The Surface Breaks

  “Well, then,” my father says. “I’ll ask you not to discuss such things in front of my daughter, or any maid for that matter. This is none of their business.”

  Zale runs a hand over his shaved head, his eyes narrowing. They are blue, like the rest of the mer-folk, and yet they seem darker as he imagines battles, sword striking sword, heads cleaved off torsos. Zale will not be happy until his spear is smeared with blood. Preferably a Salka’s, but I don’t think he’s overly particular. “I apologize, Sea King,” he says. “And a very happy birthday, Muirgen. Fifteen at last, you must be excited.”

  My name is Gaia. That is the name my mother gave me. Perhaps if Zale was a different kind of man, I could ask him to call me by the name that I prefer. But I don’t think he would care for such niceties. All he is concerned with is that I am the most beautiful daughter of the Sea King. I am a prize to be won, and Zale likes the taste of victory.

  “Did my daughter not sing sweetly tonight?” Father asks, exhibiting me for Zale’s approval. I breathe through my nose, trying to remain calm. It will be over soon.

  “Such talent,” Zale says, although I suspect he has no love for music.

  “And doesn’t she look radiant? One of the great beauties of the kingdom. A great, great beauty.”

  “That is the truth,” Zale says. “I still remember the night of that ball, when it was apparent she would become the fairest of your daughters. I knew then that she should be mine.”

  I remember that night too. I had just turned twelve. That was the night that Cosima began to cry.

  “You were smart,” my father says, pressing his fingertips into my shoulder blades. “You got in early. If Muirgen were not my daughter, perhaps I would have chosen her for myself.”

  He and Zale laugh, and I try and smile too. Just mer-man talk, I think. No need to be so sensitive.

  “But really, sir,” Zale says, sombre again. “We cannot wait much longer. There has been movement…”

  “Aye, I suppose we should,” my father says. “Shall we discuss this now?”

  Zale nods. The two men stand side-by-side, uncannily similar with their grey buzz-cuts and broad shoulders. They could be brothers. The Sea King unlocks an ornately carved door at the side of the balcony, opening it into the war room. I see a flash of silver, racks of spiked weapons, waiting patiently to be used.

  My mother sacrificed herself to ensure that this door would remain locked for ever. But my mother is gone.

  “Muirgen,” Father says. “You may leave.” Neither he nor Zale check to see if I obey his command. There is no need.

  For I am the daughter of the Sea King and I will do as I am told.

  I knock on the open door of my sisters’ room, waiting until they grant me permission to enter. Each of my sisters is lying alone, bodies made shadow by the white gauze wrapped around their beds. They are awake, and yet none of them speak to me, not even Sophia. They always end up resenting me on my birthday.

  “Muirgen,” Grandmother says. “Come in.”

  I did not see her there, tucked into the corner of the room behind Cosima’s bed, sitting in front of a mirror bordered with crystals cut into the shape of stars. It is the largest mirror in the kingdom, falling during the Great Storm which cracked the sky open and tore the sea apart. I had wanted it for the tower but Cosima had refused. “No,” she had said, folding her arms. “I found it first. It’s mine. You can’t have everything you want.” We both knew she wasn’t talking about the mirror.

  “Sit with me, child,” Grandmother says. She is sitting on a cockle-shell seat, and I align my body with hers, my dark green scales a stark contrast to her silver tail. She runs her fingers through my hair, unpicking the braid. It should be my mother who is doing this. My mother would be thirty-seven now, still relatively young. Would she have allowed the betrothal to Zale to occur, if she knew how revolted I was by him? Would she have been the only one who could stand up to the Sea King, or would care enough to do so? I stare at my grandmother and myself in the mirror, our faces fine-boned and sharp of angles. I can see the foreshadow of what is to come as the years pass and my beauty fades, my skin folding in on itself, my hair shedding its vibrant colour. Is this what my mother would have looked like one day, when she reached her hundredth year?

  “You’re bleeding, Grandmother,” I say, looking down at her tail. The pearls are twisting, the weight pulling down, plucking tendrils of flesh away. There is a gap between the gemstones and her tail, open wounds filling with bubbles of blood. “Are you in pain?” I ask. “Shall I call the healer?”

