Believing in Mermaids—The Creation of Persuasive Underwater Worlds in the Face of Disenchantment: a Critical and Creative Response

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Believing in mermaids—the creation of persuasive underwater worlds in the face of disenchantment: a critical and creative response

Solomon Wakeling

8085 - Master of Research – LC

University of Western Sydney

2017

The Cry of the Swan

By Solomon Wakeling

Translator’s note

What follows is a folktale composed by mermaids. It is known to have its origins in a human story of which all that survives is the title, The Suicide Kiss—the story itself having been lost to the sea. The tale has been known variously in other editions as The Call of the Siren (or The Siren Call), The Starless Pools, The Shy Water and The Unlit Lake. The version presented here is a re-translation of that tale from the mermaid tongue into English, based on mermaid engravings. It must be accepted that with each successive shuffle there have been losses and gains.

—E.K.

Sample glossary of mermaid terminology and usage

Fingers: Large coins.

Fingernails: Small currency/money

Haunt: Any kind of temporary accommodation, esp. tent. “A nest of haunts” would be a camp-site.

Magic: Water outside the sea, in circumstances where it has an emotional quality, esp. rain.

Moth: A human God, esp. used as an expletive.

Stranger: Dragon, monster, marauder.

Scurry: Plethora.

Swan: Refers to the bird but also to a figure in mermaid myth: the swan is any beautiful object or sound with a hidden meaning, esp. death.

Chapter 1

From the Heavens to the Centre of the Earth

In blue hues Imogen Leisch twirled out through the even deeper blue, young cityscape; careless, bold, her purse held to her breast by one hand, the other holding an umbrella upwards, spun out to block out the white coral in the black sky, the tail of her yellow scarf seeming to point via the breeze back to the Heavens to the Earth Casino behind her—her ‘kin of the same origin grove’, Crystal, trailing behind. Life was speeding like slender rockets down steep sky canals. The perch on Lighthouse central tower beyond them, where the stranger had rested for the last three evenings, was boldly empty, unpeopled. Behind the tower, sky-machines were taking down the last mysterious symbols authored by the stranger’s claw.

Crystal, the shorter-legged of the two girls, her hair twirled into a brown bob, got lost in a swirl of bubbles blown by off-duty acrobats. Her slender shoes gave her some trouble: enough to take one off and hold it in her hand as she waved for a hansom cab, reaching desperately down at the same time for the other. Imogen, laughing, noticing she’d lost her rear-guard, turned to retrieve her and before the screech of the wheels had time to finish the two entered the dark, warm hearth of the cab still giggling and panting like spoiled sea-lions, salty and fragrant, trembling not unhappily at the driver’s old-dog growl that it was “Grim magic out there, eh ladies?”

But it was not really a question and the girls just smiled and prepared to count their spoils. “Drive—drive!” Imogen said, retracting her umbrella with a swoosh, “North side of Candle Forest on the double!”

Crystal pulled out a scurry of fingernails and handed Imogen a large finger. “We can buy ‘new dresses’!”

Imogen laughed—an insinuating, plum-smelling security guard near the blackjack table had offered to buy her a new dress if she’d go home with him, and she’d replied: “What’s wrong with the one I’m wearing?” If he hadn’t proceeded to offer some suggestions, then she might have batted Crystal away when she whispered: “Distract him while I swipe his coin purse!”

The horses halted. It was still very far from Chandelier Lane. The Driver stepped out. In this slight fear the girls were reminded of the greater fear: the menace that had presided over the entire city; that stranger with the whale-skin coat darker than the thunderclouds; that enigma with the softer underbelly and glint of metal from the horse’s bit in its mouth; the obscure authorship of that inscrutable message written in pollen-gulls—and, most menacing of all, the three days’ aimless circling before the descent.

Crystal’s eyes stuck to Imogen’s and she began stealthily putting each, rounded fingernail into her purse, “If this gets ugly, your lovely stranger can help me out, right?”

“Elisha wouldn’t touch anyone,” Imogen hissed. “He’s just a stranger cub.”

They heard footsteps, loud enough not to be blunted by the torrents of magic and a few gruff but imperceptible words between driver and their pursuer. The two girls felt the same, specific terror: they had seen none of the attack yesterday, heard none of it either, but through the stories of others they’d created a vision of the marauder that was as strong as memory. They remembered the sudden swoop that turned three of the city’s members from whole beings to red water. They remembered the wretched cough as something caught in the mouth- bit, then, unable to swallow, how the thing itself perished, draped over Lantern Way railway stop, wings outstretched like an injured bat. In each footstep of the present, they heard the echo of lost, running crowds.

A hand reached through the curb-side window, firm, demanding. Crystal placed her own coin purse with the stolen booty into the hand, which retracted into a fist—the pantomime-player for an angry grunt that never materialised. No sounds crossed through the threatless air; the threat was in the hand alone.

“You still got the fare, ladies?” The cabbie said, all too matter-of-factly as he stepped back into the driver’s seat. They did not have the fare and they hopped out of the cab without bothering to protest. Though they were deflated, having escaped unharmed, they were soon just happy to be together again and laughing on the long road back to Candle Forest. Searching for a cloth to wipe away the happy and the sad and the scared tears, Crystal realised she still held the security guard’s coin purse, and instinctively opened it. She felt a small flap, like the tag on a piece of clothing on the interior and could feel there was something in it.

She stopped. There was a fine jet of blood. Very slender, very light, but sharper than a beam of sunlight: inside the purse was the tip of a stranger’s tooth, which fell to the ground with a sharp ‘clank’. Imogen turned to her friend, whose mouth was wide open in terror. Imogen saw the streaks of dark red water down her hand, and rushed to her friend, and quickly tied a knot around the wound with her scarf. She looked hopelessly to see if the cab they’d just lost was in sight, and wondered if the piece of tooth had been part of the stranger that had terrorised the city, chopped up and then gifted to the security forces of Moat City, as they had done with the body of the marauder of last May.

Chapter 2

The Iron Mermaid

As Carol dove into the water the bubbles in her ear canals made a pretty, expectant sound: like the twinkling rattle of keys for a hope-chest closing in on the lock. An enthusiastic trickle of brown leaf-fish fell around her head, like a bridesmaid’s crown, and she could see her own round face in the dim eye of the caged Greeter, as she approached him with her hands in front of her, preparing to guide him with them. During the war she’d have used her feet as well, but for safety she was tethered to a long black rope by the ankles.

Tenderly closing each eyelid with her palm, she put the beast to sleep, letting it rise helplessly to the surface. Though she rose with him, a greater tug pulled her out even further by the rope until she was above the surface and could see the Greeter’s long claw-scarred back below. Outside the pool the large crowds in regime-orange were laughing and clapping from the auditorium. To them, it was as if she had just pacified a plesiosaur. A lone purple splotch in the back row let her know her former step-daughter was watching; fleetingly she wondered why Imogen would choose to be there.

A question ambushed her before she had reclaimed her breath: “How do you keep your hair so silky when you’re in the water?”

“I use the army’s premium hair protection.” Carol smiled, red-lipped, suspended upside down by the rope, pulling a stray leaf-fish discreetly from the back of her head. She had short, blonde hair, blowing only slightly in the strong wind, like a field of wheat, and wore a striped orange bikini. The crowd laughed obediently when she continued: “It’s the only hair-care product a city girl needs.”

The questioner, a man with a hat and business suit on a sunny day, was one of many journalists on a jerry-rigged diving board which was now a press gallery. As he craned his neck to look up at her (she was about a shin-bone higher than him) Carol could see down his nostrils. The press and the crowd were on opposite sides. A barrage of questions hit her from other grey-suited types: “How do you feel about ‘The Iron Mermaid’? being your nom de guerre?”; “Will this mission bring closure for your husband’s disappearance?”; “Won’t learning the meaning of the words in the sky bring a return to war?”

Though out of turn, Carol answered the man in the hat who had asked his question the loudest, which was “When do you set off on the mission of truth?” Carol manouvered so that the rope swung her to the crowd—who had ear and eyepieces so they could listen in—and shouted: “Right as soon as I am done here!”

The sound of cheering was blocked out by the roaring of the crane. On the north side of the Greeter pool, near the docks, the crane hoisted a metal object from the ground and moved it upwards toward Carol. When it paused, just beside her, there was silence again.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” Carol spoke loudly and with her sweetest thunder. For a moment she took note of Imogen’s face, which was troubled and in shadow. But she pressed on despite pity or the intermittent interruption as the crane resumed its rage. “If my mission is successful and the prototype works the way I think it will, the use of Greeters in war will be a thing of the past. We will no longer rely on animal soldiers to…ReRrrRer…precision targeting…ReeRrrRer…the events our enemies speak of will be…RreeeRrreR…Remember, there are no bruises if you refuse!”

The cheer of the crowd at hearing Carol’s famous war cry quickly turned to a gasp, as the iron suit moved to dangle beside her and then split into two halves, like a jewellery box. To Imogen it was unclear if Carol swung towards it or if it flipped her upside down and sucked her in, but in one motion the metal shell had devoured her and cut her tether like a pair of scissors, replacing it with the crane’s. Any chance of Imogen asking her stepmother for information about Crystal’s whereabouts seemed to have been severed from life’s possibilities.

The lower half of the iron suit’s exterior was patterned with scales like a mermaid’s tail and the top half was an almost exact iron cast of Carol with a silver sheen. The machine had manouverable arms that could launch hand-held torpedos and could fit into giant iron holsters on her hips. The ‘artist’ had preserved Carol’s breasts and hips in the design, Imogen noted with a grimace. The major difference in appearance were the dark globules in place of her eyes, made for the deep sea. The crane moved a half-circle until it was outside the pool grounds and opened its jaws, and Carol in her metal suit fell like a raindrop into the water by the docks.

Carol, already feeling the pressure of blood in her head, gasped as she was taken in; the metal closed over her with its cloak of silence, regulated air, velvety comfort.The machine, having

6 already detected her distress at being suspended upside down, had disregarded the mission priority (impress the crowd) and had begun scanning her body for injuries, and repairing her reddened ankles and perfecting her breathing. Everything was as still as a lunar sojourn: she only knew she was in water because the monitor told her the new density, and the colours in the eye holes turned from blue and white to the froggy green of Rainbow Harbour.

Chapter 3

Hands and breath

Around midnight, Imogen wandered down the cobbled roads, past the docks where she’d been earlier that day, to the lonely little cottage on the outer edge, surrounded by Sorrow elms. Elisha would normally accompany her, but she’d not seen him since before the attack. It was seldom safe for a stranger to be seen when there were tensions. With Crystal having been transferred to a secret location (as Imogen discovered when she returned to the city hospital the next morning, after delivering her there the night of her wounding), and Carol locked up in her metal box and off on her ‘mission of truth’, Elisha was a third missing person in her life. Imogen had wanted to ask Carol, who sometimes indulged her with bits of information about the regime, if Elisha was suspected of collaborating in the attack, at the same time she asked about Crystal. Either question would have been asked in vain—Carol’s scraps of information were always mixed up and coloured with pre-minted regime propaganda. Crystal would be impossible to trace; it could be years before she resurfaced.

The receptionist did not look up from her work as she entered. Imogen left her bag with a pile of women’s shoes and crept into her cubicle at the end of the row. The salon stank of cigarettes, wet carpet, and incense.

A shapely woman’s silouhette brushed the hair of another woman’s silhouette on the other side of softly blowing curtains, to the left; on the right there was a window spotted with magic, each droplet large and the drops together made a pattern like crushed ice spilled from a cup. “Your client is a stranger from the Smoky Seas,” Imogen heard from the front desk, “Three only.”

The voice meant three minutes to get ready. Elisha had come from the Smoky Seas; the strangers often did. But the old men of the Smoky Seas—known as such, though there were some women, too—were surgeons during the war, and were once human. They would help the injured on all sides. They were not trusted and were expelled to the seas at the close of the war. They could travel on land only with advance permission, and the ones that came, as ragged as they often looked, were usually important people. Though they spoke the stranger’s language as well as many human languages, they were not asked to broker the peace.

Imogen took off her tracksuit and put on her work uniform, as a great purple thundercloud moved wistfully north like some grazing behemoth. The silhouette got up and moved toward the table on the far wall, briefly revealing her colours in the crack where the curtains failed to meet. The curtain jammed as Imogen tried to pull it shut, and she saw a small parchment fall from her tracksuit pocket. Elisha, who was teaching her his language, had written a line for her to study before their next session. Since he had gone missing, she hadn’t looked at it until now:

All at once Imogen recognised the words that had been scarred across the city skyline for three days, and the front curtain opened and a sickly-grey man with sky-blue eyes and long knotted hair that fell to his knees stepped into the room. Imogen, trying as best she could to hide the piece of paper, shuddered when the words fell down upon her like a farmer’s axe: “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen script written in Dragon,” and she heard a menacing cough.

Another, younger man stepped into the room, hairless, prematurely greying eyebrows and sharp blue eyes made even sharper by spectacles wrapped tightly around his face. He was neat, cleanly shaven and until he spoke again Imogen was unaware that it was he who had spoken and not the silvery old man.

“Madam, I am Sil Certlidge, interpreter to the doctor here. He has asked me to withhold his name except to the authorities, but you may address him as doctor. Please speak to him as if I am not here. He will not speak, he has made an undertaking not to speak…”

Some of the war surgeons had taken a vow of silence, to preserve their neutrality. Imogen had heard of such men, but never encountered one. Whenever they were spoken of it was with a subtle sense of buried threat, as if the silence was a form of protest. She looked from one to the other and back again. Their being here after the attack felt dangerous. Addressing no-one in particular she asked, “What do you want from me?”

There was a pause. “A haircut, only, if you please,” and as the doctor exhaled and looked to his feet, the interpreter added, “As you can see it is quite...”

Imogen was tense but eased a little in recognising a professional problem that she could solve, “Knotted. I’ll need to call in some others.”

Imogen rang a little bell on the sideboard twice, and gestured for the old man to sit on a low chair. Shortly, two young trainees entered the room like cygnets. One wore a uniform, the other only part of one. Following Imogen’s direction (via a subtle gesture of the hand) the two got to work untying the knots of the old man’s hair, starting with the very bottom. As Imogen prepared her knives and utensils, she caught a glimpse of the young man standing behind her in the mirror. In this light, he seemed terrible, unearthly, yet with an air of seriousness and even goodness that refused to settle into any one impression.

“Can you still interpret from the glass?” Imogen asked.

“Yes madam. It is less than perfect; but gestural and facial interpretation is never complete,” said the interpreter, and then, as if he had not fulfilled a duty added, “Always accurate, but never complete.”

“I just need you to step in and tell me if your master is unhappy with what his stylist is doing to his hair.”

“Yes madam. And please, he is not my master. I ask you once more to speak as if I am not here.”

The room harmonised in silence for a time, except for the sounds of breathing, hands moving, and pulling. The doctor was the loudest of all, grunting and blowing out phlegmy sighs. Imogen, who had begun cutting parts of her client’s hair, looked to the mirror at these grunts for an explanation, but the interpreter was silent. These were not communications, just bodily noise; bodily smoke.

“This may take a long time if none of us talk. Doctor, what’s been happening in your world?” Imogen asked.

Imogen looked at the doctor’s eyes. Like the young interpreter’s, they were a piercing blue, but the bottom lids were upturned, exposed, and with insides that plunged down his face, pushing a cascade of wrinkles almost to the bottom of his nose. He looked sad all of the time, Imogen observed.

