Chapter Nineteen

SUITE: THE MERMAID LAGOON

1

For all my secret forays upon this river, even I have never dared disturb the loreleis at their sinister games. The Mermaid Lagoon has always been as hidden from me as the boys’ secret lair. Why would I seek it out? Everyone knows how they lure mortals into the slimy depths and drown them for sport. My oldest, deepest fear, an eternity of bloated, airless misery in the bowels of the unforgiving sea, grips me like a choking fist.

Yet, I row with all my strength, near dusk as well, when the fair folk are up to the most mischief. It took the better part of the day to regain my boat and pull across the bay for Kidd Creek, but for once the fractious currents were with me. Stella is a grown-up; they can’t fly her to her doom; they must walk her, or resort to some hidden water route, and I must be there when they arrive. My wounded shoulder scarcely complains during this activity, making me all the more anxious and determined on her behalf.

The creek has long since given way to the Mysterious River, a maze of fetid overgrowth and steaming, tangled vegetation, heavy with the sweet perfume of jungle blossoms. Tendrils of organic slime drift across my bows, mossy mounds thrust out at me from the banks as I plow into that lush, damp, and perilous canal.

I hear the lurid boiling of the lagoon some distance ahead, but evil vapors are already rising up from the water to protect its hidden entrance. I lose my heading in the mist; one tributary beckons me to starboard, another veers off aport, and I don’t know which to follow. Which will cost me precious time, driving me in circles like the tide in the bay? Which will wreck my boat on unfriendly shoals? Which are merely phantoms? They seem to open and close at will within the shifting vapors, like mocking lorelei mouths. Yet I must choose one. I cannot abandon Stella now; she has no one else.

A splash, a spray of water, startle me in the vaporous humidity. I twist about and see a glint of vivid color, hear another splash just ahead, to starboard, something bursting out of the water, then sinking again. Expecting the tentacle or claws of some slimy thing, I crane round further to see. But it’s only a fish arcing out of the water, scales a shimmering rainbow of gemstone colors, sapphire, amethyst, celadon green, as beautiful as the roses. As it dips back into the water, another as vibrantly colored rises in formation close behind, and dives, and then a third leaps out in the others’ wake.

In a heartbeat, all three break the surface again, just beyond the starboard bows, trailing long, gossamer fins, splash again into the water, rise up some little distance further on, making for a single green lane amid all the shifting entrances that tempt me out of the mist. Rarely have I beheld such exotic looking flying fish, and never in the river; they are creatures of the deep sea.

A sign from out of the sea, that’s what the Indian shaman said. Squelching my unease, I row after the gorgeous fish through the obscuring mists and into the deep green passage. The channel narrows, and I keep close to the river bank. Bending low on the thwart, I work up under a canopy of ferns and the long limbs of ancient trees, stretching out to trail their fertile green foliage in the water. And beyond them, the Mermaid Lagoon spreads open before me, hissing like steam from a kettle, despite the chill in the air. My phantom fingers ball up for warmth, but my hook holds steady through its hole in the oar shaft as I work into the vertiginous tunnel at the mouth of the lagoon, sweating with apprehension in the clammy cold.

Smoky clouds edged in pink stretch and dissolve overhead, revealing a first faint scattering of stars in a lavender sky. The lagoon seems to pulse with its own unearthly glamor, while the water, as black as pitch, laps and eddies round the narrow wedge of Marooner’s Rock, thrusting up in the middle. It takes a moment for my ears to pick out another kind of lapping, paddles dipping almost soundlessly into water; I freeze, hug my skiff to the bank, as a canoe powered by half a dozen braves glides past the mouth of my green tunnel and back out into the river.

I see them now, a cloud of jeering, whistling boys harrying Stella along the fetid marshes at the edge of the lagoon, about a quarter way round from my hiding place at the river mouth. The stark silhouette of Marooner’s Rock stands off to westerly from both of us. They’re all in a hurry now; the boys know what an evil place this is at night. Pan orders them to strip off the blanket, and four boys gingerly grab a corner each and fly it off over Stella’s head. Her hands are still tied behind her, but the hint of her womanly body under her shift troubles the boys, who fall back on instinct. Pan alone goes boldly forward, fluttering up to her face.

“It will be a gruesome death,” he promises eagerly. “You’ll sink under the water, and the mermaids will tear you limb from limb!”

“Why would they do that?” Stella asks mildly.

“Because that’s what mermaids do!” he snaps back. “Everybody knows that!”