  “No,” she says, reaching to unscrew another pearl, wheezing as it comes away in her hands. “Ah, but I am too old for such finery. No one cares for the pitiable attempts of an old woman to retain her youth.”

  “Then why do you wear them?”

  “Your father desires that all women be properly adorned at court. And I am the mermaid of the highest birth since…” Since your mother left.

  “But—”

  “The Sea King has willed it, Muirgen,” she says. “And that is that.”

  I let it go, nestling against her as she strokes my hair. “There, there, my salt-heart,” she says. And for a second, I pretend that she is someone else, another woman who dreamed too much. Another woman who looked up.

  “Grandmother,” I say. “Tell me the story of the first time you went up.”

  She groans, but she cannot refuse me today.

  “It was my fifteenth birthday,” she begins, and I mouth the words along with her. I have heard this story so many times before. It was the lullaby that rocked me asleep when I was a baby, the soothing croon that calmed me after a fight with one of my sisters.

  My grandmother was fifteen and she looked up, following the sun to the surface. “And I felt heat for the very first time,” she says now, as she always does. “A heat so intense that I had to dive back under; it seemed as if my skin might be peeled from my bones.” She broke the water’s skin again, seeing fish that flew in the air (Birds, my child, they call them birds up there) and ships (What are they like, you ask? Well, they are like giant whales made of wooden planks, I suppose) floating past in the distance. Grandmother Thalassa stayed there until the sun fell beneath the waves and she dropped deep into the sea’s chest to search for it, to hold that scalding gold between her fingers; but it had disappeared.

  “It was beautiful,” she says now. “But not as beautiful as the Sea Kingdom.”

  My sisters whisper their agreement, their voices closer than expected. I blink to find them in a semicircle at our tails, gazing at our grandmother, rapt in her story. When she is done, they tell their own. The dawn of their fifteenth birthdays, a whole new world to be found. A dazzle of stars strewn across a midnight sky or wild swans dashing through crimson clouds with a loud battle cry. Icebergs glittering in a glacial sea, impaled by a sudden spike of lightning and sheared in two. Human children (They looked so innocent, Sophia said. They had not yet turned bad, Cosima replied. Give them time.) splashing in shallow water, a barking animal at their side (a dog, my grandmother explained). The children were somehow able to swim though they had no tails; it was most peculiar, they said. The clatter of people living in coastal towns, from whom my sisters kept a safe distance. The roar of engines, the soaring church spires reaching for heaven’s graze.

  “Beautiful,” each of my sisters says now. “But not as beautiful as the Sea Kingdom.”

  For the last five years, I have watched my sisters rise out of the water, one by one, wishing I could go with them. And for the last five years, I have watched as my father has awaited their return. “Well?” he asked each of them, his teeth clenched. “It was fine, Father,” they all replied. “But I have no desire to go back.” It is strange. The Sea King could simply ban these expeditions, forbid us from travelling to the realm that claimed our mother and took her life. But he does not. Perhaps he wants to gauge the depths of our loyalty. Perhaps it is a test to see if we are showing signs of turning, like our
mother did before us.

  “And tomorrow,” Grandmother says, “it will be your time, Muirgen. And I hope you too will see that the world up there is charming, but it has not been designed for the likes of us. It is not safe for our kind.”

  Then why show it to us? Why risk our mother’s fate? But I stay silent, for fear that such questions will result in my being unable to travel to the surface; and I must see it for myself. I must.

  “Of course it is not safe for us,” Cosima says. “Not after what they did to our mother.”

  “Your mother,” Grandmother says slowly, “was so young. Only fifteen when she promised her hand in marriage, sixteen when your father took her as his bride.” I am only fifteen too, I feel like reminding her, and I am to be wed next year; but it will be of no use. “And at the time of their bonding ceremony, your parents seemed…”

  “Happy?” Talia asks hopefully.

