All The Mermaids In The Sea Read online

  “I can’t do it, Father. I can’t do it alone.”

  “Yes you can, Helmi, and you will not be alone. You will find companions, one by one, and someday you will even fall in love and have children, as I did. Then sometime in the centuries that lie ahead, you will know your time on earth is past, and you will come to me, but not until that time.”

  “Father, don’t go!”

  “Helmi, I must. But before I go, I have to warn you of one thing. Once I depart this world, the skarzs, the demons of the deep, the children of Medea and the cyclops, will be free to rise and roam the seas. They are evil, and only the naricorn of a narwhal will pierce their hearts and bring them doom. Keep all the naricorns you have. Keep them safe, for you and yours will someday do battle with the skarzs and their army of sklugmires for the kingdom of the oceans.”

  “Skarzs? Aren’t they just an old Titan tale Mother used to frighten us with as children? They don’t really exist.”

  “Human mothers tell their children stories about us to frighten them, but we are real.” He sighed sadly as his figure slowly began to fade. “Just as my time has come to fade away, your time has come to rise and take up the scepter of the sea. Each great ruler must pass a great test, and yours shall be to battle with the skarzs. Do not falter, do not despair, or all that we have loved and all that you will come to love will be lost.”

  With that last word, he faded from sight, and she truly awoke to find her father’s scepter, the Trident, in one hand, and a cluster of the golden moss that had covered his heart, clutched in her other.

  The tiny lavender blossoms that were scattered across the moss looked like the Pearls of Amphitrite and gave off a pungent fragrance of cardamom, vanilla, and mint that seemed to soothe and comfort her.

  She wept silently as she gathered more of the golden moss and placed it in her father’s golden net. It was thousands of years old, from a time when he had been known as Neptune and had many powers. The net and the Trident were his two objects of power she felt she should take with her if she was to found a new race of merfolk and fight a battle for the sea. She left the Orb of Nerus cupped in his stony hand, and with the moss, the net, and the Trident, she swam back to her home in the Faeroe Islands.

  Helmi took comfort in the tender administrations of her selkie handmaidens who shared her great sorrow at the passing of her father. They sang and danced for her, reminding her of her sisters in better times, and she returned to caring for each new baby narwhal and collecting the gifts of the naricorns from the old ones as they came to die. Gradually, the Little Mermaid forgot about the danger of the skarzs, and a few centuries passed.

  The Story of Helmi

  Helmi always shed a tear as she rose up through the silent underwater tunnel to the entrance of her father’s palace. The stillness, the silence, the tomb-like emptiness of what had once been the heart and soul of the ocean never failed to send a shock of loss and pain coursing through her soul. The phosphorescent cavern walls illuminated the vast emptiness; light shimmered back from the gold-strewn floors. Her father, turned to stone, stared silently off as if he could see through the very rock walls to some distant place where all he loved was denied him.

  Sadly, that was exactly what had happened and why she had lost him to the eternal sleep. She still missed him. She still felt his guiding spirit from time to time, and believed he was happy with all she had done these past two centuries. She had taken his gift of the golden moss to someday create a new race of merfolk, yet she was still the only Nereid, or mermaid. The love he’d promised she would find had yet to appear. Yes, she was lonely, but she was only a century more than two thousand, and still young.

  Helmi should have known what was coming by the signs, but for some reason she ignored them. Severe storms did not greatly affect the deeper waters where she traveled between her father’s silent palace and her own. She failed to notice that the jellyfish had all descended to the lower depths and that the giant squid were gliding lower and deeper toward the abyssal plains. Schools of mackerel were flowing through the canyon as they swarmed off toward the south when they should have been gorging themselves on plankton fifty feet higher at the top of the kelp forest. All the starfish were crawling down into the rocky crevices underneath the coral reefs as the sea anemones hunkered down as deeply as they could into the sand.

  Intent on harvesting supplies to create salves and medicines for the seals, whales, and narwhals she cared for, Helmi had been lost in her own little world of reverie. Each plant or creature she harvested triggered memories of sitting on her father’s knee and learning its name and magical power or medicinal purpose.