Stella gazes out at the water, faintly rippling now with dark activity. A fishtail gleams just below the surface out near the rock, and my flesh crawls. How can I intervene? I haven’t even brought any weapons, but when have my weapons ever been any use against the boys or their allies? My groping fingers close on something damp and gritty under the thwart, and I withdraw the object the lorelei left in our boat; I once compared it to a bagpipe. I raise the reed to my lips and blow. The amphibious pocket expands the slightest bit, holding the air. I blow again.

“Of course,” Pan goes on, rising a little in the air, “I might be merciful. If you begged me.”

Stella gazes up at him. “Beg you? For what?”

“For your life, Lady. I caught you fair and square, and you deserve to be punished for your crime. Still, I could show you mercy. I could let you live. But you’d have to follow my rules.”

“Which are?” I hear the incipient smile in Stella’s voice. Their words carry wonderfully on the water.

“You could stay with the Lost Boys. You could cook our meals and mend our clothes. You could tell us stories, just like the other mothers.” Pan flutters in the air before her, buoyed by his own magnanimity, then leans his face a little closer to hers. “But you wouldn’t be allowed to think any more grown-up thoughts!” he declares. “And you must call me ‘Master.’”

Stella bursts out laughing. “Oh, don’t be silly!”

Pan’s feet hit the ground with a thump; it was almost his backside. He has to claw furiously back up into the air again. The Lost Boys are all whimpering in the shadows behind him, all of them grounded just as suddenly and scrambling to follow his lead and rise up again, their alarm as palpable as the mist on the water.

Something splashes out by the rock; with sick dread I see one of the loreleis emerging from the water. Her long, webbed fingers come first, securing handholds in the mossy rock as it angles steeply upward. Then her arms, translucently white, and her head trailing its mane of seaweed hair, iridescent black and green. The flesh of her spine curves down to the glistening scales of her rump as she rises above the surface, pert, naked breasts exposed as she twists on the rock to look toward the shore.

The boys draw back further still, but Stella stands transfixed, as beguiled as any Wendy. They stare at each other, Stella and the mermaid, as panic pounds in my blood. Don’t look, I beg Stella silently, turn away. She will enchant you. She will kill you.

Pan boosts himself to a more authoritative position in the air, cups his hands round his mouth.

“Look what I’ve brought you!” he calls out to the siren. “Tell your queen!”

The mermaid lifts her head, angles it curiously to one side, and I dare to draw a breath. If they engage in some parley, the way Pan always likes, then Stella may yet have a chance to gather her wits and flee. The boys are far up the bank now, and—

Without a word, Stella steps off the bank and drops into the water, which closes over her head. The lorelei lets go her perch and slides tail-first under the surface with the speed of an eel. The boys are as astounded as I, even Pan. He flies out to the still-rippling water and stares down in dismay.

A low vibrato begins to boil up out of the depths of the water, dissonant siren voices rising in a lurid crescendo to speed the boys off to their beds perhaps, or praise their profane gods for this succulent morsel so callously thrown their way. Whatever it means, Pan composes his features into a scowl and turns back to the others.

“Let’s go, men!” he cries, “she’s done for!” And off they fly.

I’m out of my coat, scrambling over the wales, still clutching my inflated pocket, even though every fiber of my flesh and blood and bones recoils at the black water. As horrible as it may be, I know I can’t die.

But Stella can.

The water is cold and deep, the darkness total. My wide-open eyes perceive no light, no movement, only black. I hear nothing, so instantly numb from cold that I don’t even feel the wet, aware only of my blood pounding in my ears, and the speed with which I’m spiraling downward. It’s black all around me, as black as the tomb I’ve always craved. Will this become my tomb? Will blackness swallow me up at last? But Stella is bound and helpless somewhere, alone in the blackness, and I plunge deeper still, thrusting with my hook. I wait as long as I dare before pressing the reed to my mouth for more air, a sip only: I must save some for Stella.

Something glimmers in the dark below, not the gloss of fishtails, but a smear of white. I claw after it against the pressure of black water. The white disappears just as my hook touches hard, solid rock, sharp, crusted with barnacles and ridged by the tides, but I find purchase and crawl downward along its surface, fist over hook. My lungs are some foul, heaving fish I’ve swallowed whole, the urge to spit it out all but irresistible, yet I drag myself down to a ridge of the crusty rock. That’s where it went, the white apparition that must be Stella, and I hurl myself over the edge and downward, kicking clumsily, into absolute black.

