“But I must,” said the little mermaid, for it seemed the only way.
“Why?” asked her sister.
“Because,” stated the little mermaid mournfully, “I am in love.”
As soon as the word left her lips, it hung there, suspended in the water for an eternity. She had never heard the word before but there it was, spelled out in front of her in all its weight and consequence, and she understood its body and its bones. Her sister stared at it, and a light that wasn’t there before suddenly flared in her eye like a beacon. She inhaled the word. She tried to resist it, but it entered her bloodstream.
“Don’t go,” repeated her sister, and the luminescence in her eyes frightened the little mermaid.
“Don’t tell anyone!” hissed the little mermaid.
The plan had been brewing in the mermaid’s mind for weeks. She believed that the idea first occurred to her when she left the Prince on the shore and returned to her home. It was her very good fortune that she was not attacked by gypsies on her way, for she had spent a great deal of time being lost, as she was weary and dazed. But even without the potion, she had never shone quite as brightly as her sisters, and had not attracted as much attention as they. When schools of commoners passed, she concealed herself behind the banks of the reeds, and nobody was the wiser. However, the notion did not occur there, where she watched the everyday people go about their rituals, but when she was suspended beneath the boat, waiting for something to happen. When the Prince was mere meters away, tying the ropes around his own wrists, and the only sound to be heard was the beating in her chest.
Throughout the past few weeks, she had felt the Prince gradually begin to take hold of her. It had not started small, like most raging addictions, with a reckless decision or two steps in the wrong direction. From the first time she saw him, he took a hold of all the scapes of her imagination. But ever since she had seen him descending into darkness, he possessed the creature that lived inside her, the noisy and unfamiliar thing that whispered in a voice of its own. As soon as she felt the creature awake, she knew that her whole life was over and she had to recover a new one, one that would ensure her nearness to the Prince, one that would see the parallels become reality.
Her need overcame her fear of the witch’s reputation, and the creature inside her was not to be ignored, for it had whispered the plan to her in the dark. The deciding factor had been the potion. She had used the entire stock of the very expensive protective tonic that her Father had negotiated for, and she knew she had no chance of returning to the surface unharmed without it. But the notion of visiting the Finfolk abhorred her, although she knew the way. It had little to do with the Finfolk themselves, none of which the princess had ever seen, but the gorge and what lay beneath. Just thinking of the gorge struck her with paralysing fear, and she knew that the creatures that lay beyond it were not her friends, but her enemy. So she swallowed the very last drops of the potion, and in the dead of the dark where her father and sisters and all that she knew slept soundly, she disappeared in search of the witch.
She did not know in which direction lay the witch’s lair, but instinct told her to follow the commoner’s trail. So she did, swimming the opposite way to where her and her sisters would regularly frequent, away from the shining gold reefs, and the great oyster fields that harvested the royal pearls. She passed over the homes of the commoners, ordinary structures made of practical stone, most of which without as much as a shell embellishment, for shells were expensive as they were found, with great peril, on the shore. There were fewer orbs here, as the poor did not have as much right to the light as the rich (and had less pretty things to look at, so none was wasted) and the little mermaid found that a very great comfort, as the orbs had always unnerved her.
A few miles of this led to a sort of wasteland, a shallow and arid place where the soil was grey and barren, as plants and animals had been strangled to death by the crown-of-thorns that ravaged the landscape. On the banks of the wastelands lay the graveyard, miles and miles of wreckage and rock, heaved there by raw brawn from all over the ocean. Grand, sunken vestiges of magnificent ships, little scrappy rowboats, huge steel cargo vessels were all home to the gypsy folk, who sold their bodies for food. It was little wonder, for there were no living creatures to eat in this part of the ocean, save for barnacles and the odd clam. The sea-gypsies often sent out their whollest and strongest to hunt the larger predators, but these were becoming rarer as they avoided the merfolk kingdom. But still, they preferred the wastelands to the centre of the kingdom, where they were shunned and mistreated. Many a merchant would raise their prices when the gypsies came to buy, for no one wanted to consort with them. Even their dead fish were too good for them.
When the ships began to fall apart, the water-worms corroding the wood, the gypsies would depart in search for another home. They were a stubborn people and they stayed together, a menagerie of inter-related families, and often twenty or thirty of them would live together, all on top of the other in a single vessel, and nobody complained. The little mermaid sucked in her breath and swam a good distance over them, and hoped to remain undetected.
After a long time, the little mermaid was swimming in water so dark that she could not see her hands in front of her face. She was entertaining thoughts of turning back and trying another way, when out of the blackness, three very white creatures appeared. They hovered in the water and stared at her, and the little mermaid recognised them although they looked quite different from how they usually appeared. They began to sing:
“Turn away, child of the land
Far from the breast you came
Returning now into the hand
That sewed you inside pain
For in this world, what you seek
Has died yet lies beyond
Your blood will pour, your screams ignored
In the place where you came from.”
Now the little mermaid was not like the others who had heard the Siren’s song before her, for she had heard music and she had heard voices other than her species, and she distinguished the words clearly. She turned them over in her mind as she followed the Sirens to their destination, and tried to memorise them, in case they were important later.
They passed over the garden where the plants had faces, and little voices reached the mermaid’s ears. “Help us,” they cried mostly, and “turn back”. But the mermaid was determined and so she ignored them. As they approached the cavern with its cloak of menace thrown over it, the little mermaid steeled herself and thought of the Prince. She entered the cave, and immediately felt at ease, for the room was bathed in the light of the torch-fish, so impenetrable and dim.
A terrible sound began to fill the room. It echoed in every corner and grew louder and louder. The Sirens clutched each other and retreated. The little mermaid was ashamed to cause such alarm, for she was sure the pounding was her own. But it wasn’t.
When the sea-witch entered the cavern, the little mermaid did not have the experience that so many others before her did, of déjà vu and vertigo. In fact, the sea-witch did not have any affect on her at all, because she had never seen her before in her life. Where other folk would become confounded and recall the witch’s face from the earliest moments of their lives, the princess saw nothing and felt nothing. But the sea-witch affixed a keen eye on her, and approached her cautiously, her monstrous black tail writhing beneath her, and her hair billowing dark and lustrous.