  Helmi had not spoken to another Nereid or any creature brighter than a dolphin in more than two hundred years. Her selkie handmaidens were sweet but simple, like the seals they transformed into when they entered the sea. They were playful and very silly, but they were not great conversationalists. They tended to think only of fish and frolicking, and that was about it.

  Penguins were too migratory for any long conversations or much friendship, and the dolphins were always asking questions and swimming off on little adventures chasing ships and sailors, which was something a mermaid just did not do. Helmi had never talked to a human. She had saved many a drowning sailor by sending her dolphins or creating a wave to lift him up from the deep water and cast him onto the shore. Once or twice she had even taken one by the arm and hauled him up to the surface as he gasped for air, but she had never talked to one.

  She would have liked to. It would have been like talking to her sisters or her parents, and she missed that terribly. But, her father had made her swear when she was just a little Nereid never to deal with the two-leggers that lived above the water. Helmi had occasionally shed her fins on the night of a full moon and walked on land to see the trees and animals, but she had always kept her promise and stayed far away from cities and villages. She often wondered what it would be like to do as her sisters told her they had done and lure a sailor to them with the power of their silver voices, but she was too shy and too afraid.

  She was all alone now, except for her beloved whales, her narwhals, and belugas in particular, for her selkies had migrated to warmer waters for the summer. They sang to her endlessly, and she sang back. That way she never felt completely alone.

  Suddenly, a swift current spun through the canyon and swept her golden net off the rocky ledge where she had placed it, sending it sailing upward toward the surface.

  “My net!” she cried, dropping the sea cucumber she had been digging up out of the sand and racing after it. Up, up, up spun the shining net until it was engulfed by a school of haddock. Their bodies collided with it, sending it spiraling off in a new direction.

  Now Helmi could see the signs of the storm in every direction as she raced after her magical golden net. The sky above the water was growing dark and cloudy. So was the water in the canyon below her as she darted upward grasping at her net. It was still early in the afternoon, and the sun should have been sending down its golden warmth and light, but the sky was almost as dark as night.

  Quick storms like these were usually due to her father’s wrath, but he had caused no such storm in centuries. Neither would he ever again. Only his magic Trident could call down such elemental powers, and she had it safely tucked at her side. It wasn’t so mighty looking when it was not being used as a magical instrument. It swung gently on a loop from her harness. It grew in size as it swelled with power, and she had not used its magic since her father had died over two hundred years ago. This must be a true storm of Gaia, born of the four winds themselves.

  She finally caught up with her net a few fathoms beneath the surface where a layer of calm water left the net hovering for a moment as she reached out to snatch it. Her fingers brushed the golden fibers, and she felt the tingle of power throbbing through the magic threads just as a new swift current sped it off in another direction.

  “Oh no you don’t!” she gasped as she dashed after it. “By Poseidon
’s beard!” she huffed and would have stamped her foot if she’d had one. “I’d swear one of my sisters was making herself invisible and taunting me if it hadn’t been centuries since I last saw them.” For a moment, a little ray of hope wafted through her heart that this might possibly be true, but of course she knew very well that she was the last mermaid. Her magic net was now much farther away than it had been just seconds before as it sailed off during her moment of indecision

  She shifted herself higher up into the current that had caught the net and let it carry her along as she swam to double her speed and catch up with it. The net was not only getting father away, but the ever-darkening sky above, and the cloudy waters that the coming storm was causing, made it harder and harder to see anything at all. If it hadn’t been for the darkened sky and straining her eyes to see the glow of the net in the distance, Helmi would never have missed the solid black shadows of the ships as they glided toward her. She was totally unaware of them as she caught up to the net and snatched it, triumphantly soaring up and out of the water with a giggle of glee and pride, like her dolphin friends did when they frolicked and played with her.

  As she rose above the waves, holding the net high above her head, childishly mimicking her father’s battle cry and shaking her fist as he had with his mighty Trident, she suddenly noticed the three ships tossing in the waves. Even above the howl of the wind, her silver voice, like a magical trumpet, had turned every eye in her direction. Hearing a chorus of gasps and hollers, she suddenly became aware of each ship and each sailor as he pointed to her calling out, “A sea god! We are surely doomed!”

