Alias Hook (25 page)

More peals of amusement chime round the pool. Even I laugh at the notion of the Pan frolicking in the water with the loreleis and treading on their tails. He might as well sleep with the savage tigers in the wood; indeed, he’s far more likely to do so than ever sport with mermaids in the lagoon.

“But consider the source,” I say to Stella. “The Scotch boy adored Pan. He would never portray him in a less-than-flattering light or admit there was anything his hero feared.”

“Exactly so, Captain,” Dame Lazuli agrees.

“But,” Stella begins again, “if you have regular female cycles, the same as … as any woman, and you, well, mate and give birth in the usual way, where are your men?”

“They are off shepherding our colonies in the sea,” says Lazuli.

“Colonies?” I echo. I’ve sailed the seas of the world, and never encountered a single member of the mer-race except in this lagoon.

“You cannot think we live all of our lives in this tiny place?” the old mer-dame replies. “We must make our annual migrations out in the great sea. That is how we survive.”

The great sea. My blood quickens. The merfolk migrate out into the other world every year. They know a way out.

3

“We are a nomadic race. We follow the currents that have boiled beneath the sea since the beginning of time, to places where the food is more plentiful, the climate more friendly.” Dame Lazuli settles down on her tail and pushes back a handful of her springy gray-and-silver spirals.

Wine the color and texture of squid ink dares my courage from a vessel of shell. But it’s dreadful bad form to decline hospitality, and Stella sips at hers with stoic aplomb, so I ignore the faintly marine fragrance and hoist away. It’s a cold, rich, mineral taste on the tongue, with assertive notes of copper and plum, like drinking the blood of the sea.

“We meet other migrating colonies and feast together and share our stories,” the blue dame continues. “Pods of our young males and females mingle with the youth of neighbor colonies, and pair off together, swimming with one parent colony for half the season, and then the other. But the waters are more dangerous now than they have ever been.” Her sigh extends all the way to the muscular fins at the end of her coiled tail, which quiver against the rock. “It takes the strength and cunning of all our men to protect our colonies.”

“From the men, you mean,” Stella injects. “On land.”

We sit on seagrass mats, Stella and I, our legs thrust out before us like little children. The mer-dames have no furnishings for legged creatures, neither chairs nor tables. Our shell vessels stand upright on their coralline prongs upon the pitted surface of the rock; Stella’s soaked moccasins are drying in the air further up the rock, outside the cave. Several of the young mer-mothers have carried their newborns into a deep recess of the pool under a volcanic tunnel; their soft lullabies, more melodic than I have ever noticed before, echo up through the porous rock into the Neverland night.

“It was long ago, time beyond reckoning, when the first of our brethren grew limbs and walked upon the land,” says Lazuli. “The songs of our bards tell us we lived in harmony with the legmen for ages. The world was huge and bountiful then, with room for all. There were fertile deepwater plains for planting, unspoiled pools for fishing, broad sand beaches beyond counting where we might sport and play in peace, quiet lagoons for birthing our young. But the legmen are greedy. They want the world for themselves. They’ve swarmed over all the land, and now their ships of fire disturb every sea.”

“Except this place?” asks Stella.

The blue woman nods her springy head. “We are protected here. Only children find their way here, and when they go back and grow up, they forget. This is the safest place in all the waters of the world to birth our young. The mothers stay until they and the babes are strong enough to rejoin the colony the next time it returns on the current.”

“And he allows it?” Stella marvels. “Peter? The Boy King.”

“The Neverland is the dreamworld of children,” Lazuli replies. “All manner of fey creatures make their home here, as well as the beasts in the wood, because children love us so. The Boy King is immensely proud to have such exotic and dangerous creatures in his world, to show off to the children who come here. Especially the girls. They fly overhead to view us, and we appear in the lagoon for that purpose, so he will trouble us no further. It’s a small enough price to pay, amusing the boy, chasing away his sorrows, to preserve our sanctuary here.”

“Sorrows?” I rumble. “This is his Paradise.”

