captain Alex, you are most welcome here!’ I laugh and he is pleased. ‘But where will you stay this night? It is already evening.’

  ‘I am to sleep at the fort. It is all arranged. I will leave tomorrow afternoon. I was hoping that we might share a meal now, if it is convenient?’

  ‘But I have no place to entertain you here, sir. No ceremony.’ I hold out my arms and look down at myself, even more dishevelled than the first time he saw me, barefoot as I am.

  ‘I am used to rough ways, at sea.’

  ‘In your superior cabin?’

  ‘It was not always thus. I began as a midshipman at ten years of age and lodged with the able seamen. I have seen my share of squalor.’

  ‘Then my goatherd’s hut will serve. Follow me.’

  I clear the table of my studies and we lay out all his good gifts. He has brought cured ham and sheep’s-milk cheese, custard tarts too and soft milk bread.

  ‘I must admit I am quite stunned to see you here, Captain. I would imagine you to be in Africa by now.’

  ‘We plan to sail in five days. And I have taken some leave. I came to the English Hotel in Lisbon, intending to offer to accompany you on a visit to the local attraction of Sintra, an appealing seaside location. But they told me there that you were in Peniche and also that some artist’s materials had arrived for you. So, on a whim, I hired a horse to bring you your goods, stopping off to purchase some of the finest local food on the way. On my arrival your rather dour landlady informed me in imperfect English that you had decamped from there too, and were ensconced on your island for the week, only to be reached by a sailing boat voyage of several hours.’

  ‘You went to far too much trouble, Captain, for me. All that travelling …’

  ‘To be frank, Miss Price, I have enjoyed the whole experience immensely. I always find it invigorating to explore, wet or dry. The ride to Peniche enabled me to see the country and it was a pleasure to captain a small boat again, something I have not done since I was a boy.’

  ‘I am glad. And I must say it is good to have some English company again. The Portuguese friends I have made are splendid people. But there is nothing like the sound of your own tongue.’

  We devour the food in no particular order and glug on wine from a shared tin cup. He is clearly gladdened to see me enjoying myself; we chat amicably of Lisbon and its environs, the mishaps of the Gentlemen of Science on the rowdy streets of the capital, and also the grief of Francis who apparently is bereft without me to wait upon. Once we have cleared away our scraps, I replace my studies and collection of finds on the tabletop. Captain Alex picks through the objects I have found and examines them with close interest.

  ‘When I knew you were to sail with us, Miss Price, and study fossils and so forth, I hoped very much you would seek out such as these. I anticipated that your work would serve to find evidence for the Flood described in Genesis. Tell me about these objects.’

  ‘They are things I have found in the caves hereabouts. A kind of tool for cutting, I believe, very old. Animal bones, human ones also. Here – a piece of broken horn, perhaps goat or deer, and see here, lines carved in it, perhaps by a human hand: a circle with a half line in it. It seems too studied to be chance. Some examples of fossils I found in the rocks – here, some ancient sea creatures, caught in time, turned to stone.’

  ‘Truly fascinating! Here we have clear evidence of the Deluge! These bones must have been of men who were killed by it.’ He holds up a fragment of human thigh bone and says, ‘He saw the Flood!’

  ‘Or she.’

  ‘Well, yes, perhaps,’ he replies. ‘He – or she – was one who committed wickedness and was destroyed by God, along with every other breathing, creeping thing. Seekers have found the bones of many destroyed creatures, such as the unicorn horn in your room in London, and the dragons’ teeth, griffin talons: all drowned for ever. But it is far rarer to find ancient human bones. It is, of course, because they floated on the surface of the water and rotted, leaving no remains. How splend
id that you have found some!’

  I watch him, so sure of his words; he speaks as though each utterance were a fact, not supposition.

  Say I, ‘Some have said there was a series of marine inundations, not one single catastrophe.’

  ‘Truly? But the Bible does not describe such events.’

