“Do fairy tales ever talk about a black mermaid? No. And that’s just what they are. Tales. Tea is very much real. I think she’s more dragon.”
“And I say mermaid!”
In Tea’s new peripheral vision, her scales shimmered black. Twisting about she could glimpse a tail curving into two feathery moulded fins tipped with creamy gold. More surprising as she tasted the length of herself – her menses flow had stopped. Not stoppered up, or her insides twisted, it was simply gone.
“What about … both?” she suggested.
“Both.” Grant nodded.
“Both is good.” Izzy nodded back at Grant. “Taniwha.”
“Tanny-wharr.”
“You two finished?”
“Alright, alright. Hold your horses. Grant, turn around, I’m taking my shirt off.”
“Izz, what does it matter he sees you? You’re naked whenever you’re a dog! And he’s naked when he’s a donkey! Come on!” The eelskin had sloughed away the well-trained barriers of her inhibition.
She itched to be off. Robbie’s need pulled, and it grew fainter with every passing minute. Like something vital was passing out of him.
Grant blushed bright as sunburn. He left his pants on when he slipped into the water. His shoulders and ribs poked against his skin, bones too big for his flesh.
“What’s happening?” His teeth chattered.
“I think if you hold on tight to these … tendril things, I’ll be able to pull you through.”
“To where?” Izzy sloshed into the water, still in her undergarments. The taste of her slid over Tea’s eelskin and she fought to ignore such a delicious taunt. She was still human, deep down inside. None of this animal nonsense, not when she had a job to do!
“I’m not entirely sure. Africa, though I know it’s a big continent. This water joins up to that water.”
For the first time since the whole bally-hoo began, scepticism held Izzy taut. “That’s a long way. Can you hold your breath that long?”
“Not something you need to ask me, I think.” With barely a thought Tea elongated her feather-scale tail to match the undulation of the creek.
“I think … we can …” Grant closed his eyes, took a deep breath, shook his head. “Come on, let’s do this.”
Tea tried to taste him like she could Izzy, but he was stronger in his reserved donkey ways.
How would these two land animal-people breathe? Though the journey must be thousands of miles, Tea knew it wouldn’t take them thousands of miles of time to get there, but still enough time that dozens of breaths would be needed.
Sssswim ssssing.
The water wanted her to sing at them? Sing what? She only knew hymns and a few radio tunes by heart. And singing took breath away from breathing …
… but singing also expelled air.
Oh, dear lord. Tea’s giggle burbled up.
“What’s so funny?” Izzy glared into one of Tea’s shining black-green eyes as she wrapped tendrils around both wrists. She shuddered at the rubbery texture.
“Don’t worry, you won’t hurt me, and they won’t break off,” Tea said. “And what’s funny is how I figured out you’re going to breathe underwater. I’ll do it for you.”
Grant’s mouth went almost as round as Tea’s. “Oh.”
For some reason, Tea didn’t care about kissing Grant. Izzy, on the other hand …
“Let’s go,” Tea burble-barked.
Grant found his grip on her tendrils and then as one they took deep breaths and dived under.
Yesssssss.
Fists of water yanked them down, flinging them forward into a darkness spotted with pin pricks like stars. The fresh, cold-as-a-mountain limestone-tinted water became salted, heavy, abundant. The current pulled them along so fast she had no time to make sense of the creatures great and small, the scintillating layers, the depth and age of water. This water had passed through the cycle of the world countless times, touched everything. It held incredible knowledge. The enormous wealth filled and emptied Tea at the same time.
A tug on her right tendrils. Izzy, needing to breathe. Tea had been letting her own air just be. If she thought about it too hard – the slits in her neck, the slithering through her eel body – she might start choking. She took in a great whisk-hum of air and manipulated her tendrils. Izzy’s face was right there.
No time to hesitate or think. She placed her mouth over Izzy’s.
Not so much a kiss, but a sharing of life, of the water’s song. A tingling along her edges. Somehow it felt far more intimate than anything romantic like the movies or books or magazines told.
She performed the ritual for Grant. Her edges did not tingle this time. She was getting used to the strange deal, she decided.
The current widened, narrowed, twisted, shoved them about. Tea slid along its imperative undertow easily, but she worried that the skin-bodies with death grips on her narrow whiskers were being battered. She brought them in closer, protecting them with her fins.
The ocean was not silent. Enormous shapes rushed by, moaning years-long songs. Beautiful and terrifying in their age, size, and complexity. Things deadly as knives, cutting through the water. Things tiny and clustered, life giving. The grating of metal on stone, sonorous and deep as a million years.
Water deliciously warm then urgently cold.
The idea of land rushed at her. They were flung through a narrow gap, then progress slowed enough for Tea to understand islands and peninsulas lurked like hooks ready to catch in her skin. A great mass anchoring the world to her right.
One more sharing of breath, and their headlong rush slowed to a more human understanding of time and space. The current threw them deep down one last time, a dry cold creaked around Tea’s eelskin, and the wide-flung ocean became a pitch-black tunnel. Salt-sting turned mineral again, but this one lush as sun on clay, moisture biding its time between the cracks of heat and stone. Muffled noises leaked down, growing more wicked as Tea wriggled towards the surface.
As the three travellers popped up gasping for air, the noise stitched together into an abundance of pure evil. Shouts of terror, rage, and shooting stars.
No, not stars. Shells. Bullets. Bombs. Metal threads rattling the air.
“Oh my lord.”
“Grant, are you alright?”
“I’m intact. Where are we?”
“I don’t know. It’s so dark. I need my canine nose. Tea?”
“Give me a moment.” Tea let her scales thin towards flesh, peeling back her head to something more human. She was glad it was dark enough Grant and Izzy couldn’t see. The air slapped her with a hundred things at once as she tasted it with eel and human senses. “Sunrise is hours off. We’re in … an oasis, a few miles off the coast. I recognise the palms on the edge from my atlas. There are … buildings too, but they’re empty. Sandbags. Barbed wire. Oh, God.”