“Madam, if you please, your shadow is in our path.”

Imogen moved to the side without losing the rhythm of her scissors, her left leg brushing against her kneeling assistant.

“The doctor says today he has heard that the ‘Iron Mermaid’ has gone in search of the marauder Elisha.”

Imogen felt her legs anchor to a single space in the room. A powerful distrust flowed through her body at the use of the name ‘Elisha’. How could a person read a name on another’s face? In patterns of breath? She had been willingly credulous until now, but this was too far. Who were these men, and what did they really want? Was she in danger? Why did they bring up Elisha’s name, so personal to her? And her stepmother, too?

Imogen cut harshly, silently. She motioned for her two assistants to leave. With a look she banished the doubt in the eyes of the trainee nearest to her; it was clear to them that the job was not finished, but Imogen was their leader, so they obeyed.

“Your hair is too long to untie,” Imogen said, coolly. “I’m going to use a sharp knife to remove the straggling bits below.”

“The doctor consents, madam.”

Imogen was already moving towards the lower drawer in a side corner desk, feeling suddenly less vulnerable, and without having planned to make such a move said directly to the interpreter, “So you speak Dragon?”

“I do not. The doctor does. I recognise the symbols from when I would interpret his gestures during the war. Madam please, the doctor has indulged me this long, but he is stubborn, I must ask you to speak only to him.”

Imogen looked at both men. They seemed terrible in some way, and yet sincere. There was nothing false about them. Their very ugliness was like a declaration of truth. She felt her heart turn to shattered glass. Elisha was dead and a killer. That was the consequence of believing these men. But she would face it, she would not turn away. Cornered, without possibility of evasion, she saw the only escape would be in frankness.

“Then you must be able to read this for me, doctor…it belonged to Elisha.” Imogen turned to Sil when she said the word ‘Elisha’, realising what had bothered her about his face: he had a constant half-smile, which distorted his expressions. It was there even when he was trying to

11 be serious. She also noticed a slim violet bruise around his jawbone, evidence of Smoky Sea sickness, a kind of illness that brings increasing youth and beauty the closer a subject is to death. She looked at the crystalline beauty of his left eye and felt a tremor of sympathy. She disliked him, but at the same time, she wanted to trust him. “But perhaps you both know that already.”

“Madam, no. We are simply travellers. We heard this today in the town; everyone was speaking of it. I can interpret the parchment, but for something like this…gestural interpretation is always a half-art, getting partial results. For another language, as the doctor reads… you will get emotions only, impressions, nothing that will…be definitive.”

“Give me what you can, doctor,” Imogen said, addressing the doctor directly, having finally gotten all she needed from the interpreter. Her own distress made her more mindful of the doctor’s distress each time she directed a question to the wrong person.

Imogen passed the paper into the hands of the old man, who seemed grander now that she had learned of his great but inaccessible knowledge, like that of a retired wizard. She never thought to ask him to use his voice; that possibility felt closed off. She watched with trepidation as tears ran from the dry sockets of the old man’s eyes. What could that mean?

The interpreter spoke, as if directly from the doctor, slowly, melodically, and with emotion: “The parchment is deeply spiritual. It is from the oldest of stranger languages. It is a lament. It is sorrowful. It expresses the deeper, holier parts of us. It did not come from the heart of the killer. But the words are untranslatable; except perhaps by experienced translators amongst the old men of the Smoky Sea. I wish to rest my face from sight. Interpreter, bring my hood. We will resume this hair-cutting tomorrow.”

Imogen held them at bay with a reverse wave of the hand, “My daughters-in-labour will be able to help you, doctor. I am going to seek some answers—”

The interpreter looked away from her face, and Imogen stiffened. After his prolonged stare this was a shocking gesture. The sick man had turned away at the precise moment that she decided that she would seek answers about Elisha with the help of the translators from the Smoky Sea. She felt that this terrible, perceptive creature was not just appalled, or wanting to retreat from a shameful confession, but that he wished to evade his own conscience, like a person who takes a different road home so as to avoid witnessing a crime. The Smoky Sea

12 would hold the same dangers for her that had made him ill. She guided them both to the door, no-one speaking, and each looking at the sticky floral-patterned carpet with its spots of ash.

Chapter 4

Carol Makes Headway

The Iron Mermaid blasted through the water like a roaring sea-lion, swivelling left and right, through the crocodile gardens. They were named for the shape of the rock formations; the gardens were empty of crocodiles, though there were occasional Ember Isle sharks. Carol kept her guns on. During the war, she would have told her recruits to keep them off in case of accidental fire, but she was a former General. For a General there were no accidents, only tragedies. She blasted away flotsam for target practice.

There was no need to preserve ammunition. The capsule was entirely self-sustaining: powered by the sun, backed up by the tides, it leached oxygen from the saltwater for Carol to breathe, and even caught and cooked seafood with retractable hooks. It wasn’t great food, but it was better than what a lot of the people were eating now, Carol reminded herself stoically, chewing on a calamari ring doused in satay sauce that clicked out of a tray near her face. The capsule served up food when it determined she should eat. There wasn’t much it did not take care of, leaving her free to focus her mind on her mission: ascertaining whether the attack on Moat City was co-ordinated by the enemy leadership or was a solo act.

Through a vein of rock, Carol spied a school of mermen who were out hunting, and who in turn caught sight of the shining silver capsule. They all but let their weapons float away in astonishment. Sailing up to her bright, shining form they were struck dumb. The metallic tail swished like a mermaid tail, fluidly, so that at first glance she might have seemed like a real mermaid, only larger, brighter, and more spectacular—a goddess of mermaids, or a swan sailing sunward.

“My lady, where are you headed...we are out practising for the procession tonight…but if we can offer you any assistance?” One of the older of the mermen asked, with exaggerated deference.

“We will follow you anywhere.” The youngest said, before being hushed up by the middle one. The youngest one had been reaching out and then pulling back his arm from the silver capsule. Carol could see they were three brothers; healthy, local mermen. The kind she’d recruited during the war for scout missions. They’d been trouble because though eager to

14 help, and quite knowledgeable, if they liked you they never told you anything you did not want to hear. She would have to frame her question carefully, so as not to be led astray.

“Friends, I am on a quest to prove the guilt of the marauder and to have a thousand dangerous adventures along the way. I need to translate some words in ‘Dragon’. Can you lead me the right way?” When Carol spoke, her real face appeared in a pool just below the metallic face, projected by means of light from the capsule.

The middle merman spoke, “The coral libraries will be able to translate anything you like. Unfortunately they are being held hostage by a menace with lobster-like claws—alas, you are a beautiful specimen, but it is against our customs to talk so long with the dead.”

Chapter 5

The Greeter Grove

Imogen fell through mist, the pickled green leaves, sprouts, shoots, creaking and crackling and finally squelching through her hands and toes in the wet earth that blanketed the way down deep low. She inhaled. Her knife clickety-clanked when it fell from her sweaty palms down the stone path she had been trying to follow; she chased the sound down the plunge that ran to the ‘Amphibian Felds’ of the Greeters. The moon failed to sell its light to the earth through a cluster of clouds, and was no help to her. The property, known as ‘Sporting Fields’, was owned by Imogen’s uncle and she had played there as a child for a thousand waves of the hand. Soon she had recovered her footing, and wrested back her knife and breath from the night. Feeling in the dark for some sand to rub into her hands for extra friction, she found only mud. She cut a piece from the lower part of her t-shirt and as she walked down, she wrapped it around the knife hilt and soon landed at the lower ebb of the stonework. She leapt across the mossy wooden fence that pretended to guard the herd, and felt the clumsiness of her body in painful contrast to her childhood days.

The creature had giant lungs. It pushed buffalo-shaped clouds out through its thick black nostrils. With its gurgling and snorting, it was little more than a powerful black mass of sound and heat, like all stupid animals, Imogen thought. Its head was shaped like a large, human toe, but flatter as if it had been squashed in a vice. The Greeters were the district’s official symbol: for their lethargy as much as their power, it was sometimes said. The fronds at the back of this one’s head were tied up in braids, probably by her little cousins, who took riding lessons on Greeters which—though known during the war as the bombers of the sea— were rendered harmless when on land, confined to sport and recreation. The fronds were so large the children used ropes and pulleys to tie their knots. Imogen rejected the beast in front of her: it had lost an eye to a stranger, and she needed a worker.

Imogen, pulling and lighting a candle from her pack, weaved among the great trunks of leg that made up the herd, ducking only a little so that the top of her head pressed against their soft bellies, the colour of burnt milk and clouds and stained now by candle smoke calligraphy in eastern blue. She snuck beneath four animals until the herd thinned out and she saw a younger pup out on its own. She recognised the sad ebony eyes of her old pup, nine winters

16 older now but still puppyish, shaggier maybe, but still the hopeless Tomato, her Tommy- Tomato, fronds as red as seahorses, like he had always been. He had managed to wrap his own tether in so many convoluted ways that he was trapped within a small half circle of gnawed shrubs, cut short of a full circle by the drop behind him that fell in cascades to the sea.

“You ridiculous bulb of air, Tommy!” Imogen cried aloud. The other Greeters snorted, moved a little away from her, and continued their night-time feeding. “You poor sac of smoke. What have you done to yourself?”

Tommy whimpered as she approached, but his giant eyes, strong enough to penetrate the depths of the ocean if he were ever there, saw her, almost all the way around her, and he seemed to recognise her, at least enough to purr like a stranger cub might, if coaxed. Imogen saw it would be no good trying to unravel the cord and it would just have to be removed. The rope itself was too thick for her to cut through, but she knew from her childhood that there was a lock built into the harness, and she knew how to release the spring with a twist of her knife. All she needed was for Tomato to bend his head low enough so that she could reach it.

“Tommy…Tommy…It’s me Immogy…” The sudden rush of obedience brought with it a gush of warm breath that made her unsteady on her feet. As the thick tongue and flat, rounded mouth leaned in close to her face, she quickly freed him. His face was bruised from trying to tug himself free. How many times did I fight with my uncle over harnessing the Greeters?— Imogen wondered. How many times did I insist they be released back into the ocean? How many times did I beg that they not be beaten, and wrestle with Crystal when she became a rider for the army?

During the war, Imogen had come to despise them like many of her friends: they were too dumb to be collaborators, but they had become the machinery of the regime: the slow, thudding symbol of the war itself. But when Tommy gave Imogen a long, foul-smelling lick of the tongue across her face, she knew that she had chosen the stinking beast for this mission, that there was no better choice.

The animal rushed towards the fresh shrubs and Imogen, wanting to laugh, but conscious of her mission, commanded him to drop and prepare for her to mount. His eyes were pitiful but he obeyed, flopping on to the muddy green earth as he had done so many moons before.

The soft magic cleared away until it was only half-mist. Above the stone steps a cinnamon- tinted sun rose on the horizon. Imogen, facing the sea, felt the sun on her back, and turned to look at the scene above. She could see the long sandstone steps looking far less treacherous than an hour ago when she set out. They led up to the quaint farm house of white stone which was just past the boarded-up well near the cliff’s edge in the place her uncle had called the garden of sanctity. She thought of ascending those steps on her mount—but the mission required an unswerving descent, down the seaside way, where there were no steps and where she had always been forbidden to go.

Imogen mounted, feeling the flat, flabby scales of the beast against her hands and thighs. He was softer than Elisha, lukewarm more than hot; it was like sitting on a great fat mushroom rather than the sleek, reptilian quality of Elisha’s skin. On Elisha there were places to hold, ridges to explore with hands, he was tighter, more muscular, and he moved faster. Tommy did not move at all most of the time, he lay flat until he was commanded, or he disobeyed commands. Elisha would never take a command; Imogen had never thought of it. Had she tried to direct him in flight, she’d have found herself quickly falling into the void, left to wonder—for as long as it takes for a drop of magic to reunite with its paramour on the surface of an umbrella—whether or not he would swoop around and catch her or just let her fall. But she had felt safe with Elisha, he was a reliable flier.

At the mouth of the seaside way a tree swiped across her face, leaving a teardrop on her cheek in exchange for an eyelash. Tomato burped, snored, grunted or yawned—Imogen did not know which, but most sounds usually meant a Greeter was hungry. She pulled her guiding stick from her pack and unfurled it. Careful to duck further branches, she directed Tommy to the uneaten shrubs on the side of the way opposite the sea, and let him eat for a moment. It was an easy command to obey and it required only a few taps at his side with her stick. Feeling indulgent, having succeeded in leading the animal for the first time, Imogen allowed him to bray away a rival Greeter from a neighbouring farm, when the rival took a sudden interest in this previously neglected clump of foliage.

Imogen ate some of her rations, then, when the mist had fully cleared away and the sun was higher than before, tapped a little harder at his side and sent him down the path. After a brief struggle, the beast walked humbly down the lush way, never daring to move close to an edge, conscious perhaps of the cargo and his duty. Imogen tired of ducking branches and once she felt assured that her steed would not turn back, she turned and lay skyward on her back on the

18 heaving lungs of the animal, nestling into him as she had done as a child, though both of them were larger now—and dozed.

Imogen woke to a bad smell and a grunt, and an imposing light that pinned shadows to feet. She rolled as quickly off Tommy as his bulk would allow and hid, noting the sand between her toes, the row of plants that shielded her rear, and the spray of waves not far from her. Peering under, rather than over Tommy, Imogen saw that the beach was sparse but not empty; there was at least one family on it; and she could see the brilliant blue of the sea, and importantly, nobody in the water.

“Ripped Moth!” Imogen cursed. She had never imagined herself doing this in broad daylight, or in sight of others.

The object Imogen took, furtively, from her pack, was not her knife, or another knife, though to the young family pointing and waving at the seemingly wayward Greeter, it appeared to have a knife-like shape. The little boy among them, Broti, with a wisp of black hair, and eyes not unlike the eyes of the strangers, smiled to see the youngish Greeter obey the young woman’s command and drop to its belly on the hot sand.

At the first slash of silver light, Broti resisted his parents call to ‘come along it’s time to go, give the Greeter a wave of the hand’. At the second slash, with the sliver of crimson blood that fell from the Greeter’s left lung to the sand, Broti obeyed. It was clear that whatever was happening was not a nice thing; but perhaps the young woman was a Greeter doctor, as his mother suggested upon noticing her son’s frown. For a hundred moments, Broti watched his feet separate from their shadows when he lifted them, and clip back together when they returned and hit the sand. A prolonged mournful groan followed the family, like the sound that comes from a long horned instrument. Broti turned only once, when they were already nearing Apple Tree Park where they had come in, when the groan was finally subsumed by the great splash. He saw the Greeter flop about in the ocean, and, though no-one believed him, saying that kind of thing could not be done, Broti swore he saw the young woman riding the Greeter, with a mask on her face and a tube running from it into the lungs of the beast, so that they breathed the very same air, when the two of them disappeared together into the blue.

Chapter 6

The Mermaid Procession

The Greeter cut a path through the mermaid dance, through a forest of dark ferns that topped their dancing sticks. The sticky pads on the ends of the ferns, like frog’s fingers, were pulled—as if blown—through the froth and fizzle of the lolling waves. As the ferns twisted and spun around it was difficult to see the mermaids themselves, even with all the movement and colour. Imogen caught glimpses on either side of misty-pink tails like the lower skies and frog-yellow breasted mermaids all smooth and spotty.