  As if she were made of frozen in ice, she faltered as she swirled in the waves, and her eyes slowly rose to meet the cavalcade of voices clamoring from every direction. As her face tilted up to see the decks of the ships, the wind of the storm suddenly blew her hair out behind her like a gigantic writhing cloud of burnished copper, and her eyes locked on the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.

  It was a young two-legger—a male—with a face of white marble. He stood a head taller than all those around him, and had shoulders the gods would claim. His eyes sparkled as green as kelp, and the mane of tightly curled hair that framed his face was blacker than the blackest pearl. It was as if the wind, the water, the entire world stopped, and she was swimming into his soul through those deep green eyes.

  Helmi didn’t know if their eyes had been locked for a moment or an hour. Perhaps the two beings would have remained so locked together for eternity, lost in a perfect moment, if lightening hadn’t shattered it. Like an angry bolt from her father’s Trident, it stabbed down from the sky in a fit of wrath and shattered the deck beneath the young man’s feet. It hurled him into the sea, flinging the men around him in every direction. A second bolt followed right behind the first and shattered the main mast, splitting the ship’s deck. Helmi didn’t even see the giant wave appear on the horizon and hurtle toward all three ships. She was already under the waves searching for the raven-haired two-legger. Down, down, down Helmi dove until she finally saw the unconscious form of the tall two-legger who had captivated her soul. His body was being carried along at the mercy of the violent currents of the stormy waters.

  “Oh no! He will surely drown!” Helmi cried, and without a moment’s thought to all the sea herbs and plants she had spent the day gathering, she dumped the contents of her net out and swam toward him. Fine bubbles of air like crystal-clear pearls were streaming from his mouth and nose. They glistened like beads of silver against a cloud of scarlet seeping from an ugly gash on his head, muddying the waters above him like a trail of ink from a retreating squid.

  Helmi cast her net over his head and pulled it down around him, expanding its size and pulling it tight. Suddenly the net began to glow, and within its confines, a sphere full of warm air pushed the water surrounding the two-legger away in all directions. He was floating in a golden bubble as he sputtered and gasped for breath.

  Helmi looped the end of the net over one wrist to complete the spell just as a new series of lightning bolts stabbed into another one of the ships above, cracking the hull like an egg, expelling more bodies down into the water. The storm was unnaturally vicious for this season and smelled of bad magic.

  “The old Sea Hag must be at it again!” Helmi sputtered, grinding her teeth and squaring her shoulders as she snapped her tailfin in frustration. Her father’s slumber into stone had left behind a ragged group of water spirits whom her mother had called the misbegotten of the sea. Well this was Helmi’s sea, and no one was going to create storms and wreck ships without her permission!

  Helmi snatched the dormant Trident from the loop in her harness and surged upward holding it high above her head in one hand, clutching the net with its golden sphere and captive in the other. As she broke the surface, Helmi cried out words of power in the ancient Samarian tongue. “Annitue Nergal Anue!” --- Behold, great watcher, the heavenly one!

  Instantaneously all the lightning in the sky converged into arcs of power which lashed themselves around the tips of her Trident. They seemed alive, like writhing serpents of fire, tethered in the angry black clouds above. Larger and taller she grew as the Trident grew with her. Soon she towered above the two ships as they tossed without mercy upon the waves. Her giant form turned to face the howling winds. Her silver voice rang out like a herald’s trumpet as she continued the incantation.

  “Nina sisitu zini semu.” Lady of water, summon the spirit of wind to obey.

  “Tamtu nahu.” Sea, grow calm.

  “Zamani barra.” Lightening be gone.

  “Samsum kasau asabu.” Power of the sun, overcome the darkness.“Dabbu utuk xul kishpu!” Defeat the evil spirit sorcery!

