Page 47 of The Sirens

46

MARY

Bubbles streamed past her, whirling white.

Eliza. She was there, the fins along her spine shifting and bristling, striped like a tiger in a story from the East.

The air bubble was quickly getting smaller: Bridie and Sarah pressed their faces against the dank wood of the hull, their fingers white as they gripped the planks. Annie curled into her mother’s chest, taking weak breaths of the dwindling air.

The women flinched as they approached, their feet treading the water in a frenzy of panic. They were afraid, Mary realised. She and Eliza appeared to them as monsters.

‘Bridie,’ she said.

Her friend’s lips moved in response, but it took Mary a moment to make out the words over the lap of the sea against the hull and the creaking timber.

‘Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death …’

‘Don’t you know me, Bridie? Take my hand. You have to come. If you stay here, you’ll die.’

But still Bridie’s eyes glittered with fear.

‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’

‘I’m not going to hurt you, Bridie!’

There was the thunk of the ship hitting the ocean floor. Cold fear bloomed in Mary’s gut. The air bubble morphed, shrinking.

She had to find a way to reach them. To show them that despite the new strangeness of her body – the frilled flesh of her neck, the fins – she was still Mary. Mary who had bled and cried with them, who had sung with them in the dark.

‘ You should have known me before ,’ she sang, the water turning her voice eerie. ‘ I sang you to sleep and I robbed you of wealth … ’

Eliza surfaced next to her, and together they sang the last line.

‘ And again I’m a maid on the shore ’

‘God help me,’ Bridie breathed. ‘It is you. Both of you.’ ‘Take a breath,’ Eliza said. ‘Take a breath and don’t let go.’

Bridie wrapped her legs around Mary’s waist, as if she were a little child. Eliza took Sarah’s weight, Annie tucked safe between their bodies, her mother stroking her hair to soothe her whimpering. ‘You’ve just got to be my very good girl for a moment longer, a linbh ,’ she gasped.

Checking that Bridie’s arms were tight around her ribcage, Mary slipped beneath the surface.

The moon glimmered on the waves, debris crashing against the rocks. The coast rose behind them, a dark curve. Mary felt a power humming from it. She saw eyes burning bright in a great forest, faces framed by pale trees. The land had hidden her people in her belly for thousands of years, but now the English – men like the captain and his officers – had come to split her open. Mary would have no part in it, she decided. She would not venture beyond the rocks and cave in the cliffs. She would leave the land and her people alone.

She hooked her arm around Bridie’s waist and swam backwards, letting her friend feel the night on her face, the cool air in her lungs. Tears shone in Bridie’s eyes as she took ragged, gulping breaths.

Mary leaned down and placed a kiss on her forehead.

Beside her, Eliza floated on her back, Sarah and Annie tucked under each arm.

‘Look at that, a linbh ,’ Sarah whispered, lifting her hand from the water to point at the spangled sky. ‘All those stars. Aren’t they grand, so? Aren’t they beautiful?’

While the others clung to a floating barrel, Mary and Eliza gathered as many planks of wood as they could find, lashing them together with seaweed and torn lengths of canvas sail. By the time the raft was finished, the horizon was beginning to pale, the stars fading.

They lifted their friends onto the raft, the three of them clinging tight together.

‘Do you think anybody else …’ Bridie started but did not finish. The question hung in the air.

Mary thought of what she’d seen as she swam through the sinking ship. The limp flower of a hand; the strands of hair moving with the current.

Not even the sailors had been able to swim. What chance had the women had, locked in the prison deck?

‘We should say a prayer for their souls,’ Annie said, her voice small in the night.

‘Yes, a linbh ,’ said Sarah.

Bridie reached forward, stroked Mary’s gills with gentle fingers. ‘I think we have the old gods to thank for this,’ she said softly. ‘And so I’m not much of one for praying, just now. Let us bid our friends farewell, instead.’

Sarah nodded. She turned in the direction that the ship had sunk – there was nothing but black sea, silvered by the coming dawn – and trailed her hand in the water.

‘ Slán abhaile ,’ she said. ‘ Slán abhaile .’

As the sun rose in the sky, Bridie, Sarah and Annie rested, their bodies curled into each other on the makeshift raft.

Mary and Eliza swam to the reef, to the jaws that had closed around the ship’s body. They gathered supplies for the others – a bladder of water, any food that might have survived the wreck.

The reef reminded Mary of the forest in spring, teeming with colour and movement. Bristles of pink and red coral moved gently with the current. Fish shimmered past. A dark shadow lifted itself from the seabed and floated away.

She had never seen so much beauty. Her eyes ached with looking and yet she hardly dared blink. It was as if, for all these years, she had been living with a great thirst, and at last was able to slake it.

She reached out a hand, stroking the fins that made their way down her sister’s back.

I wish you could see this , she said.

Eliza turned to her, and there was something different in her face, something certain in her eyes.

I can , she answered. I have always seen this. This moment. Us, changed by the sea. I spent so much time dreaming of it, longing for it. For the tír fo thuinn. The land beneath the waves.

I know you did.

I wanted to find it. I wanted to find Mam.

Mary placed her hands on Eliza’s arms. Energy pulsed between them.