“Would any of you know the way to the Smoky Seas?” Imogen asked of a young brunette. But the guests having made it into the procession, were by custom treated like royalty by the flattering mermaids. This meant no question would be treated seriously, for in real life royalty was too important to ask a question of a common mermaid.

“Your majesty must surely already know the way.” The brunette mermaid curtsied. This mocking was all in fun, part of mermaid play, but Imogen needed an answer. Still, knowing she meant no harm, Imogen admired the pale greens of her eyes.

Seals, perhaps even a crimson diver from the lower smokes, weaved in between the mermaid tails, too shy or too principled to swim higher than the mermaid’s ceremonial belts; the small water-lanterns they carried in their jaws (and that made the tails of the mermaids shimmer when they weaved amongst them in the dance) would have burned the bare, unscaly parts of the mermaid’s flesh if they got too close.

“Crimson seal, can you speak?” Imogen cried out. It was known that some of them could.

“Ermm. Ssserrmmm.” The seal spoke from the corner of his mouth.

“I cannot understand you. Can you store away your lantern?”

“Ermmm, SOHerrmm.” The seal replied and then promptly swam away further up the line.

As she tried to look for another candidate for questions, a fern came close to scraping across Imogen’s face, reminding her of the scratch she got in the Amphibian Fields—this time she ducked instinctively. But as she ducked, she pressed down with her left hand too hard for

20 balance and Tommy took it as a signal. The Greeter veered towards the mermaids on the right, as he dutifully guided his tail to the left like a rudder.

Imogen heard excited screams and mortified laughter as a handful of mermaids scattered— “Oh, blubber!” a blue finch-tail with dark eyes cried. Imogen released her hands entirely in the shock. Tommy, bereft of commands, sank slowly downwards and they lost the mermaid convoy. As rapidly as it had come it slipped from sight in a long rainbow line, and Imogen was reminded of how dark it usually was down here, and how lonely. The bubbles in her ears sounded like dying giggles.

Very soon a lone reddish dot swam nearer, like a fast star. “My apologies, madam, I wanted to answer but a performer never stops until it is finished. You wished to know the way to the Smoky Sea?”

“I do, seal.”

“May I first ask why? Are you on official business? Undercover, perhaps…?” The seal looked her up and down with a side-eye. Imogen looked very ragged for an official agent.

“I need to translate something. It’s not official, but it’s important,” Imogen replied. Tommy let out a slow moan.

“Your Greeter will need air soon—but you said this was important. In a few moments there will be another mermaid procession. The mermaids speak many languages; together I am sure they can resolve it for you. What language do you need translated?”

“Dragon,” Imogen said, and held out the parchment.

The sanguine seal shuddered and said gravely “Very well. Follow me.”

Imogen and Tommy were ferried to the front of the line, so that they could, the crimson seal explained, slowly fall backwards along the procession through the middle and so get everyone’s opinion. Each mermaid on either side would pass down the original words on the parchment to the next, and each would offer his or her own translation.

“Don’t pay too much attention to the first few,” The seal cautioned. “They won’t have had the benefits of the last few.”

It all happened as part of a dance. The first, lobster-tailed mermaid was not promising: “It says: Eh wa so ne li oh neh; beehua lo mi oh mi ah eh det. We all wait in line; we’re all stuck behind, some gurgling rump, fat, bald murderer,” he said, momentarily flying off in a trill and then returning to his place.

Neither was the second very promising, a dark-haired mermaid with cranberry fingertips: “You’re first in line so how would you know what it’s like being stuck behind? And you’re wrong it says: We’re excreting a smell with every exhale; we’re all stuck in a queue jealously crying ‘good luck’ to the over-boarders, jumping, jumped ship and out of view.”

“You’re using too many words. It goes: we all smell bad and lose our hair; we all get fat, lose time, leached from us by fatter peeps; we all get married or we don’t or we can’t and it doesn’t even matter,” said a slender mermaid as bright as an orange, both tail and hair.

“Less words than that even! It goes: we all have children or we can’t or we won’t; we all take days within or without the law,” said the next.

Imogen perked up at this; the nonsense was becoming tiresome, but the look on this mermaid’s older, slightly wrinkled face seemed trustworthy, as did the grey-brown eminence of her tail. The next sounded a little more like Elisha, at least, it sounded as enigmatic: “The inner or the outer of the moat; we all know the score or we don’t or we can’t or we won’t.”

Another, older, wiser looking mermaid with barnacles all over her tail said: “We all resist the equalising phrases; all things pass; you are no different than anyone else; all people are created people; all men are created equal; and dogs are people’s equal.”

Imogen would almost have gone along with this but the mermaids laughed too much at the thought of dogs being equal, a few impertinent ones glancing at Tommy as if the Greeter were also a kind of dog. Imogen saw that this was just more play, and that she would have a very hard time getting any real answers from them, unless she could make giving her the right answer as fun as fooling around. The more seriously she wanted an answer, the more fun it was for them to feed her back nonsense. So she would have to trade nonsense for nonsense, and hope that by accident one of them gave her a genuine clue.

A mermaid with an earring, and a great bald head, with a look like she was about to give the most savagely ridiculous answer opened her mouth to speak, when Imogen interrupted: “No

22 it says: And this too shall pass like the re-growing of the mown grass; we all have feet to walk upon the earth, or we don’t.”

The bald mermaid replied, curtly, “We all have questions and not answers; we all goggle and grin at the dancers.” This sounded more sincere than the answer she seemed about to give prior to Imogen’s intervention, but the next speaker took back the nonsense-advantage for the mermaid chorus:

“We all get stuck in a trap, we all break the law and/or we enforce it; we all get sick with the clap, or we don’t and for a smug moment that’s an achievement,” a mermaid, with a dress like a starfish, said, none too serious, and with an air of wicked sabotage.

Imogen groaned. The procession was still long and winding behind them, as they floated backwards through it. “We’re all bought or we’re sold, we all compromise, negotiate, grow old,” Imogen said, stealing the turn of another mermaid, this one with very soulful brown eyes, and a long string of pearls draped down to her belly button.

With great dignity, the pearled mermaid said, if you could call it speech and not a deep whale-song: “The parchment says: And you writer, redeemer, grey or white or red or black or blonde; a line not from the slums of pervert hollow, or the low-cut skirts; or the foreign tongues, in foreign theatres; about a woman peeling seashells from her backside, after sandy encounters with abstract hearts; opened a valve in my heart, set open a flame; that impelled an action with that snowy human, shielded alas, as I learned afterward, by the coat she wore that my mother gave me, so like the King’s coat; shielded, that night, so perilously close to the stars…”

“Enough!” Imogen cried. “That is clearly way too long and way too specific and nothing like Elisha at all.”

“Elisha the last marauder!?” Several gasps when she spoke the stranger’s name. But they were theatrical gasps only, the mermaids continued their dance but changed course, so that now on the left they mimicked a forward march of the stranger army, and the right flank mimicked the formations of the authority.

This could have been a terrible mistake. Not knowing the difference between the mocking and the real, Tommy the former war-steed, catching an attack signal through his lidless eyes—one of the mermaids on the authority side spun around like a dolphin—sucked in the

23 saltwater through one of his great lungs, pulling the parade toward him. He would have eviscerated five or six ‘rebel’ mermaids, had Imogen not immediately kicked at his aft-legs and ordered him to exhale and rise, furious as at no other moment in her life. The long thin rainbow line once more disappeared from their sight, this time below them, and they ascended towards the air.

Chapter 7

Crossing paths at the Whirlpool

Imogen rode the back of the creature, in the still, open air and wept. The world was quiet but for the faint hum of a robin-breasted sky-machine in the distance: the regime still patrolled the borderlands of the sea looking for traces of hostility on the empty surface. The sky was black, empty. A round moon stared down overhead like the singular eye of some penetrating guardian. No matter how many times she commanded him to resubmerge, no matter how she kicked her heels against the top of his gills—for the ligament that bound them whilst he lived on air had now torn, and they had re-opened—her Greeter would do nothing but paddle. She could discover no injuries besides the one she gave him. His colour was less ruddy now that he was in water, but this was normal, the Greeter was not sick. On the surface he moved slowly; in the morning she would be vulnerable to every kind of eye. The Iron Mermaid would be heading on apace. She would not be able to prove Elisha meant no harm. There would be another war.

With nothing left to do, Imogen guided Tommy south towards the Smoky Sea. It would be sluggish and pointless, but at least it was movement. Breathing for a time, outside of the mask, and as she plugged the hole with her thumb so as to relieve the pressure from the animal, Imogen’s head cleared. Logically, it was wrong to despise an animal for following its training. The regime had taught Tommy to kill. And she knew it was really she who was at fault for losing control of him—but somehow this did not quell the cold fury.

She remembered Elisha’s stories of the Greeter raids on the stranger hollows and nurseries; how Elisha—that cool, enigmatic being—had wept for the first and only time in her presence. His tears were unlike human tears, but like the song of the legendary ‘wolf’, clawed hunter of elephants. Elisha’s body had gone limp; he seemed to have abandoned physical space entirely.

There was a great, silent tug, and both she and Tommy were suddenly moving very quickly. Even in the darkness Imogen saw the moonlight shimmer in circular patterns that made a circle that bled into a black void. She and Tommy were being dragged down into a whirlpool. Imogen laid her hands to try to steer him, and this time he obeyed, but too fast. Imogen tumbled off into the air, clutching for Tommy’s fronds but failing to grasp even one.

Hurtling into the vortex of the whirlpool, Imogen saw rope-like threads whip around her in reds and blacks; as if weaving creatures were rocketing their webs all around her. She was suspended in the centre, neither standing nor floating. The place was an absence of life, of gravity, of physical forms. Imogen knew this at once. There was no ‘death’ here, even; the word was too positively a ‘thing’ that is nameable, that is an affirmation, and known to living being, for this place. There were no structures here, physical or otherwise; nothing as complex as a word or a language could be sustained. There was no time, except the meagre portion she carried inside her body. This is not a natural whirlpool, this is an extinguishment, Imogen thought. I’ve fallen inside a dead stranger.

The place was searing. It was not just cold, it was hot as well; or rather its temperature was outside those two poles of heat and cold, registering like a flame of ice. Or it was the temperature of Elisha’s heart, locked inside his ribcage at times, at other times inside his skull. His form never tied to one thing, but at least he had a form. This was like his spirit, unleashed from any corporeal chains. It hurt to be here, and it just seemed to keep on hurting more. She could not move in the same way, either—as if her gut was a fixed point in space, nailed to the fabric of the universe, and though she could flail her arms about her core, even turn upside down, she could never again move away from that spot.

Extinguishment was common to all strangers. Elisha had said that a stranger’s death was always deliberate. An accidental death, a death without intention, was not something Imogen had ever been able to explain to Elisha as a concept. She knew from him only that at a certain hour their bodies (for want of a better word) signalled to them that they must end. When she’d asked the inevitable, “Does that not mean it is not intentional?” Elisha was stern. He refused to answer, saying only: “That is just the Swan’s call.”

A warm yellow lantern light washed over Imogen, and the shimmering silver head of her stepmother greeted her absurdly inside the void. She was the length of a canoe away and was pushing through this queer substance, seemingly invulnerable to its effects and shielded from any of the distortions brought on by the extinguishment. Imogen, humbled, waved at the machine for rescue, but it continued on at the same pace, as if it intended to plough directly through her. Imogen saw the claw of a lobster caught on the end of the mermaid tail, when it swished upwards enough for her to see it behind the mermaid head. In the lower back there was a victory mast extended and bearing the ugly bright orange flag of the regime, neither

26 blowing nor swishing inside of the void. The iron mermaid carried on as if it was just passing through water.

When the silver face was right in front of hers, Imogen found that she could push against it, and so shift herself out of her fixed point. She managed to push herself underneath it, but she could not hold on to it. It was slippery, by design, to escape the jaws of sticky sea-creatures trying to hitch a ride. She placed her hands all over the lower part of the metal, but the iron mermaid slipped completely away from her. Imogen pivoted herself on the tail so as to turn and watch her would-be rescuer depart the extinguishment; but once she lost her grasp she could not move again. She was left behind and all she could do was watch the iron capsule pass back into the watery realm.

Just as it looked as if the silver glint was completely obscured by the weaving reds and blacks, Imogen saw the capsule perform a spinning manoeuvre similar to the one she’d seen in the mermaid procession, but with a sharp dive at the end: it was a suicide-kill signal, which divers used for Greeters in combat when survival of the beast was not essential. Imogen remembered Crystal performing this same move in demonstrations in her diving pod. Carol had ordered the Greeter to savage her. She did see me, Imogen thought—and felt an inhuman tugging and wrenching at her right leg.

Chapter 8

Above the City of the Shallows

As the Greeter rose for breath, Imogen, tasting her own solitary air again, thought to herself: Elisha only ever, truly, spoke Dragon. I thought he spoke like me, too, but I was wrong. Imogen petted Tommy, unconsciously, could feel his back leg shake when she did so. Tommy had chosen to rescue her, even in the face of a direct command from senior military.

Tommy paddled through the mist until part of the bow of a boat became visible and Imogen saw a set of maroon curtains snap shut. On deck, a woman with fine light brown-blonde hair, like the cascading branches of trees found in city parks, blew a long horn out into the desolate hour. In a dozen heartbeats, Imogen was close enough to the ship to see the Captain, in his long bicycle-red coat, finger his missing tooth and tap the large bulge in his pocket, a diary, or a bottle. Children played in the wind on the deck in red sweaters laced with borrowed mud and only stopped when the low moan of the horn hit its dying note. Hushed, the children followed the gaze of the horn blower out to the horizon directly behind Imogen.

Imogen barely had time to turn her head to see the flock of pollen-gulls, before one of them hooked her from underneath her shirt and coat and lifted her up into the air; the drab white stone of its bones peeked through its body as if through blue-stained glass. The sensation of sweet air, the high altitudes of sea level, had made Imogen feel light. She had been taught since birth not to struggle with pollen-gulls; it would only tire her out. So she let herself be carried along as if on a quaint carnival ride, waiting for the pollen-gull to tire of her, unfurl its tail and let her fall.

The splendour of the city of the shallow sea, which she now recognised, and which she might have thought beautiful at another time, with its fleet of boats with crème facades, purple roofs, its joggers and cyclists, now seemed commonplace. She heard the sounds of children’s laughter below, from the receding city, but the adults seldom smiled or played, and she heard only one fragment of coherent speech: “The sky is an open tomb.”

The pollen-gulls were different shapes. The one that hooked Imogen had a long, thin umbrella tail, and the shape was the origin of the letter “Qhuij” in the dragon alphabet; Imogen could tell that much even from this vantage point in the sky. There was an entire

28 cluster. Most of them were far enough away to look dark, but she knew them to be of many colours. It was an average cluster; Imogen guessed there were enough individual gulls amongst the pollen to compose a modernist poem, but perhaps not a sonnet. They were a friendly sort, and not the arch-gulls Elisha had used to construct his message.

Imogen was pulled higher and the city was almost covered by mist, except for the tops of a few towers and construction cranes. She felt nervous when she couldn't locate Tommy down below, and noted grimly the silver glint of Carol’s shining iron suit way down inside a deep Leviathan grove, already far on her return journey. A reddish gull flew around in front of Imogen, but seemed to make a point of not acknowledging her.

