Walking on Water

by Matthew J. Metzger

  Alarik laughed.

  “The truth need not be known until after such an alliance.”

  “Very cruel. The poor lady, to be saddled with me.”

  “The poor kingdom, to have you for a potential ruler.”

  Janez objected, and Alarik insisted, and they cackled together like children a little longer, before Janez broke off to yawn heavily. Too heavily. He eyed the cup suspiciously, and set it down.

  “Alarik.”

  “You looked tired. I’m surprised Sofia didn’t try the same.”

  “If I could damn you both without being taken for a traitor—”

  “Please,” Alarik said evenly, leaning back with a fond smile. “You damn us both half a dozen times a day, and nobody’s thrown you in the dungeons yet.”

  “There’s still time,” Janez grumbled, yawning widely again. “Last time I drink alone with you, brother.”

  “You’re a wicked liar,” Alarik said, “and none too good at threats. Come. You’ll sleep in the royal chambers tonight.”

  Janez staggered when he rose, and the slide of the king’s arm under his felt oddly reminiscent of their younger days when Father had permitted them to discover wine and women. Janez had never been much for the women, not since Greta, but the wine—ah, the wine…

  “The next toast I shall utter—” he said determinedly as they passed from the room. A sentry caught at his other arm to lift him. By the man’s unperturbed amusement, he was plainly sly to the king’s plot.

  “The next toast, Janez, can be whatever you wish,” Alarik said in that maddening, benevolent tone. “But for once, you can do as you’re told.”

  “By whom?”

  “Well, if you must know, it was Sofia’s idea.”

  “Ah, well, for Sofia—”

  “I wouldn’t finish that sentence if I were you.”

  The royal chambers were not far, but Janez was a heavy man, a veritable pile of muscle and bone. They struggled with him to the cushioned seats under the great window of the sitting room. The sentry was dismissed, and Janez heard the familiar sounds of a father—albeit one with a crown about his temples—checking on his children.

  Then a blanket settled over Janez’s exhausted form, and the low light of the candles was snuffed out.

  Janez sighed and took his own advice, sagging into the dark, warm hold of sleep.

  The ships, the sea, the war and world, would wait a while longer.

  Chapter Three

  ONCE THE PALACE had settled, and the only sounds were snoring and the gentle scuttle of the night-crabs on the sea floor, Calla fell straight out of the window and swam clear across the open courtyard to the corpse of the cloud.

  Father’s guards had explored every inch of it and declared it to be nothing more than a rock. Calla knew them to be wrong. Rocks didn’t feel like the cloud did. Rocks weren’t shaped like the cloud was. It was a cloud. And it had been slain. Under her palms, it felt so utterly beautiful.

  There was something ethereal about its surface. Something otherworldly. That was fitting, wasn’t it? Because it was from another world. It had fallen from the sky, and it could walk on water. It was obviously magical. Calla was touching magic.

  Father hated magic. Calla ought to—the only magical thing in the sea was the Witch of the Whalelands, who had driven them out of their previous nest. But there was something alluring, exciting, about magic. As if it could make anything possible.

  And now it was here.

  Calla pressed her body to the magic and sighed.

  Meri would be disgusted by it. Balta would lose interest in moments. All they cared for were singing, shells, and staring after witless mermen. Calla had never felt so distanced from her sisters since they’d outgrown their first set of scales and become mermaids rather than little merlings. She’d never felt quite right since, as though somewhere between her youth and her beauty she’d lost some of herself.

  But with her palms against the cloud and nothing but silence surrounding her, Calla could simply be.

  She’d always wanted to touch a cloud. It was impossible, of course, as the water was too hot and thin so high, and merfolk would never be able to breathe so close to the sky. It had always been an impossible little dream of hers, like running away or becoming a dolphin. Just silly, childish fantasy. She’d never once imagined that clouds could sink.