My lungs strain, the ache of holding my breath spreads from my chest up my throat into my nose. What would happen if I let go, empty my lungs, my mouth, my nose, suck in black water? It should be easy to let the blackness take me. My blood thunders to escape my flesh and become black water, my brain is giddy with the struggle not to breathe, as I’m propelled through weightless nothing. This must be what it’s like to fly. This must be what it’s like to die.

Purple, green, orange, vermillion explode before my eyes and I touch sheer solid rockface again, feel my way down to the edge of an open archway. I poke my head over the edge, see a deep underwater grotto, all a-shimmer with a pulsing spectrum of light. But she’s not here. Did I follow a phantom to this place? My mouth forms a single mournful word,

“Stella.”

It escapes in a forlorn bubble and drifts into the grotto.

Out of the riotous colors something comes wriggling toward me under a cloud of dark, greenish hair: pale arms outstretched, round breasts bared, serpentine tail reflecting all the rainbow colors snaking back and forth as she hurtles up to me, the lorelei I saw above, or her sister. Her eyes are turquoise, like the water of the Indies. I’m too exhausted to struggle, my hook too heavy to raise in the water. She takes my face in both her long-fingered hands; I feel rubbery webbing and the grit of sand against my cheek, open my mouth in a useless cry, and air explodes out of me, the last I’ll ever taste, as she thrusts her face to mine and opens her wide, gleaming mouth to suck the life out of me. My last thought is for Stella.

But when her wet lips press to mine, she breathes air, warm, dry, blesséd air into my mouth. I inhale it hungrily into withering lungs, and she gives me more. I’m almost clear-headed again when she peels away and dives down under the arch into the grotto with a snap of her tail. I clamber after her in a fever of need, my hand fisted round the air bladder thrust awkwardly forward, my hook dragging behind. Then my hand runs into thin, slippery mesh I can neither claw past nor through; I try to back away, and more of the stuff drops over me wrapping round me like a spider’s web, cocooning me like a moth.

I am netted.

2

It’s no use wriggling or squirming as I’m dragged into the grotto. Through a haze of colors, my captors’ fishtails flicker on either side of me; the water thrums with their language, or their laughter. I taste wet lips, salty tongue, as one, then the other press air into my mouth, yet I am scarcely conscious as I’m drawn into a dark passage, unceremoniously scraped against a jagged wall, feel a vibrato in the water like a remonstrance, and a softer ripple of apology. Through the passage at last, an aurora of lights pulses far overhead, I’m flying into a starry sky, toward the arch of a rainbow. Then my head breaks the water’s surface.

Air! So much, I gag on it. Wet mesh clings to my face, but I throw back my head and slurp in air, choking and spluttering, my lungs heaving as I’m dragged to the edge of a pool, hauled onshore, where I lay coughing and panting, sucking in the abundance of air. The shock of it is like the finest spirits; my brain reels, intoxicated, exhausted, slipping in and out of sense.

 

 

Hard rock beneath me, neither sand nor mud, this is my first sensible thought. How long have I lain here? Long enough for my joints to ache, my muscles to cramp. I’m still bound in mesh, my clothing briny-stiff. It’s not a dream. I open my eyes to find myself discarded like an old boot on a ledge of hard shale that rings the pool I came up in. The sirens who dragged me here maneuver themselves across it, sitting up on their tails like sea lions, rotating their after-fins like rudders.

We’re in another grotto, hidden behind the first, but this one full of air above the pool, under a ceiling of rock as high as a cathedral. Clusters of glowing, incandescent crystals, unimaginable in the world above, thrust downward from the rock ceiling like gaudy chandeliers, bathing everything in rainbow hues: turquoise green, cobalt blue, ruby, violet. Soft, dark shadows gird the perimeter of this enclosed space so far from the sun, but a luminous mineral haze hangs in the air, and the water glows velvet green. And in every direction I peer, twisting my head around, are mermaids, a score at least, some idling along the surface of the water, others hauled up onshore, murmuring together in pairs or lounging on thick mats of seaweed and grass and kelp plumped into crevices of the rock.

Their variety amazes me. In the water they glimmer blue and green and purple, but others on shore are chocolate brown or pink or caramel above their fishtails, like human females on land. One elderly, dusky-colored dame, hair knotted into a sunburst of snow-white tufts all round her head, strands of shells and sea glass clattering on her bony breast, sits up on her coiled tail higher up the bank, amid thin spires of crenellated rock. Others have distended bellies above their scales, or cradle infants who flap their shiny little tails. Most wear shells round necks or waists, or in their hair. None are modest.

As I attempt to shift my sore body, they quiet their chatter and peer at me. Twisting up my head, I see an opening like the mouth of a small cave not far from me, set back along the rocky shore. Something stirs in the shadows within, a whisper of white fabric.