Elisha—who had won skywriting competitions, Imogen thought bitterly—had taught her that she couldn’t impress the pollen or appeal to their pity; they were only impressed with confidence. If she looked at them, they would assume she was someone who had earned the right to look at them. To them, her mere presence meant that she was someone who deserved to be there. They would trust her to project an accurate view of herself, assuming that she would know better than they, unless she did something foolish like make an unconfident blink. If she showed any sign of displacement, insecurity, in their company, and asked that they acknowledge this, they would detest her, and refuse to let her down. But if she showed enough indifference, they would come to mimic her, and she would be able to direct them, even though the lower skies were their domain.

So Imogen stared up at the sky and not the pollen, and soon enough, the same reddish gull swung around and addressed her, gruffly: “Help this man! Will you?” in his long ruddy voice. The wind almost rushed away the “you” in a cold blast.

Imogen spied two gulls, with tails shaped like the curlicues of a young girl, stuck together and unable to separate. The pollen-gulls were at once airy and delicate, but they were strong as pack-horses: the stronger ones could lift a steamship out of the water and drop it three miles out of its way. But they posed no more danger to hands and fingers than a flimsy mousetrap.

Imogen knew that she must help, but that she must not do so too quickly. Gazing about the silver clouds as if she had no cares—taking note that the reddish gull had pretended he had washed his hands of the matter—Imogen noticed another woman had been caught on the other edge of the flock, but not too far away for Imogen to see she was dressed in the orange

29 uniform of an infantry recruit for the regime, with propaganda-quality lips and brown eyes; and that her face and nose were rimmed with bruises—probably from when she was lifted by the pollen-gulls.

Imogen waved at the recruit, and, shouted “There are no bruises if you refuse them,” laughing a little cruelly, but the recruit laughed back at this and Imogen felt that their predicament was equalising. With a sideways gesture, she unhooked the two linked gulls so that they flew apart, taking with them as sudden followers a portion of the flock. In the commotion, the gull holding the recruit let her fall. She smiled at her freedom, falling screamlessly, her expression like that of the thorn victim in a rose garden during the unavoidable after-bleed. Imogen smiled back and for a second they saw each other’s faces uncloaked by any artifice; all the freckles and bruises and frail human beauty radiating from one to the other in the soft grey sky. It was Crystal; Imogen recognised her by the distinctive brown curls cut just below the ear. Except that Crystal was in a hospital in a secret location, and hadn’t worn her hair like that since wartime.

Instead of letting her go as well the pollen-cluster rose higher, with Imogen’s gull leading the charge. The clouds darkened and it grew cold. The air thinned and her thoughts scattered. “I don’t remember where I got this shirt”, she repeated meaninglessly to herself. The hook underneath her clothes had not been uncomfortable, but as she got higher, and her situation became perilous, she felt a maddening itch on her back. She tried to find a better position, knowing it would be fruitless: she would always slip down to the same point on the pollen- gull’s hook. And the more she struggled, the more disdain the pollen-gull would have for her, despising even her distress. For the first time since she’d surfaced, she longed not for Elisha to rescue her with a swoop but for the freedom of the water.

In the clouds of the middle skies, the war was still happening. There were places where the clouds still looked like clouds, where they were dark and pregnant with magic, and did not have patches of green and fire. But in the visionary places, the points where the war could be seen were encased as if in a soap bubble. Sinister lights within the bubble played off the surrounds as it moved across the sky, in the shape of a great hand. Within the shape of the hand a vision could be seen, from the beginning until the end, from the south of the country to the north, and under the sea. Every bloody moment, every horror, refracted, as if through crystal; and semi-transparent, the machines rolled across the clouds, and the sounds of the war were created with thunder. Yet it did not stop at the end of the war. The hand passed

30 backwards, and as it did so, new sights, new weapons, new machines were visible to her, more terrifying than any others—Imogen had a terrible thought that these were visions of the future.

Chapter 9

A nest of haunts

Carol ran aground on the way home. It was as if she’d been driven by the current into a mass of floating seaweed, but she knew the capsule would not allow such a thing to happen and that something of greater intelligence was at work. The monitors depicted a pink creature, with many long fronds or tendrils, like a deep-sea cabbage. Pummelling, flares, machine gunfire; nothing loosened her from its grip. For the time being, the iron mermaid could not budge. Thinking that the creature was hungry and would not find anything tasty on the capsule, Carol decided to wait it out.

Carol held to her training. She searched for a mental exercise designed to handle the long waits of warfare. She could hear the tendrils constrict the capsule; it was very faint, but she should not have been able to hear anything from outside at all. It was like someone tapping directly through the top of the skull—by-passing air or water—and registering in the cochlea.

The capsule spoke in a low, male growl, like a bored but insistent lion: “Think back to every haunt you’ve ever slept in. Start with the most recent haunt and work backwards. Do not worry if something is out of order. Just continue until you can think of no more haunts. Try to picture each one. Think of something distinctive about each one.” The capsule spoke only if it detected distress in Carol’s bodily systems, and had evidently chosen a voice and an exercise for her. Carol had not known she was distressed. She inhaled, counted to six, and mentally ran through a list.

There’s the sparse military haunt where I sleep that I am not allowed to mark, because emptiness is beauty; there’s the haunt with brown curtains, now moth-yellow, where the light shone into my eyes every afternoon; there’s the large haunt with a glass window for a front wall where I gave up my happy space for the common cause; there’s the windowless haunt with a bed made for a smaller human than I was in length and breadth, which broke underneath my weight; there’s the windowless haunt I was no longer welcome in because I made people feel small; there’s the haunt with the sound of crickets and the hard mattress; there’s the olden day haunt where I split my gum when I raised a bottle too high and it struck the transom between two rooms; and there’s this foul capsule, less a haunt or a room or a place than a prosthetic, stapled into my own body…

Carol pulled down hard on the side lever and burst from the capsule into dark water. The shock of the cold water, the darkness, and sudden pain in the moments when the creature wrapped its tendrils around her limbs and stretched her as if to quarter her: all of this together stopped her heart.

The capsule, recognising the danger, sent a remote breathing unit toward her and fed oxygen into her lungs, and sent an injection through her trachea to restart her systems. Carol opened her eyes: there were fish, startling blue-gold striped fish, swimming in front of her face, very close to her eyes, as if they intended to nibble on them. The sea around her felt unsteady. She felt warmer, the pain was falling from her, except at the extremities. She looked at her hands, her feet—they were being pulled outwards by the tendrils of the creature. He was speaking. He batted away the fish so that she could see his one eye and his two mouths.

“I think you might be mistaken about certain things, friend.” The creature sounded tired, beaten down, as if it had been taking smoke into its lungs for many years. But it was confident too, and cunning. Only one of the two mouths spoke, whilst the other chewed anxiously as if waiting for a pause in the conversation. “We just want to talk about it. Friend to friend.”

Carol heard only some of this, but with the word ‘friend’ recognised the colloquial term used by young strangers for humans. This creature, different as it was from other strangers, was part of the enemy.

The breathing unit, slender, black, looking a little like the visor on a motorbike helmet but a solid shape, was also covered with tendrils. Carol kicked. The tendrils slipped from her skin like the tongue of a fly, taking only her socks. With her hands she tried to pull the tendrils off the breathing unit, but she was unable to grip. The thin strands, like ropes, had a skin-like surface, and their skin would not adhere to her skin, only hard surfaces.

“You’ve gotta know, friend. There’s two dialects. The one you got ain’t right. You’ve got ‘vapid language’, we’ve got ‘stroke’, you know friend? The vapid language isn’t for us, and we isn’t for them. The strokes, we’re good folks, you know? Elisha, he was too holy-serious for us, we would never write that Ehlalohihahimmmmm stuff. My friend here, he is vapid, he’ll tell ya.”

The stranger gathered around her, to close in, moving all around like seaweed on a rock, so that each time she slid out of its grasp, she just fell into more of its skinny arms, as if pushing

33 through a series of curtains. The stranger had one large, bulbous eye, bloodshot, in the centre of its body; and for a moment Carol thought she saw this eye straight in front of her. But the eye she saw was kinder, older and too far away to belong to the pink creature. It was a whale eye. She had the faint beginnings of a plan.

“…That’s why…tasty friend…I can’t let you go anywhere…until you know how it is…two sides of the coin. Two languages.” This time the second mouth spoke, Carol could see from the bubbles it made, but there was little difference in sound, as if it came from the same set of vocal chords.

Carol shook some small strands from her arm. Feeling no pain, knowing that with the air the unit was also relieving her pain, giving her warmth, at least protecting her interior the way the capsule had protected the whole of her, Carol reached up to the top of the unit, where there was a sealed hatch and tried to pry it off with her fingernails. Her grip failed her and she saw a stream of blood leak into the dark water, but felt almost nothing. The unit was sleek and smooth, and there was nothing on it she could use; in desperation, she’d hoped to use the hatch to cut through the onslaught, and now had nothing but her body.

“…might take decades…for you to understand the difference between the two tongues…” Carol did not know which mouth spoke. Everything was obscured by swirling arms.

It was only when Carol tried to kick forward that she learned her left leg was injured. It was likely that as part of its surgical maintenance, the capsule had broken it without notifying her, and she’d interrupted the repair operation mid-surgery by exiting. Awkwardly trying to kick away the stranger, which retreated easily but re-grouped and re-attacked instantly, Carol felt as if she was being smothered by seaweed. When she swam with her arms alone, the creature pulled her backwards, away from whichever direction she was heading, like a sly cat with a beetle. She glimpsed one-man submarines from the regime caught up in the stranger’s folds, not from the last war, but the one before that, and even a very early model of the iron mermaid shining like a gold tooth. They were completely preserved, undamaged. Somehow the glint and shininess of the metal was the most frightening thing, almost as if they were polished trophies.

As she moved further from her own capsule, now hopelessly infested with swirling strands of the creature, Carol heard the sound that indicated the antennae on the breathing unit were raised in order to continue receiving signals from the capsule, as a warning to return closer to

34 home. In one motion, Carol took a large breath, snapped the antennae and in the moment of down time, unclenched her jaw from the breathing unit, tearing as little of her own mouth as she could, then kicked in a straight line out of the creature’s folds. They were easy enough to fight off, but with the fierce cold, the breathlessness…finally she saw an eye, not the devilish eye of that pink creature, fading away in distance now and in memory, but that old, grey, kind eye, the honest whale eye, and Carol moved toward it. With the antennae in her fist she swam half-blind to the sea elder and punched a hole in its lungs until air bubbled up from the hole like lava from the earth. She put her mouth to the hole and drank the stolen air, knowing dimly the beast would rise up from the pressure of pain to the surface, and feeling its big heart against hers as she dug in with her arms and good leg and resumed her exercise:

There’s the pink haunt where I pinned a canvas to the wall and painted bloody and colourful butterflies and drank spirits until I could drink no more and bit off parts of the captain’s favourite petunias; there’s the particular, borrowed haunt with a shower that is pitch-dark when you turn off the light, and where a part of me will remain and reside forevermore; there’s the haunt with soft lights; the haunt with many photographs; there’s the haunt with always open doors; there’s the haunt with the spiders that would crawl across the floor and in my bed; the haunt where I made contact with something greater than myself—the cause; the haunt of many joys and terrors; the first haunt in memory, where I’d seldom spend the whole night, running always for reasons obscure to me then as now to my mother’s bed, with my weak bladder, for comfort; there are the unremembered haunts, the haunts in foreign lands: cabins, huts, gites, beds under skies, hospital haunts with white curtains that I mistook for rebel insignia, nights I did not sleep and had no haunt at all (missing, on the run, hiding in the Greeter Gardens); there was the haunt the night we sailed close enough to see the stars fall from the nests of heaven, the colour of burnt milk, in the beast in whose belly I slept, darling, on a bed of ambergris.

Chapter 10

The City of Repose

“Welcome to the city of repose,” a voice said. Imogen felt someone pulling on her left foot and strained to get a good look. The air was beautiful and sweet but it hurt her lungs and left her weak. She saw that a pollen-gull had lifted her high into the upper realms into a city of hot air balloons, but could not see the speaker under the curve of a sunstained-gold balloon.

“Who are you?” Imogen asked, now face to face with a man with a large bear’s pout and not unlike a seal with his pointed nose, and whiskers that descended into the basket and possibly down to his feet.

“I am chief story-teller. It is a condition of entry that you listen to me recite the story of the city.” The man had a grand elocution that seemed only a little affected, as if it had become natural after many long years of commanding pollen-gulls.

“Then I suppose I must.” Imogen felt a background anxiety over the time that was being lost, but it was overtaken by the fatigue and unfamiliar air.

“Well then. One day a fisherman was given, for his sins, a gift of infinite wealth, a key to the world, in the form of a talisman, a single finger, fashioned by the Guardian, whom in stories we use the old phrasing and call the ‘Troublemaker’. Do you follow? Good. On showing of the talisman, any person who ordinarily offered services for a fee had to grant those same services free of any charge or consideration. The man could not compel another to provide new or different services but anything ordinarily sold had to be his for free. He could catch any ferry, wander any place on earth, sea or sky and stay in any vacant lodging. He could not have a person kicked out, or run ahead of any queue. But it was a powerful object, for everywhere on earth the talisman was recognised, for the Troublemaker was known to all people.”

Imogen attempted to interject but was quickly hushed. The storyteller continued, “The one condition placed on the fisherman was that he was not permitted, no matter how much he so desired, to give a drop of his wealth to another. He could not transfer his power or his wealth to others in any way, and no amount of artistry could get around this non-giving; even the

36 thought of giving caused tremors and the rumble of thunder and vengeance emanating from the Troublemaker.”

Again, Imogen, curious to know more about this “Troublemaker” opened her mouth to interrupt, but the storyteller shook his head vehemently, and continued, “The fisherman was a simple man and not greedy by nature. At first he merely wandered the earth, met many friendly people, and everyone he met treated his talisman, which he kept around his neck, with due reverence, even those who did not believe in the Troublemaker. Old women would kiss the talisman wishing for luck. But of course this was foolishness, for the talisman worked for its owner alone. It could not be borrowed, even for a moment. It could only be stolen.

The fisherman climbed great mountains and entered the deepest groves of the leviathan in the most luxurious convoys. He sailed the highest reaches of the sky on the most free-roving pollen-gulls—some of those you’ll see maintaining our balloons. For it was on one such trip to the sky, seeing the peace and isolation of the higher realms that the fisherman resolved to build the city of repose in the sky that you see around you.”

Imogen noticed that a “Jhuie” pollen-gull was fussing over a red balloon to the east. This time she planned to insist on asking a question but the air stalled in her lungs and she missed her chance. The man in the balloon continued, with increasing fervour, “For the fisherman was hunted by thieves seeking what he had. He kept moving, but his fame spread. The more he used the talisman, the more people knew him as its owner. At each turn he was able to evade his pursuers with ease, for the advantages he held were so great. He could easily engage the swiftest vehicles to carry him away. Everyone who was able to became his protector.

A group of us, known during the old war as ‘The Eavesdrop Society’, made up of six men of the smoky seas, were caught in his bedchamber with our knives readied to kill him in a plot to take the talisman. But the fisherman was wise to our coming. He had trained a hawk to watch from a tree outside his window, and it flew in and marked each of our faces with its claws just before waking the fisherman with a beak-kiss to the cheek.

‘Nobody else has gotten this close, gentleman.’ The fisherman spoke, wearily, barely roused from sleep. ‘I will wage my life that you are what is left of The Eavesdrop Society, the

37 protectors of the old king. I am sure you are trained as bodyguards as well as as assassins. I hire you now on the same terms as your last engagement.’

