Water (8 page)

“They used the river system,” he replied, grinning at my enthusiasm. “May I continue with the story?” he asked politely.

“Oh yes of course, sorry.” I blushed as he took my hand once more.

“Over time Pelagius and Sabine fell in love.” The emotion that blossomed in my chest was so intense it was almost painful, a combination of the sweetest and most innocent happiness and richest desire, mingled with pride and excitement and joy. “Their marriage would have been completely forbidden if they were part of normal Oceanid culture, but up here in the mountains, everyone celebrated with them in great feasting and dancing. Sabine apparently went back to the cave where Pelagius had found her and drew their marriage feast in at a later date. She wanted it known, by whoever found the pictures, that she and her people were very happy.”

I smiled, as an exquisite marriage ceremony played out behind my closed lids. I recognised the breathtaking valley and waterfall we’d been at yesterday as the backdrop to a radiantly beautiful woman, surrounded by people who obviously loved her deeply. She was smiling expectantly at the pool as an excited tension encapsulated the group. With a sudden burst of music a strong and handsome man rose from the centre of the pool. He carried himself with great majesty, his eyes focused only on her.

Merrick released my hand, grinning at me as I opened my eyes, the fear of these unknown people fading into the background and leaving me hungry for more information.

“Sabine began very important work here,” he continued. “As more and more Oceanids were driven from the sea to seek refuge in the cleaner water, she recognised that they may need to interface with humans in order to survive. At first she was that interface, going into the local town at times to purchase medical supplies or food, but as their numbers grew she realised that she must start teaching the Oceanids to do this for themselves. She’d been educated in a missionary school and so the first thing she brought to us was an understanding of a passionate and loving God. She taught them English, she bought books for them and taught them to read and write, but most valuable, she taught them how to appear human. The way you walk, the way you sit, hand gestures, facial expressions.”

I jumped at Merrick’s abrupt movement as he leapt to his feet and held out his hand.

“And now I’d like to show you something.” He turned his body slightly, gesturing behind him and into the bush. I stood with him, alarm bells ringing in every cell in my body. As much as I was indebted to him, and as excited and curious as I was about all he’d told me, I didn’t know him at all. Every horror story about kidnapping I’d ever heard flashed through my brain insisting I should be careful.

There were two reasons I ignored the frightening thoughts, two reason why I followed him across the river. The first was because he’d saved my life the day before; the second, much more inexplicable one, was because his story made me feel alive for the first time in a very long time, and I wasn’t about to let that go.

He leapt gracefully from boulder to boulder, leading me upstream. I stumbled after him, struggling to keep up with the manic pace he set, and arguing with myself the whole way about stupidity and poor choices and beautiful strangers being just as dangerous as ugly ones.

The sheer excitement and adventure of the moment overwhelmed any sensible instincts I had, as Merrick’s lithe form flitted from rock to rock with ease.

He led me across the river, and through a swathe of tall reeds. The enormous boulders beyond the reeds looked as though some giants had casually scattered a bag of house-sized marbles across the land, each massive boulder marooned in a sea of lush grass.

He ran at the closest rock to us, using the curve of the rock and the force of his movement to angle himself up the side of the boulder. When he reached the top he motioned for me to follow him. I laughed.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I told him.

His expression was curious. “Why?”

“There is no way I can run up the rock like that,” I told him firmly.

He reached down and grabbed my arms, hauling me up the side of the rock,being careful not to scrape my knees or shins as he did so.

The top of the boulder was about the size of a tennis court and perfectly round, mottled with lichen and peeling in places in great rain-chipped sheets which created jagged edges that caught my toes as I tried to keep up with Merrick.

He strode confidently around the perimeter of the boulder before leaping lightly across a fissure in the surface and then turning to face me.

I followed him until I came to the fissure, standing opposite him, my fear of heights making my palms itch as I tried to gather the courage to leap across to his side.

“Are you up for a bit of an adventure?” he asked playfully, holding his hand out across the chasm.

I smiled a wobbly smile, my forehead creasing in concentration as I took his hand, holding onto it like it was a lifeline.

He pulled my across the gap with a firm jerk and held onto my hand as he led me to the edge of a perfectly round rock pool. The water around the edge was the most brilliant shade of turquoise I’ve ever seen in nature. Like every pool I’d seen so far, the centre was as black as night.