“Parrish!” I croak.

The white thing moves, grows larger as she comes crawling to the mouth of the cave like a child, on her hands and knees, her wrists no longer bound. She’s breathing, alert, alive. Her dark eyes widen with surprise.

“Captain!” she exclaims. “But … what … what in the name of God’s spleen are you doing here?”

“Looking for you, looking for you, looking for you!” chants one of my captors, materializing from behind me, the dark-haired jezebel who filled my mouth with air, then lured me into this trap. Her inky-green seaweed hair is plaited back in dozens and dozens of long, snaky coils trailing down her back. She wriggles up to Stella, balancing something liquid and luminous on upturned fingertips, which she bats delicately upward: it’s a bubble. It breaks in midair with a tiny pop, and a sound like a far-off echo bursts out of it.

“Stella.”

It’s my own voice, or a ghost of it, forlorn with defeat. Stella climbs to her feet, peering down at me without a word to say. My captor is looking very pleased with herself.

“What has he done?” Stella asks anxiously. “Why is he tied up?”

“He’s a man,” the fish-woman caws triumphantly.

“That’s a crime?” says Stella.

“And a thief!” the pale lorelei insists, and she produces the marine bladder that brought me here, wrested from my hand, and hurls it down to the rock beside me. “He’s come to hunt you!” the minx explains to Stella. “That is what they do! The legmen, they hunt us, capture us in nets. They will eat us, or put us in cages, force us to bear their children.”

“But that’s nonsense,” Stella begins, but her voice trails off into a sigh. She’s surely heard the old tales as often as I have, lonely fishermen and their captive mer-brides, although I’ve never heard of one served as an entrée. In the court of the Sun King, perhaps, or the decadent palaces of the Turks. “Well,” Stella tries again, “it may be true out there in the other world…”

“Of course it is true,” a voice wafts out from inside the cave, and another mer-female hefts herself into view. Her complexion is twilight blue, her face as broad as the moon under a quivering cloud of kinky hair, granite-gray and silver. Of all those watching us now, she seems to command the most authority, rising up on her tail to gaze down at me. “That is why we come here,” she says to Stella. “To get away from the men. They are everywhere in the world, in every ocean. Everywhere but here.”

“This man means you no harm, I swear it,” Stella insists.

“No male ever enters the lagoon, not even the Boy King,” declares my fierce captor. Her fingers are working a mollusk shell off a seaweed rope round her middle. A weapon, by the way she hefts it. Now, too, I notice teeth marks of some savage marine predator branding her pale shoulder. A wicked shark’s tooth pierces her ear lobe like a trophy. “Why else would he come all this way?”

“Looking for you,” muses the blue woman, with a speculative glance at Stella. They all heard my voice in the bubble.

“But not to hurt me,” says Stella. “Please let him loose.”

Does she think to move the loreleis from any course of action but their own desires? Hasn’t she learned from the Boys Council how heedless and willful all creatures can be in the Neverland? The blue fish dame gazes at Stella a moment longer, then moves between her and my captor down the rock toward me. If one could be said to wriggle majestically, that is how she comes at me, smoothly muscled arms pulling her forward, her rotating tail propelling her from behind, unhurried, her head erect under its cloud of quivering corkscrew curls. A thousand colors shimmer in the scales of her undulating fishtail, and when she stops to bend over me, the wine-colored aureoles of her blue breasts dangle nearly to the rock. I cannot say she sniffs at me, exactly, but her face hovers above mine as if she’s taking some measure of me, pitiful sight as I must be.

“Mica. Amber,” she says mildly to my dark-haired captor, and a brown-skinned, golden-haired female who must be her partner. “Release him.”

Astonishment gushes out of me like steam from Mount Merciless. Her eyes above me are dark marine blue, like sapphires, bright with curiosity, like all glamorous creatures, but calm and intelligent as well. I nod my thanks, and the sirens who captured me slither up alongside me. Each carries a shell honed to a blade-like edge, and they set to slicing through the strings of mesh, so close, the hairs on my body rise to the whisper of their blades. They peel the wet mesh off of me, and I sit up slowly, my arms still shaky from confinement. I shove wet hair off my face, throw the sodden length of it behind my shoulder, every atom of my person and my clothing soaked and sullenly dripping as Stella comes down the rock toward me. Over her shoulders she carries a matting of long, dried, pliable sea grasses woven together, like a cloak, and as she crouches beside me, she slides it off her shoulders and over mine. It’s blissfully dry, and warm from her body. However long we’ve been here, she’s not much worse off for her ordeal. Her cinnamon hair falls in a tangle of damp, stiffening curls, her dark eyes are alert with concern, as comforting as the dry grass cloak.

