16

A Song for Miriam

It was at some point in that indeterminate, endless dawn when she heard it. It carried with immaculate clarity over the echoing surface of the water, rebounding from every wave. Luce wasn’t really asleep, just in a kind of feverish daze, but that particular sound would have recalled her even from perfect unconsciousness.

A scream, but it was louder, and somehow paler, than a normal scream. Luce knew what it meant at once. She’d heard it before; it had even ripped from her own throat. The scream broke into strange pulsations of noise, a kind of gagging “HA, HA, HA,” and then faltered, but an instant later it came back again at full force: a long, high note of purest agony. Luce was already out of the cave, her tail spiraling violently behind her; she was nothing but the movement of indigo waters. Unidentifiable shapes veered suddenly away from her head, but there was no time to worry about colliding with something. She had only moments left, moments . . . That scream was the sound of a mermaid out of the water. And as she raced closer Luce became sure of what she’d suspected from the first moment. It was Miriam.

As long as Luce could hear her, there might still be time.

Soon some of the shapes had reaching arms and corkscrewing tails like hers, all of them converging on the voice. They ruptured the waves with their speed, and a harbor seal zigzagged in confusion at the onslaught of bodies. For a few seconds the scream fell away, and then there was only the blue-glowing water stirred into streaks of white by dozens of tails, the gush of racing foam in Luce’s ears and the roar of her blood. Where was Miriam’s voice?

It came back but more faintly now: she was on a different beach, one they never used because it was too broad and open, too easy to spot from passing boats. Had she deliberately chosen a beach where they wouldn’t immediately think to look for her? There was no air in Luce’s lungs, and no time to swing up to the surface for a breath. Instead she slashed out, driving herself faster, until the water blurred in her eyes and she was barely in control of her direction. It was all one vague onward thrust, a formless press for speed into the sudden, uncanny silence. Pebbles scraped across her belly before she even knew where she was, and then she saw the curls of amber morning dancing on top of the waves. Air poured into her lungs.

Miriam was there but at least twenty feet back. It was incredible that she’d managed to drag herself so far from the water. Luce bit her lip as she thought of the pain Miriam must have endured during that long crawl up the beach. She still had her tail, she was still trembling and exhaling a raspy, rattling hiss, but her scales were no longer their usual glossy blue-black. They looked disagreeably ashy, flaky: almost like dandruff or the shells of desiccated seeds. A dozen girls were around Luce now, all leaning on the shore, all reaching, but Miriam was far above them, almost at the line of black clotted seaweed that marked the highest tide. Even if someone miraculously managed to reach her, Luce thought, they’d never make it back to the sea in time. A quickly strobing vision possessed Luce’s mind, just for a moment: now it wasn’t Miriam lying there but her own mother. Alyssa was shaking from pain in the back of the red van, fighting to suppress her screams; she was dying all over again, while her small daughter clung to her chest. Then Luce’s eyes cleared, and she realized that, while it would be impossible to pull Miriam back into the waves, she might still find a way to save her.

She could make the sea go to Miriam.

It would take a much bigger wave than she’d ever conjured before, but still she could try. Luce closed her eyes and concentrated on gathering every last bit of strength so she could pour it all into her voice. The note began to form, to spread . . .

“Miriam!” It was Violet shouting near her. “Miriam!” And then Luce heard a final, sharp groan like tearing flesh way up on the shore. The song she’d barely begun crumpled in her chest, and she looked up. It was already too late.

Miriam was silent, unmoving. Her scales were peeling off so quickly that it was hard to really see what was happening; they seemed to become like tissue paper, then like something even frailer, spider webs, old crumbled flecks of seashell, wandering smoke . . .

All at once Miriam had two long, bluish, naked human legs where her tail had been. Her toes were curled tight, like a new baby’s. The skin on her legs looked raw and unused, traced by oddly dark purple veins, and her black hair lay in ropes along the tide line.

She was dead, lost beyond all doubt or hope. All that was left of the girl she had been was a grimace of stilted pain.

The tribe was still gathering. Stragglers were catching up to the mermaids gathered along the shore. Every time another head broke through the water, a fresh cry of shock shivered out across the sea. Luce was unnaturally aware of the rhythm of the surf against the pebbles, aware of the aching immensity of the sky above them all.

