Mark of the Mermaid
Warning: This is a dark story, with a good part of violence, gore,
bloodshed and perhaps even morbid ideas. Anyone familiar with the
Mermaid Trilogy will know why this is so, and not be surprised by it,
but as far as anyone else is concerned... if you're sensitive, don't read
this. I don't want anyone to get upset by it.
I would also like to recommend to anyone who might read this to check
out Takahashi Rumiko's fabulous manga trilogy about the Mermaids. If
only both the main characters were female (and lesbian, of course ;),
it'd be absolutely perfect. *grins*
Feedback would of course be very, very welcome.
----------
What do you know about mermaids?
Do you think of them as cute little redheaded princesses that are
willing to give up their voices for true love, perhaps? Or even the more
sad original fairytale about the little mermaid who gave her life in a
vain search for love?
Or are you one of the few that might have heard the dark legends of old...
that knows that eating the flesh of a mermaid grants a human eternal
life and youth?
The romantic tales are harmless, if cloying to one that knows the truth.
The other... is a damnation for the greedy hearts of men.
I heard those tales myself, in my far distant youth. The flesh of the
mermaid was longevity and happiness, and most of all it was salvation
from famine and disease that plagued us all. I was a fisher and a
hunter, when there was any game to find, in a small village that is long
lost in time by now. My family was ridden with the same misfortunes as
all others then, and I watched my brothers and my father all fall to
them. In the end there was but me, my ailing old mother, my brother's
wife and his small son.
Today people might think it strange if they knew how little it mattered
to my people that I was a woman when I fought alongside them to keep
what remained of my family alive. It was, after all, so very long ago.
It certainly didn't matter when finally, in desperation, I agreed to
join a few of the last moderately able-bodied men from the village in
what I assumed was a wild goose chase.
We were going to catch a mermaid.
I never did find out how the knowledge of her presence came in our
possession, or why she was suddenly just... there. I never bothered to
ask, then, I just picked up my spear and rowed along with the other four
into the dying night. It took us five days to find her. Five days that
might each have cost us all that we were fighting for, but we knew this
was our last desperate effort to keep at least some of our loved ones
alive.
When she broke the water on the fifth night, scales glimmering like
silver in the pale moonlight and her comely face too ethereal for an
earthly creature, I was certain I was dreaming. It seemed like a dream,
how the others threw their spears to harpoon her, and how I raised mine
and let it fly alongside them.
They all hit home, and we had her body pulled from the sea in no time.
Someone else cut up the meat and divided it between us, ending me up
with a smaller piece of the tail than perhaps had entirely been the
agreement. I did not argue as I was grateful I would not have to cut up
what to my eyes was still a woman's body myself, but took my smaller
share in silence as we travelled back to the village.
It took us another two days before we reached our home, and it was a
sombre homecoming. I do not recall it rightly, but I believe that we had
all lost someone during our absence. As for me, I had lost my little
nephew.
The irony of it all is that it was mostly for him that I had gone. We
all knew he had not long to live, just like my mother, and it was all
that I could hope to do for him. I never wanted eternal life, or any of
the things the myths spoke of, I was trying to save the last of my kin.
My sister-in-law blamed me for being away when her son had died, I who
had been forced to take the place of the man of the family. We ate our
last meal together that evening in silence, each of us lacking the
desire to live anymore, but damned to eat regardless because not doing
so would have been to diminish all those lost before us.
It began immediately.
My mother began coughing up blood almost as soon as we had all swallowed
our small fare, and we rushed to her side in horror. With a mighty heave
of her small and emaciated frame, life left her body and she went still,
staring blindly into the distance. My sister-in-law began to keen, a
ghastly, grating noise that would never fade in my memory afterwards,
and doubled over in pain. Before my horrified eyes her body twisted and
turned, buckled and bended, limbs elongating and growing, until what
remained was not the small, skinny woman of mere moments before. She was
now a hideous monstrosity, huge with scales, fangs and claws, twisted
into a nightmare that should never have been allowed to step out of the
night.
