The Water Mirror
Authors: Kai Meyer
ONTENTS
1
T
HE GONDOLA
CARRYING THE TWO GIRLS EMERGED FROM
one of the side canals. They
had to wait for the boats racing on the Grand Canal to pass, and even then, for minutes
afterward there was such a jumble of small rowboats and steamboats that the gondolier
chose to wait patiently.
“They'll be past pretty soon,” he called to the girls as
he grasped his oar with both hands. “You aren't in a hurry, are
you?”
“No,” replied Merle, who was the older of the two. But
actually she was more excited than she'd ever been in her life.
People in Venice had been talking about nothing but the
regatta on the Grand Canal for days. The promoters had advertised that the boats would
be drawn by more mermaids at once than ever before.
Some people disparaged the mermaids as “fishwives.” That was
only one of the countless abusive terms they used for them, and worst of all was the
claim that they were in league with the Egyptians. Not that anyone seriously believed
such nonsenseâafter all, the armies of the Pharaoh had wiped out untold numbers of
mermaids in the Mediterranean.
In today's regatta there were to be ten boats at the starting line,
at the southern end of the Grand Canal, at the level of the Casa Stecchini. Each would
be pulled by ten mermaids.
Ten mermaids! That had to be an all-time record.
La
Serenissima,
most serene lady, as the Venetians liked to call their city, had
never seen anything like it.
The mermaids were harnessed in a fan shape in front of the boats on long
ropes that could withstand even needle-sharp mermaid teeth. The people were gathered to
watch the show on the right and left sides of the canal wherever its banks were
accessible and, of course, on all the balconies and in the windows of the palazzos.
But Merle's excitement had nothing to do with the regatta. She had
another reason. A better one, she thought.
The gondolier waited another two or three minutes
before he steered the slender black gondola out into the Grand Canal, straight
across it, and into the opening of a smaller canal opposite. As they crossed, they were
almost rammed by some show-offs who'd harnessed their own mermaids in front of
their boat and, bawling loudly, were trying to act as if they were part of the
regatta.
Merle smoothed back her long, dark hair. The wind was making her eyes
tear. She was fourteen years old, not big, not small, but a little on the thin side.
That was true of almost all the children in the orphanage, though, except of course for
fat Ruggiero, but he was sickâat least that's what the attendant said. But
was it really a sign of illness to sneak into the kitchen at night and eat up the
dessert that was to be for everyone else?
Merle took a deep breath. The sight of the captive mermaids made her sad.
They had the upper bodies of humans, with the light, smooth skin that many women
probably prayed for every night. Their hair was long, for among the women of the sea it
was considered shameful to cut it offâto such an extent that even their human
masters respected this custom.
What differentiated the mermaids from ordinary women was, for one thing,
their mighty fish tails. The tails began at the level of their hips and were rarely
shorter than six and a half feet. They were as agile as whips, as strong as lions, and
as silvery as the jewelry in the treasury of the City Council.
But the second big differenceâand it was the one
that humans feared mostâwas the hideous mouth that split a mermaid's face
like a gaping wound. Even though the rest of their features might be human, and
strikingly beautiful as wellâinnumerable poems had been written about their eyes,
and not a few love-smitten youths had voluntarily gone to a watery grave for
themâstill it was their mouths that convinced so many that they were dealing with
animals and not with humans. The maw of a mermaid reached from one ear to the other, and
when she opened it, it was as if her entire skull split in two. Arising from her jawbone
were several rows of sharp teeth, as small and pointed as nails of ivory. Anyone who
thought there was no worse bite than that of a shark had never looked into the jaws of a
mermaid.
Actually, people knew very little about them. It was a fact that mermaids
avoided humans. For many of the city's inhabitants, that was reason enough to hunt
them. Young men often made a sport of driving inexperienced mermaids who'd gotten
mixed up in the labyrinth of the Venetian canals into a corner; if one of them happened
to die as a result, people thought that was too bad, certainly, but no one ever reproved
the hunters.
But mostly the mermaids were caught and imprisoned in tanks in the Arsenal
until a reason for keeping them was found. Often it was this boat race, more rarely fish
soupâthough the taste of their long, scaled tails
was
legendary, surpassing even delicacies like sea cows and whales.
“I feel sorry for them,” said the second girl, sitting next to
Merle in the gondola. She was just as undernourished and even bonier. Her pale, almost
white blond hair hung way down her back. Merle knew nothing about her companion, only
that she also came from an orphanage, though from another district of Venice. She was a
year younger than Merle, thirteen, she'd said. Her name was Junipa.