What she felt was a song, Luce realized. She’d failed Miriam, she’d wounded her beyond repair, she hadn’t reached her in time, but she absolutely wouldn’t leave her body there on the beach, stripped and sad and exposed to the view of anyone who came by. Miriam belonged to the sea. Luce could feel something strange entering her chest: the whole silky interface of ocean and wild sky. She could make the water bend, rise . . .

The noise that erupted from Luce was a mixture of song and scream. A wave with peculiarly vertical sides towered five yards into the air, knocking bewildered mermaids out of its path. It teetered for a moment, struggling for balance, then as Luce’s voice ascended to a higher pitch it gained strength and raced far up the shore. They all saw Miriam’s pale body lifted in the water’s arms. She floated above their heads for a moment, stretched out peacefully at the top of a moving silver bier.

Then Luce gradually lowered her voice; it followed a velvety downward slope, carrying Miriam back home.

***

Miriam was in the mermaids’ arms. They kissed her eyelids, and their hands swirled over her, caressed her cold wrinkled feet, then gently carried her out to the deep water. They were all singing at once, all swimming out into the spreading ocean, and their song was more uncontainable than it had ever been before. None of the anger, none of the bitterness mattered now; they were together in the song, united in one endless vibration. Luce saw Catarina in a rippling blaze beside her, her hair mingling with the molten gold of the dawn. None of that mattered. Fins sliced the blue depths with giddy speed. Anais’s blond waves scrolled through the water, and Luce’s voice merged with hers without the slightest resentment. They sang for Miriam, and no ocean could have been big enough to hold them.

The ship just got in their way.

It was huge, the biggest cruise ship Luce had ever seen in their territory, its sides as white and numb as an iceberg’s. Luce dimly registered its bulk slicing the air in front of her. There had to be hundreds of passengers on a boat that size. It didn’t matter. They didn’t have any business coming here, anyway. This was a place where the sky crashed and dripped, liquefied in the howling of the mermaids for their dead. The elegy was half a scream, inhumanly sustained, and they would make the whole sea scream with them. None of them said a thing; they only sang. It had nothing to do with the humans, and it wasn’t a song intended to enchant them. Luce let her voice rise into another sky-sweeping wave, and now she rode along the crest of the water tower she’d raised, her mouth open around a shriek of unimaginable music.

She could see the people stumbling out onto the deck, still in their pajamas or sometimes just underwear. They were all driven insane by a sound that was at once intolerably beautiful and murderously sad; they were running into one another like ants, clawing their own foreheads until the blood dribbled down. Luce saw one man smearing yellow paint on his face, then shoving his cheek against a wall, using his own head as a brush. The ship slowed, feinting from side to side as the pilot’s mind reeled under the impact of that unearthly music. It wasn’t a song made for humans to hear, and there was no way they could endure it. The world they lived in wasn’t a human world, Luce thought. It was the humans’ own fault if they were arrogant enough to believe that it was. If you were honest, if you were brave, you’d know that anything could happen: you might overhear a mermaids’ funeral, their voices distended in frantic grief; you might die. She made the wave carrying her arch like a swan’s neck, and she swept back under the water.

Catarina’s voice was silkening now. It softened the air into floating kisses. Luce understood, of course. They hadn’t wanted the ship, not at a time like this, but now that it was here it didn’t stand a chance. Any human who heard the mermaids singing had to die; the timahk made that clear. Gently the mermaids let Miriam’s body go. Then one by one they followed Catarina’s lead, and the stupendous scream-song relaxed into a thrum. Only Luce was still shrieking, but finally even her voice jolted upward, higher and higher, until it floated like a single savage star. The star had appeared out of nowhere at the top of a worn farmhouse staircase, and it was poised to fall into the arms of the lovely dark-haired woman who waited at the bottom. Luce still sang for Miriam, but now for the first time she also sang her own mother’s death from a ruptured appendix on the dirty floor of the red van. Her mother squeezed Luce’s hand and tried to smile, but her smile kept knotting up from the pain . . .