He turned to me smiling.

“I’d like to show you something,” he said again.

“OK, what is it?” In reply he pulled me slowly into his body until I was uncomfortably close to him. I could feel the warmth from his skin radiate along the length of my body and although I recognised the voice of reason and caution and all things sensible from a distance, my will to resist was a hazy and intangible thing that I couldn’t quite seem to access.

I looked up at his face. He was grinning at me, his smile stretching just a little too tight across his face, his teeth white in the sun and his eyes, his eyes were feverishly excited.

He lifted his other hand and tucked a stray tendril of hair behind my ear. I blushed at the intimate gesture.

“Alexandra, do you trust me?” His voice was husky.

“Um… I… I don’t know,” I stuttered, my heart racing.

He gazed into my eyes a moment longer and then, wrapping his arms around me in an unbreakable grip, launched us into a perfect tandem dive into the very centre of the pool.

The icy water whipped past me stinging my eyes until I had no choice but to close them. I couldn’t work out where the surface was and the disorientation made me dizzy.

We had moved so fast that I hadn’t had time to be afraid yet. Only when Merrick stopped suddenly and flipped us the right way around did a flicker of fear resurface. I opened my eyes as wide as they could go in the strange twilight. The light was too weak to fight its way through the water which stung my eyes. I looked up and could vaguely see a ring of wavering light far above me, the entrance of the pool the size of a beach ball above us. We were very deep.

As if on cue, my lungs began to burn, the shallow breath I’d taken just before we dove into the pool was running out too quickly. I fought against Merrick’s iron grip, trying desperately to get to the surface I knew I’d never reach in time.

He pulled me closer to him and put his mouth to my neck just below my jaw.

“Calm down, Alexandra,” I heard him say with such startling clarity that for a moment I went completely limp with shock. Stretching my eyes as wide as they would go in the murky water I tried to make visual sense of what my brain had informed me was impossible.

He was so close to me that even with the water distortion I could see that his eyes were very calm with just a hint of the excitement I’d seen in them earlier. He leaned forward again.

“I need you to learn to breathe with me before we go any further.”

I stared at him, my mouth clamped shut as I desperately tried to keep the meagre oxygen I had left trapped in my now starving lungs.

“Breathe the oxygen you have left in your lungs out through your nose,” he instructed.

How was he doing it? Every time he spoke bubbles escaped from his mouth, but it didn’t seem to bother him at all. An icy cold that had nothing to do with the water temperature crept through me as I noticed the slight rise and fall of his shoulders, as if he were breathing.

I started to fight then.

I kicked and hit and struggled with all of my strength. I didn’t know how he was able to speak to me without air, I didn’t know why his shoulders were moving slightly, as if he was breathing, or how he was going to breathe for both of us underwater. I didn’t trust him any more, and the fascination I’d felt earlier fled before the fear that crashed in on me, pressing me into a cowering, weak, pathetic version of myself.

He held me for the few feeble seconds it took for me to realise that he was my only option, that I wouldn’t make it to the surface in time, and that regardless of how much I wanted that breath to stay in my lungs, I couldn’t will my body to keep it in.

A stream of bubbles briefly danced in front of my eyes before drifting upward, growing larger as they raced for the surface. My body went limp with defeat.

Merrick waited a few seconds more until black spots began to dance in front of my eyes, and then he clamped his warm lips over mine, forcing my mouth open, and breathed rich oxygen into my lungs.

I slammed my mouth shut over the air. Hope surged through me as I struggled to get to the surface again, kicking desperately against him, using my new-found strength to try to break free.

The air in my lungs lasted such an awfully short time. Merrick’s iron grip hadn’t faltered once before the strength seeped from my limbs.

He waited until I was desperate and then breathed into my lungs again.

After the third time of breath-struggle-black spots…

“Alexandra!” Merrick’s voice was exasperated. “Even with the air I’ve given you, you wouldn’t make it to the surface in time.”

I looked up. The circle of light was tiny. We’d been sinking the whole time I’d been fighting for air, and now we were so far from the surface, I’d never get to the top before I ran out of air.

I stared at him desperately.

“I will take you up again, but I want to show you something first,” he said. “Trust me.”