The monster then attacked me, cutting me to the bone and tearing me into
a bloodied mass before I had reacted. I can recall the pain of that
first death, but to this day I do not know why I was not eaten by the
beast. Regardless, I woke the next day, my body hale and sound though
filthy with blood, and my clothes mere rags.
I stepped out from our ramshackle hut into hell on earth. Mere words
cannot describe the sight that met me on that trodden piece of mud that
had been my home for all the twenty-six summers I had been under the
sun, so I shall not attempt it. Let it be enough to say that of the
roughly two score people that had been alive at nightfall, only a
handful remained. And they were all beasts like my sister-in-law, indeed
I could tell no difference between their twisted forms as they fed on
the corpses of what could have been their own family members, or fought
viciously with one another.
In time I would come to learn that beasts like these are called 'lost
souls', and that they are created when an unfortunate soul tries to feed
upon the flesh or blood of a mermaid but does not die from it. Only a
rare few, perhaps no more than one or two in a century, are like me and
can survive the dreadful poison of the mermaid flesh.
I discovered many things that day. I discovered that a lost soul is very
difficult to kill, the only sure way would be to behead it, although
fire can work too, and I would much later learn of a poison created by
the rotting form of a mermaid that is most lethal to lost souls as well.
I also learned that not only do I not die, or at least I do not stay
dead for long, but all manner of wounds heal all but instantly, and I
was stronger and faster than before. In fact, my senses seemed sharper
as well, though I have never been able to tell if it was one of the many
effects that comes with the change mermaid flesh brings.
When I left the village I had called home, I left it burning. I am the
sole survivor of that tiny and long forgotten place, and not a mark on
the soil remains to tell people it once existed there, indeed I nearly
missed it when I came back that way a long, long time later. With me I
took my spear, my dagger, a few small tools in a pouch on the rope that
served as my belt, and a set of rags that while worn and tattered at
least did not reek with blood.
At first I travelled aimlessly, not staying long in any place, just
passing through life as a ghost. A hundred years passed unnoticed this
way before I settled down in a village. When I settled down with
someone.
She was a young widow that was well to do and needed not marry again to
ensure her future. It was not a passionate love between us, but rather a
friendship and understanding that kept us together, a need for a
companion. I worked for her to the best of my abilities, and had she
nothing to her name she would still have lived well, I made sure of
that. I also provided her with a kind of protection against unwanted
suitors, as surely no-one could say to her that she needed a man in her
life when I so obviously filled that role to the fullest.
At first the people in the village held their tongues regarding our
relationship out of fear and respect for me as I have always been a
woman standing head-to-toe with any man, stronger than reason, and more
capable at the things they did than they could claim to be. In time it
was out of fear of me, period.
I didn't realize it until my... for all of our supposed arrangements, I
thought of her as my wife. And my wife looked upon me one evening with
an expression in her eyes that cut me far more deeply than any weapon or
claw ever had; she was afraid of me. She was growing old, and I remained
as ever I had been, appearing as though I was still merely twenty-six
summers old. Even though I remained with her until the night she died, I
was from that moment on just a stranger, a hired help that wasn't really
trusted, in her home.
I had told her my secret, and she loathed me for it. But before she died
she did look at me once with something akin to pity in her eyes, and
told me that I needed to find a mermaid if ever I was to find peace.
Nothing else would answer my questions, she said, and until then I would
only be drifting through life as a spectator.
She spoke truer than either of us knew.
I am now roughly five hundred years old, give or take a few as
individual years means so very little to me, and in this time I have
seen so many things. I have seen the history of man stagger onwards
before my eyes, and I have seen untold horrors that would leave people
huddling together in fear of the night. I have had my heart broken so
many times in so many ways... a young woman that touched my heart but that
I had to leave behind, girls that laid their own hearts before my feet
despite my attempts at keeping them at arms length, friends, children,
places I would have loved to call my home; all gone.
Upon occasion my search for mermaids has led me to others such as
myself, and those occasions have given me my greatest heartbreaks.
Like little Natsume.
She was a small girl travelling with her elderly father as he peddled
his fake mermaid medicine in village after village, and I thought I had
met someone like myself. She was impervious to harm, like myself, and
seemed unable to age, and still naïve in regards to the nature of man, I
thought she had been fed mermaid's flesh. A crazy monk told me the
truth.