  It was like a cave inside—perhaps when Meri finally spoke to that insufferable bore she liked, they could nest in here and give Calla an excuse to visit her little nieces and nephews in the cloud. Calla flitted in and out of jagged holes, touching their edges and wondering what teeth had ripped them there. She found strange contraptions made of some thick seaweed or skin and took them to wear like smocks. She tugged a little rope free to tie in her hair. It was rough, unlike any weed she’d felt before, and although it floated amongst her hair, it was heavy and alien.

  There was a spear, thick and grey with a strange point, caught in the weeds by one of the holes, and Calla worked it free before wielding it like a guard in Father’s command. She laughingly challenged a wandering cod to a duel. It eyed her with dumb distaste and swam away.

  “Fine,” she said. “Be like Meri.”

  She would only have tonight. By morning, the nest’s sons would crowd their new plaything, and the king’s daughters would not be allowed. This great slaughtered beauty was not for shells and singing. It was for spears and shields. The guards would likely make a training arena of it until the sea claimed it and it rotted away to a mere hulk.

  Calla pressed her webs and fingers against the dark surface until they turned grey, and—for a split second—hated being herself. If she were a merman, even a royal one, she could have played here. Could wear clothes like commoners and explore this grand new thing. Not have to swim bare all the time, and practise nothing but singing and combing seashells into her hair.

  “You’re lucky,” she told the cloud. “You can walk on water, and do whatever you please. I imagine clouds can be anything.”

  The cloud didn’t answer.

  Her bright mood diminished, Calla shed the makeshift shirt and ripped the rope from her hair. She swam high above the cloud to stare at its crippled body from above, and then dropped in a slow, drifting spiral to its head, running her hand over the huge, jutting beak.

  And—stopped.

  Below the broken beak was rock. A great grey stone, protruding from the dark, alien surface like a giant barnacle. Only, rather than a smooth cloud-shape, or a rough bubbled bottom of a barnacle, Calla found herself staring at a mermaid.

  A mermaid.

  It was like a stone reflection. A slim figurine, rising out of the cloud like a prophecy. The telltale lip around the top of her tail was buried and hidden within the beast. She had the flat belly and bare breasts of a princess, with her arms streaming out behind her as though she was about to burst free from a great current.

  And her face. A blank, beautiful face, crowned by shell-adorned hair.

  Calla touched her fingers to the cold face, and a shiver ran up her arm.

  A sign.

  Oh, it was a sign.

  MERI WAS NOT convinced.

  “Clouds,” she said over breakfast, breaking off from combing her coral-bright hair only long enough to throw Calla a contemptuous look, “are like rocks. They have different shapes all the time. It’s just happenstance.”

  “It’s not. It’s a mermaid. I’ll show you!”

  “You won’t,” Meri said. “We have singing lessons. And—”

  Calla pulled a face that made Balta giggle.

  “I don’t want to have singing lessons. There’s a cloud in the courtyard, Meri! A cloud with a mermaid on it!”

  “A cloud with a chance shape on it. The belly looks like a whale, that doesn’t mean the whales are anything to do with clouds.”

  “They look a bit like clouds,” Balta said, “when they swim over us.”

  Meri threw her a withering glance. “Balta, eat your breakfast and don�
�t encourage her.”

  Calla opened her mouth, insulted, but Meri shot her a sharp look.

  “Just don’t, Calla. It’s a cloud. Nothing more. Father’s guards will break it up and remove it, and—”

  “And it’s a cloud that fell to earth with a mermaid on it! These things don’t just happen, Meri! They don’t—”

  “Father!”

  Meri’s raised voice coincided with the opening of the dining hall door, and Calla subsided as her father’s imposing form shadowed the entrance before gliding serenely to the table. He was long and sleek; his deep green tail faded into pale green fins and patterning on his back, where scales and skin mingled in an intricate tattoo and ended in green hair so fair it was nearly white. That hair was long but, in the male tradition, coiled up onto his head in an intricate weave. Calla had always thought mermen wore their hair better than the loose flow of the mermaids, but that was yet another thing Meri would say ‘just don’t’ to.

