Like a bullet Syrena shot through the waters, the curl and punch of her tail rocking Sophie into a soothing rhythm. The intensity of their conversation faded, and Sophie grew dreamy with the rhythm of the mermaid’s motion and the pulsing of the water around her. As they descended, Sophie felt her ears clog and pop. Through the veil of mermaid hair she saw lights in the water, luminescent creatures glowing moonish and blue, or hot pink, bright orange. A strange wormlike thing became snagged in Sophie’s net and wriggled blindly across her face. It was fleshy and glowing, with neither a head nor a tail, just color and movement. Sophie was mesmerized. And she understood what the mermaid had promised, that when she got hungry enough she would join her underwater feasting. Though the thought of biting into the alien critter repulsed her, she was drawn to it, too. What would such a thing taste like? It was bright as candy.
Syrena’s hand reached behind her and ran down her mane, searching for food. She found the soft worm and plucked it away from Sophie, popped it in her mouth. After she swallowed with a satisfied sound, she cleared her throat. “So, since I know all about you,” Syrena said to her charge, snug on her back like a baby in a papoose, “Now I will tell you all about me. Will help us pass the time to Poland. We have long way to go, ya? And frankly, I do not want to listen to you all the way. Will make me crazy to hear you yammering like human girl for so many days. Will be good for you to be quiet, listen. And be good for you to have something to listen to, so you don’t go crazy yourself, in your mind, thinking about all this saving world problem. And who know?” the mermaid asked thoughtfully, “Perhaps something in my story can help you.”
“I WAS BORN in a mermaid village,” Syrena began. “Just outside the North Sea. Maybe six hundred years ago.”
Syrena was born into a village embroiled in a life-or-death debate. At stake was the life of mermaids, and it was the mermaids themselves who were asking the question: with the ocean such a perilous place for them, was it wise to keep creating more mermaids?
There was a feeling, held passionately by many of them, that the sea was no longer a safe place for even the oldest and strongest among them. Of course, life underwater had always been heightened by the fact that at any moment sharks could arrow into the village and leave the water there reddened in their wake. The mermaids had always fortified their homes as best they could, digging great caves beneath the sand or building bunkers from the discarded shells of giant clams and old sea-monster bones. They set traps for the sharks, and some mermaids took up the task of fighting them in combat, armored in seashells, a spear in each hand. What feasts the village had when a mermaid slayed a shark!
To protect their offspring the mermaids constructed castles of foam from their own mouths and nestled their fragile eggs inside. Tucked up in the crook of a sea cave, or hidden in a jumble of rocks, the babies grew from a speck of nothing into the littlest tadpoles, finally clawing out of the soft, watery eggs. They scattered into the sea blindly, instinctively sticking close to rocks, darting into crevices, eating plankton and microbes. The ones who weren’t swallowed by fish grew larger. The ones who weren’t lassoed by hungry squid grew larger still. Eventually the mermaid babies made their way into the heart of the village, where they were greeted with cheers of joy. These were the hardiest mermaids, the craftiest, the ones with intuition like radar. The grown creatures protected them from seals and sharks and taught them how to be mermaids—how to care for their scales and their hair, how to build caves and spear fish, how to weave nets and make mermaid magic. It was the way they had lived for thousands of years.
But the coming of the people onto the seas changed everything. At first there were only a few, and their boats were humble and so were they. Knowing they were entering another’s land, the humans brought gifts for the mermaids, and the mermaids offered their own tokens in return—wreaths woven from seaweed and their own hair, clusters of pearls wrenched from the tight lips of oysters, a perfect fish, wrestled with their own hands.
First there were only a few boats, but then there were many, and the vessels grew larger and larger: no longer a single man rowing the hull of a tree, but a rowdy crew commanding a ship built from an entire forest. They sailed further from their native shores, no longer coming through the nearby channels and straits but cutting across the wide, open ocean.
And the ocean, it appeared, had made them mad. The further they traveled from home, the more troubled the men of the ships seemed to be. They were soiled and dizzy, drunk on poisons they’d made themselves, brewed from potatoes they’d have been better off eating. The men were sickly, and the mermaids felt bad for them, so they pulled themselves onto the rocks and sang.
