All The Mermaids In The Sea

by Robert W Cabell

  “The last personal contact I had with the duchess was the news of Princess Adara’s birth, right after a copy of her birth certificate was faxed to our office. She was listed in the records of the royal Danish family and as the legal heir to the Duchy of Egeskov.” Bruun pronounced the title as if he were a herald in a grand court ballroom. “Do you know anything regarding Princess Adara’s whereabouts?”

  “Nothing for certain, but we believe she will attempt to pass through the Panama Canal any day now,” Holger told him with more confidence than he felt.

  “But that could be quite dangerous!” Canute gasped. “We must try and contact her before that and have our agents positioned on both sides of the canal to give her assistance if she needs it.”

  “I agree,” Holger said. “But where is this Queen Helmi? Can’t she help us find Pearl in the sea? Can’t she do the Dr. Doolittle trick and talk to the animals and find out where Pearl—I mean Adara—is?”

  “Communications with Queen Helmi have always been extremely rare. She is, and has always been, distrustful of being on land, which is why she was never vested with the title of Duchess of Egeskov. It was a title created for the Princess Miranda who loved to visit the cities and courts of Europe with

  her father. Queen Helmi seldom left the sea and almost never went anywhere on land except for the Manor House in the Faeroe Islands. We have, of course, sent word there.”

  “What did she say when you told her about Pearl?” Holger asked.

  “She wasn’t there. They said she was aware of her granddaughter’s transformation and was already in the sea. That word was sent by whale song, which is the fastest way to send news around the world. Queen Helmi directed the whales to guide Princess Adara to the Turtle King in the Galapagos Islands and protect the princess until she can reach her. But the closest access the queen would have to a portal is the palace in Bermuda, so the Panama Canal would make sense if the Turtle King informed the princess of its existence.”

  “The Turtle King? Portals? I don’t think I can handle too much more of this stuff right now. This whole thing is too fairy-tale-mythological-madness already. Worst of all, because of Disney, every fisherman and navy vessel—heck every nut that has a canoe—is out looking for the ten-million-dollar mermaid!” Holger ranted. “We have to find her and protect her.”

  “With your permission and authorization, Your Grace, as you are Adara’s legal guardian, the CEO of Oceanus, and the Regent Duke of Egeskov, there are many things we can do,” Canute asserted. “Shall we discuss those possibilities?”

  “That’s a very good idea,” Holger answered.

  Having It All

  Halder woke up the next morning in a fine, four-poster bed beneath a soft, down comforter. The bed curtains to his left were open, revealing a small coal fire burning in the little fireplace in the room, and sunlight streaming in through the window. As he turned to look at the source of the light, he saw a magnificent view of the ocean.

  “Where am I?” he wondered groggily. Then he suddenly bolted upright in bed and gasped, “The Manor!”

  “How are you feeling, darling?” Miranda asked. She had been sitting in the armchair on the opposite side of the bed, waiting for him to wake. He had not been aware of her presence until she spoke.

  “What the heck did you put in the wine last night?” he nearly shouted as he whipped the other bed curtains open. “I’ve been having hallucinations and nightmares like you wouldn’t believe!”

  “I thought your dream has always been to marry the Little Mermaid, and now you call it a nightmare?” Miranda crossed her arms and glared at him.

  “Are you telling me all the stuff I saw last night was real?”

  “If you mean the fact that my mother was the Little Mermaid that you so ardently dreamed of as a little boy, and that I’m a mermaid too, then yes.”

  “But that’s not possible!”

  “Why?”

  “Because mermaids don’t exist! I wish they did, but they don’t, or science would have found some by now.”

  “Well, there are only two mermaids in the entire world, and you’re looking at one of them!” she shouted at him. “So maybe your scientists just never got invited to dinner!”

  “Why are you angry with me?” he asked

  “Because you’re calling me a liar!” she hissed.

  “I am not!”

  “Oh, yes you are!” she snapped.

  “But you’re not really a mermaid!” he snapped back at her. “I want to talk to your mother.”

  “You can’t, she’s out swimming with her whales.”

  “Okay, Miranda, I love you. You know I love you, and I want to marry you, but you have to stop lying to me about this. Now where is your mother?”

  “Errrrh!” Miranda screamed and stomped her foot. “You are so stubborn!”

  She grabbed him by the wrist, dragged him to the window, and pointed down to the ocean sixty feet below. “Look, you stupid jerk!”

  Halder shook his head in frustration and looked where she was pointing to below. “See? As I told you, she’s swimming with her whales!” Miranda glared at him.

  There was Helmi, far below them, hugging the neck of a white beluga whale, with her mermaid tail trailing out behind her.

  “But—” Halder stammered.

  “I don’t want to hear another word until you apologize!” Miranda cut him off with a wave of her hand.

  “Apologize?”

  “You just called me a delusional liar,” Miranda interjected. “I think that deserves an apology, especially since you told me how you always wanted to marry a mermaid, and

  now you—” Halder spun her around, pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Then he kissed her again.

  “Apology accepted,” she whispered.