Natsume had died long ago, and the monk had aided her grief-stricken
father in reviving her corpse with sacred chants and the liver of a
mermaid. The child rose again, but without memory or, it seemed,
humanity - she preyed upon any creature she could to tear out their
livers and eat them; indeed she tried to eat mine.
And yet, the small child befriended me. She wanted so desperately to
understand her own existence, and saw in me a kindred spirit. Also, her
father was old and ill, and she worried that she would soon be left
alone in the world to fend for herself. Perhaps I was truly too naïve,
but I loved that child. I offered her to come with me on my journey, and
she seemed overjoyed when she accepted.
It was not to be, however. While the old man, driven mad by his fear of
losing Natsume, tried to kill me, the monk found her and removed the
mermaid's liver. She ran away from him, and with her last strength, came
to me.
I held her in my arms as death returned for her, turning back into bones
and ash this child I had already begun to love as my own. It felt like
my heart was turning into ash along with her.
Far from all that have achieved eternal life through the means of the
mermaid's flesh would be as sweet as that poor, tortured child, although
it would take a long time until I fully realized how dark my world truly
was.
An encounter with an old oracle once told me that what I was truly
searching for was the one that had been allotted to me. Over time I
would come to realize that in a way that woman was right, and I was
searching for someone to share this unending life with me. But if I were
to have guessed who and how I were to have found her, I would never have
come anywhere near the truth.
Going on my five hundred years I was heading up into the wild mountain
areas that was reputed to be devoid of human population. That served me
fine, I wanted solitude at the time and had no mermaid trail to follow.
Or so I thought.
In those mountains I came upon one of the strangest thing I have
encountered, a village of only women, and not only that, but all the
women wore the same face separated only by age. They were hostile, so
hostile in fact that on the first encounter a group of the younger ones
speared me to death and threw my carcass down into a cavern.
By morning I was revived and quite angry, but before I had the time to
think of what to do, I saw something there. At the water's edge where
the ocean entered the cavern, lay a body. It had a woman's torso, but
the long glittering tail of a fish... at long last I had found a mermaid.
She was beheaded with a piece of her tail missing, and I did not doubt
for a moment that it had something to do with those overly aggressive
women, and so I went in search of them.
I found my way to their village in the nick of time, or, seen in another
way, just slightly too late.
I barged in into the manor house, the largest and finest building there,
despite the women trying to once again kill me with their spears and
axes. Inside I stumbled right upon a couple of old hags loading a young
woman onto a palanquin. I threw the remains of the mermaid at their feet
and demanded they answer my questions, but I had underestimated their
willingness to fight.
I ended up grabbing the girl as a hostage to make them answer me, but
instead the women appeared to be trying to kill her as well. In
desperation I drew her to her feet, preparing to run off and pull her
along with me just through the door so I could escape. It was then I
noticed that her feet were shackled.
The whole event was not one of my finer moments, but in that split
second when spears where dancing around my head, I did the only thing I
could have and lived with myself; I hoisted her up on my shoulder and
ran off into the woods taking her with me.
We ended up in another cave, hiding out while I used a spear I'd filched
to smash open her wooden shackles. She told me her name was Mana, and
that she had worn those shackles all her life. Apparently the women in
the village treated Mana as if though she was a princess, although at
the same time she was very much their captive.
It wasn't until I wiped the blood away from her wounds to find them
completely healed that I realized that she had been fed mermaid's flesh.
I tore the edges of her fine robes into rags I used to bandage the awful
wounds on her legs, and I was shocked to find that even in that
situation I noticed what a rare beauty she was, this Mana. Small and
shapely, with full lips and huge spring-green eyes, long red-blonde hair
and unblemished skin that looked like porcelain; she looked like what I
might have considered perfection to be had I given it thought. I
remember I shook my head to clear it, bemused with why my reaction to
this beauty was so strong. I had after all met many an attractive woman
in my day, and none of them had pulled me in this quickly or this
completely.