Lazuli peers at me, surprised. “Life brings sorrow, Captain, and his life has endured for so many suns and moons. So many losses, so many children gone, leaving him alone. His losses haunt his dreams sometimes, in spite of all our singing, my sisters and I. It is a delicate thing, keeping him happy, protecting him from the memory of all he has lost. Preserving his innocence. Our bards sing of a time when this place was in fearful peril, when the Boy King nearly succumbed to his sorrows, but for the heroic chanting of our singers. Now harmony is restored.”

She sits up a little taller on her coiled tail. “Of course,” she adds delicately, “he does not guess what our true purpose is within this grotto. Indeed, our own men, who would gladly shed their last drop of blood to defend this place, do not like to come in here. They know perfectly well what we do here, play no small part themselves in the cycle that brings us here, and yet they prefer to keep off, to let us do our work in peace.” She lifts her blue shoulders in wistful resignation. “That is how men are.”

And her sapphire eyes shift again to me. “It’s a matter of no little concern to us, Captain, that you have found your way here.”

I set down my wine vessel abruptly. They are looking at me from all round the pool, as if awaiting judgment against the wayward man foolish enough to penetrate their sacred circle. The two warrior sirens who captured me loom nearer. I have very little desire to be flung back into the water like a disappointing fish; it’s a long, long way back to the surface of the Mermaid Lagoon. My fingers inch across the rock to where my expired air bladder still lies, which I lift to show Lazuli. “I was trying to bring this to Stella.”

“Thief!” hisses Mica.

“Why was it placed in my boat?” I ask them.

“For the journey, I was told,” Stella pipes up.

The blue merwife nods up at the ancient mer-dame I spied before, with the aureole of snowy white hair, perched up in a higher elevation of the shore. “Our sibyl throws sand collected from the shores of the seven seas into her water-glass and reads the patterns,” says Lazuli. “She saw an image of your ship, and we knew we were meant to aid the land folk the only way we can—a safe passage through our element, the water.”

“But why aid your enemies?” Myself, I mean.

Lazuli smiles patiently. “Not enemies, Captain. Yours and mine were the same race, once upon a time. We knew not whose passage it was, nor for what purpose. Nor do we know what the journey is. The old songs tell us only that it begins with the signs.”

“Three signs,” Stella whispers, with an eager glance at me.

The old woman, their sibyl, wriggles up higher upon her shiny tail and mimes at what must be another, much smaller pool of water amid her spiky volcanic peaks. Her voice is soft with age, but it rumbles across the water with authority. “The journey has begun!”

The three elegant fish I saw before, with their jewel-box colors and silken fins, leap across the surface of the water-glass. It seems an ordinary pool of dark water, the circumference of a large platter, formed within a circlet of coralline spires on this crag above the birthing pool. Lazuli worked her way up a terraced path hewn out of the black rock, kept moist by a trickle of water from some hidden spring, while Stella and I were obliged to claw our way up the rocky incline to this plateau, where the sibyl keeps watch over her oracle.

“The sign of Mother Sea,” the mer-sibyl announces, gesturing to the image of capering fish in her water-glass.

“I saw them in the river,” I say to Stella, and feel every other pair of eyes in that vaporous cavern turn upon me. I turn again to Dame Lazuli. “They brought me here.”

“The blessings of two mothers smile on this journey,” the sibyl intones, bright-eyed under her tufted white hair.

“Mother Sea,” Stella murmurs at my elbow. “Mother Earth.”

The sibyl beams at her and stretches knobby fingers into a large, upturned clam shell full of sands of every hue: black, white, red, honey-gold. She sprinkles a handful over her water-glass, peers into it again. “One journey ends, another begins.”

“There are more than one?” I frown.

“It may be like a birth,” the blue merwife suggests. “A change from one condition to another.”

“But whose?” Stella asks softly.

“Whoever earns it,” Lazuli replies. “So our bards sing. But if all three signs are not seen, the chance to take this journey will never come again. Never, ever.”

“So you called Stella here?” I venture. “To placate this oracle?”

But Lazuli gives an adamant shake of her head. “We are very distressed that you are here at all,” she says to Stella. “None of us would ever call you. It is much too dangerous for you.”

“I’ve no wish to cause any more distress,” Stella sighs, shoving back an unruly wisp of her own hair. “Ma’am, the route you spoke of, the one that leads to the great sea. Can you show us where it is?”

