Prospero’s Children

The Mermaid

The mermaid rose out of deep water into the stormheart. Being a creature with no soul, she was without fear of the elements which had engendered her. She rode the giant waves like a child on a switchback, sucked laughing into terrible black chasms of water, then hurled skywards towards the plunging clouds, riding the sea-crests with her hair lashing in the wind. Lightning illumined her for an instant, an efreet of the ocean, face a-scream with glee, slanting bones and elongated eyes sloping back from the pointed nose and tapering chin. It was a misshapen imitation of a human visage, formed perhaps by some pagan Creator who had caught only the briefest glimpse of Man. Her storm-tossed body was almost androgynous, flat-breasted, fish-pale, the ectopic nether limb glistening steel-silver with scales, each jagged fin shot with the needle-glint of poisonous spines. Above her, thunderhead clouds were piled into toppling cliffs of airborne water; the wind came roaring from the throat of the sky. More lightning-flashes, almost incessant now, picked her out in every motion of her wild play, leaping, diving, tumbling, amidst the heaving mountains and rocking valleys of the ocean. She could not remember another such storm, never in all her uncounted years on earth. Always alone, alienated both from Man and beast, a careless elemental for whom the waters were mother and lover, lifeblood and home.
She saw the barque ahead of her through a cleft between rearing waves, broken and desperate, clinging precariously to the skirts of the tempest. Drums rolled from the chasing clouds; storm-fires flashlit the ragged sail streaming like torn skin from a skeletal wreck of mast and spar. She was a small boat, sturdily built; the last remnants of her crew had secured themselves to tilting deck and sides with frayed rigging. Spume-capped ridges lifted her skyward, spun her round, then sent her plummeting nose-first into liquid ravines; but she was in her element even as the mermaid, and each time she would right herself and battle onward.
Strong arms gripped the useless wheel, not to steer but for an anchor against the greedy undertow that would have sucked the sailor from the deck. Lightning gleamed on a sea-glossed interplay of muscle in forearm and shoulder. The mermaid saw him as she drew astern, her hand on the gunwale, cold fingers touching the boat’s skin with the chill of the uttermost deep, weed-green hair crackling with secret electricity. He glanced round, some instinct warning him of the deadly gaze on his back. She saw the brine-blackened locks webbing his face,