I asked her about the mermaid, but she knew nothing about it. We figured
out that the old hags had fed Mana the mermaid flesh the evening before,
on what was supposed to be Mana's seventeenth birthday, but for what
purpose we had no idea. As we spoke over the dressing of wounds, I could
suddenly hear a very familiar moaning coming out of the cave behind us.
The monstrosity that towered up behind us as we turned around could as
easily have come from my home village all those years ago, for it's
appearance was almost identical. Mana gasped out the name that I would
from then on use for these creatures, calling it a lost soul, while I
charged it with the spear I had taken.
As I charged it, it also charged me, and the spear in my hands embedded
itself in discoloured, twisted scaly flesh somewhere around the
shoulder. Another creature would have died, but not a lost soul, and
instead it impaled me on its large claws and flung me across the cave.
Instinct would have had me close my eyes at the impact with the
rockface, but Mana's scream and the roar of the lost soul spurred me
back on my feet instantly. I no longer had a weapon, but I still charged
it to keep it away from her.
Mana's scream had alerted one of the village women out searching for us,
and while I did my best to grapple with the huge beast she jumped down
into the cavern to us. Armed with spears dipped in poison she lunged at
the lost soul, scoring a solid hit in it's side, but not one that would
otherwise have been lethal. It roared and flung me away again, then
turned and slashed its giant claws over the woman's throat.
Mana screamed the woman's name, and I got my feet back under me to
charge again, but the wounded village woman called me back. The creature
shuffled back into the darkness and fled from us, it's pitiful moaning
echoing in the distance as apparently even the relatively minor wound
caused by the poisoned spear would be enough to kill it quickly. The
woman fainted from her severe wounds, and I felt obliged to return the
favour of rescue even though she had been sent out to kill me. I told
Mana to stay while I carried the unconscious woman out of the cave, then
I would come and lift her out as well.
Mana disagreed, stating that she wanted to walk. I was certain she would
not be able to stand, much less walk, after all she had never been
allowed to stand in her life, but I had not taken in account the
strength of Mana's will. I would learn over time that Mana's will is
quite formidable.
Was it a trick of light that made the air seem to glow around her as she
stubbornly pulled herself to her feet? Either way she stole my breath
away with the simple act of standing unsteadily on her own two feet
while the light seemed to turn her hair ablaze. I stopped and stared
like a fool.
Then she fell.
For all her formidable will, her legs would not hold her for long, at
least not at first. It would take time and practice before she learned
to walk and run, but when she did she was even faster than I. At the
moment though, I hoisted the unconscious woman over my shoulders and
lifted Mana into my arms, and carried them both out of the cave. I
placed Mana in as safe a location as I could find and swore to come back
for her later, then set off towards the village trying not to smile at
Mana's cute pout as she stubbornly muttered to herself about not wanting
to be left behind.
I stopped the villagers from attacking me when I reached the village by
telling them that if I was killed, they would never find out where their
precious princess Mana was hidden. A group of women that all wore
exactly the same face as the bloodied one of my burden came forward and
took her from my arms. The only face I could see that was not duplicated
was that of the eldest hag, she who appeared to be their leader. She
invited me to sit and speak with her, and that was after all what I had
wanted all along. I wasn't foolish enough to let down my guard though.
We spoke of mermaids, and of mermaids flesh. We spoke of the curse of
immortality, and eventually I proved that I had eaten it by cutting my
arm open, then letting her watch as it quickly healed before our very
eyes. I didn't realize the danger I had just put myself in.
I also did not know that while I had been away, Mana had stubbornly
continued her attempts to stand. After a few most likely rather
undignified tumbles she finally managed to stand upright and, with the
help of trees and rocks along the way, walk towards the village.
The villagers intercepted her.
The old hag and I were interrupted by a ruckus from outside, and when I
heard Mana's angry voice shouting I rushed to the doors. She was caught
and bound, and frankly put, spitting mad about it. I shouted as well,
demanding she be released, and was about to step out to her aid when my
words turned to blood in my mouth.
One of the old women had crept up behind me while I was distracted, and
rammed a steel harpoon through my chest.