Junipa was blind.
“You feel sorry for the mermaids?” Merle asked.
The blind girl nodded. “I could hear their voices a while
ago.”
“But they haven't said anything.”
“Yes, under the water,” Junipa countered. “They were
singing the whole time. I have quite good ears, you know. Many blind people
do.”
Merle stared at Junipa in astonishment, until she finally became conscious
of how impolite that was, whether the girl could see it or not.
“Yes,” said Merle, “me too. I feel they always seem a
little . . . I don't know, melancholy somehow. As if they'd
lost something that meant a lot to them.”
“Their freedom?” suggested the gondolier, who had been
listening to them.
“More than that,” Merle replied. She couldn't find
the words to describe what she meant. “Maybe being able to be
happy.” That still wasn't exactly it, but it came close.
She was convinced that the mermaids were just as human as she was. They
were more intelligent than many a person she'd learned to know in the orphanage,
and they had feelings. They were
different,
certainly, but
that didn't give anyone the right to treat them like animals, to harness them to
their boats or chase them through the lagoon whenever they pleased. The Venetians'
behavior toward them was cruel and utterly inhumanâall the things, really, that
people said about the mermaids.
Merle sighed and looked down into the water. The prow of the gondola was
cutting through the emerald green surface like a knife blade. In the narrow side canals
the water was very calm; it was only on the Grand Canal that stronger waves came up
sometimes. But here, three or four corners removed from Venice's main artery,
there was complete stillness.
Soundlessly the gondola glided underneath arching bridges. Some were
carved with grinning stone imps; bushy weeds were growing on their heads like tufts of
green hair.
On both sides of the canal the fronts of the houses came straight down
into the water. None was lower than four stories. A few hundred years before, when
Venice had still been a mighty trading power, goods had been
unloaded from the canal directly into the palazzos of the rich merchant families. But
today many of the old buildings stood empty, most of the windows were dark, and the
wooden doors at the water level were rotten and eroded by dampnessâand that not
just since the Egyptian army's siege had closed around the city. The born-again
pharaoh and his sphinx commanders were not to blame for all of it.
“Lions!” Junipa exclaimed suddenly.
Merle looked along the canal to the next bridge. She couldn't
discover a living soul, to say nothing of the stone lions of the City Guard.
“Where? I don't see any.”
“I can smell them,” Junipa insisted. She was sniffing at the
air soundlessly, and out of the corner of her eye Merle saw the gondolier behind them
shake his head in bewilderment.
She tried to emulate Junipa, but the gondola must have gone on for almost
another two hundred feet before Merle's nostrils detected something: the odor of
damp stone, musty and a little mildewed, so strong that it even masked the breath of the
sinking city.
“You're right.” It was unmistakably the stench of the
stone lions used by the Venetian City Guard as riding animals and comrades-at-arms.
At that very moment one of the powerful animals appeared on a bridge ahead
of them. It was of granite,
one of the most common breeds among the
stone lions of the lagoon. There were other, stronger ones, but that made no difference
in the long run. Anyone who fell into the clutches of a granite lion was as good as
lost. The lions had been the emblems of the city from time immemorial, back to the days
when every one of them was winged and had been able to lift itself into the air. But
today there were only a few who could do that, a strictly regulated number of single
animals, which were reserved for the personal protection of the city councillors. The
breeding masters on the island of the lions, up in the north of the lagoon, had bred out
flying in all the others. They came into the world with stunted wings, which they bore
as mournful appendages on their backs. The soldiers of the City Guard fastened their
saddles to them.
The granite lion on the bridge also was only an ordinary animal of stone.
Its rider wore the uniform of the Guard. A rifle dangled on a leather strap over his
shoulder, pointedly casual, a sign of military arrogance. The soldiers had not been able
to protect the city from the Egyptian Empireâinstead, the Flowing Queen had done
thatâbut since the proclamation of siege conditions thirty years before, the Guard
had gained more and more power. Meanwhile they were surpassed in their arrogance only by
their commanders, the city councillors, who managed affairs in the captive city as they
saw fit. Perhaps the councillors and their soldiers were only trying to
prove something to themselvesâafter all, everyone else knew that they
weren't in a position to defend Venice in an emergency. But so long as the Flowing
Queen kept the enemy far from the lagoon, they could rejoice in their omnipotence.