Song, beneath the ocean, was powerful medicine. The whales knew this—they bathed the hurt and disturbed members of their pods in the vibrations of their voices. As it traveled through the waters, the noise grew in its magic. It was as if the sound directed itself toward the problem, modulated its harmonies to fix it. The songs of the whales soothed illnesses of the body and the spirit, and it was the whales who’d taught the mermaids the power of their own melodies. Mermaids who were torn by shark teeth, or had swum too low into the depths and emerged dark-minded and spooky, were ringed by a floating cotillion of their sisters and bathed in the symphony of their voices, their high squeals and low rumbles, sounds that grew and receded like the sea’s own currents. Sound that came together like a school of shimmering fish, sound so bright you could almost see it in the water. Creatures from fathoms away would gather round to listen to the mermaids, gleaning comfort and care from the sounds that bounced off the seafloor. The mermaids’ song surrounded them all in a still and sacred moment. The constant hungers of animals who prowled the sea were sated, if only for a moment. Fish who normally swallowed each other whole would look into each other’s wide, staring eyes for the first time. The world of the ocean was whole, as if every single creature was a drop of its water.
The mermaids had never sung above the waters, but the sight of the men, so sickly and wild, urged them to try to help with their sounds. And so along the rocks they arranged themselves, and as one they sounded their zawolanie—their magic cry.
It was a sound such as the men had never heard. Already crazed from too much drink and time at sea, they raised their faces in despair, sure that their god, a terrible one, had pulled the sky apart with his fist. The sound, to them, was like a tearing, and they looked down, certain they would see their ship itself coming apart around their feet, nails popping from the wood. It was the noise of the end of the world, and it came from the mouths of the fish-women on the rocks, their mouths open as if hungry to eat them all.
The mermaids dove from the rocks as the ship, suddenly freed from the control of its crew, sailed toward them. They saw the sailors’ faces, contorted as if in the final throes of death, their grubby hands clamped to their ears. The sound of the mermaids echoed inside their minds; even as the creatures fled beneath the water, their cries seemed to continue. Men slammed their heads into the walls of the ship, trying to shake out the terrible screams; they tore the sails from the mast and wrapped their faces in them. Many, in their agony and confusion, fell from the vessel into the waters.
Beneath the water the mermaid village had been thrown into chaos as well. The mermaids churned about, distraught and alarmed. They had never known their voices to wreak havoc, but without the ocean to soften and carry it, their song’s raw power must have been too much. They looked up as the tall boots of sailors, kicking at the sea as if it were a giant beast, punctured the water’s surface. The sailors hollered and flailed. Soon, the mermaids knew, the sharks would come for them. Something must be done quickly.
A mermaid swam up to the boots of one sailor and with both hands pulled him beneath the waters. Now his struggle increased, his fists shot out at the mermaids who gathered around him, but the water slowed his motion. A stream of what looked like jellyfish rose upward from his mouth. The mermaids would have to act quickly; he would not last long beneath the waves. Circling the sailor, they began their song anew. The soft ocean waters held the vibrations and brought them to the sailor. And just as moments ago his mind was full of knives, now only tenderness filled him. His body, knotted from months at sea, relaxed. As the waters washed from him the grime of his time at sea, the mermaids’ song cleaned his head and his heart.
When it seemed he was healed, the one who still held his boots gave her tail a powerful kick and pushed him up above the waters. He broke the surface like a boy reborn—and really, he was just a boy. No longer aged by the harshness of a sailor’s life, the mermaids could see that he was not much older than a human child.
The mermaids rose behind the boy and swam to the rocks, where more sailors did strange dances of pain. The first mermaid to arrive was received with a boot in the face.
“Witches!” the sailor howled. The mermaids paddled back quickly, but the men struck out, catching some in the face and head with their boots and fists. More shocked than hurt, they scattered beneath the waters.
“They cured me!” the boy they had healed shouted to the men on the deck of the ship, a ship that had been gouged by the rocks, a ship that was crumbling and sinking. The boy saw what his crew had busied themselves with even if the mermaids did not, and he waved his hands, frantic, above the waters.
“They are peaceful!” the boy cried. “They cured my mind—I hear the screams no more!”
“The screams are theirs!” shouted his captain. “They’ve sunk us! Sea witches! They have bewitched you, young lad, you’ve been deviled!” Sparks shot from the captain’s hand as he brought his flaming fist to the rope of the cannon.
The mermaids had never seen a cannon before.