  “They seemed settled,” Grandmother says. “They had you girls so quickly, one after the other.” So many girls, and all my father wanted was a son. Another way in which Muireann of the Green Sea failed him. “And your mother was fine. I thought she was fine.”

  “She was fine until you were born, Muirgen,” Cosima mutters.

  “Stop that,” Grandmother says. “Your mother always loved the human world; she visited there often after her fifteenth birthday. She would regale your grandfather and me with the sights she had seen, the things she had witnessed. Your grandfather, the sea gods bless his memory, he warned her to be careful. He warned her that the humans were not to be trusted. But she didn’t listen. She was so tempestuous, that girl. There was no controlling her.”

  “Our mother started to visit the surface more often.” Talia picks up the story for Grandmother Thalassa. We know it well. “She stopped eating. She complained that she was tired all the time.”

  “And the Sea King thought she had fallen sick,” Arianna joins in. “And he got the healer to brew potions for her, but nothing worked.”

  “And then on the day of my first birthday party…” I start, but I cannot continue. My grandmother squeezes my hand.

  “We were all gathered for the celebration,” she says, so I don’t have to. “But we were waiting on your mother and the Sea King to arrive. There was no sign of either.” She takes a deep breath. “And then the Sea King burst through the palace doors, looking as if he had been struck by lightning. And he told us.”

  He told the mer-folk how he had followed my mother to the surface that afternoon, and had seen her become ensnared in the human nets. Her body thrashing, the men on the boat jeering, touching her tail without permission, screaming with laughter at my mother’s cries for mercy. He could have stopped them, the Sea King told those congregated at my crib; he was the most powerful man in the kingdom after all. But if he did, then the humans would know there were more creatures like my mother to be found. They might come looking for us, hunting us. And while the Sea king could have protected himself easily, he didn’t want to risk the lives of every other mer-man or maid under the sea in order to save just one of our kind. So, he watched as they took our mother away. And then he told us that she was dead. Which she was, probably; she would not have survived outside of the water for that long. She is dead. Of course she is, it is the only logical conclusion to the story. And yet… We never closed lids over frozen eyes, nor rested tiny pearls upon her lips. We never sang hymns by her lifeless body, nor prayed to the gods to dissolve her soul to sea foam and scatter it on the waves. We were just told that our mother was selfish, that she had abanonded her six daughters to see the wonders that the world above the surface had to offer. And then we were told that she was dead, and we were expected to believe it.

  “We are blessed to be where we are, living in this kingdom,” my grandmother says now, and she kisses my head, murmuring love into my skull. “It is time for bed now, little mermaid.”

  I wish my family goodnight as I leave, swimming the long corridor from their room until I reach the spiral staircase to my tower. The steps are cut out of packed sand, the walls a mosaic of sea-glass and broken shells, like the bones of fallen sailors that the Salkas steal to make their homes in the Shadowlands, that realm far away from here that the Sea Witch has made her own.

  Two maids pass me on the winding path, pushing their backs into the wall. “Apologies, Princess Muirgen. We did not mean to disturb you.” I recognize the prettier girl immediately; Lorelai, whose husband had abandoned her and the children. She had been banished to the Outerlands for a time but she was allowed to return to the palace as a member of the chorus when the Sea King decided he missed her perfect falsetto. No one ever calls her husband “unnatural” for abandoning his children; no, instead they whisper that Lorelai must have failed to satisfy him. Her former husband is re-bonded now, but no mer-man will take on Lorelai. No matter how pretty she is, the weight of a tainted maid with a reputation is beyond endurance.

  “Don’t worry,” I say, allowing them to pass without further objection.

  I close my bedroom door, leaning against the heavy coral with a sigh. Gaia, I whisper, as if summoning her from deep within, telling her that it’s safe to come out now. I have left Muirgen on the stairs outside; I could not bear her for much longer. I am alone, so I can be true again.

  I look up.

