Beautiful to Me

by E. L. Tenenbaum

  As a whole, the princesses did fine jobs in tending their plots and it wasn’t unusual for castle visitors to specifically make time to admire their wonderful designs prominently displayed in the most noticeable sections. The princesses made changes whenever it suit them, and anyone who really knew them could find patterns within the little spaces.

  For example, one of the princesses who was adept at mosaics once turned colored bits of shells into a school of fish that looked like it was just passing by. Another planted and trimmed seaweed into the shape of a breaching whale. Still another formed her garden into the loveliest coral reef that ever was. The blonde sister singled out in Bestaymor’s storytelling tended to only plant things that matched her hair, namely anything green, blue, and, for a while, orange. As such, she mainly grew a variety of seagrasses and particular sea anemones, a combination of the beautiful and mundane to create something worthy of attention.

  Though relegated to a back corner, I was assigned a plot among those designated for other daughters of castle nobility. Having no one at the castle to speak to, I often spoke and sang to my garden instead. Granted, all merfolk sing, because, aside from the basic magic we use to grow our gardens, we mainly cultivate them through songs—which hone and direct our magical voices—the real secret behind the vivid colors and vibrant bursts of blooming flora. Which made Sienna’s easy sacrifice of her voice all the more painful for us.

  Fortunately for me, such magic carried onto land, as anyone who visits my former palace and asks after Queen Ariel’s hedges will gladly be told by both servant and noble—even those I never met—about the queen who sang to her plants, about how they grew and blossomed for her.

  My small plot sprouted a kelp forest carefully shaped into two very dear dolphins, their noses pointed toward the surface as they veritably appeared to be leaping out of the garden. I’m sure more merfolk than my parents would have appreciated the vivid scene in my garden square had any bothered to wander past the princesses’ plots and into my corner. However, the joy of always being able to see my friends, especially when they were migrating, was something no one could diminish for me.

  I was able to create such a lifelike design through the notable level of power in my voice, their magnificent outcome my one confirmation that I really did have an admirable talent for encouraging growth, which no one but my parents bothered saying as much to me. Whenever we performed for the royal court, the choirmaster always motioned me to sing lower, always ushered Sienna forward to sing solo after solo to the delight of our listeners. I understood it was because Sienna was far nicer to look at, even if her voice wasn’t quite as nice and her magic wasn’t quite as strong as mine.

  As expected, there was something different about Sienna’s garden, because Sienna always had to be different.

  She had shaped her little, central plot into a circle like the sun. She placed all kinds of coral in varying shades of red, orange, and yellow to mimic the burning colors that gave warmth to the land and sky. In the center of it all was a white marble statue of a boy she once retrieved from a wrecked ship, the only foreign piece included in any of our gardens. And that statue never moved.

  It was clear to anyone brave enough to acknowledge it that Sienna was obsessed with the human world in the most unnatural and unhealthy of ways. Some of it stemmed from curiosity, but much of it came from her misguided, unwarranted conviction that only humans have immortal souls, that only they have some sort of life after death. I’m still not sure where she got such notions or why she was so sure they were true. To me, it never sounded right when she spoke about how merfolk were soulless. It made us seem like haunted specters floating through the underworld of the sea, and just seeing what we had done with our gardens was proof that we were anything but. Besides, everyone knew that after three hundred years of life merfolk dissolved into the waters of the sea, our own type of continuity, an underwater level of dust-to-dust, while our souls returned to the Heaven that warmed and colored the sea from above.

  Sienna was so consumed with that other realm, she thought and talked about it endlessly, until even the grandmother who favored her above all the others would beg her to stop. Merfolk, in general, weren’t interested in humans. Aside from an occasional, accidental, interaction with a lone fisherman here and there, they were too distant and had no bearing on our world. They lived and they died, same as any of Heaven’s creatures. The more she spoke of humans and their world, the more she became possessed with some powerful, unspoken force, some intangible desire relentlessly pulling her upward to them. More than once I caught Bestaymor casting a quick, pursed-lip frown in her direction.

  I, for one, never bought into any of Sienna’s nonsense. Anything that lives needs to have a soul, and as every soul comes from the immortal, infinite Being, of course it’s also immortal. If the princess would have only taken five seconds to notice me there, always there, she could have avoided many of the regrettable things to come. I think.

  But Sienna never bothered speaking to me about any of this, and I never had the courage to approach her, because I knew she would either look past me or just swim away, like perhaps I was an amorphous underwater specter.

  So outside of dear Bestaymor, the only other one to ever vocally challenge Sienna’s obsession with the other world was her personal steward, Pavo.

  Each of the king’s daughters had a personal steward who was not only in charge of her staff, arranging her schedule, and a host of other boring things, but also, from when they were young, the stewards were tasked with their education and would eventually become a type of mentor to each of their charges. Not all the princesses had the same sea creature as steward either. The lucky ones were assigned a wise sea turtle, the spoiled one who always had to be different was specially granted a lovely axolotl named Pavo. Pavo was actually a lake creature and shouldn’t have been able to live in the sea kingdom’s capital at all. However, King Trident made an exception for his youngest daughter and Pavo was enchanted to enable him to live in our world.