  Brunch With Belugas

  Halder and Miranda had a late breakfast with Miranda’s mother Helmi down in the grotto. Halder was still finding it hard to believe, but it all came home when he stood before Helmi in her mermaid form and asked for Miranda’s hand in marriage.

  “I know you love my daughter, Halder, and she loves you. I wish to give you my permission with all my heart, but there is one condition, and one condition only,” Helmi stated.

  “Anything, Your Highness. I will do anything to be with Miranda,” he assured her.

  “You must give up your life on land and come to the sea.”

  “That’s not a problem, Your Highness, I swear. I live on boats and love scuba diving.”

  “No, Halder, I mean you must become a part of the sea. We can live on land for short periods of time only. Miranda has learned to love both worlds because her father, like you, was once a mortal. But we mermaids live a long time. I am nearly three thousand years old, and once Valdemar became a merman, he lived another seven hundred years before he was killed in the Battle of Krakatau.”

  “We’re asking you to make a very long-term commitment, Halder,” Miranda interjected, and she was suddenly standing there beside him. “I want you to love me forever, or for at least a thousand years. For that, you need to become a merman.”

  “How can you do that?” Halder asked. “How can you possibly change me into someone, some thing else?”

  “First, we will use the Ring of Atlantis to allow you passage between both worlds.” Helmi nodded, and Miranda slipped a heavy gold signet ring on his finger that seemed to flair hot for a moment and then tighten.

  “But to become a true merman and live an extended life, you must eat the Golden Lichen of Poseidon,” Miranda explained. “It will create a change in your body, perhaps like a virus, or simply magic … I don’t really know how it works, darling. Once you eat it, you will grow gill slits like mine and mother’s, and other small changes will occur that will keep you young and healthy for centuries to come.”

  “If we are out of the water for over twenty-eight days, our gills will seal forever and we cannot return to the sea,” explained Helmi. “We will age like other mortals and die. This is how I
lost several of my sisters. There were once nine mermaids in the sea, now there are only two.” She sighed sadly.

  “Well, there’ll be a heck of a lot more of them if I have anything to say about it.” Halder grinned and kissed Miranda passionately. He held up his hand and looked at the signet ring and then smiled. “With this ring I thee wed?” he smiled.

  “You betcha!” She smiled back at him and then walked with him, hand in hand, into the water.

  Swimming With Whales

  Halder kept thinking that nothing more wild or amazing could ever compare with finding out about Miranda. He was wrong. The minute the ring touched the water—the Ring of Atlantis as Helmi had called it—he felt changes in his body.

  He did not grow gills as Miranda had said, but he felt a strange power surge through him. A sphere of compressed air encircled his head and there was a faint scent of ozone or electricity to it. The air seemed to pass through it from the water, feeding him a constant supply of oxygen, and he was able to see with total clarity.

  Not only that, but he found himself in total mental rapport with Miranda. She knew he needed to return to Tórshavn to talk to his brother, and she knew it would take some time to organize his life.

  “That is what the ring is for, darling,” Miranda relayed.

  “Is this ring really from Atlantis, Miranda?”

  “Yes, Halder, it is thousands of years older than mother. About thirteen thousand years old, she told me. I know you will have lots of questions, and there will be lots of time to answer them, but let’s just enjoy this moment and swim back to Tórshavn.” And so they did, but not alone.

  The word had spread throughout the sea that the Princess Miranda had found her prince. Dolphins, seals, sparkling-white belugas with their childlike, wide-eyed faces, narwhal males with their mighty horns, and many other sea creatures came to see Halder, the new Prince of the Sea.

  They danced for Miranda in their watery way. They celebrated her nuptials. Then one particular seal swam up right in front of Halder and placed her flipper gently on his right shoulder.

  “Thank you, Inga,” Miranda said, nodding to the seal. Then the seal turned her head toward Miranda, bowed to her, and Miranda appeared to be listening for a moment. “Inga says she liked you the moment you came to the castle, and she will cook anything you want the next time you come.”

  “Inga? You mean the cook? But she’s not a seal!” Halder laughed.

  “She is when she goes back to the sea at night. All the servant women at the castle are selkies.” Miranda giggled, and swooped into a dive toward a male narwhal.

  “What’s one more myth to get used to?” Halder shrugged and dove after her.

  So they rode on the backs of two male narwhals holding on with bridles made of braided kelp that two seals, most likely selkies, had given them. What a rush! Halder thought as they surged forward at almost breakneck speed breaching the surface on whaleback. They leaped up into the air and then dove deep into the ocean, which no longer felt cold to Halder. The things he saw that morning on his “honeymoon ride,” as Miranda called it afterward, were etched forever in his mind. Before he knew it, and long before he wanted to be, they were circling the landing at the docks where he had parked his car.

  “I’ll meet you for breakfast tomorrow morning at the Hotel Foroyar,” she told him, “and bring your brother with you.” Miranda kissed him soundly, and then dove back into the water as he walked toward his car. Halder was dripping wet, but the ring seemed to keep him warm, and by the time he arrived back at his hotel, his clothes were dry.