His voice was somehow plaintive. He brushed his thumb over my cheek, the gesture slow and dreamlike in the water.

I looked at the surface. The circle of light was only a hand’s breadth across. My lungs began to burn again as I searched his eyes and, out of sheer desperation, made the choice he’d been waiting for.

He smiled.

“Don’t hold onto a breath, it will only make you uncomfortable,” he instructed. “Breathe the air out through your nose and in through your mouth.”

I nodded to show I understood and breathed out. This time he immediately filled my lungs with air again.

“OK, wrap your arms around my neck and keep your legs as close to my body as you can.”

I lifted my arms from where they’d been pushing uselessly against his bare chest, and put them awkwardly around his neck, my movements slow and weightless in the water. He was grinning mischievously as he suddenly pulled me against him, the warmth of his body pressing against the length of mine.

My shorts billowed around me, and my bare legs brushed something as smooth as silk.

My blood ran cold.

It was the exact sensation I’d had in the jade pool. Exactly the same sensation as my recurring nightmare.

I didn’t have time to think about it though because Merrick circled the perimeter of the pool with startling speed. I realised he was giving me the opportunity to practise our breathing, waiting for me to become completely comfortable, before he suddenly flipped us downwards and then very quickly spiralled us into a narrow passageway that seemed to be angled upward, although it could have just as easily been downwards I was so disoriented.

The water lightened to a soft greeny blue, still crystal clear, as he slowed down to almost a complete stop. My eyes felt as though they would pop out of their sockets as I stretched them to take in the alien beauty that surrounded us.

We were in a water-filled underground cave. I glanced upward as Merrick pointed to the ceiling, relieved to see sunlight filtering through some cracks in the rock above us.

“We are beneath the fissure you leapt across earlier,” he explained, the perfect clarity of his voice still startling me.

I nodded to show I understood, and accepted another breath from him as he released me and showed me how to float, suspended in the water above an exquisitely delicate world of ancient stalagmites that must have grown from the cave floor thousands of years ago. They glowed softly in pastel shades of green, blue, lilac, yellow and pink, each one delicately unique as it reached longingly for its partners which stretched from sections of the cave roof. Some of them had met each other in the middle all those years ago, before the cave became flooded with water, and Merrick wove gracefully between the columns they created circling back to me every couple of seconds to give me another breath.

On one of his trips back to me I grabbed his arm before he could swim away and tried to speak. It came out as a muffled hurrrgmpf, but he smiled and replied easily.

“It
is
beautiful.”

Despite the exquisite beauty of the cave, I was still wary and painfully aware of how utterly dependent I was on Merrick for my next breath. The crisp mountain water had chilled me to the bone and the nagging worry about how I was going to get back to the surface, and most importantly the sun, clouded the beauty that surrounded me.

Merrick seemed to read my mind, because on his next round back to me he pointed to the surface.

I nodded as he wrapped his arms around me and swam quickly back through the passageway in the same disorientating swirling spiral before shooting to the surface, the speed of the water stinging my face.

The warmth and light of the midday sun blinded me as we burst out of the pool in a wave of water.

Despite the incredible beauty he’d shown me, I disentangled myself from him and swam quickly to the side, slipping on the smooth rocks in my hurry to get out of the water and away from him, dragging great gulps of air into my lungs.

“What was that?” I rasped at Merrick, terror of the implications of what he’d just done and shown me making me breathless as I pulled myself out of the water onto the rock.

He was laughing as he sprang nimbly onto a boulder opposite me.

“The speed is awesome isn’t it?” he asked, grinning like I should have enjoyed the experience. “That cave is pretty average but the speed…” He laughed.

“I’m not talking about the swimming,” I whispered, clenching my teeth angrily.

He cocked his head to the side looking at me quizzically, surprise and amusement playing across his features.

“How did you breathe for both of us?”

I whispered, because I was afraid that if I didn’t whisper I’d be screaming at him, crazed and uncontrollable.

He just ginned at me, looking a bit confused. “I already told you, I’m an Oceanid.”

“No,” I told him emphatically, “you didn’t tell me that.”

He cocked his head to the side, thinking. “Well, not in so many words I guess,” he replied.