  ‘Some have looked at layers of rock, laid down in time, so that the deeper layers are the eldest. Fossils found at various depths do not resemble one another. Some think there was perhaps a different climate on earth at the time of the Flood. Or that there were several floods, as I say, to create these layers of animals.’

  ‘Pure fancy,’ states the captain with certainty. ‘We have the evidence of the Bible and need nothing more.’

  ‘You are a sailor, Captain. You surely recall your great predecessor Sir Walter Raleigh, imprisoned in the Tower.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He wrote a history of the world there. He had sailed to the Americas, he had seen with his own eyes the hundreds if not thousands of new kinds of animals and plants as yet unknown in Europe. How could Noah have fitted all these species into the Ark? Raleigh was an admiral, he knew that even Noah could not have built a ship spacious enough to contain them all. He suggested that the animals of the New World did not have a place on the Ark; that Noah only saved the creatures of the Old World; that later those animals somehow emigrated to the Americas, and with the new climates they found there, changed over time and transformed into the new species we find there today.’

  ‘That is one possible explanation, yes.’

  ‘In the last century Matthew Hale devised the idea that the animals on the Ark were a kind of breeding stock, that they were formed of simpler animals that later developed over time into the complex range of creatures we see now.’

  ‘Also possible.’

  ‘So if animals can change over time, perhaps humans have changed too. Perhaps there was a time long before the Bible, long before the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome, where humans were more primitive; a simpler time, where we were not as we are today, where we were more closely related to the simpler forms of life on the earth.’

  ‘No, no. That really is nonsense, Miss Price. We all know from the Bible that we are the descendants of Noah, a highly skilled and intelligent man, who carried the knowledge of his people with him and his family.’

  ‘Then answer me this. You see this tool, this cutting tool held in the hand. Hold it, see for yourself, feel it. It was made by human hands, undoubtedly.’

  ‘I have heard it said these ancient weapons are no more than thunderbolts, formed in storm clouds and rained down on the earth.’

  ‘Which is most likely? Formed by cloud or by hand, chipping away with another stone – here are the strike marks, you see?’

  ‘Agreed, most likely.’

  ‘So, who made it? Why? Why not use metal? It works much better than stone, for cutting.’

  ‘I do not know. Perhaps there was no metal on this island.’

  ‘But men could have brought metal across from the mainland. They had boats, Noah the master shipwright would have passed down this knowledge to his descendants, surely.’

  ‘True.’ He is frowning now.

  ‘There was an apothecary in London named Conyers, at the end of the last century. He found a stone axe like this, and some fossilised ivory which he concluded was that of an ancient elephant, that the beast had been killed with the stone axe, by ancient Britons.’

  ‘What folly!’

  ‘Is it? He surmised that these ancient Britons had not yet learned the use of metal and used stone instead. More recently, the German historian Eckhart had investigated the burial-places of his ancient countrymen, and saw that the oldest tombs contained artefacts shaped only from stone or antlers, while the more recent ones had bronze swords, shields and ornaments, and finally the most modern had iron implements.’

  ‘What does that prove, Miss Price? Only that some were richer than others, that they could afford to buy iron or bronze, while others could only afford the rocks they could find themselves.’

  This seems a good point and he is pleased with himself, sure of himself, his eyes bright. But I am sure of myself too.

  ‘I do not think so. They were of vastly different ages. I think that European humans have developed over time. That they were primitive once, knew not the art of metal working, yet changed and grew and learned about the world. Perhaps their climate changed – the floods I spoke of – and they were forced to change with it. Sea levels have risen and fallen – this is obvious from the sight of fossils of sea creatures high up in rocks hundreds of feet from ground level. It is also clear that different places on the earth have different kinds of animals living in them. Why is that? Here on these tiny islands live a range of creatures not found commonly in Peniche. Even the very rock itself is different. Is it not possible that animals on islands grow differently, according to where they live? That the weather, the plants and landscape surrounding them, their very situation may guide and change how they are, over great periods of time, over thousands of years?’