We dropped our knives and very soon we were devising a plan to keep the master—as we now called him— safe from harm. The master orchestrated the balloons, peaceful as we’d never seen him, whilst we protected him from his enemies below. When the city was finished, we were called up to defend it and protect the master and his talisman. The master died a hundred years ago, his remains are in that red-topped balloon on the east side. It is only I and two other grey men who survive, either from the good air or the good graces of the Guardian.”

“If the master is dead, why does he still command you?” Imogen asked, feeling that by using the more familiar term ‘Guardian’, the man had relinquished some of the grandiosity of tone in which he told his tale, and so it was an opportune moment to wedge in a question.

“The master hired us on the terms of our last engagement, which was to protect the King and his interests forevermore. All contracts with the King are of course made on the assumption that the King will live in perpetuity, and to guard against assassination, all bodyguards are sworn to protect not only their charges’ lives, but their interests, even after death.”

“What interests does this dead man have?”

“Only the talisman itself is left to guard. The master in the end hated the talisman, wished to give it up, but was not permitted to by the rules of his curse. But before he died he instructed us not to allow anyone else to take ownership of it, for their own good, so that they would not suffer his fate, bitterly regretting he had ever dredged it up from the sea.”

“So if I were to try and take it and use it, you would stop me by force?”

“The three of us are too old and feeble to stop you; though we have had a slow ageing and slow dying thrust upon us, we’ve not been rejuvenated, merely prolonged by proximity to the Guardian... The only defence we have left is words, but we have a long time to fashion them. Funnily, whenever I have told this story, though the talisman is there for the taking, nobody has ever tried to take it.”

Imogen stared at the red balloon, could almost make out the hollowed-out eyes of a skull, and obligingly the basket dipped, almost as if a great hand had pushed it down, and she saw the full skeleton and the little glint of the talisman—a single, worthless fingernail—suspended

38 from his ribcage. It would be easy enough to swing by there, if she caught the right breeze; her mission would be all but concluded. She would have her answer, and she could hire protectors, weapons, armies, anything she desired to keep the peace. Imogen shook her head. “Sir, you say you are man of the smoky sea?”

“It has been a long time since I have even been wet, so far above the rainclouds but—yes.” The man seemed taken aback by the question.

“And do the terms of your bondage with the dead man prevent you from undertaking work for others?”

“Of course, they are the King’s terms, and the King demands absolute loyalty. If you are thinking of a way to release us from our bond, there is none. Milkberry is the expert on the jurisprudence on curses and—”

“Alas, I have nothing to offer, only favours to ask; tell me are you permitted to do small favours for others so long as it is not for reward?” Imogen asked.

“We may do favours for our family and up to three favours for three friends per year.”

“How many favours have you left this year?”

“Erm, I have one left. Sometimes I swing by Lord Milkberry’s balloon with a pie but he’s been so—”

“Sir, I did not come here for wealth or for talismans but by accident alone.” Imogen interrupted, adopting as best she could guess the commanding diction of the people of the city of repose. “I was searching for someone who could translate a parchment in Dragon for me, but I was taken up by this pollen-gull. If you would be so kind as to grant me your last favour, instead of the dreadful Lord Milkberry who has been so—”

“I’d be delighted.” The man nodded his head with approval. Imogen stretched out her arm, holding the parchment tight in her fist. The wind died down almost obeisantly as the parchment crossed over. The man wrinkled his nose a few times but did not squint, and said: “Ah yes, it’s a line from the old lawyer-poet, from his series on advocacy. In the old language it says: No soul may speak for another soul, but lovers may hold each other’s hands in the dark.”

“Sir, what is the old language?”

“The language of fullness, not emptiness, or vapidness. The priests still use it, as do the inhabitants of the smoky sea. If you like, I can write you a sealed translator’s affidavit.”

With that, with a smile just born on her face for the first time since the night at the casino, Imogen fell to the smoky sea.

As she fell, there, always there, even before Imogen noticed her long, robed, sorrowful face, stood the Guardian. Her robes were thunder-coloured, moving like thunder, perhaps even literal thunderclouds that coalesced around who knows what inner structure. The coloured balloons of the city of repose were smaller, infinitely smaller than her eyelashes. She was large, larger than anything, so that the ceiling of her conical hat and the bottom of her feet below the sea (Imogen noticed as she spun around) were places the colour didn’t seem to reach: the highs above the Guardian’s forehead and the lows below her ankles (beneath the water) were populated by strange stars, more than Imogen had ever seen, but the stars were striking in their muted colourlessness. Imogen landed hard on the Guardian’s sleeve, a sleeve of rainclouds, feeling like soft velvet, and a rich purple, wanting to sleep forever in its folds and feeling all but the painful parts of her melt away, the sores anchoring her to the present reality. Each cut now, each wound received on her journey, feeling so cruel before, seemed to have perfect meaning. They were the only real thing; everything else was a heavenly delight.

Resisting that pleasant shudder, the birth to the other world, Imogen slipped further down to the cool blackness of empty air just on top of the wrist. Imogen knew she could not be this small or this big, that the sizes of things were not right, and felt the air itself become too large or too small for her to breathe easily. Fearlessly, straddling the hand, facing the fingers, trying to resist the great fall, instinctively feeling for Tommy’s direction points, as if the Guardian’s wrist were the back of a Greeter, Imogen bent back and looked into the face of the God of the strangers. She saw the Guardian wore no hat; the shade was from a great black umbrella, the underside of which was the night sky. The umbrella was torn full of holes, which were the stars, bright pointed daisies. Behind the black tent of the umbrella, Imogen got the impression of a great, all-too bright world, the stars not discrete points in space, separated by vastness, as her people believed, but the singular intrusions beaming out from a vast sheen of light behind the curtain, kept at bay only by the Guardian. Her round, sorrowful moon face, with its moon eyes, and tender lips, looked kindly, unsmilingly, long-sufferingly at little Imogen, as a sad little girl might look at an injured butterfly. Her face was not statuesque, it was living, but neither did it breathe or move or speak.

With her free arm, the one Imogen rode, and the one that did not hold back the light that threatened to engulf the world, the Guardian reached into the darkness she created and was forever creating. She reached soul-deep into that darkness, stretched out the longest of arms, backwards through the current of time. The Guardian, thin, taut, swamped by the cloak, tall and bosomy, brown-eyed, pale grey-skinned like a porpoise (but only momentarily for her aspect was always changing, though somehow stationary) reached out for the souls that were lost to violence and retrieved them, precisely cut them out from the frieze they were held in, disturbing no space or time around them, pulled them slowly out, over fathoms of time, to the brighter place where they were restored, given the highest place in the bright world. She was the Great Surgeon. It was through the ring on the Guardian’s hand, waving across the world, that Imogen had seen the future and the past wars, but it was the Guardian’s scalpel which corrected them.

Imogen fell. The Guardian’s wrist now lost, visible only up high above her; looking no bigger than Imogen’s own arm, held up to shield her face from the violent slash of raindrops. Imogen felt hot familiar air, familiar smells, as if she was being sucked into something. The Guardian disappeared, and it was almost as if Imogen left her there voluntarily, etching a mirror world to our horrors, making trouble out of dark matter, leavening the heavens like bread, the Reachers, the Rescuers, the Surgeons, the Smoky Sea… Imogen left the majestic Troublemaker with a wave of the hand.

Imogen landed gasping for air on the soft, putrid pad of the tongue of a Greeter.

Chapter 11

On the beach

The beach was deserted—probably a high security zone, Carol surmised—but there were still signs that humans had once lived here. In the beach parking lot she’d found a motorbike. The residents of the beach caravans must have abandoned it when they fled. It wouldn’t start.

Each beach had a locker with a security code where she’d managed to equip herself with supplies to tend to her wounds; when she landed she did not know the regional code, or even what region this was, but as senior military her code was universal. She found a set of regime wear for a male infantry soldier: an orange t-shirt, a pair of jeans, sunglasses—and some first aid material, some tinned rations and some tools. The regional code was printed on the inside, but not the outside of the box; to help disorient an invading army there were no signs posted in the sparse and monotonous northern regions. She knew the code and worked out she was stuck in Gamblers Flats, a remote training facility.

After a few hours’ gentle work, she turned the accelerator and the motorbike came to life. Smiling, she placed her screwdriver down on the beach towel and began to pack up her things. Carol moved slowly: she was out of shape compared to when she entered the capsule; though the machinery inside kept her body moving in its own way, this was no substitute for natural movement. Her leg was not broken, only badly bruised. Just as she swung it over the bike, Carol saw two bedraggled creatures head towards her from out of the seas, and she laughed.

“Hey, what have you done to your Greeter?” Carol shouted out, still cackling. Carol got off the bike, picked up her pack and hobbled over to the sorry pair. Imogen looked confused, scared and mistrustful; but this was typical of her, as Carol had known her.

“What do you mean?” Imogen glared at Carol. Carol had already moved Imogen aside and had pulled out the breathing tube.

“Hand me the cream and the gauze, and the needle pack,” said Carol, motioning to some discarded supplies near the beachside camp she had made when she first landed.

Imogen obeyed. “Did I hurt him that badly?”

“He will be okay.” Carol said, shaking her head, “he’ll never fight again though, that’s for sure. And not because of the wound you gave him. Look at how he kisses up to you. You can’t train a Greeter once you treat them like a toy. Look at all the patches on his skin where you’ve been petting him with your feet.”

Imogen looked silently at the patches of footprints made plain now by the dry air (pale blue instead of his normal rusty-red). She hadn’t realised she’d been doing this. Tommy bent around and licked the air, embracing Imogen with his neck. When Tommy obeyed Carol’s command to drop, Imogen felt a tightening in her gut.

Carol spoke first. “You’re lucky I had gauze left; I had to patch up a whale,” and at this she laughed, “but that’s a long story. Is there something you want to say to me?”

“I know what Elisha’s message means—”

“Oh, do you? Well thanks, but I already have that from the clerk at the East Coral. It means: ‘No brother speaks for another; and our fire will pour down in the dark.’ It’s a typical war- cry. I’m afraid that we’re headed back for war.”

“Wait. It might mean that in the new language, but in the old language it’s a quotation. It has a peaceful message.”

“The old language? Where did you hear of that?”

“An old man of the Smoky Sea told me.”

A little mockingly, Carol said: “You reached the Smoky Sea? Are you sick? I could have recommended a beautician if you—“

“No it was…the man was travelling.” Imogen cut her off. She looked away from Carol, moving her eyes between Tommy’s drying skin and the turtle-green waves. It was nearing sunset, and would get suddenly cool.

Carol was thoughtful, “I believe you,” she said finally.

“What?” Imogen cried.

“Yes, I saw how far out there you got, in that extinguished stranger, so it fits you’d run across someone who might mention the old language to you.”

Imogen stepped back towards Tommy and leaned on the trunk of his leg. She had expected she would not be believed, and had thought she would have to fight to convince the regime of her translation. She had never thought that she might be believed but that this would not matter.

Carol continued, “I got caught up in some…thing…out there, and he kept banging on about two languages. We’ve known for a while the militants are reviving the old language, but we didn’t think it reached this far near shore. Based on what you’ve reported, it’ll affect where we attack first—” Carol paused and smiled. “Good work kid, for that I’m going to pretend I didn’t see you. Otherwise I’d have to turn you in for consorting with a marauder.”

Carol finished her stitching and mending, petted the creature and started walking away. Imogen followed her up the sandy path. She felt the world had become even less substantial than it had been inside the extinguished stranger. Time was receding, like the jewelled hand of the troublemaker, passing through the clouds.

Carol hoisted her leg over the chassis a second time with a groan and started to rev the engine, but stopped and reached for her mouth. Imogen noticed face-paint peel from her face—Carol was born with birthmarks over her face and neck, which she had always covered with the army’s facial tonic. Stitches on her mouth were pushing the paint off and causing it to peel away. Nobody alive but Imogen remembered that they were birthmarks. The rumour was that they were scars from some heroic act. The pause felt uncomfortable, there seemed no reason for it: Carol’s hands were back on the handlebars, but she did not move. They were in the Flats—Imogen recognised the long empty stretches of sand and spiked weeds from her year of compulsory service, and wondered if the overnight train still ran west to High Command. She had so many questions, but it was the most pathetic, child-like one that came out, “If you saw me out in that place, why did you give the attack signal?”

“I was on duty,” Carol grimaced and then sighed, “You’re lucky. If you hadn’t so badly- trained your Greeter, you’d be dead.”

The motorbike roared, but quickly died down again. Reluctantly, as if she was throwing a cut of fish to a pet seal which had gotten too flabby, Carol said: “Crystal is in Kissing Point, bed 6-F, under guard. You better go quickly; she’s due for a transfer. The password for visitor entry is ‘duckling’.”

With that, the iron mermaid sped away in a blast of dust, noise and machine smells. Imogen’s hopes of peace shrank with the vanishing rider. Kissing Point was a suburb of Moat City in the south, very far from High Command. Such a detour would make it impossible to reach anyone in authority and tell her story before Carol. The plain selfish motive made it believable; Imogen almost felt she had seen on her face that Carol was telling the truth. Imogen scanned the sky for pollen-gulls, but no silhouette disturbed the blaze of the sunset. They would never believe me anyway, she thought—I should visit my kindred, before there is war again. The Greeter’s breath, still chilly from the depths, enveloped her from behind— blowing just a little of the smoke away.

Believing in mermaids—the creation of persuasive underwater worlds in the face of disenchantment:

A critical essay

Introduction

We note, in passing, that Morris need not impart to the reader his image of the centaur, nor even invite us to have our own. What is required is that we believe in his words, as we do the real world. (Borges 76)

The following represents the fruits of an inquiry into literary method whose objective was to find a means of imparting the literary qualities common to the genre of literary fiction—such as the foregrounding of interesting language forms, cadence, specificity and complexity—to fantastic literature, using stories involving mermaids as a case study. Part I provides a comparative analysis of a group of three texts from the early 20th-century—The Sea Lady, The Sea Fairies and Wet Magic—which betray a tension between the realist and fantastic modes when telling stories involving mermaids and underwater worlds. In part II I propose a method of imparting the believability and “precision” of detail that Borges discusses (77) to an underwater fantasy world in which the physical environment renders most real-world details meaningless or absurd. This method entails an application and re-purposing of the theory of “functional equivalence” from translation theory and is based upon a utilisation of the writings of Umberto Eco. Part III will discuss the use of mistranslation as a model and other strategies for creating a dense, specific and richly-textured ‘other world’ in Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.

There are characteristic and essential features that are common to almost all mermaid tales, including cross-cultural exchange and the allure of the exotic or foreign, generally leading to tragedy. The tales, having their genesis in the myth of the Sirens, place the beings as foreigners who enchant men and lure them to their deaths. The curious reader may find the evolution of the image of the siren from the reddish plumed birds in Ovid onwards to a “supposed sea-beast” in a footnote in Borges (77-78). Homer provides a succinct example of the menace inherent in the myth, frequently drawn upon (and as often deconstructed) in the early 20th-century texts to be discussed in Part I: “woe to the innocent who hears that

46 sound!/He will not see his lady nor his children/in joy, crowding about him, home from sea;/the Seirenes will sing his mind away[.]” (Homer 200)

Two fairy tales from the 19th century, involving female beings from the sea, the German Undine and the Danish Den Lille Havfrue (“The Little Mermaid”) involve the meeting of two worlds, separated by the physical discontinuity between land and sea. Both involve a migration in which the migrating party is culturally dislocated in the new world. In each case the mermaid attempts to obtain a soul by marrying a human. The stories operate allegorically as explorations of cross-cultural relationships, each involving a love triangle between a surface-dwelling man, a being from the other world, and a woman from the surface. The relationship is enchanting but fragile and in each case ends tragically. Significantly, the enchantment is prolonged in comparison to the siren myth. In Undine, the migrating water spirit is a foundling whose name—the only thing she says she remembers—is viewed suspiciously as a “heathenish name” (Motte Fouque 18). The water spirit is then hastily baptised (Ibid). In The Little Mermaid, in addition to cultural dislocation, the heroine becomes physically disabled in the new world; after paying an agent (the sea-witch, with her tongue) for legs, she arrives on the surface with pain in her lower body and having lost the ability to speak.