  The Morning After

  When Halder arrived at the dock, he saw that Holger had arrived with all the equipment in tow and had a full crew standing by. A few of them looked a little shady, and one or two even a bit familiar, but he had far too many other things on his mind to question or comment on his brother’s choices. He hated the staffing and acquisition stuff. He was the hands-on, down-in-the-trenches, more-in-the-sea-than-out-of-it half of the duo.

  He looked down at the Ring of Atlantis and slipped it off his hand and into his pocket. He’d show it off to Holder later, but he didn’t want any prying eyes to notice it now.

  “Where have you been?” Holger shouted as he came up the gangway. “I’ve been looking all over for you since yesterday!”

  “I got a last minute invitation to meet Miranda’s mother and wound up spending the night at her house,” Halder placated him calmly. “Don’t get all crazy—you told me you wouldn’t make it here until this morning.”

  “Well, we made good time,” Holger growled. “You could have left me a message,” he grumbled, not ready to relinquish the issue.

  “Well, I would have, had I known about everything in advance. Now just calm down, because I’ve got some stuff to tell you that will blow your mind—”

  “I’ve got something to tell you first.” Holger held up a hand to stop him. “We’ve got Doctor Petersen here with us for two days to do a beta test of his new bathysphere with sonar topography equipment. Now that you’ve finally strolled in, we’re leaving port in fifteen minutes. So you need to get your rear in gear because you’re taking the bathysphere down in about forty-five minutes.”

  “Well we’d better get back tonight because tomorrow you’re having breakfast with me and the girl of my dreams!” Halder laughed.

  “You’ve really got it bad, haven’t you?” Holger clapped his brother on the back.

  “You are looking at a married man, Bro!” Halder beamed.

  Bitter Betrayal

  It was far too easy. Taking another man’s life should not be as easy as sawing through a steel cable and jamming a release clamp, but that was all it would take.

  He was not an evil man. No amount of money could have made him betray Miranda or her family.

  He was tall and strong, and his selkie wife had left the sea and borne him a daughter because, as she often told him, she loved the gentle soul in his big-boned body. She had died in childbirth with their second baby. The infant boy had followed his mother a few days later, too ill to survive. The only thing he had left of his wife was their daughter, Irene.

  She had gone to Greece to attend college, something no one in his family or the family of his friends had ever done. Irene had met a man there who had courted her and charmed her, then married her. He was an employee of a Greek shipping magnet, an executive of the firm. Her husband also had two mistresses and three children by them, though poor Irene had known nothing of them when she’d borne him a son.

  He only knew the truth because it was important that he understand that the executive had married his daughter only to keep her in Greece. He had been paid to marry her by his employer, paid a great deal of money to keep her happy so his boss could use her as a bargaining chip against the old sailor.

  He was a simple servant, and he served the Duchess of Egeskov as his family had for generations. He would gladly die to protect the duchess. Unfortunately, his son-in-law was willing to let his wife and child be killed by his boss if the old sailor did not help them.

  They swore no harm would come to the duchess herself if he did what they asked. The old sailor could not let his daughter and grandson die, even if it meant he had to kill a fine young man guilty of nothing but falling in love with the most amazing woman in the world.

  So he put away the hacksaw and went to bed. The old sailor did not sleep. He might never sleep again. But he went to his bed and prayed for his soul.

  In Swims the Cavalry

  Halder and Holger were both consummate professionals. People don’t complete double doctorates by the age of thirty without knowing when to get to work, and how to get the ball rolling. Just like clockwork, within forty-five minutes of leaving port, they were drifting over a deep trench where they would test out the new bathysphere.

  Until as recently as the 1930s, the depths of the sea had been closed to man. Then the invention of a man-sized, hollow metal ball on a long chain with a window, reminiscent in appearance
of those magic eight balls that tell the future, changed everything. That is basically what a bathysphere was as created by inventor and engineer Otis Barton and an undersea explorer and naturalist William Beebe William.

  Their invention kicked the door open to the depths of the ocean, and deep-sea exploration was suddenly possible. The bathysphere could safely take a man down hundreds, even thousands, of feet below the surface. The metal sphere was thick enough to withstand the crushing pressure and still contain a breathable atmosphere. The bathysphere was simply lowered on a thick steel cable. Metal weights counteracted the natural buoyancy of the air inside the sphere. When the bathysphere was ready to rise, it could simply be pulled up, or the weights could be released and it would float naturally back up to the surface.

  This had been done successfully as deep as 3,500 feet. A second cable in a rubber hose carried electricity to provide light and communications cables that allowed for two-way conversations between the bathysphere occupant and the mother ship above.

  The bathysphere was not a submarine. It had no propulsion system or steering capabilities. It was merely dipped from a ship like a tea ball into the ocean above a specified location. When the air supply was about to expire, it was raised back to the ship. The interior was approximately four and a half feet in diameter, with most of that room taken up by communications equipment, oxygen tanks, soda lime to absorb carbon dioxide, and calcium chloride to absorb moisture. The accommodations were far from deluxe.

  Halder had become fascinated with the idea of deep-sea investigations, not only to map the ocean floors, but also to study the diving capabilities of whales and dolphins. A sperm whale can dive a mile deep, passing through pressure ranges of a few pounds per square inch up to more than one ton per square inch against its big body. It can then resurface within minutes with no harm.