“Are you all right?” I demand, more brusquely than I intended, ashamed for her to see me exposed in all my failure.

“I’m not the one who dreads water, Maestro,” she reminds me.

I peer into her face, close enough to mine so that we might not be overheard by the curious sirens still watching us. “Why did you jump in?” I whisper to her.

She blinks at me; of course she can’t know I was watching her from my hidden boat. With a discreet movement of her dark eyes, she indicates my former captor, the tooth-branded lorelei called Mica who climbed out on the rock in the Mermaid Lagoon.

“She told me to come with her,” Stella whispers back. “She just looked at me, and I knew. Said I’d be safe here. The boys are terrified of the lagoon.”

“Of course they are,” agrees the blue grand dame, coming up again beside Stella. “That is the way we prefer it. Boys can be such a nuisance sometimes.” Her sonorous voice is low, marshy, faintly damp, but her words are clear, and her English excellent. A murmur of agreement bubbles up from the others all round the pool in tongues of which I’m far less certain.

“For that matter, Captain Hook,” the blue woman addresses me, “we have never seen you near the lagoon before.”

I suppose the wretched stories have penetrated even here. Perhaps I’m part of their folklore, passed down through their generations, the wicked legman who lives above.

“Please forgive my poor manners, Madam,” I reply, with a feeble stab at chivalry. “Have I the honor to address the queen of this place?”

But she bats away my flattery with a wave of her blue hand. “We have no queens here, Captain; that is a fantasy of the Boy King. But it is my duty to preside over this place, yes. I am called…” and she makes a lubricious sound, not unpleasant, but impossible for me to decipher. Something humorous stirs in her plump face as she awaits my response. “The closest word in your tongue,” she offers, “is Lazuli.”

“I am enchanted, Madam Lazuli,” I reply, with all the formality I can muster, half-drowned and shivering on my knees. “The fact is, I … I never expected to find hospitality in the Mermaid Lagoon. There are few enough places in the Neverland where I am welcome.”

“Because they are all controlled by the Boy King,” pipes up my captor with the shark tooth in her ear.

“But not here?” Stella wonders, turning again to blue Lazuli. “Do you mean you are immune somehow to his will?”

The blue mer-woman chuckles, like water gurgling softly over smooth river stones. “We are all women here, you see.”

I glance round the pool again, where the females are all watching us, and notice what I’d lacked the wit to appreciate before: the large-bellied women, the infants, the elders, the fierce armed guardians protecting the outer grotto.

“It’s a temple of witchcraft!” I cry.

They all burst out laughing, a rolling, musical sound with sharps of high hilarity and bass notes of scorn that echoes all round the high rock walls. Even Stella smiles, her hand touching my sleeve in gentle reproof.

“I believe it’s a birthing pool,” she corrects me.

“Yes,” Lazuli beams at her. “But it is all the same to the boys. Female cycles are very mysterious to males. It is the difference between the bold and constant sun, and the dark, ever-changing moon. They cannot quite grasp it.”

“And what they can’t understand, they fear,” says Stella.

“Peter is so innocent he does not even know what a kiss is called, but he knows to fear it beyond all things,” Dame Lazuli agrees. “He senses it will corrupt him in some unfathomable way, change everything. It is almost always wanting a kiss that gets the young girls sent home from the Neverland. Imagine how frightening an entire community of females must seem.” The blue merwoman smiles and nods toward me. “Ask your friend, the Captain.”

“But … there have been mermaid stories since the beginning of time,” I protest. “I didn’t invent them. Every sailor knows them. The lorelei, the succubus whose love is rash and all-consuming, who will drain away your soul and drown you for sport…” My words trail away to a fresh bubbling of female giggles. How absurd they sound.

“Fear itself is a powerful force, Madam.” I speak to Lazuli, but my words are meant for Stella, whose glance answers with a flicker of understanding. Here is an entire district in the Neverland beyond the Pan’s control. A place he fears.

“But in the stories,” Stella pipes up, “Peter is great friends with the mermaids. He lolls about with them on Marooner’s Rock and teases them and sits on their tails. He is the only one the mermaids allow to play their games with them in the lagoon. All the other children are jealous of him for it.”