  Pavo did the best he could by the princess, but even I would agree it’s difficult to take such a cherubic creature seriously.

  For example, if Sienna was jealous of one of her sisters, and Pavo would remind Her Royal Highness that “every princess is unique and her mother’s only child,” Sienna would simply change his colors, stick her sea star behind his ear, catch him by his tail, or the like.

  Another one of Pavo’s replies that I never liked was his response to Sienna’s talk of becoming a “soulful” person on land. He would wave a hand at her and point out that life was less morally complicated for merfolk who don’t have the same pressures and temptations as humans do. In response, Sienna would trap him in a bubble, and leave him to float away until it was mercifully popped.

  Having lived in both worlds, I agree our underwater life was somewhat less complicated, but perhaps Sienna simply thought humans were more soulful because their struggles were harder. Granted, life wasn’t entirely easy for merfolk. After all, we still struggled with love and hate and passion and rage and jealousy.

  One thing the steward was right about though, and I won’t hesitate to say it, was his insistence that everything Sienna could ever want or need in her life was right there in the sea. I can say now with certainty that no matter what I’ve seen or tasted of on land, nothing can quite compare to life in the Sea King’s magical kingdom. We only believed it then; I know it to be true now.

  When Sienna would daydream of the world above water or get lost in a jumble of words about life with legs during her lessons, Pavo would harshly rap an old turtle shell, effectively cutting her off mid-sentence or mid-dream.

  “Sienna, you are a princess,” he’d sharply reprimand. “Obviously, the most beautiful, the most beloved by your father. The entire ocean kingdom is yours. What can you possibly find on land that’s any better? What more could you be looking for?”

  Nothing. There was nothing more that she should have been searching for. Nothing that shoul
d have tugged her away from her privileged life in water to lead a life dependent on air, nothing that should have led her to betray her father, her sisters, and all of Merdom. Everything she had, everything she was searching for, was with her all along. She proved as much in the end.

  I sincerely believe Sienna could have been made to realize this if Pavo, if any of her family had thought to ask the right questions of her. She may have been set in her philosophies, but she was still young and malleable, still able to be set straight with proper guidance. Because it wasn’t a what but a why she was searching for. They should have wondered why she was looking for more. Maybe Sienna didn’t have the right words to answer that question, but she would have found them in time, would have been led to understand what her restlessness and dissatisfaction were all about. Before she had the chance to be so irrational. Before she could do something so irrevocable.

  The princess had a hunger in her soul that she couldn’t explain. Being royalty, knowing that the entirely of the ocean kingdom bowed to her, wasn’t enough for King Trident’s youngest daughter. Not because she was greedy or selfish, but because she had an emptiness that needed to be filled. She needed something more in her life, something that held specific meaning to her, and she was convinced that whatever it was couldn’t be found underwater.

  Of course, she was gravely mistaken, but no one would realize that until it was too late.

  At the age of fifteen, merfolk are finally deemed old enough to break the surface and swim above water for the first time. From then on, we are allowed to surface as often as we wish, but it is a rite of passage to spend that day with our heads above water, even though most of us found nothing to tempt us back after our initial curiosity was satiated. We wait fifteen years to see firsthand how much less the human world is, and no one is allowed to break the surface a day, an hour, a minute before. Without exception. It simply is not done.

  But there’s a first for everything, and, as usual, it had to do with Sienna.

  As the only one in the capital raised with siblings, five at that, Sienna was given a frequent taste of land before she finally turned fifteen. On each of her sisters’ fifteenth birthdays, Sienna would swim up as far as she was allowed, then sit by the castle gates the rest of the day. Once they returned, she would scarce let them rest before bombarding them with incessant questions.

  “What was it like?”

  “It was…nice.”

  “Did you see humans? Were they using their legs? Were they running and dancing and-and standing?”

  “I saw some humans aboard a great big ship. They were playing music and dancing and singing, though not very well.”

  “What else? What else? What else?” she clamored, excited and frustrated by her sister’s disinterest.

  “I saw the small winged creatures called birds that swim in the big blue space called sky. I saw the very tall brown and green seaweed called trees and the towering mounds of earth called mountains. The sun above the water is very hot, much hotter than at the surface. Animals and humans drink water to live, but fish cannot live on invisible air.”

  Despite the answers she received, Sienna still inflicted a similar interrogation upon her next sister.

  “Did you see any humans? Did you say hello?”

  “You know very well it’s not allowed, Sienna! It’s unwise for humans and merfolk to interact because we each bring death to the other. It is better to hear without being heard, to see without being seen, for if we are caught, we must do as Bestaymor taught and sing them under the waves!”

  “When will you go up again?”

  “Perhaps soon, perhaps not at all. Land is very lovely, and there is quite a bit to see, but it is not quite as lovely as our home in the sea.”