While I stood there, swaying on my feet and grabbing the part of the
harpoon that stuck out through my chest as my blood poured out of me,
the old hag spoke quite calmly to me. Perhaps even slightly regretfully,
although I really couldn't have cared less.
She told me that I had been mistaken. A mermaid would not be able to
help me come to terms with my nature, would not give me my mortal life
back. Indeed the only thing a mermaid had to offer me was death, true
death to end an immortal life, by way of the mermaid poison that also
served to kill the lost souls. She also informed me that the weapon
sticking out of my chest had been dipped in that poison, and that I
would most likely die soon.
Did she expect me to nod and sit back down like a good little girl? With
Mana yelling at the top of her lungs? Not hardly. I grabbed the door and
tore it of it's hinges, roaring furiously as I did so, and slammed it
into the women holding Mana.
I caught Mana on the door before she fell to the ground - a rather
nimble feat all things considered - grabbed her, and dashed back into
the building. I snapped her bonds on the edge of the weapon sticking out
of my chest, and managed to grab a large container of something that
smelled oily just as the women clambered to get through the doorway. I
doused them all and Mana threw the torch on them, and they, as well as
most of the building, immediately caught on fire.
In the panic and confusion that followed I grabbed Mana and carried her
under my arm as I made a run for it towards the woods. No-one pursued
us... they didn't need to.
I made it some distance into the woods before I couldn't carry Mana any
more, in fact I could barely keep myself conscious. Mana dragged me the
last bit to a hole in the ground that proved to be yet another of those
endless caverns that traced through the hills there. We got inside a
ways before I felt it would be safe enough for me to pull the harpoon
out.
It was... unpleasant. I placed the back end of the weapon against the rock
wall, and had to ask Mana to help push me back all along it's length
until it could be pulled out of me. I bit down on a piece of her robes,
not that she had much of them left by now, and she looked very
determined.
Then I asked her to suck the poison out.
I am fortunate that under that surface of refined sweetness she has a
core of solid steel, because how else could she have bent down to that
gaping mess of my chest and sucked the poison out. I am sure I would
have succumbed to it had she not helped me like she did.
I passed out from the pain, but not until I saw her serious face light
up slightly in a tiny relieved smile when she saw that I was still
alive. I do not know how long I was out, but Mana has told me that while
I was unconscious she sat watching over me in the dark of the cave.
Eventually she heard the moaning of a lost soul heading our way, and as
the completely fearless being that she is, she picked up the bloody
harpoon and prepared to protect me.
She cut it deeply over it's belly, and it slashed open her cheek. It
also threw her right into my arms, which is what woke me up. We both
heard the rumbling just before the water hit.
The reason the village women had not pursued us into the caves was that
they had another plan; they were going to flush us out. Apparently the
caves that riddled those hills were all connected and ended up in the
sea, which was why the lost souls wandered so freely through them all,
and the villagers had long ago built a dam to keep the village from
being flooded. Now they released the dam, sacrificing their village in
their pursuit of us, and placed themselves at the exits where the water
would come rushing out.
I clung to Mana, and she to me, and I was certain I was going to drown
yet again. I had experienced that kind of death once before, and knew it
was not pleasant. But then again, dying without the benefit of death
never is.
Mana was no longer conscious when the water carried us out to the
ocean's edge where the village women awaited us. So she did not share
the view I had as I suddenly saw them all transformed by the water into
their true forms... as mermaids.
A mermaid that is not hungry or on the hunt is a beautiful creature, so
beautiful in fact that it lures it's prey right into it's arms - it's
prey being humans - before it's true face is revealed. A mermaid on the
hunt however is hideous, every bit as hideous as a lost soul because the
beauty that was there mere moments before is instantly elongated and
twisted into that horrendous fanged creature. It is even more
frightening because it is only the head that changes, the rest of the
mermaid remains it's beautiful, graceful self, sending a jarring feeling
of... wrongness into your soul.
They opened their huge, hungry maws to attack, and swam right up to us.
One white-haired beast bit deeply into Mana's arm, taking a chunk out
before I could tear it away. As I fumbled with the harpoon that Mana had
not lost during our turbulent ride, I saw the creature's face turn into
a duplicate of Mana's as it swallowed the piece of her, it's hair
turning black and it's body becoming younger.
