Secrets of Carrick: Merrow Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Logo

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Glossary

  A Note From The Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Other Books by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  Life doesn’t just grow you up and leave you there;

  it keeps beating you into different shapes, like the cliffs.

  The people of Carrick have been whispering

  behind Neen’s back for most of her life; ever

  since her father drowned and her mother

  disappeared. The townspeople say her mother is

  a merrow who has returned to her real home in

  the ocean. But if the villagers are right, then what

  does this make Neen? This pitiless summer, all the

  talk will end in trouble.

  All Neen wants is the truth.

  Chapter One

  Wrack

  AUNTIE USHAG SAID I WASN’T FIT to be around. She said it was beyond her how a body could be so prickly and dark. She said it gave her the Screaming Purples just to look at me, always lying about looking sideways at her like a reptile on a hot rock. That if I couldn’t raise myself on my hind legs and help, the least I could do was Go Away and leave her to it.

  Honour Bright, all I said was I wished she’d open her mind a bit and that she didn’t know all about everything. I said she couldn’t prove that our Marrey great-grandmother wasn’t a merrow. She couldn’t swear that Mam had run away after Pa drowned, now could she? All I said was perhaps Mam had actually just gone home to her people under the sea, and that she could come back to us one day, if she wanted to. I only said it was possible.

  ‘What you don’t witness with your eyes, don’t witness with your mouth,’ my aunt snapped. She could be as tight-minded and purse-mouthed as the southerners she hated so. These days she was as touchy as a slug, and wholly unreasonable. I slipped out the window with her still whittering on behind me, and was nearly away when she shouted, ‘Never mind me opening the mind. What about you opening and using the door?’

  That woman had eyes in the back of her head. ‘And fetch some garlic if you can spare the time.’

  I headed for the cows.

  In the byre I filled my stomach with warm, foamy milk straight from Breck. Bo lowed softly and butted me, gentle but determined as always. I rested my head on hers, smelling her warmth and listening to the crunch and creak as she ate. She was only a calf and I loved that we could stand head-to-head and eye-to-eye. As we stood that way I felt some of her steadiness pass into me. There’s nothing more peaceful than a happy cow.

  All winter I’d been tormented by these restless humours. My legs itched inside and I just had to walk. It was the only thing that helped. I walked through icy wind and sleet, storms and thunder, and those days that sulk about in grey garments and sighs. Each day, I walked further and found more of Carrick’s hidden places. I was sure Auntie Ushag knew nothing of these warm hollows filled with dry leaves and moulted fur, or those caves up the gorge where bats hang all day like drying kelp. Life was all work to her. She probably knew only the yard and her trapping trails, and the cove.

  I was sure she knew nothing of the little inlet tucked into the cove’s cliff-walls. Its white sand and green water, its climbers and dangling vines, appeared to me a kind of impossible paradise. I could see all the way to its sandy seabed and even make out the schools of tiny fish and deep drifting weed. I heard the inlet call to me; I knew it was my own, my very own, but I couldn’t find a way to get down the sheer face. All I could do was stand on the cliff and look, as the inlet beach whispered and gleamed.

  We have always had days when this island floats in an edgeless blue world. When I was young they’d been easy days to be happy, but now everything was wrong. The sun was too hot, the sky was too blue, the dawn birds screamed at the blinding sun and the cows bored or bullied me. All talk ended in trouble and Auntie Ushag and I were strangers.

  Even the island had grown restless. We had been rocked by earth shakes all through fall and winter. In our cove the cliff had been quietly slipping into the sea, rock-by-rock, and stone-by-stone. Summer had been calm, but the very ground now had this pent-up quality and we lived with one eye on the cliffs. I didn’t mind. It suited my humour, which was full of dark predictions and trouble.

  Go away! I couldn’t remember Ushag ever telling me to go away before. No mam, no pa, and now this aunt who didn’t want to claim me. I was an orphan. Why had I never noticed how sour Ushag was? It was baffling how much of a spit-hag she’d become in just a few months.

  That morning, all I’d done was tell her about my dream, and she couldn’t have looked more buffeted if I’d turned into a fish before her face. She turned grey and pressed her lips together as if she wanted to stop them forming words.

