The Sea Keeps the Wronged

I have lived in the sea long enough to understand that it will not save the drowning. It only saves the condemned.

From the safe depths of the ocean, I trailed a school of sardines meant for my dinner.

My tail slowed to a lazy undulation. Calm. Casual. As if I were one of them. Then a veil of darkness fell over us. They scattered. I huffed a plume of bubbles—such fretful things. The shadow moved along, growing in size as it advanced. Darkness cascaded over my face, then enveloped my body. My eyes tracked the shadowed path to the surface.

A dark wooden belly slid over the bright ceiling of the sea. Its curved ribs recalled the nave ceiling of my village chapel.

Merchant ships heavy with olive oil, wine, and spices often crossed the Ligurian Sea. I kept far from every coast, far from humanity and what I had once been.

With a flick of my tail, I eased upward to inspect from afar. The hull grew larger. Timbers creaked, vibrating a groan. This was no merchant ship, but a smaller, private vessel. Much too small to be this far at sea.

I glanced at my tail. Bones still protruded on each side of the joint, hinges to my frayed fin. A jagged scar ran a young eel’s length up from where my ankles used to be. The tan scales grew back irregular and ugly—a mark of my last encounter with people.

I had no intention of surrendering another corner of the sea I had carved out for myself.

Giving myself a wide berth, my tail carried me a few body lengths away before I let my head break the surface. Only my dark hair and eyes broke into their world. It was loud. I forgot how noisy humans were. Wind tousled my short hair. I took in a deep breath, the gills on my neck clamped shut.

Men scurried about and shouted upon the deck. Blocks knocked against wood, canvas sails cracked against the steady gusts. I rocked with the waves while the sea slapped against the ship's sides.

As if leading the way, a bare-breasted mermaid with features carved into impossible beauty was built into the bow. Long waves of hair fell to her hips where her ornate tail began.

I exhaled a chuckle. My hand lifted to the back of my head, fingers combed through my short locks. Such long hair would get caught in everything. I had seen such ridiculous renderings before… before I knew what mermaids truly were. Perhaps men conjured such beautiful visages to spare themselves the embarrassment of admitting they followed our calls straight to ugly creatures bent on their demise.

With a shake of my head, I was about to duck back into my own world when I saw her. A young woman stood at the edge, unmistakable amongst the ugliness of man. Delicate and young—younger than I had been when I was still human.

A thin, cream linen wrapped over her head and hung below a pointed chin. Two loose blonde strands like rays of sunshine framed her face. She scanned the horizon, unaware I was part of it. My heart leaped when her eyes passed over me. But they never lingered.

Then a man came to her side. Ruddy and dark in complexion like me. Tall and dressed in attire uncouth for a rugged sailor. A long arm stretched out and hugged her around the shoulders. Wind fluttered the shawl beneath his hand as if it willed to be free. She leaned into his touch with a smile spread wide across her small face.

My cheeks burned at the sight.

Stupid girl. She knew nothing of the horrors of men. I should have turned away. Instead, I followed her. The ship, that is. Out this far from land, I could not surmise what a woman was doing aboard at all.

For miles I drifted beneath them. As day ebbed to evening, their pace slowed. Strangely slow.

Their sudden stillness drew me back to the surface. The wind did not flick my hair this time. Shadowy masses drifted overhead faster than the vessel that depended on the wind’s mercy to carry it.

Men still moved about, but without their earlier haste. Their sails hung slack.

As night came, I retreated to my own shipwreck on the seafloor, an ancient failed voyage tucked into the seagrass as though in slumber.

Sleep came slowly. I could not decide whether I feared the ship would be gone by morning or hoped it would be.

When I awoke, I hurried out and up to find the ship unmoved. The air remained thick and still, with a morning sky as dark as evening.

I searched the deck, but never saw her. By nightfall, unease drew me back up again. My face was met with steady rainfall, blurring my sight of the ship.

Two more days of rain came and went with only sympathetic sways from the sea. The sails still hung like burial cloth.

Their stillness drew me unnaturally close. Hidden beneath the bow, I could make out voices.

“Not a breath!” a man said. “Days and not a breath!”

My throat tightened. They spoke my language. I had not heard Genoese in so long.

“I have been praying,” another said hopefully.

“Pray all you like; the Madonna will not fill the sails!” the first man hissed.

By night the rainfall had turned ugly. Thunder rattled their wooden coffin. Lightning streaked across in flashes. I imagined the men quaking inside. The thought warmed me.

Except… she was aboard. A sardine amongst sharks. The storm worried me less than what the men might do if they got desperate.

Sleep evaded me yet again. The sea swayed me in my seagrass-woven bed like a mother rocking me to sleep. But if this was the sensation at the bottom, I knew the top must be turbulent. In the dark, I surged past squids whose pale bodies glistened as they coasted through the black water.

