“No, Princess. You will never have an Immortal Soul.”
The little mermaid looked so downcast that hastily, the nanny stated, “But who wants an Immortal Soul when the price to pay is such a short life? We merfolk are the lucky ones, we live for three hundred long years.”
The little mermaid shook her head. “I would rather live on earth for a short time if it meant heaven for eternity,” she breathed, and her hope was like a prayer.
“And die of the Great Condition?” asked the Nanny. “It’s a painful thing, a dreadful thing, and you could not bear it.”
“Oh, to die of heartbreak!” exclaimed the mermaid passionately.
“You will never die of heartbreak,” predicted the Nanny dryly.
Four
A Prince
It was lonely at the top. That was the little mermaid’s first impression as her head crashed through the last watery layer – the final frontier between all she was and all she hoped for.
She had expected the human world to be chaotic – a mixed bag of screeches and howls and crashes and voices – anything but this silence that was so like yet unlike her world below. It was lonesome too and she felt a crashing disappointment, for in her naivety she had expected something different, like this new world had waited for her so desperately that it would send out a host of friends to welcome her. But there was nothing except this whiteness, this bright pain that filled her eyes. She wondered if she had been lied to all along, and there was nothing beyond the surface, just emptiness. But she waited in the waves and through the white silence, something appeared.
It was a flying fish. It soared above her head, squawking, then dove beneath the surface, clacking its beak hungrily. The little mermaid watched in awe as it arose, its magnificent wings spread, and flew to heaven. As she watched it disappear into a red, round sphere of light, it seemed to her that she had just witnessed a departed Immortal Soul returning to God, its maker. And it occurred to her that this God could be none other than the great red light overhead. It was so bright that she could not directly look upon it, such was its glory. And when her eyes screwed up tight, she saw imprints of God in the darkness beneath her lids. When she looked away, she felt the God all around her, its rays stroking her skin and filling her heart with thick, hot soup. It seemed to her that she had been frozen all of her life and was slowly thawing.
Now that she was looking harder, she noticed that everything the God touched turned to magic – for she could see a landscape dancing in the distance, and wonderful pillars of rock on the shore, and the greenness of fauna, and the moving images of little living creatures running up and down the beach. She could even see its reflection in the sea itself, and her own reflection beside it, and she realised then that God had wanted her here all along, and they were destined to meet one day in the heavens.
Gladness filled her, and she saw the sky was streaked with orange and pink, and the fading brightness of all around her. She was aware that the brightness was not the same as that below, where everything glittered and shone so brittle and hard. Instead, this light spread all over the world, like a layer of film, and the occupants of earth could breathe. And breathe she did now, taking greedy gulps of salty air. She felt that the human beings were the luckiest creatures indeed, not for their possession of their immortal souls, but that they could fill their nostrils with this goodness and feel God on their faces.
The God was going to sleep now, for half of it was buried in the ocean, but the little mermaid was not sad because she knew that she would see it again. Time ticked by, and she did not move, and when the God was fast asleep, she saw its angels emerge in the sky and wink down at her, thousands of them.
But then, across the waves, came a sound that entered her ears and vibrated through her, cutting her into jagged pieces with its knife. It was a distant wailing, like a sad animal whose beauty was being strangled away. So sad it was, so achingly haunting, that the little mermaid began to follow it, forgetting there was ever a God at all.
The music, for it was indeed music that she heard, led her around the beach, where it abruptly ended in majestic limestone cliffs. The cliffs seemed to ascend to the stars, and as she swam around the coastline, she was accosted by an amazing sight.
A palace, of the kind the little mermaid could only dream of, seemed to materialise out of the limestone cliffs, trickle down to the shore and plunge into the ocean. A gorgeous, decadent structure of stone and glass, its towers and upper halls were indeed carved out of the enormous cliffs, where it evolved into balconies and terraces of stone. As she peered closely, she could distinguish courtyards and clock towers beyond the balconies, and gardens whose fragrance punctured the breeze. But perhaps the most remarkable of all its features was the way the palace poured onto the ocean, the reflection of the moon shimmering in the glassy walls and tiles. There were paths across the water’s surface that led from chamber to chamber, and open hallways lit by dozens of lanterns, so unobstructed that you or I could swim between the corridors of royalty. Her father’s palace, in all of its splendour, seemed cheap and false in comparison.
The music lured her to approaching the palace, and the mermaid soon found herself amongst the very same passages that lay unfenced on the calm, shallow waters. Dazzled as she was, she failed to notice that the music had stopped. Instead she busied herself peering into the large glass windows of each passing chamber. She loved the chandeliers affixed to the ceilings that warmed the room with a golden glow. The little tongues of red wind that danced atop candlesticks transfixed her. She inhaled the coats of arms and patriotic flags, royal emblems and tapestries. Even the furnishings and carpets nourished her, and she mistook a harpsichord for a magnificent sleeping beast. She nourished her soul on each and every item until all of the lower chambers, the sea-level subsection of the palace, had been discovered.
An alarm began to sound in the mermaid’s mind as the Finfolk’s spell began to wear off. As she prepared to leave, she noticed the same red wind dancing in a darkened room beyond, at the very end of the passage. She approached, and through a silver-paned window, she saw a man.
He was lying on a large, canopied bed in the middle of a vast room. It would have boasted the most hedonistic of worldly goods, had it not been cloaked in darkness. In fact, the only light in the room was from a single candle, burning carelessly from where it was lodged into the cover of a book, thrown to the floor in a fit of boredom. Puddles of wax hardened beneath it. The mermaid shuddered, and every pore of her skin drunk him in, for this was the first human she had ever laid eyes on. She devoured him with her gaze.
He was unlike anything she had imagined. She had surmised that human beings were merely merfolk with legs, for that was the way her sisters had described them. And what legs they were! But they were covered, as was his whole body, with thick and flowing cloth that seemed to mould to every angle. The little mermaid was instantly ashamed of her nakedness, and folded her arms over her bare breast. As she peered closer, she realised that he was no man but a boy, with his hands behind his head, and a leg swinging absently from the bed, childishly. She created parallels in her mind: for he was a prince and she was a princess, and they were similar in age, and in a single moment she could see an entire lifetime of parallels between them.