  “Father, do clouds fall from the sky often?” Meri asked loudly, and Calla frowned at her.

  “Not often, but it is known. Calla, don’t scowl at your sister.”

  His voice was a rattle in the water. Calla smoothed out her expression automatically.

  “There’s a mermaid on it!” Balta said, and Father eyed her.

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Calla said so.”

  “And how do you know that?” he asked, his great stern face turning towards her.

  “I saw.”

  “You went, you mean.”

  “I—well—”

  “A king’s daughter should not be playing in clouds.”

  Something inside flinched at such a remark. “Nobody saw me. And I didn’t mean a live mermaid, I mean—”

  “Someone has died there? You should have informed the—”

  “No! A stone one!”

  Father paused.

  “Oh, Calla, stop it,” Meri whined, but Calla ploughed on.

  “Under its beak, there’s a stone mermaid.”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “There’s a stone that looks just like a mermaid. A carving!” She seized on the idea hungrily and stared up at the great columns around them. The palace had been carved into the greatest rock on the seabed, and suddenly it was obvious. Meri was right: a stone mermaid wasn’t by chance. “Someone carved a mermaid onto that cloud!”

  “Oh, now you’re being ridiculous,” Meri said.

  “Calla,” Father said. “You’re not a merling anymore. Silly stories of stone carvings on clouds are—”

  “It’s not a silly story!”

  Father thumped the table abruptly. “Don’t answer back to me!”

  Calla fell mutinously silent.

  “Clouds are natural things that walk on water,” Father said sternly. “There is nothing that could have carved anything onto it, because nothing exists above the sky. It is chance. Nothing more.”

  “Skymen could.”

  There was a sharp pause.

  Then Balta started giggling. “Skymen?” she trilled and clapped. “Skymen made the clouds! I like that!”

  “Oh, Calla.”

  Father’s face was dark. “Ridiculous,” he said flatly.

  “It’s possible! Mother used to say—”

  “Your mother used to tell you eel-stories to make you sleep,” Father boomed. “They were make-believe. There is no such thing as skymen.”

  “Then who carved that mermaid?”

  The next fist thump made the plates jump. All three sisters cringed back from the table. Father’s knuckles were grey.

  “Nobody,” he grated, “carved anything.”

  Calla opened her mouth.

  “Not a word! You are no merling, Calla! You must stop with these silly stories and start applying yourself. You haven’t sung a note in months, and now these silly fantasies of skymen and carvings in clouds—it is an embarrassment!”

  A lump swelled in Calla’s throat and cut off her voice. An—an embarrassment?

  “You will not go to that cloud again,” Father said. “And I will check that you have been to your singing lessons this evening. It is time—beyond time—to start acting like the mermaid that you are.”

  Like the mermaid she was? Like Meri and Balta? To sit around playing the pipe and singing until some boring clot of a merman from a neighbouring nest was picked for her? So she could—what? Go and swim naked in some other waters and bear a shoal of merlings and do nothing else?

  Like Meri and Balta.

  Only she wasn’t like them. She didn’t know how, but she wasn’t.

  There was a mermaid on the face of that cloud. Someone had put it there. And stories—stories came from somewhere, didn’t they? How could Mother have invented skymen? Mermen with legs, who could walk on water but couldn’t breathe under it like everything else—that sort of thing was so strange that it couldn’t be made up!

  There had to be a grain of truth in it, and that grain wore a mermaid’s face and was jutting from the beak of a fallen cloud.

  Calla curled her fingers into fists on the table and lowered her face.

  “Yes, Father,” she said.

  She lied.

  Father had also once said that nobody could touch the clouds. That the merfolk couldn’t breathe all the way up there.

  But Calla had touched a cloud last night.

  So tonight, she was going to try to touch the sky.

  Chapter Four

  THERE WAS SOMETHING about the sea.

  The smell, the sound, the sway of a ship under one’s shoes—it was a maddening and addictive drug, and until he stood on the deck of the Vogel, Janez didn’t realise just how much he had missed it. Mountains were all fine and good. The Winter Palace and Mother’s time were wonderful things…but God, how he’d missed the sea!