  The twisting ropes of lightening lashed to her Trident’s tip seemed to swell and swirl upward and meld into a pillar of light. It thrust up high above the ships and domed outward with a roar that made the very thunder quiver. A wall of light swept out away from the dome and pushed the storm clouds back, scattering them in every direction. The whole storm seemed to implode and then explode like a sea anemone bursting open in all its glory. In the length of a sigh, the sky was a summer blue, and the golden sun kissed the waves with regret and tender reconciliation.

  After the power burst forth and dissipated the force of the storm, Helmi shrank quickly back to her normal size. She unexpectedly felt frightened and confused. She had never wielded such power, and had never been seen by two-leggers, let alone three ships full of them. She suddenly felt vulnerable.

  What about the Sea Hag? If this storm was of her doing, she would be very angry with Helmi. Abruptly, Helmi just wanted to go home.

  Down she dove without another thought, clutching the shrinking Trident in one hand and forgetting the golden net looped around her wrist—and its wounded captive. She turned her back on the now-calm, clear waters and dove deep into the canyons of the sea. Home and safety were all she thought of as she raced to the entrance of the cave that took her up into the caverns of her father’s underwater palace.

  As she rose toward the surface of the palace pool, the water above her sparkled gold from the torches she had lit. She had left that morning to gather her supplies never expecting to face such an adventure. As if the fire of the torches could sense her emotions, they suddenly flared as if to beckon to her, crying, “Hurry! Hurry home before the Hag comes after you and cuts off your tail!”

  As Helmi broke the surface with a cry of relief, the sphere of air inside the golden net bobbed up beside her. It wasn’t until the motionless figure let out a pitiful groan that she realized she was not alone.

  “Oh my!” cried Helmi, “I’d completely forgotten about you.” She couldn’t believe she had brought a mortal two-legger into the sacred palace of her father. Poseidon might even be shocked into awakening! She had used the Trident, been seen by sailors, swum among ships, and brought a two-legger home with her. In all her eighteen hundred years, she had never done such outrageous things, and today she had done them
all in a few short minutes. If the world was going to end, today was the day! But, the earth didn’t shake, and the walls didn’t crumble. Her father didn’t suddenly stand up from his stony perch and come to life full of wrath and outrage. Only one thing changed—her heart had been captured.

  She was totally taken by surprise. She had seen the two-legged male a few whales’ lengths away and thought him beautiful. But this time, when she reached out to free him from the net and he raised his head to look at his captor, their eyes met just a hand’s width away.

  During the storm, the Trident had caused her body to swell to a giant size. It had prickled her skin with energy. It had been a force every bit as strong as that which now surged between her and this two-legger … an energy that poured into her through his kelp-green eyes … eyes like glowing green stars in a midnight sky, framed as they were by his tangled black curls. They were glorious curls that surrounded his handsome face, swollen with fear that, before her eyes, turned into awe, then wonder. A heartbeat, or perhaps an eternity, passed between them, as they swam into each other’s souls.

  With the touch of her hand, the golden sphere dissolved and the net slid off him and shrank down in size to dangle from the loop on her wrist. The power was released and the spell was gone, yet Helmi felt a surge of warmth that tingled from the top of her head to the bottom of her tail fin, as though she was caught in a net herself. It was the net of true love, and for mermaids, there was never more than one true love in a very, very long life.

  The Good Doctor

  Dr. Holger V. Thorson consulted his clipboard to review the list of Dolphin Quest attendees for the day. Pearl Sorenson, daughter of Ivan and Lina Sorenson, was flagged as “Birthday Party,” which meant his son Hal needed to make sure they were stocked with enough sparklers for the Buoy Cake. They’d had a run of birthdays this week, and he was pretty sure they were getting low. In their signature trick, a dolphin towed a miniature buoy carrying a cake decked out in sparklers as the crowd sang happy birthday, and this trick generated over sixty percent of their business alone. The cable network, Animal Planet, was shooting a segment on their recent advances in dolphin surgery today and wanted to snag some footage of the birthday party for a spot on the show. Dr. Thorson hoped Pearl was a nice little girl and not like the spoiled rich brats they’d had yesterday.