A conflagration of feeling crashes against my ribs. But Dame Lazuli sighs, shakes her head again. “It’s a very long way under the sea. Our air bladders would be no use; your human lungs could never endure it. We of the mer-race have sea lungs. They serve us much like yours when we are in the open air, but they extract the air we breathe out of our blood and muscles when we are long underwater. As senior midwife here, I know how our bodies function,” she adds, as if we might disbelieve her.

“Yes, I’m a nurse,” says Stella.

“Then you understand that the distance is too far and the pressure of the sea too great,” rejoins Lazuli. “But if you are skilled at nursing, we might make a place for you here with us.”

“Why…” Stella falters, “that is … a very great honor, Ma’am.”

“She is exceptionally skilled at healing herbs and the like,” I offer eagerly. A refuge from the boy!

“It is calm just now, but at some seasons we have great activity here,” Lazuli tells her. “Another pair of hands would be useful.”

“But … my experience has mostly been with male patients,” Stella confesses. “I have little knowledge of … birthing.”

I hear the sadness she tries to mask in her voice. How might it affect her, all these females birthing healthy young?

“We can teach you what you need to know,” says Lazuli. She tosses back her explosive curls, wriggles a little closer to Stella. “I would prefer to have you here with us than to leave you above and vulnerable to the Boy King.”

Stella looks at me. I nod heartily.

“I regret,” murmurs Lazuli smoothly, “that I cannot offer the same hospitality to you, Captain. You are a legman, an object of great wonder to us, but disturbing to my women at this delicate moment in their cycles. As it is beyond our power to send you anywhere else, you must return.”

“Return? To where?” Stella demands.

“To his ship,” says Lazuli patiently. “Back to the Neverland.”

Back to my eternal torment. Stella will be useful here, the thing she most craves, and safe. But there is no mercy for Hook.

“So be it, Madam,” I say, coolly enough. I step out to the edge of the plateau and gaze down at the water in the pool, darker now, less green and friendly. If Stella’s journey ends here, let her at least remember that I’d not stood in the way of her good fortune.

But Stella rustles to my side. “Then I’ll go with you.”

Thus she makes hash of my attempt to accomplish one honorable thing in my life. “But you’re safe here,” I tell her. “You’ve nothing to fear from Pan if he believes you dead.”

“And what about you?” she counters.

“He can’t hurt me,” I say grimly. “But if you return to the Neverland now, you will be an outlaw. He’ll believe himself justified in hunting you down like an animal with his wild pack of boys.”

“We can do nothing at all for you, my dear,” Lazuli speaks up, “beyond the protection of this grotto.”

“You honor me with your offer,” Stella tells the blue merwife. “I wish I could accept. But I don’t believe that is why I’m here.” She turns again to me. “The signs appeared to you. You had the Dream Vision. It must be your journey, Captain. This must be the chance your witch told you about.”

“This is no game, Parrish—”

“But what if I’m part of the journey somehow?” she goes on eagerly. “What else can I possibly be doing here? Suppose we’re on this journey together?”

Something long dormant stirs inside me. Dare I call it hope? It is a reckless thing.

“Take this,” Dame Lazuli bids Stella, emerging again from the mouth of her cave. She hands Stella a small spiral of pink shell strung on a seaweed thong. “Our sisters are posted in every island waterway, conveying information on currents, tides, and boy activity, for the protection of our grotto. If you change your mind, blow a note on this shell over any body of water in the Neverland, and we will come for you.”

Stella wears the little shell round her neck. It floats above her nightdress as we make our ascent through black water back to the Mermaid Lagoon. The merwife gave us fresh air bladders, puffed up like pastries when properly filled with air; a ready supply is kept for the mer-babes’ first long migrations underwater to rejoin their colonies. Mica, the shark-wrestler, escorts us, although I’m not at all certain she has our best interests at heart. At least not mine. But Stella guides me through the water even when we lose sight of our escort.

Stars scatter like diamonds across the black sky when we finally break the surface of the lagoon. All is still but for a lazy chittering of insects. Stella and I grope for hand-holds in the volcanic mass of Marooner’s Rock, gulping air before swimming for the shore, as Mica disappears again beneath the water.