The texts summarised above can be considered ‘canonical’, and the texts we discuss in Part I, generally treat them as such, for example, a character in The Sea Lady explicitly compares the mermaid to Undine (12). In Wet Magic, the children each have different preconceptions of the underwater world depending on which mermaid-related text they’ve studied, including Undine (119-120). In contrast to the early 20th-century texts, these canonical texts operate on fairy tale or mythic rules and so lack any requirement to make the fantasy world conform to the known laws of the physical world. As Todorov notes: “If animals speak in a fable, doubt does not trouble the reader’s mind: he knows that the words of the text are to be taken in another sense” (32).

These tales have a poetic unity and perhaps for this reason, have an enduring popularity. As Coats notes, in relation to the influence of realist modes on children’s fiction:

Clearly, what is repressed or ignored does not simply go away; in this case, the increased emphasis on the canny produced a fascination with the uncanny—as

evidenced by the persistent interest in[…]fantasy literature for children [including] Hans Christian Andersen (79)

I have made some use of the writings of Todorov in relation to the fantastic: “[T]he hesitation between [an explanation based on natural causes or supernatural causes] creates the fantastic effect.” (Todorov 26). The uncanny and the marvellous, to Todorov, are those stories which resolve the cause of hesitation either with natural, or supernatural, explanations respectively. However, I am less interested here in taxonomy—fitting these texts into a particular categorisation, or inventing a sub-genre for them—than in how each author has grappled with the same problem of rendering the impossible: the underwater beings and the world they came from.

What we shall see in the texts discussed is that they represent a hybrid genre, in which the traditional form (a fable, fairy tale, or fantasy adventure story) is subject the pressure to provide rational explanations for supernatural phenomena, however the explanations themselves are in modes that are not exclusively intended to be taken seriously. Placed side by side, these elements can produce a tonal dissonance and reduce our inclination to “believe in [the] words, as we do the real world” that Borges argues allows us to suspend our disbelief.

Part I—The pressure of the real in depicting underwater worlds

H.G. Wells, The Sea Lady (1902)

It is not necessary to go too deep into a reading of The Sea Lady to mount an argument for the tension between older mythic forms and realism—the self-reflexive quality of this text (and of the others examined here) means that this implicit tension becomes an explicit theme of the text:

A picture of a mermaid swinging in a hammock of woven seaweed, with what bishops call a "latter-day" novel in one hand and a sixteen candle-power phosphorescent fish in the other, may jar upon one's preconceptions[…] Everywhere Change works her will on things. Everywhere, and even among the immortals, Modernity spreads. (Wells 9)

The Sea Lady roughly follows the plot of Undine: a precocious water spirit from another world is entangled in a love triangle with a man from the surface and a surface-dwelling woman; the man is enchanted by her, and ultimately (presumably) killed by her. Occupying the Knight’s place in Undine, the protagonist must decide between the more atavistic figure of the Sea Lady and the modern (socialist leaning) woman in Miss Glendower. Written in the style of a true account by an amateur reporter, The Sea Lady makes use of a narrator with limited information about events. Everything surrounding the mermaid is written in the form of a light social satire, which revolves around the trouble/inconvenience caused by the presence of the mermaid and the reactions of the characters in the story to her.

The primary strategy for rendering the impossible used by Wells is a kind of prolonged hesitation, or persistent uncertainty. Though the reader is never in doubt as to the corporeal reality of the mythic being in the story, her existence is subject to a sustained interrogation as to its precise nature, and her accounts of her world are frequently scrutinised for the plausibility of different aspects.

After a long satiric sequence relating to mermaid reading habits, about which the only explanation of practicalities offered is: “in one way or another nearly the whole of terrestrial literature…has come to them” (9), Wells casts doubt on the entire phenomenon:

But about those saturated books and drowned scraps of paper, you say? Things are not always what they seem, and she told him all of that, we must reflect, one laughing afternoon. (11)

The underwater world is “nebulous”, “vague” (Wells 11). This kind of haziness in relation to the fantastic is distinct from, for example, the usage of a particular kind of ‘hearsay’ in the modern fable The Mermaids by Khalil Gibran: “[a]nd the conversation, heard by the depths and conveyed to the shore by the waves, was brought to me by the frolicsome breeze” (Gibran 63). That distancing operates to allow space for the fantastic to be fantastic, without further explanation, and for a line like the following with its simple cadence to be read unimpeded by questions about the practicalities of reading underwater: “The mermaids approached the youth, and found a message close to his heart; one of them read it aloud to the others.” (Gibran 64)

The reader is uncertain as to the Sea Lady’s precise nature throughout and nothing about her is ever resolved—not just whether she is truthful, whether benevolent or otherwise, but even whether she originates in the sea: “I do not even feel certain that it is in the sea particularly that this world of the Sea Lady is to be found” (Wells 11).

The Sea Lady evidences the curious distinction in plausibility between two impossible things: that involved in imagining breathing under water—and the reverse situation, where an impossible being from an underwater world can be more easily accommodated on land. Perhaps this distinction is due to the human fear of drowning and suffocation. This is demonstrated by the character Lady Poynting Mallow’s (self-serving in context but) visionary discussion of the Sea Lady’s “disablement” (35), suggesting accommodations be made to allow for the Sea Lady to live on land and marry her nephew, including installing a tank (65), continuing to use a bath chair to move around (65), and for her nephew travelling out to sea in a “yacht with a diving bell” when he visits her people (64). “I don’t see where your impossible comes in”, Lady Poynting Mallow states (64), characteristically. Lady Poynting Mallow’s grappling with the ostensibly impossible contributes to the hesitancy about the nature of the Sea Lady by adding a note of hopefulness about possibilities that balances the fears of drowning. In the narrative, her remarks are strategically placed just before the main character descends step by step into the oblivion of the sea, with the sea lady in his arms.

The story builds to a climax in which the doubt about the fate of the protagonist as he approaches the crossing into the sea creates suspense, built from the anxieties created by the tension between the real and the fantastic. The laughter of the sea lady witnessed by a hotel porter (73) provides a haunting detail, and gives the only hint of a possible (grave) resolution to the question mark over her intentions. The final passages, where the narrator lacks any direct information, are (significantly) offered as an act of empathy, by projecting how things might have occurred. The previously fussy tone of the amateur reporter gives way to a rolling cadence in keeping with the grave and elemental themes. The strategies of hearsay, indirectness and doubt never quite take us into the fantastic world in a way that we can believe with any certainty, and the novel ends on a harrowing note at the point of crossover. The mystery remains unresolved until the last, and so we are never really shown the undersea world.

L. Frank Baum, The Sea Fairies (1911)

“The Sea Fairies” is rare amongst longer-form mermaid tales in that it spends most of its time underwater. Written for children, at the request of fans (9), it features a very rational, questioning child-heroine in the person of Trot, who contradicts the rumours about the dangerousness of mermaids put forward by her companion Cap’n Bill, through the use of a logical argument: if no-one has ever seen a mermaid and lived—how does anyone know that?

In Homer, Odysseus knows of the sirens because the goddess informs him: “Listen with care/To this, now, and a god will arm your mind,” (Homer 200). But Trot reasons in a universe without the advantages of divine revelation. Though there are biblical references— Zog, the main antagonist, almost acts as a stand-in for Satan himself (41)—the outlook is primarily secular and rational. In the introduction, Baum declares that the story is fiction, but that all but the villains are “supposed to exist” and states that the “learned people” who deny their existence would find it hard to “prove such an assertion” having not been to the undersea (9). In its design, the story is intended to ease the anxiety a child feels about a fantastic world in which things such as immersion under water are not dangerous, and in so doing allow them to experience delight and be rewarded for their belief; however, the child’s ability to unquestioningly suspend their disbelief is not taken for granted, and with this comes a need to account for supernatural phenomena.

Frequently this account of the impossible resorts to something which is boldly impossible itself—magic. However, once introduced, each magical phenomenon is bestowed with

51 physical properties resembling those of our world. After the mermaids declare that “there is no natural way to make glass under water” (27-28) and that such glass in the mermaid realm is sustained by fairy powers, glass nevertheless appears to behave in accordance with familiar physical laws and limits. The glass operates as a form of alternative energy through a great solar lens that is used for cooking. In this way, even magic is then utilised in a scientific and quite visionary way. When the day is cloudy (as Trot inquires), alternative sources such as hot springs are used (ibid).

Todorov’s framework, with slight modification, provides some assistance here: there are three broad categories of explanation for fantastic phenomena used by Baum: magical (marvellous), rationally-based (uncanny), and a bundle of strategies (which we might call the “ludic”), in which an explanation is provided, but that explanation does not have the dominant purpose of providing a realistic or magical explanation for fantastic elements. These ludic strategies often rely on puns for the etymology of sea-based beings and environs, or satire of the surface world as the origins of fantastic phenomena, and are inherently playful and non-serious. The result is an uneasy tension between, on the one hand, more realist modes and the purely uncanny (where rational explanations are ultimately provided) and, on the other, the marvellous (where it is asserted that they need not be).

As with The Sea Lady the difficulty of absorbing the impossible into the real creates structural tensions for the narrative. The fear of the ocean is largely erased as the child and her companion are made effectively invulnerable through the use of mermaid magic. Unlike magic in fairy tales, which are subject to rules, the power of magic here is almost plenary (19). In The Little Mermaid, magic functions to create the pre-conditions for the dramatic question to be resolved, i.e. “will the little mermaid slay the prince with the knife and be allowed to turn back into a mermaid or will she allow herself to turn to sea-foam?” By contrast, in The Sea Fairies, the main antagonist (The Evil Magician Zog) roughly matches the magical power the mermaids, and there is a prolonged stalemate during which the characters frequently take time out from the showdown to scheme a method of resolving the deadlock (55).

The fear of not being able to breathe underwater and the subsequent immensity of the threat of the ocean is softened to the point of near erasure via magic as narrative ‘antidote’; the characters are literally surrounded by a magical pocket of air that protects them from ever touching the water (24). The dramatic tension lasts no more than six lines in the entire book

52 before the kindly sea-serpent King Anko comes promptly to the rescue (71-72). This is acceptable for a story aimed at younger children, but it may be that the structural tensions between realist and fantastic modes in this underwater scenario can only be resolved in a way that is satisfying to such a younger audience, who require merely that explanations for fantastic phenomena be given, so long as there is a cause and effect relationship presented, even if the explanation is entirely magical.

Edith Nesbit, Wet Magic (1913)

"Why did you meddle with magic at all if you weren't prepared to go through with it? Why, this is one of the simplest forms of magic, and the safest. Whatever would you have done if you had happened to call up a fire spirit and had had to go down Vesuvius with a Salamander round your little necks?" (Nesbit 123)

Despite remarkable similarities in other areas, the difference in tone between The Sea Fairies and Edith Nesbit’s Wet Magic could not be starker. This is a story written for older children in the grim context of England in 1913 on the eve of World War I. It contains the same pressure to be real as Baum’s work—and the same pushback through the use of magic as an endangered storytelling tool. The quote above, coming from a mermaid herself, speaks to a certain frustration with the children’s incredulousness, though she later attributes this frustration to the negative influence of the human environment: “And I feel that this air is full of your horrid human microbes—distrust, suspicion, fear, anger, resentment—horrid little germs” (123). Like Baum’s, Nesbit’s underwater world utilises magic, but the magic has distinctly scientific qualities. In their natural environment, the mermaids are immersed in a substance that exists between water and air and is breathable by both humans and mermaids, and in which characters may stand or float (127). Rife with dark humour and vivid description, Wet Magic tells the story of loss of childhood innocence and the premature adoption of adult responsibilities. Even the escape into fantasy involves the children fighting in a war. Water hems them in from all sides (in the protection of the in-between substance), but the threat of the ocean’s immense power is held at bay by a fragile magic—there is much at stake.

The entry into the underwater world by the children in the story follows a similar pattern to that in Baum’s story: the main characters enter a cave, they engage in conversation with the mermaids who tempt them in, one character enters the depths and the others feel compelled to

53 follow. Nesbit states that ultimately their belief in the impossibility of entering the underwater world is overcome by the idea that it would be too horrible to believe that children would be lured and killed by a mermaid. Yet, even that idea is presented to the children afterwards by one of the mermaids:

"Well, you are drowned…At least that's what I believe you land people call it when you come down to us and neglect to arrange to have the spell of return said for you” (146).

The children’s belief in magic comes as a last resort. Though the tale ends with a repetition of a recurring statement that the adventures would provide a fond memory “when everything becomes beastly”, this statement is followed in each case by the dour (but humorous) afterthought: “And it was” (274).

In similar fashion to Wells, who made use of bioluminescent fish in the “matter of illumination” (16), and Baum who used electric jellyfish to light the mermaid realm (37), electric eels act as batteries for looms and lathes in Nesbit’s underwater world (139). As in those other tales, there’s an uneasy combination of strategies to account for the impossible, including magical, rational and satiric (again involving frequent use of puns) which leads to structural tensions and a certain hybrid-ness of genre.

Nesbit uses similar ludic strategies to Baum, and the result is an underwater world that does not feel “lived in”. A sequence in which characters from books come to life and threaten the children, and other characters from books—Amazonian women—are called upon to assist them, provides an example. This sequence works at the level of playfulness and satire. The Amazonians fail to win the battle (and so save the children from their perilous situation) because “it would seem, the Amazons had only shot their arrows at the men among their foes—they had disdained to shoot the women, and so good was their aim that not a single woman was wounded” (198). Through its use of amplification and distortion, satire has the potential to be a handy tool in the creation of fantastic worlds which also use such techniques; yet, here the amplifications of satire and those of fantasy are heading in opposing directions. There is nothing dependent upon or interacting with the underwater environment in the operation of the satire in this entire sequence—the Amazonian women use bows and arrows and other impractical devices, and it would work as easily, and less distractingly, on the surface. Despite the dark humour, grim tone, and air of danger in the tale, Wet Magic loses

54 narrative tension when the stakes are highest, because details like those mentioned above do not fit organically with the underwater environment.

An element of the story which harmonises these tensions lies in how Nesbit envisions the mermaids as a society of working women: they maintain the flowing of the rivers, and ask the children, naively, if princesses on earth “open wind cages” (140). There is an implicit social commentary here, not just about the usefulness of princesses, but about the value placed by human communities on the work of women. The social commentary harkens back to one of the essential features of a mermaid tale: a cross-cultural exchange involving misunderstandings, and finds appropriate poetic expression in the undersea life as a counterpoint to ours.