I am sorry for the things I said. That night we were arrested. I am sorry that I didn’t want to talk about Mam. That I didn’t believe you. And that – and that I made us stay behind, all those years ago.

Eliza smiled, tears glinting in her eyes.

But you didn’t, she said. I was the one who was frightened, who did not want to go.

I do not understand. Eliza?

I had told you that I didn’t want to leave Da. But you knew I would not tell Mam; you knew how much I longed to please her. And so you pretended that it was you – that you were the one who was afraid. You did that for me.

Eliza begins to cry, and soon, Mary joins her. This, Mary understands, is why Eliza had wanted so badly for her to remember, why she had wanted them to talk about Mam. She had not wanted Mary to blame herself for Mam’s leaving.

Perhaps we were both afraid.

Yes. Perhaps we were not ready – perhaps we would never have been ready, if not for the ship, and everything that led to it. But now we are here, and it is ours. The tír fo thuinn. Unless you want to go back?

Mary thought of the world above the water’s surface. She thought of Byrne and his cruel, sharp fingers. She thought of the captain and the look on his face when he had ordered that Aoife be whipped.

But then she thought of Da. The comfort of his voice, his stories. The way he had tried so hard to protect them – from men like Byrne, but also from themselves.

But hadn’t he taken them from the sea, from their birth right? Hadn’t he deprived them of the chance to choose?

She knew that she would miss Da for every day that remained to her. The currents would change and the coral would grow and she would think of him and worry. Whether he was ill, whether he was warm and fed. Who would wash his body and light the candles after he died.

But even if she wanted to find her way back to him some-how – back to the little village near the stream – she could not. She was changed. She was free.

She prayed for Da, prayed to the God that he had taught her to believe in. And she prayed to the sea with all her power. In her mind’s eye, she saw Da returning to Ard na Caithne, looking at the sun upon the waves and knowing in his heart that Mary and Eliza were safe.

As a girl, she’d longed for a husband to share her bed and fill her with a child. That, she had thought, was her purpose in this life.

But now another purpose hummed inside her. For while there were some men like Da, too many were like Aoife’s husband, like Byrne. Like the captain.

The captain, like Wright and the other sailors of the Naiad , was gone, lost to the waves. She thought of his bones crumbling on the seabed, becoming nothing. There would be other men like him, she knew. Whole ships of them ploughed the waves even now, bringing fear and violence to this unfamiliar land. Mary felt the strange new muscles in her body clench, felt the spines bristle on her back. Her blood sang with fury.

No , she told her sister. I do not want to go back.

‘Where will you go?’ Eliza murmured.

Bridie shaded her eyes, looking at the coastline. Mary followed her gaze. Close to the shore, the water was blue as a jackdaw’s eye. The sand was strewn with seaweed and broken fragments of wood. Worse were the bodies, bloated and battered by the rocks.

There was a flicker of movement through the scrub.

‘They will come looking for us soon,’ Bridie said, watching the shoreline. She turned to Sarah, who pulled Annie closer to her.

‘And if they find us?’ Sarah asked.

‘The female factory,’ Bridie said, her eyes dull. ‘They will take Annie from you. A man will pick you out of a line, to work his field or his bed. If you marry, you can get a ticket of leave. But you won’t be free. Not really.’

Annie tilted her face to look at her mother’s. Her eyes were so filled with fear that Mary had to look away.

Sarah sobbed, a broken, quiet sound.

‘It’s all right,’ Bridie said, her voice soothing. ‘We just won’t let them find us. If an English girl can make her way back home, then so can we.’

Mary felt Eliza’s hand brush hers under the water, unseen by the others. The time for farewell had come.

Mary lifted herself from the water, letting each of them embrace her in turn. Bridie’s hair crackled against her cheek, and underneath the reek of the prison deck, she fancied she could detect some other scent. Peat and flowers, the Irish earth she would never see again. Annie kissed Mary’s forehead, and Sarah gripped her hands tight.

‘Thank you,’ she said, eyes shining, as she reached out to touch Eliza’s face. ‘Both of you. For saving her. For saving us.’ Mary could only nod. Grief closed her throat. So many days and nights she had spent with these women, sharing their pain, their fear, their hope. But now they must say goodbye.

Their friends belonged to one world, and they to another.

A world where sharks glided in the deep, where fish swam in glittering clouds. A world where songs swelled and rippled, travelling for miles.

A female world. Mam’s world.

She remembered what Aoife had said, the day they’d been forced aboard the Naiad , terrified and in chains.

A woman on a ship. Bad luck, so.

She thought of the maid on the shore who lured the sailors with her song. Of the mermaid figurehead and her painted smile.

Again, she saw the cave. The girl with her swollen body and wide, scared eyes. And all the other girls who would come, before and after her.

Mary had thought that being a merrow meant she could never be a mother; that she’d have to choose between the two, the way Mam had done. But now, her mind full of the frightened girl in the cave, she felt an ache of certainty. She would be a mother. Yes, together she and Eliza would mother all the girls who came to this place, all the girls who needed protection and vengeance. She, Mary, would do this; until there was no more life in her body, whenever that time would be.

She pictured them again, that line of girls waiting.

We will keep you safe , Mary thought as she and Eliza watched the raft drift away, carried by the sunlit water.

I promise.