The veiled words of the old hag suddenly became all to clear... the
village women had raised Mana for the purpose of eating her once she was
old enough, and if she survived eating the mermaid's flesh. Apparently
it was the reason they had all worn the same face, as they took on the
appearance of their victim.
I speared the creature wearing Mana's face repeatedly, until I managed
to tear of it's head. Then I managed to get us both to the surface, my
lungs burning from lacking air for far too long. I was in luck, and we
had not come far from the rocky edge of the cliffs, so I pulled us both
up and prepared for the attack.
And they came.
One by one in an endless row, throwing themselves out of the water at
me. The harpoon in my hands was used to the outmost of my ability, and
they were thrown back into the churning water. Until the last one.
I lost the grip on the harpoon, or rather I had to let it go as I needed
to use both hands and all my strength to keep the mermaid from eating
me. Thus occupied I didn't see the old hag walking up to Mana were she
lay, still unconscious. I didn't see her as she lifted Mana and held a
spear to her chest, intending to run her through. I didn't see Mana wake
and struggle with her, or hear the old hag tell Mana that she must be
eaten.
I did, however, see them when the old hag had the spear cutting into
Mana's throat, and my struggles with the mermaid increased. I'm sure I
shouted some profanities or threats at the hag as well. I had after all
just found Mana, and was far from willing to have her taken from me so
soon.
Just as I chopped the head off the mermaid I was fighting, Mana roared
angrily at the hag and tossed her nearly all the way to the water's
edge. She yelled that she wasn't going to let someone kill her, she was
going to live, damnit!
Did I mention that Mana has a quite a temper sometimes?
I was back on my feet and with the harpoon in my hand, so I stepped in
front of Mana just in case the old hag decided to try her luck. She
wouldn't take one step before I had her skewered, and I'm sure she knew
it. She sat, unmoving and silent for a long while. All that could be
heard was the splashing and panting moans of the mermaid beasts right
behind her at the water's edge, driven mad by hunger but unable to come
to us now that the water was no longer churning so wildly.
The old hag sighed, then told me that it was too late anyway. The
mermaids had reverted too far, even if they ate us they would no longer
be able to return to human form. I asked her why she had not tried to
eat Mana herself when she had the chance, after all, the ones that
attacked me in the water had tried to get a chunk out of either of us
any way they could.
To my surprise the old wretch told us that she was not a mermaid, but a
human turned immortal by eating mermaid's flesh, just like Mana and
myself.
If it had shocked me, the rest she told us shocked me more; she had
lived in that village for a very long time, since it was the only place
she thought someone like her could live. Every once in a while they had
stolen a female infant from the villages surrounding their wild expanse,
and raised them until they were old enough to be eaten. Only a rare few
survived eating the mermaid's flesh, and the ones that turned into lost
souls were brought to the caves and left there, as a new child was
taken. Because mermaids need to feed upon the flesh of an immortal human
to remain able to take human form and retain their youth. She had aided
in all this horror, even though it had tortured her soul beyond repair.
And now that the mermaids were once again bound to the sea, she would
remain there, alone, to watch over them. Until the end of time.
I took Mana with me and left that wretched place, indeed I don't know if
I would have been able to let her go if she had wanted me to. But it
didn't matter, she would have insisted I take her with me had I decided
not to. And given her nature and my curious inability to truly tell her
no, she would have gotten her way.
Through her eyes I am learning to see the world anew. I never noticed
all the marvel of it before, but when she turns that wide-eyed green
gaze my way and asks questions in wonder over something, I can't help
but share it with her. I feel curiously young and hopeful again.
The one allotted to me.
She is young, so very young... I won't pressure her with any of my
burgeoning feelings towards her, or the longing sprung from an immortal
life in solitude. I'll just be her guide, her guardian and her protector
as she discovers herself and the world, and we'll see what happens.
Perhaps one day, when she is ready...
Suddenly the thought of seeing how long you can live before getting
completely sick of it doesn't seem like such a bad thing anymore.
Not a bad thing at all.
Back to Mermaid Trilogy Shoujo-Ai Fanfiction