  She was rough this morning. A fog had risen off her in the night, and the watchmen had seen the flash of guns and shadow of a foreign sail. And to hell with Alarik’s orders to the sentries—Janez was a commissioned officer. He would answer those horns even if he had to—as he indeed had—leap from a window to do so. The Vogel and the Ente had launched, and now sulked in the open water, watching and waiting for their phantom enemies.

  Privately, Janez rather thought a ship called Duck was appropriate in such conditions.

  “See anything, Lieutenant?”

  He lowered his eyeglass and shook his head at the captain’s question. The fog was lifting—foam-tipped waves licked their sides and crashed back into the water, visible now to fifty feet—but there was a sense, perhaps. Some intuition.

  “Something’s out here,” he murmured, “but I cannot say where.”

  The captain hummed. He was a great fat man, gnarled and weather-beaten into some grotesque figure, but he was a good one. A true seaman. He knew as well as Janez that something lurked beyond the rising mists.

  “Keep looking, Lieutenant. We must see her before she sees us.”

  Janez nodded and lifted the glass again.

  This world was simple. He was no more a prince here than the ship’s cat. He was an officer, on watch, and his duty was simple. No politics. No pretences. No gauging what he was, or whom he was speaking to, before answering as demanded.

  He had to spy a sail. Nothing—

  There.

  “Captain.”

  He came at once. They were close. Whisper.

  “There.”

  The glass passed between them. A nod. And Janez slipped away to give the order. Quietly now, quietly. Bring her about. Men to the guns—quickly, quickly!

  The men were a hardened crew, used to doing such manoeuvres in far stranger conditions than quiet. As the sun began to poke through the mists at last, and their time ran low, Janez raised his sword, the glimmer bright in the early morning.

  A horn rang out over the water.

  They were seen.

  “Fire!”

  The guns roared. Smoke rose in thick, dark clouds as they jumped
and bellowed. The roll of them being drawn back to reload was like a thousand-chambered heart, pounding on the boards. Janez squinted against the sun, and it burst through the last entrails of fog to reveal a frigate, turning in a slow arc to show her broadside.

  Alone, and this close to shore?

  Oh, yes. They had been emboldened by the Held all right.

  In fact—Janez raked her with his eyes—this monstrous whale had likely brought her down. Her sails had been double-patched and were unnaturally tight. Her railings were a rainbow of different woods. Two of the gun ports had no hatch.

  No hatch.

  “She’s taking water!” he bellowed. “Sink her! Sink her!”

  The captain took up the roar, ordering the soldiers into the netting and up the masts. They swarmed like brightly coloured bees, and musket fire began to pepper the enemy deck. And their own. A shot whipped past Janez’s ear, taking a lock of hair with it. He ignored it. Stood firm and fast at the railing. The men would not see their officers yield.

  “Blast her at the waterline! She’s lame, and means to sink us like the Held!”

  The name spurred them. Several hundred hands lost, many that these men would have sailed with, fought with—and would have, would have, died with.

  “For the Held!” the captain roared, and the cry went up even as the guns roared again, and splinters flew from her hull as the great broadside drew up, and the hatches—those that remained—flew up in a wave.

  The boom was deafening. A railing was torn away. Smoke belched over the deck. The mast shuddered under the impact of two eighteen-pounders, but held. The sails shivered, and then filled gluttonously with the breeze. They raked her stern and came about, tighter than their larger prey, and the men flocked to the starboard side to load the guns again.

  They circled for perhaps an hour. The frigate was better armed and better manned, but the Vogel’s size allowed them to weave around her and tire her men, and her battered hull worked to their advantage. She began to visibly tilt when they brought her rudder clean away, yet she would not hoist her colours. She would not yield.

  “This is a suicide,” Janez breathed, and the midshipman at his side nodded, eyes wide and streaming against the smoke. “They mean to sink us, or be sunk.”