Conclusion

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each

I do not think that they will sing to me

(Eliot 7)

Eliot’s much-lauded poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, from 1917, revolves around disenchantment; a hesitation towards believing in the fantastic (7). In the three early 20th- century texts discussed, we see the idea of ‘enchantment’ under siege and imperilled, like an endangered species of storytelling tool. According to Landy and Saler, this trend has its roots in the enlightenment:

In the late seventeenth century, fairy tales and other stories began to treat discredited notions of the supernatural with ironic playfulness; readers were instructed to view the fantastic as an entertaining artifice that no longer laid claim to veracity. (12)

The three texts discussed previously demonstrate how the different genre and modal pressures on the text create an uneasy balance of tone that is frequently in conflict with believability, creating a hybrid form that rests comfortably neither in realism or in fantasy, and which seems reluctant to sacrifice the old world connotations of mermaid tales in favour of, for example, a more science-fiction-oriented approach.

Rather than being blips or historical curiosities, the three texts studied are interesting because the tensions they contain persist into the present. Animated features, such as Disney’s The

Little Mermaid are undeniably popular underwater stories, but they come from a medium that has much in common with traditional fairy tales in the conventions and licenses it has to side- step physical laws.

The tension between realist and fantastic modes can be seen starkly in contemporary literature for adults, for example in the story The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean by dark fiction author Caitlin R. Kiernan, in a mermaid-themed anthology. In this story there is a resistance not merely to enchantment or the fantastic, but even to the drawing of thematic links to mermaid myth. Kiernan skilfully uses the potential of the fantastic, apparently as a decoy to help create narrative tension. In the story the narrator interviews the retired model of a famed painter of mermaids. As in The Sea Lady, the account is given by a reporter. The pressure of the real on the story seems to resist all abstractions, including the imposition of symbolic meaning on any event, or any kind of interpretation. This is reflected in the journalistic style of the narrator who reports nothing but facts, and the personality of the model. “She tells me she’s always loathed writers and critics who tried to draw a parallel between mermaids and her paralysis,” the narrator reports her as saying (Kiernan 208). Yet, even within this constrictive realist world, there is evident pushback against it, with the model declaring that she should have “taken it as an insult” that the painter made a metaphoric association in his mind between her and the body of a woman he found on a beach, half eaten by a shark—but she does not. The norm of the world of the story is one in which metaphor or poeticising is insulting as a rule, but the possibility of exceptions faintly flickers.

In an increasingly sceptical world, fantasy worlds will require robust tactics in order to create the circumstances for suspension of disbelief. In part II a method is offered with that aim.

Part II—Finding precision of detail in fantastic worlds

Introduction

The aim of this inquiry is to uncover potential methods of creating specific, dense and richly- textured fantastic worlds. Borges describes what he calls a “persuasive method” (76), a technique involving placing real world details side by side with the fantastic ones, and approaching the fantastic elements with a degree of indirectness. As we noted in part one, to Borges the requirement of the text is not to be descriptive of the fantastic object but to have us “…believe in [the] words, as we do the real world” (76). In analysing William Morris’ depiction and usage of the myth of the sirens, he notes that “[a] series of sweet images precedes the actual appearance of these divinities: a gentle sea, an orange-scented breeze, the insidious music…[t]he sirens, finally glimpsed by the oarsmen, still keep their distance” (76). Later he emphasises that “[t]he very precision of Morris’ colors—the yellow rims of the shore, the golden spray, the grey cliffs—moves us, for they seem salvaged intact from that ancient evening” (77).

The method proposed here aims to achieve this kind of precision of detail. To do this the method borrows and re-purposes the concept of “functional equivalence” from translation theory as a means of deriving this precision from a source domain. The method is illuminated by Umberto Eco’s writings on translation.

The most common strategy discovered in the construction of underwater fantasy worlds is the use of substitution and modification of real world concepts in the underwater sphere. The particular difficulty of underwater worlds is that the amount of real world detail that can be simply and plausibly transported across to that world, will vary according to the level of realism of the story. This substitution and modification is already, loosely, comparable to the operation of translation practice, involving a ‘source’ and a ‘target’ (see Eco 88) and the transfer of images and concepts from one to the other, with both losses and gains (Ibid 32- 61). The content of those substitutions will often have a literal quality, deriving from a likeness in word forms to some word used to describe the real world.

When this inquiry began it was thought that mistranslation would provide a promising model for an application of translation theory to the problem of creating specificity and density in a fantasy world. This is because when real world details are imported to fantasy worlds they are

57 by necessity changed, and this seemed readily comparable to a loosely defined “mistranslation”. However, it was found that mistranslation bears a striking resemblance to some of the weaker strategies and usages in the texts studied, relying as they often do on mere likeness of word forms in the creation of fantasy elements. I will return to an analysis of the potentialities of mistranslation in part III of this essay, when I examine Nabokov’s Ada, but for the moment compare these remarks on mistranslation by that author and translator of Russian verse:

“I knew a very conscientious poet who in wrestling with the translation of a much tortured text rendered “is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” in such a manner as to convey an impression of pale moonlight. He did this by taking for granted that “sickle” referred to the form of the new moon.” (316) and:

“…the likeness of between the Russian words meaning “arc” and “onion,” led a German professor to translate “a bend of the shore” (in a Pushkin fairy tale) by “The Onion Sea”.” (316) to Nesbit’s use of a pun on “Almoner” and “Salmoner” in her Wet Magic with its reliance on likeness in the word forms:

“[T]hey're the Salmoners, and the one behind Mother's chair is the Grand Salmoner. In your country I have heard there are Grand Almoners. We have Grand Salmoners." (138)

This involves a combination of undersea and surface elements, but in each aspect there is a literal quality; the Salmoner performs the same role as an Almoner, but looks like a large salmon, and so nothing extra is gained by the substitution and modification of real world elements. It works contrary to the quality of believability discussed by Borges, precisely because of the use of the pun and the lack of any further surrounding substantiating details that would fit this into a cohesive universe.

A similar tactic of transferring and literalising surface world concepts based on word likeness is used frequently by Baum, repeated and varied throughout: “doll-fish” have long hair and eyelashes and resemble doll-babies (74), the newspaper epithet “Codfish aristocracy” becomes literalised to “Aristocratic codfish” (32-36). A variation of this is used most

58 effectively in a sequence in which an Octopus is offended when he learns of the appropriation of his image (his long tentacles) in political material opposing the Standard (“Stannerd”) Oil Company. Here the literalised and fictional “source” of the metaphor, becomes offended by the distortions of the metaphor (40). The satire in this example harmonises well with other elements in this story (where the previous two were amusing wordplay but otherwise arbitrary) because it makes use of an inherent feature of mermaid tales, and the physical environment, specifically that underwater worlds on earth are separate and distant from human culture, but not completely cut off.

Eco defines functional equivalence thus, “...the aim of a translation, more than producing any ‘literal’ equivalence, is to create the same effect in the mind of the reader…as the original text wanted to create” (Eco 36). I propose a method for the creation of underwater worlds, which involves looking at the effect that an element of the source domain has, when using sources in the real world as the basis for substitutions with modifications to create fantasy elements in an underwater world, rather than merely transporting (and then changing) objects and concepts to give them a more superficially “watery” aspect.

A useful example of the operation of functional equivalence underwater can actually be found in Andersen’s classic tale itself:

“[The little mermaid] was particularly pleased when she heard that the flowers of the upper world had a pleasant fragrance (for the flowers of the sea are scentless), and that the woods were green, and the fishes fluttering among the branches of various gay colors, and that they could sing with a loud clear voice. The old lady meant birds, but she called them fishes, because her grandchildren, having never seen a bird, would not otherwise have understood her.” (5)

Here the grandmother/storyteller negotiates the most functionally equivalent substitute for “bird” within the knowledge framework of her target audience (the young mermaid sisters)., and comes up with “fish”. The child reader is left with the amusing image of a fish singing in a tree, and the knowledge that this was a mermaid’s false perception provides delight and an opportunity for empathy. This is not, however, a mistranslation—the grandmother knows the true meaning of the world, and the change is made because the word “bird” itself has no meaning to the younger mermaids. The substitution of one term or referent for another, where that term replaced has no meaning in the target culture, is a feature of functional equivalence:

“[W]hen a given expression has a connotative force it must keep the same force in translation, even at the cost of accepting changes in denotation…no Italian translator is obliged to respect the reference [in the expression it is raining cats and dogs]…because the expression does not mean anything in Italian.” (Eco 63)

Likewise, the grandmother in Andersen’s tale has effectively changed the referent (from “bird” to “fish”) in order to retain the connotative force (a small, harmless animal that gives delight).

The creation of underwater fantasy worlds involves the invention of cultures and environments where the majority of surface concepts have no meaning, or must be radically modified to suit the environment. It will also, of course, not typically involve the modification of a single text as a source text, but rather a range of influences derived from the real world. The distinction between a translation and this kind of creative transfer of real world concepts to the undersea is in the multiplicity of sources of influence and the necessity of modifying almost every referent. Nevertheless, there usually is some kind of referent that is transported across—an object, an image, a concept from the surface. What will often get lost in the ‘translation’ are the other potential connotations of those objects, images and concepts that they might have in a surface-dominated text, including their poetic resonance. To recycle Eco’s example above, it would be possible to substitute “squids and cods” for “cats and dogs”, but something as ubiquitous in literature as “raining”, with all its poetic connotations, is a concept that has no meaning in a wholly underwater world.

Seaweed offers an instructive example of the potential losses that occur when surface concepts are transported underwater. Note the magnificent, precise description of seaweed in the early, surface-dominated portion of Wet Magic:

When they got down to the shore the sands and the pebbles were all wet because the tide had just gone down, and there were the rocks and the little rock pools, and the limpets, and whelks, and the little yellow periwinkles looking like particularly fine Indian corn all scattered among the red and the brown and the green seaweed. (38)

Later in the same sequences, she continues,

[Y]ou know how soft and squeezy the blobby kind of sea-weed is to walk on, and how satin smooth is the ribbon kind; how sharp are limpets, especially when they are

covered with barnacles, and how comparatively bearable to the foot are the pale primrose-coloured hemispheres of the periwinkle. (40-41)

These passages occur just after the youngest boy in the story, Francis, has had a longing to see the sea satisfied for the first time, and so carry emotional weight. This kind of specificity of detail, abundant in the surface portions of the novel (and significantly, here, isolated from any fantastic element), is lost when the children venture to the underwater world and the poetic potentials of seaweed are erased in favour of its uses as a substitute for clothing and decoration. There are numerous references to seaweed after the submergence, but in each case it operates as a substitute for something else, usually a manipulable object. Compare the above-quoted passages to the later one below, in which seaweed is used underwater as a substitute for other materials, lacking the same level of evocative, sensual or symbolic richness:

They could see it was seaweed though it was woven into a wonderful fabric. Bernard and Kathleen and the Spangled Boy had somehow got seaweed dresses too, and the Spangled Boy was no longer dressed as a girl; and looking down as they scrambled up the steps Mavis and Francis saw that they, too, wore seaweed suits. (127)

Even the distinction between “suit” and “dress” is blurred and homogenised. It should be noted that Nesbit is conscious of and finds a symbolic use for this homogenisation, in the equalisation it brings to the status of the “gipsy” boy Reuben, who was coaxed into debasing/disguising himself in girl’s clothes on the surface (and then gains status fighting in the underwater war). This can be considered a gain. But the complexity of the boy’s reaction on land—hesitant but not hostile, and acquiescing without a struggle (112)—is a more significant loss with the introduction of the seaweed dress/suit. Reuben as a character fades into the background, literally separating from the other children during the underwater war, regaining weight at the end when he is reunited with his lost parents, on the shore (272-273). Here we see how a referent—seaweed—functioning in complex and poetic ways on land, is rendered uniform in the same text, by the same author, with the change in environment.

In The Sea Fairies in order to overcome the obstacle of distance, Baum gives his characters and their mermaid protectors the power to swim at high speeds via magic. The terrain of the mid-ocean lacks the landmarks that would make it distinct to the imagination: “I s’pose there are no winding roads in the ocean,” as Trot observes (Baum 18). The characters literally reach the depths of the ocean, where the mermaids live, by chapter three, and return to the

61 surface for a detour with no particular obstacle, before the drama starts midway through the novel. The viscous quality of water has been erased, but also a narrative quality: the sense of getting deeper and deeper into water (and into trouble) is absent when magic can propel you to the surface in an instant. Baum’s solution has ‘sea-devils’ slowly and insidiously trap the characters, and though they are unharmed, only then do we get the feeling of being far from the surface, and of being deep underneath the water (47). The literal referent “in the deepest part” of the sea, referring to the mermaid home at the beginning (21), lacks the same believability, because it lacked that precise, functional quality that being deep under water has—the inability to reach the surface of the water quickly. The very meaning of a phrase like “at the bottom of the ocean” (21) loses the connotation of threat and danger (deliberately, to ease the child’s anxiety) through the initial mechanics of the fantasy world and the mermaid’s power of conveyance; it regains it through the introduction of other fantastic elements whose sole function is to restrict the movement of the main characters and direct them to the evil magician’s palace (47).

In one particularly effective passage of Baum’s satiric tale, a group of mackerels declare their hooked friends have “gone to glory” when they are ensnared and delight in the opportunity to do likewise (35). Is the glint of the hook, here, the shimmering possibility of glory to come, not the functional equivalent of all lures in human tales that lead to false promises, including the enchanting Siren’s song that lures us to the rocks?

Part III—Mistranslation and other strategies for creating other worlds in Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)

Nabokov’s Ada has much in common with the texts already discussed in part II: it was written after the work for which the author is most famous (Lolita—1955), it is a work of fantastic literature, it has failed to gain the same foothold in its public or critical reception as Nabokov’s better-known works. Brian Boyd, the prominent Nabokov scholar, writes:

Alongside the enchantment of Ada there also seems much that some readers find all but enchanting. Three aspects of the novel particularly rankle: its sheer difficulty, or rather that sense it continually imparts that one may have missed this or that local obscurity, recondite allusion, half-buried joke; its lack of form…and the attitude towards [its main characters] that the book seems to invite. (262)

In constructing its fantastic other world, Ada makes use of a number of strategies already seen employed by the authors of the early twentieth-century mermaid texts: fantastic elements built from puns, modification of real-world objects and concepts to create fantastic ones, hesitancy and distancing, self-reflexivity and satire, and even, as will be shown, magic. This presents something of a challenge to my central thesis, as the techniques used are common to the mermaid texts, and yet they result in an intricate and rich fantasy world that is convincing but confounding to many readers. For all its inaccessibility, Ada elaborates a fantasy world of staggering density and specificity that succeeds by finding ways to blend and harmonise diverse strategies. It is aimed at a readership which Nabokov had actively been re-training as readers in his fiction, criticism and translation work and so can afford to demand a lot from them. Because of the density and scale of Ada as a text, I will limit myself to three examples.

Example 1 - Mistranslation as a model for constructing a fantastic other world

Nabokov’s approach to translation differs in terminology and approach from that of Umberto Eco, which I discussed in Part II. Nabokov defined three classes of translation: paraphrastic, lexical and literal (Coates 103). “Literal” in this sense includes the capturing “as far as another language will allow the exact contextual meaning of the original” and is the only “true translation” (ibid). “Lexical” refers to machine-like translation based on simple correspondences of words from one language to another. With regard to “paraphrastic”

63 translations, resulting from ignorance or a desire to alter the text, Nabokov warns: “no scholar should succumb to stylishness” (ibid). Paraphrastic translations he would consider mistranslations and therefore forbidden.