AS THEY TRAVELED, time passed in a blur for Sophie, bundled like a baby on the mermaid’s back with visions of mermaids and sailors flitting through her mind like dreams. When Syrena ended her tale and finally stopped swimming, there was only the epic quiet of the ocean and the surges of currents washing over them—warm water, then cold, then colder, then a rush of warm again. They were so deep it was like being nowhere. Outer space, Sophie thought hazily, weightless in the dark water. She felt like an astronaut of sorts. When the mermaid undid the tangles of hair that cocooned her, Sophie floated down onto the sandy ocean floor, thinking, This is another planet entirely.
When she looked up toward the sky, Sophie expected to see nothing, a void, in this place where the sun had never shone. But what she saw in the darkness was a great wall, a darkness upon the darkness that rose high above them. Sophie’s eyes adjusted to the dim glow of her sea-glass talisman, the light fighting against the extinguishing weight and blackness of the depths.
It looked like a mountain range that rose up as far as she could see and extended all the way to the edges of her vision. But it made Sophie think of the wall inside her, that dark fortress Angel taught her to pull up around her heart so that no one—not good-hearted Angel or evil-hearted Kishka—could get inside, so Sophie decided to regard the epic strength and darkness rising before her as a safe space, not a sinister one. A place for them to rest.
“Talk about the middle of nowhere!” Sophie said aloud and started to giggle, a bit overwhelmed. Even if she was part znakharka, Polish witch, she was still part teenage girl, and she was a human girl at the bottom of the sea, looking up at the biggest mountain the earth had ever kicked up. As her eyes continued to adjust, Sophie could spot thin streaks of brightness at its black peak, orange flares that shone and vanished. Were her eyes playing tricks?
“Can you see?” Syrena asked, swirling down to the floor beside her. The mermaid stretched, raising her arms high above her head and unfurling her giant tail onto the sand. She pointed toward the mountaintop with her long, pale finger, blue in the glow of their talismans. Syrena’s sea glass sat upon her bare chest, a starfish trapped in its center like a bug in amber. Sophie’s, sitting on her grubby t-shirt, held a seashell. The blue light shone up to their faces, and their eyes met: Sophie’s wide with wonder, the mermaid’s ageless, ancient, with their own luminescence.
“It is the earth birthing itself,” Syrena said. “Special place. The mountain—how you say it?—barfing out hot liquid earth, water-fire.”
“It’s called lava,” Sophie said.
Syrena rolled her eyes, a faint strobe in the darkness. “Yes, lava. Don’t be show-off. The lava barf is cooled and hard and becomes the earth. This is where everything happens. Powerful place. Good place to fix you.”
They lay there, watching the orange tongues lapping at the peak as if they were fireworks in the sky. A fire in the sea. Here and there, great explosions of what looked like black smoke shot from cracks in the endless crags.
“Just water,” Syrena said. “Much minerals in it, make it dark. Very rich water, very healthy for us.”
Beneath them the ocean floor trembled, a daisy chain of earthquakes as the mountain did its eternal work creating more of the planet. Syrena leaned into Sophie and offered a lock of her hair. “Hungry yet?” the mermaid smiled. For thousands of miles, her hair had acted like a net, a trawler capturing algae and plankton, small shrimp and fishes. Syrena grabbed a thick lock of it. It was messy and weird, yet the dark tangle Syrena had dangled in front of Sophie’s nose smelled oddly delicious. Sophie’s belly rumbled. How long had it been since she had eaten? How long had she traveled on the mermaid’s back? Sophie opened her mouth to the tangle, and it was like eating a great stew. Tastes she’d never known, green tastes and blue tastes, deep and oceanic. Everything salty and briny and delicious. Syrena bowed her head to the girl and Sophie nibbled right up to the roots.
“Okay!” the mermaid snapped, slapping away Sophie’s hands. “I am not buffet! This is me.” She shook the lock, cleaned of algae and the edible dust of the sea, at Sophie. “You pull my hair, it hurts.”
“Sorry,” Sophie burped.
“How is it you feel?” Syrena asked. “Still you can’t move?”
Sophie nodded her head. “Only my head.” She paused, and then spoke out loud a thought that had been haunting her. “Syrena, is there something wrong… with my magic?” She swallowed nervously. “Shouldn’t I be able to fix myself?”
“Even if you half Odmieńce, you can’t do everything. Nothing can. Everything need help, everyone. I will help you. And this place, it will help you.” Syrena scooped a palmful of mud from the ocean floor and gazed at it by the light of their talisman. It sparkled with phosphorescence like neon, and seemed to wriggle with the movement of things too small to see. Sophie watched in horror as the mermaid tossed the glob of mud into her mouth. A fringy bristle she had never before noticed hung like a broom over Syrena’s teeth, and she sucked at the mud, ingesting the plankton and minerals while the brush caught the sand. With a very unladylike noise, the mermaid blew the mud from the bristles, and then the bristles disappeared.