Even though we’d come looking for them, even though Josh’s story had sparked a deep longing in me for them to be real, I realised in that moment that I’d never actually expected to find any fish-people, or Oceanids or whatever they were called.

It had been a strange alluring idea that they existed, but faced with the very obvious evidence that Merrick was decidedly more than human, I found myself scrambling to accept the reality of what he was saying.

“What does that even mean?” I asked, exasperated by his casual demeanour, and hoping to find something solid I could cling to.

“I know you’ve heard of mermaids?” he replied, squeezing the water out of his hair before running his fingers through it to smooth it away from his face. “I watched you play in your swimming pool at home, and I’ve seen the drawings you keep in the back of your diary of what you used to dream about. You know what an Oceanid is.”

I gaped at him in astonishment, unable to articulate the shock at his obvious intimate knowledge of me, and finding his words oddly comforting as he reminded me of what I’d been dreaming about and maybe even yearning for my whole life.

He grinned at my expression, waiting for me to say something more.

A tiny spark of hope that I hadn’t even realised existed blossomed in my chest as the events of the past few days clicked into place with his nonchalant explanation and confidence that I already knew what he was.

He’d been watching me carefully, and now smiled when I grinned back at him in delight.

“So are you ready?” he asked.

“Ready for what?” I countered, still feeling a little bewildered with how quickly a lifetime of dreams could become a reality.

“To go and meet the others,” he replied, again looking bemused that I hadn’t already figured this out.

“I don’t know,” I told him.

“You should be,” he said, a little smile playing across his lips. “I mean, you took to breathing with me really quickly and your Dad…”

His expression turned serious as he looked out over the swaying grasses and the mountain-framed view of patchwork meadows and farmland far below us.

“Your Dad …” his next words were so quiet they almost drifted away on the breeze. “… is one of us.”

I stopped breathing in shock.

It was one thing to discover creatures I’d always suspected existed. Quite another to be told my father was one of them. I turned the idea over in my head, trying to view it from an angle that made any sense. Tiny pinpricks of memories assaulted me, anomalies that by themselves meant nothing but when viewed through this lens all came together to paint a strange picture, one that seemed to shift and move as another memory popped into focus until they eventually solidified.

The absence of any family information about Dad’s parents or siblings, most obvious in his lack of oral history – I couldn’t remember a single story from his childhood, nothing good or bad.

His complete lack of knowledge of any school subjects, he hadn’t been able to help me with reading or maths or any other subject.

One of my more confusing memories – Dad staring at a television programme on whaling, big fat tears tracing frightening patterns down his cheeks.

I’d been staring into the pool as I thought, absently trailing my foot through the water as I did so. The whispers I’d heard previously interrupted my scrambling thoughts, as my muscles locked down in shock.

“You can hear them too can’t you?” Merrick asked, his face alive with delight.

I stared at him, my mouth hanging open a little in shock.

He laughed at my expression.

“That’s how we communicate, through the water.”

I snatched my foot out of the pool, looking into it anxiously.

For the first time in my life I was facing the reality that there was other sentient life apart from humans on earth. That I could deal with, but the revelation of Dad possibly being an… ocean creature was something else entirely because the implications were that if Dad wasn’t human, then neither was I… not fully anyway.

“What exactly are Oceanids?” I whispered, the sound floating in the hollow over the pool and echoing softly back at me.

He looked up and straight into my eyes. Everything around me faded into a blur, and all that was left was the intensely beautiful and determinedly passionate expression on Merrick’s face. Every cell in my body strained towards him as I waited for him to tell me the “something” I knew would change my life forever.

“We are water people, Nereids,” he clarified.

“Uh, are you talking about… uh…fish-people as in like mermaids?” I stuttered.

He winced and then nodded. “You could call us that too, I guess.”

“So you’re telling me my Dad is a mermaid?” The sentence was a preposterous one.

He shook his head and a moment of relief flooded me. “No, he’s a merman,” Merrick replied firmly.

I pulled my knees up to my chest and stared at him.

“How do you know that?”

“Every Oceanid knows of your Dad, Alexandra, he was one of the greatest warriors we’ve ever had.”

“Was?” I whispered weakly, my mind reeling.

He nodded. “He left the ocean, and his people, a little over twenty years ago, but before that he spent a lot of time helping Oceanids to survive.”