  And so it went. Sienna peppered each sister in turn, and with each of their answers, her infatuation with land steadily grew, feeding like a colony of barnacles stuck to the rocks near underwater volcanoes.

  I’ll admit to being curious about the mysterious world above the sea, a whole world that existed outside the boundaries of our vast underwater kingdom, and a part of me also wanted to explore what made it so different from ours. Aside from the stories and basic terms we heard from our elders who’d seen it for themselves, the most any of us could know came from the little bits we learned digging through shipwrecks and catching items thrown overboard or washed out from shore.

  I was too shy to ask my parents about it, especially my father who met human faeries and other land magicals at least once a year, as it felt unseemly in the face of Sienna’s well-known obsession. However, I did have two friends who had leave to break the water’s surface whenever they needed to catch a breath.

  “Callan, Cigny, may I ask you a question?” I finally blurted out one day.

  “Sure,” Callan, always the nicer of the two, answered first.

  “What’s it like?” I asked. “Above the ocean?”

  Cigny wrinkled her nose. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Well,” I began slowly, “I am almost fifteen, and…well, I should prepare myself however I can.”

  Callan thought a moment before answering. “There is nothing to compare to the sea, but some things are very lovely on land. The trees grow to be very tall and the sky is the most wonderful shade of blue. Sometimes there are clouds which look light and fluffy, but sometimes they are dark and stormy. These clouds rain water which feeds the land below them. The people do not live in amber castles or coral reefs, but in dull square boxes. Their kings live in palaces, which are fairly noble and grand. We’ve gone swimming around some of them a few times for fun.”

  “And humans?” I almost didn’t dare ask. “Have you seen humans?”

  Cigny nickered impatiently. “We’ve seen them on ships, and we’ve seen them on land, and they shriek and wave excitedly whenever they spot us. They cover their bodies in lots of material they call clothes, but they are very much like merfolk, because they also have two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth. They have hair and—”

  “Legs,” I couldn’t help but add.

  “Yes, and legs,” Cigny continued. “But they cannot live underwater, which is why they ride their ships on the sea.”

  “They cannot live underwater?”

  This was news to me. Although we knew that humans and merfolk lived separate lives, no one had ever said anything to me about their inability to live in the sea. I’d always assumed I never saw any of them around because their legs made them so different, they were given a kingdom away from ours. I also never thought to question the simplicity of the fact that their kingdom was on land while ours was in the sea. There never seemed reason to wonder that perhaps they never came to visit because they simply couldn’t.

  “Humans,” Callan explained, “do not have gills, and only faeries are magical. They cannot breathe in water, so they can only be under it for a very short time. I have seen some of them swim, but they aren’t very fast, and they have to fill their lungs with air much more often than we do.”

  I wondered if Sienna knew about that, if she understood what her sisters meant that merfolk could be the death of humans because they could not live as we could. I wasn’t yet sure what it meant that humans could be the death of merfolk, but I have my suspicions now, though not specifically in regard to what happened with Sienna. She brought that on herself.

  Otherwise, it wouldn’t take very long for me to find out just how very naïve I really was about humans and their world. Of course merfolk knew they couldn’t live underwater. It’s why we were taught the songs to sing them to their deaths if ever they saw us.

  Sienna’s fifteenth birthday finally dawned, much to the relief of all those sick of hearing her endless questions about life on land. Finally, finally, she would see for herself how simple, how pretty but incomparable the world was away from the ocean floor. It was as if all of Merdom breathed a sigh of relief when the long awaited day arrived.

  Except, when Sienna broke the surface, her desire for a human life
grew unbearably stronger, so her fifteenth birthday was not to be the end but the beginning. The beginning of her end. Would King Trident, her mother, or even Bestaymor have tried to hold her back if they’d but only known?

  Sienna woke early as she could the morning of her birthday. She wanted to break the surface by dawn, early enough to see for herself how the sun painted the sky in the types of colors she forced upon poor Pavo. Bestaymor, for her part, would not let her royal granddaughter go anywhere without appropriate dress.

  “But these clamshells are too heavy for me to carry!” Sienna protested when her grandmother tried to decorate her tail for the occasion.

  “Nonsense, Sienna, darling,” Bestaymor cooed, “and see how lovely you make them look.”

  Sienna obliged Bestaymor with a single downward squint and declared, “I do not need them, I do not want them!”

  I was probably not supposed to have seen any of this, there was surely much I wasn’t supposed to have seen over my years in the underwater castle, and I suspect overhearing it had much to do with dragging me into the mess that followed. However, it was the princess’s long awaited fifteenth birthday, and I, ever faithful and faithfully ignored, had gone early to her rooms giddy with anticipation. Even now, I have no idea why.

  “You used to love decorating your tail with clamshells,” Bestaymor reminded the princess. “Just last year, you tried sneaking some off your sister’s tail!”

  “Bestaymor, much as I would love to wear your great-great-grandmother’s ivory shells, I refuse to wear anything that may slow me down this morning,” Sienna said in her most conciliatory tone. “I will not lose a second of this day to lugging around old charms.”