More peals of amusement chime round the pool. Even I laugh at the notion of the Pan frolicking in the water with the loreleis and treading on their tails. He might as well sleep with the savage tigers in the wood; indeed, he’s far more likely to do so than ever sport with mermaids in the lagoon.

“But consider the source,” I say to Stella. “The Scotch boy adored Pan. He would never portray him in a less-than-flattering light or admit there was anything his hero feared.”

“Exactly so, Captain,” Dame Lazuli agrees.

“But,” Stella begins again, “if you have regular female cycles, the same as … as any woman, and you, well, mate and give birth in the usual way, where are your men?”

“They are off shepherding our colonies in the sea,” says Lazuli.

“Colonies?” I echo. I’ve sailed the seas of the world, and never encountered a single member of the mer-race except in this lagoon.

“You cannot think we live all of our lives in this tiny place?” the old mer-dame replies. “We must make our annual migrations out in the great sea. That is how we survive.”

The great sea. My blood quickens. The merfolk migrate out into the other world every year. They know a way out.

3

“We are a nomadic race. We follow the currents that have boiled beneath the sea since the beginning of time, to places where the food is more plentiful, the climate more friendly.” Dame Lazuli settles down on her tail and pushes back a handful of her springy gray-and-silver spirals.

Wine the color and texture of squid ink dares my courage from a vessel of shell. But it’s dreadful bad form to decline hospitality, and Stella sips at hers with stoic aplomb, so I ignore the faintly marine fragrance and hoist away. It’s a cold, rich, mineral taste on the tongue, with assertive notes of copper and plum, like drinking the blood of the sea.

“We meet other migrating colonies and feast together and share our stories,” the blue dame continues. “Pods of our young males and females mingle with the youth of neighbor colonies, and pair off together, swimming with one parent colony for half the season, and then the other. But the waters are more dangerous now than they have ever been.” Her sigh extends all the way to the muscular fins at the end of her coiled tail, which quiver against the rock. “It takes the strength and cunning of all our men to protect our colonies.”

“From the men, you mean,” Stella injects. “On land.”

We sit on seagrass mats, Stella and I, our legs thrust out before us like little children. The mer-dames have no furnishings for legged creatures, neither chairs nor tables. Our shell vessels stand upright on their coralline prongs upon the pitted surface of the rock; Stella’s soaked moccasins are drying in the air further up the rock, outside the cave. Several of the young mer-mothers have carried their newborns into a deep recess of the pool under a volcanic tunnel; their soft lullabies, more melodic than I have ever noticed before, echo up through the porous rock into the Neverland night.

“It was long ago, time beyond reckoning, when the first of our brethren grew limbs and walked upon the land,” says Lazuli. “The songs of our bards tell us we lived in harmony with the legmen for ages. The world was huge and bountiful then, with room for all. There were fertile deepwater plains for planting, unspoiled pools for fishing, broad sand beaches beyond counting where we might sport and play in peace, quiet lagoons for birthing our young. But the legmen are greedy. They want the world for themselves. They’ve swarmed over all the land, and now their ships of fire disturb every sea.”

“Except this place?” asks Stella.

The blue woman nods her springy head. “We are protected here. Only children find their way here, and when they go back and grow up, they forget. This is the safest place in all the waters of the world to birth our young. The mothers stay until they and the babes are strong enough to rejoin the colony the next time it returns on the current.”

“And he allows it?” Stella marvels. “Peter? The Boy King.”

“The Neverland is the dreamworld of children,” Lazuli replies. “All manner of fey creatures make their home here, as well as the beasts in the wood, because children love us so. The Boy King is immensely proud to have such exotic and dangerous creatures in his world, to show off to the children who come here. Especially the girls. They fly overhead to view us, and we appear in the lagoon for that purpose, so he will trouble us no further. It’s a small enough price to pay, amusing the boy, chasing away his sorrows, to preserve our sanctuary here.”

“Sorrows?” I rumble. “This is his Paradise.”

Lazuli peers at me, surprised. “Life brings sorrow, Captain, and his life has endured for so many suns and moons. So many losses, so many children gone, leaving him alone. His losses haunt his dreams sometimes, in spite of all our singing, my sisters and I. It is a delicate thing, keeping him happy, protecting him from the memory of all he has lost. Preserving his innocence. Our bards sing of a time when this place was in fearful peril, when the Boy King nearly succumbed to his sorrows, but for the heroic chanting of our singers. Now harmony is restored.”

She sits up a little taller on her coiled tail. “Of course,” she adds delicately, “he does not guess what our true purpose is within this grotto. Indeed, our own men, who would gladly shed their last drop of blood to defend this place, do not like to come in here. They know perfectly well what we do here, play no small part themselves in the cycle that brings us here, and yet they prefer to keep off, to let us do our work in peace.” She lifts her blue shoulders in wistful resignation. “That is how men are.”

