Copenhagen or Anywhere
by Hanne BlankMoonlight gleamed off the top of the rock, or more accurately off the guano that painted the wet basalt. A grunt, a splash, a muttered curse came from the shadowed waterline, unheard by anyone save the barnacles. In the distance, the lights of moored ships glowed a wan yellow that looked, to Canta’s eyes, much warmer than any artificial light had any right to do. She glowered at their duplicity, or perhaps at her own for thinking of them with such instinctive fondness, and thrashed her flukes hard against the cold water, heaving with tail and arms until she managed to get herself far enough up that she wouldn’t slip back down again.
Rock scouring her belly, Canta pushed herself further, snarling at the insult that was the weight of her body out of water. Once she had thought it terrifically romantic, the idea of a mermaid sitting alone on a rock, Andersen’s beautiful young siren staring longingly toward the land. Familiarity, however, had bred contempt, as well as the realization that the only thing realistic about the fish-tailed girl in Copenhagen harbor was that she too was smeared with seagull shit.
The air tasted of iodine, rot, and faintly of fuel. It took Canta a moment or two to remember how to breathe it deep, to suck it into her lungs. After water, air was so thin, so uninformative, that it scarcely seemed worth the trouble. She had learned to smell the undulating darkness of schooling sardines, to identify without pausing the ammoniacal tang of sharks, to scent the wake of other mermaids, so that only the strongest currents could keep her from finding her way home, even in the inky completeness of the undersea night. Atop the rock she could smell only the stench of the rock itself, and sometimes a puff of diesel from the generators across the bay.
Then the wind changed, scooping the smells from the restaurants along the curved and whitewashed waterfront and sending them out to sea. Canta’s mouth watered. A thousand memories of kitchens and tables flashed in her mind, kitchen tables, dining rooms, restaurants. The reassuring solidity of diner china. The taste, no, the feeling, of hot food in her mouth. Warm bread with butter. Fried chicken, crisp and tender-lush. She sniffed the air like a dog. Someone was grilling meat. There was garlic and tomato and oil, fat spitting on a grill. She imagined that she could see the glow of the wood fires in brick courtyard ovens. Fine and high, a wisp of sweet nutty bread came to her as if she had magicked it into being. Oh God, pizza. Canta bit her lip hard, and sternly told herself that she would not cry.
She sat with her back to the moon, of course. Hair down, wet and sleek against her back, arms folded in what she had once thought of as a lap, the mermaid curled in on herself. In the dark, and from a distance, there was no telling her from a sea lion. Or so she had been told, so the mermaids believed, and she hoped that it was true. Carefully she let her fingers measure the length of the scar on her chest, the corded thickness of it curling up and around her shoulder. Would she have survived such a thing had she suffered it before, in her other life? Canta thought not. She had always healed fast. But she was a full mermaid now, and her arms and hands bore streaks that had gone from raw and bloody to being as silver as her scales almost overnight. No one bled for long underwater and lived. It was adaptive, and so were the healing arts that were practiced beneath the waves: it was a long war, and not a warrior to spare.
Canta couldn’t remember now whether she had really known about the killing when she joined them in full. It seemed that she had been vaguely aware that the stories were not mere show, that men were right when they said the sight of a mermaid meant doom. Maybe she had reckoned it a magical process, an ensorcelment, a compulsion, that the men would simply drown, or die in their sleep, or go so mad that they were dead to themselves and no one could possibly take them seriously. Maybe she hadn’t really reckoned it at all, hadn’t thought it through. And by the time Dritta found her in the thick of it, with the burning petrol and the debris all around, and the screaming and the pleading for mercy and the faces taut and tortured in the flame light, well, by then it had been too late, hadn’t it?
She still remembered how the dagger went in. She hadn’t been entrusted with a longer blade yet. Clumsy even with the short one she had had to grab the man and pull him close to stab him, her tail and body not yet coordinated enough to give her leverage against both sea and sailor. He had had the broad flat nostrils of a New Guinea man, the sleek hair of an Indonesian, and the blade pierced his belly like soft cheese as his eyes went wide with sudden comprehension. He hadn’t known there were mermaids until one killed him.
He hadn’t realized that we were mermaids until I killed him. Canta shook her head, remembering Luvosh’s reaction. To Luvosh it didn’t matter whether they knew it or not. There could be no witnesses, no one left who might have seen, who might have known, who might even possibly have seen enough to spin tall tales later, after he had healed and gone back to land, about the night he fought the mermaids.
Luvosh had tracked her down that night, she and Dritta, even as the battle raged overhead. They followed the scent of the man’s blood through the water where Canta had dragged him down and further down, doing him the mercy of drowning him more quickly than he would bleed or burn to death amidst the wreckage of the Jenever.
You placed the charge on the hull, Dritta had hissed, what did you think we were going to do with them, give them surfing lessons? Canta looked across the dark water at the tree-furred hump of hills that rose above the town and tried to stretch to soothe the bits of her that ached. She couldn’t remember what she’d said to Dritta any more, or what she’d thought. Loud laughter, low and raucously male, echoed from a ship. Faraway music came and went with the breeze, fading in and out as if on a failing crystal set. The side of her flank shone like platinum in the rising moon that whitened her skin and scales. She sighed and slid down the rock. The night was too bright. What was it that Luvosh had said?
Canta slipped easily back into the water, the comforting black pressure yielding to the curves and planes of her thick muscled body, her body responding easily to the weight and density of sea. Yes, that was it. I know it’s hard for you. But you’ve got to get it through your head, Canta, survival means we have to resist the temptation to exist. We do not exist. You do not exist. We are figments of old sailors’ imaginations and singing, dancing plush toys made for little girls.
Canta pulled in a deep, deep breath of water, relishing the hiss and bubble of the air leaving her lungs. She could surface, could look back one more time. But it was all the same to her now, the dry world where she had spent so many years. It was nothing but a desert, its sands made of memory, its air too thin. It was just another harbor town, just another mirage. She could only ever be the little mermaid, in the harbor on the rock, a moment from vanishing back into the sea, Copenhagen or anywhere. Even that was too much.
The scent of her sisters was in the water, twined among the kelp, the warm sweet scent of fierce impossibility. Canta put her head into the current and swam.
©Hanne Blank
Hanne Blank has published more books than she has fingers on one hand, the most recent of which is the acclaimed Virgin: The Untouched History
(Bloomsbury USA). Learn more at www.hanneblank.com.