The sea seized and tossed me as I neared the surface. I broke through into chaos. The sky was a bruised, fathomless blue; lightning revealed men frantically running about. Their ship tossed them back and forth, playing with them. I bobbed with the waves, my eyes darting about the ship in search of a flaxen head.

Their commotion allowed me closer than I had dared, until my shoulders broke the surface.

I circled once, twice, before I saw her. Two men carried her by the arms onto the deck. Her frantic heels kicked up her soaked skirts as she fought. Her head covering was gone, rain pelting her bare face.

Unable to hear but a few cries, I came as close as I dared. Not so near as to be slammed against it by the waves.

“No! Please!” A shrill cry sounded.

A man shouted, “It has to be done!”

“You cannot kill my wife because the wind has failed us!” Another voice, deep and desperate.

The first man answered. “And when the water runs out? Will you kill thirty men instead?”

A gruff, harsher voice carried over them all. “If she is innocent, God will receive her.”

Screams carried over the clash of water pelting down. A deep thumping of feet echoed as the girl’s cries grew shriller.

“Bastards! No! You cannot do this! Let go of me! Domenico! Domenico, you cannot let—!”

A shrill scream ended her words, punctuated with a sickening splash from the other side of the vessel. 

I dove beneath the belly. Then, a flash—the lightning above lit my world.

Down she drifted, her long hair wavering like seagrass. Her clothes, mostly bound to her body, flitted upward as a trail of silver bubbles streamed toward the life she left above.

I rushed after her until another flash guided me deeper.

Up close, her blonde hair blazed in the burst of light, only to be swallowed by black again when the lightning passed.

An arm flailed out, reaching upward. She thrashed her body. Her legs remained stiff as a board. Rope bound her tightly from her feet to beneath her bust. One arm was tied down to her body while the other had broken free.

I kept pace with her as she plunged deeper and deeper. Her woolen skirts weighed her down under the rope and hastened her way to the bottom. Her eyes were wide. Another flash. They were blue—such a pretty, serene blue.

Her arm bent from straight up and reached for me, her hand shaking. Her mouth clamped shut, then opened in a scream. Through the burst of bubbles came one word: “Aiuto!”

I could save her. Cut her bonds. Carry her to the surface. But what then? I could never return her to those men. A woman’s presence upon a ship was bad luck.

Where could I take her then? What would I do with her?

I had not seen a mermaid like me. Alive, that is. I saw one dead once. Her body wedged between red coral of the Sicilian coast, her face pecked away and chunks taken of her body by other creatures of the sea. What would it be like to have another to swim along beside?

The rope cinched around her bones brought a choke to my throat and speed to my heart.

Men shouting, spitting at me, wishing me dead for the betterment of the crew.

Women are a curse to the ship!

The burning in my throat as the sea filled it. The light disappearing as I sank deeper and deeper. The terror when I awoke alone on the sea floor.

I would not let her be alone.

It should be only moments now. Soon, the last of her air would escape, and the sea would fill the hollow left behind. I had seen many drown, but none transform. What if, like me, she could?

I took her outstretched hand, my tail tucked beneath the bend in her legs to slow her descent.

It took only a minute more for her to succumb. She fought against it, her eyes wild and fixed on mine. Her thrashing slowed, then stopped altogether. I carried her home, into the hollow remains of a ship that had met much the same fate.

The cabin was small. Turned completely upside down, the floor was the ceiling, the ceiling the floor. I laid her on a woven bed in the furthest corner and retreated to a spot near the entrance. For hours I watched from across the cabin. The current gently stirred her hair and skirts, but otherwise she lay unchanged. At some point I fell asleep.

I awoke to screaming.

My eyes took a moment to focus. I scrambled up. Across the room, the girl was curled inward, half bent to the extent her bonds would allow. Her one freed arm propped her up.

“Aiuto!” she pleaded.

One hard sweep of my tail carried me to her.

She flung herself backward, cracking her head against the wooden wall.

“Stay away from me!” The water caught her words and carried them to me, low and strange.

For the first time in decades, a voice beneath the sea was not my own.

She moved about so much that she stirred algae to drift up and tore my seagrass bed.

I lifted my hands, palms out, my sharp nails instinctively flexed as my fingers straightened.

She shrank against the wood, though there was nowhere farther to retreat. Her chest strained to rise and fall. Fresh gills fanned out on each side of her neck, opening and closing rapidly like shutters.

“Please,” I began. Words felt so rusty in my mouth. “You are safe now.”

Still, I edged closer. Her body quivered as I came alongside her.

“Stay away!” she said between ragged breaths.