And her sapphire eyes shift again to me. “It’s a matter of no little concern to us, Captain, that you have found your way here.”

I set down my wine vessel abruptly. They are looking at me from all round the pool, as if awaiting judgment against the wayward man foolish enough to penetrate their sacred circle. The two warrior sirens who captured me loom nearer. I have very little desire to be flung back into the water like a disappointing fish; it’s a long, long way back to the surface of the Mermaid Lagoon. My fingers inch across the rock to where my expired air bladder still lies, which I lift to show Lazuli. “I was trying to bring this to Stella.”

“Thief!” hisses Mica.

“Why was it placed in my boat?” I ask them.

“For the journey, I was told,” Stella pipes up.

The blue merwife nods up at the ancient mer-dame I spied before, with the aureole of snowy white hair, perched up in a higher elevation of the shore. “Our sibyl throws sand collected from the shores of the seven seas into her water-glass and reads the patterns,” says Lazuli. “She saw an image of your ship, and we knew we were meant to aid the land folk the only way we can—a safe passage through our element, the water.”

“But why aid your enemies?” Myself, I mean.

Lazuli smiles patiently. “Not enemies, Captain. Yours and mine were the same race, once upon a time. We knew not whose passage it was, nor for what purpose. Nor do we know what the journey is. The old songs tell us only that it begins with the signs.”

“Three signs,” Stella whispers, with an eager glance at me.

The old woman, their sibyl, wriggles up higher upon her shiny tail and mimes at what must be another, much smaller pool of water amid her spiky volcanic peaks. Her voice is soft with age, but it rumbles across the water with authority. “The journey has begun!”

 

 

The three elegant fish I saw before, with their jewel-box colors and silken fins, leap across the surface of the water-glass. It seems an ordinary pool of dark water, the circumference of a large platter, formed within a circlet of coralline spires on this crag above the birthing pool. Lazuli worked her way up a terraced path hewn out of the black rock, kept moist by a trickle of water from some hidden spring, while Stella and I were obliged to claw our way up the rocky incline to this plateau, where the sibyl keeps watch over her oracle.

“The sign of Mother Sea,” the mer-sibyl announces, gesturing to the image of capering fish in her water-glass.

“I saw them in the river,” I say to Stella, and feel every other pair of eyes in that vaporous cavern turn upon me. I turn again to Dame Lazuli. “They brought me here.”

“The blessings of two mothers smile on this journey,” the sibyl intones, bright-eyed under her tufted white hair.

“Mother Sea,” Stella murmurs at my elbow. “Mother Earth.”

The sibyl beams at her and stretches knobby fingers into a large, upturned clam shell full of sands of every hue: black, white, red, honey-gold. She sprinkles a handful over her water-glass, peers into it again. “One journey ends, another begins.”

“There are more than one?” I frown.

“It may be like a birth,” the blue merwife suggests. “A change from one condition to another.”

“But whose?” Stella asks softly.

“Whoever earns it,” Lazuli replies. “So our bards sing. But if all three signs are not seen, the chance to take this journey will never come again. Never, ever.”

“So you called Stella here?” I venture. “To placate this oracle?”

But Lazuli gives an adamant shake of her head. “We are very distressed that you are here at all,” she says to Stella. “None of us would ever call you. It is much too dangerous for you.”

“I’ve no wish to cause any more distress,” Stella sighs, shoving back an unruly wisp of her own hair. “Ma’am, the route you spoke of, the one that leads to the great sea. Can you show us where it is?”

A conflagration of feeling crashes against my ribs. But Dame Lazuli sighs, shakes her head again. “It’s a very long way under the sea. Our air bladders would be no use; your human lungs could never endure it. We of the mer-race have sea lungs. They serve us much like yours when we are in the open air, but they extract the air we breathe out of our blood and muscles when we are long underwater. As senior midwife here, I know how our bodies function,” she adds, as if we might disbelieve her.

“Yes, I’m a nurse,” says Stella.

“Then you understand that the distance is too far and the pressure of the sea too great,” rejoins Lazuli. “But if you are skilled at nursing, we might make a place for you here with us.”

“Why…” Stella falters, “that is … a very great honor, Ma’am.”

“She is exceptionally skilled at healing herbs and the like,” I offer eagerly. A refuge from the boy!