These prohibitions against paraphrasing and mistranslation do not apply to their usage in his fiction. Beginning from its opening line—a satiric mistranslation of the opening of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (9)—Ada makes frequent use of mistranslation, particularly of Russian literature, such that mistranslation is the bedrock for the construction of this other world. The world of the novel ‘Antiterra’ bears a name that defines itself in opposition to a speculated ‘Terra’, which is Latin for ‘earth’, and presumably refers to our own Earth. Therefore, elements which closely resemble those of our own world, but which have been altered, are nevertheless ‘fantastic’ even when they might plausibly exist.

In part II, I argued that the weaker strategies employed by the authors of mermaid texts often were built from arbitrary associations akin to those that Nabokov himself derided as “howlers” (Lectures on Russian Literature 316). In Nabokov’s own work the usage of mistranslation is a generator of meaning and richness in the fantastic world. One example will have to suffice of how mistranslation is utilised in this other world: Nabokov offers “Lowden” as a translator of Russian verse (Ada 103), which he describes in the fictive glossary of the book as “A portmanteau name combining two contemporary bards,” without giving the identity. Later he gives some translated verses by “Lowden”:

“How lovely to see you! Clawing your way through the clouds! Swooping down on Tamara’s castle!”

(Lermontov paraphrased by Lowden). (Ada 193)

At a basic textual level, the dialogue references a literal demon who falls in love with a Georgian princess Tamara (see Binyon xix), which echoes the character of Demon in Ada as the lascivious, secret father to both the main characters Ada and Van Veen. The reference to a paraphrase of the Russian writer Lermontov recalls Nabokov’s comments in his translator’s foreword to Lermontov’s novel, A Hero Of Our Time: “This is the first English translation of Lermontov’s novel. The book has been paraphrased into English several times, but never translated before.” (Nabokov 7) Though praising aspects of Lermontov’s work, Nabokov sharply criticises his “inelegant” Russian (Ibid) and notes: “In attempting to translate

Lermontov, I have gladly sacrificed to the requirements of exactness a number of important things—good taste, neat diction, and even grammar[.]” (Ibid)

In his translator’s notes, Nabokov lists a number of versions (“all bad”): Wisdom and Marr, Pulszky et al, none of whose names can be easily combined to produce a portmanteau “Lowden”, though there is the teasing quality of the additional comment: “And there have been others” (175). Nabokov’s intricate associations, and self-conscious puzzles, invite this kind of scholarly sleuthing: with a little more knowledge another possible answer emerges: Lermontov was best known as a poet; the reference to Tamara points to his narrative poem The Demon (see Binyon xxxviii ) (an earlier clue: a character in Ada bears the name of ‘Demon’). Two well-known contemporary poets (“bards”) that could form the portmanteau would be Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden, neither traceable as translators of Lermontov, but who could conceivably fit with the motif of the translation of Slavic texts into English. The use of three exclamation marks suggests Nabokov views the translation (“paraphrase”) as exaggerated, and its literal placement in a conversation evokes the “conversational” style of modern poetry.

The question arises: what purpose is served by applying these satirical “creative mistranslations”? The ‘portmanteau’ discussed here is a simpler example that acts like a key or a clue that Nabokov provides to decrypting the text: it shows in miniature how Ada blends or fuses elements from our world in creating Antiterra. Page after page in Ada, these intricate distortions of our world crop up in association with mistranslation and in their cumulative effect create the impression of a wholly “mistranslated world” that is similar to our world yet different, exactly as one genus of butterfly may differ from another. For the most part, these distortions don’t result in any major differences in physical laws between Antiterra and our own world, but there are elements that seem to defy our expectations about what is physically possible.

Borges provides a number of potential positive uses for mistranslation in his commentary on the versions of the The Thousand and One Nights. He provides one possible justification for censorial (mis)translation:

when the primary aim is to emphasize the atmosphere of magic…The Thousand and One Nights is [as Littmann observes] a repertory of marvels. Less fortunate than we, the Arabs claim to think little of the original; they are already well acquainted with the men, mores, talismans, deserts, and demons that the tales reveal to us. (96)

So, according to Borges, mistranslation could result in a “gain” to the target readership where it serves to bring out unique and enchanting elements. Though we can safely assume Nabokov would have balked at this as a translation practice, if we consider Ada as a fantasy world built from mistranslations of our own world within a fictive domain, a parallel emerges between the kinds of “gains” that occur in the text Borges refers to and in Nabokov’s fiction. The introduction of fantastic elements into what on the surface appears like realist fiction acts to amplify the atmosphere of magic and re-enchant the reader.

Example 2—Flying carpets

There is a passage in Ada which illustrates succinctly many of the issues and concerns surrounding magic and the pressures of realism that I discussed in part I of this essay. Taking place in an attic and following sequentially and symbolically as an extension of a scene in the library (38), the passage describes how one of two main characters, Van Veen, discovers a disused flying carpet:

[The attic] stored a great number of trunks and cartons, and two brown couches one on top of the other like copulating beetles, and lots of pictures standing in corners or on shelves with their faces against the wall like humiliated children. Rolled up in its case was an old ‘jikker’ or skimmer, a blue magic rug with Arabian designs, faded but still enchanting, which Uncle Daniels had used in his boyhood and later flown when drunk. (40-41)

This is by no means a novel way of introducing fantastic elements in a story. In the sequel to The Sea Fairies, L. Frank Baum’s Sky Island, Cap’n Bill, on being told of a magic (flying) umbrella in an attic, in his own parlance neatly summarises the extinction of fantastic elements, and so sets the stage for re-enchantment:

“Magic…was once lyin’ round loose in the world. That was the Dark Ages, I guess, when the magic Arabian Nights was. But the light o’ Civilization has skeered it away long ago, an’ magic’s been a lost art since long afore you an’ I was born, Trot.” (92)

But like Borges’ Centaur, the fantastic carpet in Ada appears believable to the reader (although slightly corrupted in its aspect) because it is placed after a series of mundane objects rendered with precise detail, and which relate to the theme of childhood shame and re/discovery. The passage continues:

Because of the many collisions, collapses and other accidents, especially numerous in sunset skies over idyllic fields, jikkers were banned by the air patrol; but four years later Van who loved that sport bribed a local mechanic to clean the thing, reload its hawking-tubes, and generally bring it back into magic order and many a summer day would they spend, his Ada and he, hanging over grove and river or gliding at a safe ten-foot altitude above surfaces of roads or roofs. How comic the wobbling, ditch- diving cyclist, how weird the arm-flailing and slipping chimney sweep! (40-41)

The provision of a scientific explanation for the magic here reads more as a commentary than as the product of any genre pressure: a lament as to the loss of magic in the imaginative space. Support for this interpretation is not hard to find, in The Art of Literature and Commonsense, Nabokov defends the world of the imagination against the incursion of “Commonsense”. The primary tool that Nabokov uses in his pushback is precision of detail. He notes his delight in:

a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering why in his headlong flight nobody had thought of correcting it.” (Nabokov 1980 373)

The details offered in Ada such as “hawking-tubes” are significantly not explained in the fictive glossary, and apart from suggesting a literal “hawk” there is no particular clue as to what they are or how they function. It is not a convincing scientific or rational explanation that produces this believability, so much as the dense and intricate distorted world which allows these fantastic elements to exist in a character-driven, family drama, that might otherwise resemble Anna Karenina. There is nothing (at least in this chapter) that would give license to treat these other than as literal magic carpets, and later they provide a practical obstacle as “inquisitive skimmers” (41-42). In example 3, I will examine how the layering of meaning in Ada allows the reader a choice in how to interpret phenomena, either as literally fantastic or as thematically allusive.

Example 3—Tracing mermaid themes in Ada

The character of Lucette in Ada, who commits suicide by drowning, is doubtless thematically linked to mermaids. This is stated plainly in the glossary notes to the novel, which identify a conversation relating to a mermaid message as “an allusion to Lucette” (477). Lucette has been linked to the notably darker Russian mermaid myth of the rusalka, a drowned woman

67 who seeks vengeance from the dead (Collins 78; Johnson 241-242). As Collins notes, “Nabokov’s move from Russian to English entailed the metamorphosis of the image of transition itself: from the vengeful Rusalka in Nabokov’s English works, to watery women more familiar to his new audience, including Andersen’s little mermaid” (78). Lucette is significantly a benevolent character not a creature of vengeance.

Brian Boyd devotes a chapter to deciphering the “mermaid message” in his work on Ada, arguing ultimately that more than simply a thematic allusion, in the world of the novel Lucette in fact literally communicates from the dead (202-236), after noting that “such a suggestion seems to violate the ordinary rules of fiction” (203), a statement which we can safely assume was not intended to include fairy tales. Boyd does not go so far as to declare that Lucette has become a mermaid, but rather he speaks about her in terms that resemble the vagaries of Wells’ Sea Lady’s world.

The reference to the mermaid message appears late in the novel and is surrounded by dense (even for Ada) passages where Van Veen, returning to meet Ada after a separation, philosophises about the nature of time (419-442). Ada recounts how she received the message and was diverted from her journey. Boyd does not cite Undine as an influence or a potential intertextual reference, but La Motte Fouque’s story does provide support for his thesis of a literal communication from the underwater world. When Ada describes the message she received earlier as a “mermaid’s message”, she does so at a hotel called “The Three Swans”, and is accompanied by swans. The sequence occurs during a “mosquito dusk” (442):

All her flowers turned up to him, beaming, and she made the royal-grand gesture of lifting and offering him the mountains, the mist and the lake with three swans. (Ibid)

This has a strong correlation poetically and thematically to a passage in Undine, where the knight, separated from his beloved Undine and having married a woman from the surface, Bertalda, is taken up into the sky in a dream by swans and warned of his impending death by his own would-be murderer Undine, who communicates with him remotely from this other world. During his flight the knight cries:

The music of the swan! The music of the swan! … Does it not ever presage death? (123-125)

There is also a poetic connection between swans in Undine and the unreachability of the sun in Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, where the second sister reports seeing swans at dusk:

[S]till more swiftly [than the clouds] flew a flock of white swans, just where the sun was descending; I looked after them, but the sun disappeared, and the bright rosy light on the surface of the sea and on the edges of the clouds was gradually extinguished. (6-7)

I make this case in support of Boyd’s thesis, in part, to illustrate the temptation and then dispel this kind of “case building” analysis as a method for this exegesis. The chapter, dense with references to time, could alternatively find an intertextual source in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and the “Swann” family of that text. It could be a reference to the term “Swan Song”, this being a written in the form of a memoir composed during later stages of the fictive authors, Ada and Van Veen’s lives; or it could be none or all of these. Nabokov’s work is so rich with allusion and intertextuality that to trace particular threads of association is both profitable and perilous, as evidenced by the anxiety that Boyd noted about Ada and the reader’s fear of “missing this or that local obscurity” (262). Boyd finds associations between Lucette and mermaids, as well as the bird of paradise, diving birds generally, red hair and the “gipsy” Esmerelda, giving evidence of a blending of references from myth and the real world (204-205).

Trying to pin down the source of a particular allusion misses a key element of how the fantastic world is constructed: the associations and references create a set of layered narrative realities, in which the reader is able to navigate and which vary in their degree of realism or fantasy. The effect is that no element of Ada and its fantastic world can have a singular fixed corollary, but rather that the richness and multiplicity of allusions and associations, the careful blending of elements, creates a world in which nothing has any definite one-to-one correspondence with our world, and yet so many dense connections with partially familiar things and creates such a rich texture, that the choices we have in how we understand the world are not limited by a single set of generic conventions.

In Baum and Nesbit, although there are journeys from disenchantment to belief, the fantastic is built into the narrative; in Wells the prolonged hesitancy as to the nature of the sea lady most resembles Nabokov’s layering, but hesitancy or doubt is an essential piece of the narrative journey—in order for the final passages to work effectively, the reader must continue to be apprehensive, and Wells leaves the reader suspended between opposing explanations, never being able to choose freely whether the sea lady is benevolent or destructive.

Lucette is akin to a mermaid because of her suicide by water, and her benevolence, which creates the conditions for tragedy. This is a faithful usage of mermaid lore at a thematic and poetic level. Lucette may alternatively communicate from the dead (even as a literal mermaid with a tail) and this multivalent nature of Ada derives from the intricacy of its blended allusions, making a world rich enough for choices to be made. Nabokov’s work can be seen as a playground, as the author himself seems to be training his readers to use it as such—the red herrings and scholarly wild goose chases are intended to be part of the fun.

Conclusion

The dolphins, after all, even though they are unable to manipulate the environment and unable to build and use fire, may have in their own way developed a subtle philosophy of life. They may have worked out, more usefully than we have, a rationalization of living. They may interchange more joy and good will with their feelings and understand more. The fact that we cannot grasp their philosophy and their moods of thought is no evidence of their low intelligence, but is perhaps evidence of our own. Well, perhaps! (Asimov 26 -27).

The above comments from scientist and science-fiction author Isaac Asimov, are extracted from an argument about the possibility of non-human intelligence on earth and beyond, from a work of speculative non-fiction. He details extensively, using rational argument, why dolphins could not have evolved hands rather than flukes due to the viscous quality of water, and why their inability to wield fire (even if they could conceptualise how to do so) is a marker of non-intelligence, or at least the kind of intelligence that is recognisable to us. He thus offers as generous an argument as he can in favour of the potential for nonhuman intelligence in the oceans amongst dolphins, in order to refute that very possibility. I note that his formulation would almost certainly rule out the possibility of intelligent life in the form of a mermaid.

Pushing the boundaries of the possible is part of the task at hand for an author of fantasy. In the texts discussed in part I, each author had to address the impossibility of breaching the divide between water and surface worlds that is acutely felt in the imagination. I have argued that the result is an uneasy compromise between different strategies for easing this particular anxiety, but I want to emphasise here in conclusion that this comes also with some not infrequently visionary results. In Baum we saw early descriptions of alternative energy, in Wells of the social model of disability, and in Nesbit of a society in which women perform manual and military roles traditionally reserved for men.

In this essay I have offered two main strategies for creating convincing fantasy worlds with precise detail, based on the observation that most existing works about underwater worlds depend on a practice of substituting and modifying elements from our own world. The first is to focus on the “effect” the source element would have in a literary sense rather than merely

71 transferring a source object/concept to an underwater environment with a slight change. The second is to blend multiple elements from the real world into each element of the underwater world, so that the resemblance to any one thing is elusive enough to create richness of texture, without creating a one-to-one allegory.

What this inquiry has demonstrated is a strain of resistance amongst readers to the fantastic in post-enlightenment times, which may require ongoing adaptations. However, as Landy and Saler write (referencing Andrea Nightingale), increasing scientific knowledge may not be the enemy of the marvellous:

modern science is just as likely to restore mystery as to extirpate it from the natural world. Science—which once used, like philosophy, to grant wonder only instrumental value… now becomes, paradoxically enough, the single most powerful generator of the marvellous. (7)

A fire-wielding dolphin is an excellent starting place for a story, perhaps even a story about how a dolphin first conceptualised fire. When the question inevitably arises: “Well how does the fire stay dry?” a canny author will have an answer, or a sleight of hand, convincing enough to move the reader to the next part of the story, and will develop a strategy adapted to that reader’s particular level of incredulity. However a note of caution is warranted here: what a reader considers to be “believable” will change over time, and perhaps in mulling over the impossible, science and rationalism will one day establish “the intelligence and philosophy of the dolphin” as scientific fact. It is in that faculty of the imagination to say “well, perhaps!” that the beginning of discovery lies.

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