In Which the Princess Entertains a Guest

From the diary of Dulcie, Crown Princess of Bentlefay:

(continued from here)

I never thought I would sleep after such a day, and indeed spent quite a long time writing up my diary. But by the time the night reached its small hours, I was drooping over the page and thought it might do me good to try and doze for awhile before morning. I was in the fuzzy first-sleep stage in which dreams and reality feel as though they are melting together, and the most cockeyed circumstances seem perfectly normal – which may explain a lot – when I heard the splashing.

At first I thought it was some sort of porpoise or large fish, though I wondered even in sleep why I hadn’t heard any before. But as I came fully awake I realized that the periodic hurling of handfuls of water against the shuttered porthole was not behavior that made sense from a fish, and any doubt that there was sentience at work was dispelled a moment later when a rich, fruity and definitely feminine voice called from just outside.

“Hallo? Hallo, now. I say … oh, what was the name … Hawker? Falconer! Mistress Falconer? Hallo?”

I shot from the bunk as though from a cannon and flung open the shutter.

“Quietly,” I hissed, and was about to go on when my eyes fell on the indeterminate shape in the moonlit water and fell dumb.

The face was like none I had ever seen before – mesmerizingly beautiful, but hauntingly strange, with wide cheekbones, slanting dark eyes, a plush mouth and a broad flat nose. Her skin was dusky, and her hair, coarse and heavy, streamed back wet from the arresting face.

All of this would have been sufficient to attract my attention had I merely been introduced to her normally at the receiving. What overwhelmed me now was that she was not supported by a boat or raft as she dipped and bobbed on the wavelets lapping against the still ship, but by her own unmistakable tail, patterned in the moonlight by iridescent scales and trailing translucent fins like scarves.

A mermaid!

“Ah! Greetings,” she said when she saw me. “You are Mistress Hawker?”

“Falconer,” I corrected automatically.

“Oh yes. Greetings then, Mistress Falconer. I am Kah-ee-lah.”

“But I’m not she,” I added hastily.

“Oh?”

“No, I’m Princess Dulcie of Bentlefay.”

She put her head on one side and repeated “Oh?” in puzzlement.

“Not that it matters,” I amended. “Listen, normally I wouldn’t ask anyone a favor on such short acquaintance.” And I’m not sure you even exist, I added to myself silently. “But you don’t suppose you could take a message for me, could you?”

This appeared to touch off a train of thought in her. “A message!” she cried joyfully.

“Not so loud…”

“I have a message for Mistress Lynde Falconer from Captain Masters!”

Even under the circumstances I paid mental tribute to Masters for being the sort of person who had a mermaid running his errands for him, and wondered irrelevantly if it might not be a quality that would wear thin in everyday life.

“So,” Kah-ee-lah went on, sure of her purpose now, “do you suppose you could fetch her here for me or is there some other window I should try?”

“No!” I could only imagine what the reactions of Bleake and his thugs would be to a mermaid – she would probably be dried and powdered for sale as an aphrodisiac in a foreign port or something equally nasty. “Tell Captain Masters that a terrible fate has befallen us – has befallen Mistress Falconer, actually,” I added, since that was likely to carry more weight.

“This ship has been captured, and we are all taken prisoner. I don’t know where Mistress Falconer is, or if she’s hurt.” In spite of myself my voice trembled. “Please tell Captain Masters and the other two captains to come and help us.”

“Prisoners…” she began meditatively, as though the concept was foreign to her, as it may well have been. “You mean you can’t get out of where you are?”

“That’s right.”

“And even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to swim away, I suppose?” Her tone mingled heartfelt pity and slight condescension.

“…No.”

“So you need the captains to come and help set you free, is that what you’d like me to tell them?”

I wasn’t sure if her manner was an inevitable product of the way mermaids see the world, or if Kah-ee-lah was actually rather silly.

“Precisely.”

She thought for another moment. “I suppose I’d better hurry, then,” she said at length.

“If you wouldn’t mind.” I was not quite able to keep from sounding sardonic, and hastily pulled out my social manner to cover it up.

“It is terribly kind of you to help us. I do hope we are able to speak at more length when we meet again.” If we meet again, I could not help thinking.

Her smile was like a treasure box of pearls. “Oh, yes.” She inclined her head confidentially. “I am a princess too, so we will no doubt have much to talk about.”

“…No doubt.”

“Oh, by the way…”

“Yes?”

“Should I tell the captains who has captured you, or doesn’t it matter?”

“It probably doesn’t,” I said with amusement, “but tell them it’s Norhammer and they’ll understand.”

Kah-ee-lah made a grimace of disgust so pronounced that I could see it even in the moonlight flickering off the water.

“Norhammer!” she said. “Typical.”

And with a flash of her shimmering scales and a flick of her tail fins, which splashed me slightly across the face, she was gone.

Naturally I wasn’t going back to sleep after that, so I went back to my diary and set the whole scene down in black and white. Even so, it has taken on such a tinge of unreality that I now don’t quite believe it happened. If it did, though, tomorrow should be an interesting day.

(continued here)