“It is calm just now, but at some seasons we have great activity here,” Lazuli tells her. “Another pair of hands would be useful.”

“But … my experience has mostly been with male patients,” Stella confesses. “I have little knowledge of … birthing.”

I hear the sadness she tries to mask in her voice. How might it affect her, all these females birthing healthy young?

“We can teach you what you need to know,” says Lazuli. She tosses back her explosive curls, wriggles a little closer to Stella. “I would prefer to have you here with us than to leave you above and vulnerable to the Boy King.”

Stella looks at me. I nod heartily.

“I regret,” murmurs Lazuli smoothly, “that I cannot offer the same hospitality to you, Captain. You are a legman, an object of great wonder to us, but disturbing to my women at this delicate moment in their cycles. As it is beyond our power to send you anywhere else, you must return.”

“Return? To where?” Stella demands.

“To his ship,” says Lazuli patiently. “Back to the Neverland.”

Back to my eternal torment. Stella will be useful here, the thing she most craves, and safe. But there is no mercy for Hook.

“So be it, Madam,” I say, coolly enough. I step out to the edge of the plateau and gaze down at the water in the pool, darker now, less green and friendly. If Stella’s journey ends here, let her at least remember that I’d not stood in the way of her good fortune.

But Stella rustles to my side. “Then I’ll go with you.”

Thus she makes hash of my attempt to accomplish one honorable thing in my life. “But you’re safe here,” I tell her. “You’ve nothing to fear from Pan if he believes you dead.”

“And what about you?” she counters.

“He can’t hurt me,” I say grimly. “But if you return to the Neverland now, you will be an outlaw. He’ll believe himself justified in hunting you down like an animal with his wild pack of boys.”

“We can do nothing at all for you, my dear,” Lazuli speaks up, “beyond the protection of this grotto.”

“You honor me with your offer,” Stella tells the blue merwife. “I wish I could accept. But I don’t believe that is why I’m here.” She turns again to me. “The signs appeared to you. You had the Dream Vision. It must be your journey, Captain. This must be the chance your witch told you about.”

“This is no game, Parrish—”

“But what if I’m part of the journey somehow?” she goes on eagerly. “What else can I possibly be doing here? Suppose we’re on this journey together?”

Something long dormant stirs inside me. Dare I call it hope? It is a reckless thing.

 

 

“Take this,” Dame Lazuli bids Stella, emerging again from the mouth of her cave. She hands Stella a small spiral of pink shell strung on a seaweed thong. “Our sisters are posted in every island waterway, conveying information on currents, tides, and boy activity, for the protection of our grotto. If you change your mind, blow a note on this shell over any body of water in the Neverland, and we will come for you.”

Stella wears the little shell round her neck. It floats above her nightdress as we make our ascent through black water back to the Mermaid Lagoon. The merwife gave us fresh air bladders, puffed up like pastries when properly filled with air; a ready supply is kept for the mer-babes’ first long migrations underwater to rejoin their colonies. Mica, the shark-wrestler, escorts us, although I’m not at all certain she has our best interests at heart. At least not mine. But Stella guides me through the water even when we lose sight of our escort.

Stars scatter like diamonds across the black sky when we finally break the surface of the lagoon. All is still but for a lazy chittering of insects. Stella and I grope for hand-holds in the volcanic mass of Marooner’s Rock, gulping air before swimming for the shore, as Mica disappears again beneath the water.

“Let’s get out of this lagoon, in case there are any spies about,” I suggest.

Stella wrapped her gown with sea vines in the loreleis’ cavern to prevent it filling with water, and she strokes ahead for the shore as I paddle behind. She pulls herself out by a tangle of roots at the water’s edge, the wet skin of her gown clinging to every curve of her breasts and rump—pear-shaped, I notice, now that she’s out of those damned trousers. I was lately surrounded by exotic, bare-breasted sirens of the ripest carnality, the private dream of every sailor, however much he fears them, but none excited in me the same quickening as the sight of Stella sprawling on the bank in such artless abandon. In my day, women of her matronly years took pains to conduct themselves with dignity, real or imagined. But Stella flops over, flushed and giddy, without an atom of self-consciousness. And why not? There’s no one to see her but me.

I splash in closer to the shore, stretching for something solid to grasp onto. “You might lend a hand,” I carp.

“Sorry, Captain. You’re so full of surprises tonight, I thought you might walk on the water,” she blasphemes merrily.

But my clever rejoinder dies as a distant percussion I’d taken for insect clacking becomes louder, more insistent, a steady rhythm like a heartbeat. Like a ticking clock.

He sent a spy, all right.