Syrena smiled at the girl, her own teeth pearly as abalone shell. “What?” she demanded. “You never see retractable baleen before? You lie there with your mouth open, you will wish you had some too!”
Indeed, Sophie’s mouth was a bit muddy from hanging open in shock. She tried to spit it out, but it crunched in her teeth. “Retractable baleen?”
“Like whale,” Syrena shrugged. “But it comes and goes. See?” The mermaid opened her mouth wide, and above her teeth Sophie spied not gums but bits of brush. With a flex the baleen came down, a curtain that allowed the good stuff to pass into the mermaid’s mouth but filtered sand and grit. The baleen rose, and Syrena spoke.
“Quite handy,” she said.
“Are you part whale?” Sophie asked, and Syrena shrugged.
“Perhaps. Like you are part monkey. But we are part human, too, so perhaps mermaids part monkey as well.”
“And people are part whale?”
Syrena scoffed, a bubble of air shooting out from her nose. “You wish.”
“Syrena, where are we?”
“Mid-Atlantic Ridge, is called by you people. We stay here a bit.”
Syrena gathered Sophie in her arms and let the muscle of her tail propel them up the side of the mountain. Like flying, Sophie thought, passing over fissures and valleys rising toward the lakes of lava that bubbled at the top. Sophie could see great molten globs of it crawling from the mountain’s lip and sliding down, cooling into rock. Baby earth.
They settled into the soft earth of a high crevice below the range of the hottest lava. The ridge of rock was solid and the water there was warm, strikingly so after the frigid depths of the Atlantic. Sophie felt a tingling as sensation returned to her skin. She hadn’t even realized she had been so cold.
“Oh this is so nice,” Sophie murmured, finding herself lying on a vent that bubbled soothing hot water all over her. “Like a spa.” Sophie had never been to a spa, but she had seen pictures in magazines of women looking impossibly relaxed, with mud on their faces and slices of cucumber on their eyes, soaking in a tub. And Sophie sure did have mud on her face—both she and Syrena were streaked with it.
“Are you comfortable, Sophie?” Syrena asked.
“Mmmm-hmmmm,” the girl mumbled.
“Very good. Then I will sing to you. Heal you, like my kind have done for generations.”
Hovering over Sophie, with her talisman floating down until it bumped gently into Sophie’s own, Syrena began her song. It ricocheted off the mountain range, its power multiplying with echoes. It engulfed Sophie as completely as the water, becoming one with the water and soaking into the girl, streaming into her ears, her nose, her mouth. Heaven, Sophie thought. This must be what heaven is. The sound moved into her bones and made them whole again, turned them to song. Sophie was the song, the song was she and she was everything. What a gift it was, the mermaid’s harmony. Sophie had thought that a mermaid’s song was something that washed over you; now she understood it was something you became. Sophie was Syrena’s song—and Sophie was healed.
“Oh!” Sophie cried when the last bit of echo had faded into the darkness. She flung her arms up around the mermaid’s neck, buried her face in her hair, the source of her sustenance. It was as if Syrena were the ocean itself, and everything it had to give.
“Okay, okay, okay, now now,” Syrena peeled her charge off of her. “Not too fast, not too fast, okay? Your bones are whole, but they weak like baleen, okay?” The mermaid brought the brush back down across her teeth and flicked them with an opal fingernail. “They still weak. You will lie here and eat the minerals in the water, you will soak in the salt and I will sing and we will talk. Dobrze?”
“Dobrze,” Sophie agreed, effortlessly translating and speaking the mermaid’s Polish. As she reclined upon the vent, Sophie became aware of the nutrients in the hot water, microscopic shrimps and algae, and it was as if she were lounging in a giant pot of stew. She drank from it sloppily, without baleen to strain the crunchy bits of cooled lava. Soon she began to enjoy the bite of the lava, the smash of glass and crystal beneath her teeth.
“Is good for you, too,” the mermaid nodded approvingly. “You have the intuition. Your body tell you what it wants. Lava is good medicine—iron, calcium.” She plucked a porous black crumb from the earth beneath her and popped it in her mouth, sucking on it like a candy. The molten lava above them glowing like candlelight, the two fell into a soft and salty slumber.