The mermaids were spreading out, falling into formation around the ship. Catarina had turned it to the right. They were going back to the island, then, but approaching it this time from the other direction. There was no time to worry, no time even to think. Dana was swimming in the wake, so Luce let her voice carry her around the ship’s left side. The note finally broke and tumbled down the stairs, and as it fell Luce thought of her mother. The song spelled Alyssa’s name. A few blurred forms began to pitch from the deck, streaking past Luce as they plunged into the water. Luce’s voice rose into another angelic scream, and she burst up through the waves and stared at the white hulk above her.

A boy of maybe fifteen leaned out directly above her. His dark blond hair was a tousled mess, blowing across his eyes. He stood proudly, his chest out and chin lifted as he gripped the railing. He stared right at her with a dark, sarcastic, open-mouthed grin on his face. Luce couldn’t understand what was happening at first, then something hit her: the note of a singing voice that stood out in perfect isolation against the thrilling swarm of mermaids’ voices.

It stood out because the voice was human. The boy above her wasn’t enchanted at all. He stood there singing deliberately back at her, even as an overweight woman in a hot pink sweatshirt flung herself over the railing right next to him. If he wasn’t enchanted, though, why didn’t the chaos on all sides send him into a panic? Next a middle-aged man gaped down at Luce; he seemed astonished to discover that he was capable of such absolute love, and he clambered up the rails, beckoning Luce frantically with both hands. The boy barely glanced at the older man as he leaned out and then over, waving even as he fell.

The boy’s voice rose, veering badly off-key as it reached for that soaring, impossible note. He held it anyway. Luce was silent now, gaping back in shock. The boy looked at her, and his coarse, unmagical human voice tumbled down a long staircase. Then at the bottom of the stairs it turned abruptly, running out into a sunny garden.

Luce was dumbstruck. It was unbelievable enough that a human boy was singing to her; it was even worse that he was bellowing a crude approximation of Luce’s own song. But now, going even beyond that, he was changing it as if he could make it his own! It was inconceivably insulting, worse than insolence. But also, she had to admit, a bit impressive. Since when were humans so unafraid of the secrets rippling under the surface of their safe little lives?

The boat’s engines were grating, snarling, its wake rising higher as it throttled forward. She had to get herself together, Luce realized. She couldn’t let a human enchant her! She pressed her voice back up, driving it into the death song, staring at the blond boy and wrapping him in coils of trembling music. He didn’t break. He stared at her with grim defiance, and his voice dueled with hers. It was only then that Luce noticed the cloud of dark shimmering that clung around him: the indication. He was a metaskaza, then. Was that why he was so brave and why he was able to resist her?

Metaskaza, except that he couldn’t be. He’d drown instead of change, purely because he was a boy.

It was so unfair, Luce thought. And then the ship slammed headlong into the sharp crags of the island. Birds like splatters of snow-white blood sprayed out around the prow. The metal crunched, and the deck jerked up into a sudden slope. The boy’s eyes left Luce’s for the first time as he staggered, caught himself, and then glanced around; even now no fear was visible on his face, only curiosity and perhaps sadness. He turned his gaze back at Luce, daring her with his eyes—but daring her to do what?—and climbed onto the tilted railing, swaying for a second as he found his balance. Then he dove gracefully, and his body formed a long blue streak as it sailed past the white ship and down into the swells. It took Luce only a second to catch up with him.

Any human who heard the mermaids singing had to die; Luce knew that. There was much more than the timahk at stake. Their existence had to be kept secret from the humans forever, or Miriam’s awful visions would almost certainly come true. The boy was a witness to the mermaids, to what they did to human ships, and Luce had a responsibility to make sure he didn’t live to tell anyone what he’d seen. Her own feelings had nothing to do with it.

She hooked an arm around his waist and spiraled her tail, careful this time to compensate for the weight dragging her to the right. She lashed away from the carnage as fast as she could, hoping desperately that no one had noticed her leaving. He was already gagging a little, leaning back and prying at her arm to free himself, but Luce was stronger now than any human. She sliced so fast through the empty waves that all she could see was the greenish pale frothing water, the yellow of lingering dawn, and when the singing grew a little quieter behind her she angled sharply up, breaking the surface. A school of porpoises leaped around her and then scattered in alarm.

