Prospero’s Children. Jan Siegel

the makeshift tool to wrench them asunder. Too quick and too clever for the larger predators, she roamed her domain in fear of nothing, having not yet learnt the fear of Man which would soon infect all living creatures—Man her cousin and her kinsman, a killer more ruthless than the shark, deadlier than the kraken. She gazed on the sailor’s still face with a strange yearning, a tugging at her heart, or where her heart should have been, touching his cheek with her cold caresses, closing his eyes with shells, binding his hair with weed. Then she would grow irritated or bored with her dead plaything and swim away, forgetting him for an hour or a week, only to return and gaze on him again.

      He was beyond the reach of the sun but the thing on his breast still gleamed erratically, sending glancing rays through the moving currents. Sometimes it seemed to grow hot, as if emitting pulses of fretful power: the water around it would hiss and shrink, forming bubbles full of steam which floated upwards in broken trails. When the mermaid tried to remove it her fingers prickled as if with pins and needles; once her whole hand grew numb. She left it alone, and as time passed it became dark and dull, and the face of the sailor was eaten away by creatures too microscopic to torment, and the sea washed his bones, leaving them moon-white among the hidden colours of the coral, and an anemone blossomed in one empty socket, and angelfish kissed his hollow cheek. Yet still she came back, once a month or once a year, as a miser returns to his hoard, and her gloating dwindled and her games, and she gazed long and long on the mystery of his death. She had never before been so close to a being which resembled herself, having no memory of parents, brother or sister, if indeed she had ever possessed any, born of the wind’s breath and the sea’s tears. Ever alone, for the first time in the aching shallows of her spirit she knew that she was lonely, and the seeds of her ultimate destruction were sown.

      The Earth turned, season melted into season, the timeless morning of the world drew on to noon. The years were numbered, events arranged into history; the age of magic gave way to reason and science, knowledge and prejudice, religion and heresy. Men attempted to limn the continents with maps and web the seas with charts. A fisherman from a coastal village, more daring than his compeers, was casting his nets in unfamiliar waters when he hauled in a clotted mass that looked like weed. He bent over the side of the boat and plunged his hands in it to free it from the net, and it felt lithe as silk and curiously alive, writhing between his fingers. He pulled hard, sensing an alien weight below, and the weed parted beneath his hands even as the head emerged from the water. A terrible head with the blanched clammy complexion of the drowned, bloodless mouth agape, glaring eyes above slanting bones. But the head lived. The eyes flashed like the glint of light on broken glass and an eldritch wail came from between the pallid lips, rising in pitch and slowly strengthening, vibrating from the long throat as from a living flute. The fisherman knew that call from race memory or traveller’s tale, and he dragged the head close to the ship’s side and laid the naked blade of his gutting knife against her neck, ordering silence in a tone that transcended the barriers of language. Her mouth shut tight and he called to his sons to help him heave her on board, staring in wonder as the water ran from the unnatural tail squirming against the bonds of the net. One of the boys received a handful of spines in the struggle, and in the night he sickened and lay in the cabin burning with fever, but the fisherman would not throw the mermaid back. He poured water over her to keep her moist and fed her raw fish from their catch, drawing near to press his knife into her flesh even while her live hair coiled about his ankles.

      Whether this was the same mermaid or another no legend tells: certainly this one understood something of mortal speech, or learnt understanding in the extremity of her need. She was alone as always, divided by a few flimsy planks from the sea that was her element, prisoner of her enemy, her only real predator, her kin. Perhaps she had sought that capture, driven by centuries of isolation or a fatal curiosity; but here was no storm-tossed seafarer, his hard beauty softened by the phantom of love, here was only a weather-weary peasant, toughened by the long slow battle for survival, and in his face the blending of fear and anger, and a deadly greed.

      After two days in a babbling delirium the boy died, and in the morning the fisherman went to his captive with a raw heart and new-sharpened knife, grasping her green hair and dragging her head back for the death-blow. Her angled eyes stared into his, impenetrable as the eyes of an animal, and he could not tell if there was terror behind them, or intelligence, or deceit. And then for the first time in memory or legend she spoke, and her voice throbbed harshly from unused vocal chords; but there was an echo in it of the wind, and an echo of the sea. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t kill.’ She could not say please because the word was beyond her understanding.

      ‘My son is dead,’ said the fisherman. ‘A death for a death. You should have found your voice the sooner. It is too late now to beg.’

      ‘Your son was careless. He died easy. If not now, then later. Is no loss.’

      ‘I loved him,’ said the fisherman, and his hand tightened on her twisting hair and the knife gleamed before her.

      ‘You have other sons. What is love?’

      The fisherman knew few words for the gentler emotions. ‘He sprang from my loins,’ he responded at last. ‘Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. You could offer me the treasures of a dozen shipwrecks, the pearls from a hundred oysters, but it would not buy your life. That is love.’ The blade sank into her flesh until a thin trickle ran down her white skin, and he saw with something close to desire that her blood was as red as his.

      ‘I have not found love,’ said the mermaid, and her voice was as thin as the wind hissing through a chink in a wall of ice. ‘There is none in the deep sea. But I have treasure. I have a great treasure.’

      The knife was withdrawn an inch or two; the fisherman’s tone changed very slightly. ‘What treasure?’

      ‘From a ship,’ said the mermaid. ‘A ship that sank long ago. The treasure lies in the coral. Even the bones are coral now.’

      ‘What kind of treasure?’ the fisherman reiterated, and there was no mistaking the eager glint in his eye. ‘Gold?’

      ‘It glittered,’ said the mermaid. ‘In the dark beyond the sun it gleamed like the storm-fire. It is my treasure, my secret.’

      ‘I will trade you this treasure,’ said the fisherman, ‘for your life. My son is gone and neither love nor gold can bring him back. But I will take your treasure as blood money, the price of my revenge.’

      At that his two remaining sons cried out against him, for their brother had been very dear to them, and they found the mermaid both alien and unchancy, too wayward to trust, too perilous to spare. No oath would bind her to her bargain: principle and mercy alike were outside her comprehension. ‘Release her,’ they said, ‘and she will swim fast and far, and we will have neither vengeance nor payment. We want blood for our brother.’

      ‘Gold is better than blood,’ said the fisherman, and they were silenced. Then he cut a single tress from the mermaid’s hair and knotted it, though it seemed to resist him, the separate strands seeking to slip away between his fingers. ‘I will let you go,’ he told her, ‘and for three days I will keep this lock of hair in a jar of water. But if in that time you do not return—if you try to cheat me—if you do not bring me the treasure, then I will pin the lock to the mast and let it dry in the wind, and if you never come at all then when I am back on shore I will lay it out in the noonday heat until it shrivels away, and even in the ocean’s depths you too will shrivel, burned by a sun you cannot see. Do you understand?’

      ‘I understand,’ said the mermaid.

      ‘Go then.’

      He snapped the rope that held her and she pulled herself over the side, diving like a flying fish in an arc of silver, lost in an instant beneath hurrying waves. ‘You will not see her again,’ said the boys.

      But the fisherman clasped the lock of hair and smiled a smile without humour, confident and grim.

      ‘I will see her,’ he said.

      On the afternoon of the third day the mermaid returned. The fisherman had lingered in the area against the wishes of his