  ‘But we know that the world is only perhaps six thousand or so years of age. And that the Flood happened only four thousand years ago. There is no time for this kind of change, surely.’

  ‘If one accepts such a calculation, Captain. Based only on one book.’

  ‘On the book, Miss Price. The divine word of God.’

  ‘Perhaps the Bible just tells part of the story. God created the universe, set in motion the planets, the stars and our sun. De Maillet was writing, around the turn of our present century, that seeds rained down from the universe on the ancient oceans and animals grew from them. As the seas receded, some of these simple animals were forced by the change in their environment to breathe air. So amphibians and reptiles came into being. And over time, fins turned to gills, skin to down, scales to feathers, and a fish has turned into a bird.’

  ‘That is the oddest kind of fancy.’

  ‘It is written down. In a book. But of course, we should never presume to explain the whole of creation by reading only one book.’

  He replaces the hand axe carefully upon the table. He is frowning again. He looks up at me pointedly, as if searching my features for answers to the questions I have laid before him.

  ‘You are a very disturbing young woman, Miss Price.’

  I smile at him. I take it as a tribute.

  He turns away, coughs, then pronounces, ‘I should like to view some of the caves where you found these objects. I would like to see what you have seen. Perhaps in the morning?’

  ‘Better than that. I need a good sailor to take me over to the smaller islets out there. There will be caves there too, I warrant, undisturbed by modern people. Who knows what lies within them? Are you willing, Captain Alex?’

  He knocks on my door just past dawn. I am already up and prepared, as I am every day here. I rise and sleep by the rhythms of the sun and moon. It is a perfect day for sailing: enough breeze, yet calm and warm. We begin with a trip around Berlenga Grande, and the captain manoeuvres his craft skilfully in and out of several sea caverns. One has the peculiar quality of turning your hand blue as you trail it in the water. One cavern is so enormous it undercuts the island from one side to the other. We go on to the nearby Estelas Islands and find them covered in seagulls, screeching in a cacophony of sound, some angrily screaming at us for invading their utopia, others mewing like kittens over their speckled eggs, laid in nests that cover almost every inch of the islands’ surfaces.

  I want to go further, the longer trip over to Farilhão Grande. I have asked Horacio before if he would take me, but he only makes brief visits here these days to leave my supplies and then he rushes back to his life on the mainland. ‘One day,’ he says, but he has not yet. My captain agrees, I think because he so loves to sail this little boat. The breeze is up and we whip smartly over there, guided expertly by his hand. But when we arrive, the wind is stronger still and it is too
dangerous to approach the islets close enough to enter the caves. There is one islet much smaller than the others, a craggy rock that would take one five minutes only to walk its entire circumference. He keeps his distance, yet I can see, if the weather had served us better, that there is a landing-place on this tiniest islet of the Farilhões, from where a rough path ascends to a cave up above the sea line. I can see there are many fossils in the stone surrounding the cave mouth and even glimpse, between the bucking of the boat over the choppy waves, that there is something red, something black there, on the walls of the cave, at the very entrance. As if there were paint there, but surely this is a trick of the eye.

  ‘Closer, bring her closer!’ I call to him.

  ‘I cannot. The weather is turning. We must go back.’ He points at the sky and I see dark clouds ominous in the near distance.

  A tightness in my chest grips me, yet still I strain my eyes towards the cave, soon out of reach and out of eyeshot, as we are buffeted by the stiff wind and turn about to make the queasy journey in return. By the time we reach my island, the approaching storm rains down over the Farilhões: a blanket of grey lines cuts the air and charges the sky. We scramble up to the hut and watch the storm move mighty and slow over the far islands, then drift out over the Atlantic, whipping up waves, to become some poor souls’ problem in a lonely ship out there. We are spared. Then I realise how hungry I am and we go inside, shovelling in the leftovers from yesterday’s supper.

  ‘I think there were paintings in that cave,’ I tell him. ‘I saw colours and lines. I must return. I must! As soon as ever I can!’