The blond boy coughed, spitting up gouts of salt water. Luce used her free arm to hold his head face-down just above the surface so he could disgorge the water without choking. She glanced behind her. They were still much too close to the fractured ship, the shrilling mermaids, for her to take the chance of swimming slowly along the top of the waves. She had to hurry; she had to be back before anyone realized that she’d vanished . . . The boy looked over at her wearily, stripes of wet, tan hair gripping his cheeks. He had unusually wide-set ocher eyes, a large nose; Luce got the impression of a certain ragged grandeur, and the kind of unyielding, open intelligence that could gaze at a mermaid with steady acceptance. He might be angry, she thought, but he wasn’t even surprised by the uncanny turn his life had taken. He knew how the world could be.

“Take a really deep breath, okay?” Luce told him. “We have to dive under again.”

She tried not to go too deep and to bring him up for air at reasonable intervals, but she was in a desperate hurry, and also she’d forgotten just how frail humans were. By the time they were close enough to glimpse the docks of the small village up the coast, the boy was only half conscious, gagging up seawater every time she surfaced. His head rolled against her shoulder, and sometimes his hands groped feebly through the empty grayness in front of them. She’d bring him as close to the village as she dared. At least it was a warm morning, and once he was out of the water there wouldn’t be any danger of hypothermia.

He had the indication, Luce told herself. He wouldn’t tell anyone about the mermaids, and even if he did, he wasn’t much older than she was. No one would take him seriously. Besides, whether he knew it or not, he was one of them. He was really a merman, only he couldn’t get rid of his legs.

He had the indication, so in a way—if you just thought of it the right way—maybe it would have been a violation of the timahk not to save him.

She shoved him face-down onto a stony beach and then backed away, watching him for just one more moment. He seemed to regain a bleary awareness of his surroundings, dragging himself up until only his sneakers were still submerged in the splashing sea margin, then rolling awkwardly onto his side to gaze back at her. Water hacked up from his chest and poured down his chin. He was going to be okay, though; Luce could see that. She saw his yellow-brown eyes regarding her from beneath one up-flung arm in its drenched blue sweatshirt, but he didn’t speak or even smile. It was such an interesting face, she thought; not exactly beautiful, but alive with quick-moving emotions . . .

She had to go, Luce knew. She had to get back to the shipwreck, hope that in the tumult of voices and drowning bodies no one had noticed that one especially powerful voice was missing from the chorus. She backed a bit farther out into the water, waves lifting her repetitively so that his returning stare rocked in her eyes. Stop it right now, Lucette. She had to squeeze her lids down tight before she could tear herself away. It was a windy day, and the water was rough and angry.

When Luce got back, she found Catarina and Dana just polishing off the last survivors. A few girls gave her strange looks, but no one said anything, and Luce didn’t know if it was because she’d been away too long or because, now that they were calmer, they were thinking of her fight with Catarina, and of the wave she’d called to bring Miriam back to the water.

No one said anything. They’d sung themselves empty.

***

The magical communion of their grief was fading. Everyone remembered the events that had led up to Miriam’s suicide, and they began to have trouble looking at one another. A pall of exhaustion and embarrassment spread over the tribe, all of them straggling weakly back to their cave. And now that she wasn’t stupefied by the first shock of mourning and the exultation of their dark, shared song, Luce felt sick with guilt. Hadn’t she sworn she’d never help kill humans again? Now a thousand fresh, cold bodies rolled in the surf, their outspread fingers trailing against the seafloor. Passing silver fish were reflected in their unseeing eyes . . .

And while she’d persuaded herself that it wasn’t exactly a violation of the timahk to save the bronze-haired boy, Luce was vividly aware that no one there would agree with her. She was glad that she was too tired to think straight, too tired even to feel.

Everyone seemed equally depleted. They lay side by side all day; for the first time in weeks Luce took her old place beside Catarina. She knew this peacefulness between them couldn’t last, but for now—just for now—Catarina smiled at her again with broken, tear-streaked eyes, and Luce let her head drop against Catarina’s pale shoulder.

“Well done, Lucette,” Catarina whispered. “My brave Queen Luce. You brought Miriam back to us. Oh, there’s nothing more terrible than a mermaid left abandoned on the shore . . .” Luce wondered drowsily if Catarina was being sarcastic, but her voice sounded warm and gentle, traced with lulling halfsong. Dimly Luce realized that Catarina was enchanting her, coaxing her into a deep and healing sleep.