  The tower opens to the roiling black sea, waves stirring as shoals of fish twist past, a glimmer of metal in the darkness. Moving to the sea-bed for safety, it seems. Storm, the water whispers to me, its voice as familiar as my own. The gods must be angry. A shape passes over the palace; a whale, perhaps, or one of the ships from the human world that my grandmother warns my sisters to be wary of when they go swimming. Not that she need worry; my sisters have broken the surface only once since their respective birthdays. They say it is safer that way, they are reducing the risk of being spotted and imprisoned – we don’t want to end up like our mother, are the words that are left unsaid. I wonder what it must be like to be one of them, to have their curiosity so easily sated. I reach my hands up the surface, as if to touch the ship or the whale, but it is too far away. We are buried alive down here.

  “Mother,” I say aloud, the word unfamiliar on my tongue. I am not supposed to say her name. I am not even supposed to think of her. “She didn’t think of any of you, did she?” my father told us time and time again. “She didn’t care enough to stay.”

  Mother.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It is still dark when I wake, a tiny pinprick of light burrowing its way into the palace, promising the coming day. It is time, the water whispers to me.

  I am strangely calm as I prepare for my journey, the journey I have been waiting to take for so long now, but I cannot help but picture my mother’s fifteenth birthday. I imagine her, wild hope caught between her teeth, her bone-knowing that she was meant for more than a life of combing her hair and singing for survival. Betrothed to a man much older than her, a man who saw her as a toy, a shiny thing that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on, and yet she married him anyway, putting aside her own needs to make others happy, because that’s what maids are supposed to do. Zale makes my skin crawl, I would tell my mother if she was still here. He looks at me like he wants to destroy me. Sometimes I wish I could hate my mother, that I could resent her for leaving us behind. But all I can do is long for her.

  The darkness is collapsing into a murky grey, chasing me upwards. I swim out of the open tower, looking down at the palace beneath me. Thousands of fish surround the walls, a circle of phosphorescent skins, cowering for shelter. They can smell the storm too, can sense shattered sand. Their fear today is greater than their usual trepidation about the nets the humans cast to trap them. It is difficult for me to fathom, but up there it is said that they eat fish the way the Rusalkas eat men, teeth tearing flesh, sucking juice from bones.

  We mermaids are not so easily caught. We are rare, and that makes us precious. The humans that believe we exist want to capture us and exhibit our bodies, for tha
t is the only way they can make us real for their sceptical brethren. Most humans cannot believe anything that they cannot see with their own eyes, touch with their own hands. But we are more clever than mere fish; we know how to avoid such snares.

  I follow the dawning light, fighting through tangled lumps of seaweed, avoiding the fields of jagged coral that would tear my tail apart, keeping the tattered scales as ornaments. Dodging sucking currents that ache to consume bodies, throwing them back and forth, as if it is a game of catch, like the mer-children play. And then a shark grazes past me, eyes sly and mouth closed to hide its sharp teeth. I stay very still, hoping that it will pass me without incident, holding my breath until it has gone. I keep going, ignoring the niggling twinges in my arms, tired from swimming such a great distance. The light becomes easier, dappling the water in a way that I have never seen before, and I know now I must be close. Panting as I break the surface, my gills fit to burst with the extra oxygen pumping through them. Pushing snarled hair down my back so I can see this new world without impediment, I open my eyes, wincing as the unfamiliar gleam scours my eyeballs. It is too bright, the sun in the pale sky razing heat across my skin. I have never experienced such warmth. My grandmother tried to explain what this would feel like – but how could I understand this sensation? I was born in the water and I was born of the water. The cold is all I have ever known.

  It’s too much – the dazzling glow of the sun, its warmth licking my skin, the screaming caw-caw of winged fish (birds, they are birds, Gaia) swooping in the heavens. There is a rock jutting out of the sea’s skin and I swim to it, shooing the seals bathing on its surface away so I can hide behind it. I duck under the water for comfort, soothing my sun-seared face. Panic is twisting my gut, thick-thick, but I cannot give up now. For what would my sisters think if I returned so early? I have been the most eager to see the human world, the one who wanted this adventure the most. Typical Muirgen, Cosima would say, I wasn’t afraid when I broke the surface, I was brave. Zale will not allow you to act like such a baby once you are bonded. As if courage is something that Zale would ever want in his bride.