At these words, her eyes wildly followed the bubbles that sprang from her mouth. Her hand lifted to cover her mouth, only to lose the prop that held her up; the water eased her fall.

I rested beside where her legs had once been. In one hand, I gripped a section of rope and, with my talons, tore her free of the ties across her body. As the ropes fell from her, she squirmed away and clumsily swam backward to the other side of the room. It was then her wild eyes unlocked from mine and fixated down at herself.

It was not as pretty or ornate as the one portrayed at the bow of the ship.

Her tail was like mine. Thick. Misshapen. Fused along the soft inner flesh where her legs had been bound together.

Her trembling hands explored it. They stopped at her knees. Two knobby joints pressed beside one another beneath the skin. She strained to pull them apart.

They would not move.

Her hands crept toward her ankles, trembling harder. Small triangular scales covered her from beneath her bust to the tip of her tail. Where her ankles had been bound, a fin now fanned outward.

Another gentle sweep of my tail brought me closer.

“You are safe now. Please calm down,” I said.

Her eyes darted from me to the opening by her side, and she fled. Well, she tried. Her tail bucked awkwardly beneath her, carrying her through the opening in a crooked surge.

She managed to make it outside and to the seafloor. Her chest rose and fell at a rapid pace.

I remained in the doorway and settled onto the overturned frame.

From lying on her back, her arms lifted her to a seat, then she scooted back, billowing puffs of silt from the seafloor until her back met a rock. There, finally, she eased herself to somewhat of a calmer state.

“Who—what are you? What is this? What is happening?”

I offered her a small smile. Careful to keep my lips covering my teeth.

“You were thrown overboard by the men on your ship. The sea deemed you innocent and let you live. You are like me now.”

She shook her head wildly. “No, no, my husband is on the ship. He is the ship master. He would not—he could not—he…”

My nails picked absently at the rotting wood beneath my hand. “I was snuck aboard by a man who declared he loved me. Promised to take me from Genoa to Palermo to start our lives together…” A glint of silver caught my eye as a small school of minnows wove their way overhead. “He stuffed a kerchief in my mouth to muffle my scream before I was thrown over.”

She stared, taking me in from head to tail. “What are you?”

“People call us mermaids.”

Her features pinched. “You do not look like a mermaid.”

A chuckle coughed out of me, rusty from years of disuse. “No, no, I suppose I do not. Men get it wrong. We do not look like the stories.”

She swallowed. “Who are you?”

“I am Battistina.” I paused; I had not said my name since I was earthbound. “What is your name?”

Her nostrils flared, the fragile calm in her breathing unraveling. “Lucia.”

I bobbed a slow nod. “Lucia…” I said, testing it out. “Beautiful name. Lucia, I know this is scary. I became this way just as you did. Bound and thrown into the sea because of men's fallacies.”

Her nose wrinkled, brows drew together. “How long have you been down here?”

“Hmm.” A crease formed between my brows. “What year is it?” I asked.

“1683.”

A deep breath left me; my gills flexed.

Lucia caught sight of my neck and stared.

“I have been here since 1624,” I said.

Her brows climbed into her hairline. “What? No…no…. That cannot be. I cannot be…”

Lucia’s head turned sharply as she took in the strange world around her. Her attention paused briefly on a rainbow wrasse gliding past in a flash of green and gold.

“Wait, you were there as I was drowning… Why did you not save me?”

A rasp escaped me before I found my voice. “I did save you. The curse is not to live beneath the sea; it is to be on the earth amongst the perils of men.”

Lucia craned her neck upward. The vast sea stretched endlessly above her. I saw nothing but opportunity there—a peaceful life waiting for her, if only she would accept it.

I eased off the edge of the door frame and drew near her again. She did not recoil as she had before but eyed me warily. “You need to eat. Mussels? Eel? I hope you favor seafood because you will soon have to learn to.”

Her mouth fell open a moment before it swung shut to form words. “I… I live down here now? I have to accept this ill fate?”

I grimaced. “Child, do not think this way.” I sighed. “This is a life of peace, harmony amongst the sea. You are blessed. The sea chose you.”

Her gaze dropped to her tail, her features twisting with disgust. “What about my husband? The others upon the ship? What will become of them?”

I smiled softly, the points of my teeth peeking through. “Oh, do not fret, child.”

A hand lifted to her own mouth, poking at her teeth. Her hand jerked back at the sharp tips.

Careful not to startle her, I took her hands and drew her up. “We will build up your strength and find those men, your husband and the crew. It took me a few weeks to get my bearings, but after stranding a few ships on rocky shores, I finally found the one heading to Palermo… My lover got to see me claw his heart out before throwing him amongst the rocks with the others.”

Lucia stared at me, widening her pretty blue eyes. Above us, somewhere beyond the dark, her husband's ship waited.