  It was only a dream, I told her.

  In it, the sea was getting green in the light of morning and I was on the shore collecting limpets. Everything was as it always is, calm and unremarkable, then I saw out in the cove a pale round moon rippling just under the water and closing in on the shore. I prickled all over but couldn’t look away.

  When the moon-thing reached the shallows, it drew itself out of the purple sea and bobbed there, half-in, half-out, letting me look. The torso of a greenish woman rose out of the foam; paler than any woman I ever saw. It seemed transparent and I thought I saw the blue veins pulsing in its neck and breasts. Its flowing hair seemed to be an ocean in itself, so flapping was it with tiny silver fish. I stepped into the water up to my knees to see it better.

  I saw its tail then, shining and coiling under the surface, and I knew it to be a merrow. Raising my eyes to its face, I was shocked to see tears dropping from eyes singularly wild and hollow. I suppose I’d never thought of the merrows as having mortal feelings. I suppose I’d thought of them as glamorous fish, but cold and heartless. This one seemed to be full of a heart that was breaking. Wading in up to my thighs I lifted my hand toward the wet, weeping creature.

  It called me by name.

  ‘Neen.’ My blood ran cold as a winter stream.

  Twice it called. ‘Nee-een.’

  A third time.

  ‘Nee-eenie,’ it called me, doleful-like and lonely. Reaching with webbed fingers through the sea-spray, it dropped a sizeable pearl into my hand. There was something about its face I knew from somewhere. Then it turned, and was gone, with no trace of bubbles to mark a trail. I was left on the shore, gripping the pearl and searching for the wake.

  Then I woke up.

  After my aunt’s first reaction, during which I thought she was going to be sick, she’d pulled herself together and asked who’d been telling me those stories.

  ‘What stories?’ I asked.

  ‘Merrows, water-horses, charmers…all of that.’ She rolled her eyes to the sky as though petitioning someone there for patience, and I felt myself grow still and colder even than the dream-merrow’s touch.

  ‘Nobody told me, I just heard,’ I said. ‘What’s a water-horse?’

  ‘It’s nothing is what it is.’ She gave me a sharp, sudden glance. ‘You can’t have just heard. Somebody has been filling your head.’

  I
thought how typical it was that she would take it for granted that I had a head that needed to be filled with stuff, as if it were hollow. As if I had no head already filled with its own stuff. I felt over-hot and shifty, and before I knew it I was saying all that about opening her mind a bit and not knowing everything about everything.

  Auntie Ushag did not like me saying such things.

  ‘And you, heishan, you know nothing about anything.’ She came close and pulled herself up to her full height but, because for the last few months we’ve been the same height, it didn’t have the effect she was looking for. In fact, we both noticed at the same time that I had to look down to meet her eyes. She took a big breath, fattening herself up like a pufferfish. ‘The trouble with you is that you’re neither one thing nor the other,’ she added. ‘You’re an in-between.’

  I didn’t know what that was. It sounded like an insult.

  ‘You’re in-between your own self,’ she said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked but she’d finished with conversing. She said all that about reptiles and darkness and then she shouted at me to go away.

  So I did.

  But the byre and the cows weren’t far enough. It was the sea I needed. My aunt’s words followed me and the air swarmed with irritable humours. My feet pounded the path with a satisfying crunch and set gravel rattling down the cliff and onto the beach below. Collecting my stone-sack from its hidey-hole I dragged it past the rocks and to the edge of the water. Our spread of white sand and half-moon of foam made me welcome and filled me up with content.

  One of the seals had chosen to whelp alone in our cove this year, though hundreds of her fellows were doing likewise just around the corner in the next cove. It was a strange thing for a seal to be so solitary. They commonly like the company of their kind, and can’t be persuaded away, even for fish. This lone mother lay on her side, head and tail both held off the ground, and watched me stamp past. The hungry pup at her teat stopped feeding to watch too as I, dragging my sack behind me, walked straight into the sea and raised a cloud of fussing gulls all about us. I waded into the warm water up to my waist, to my chest, to my shoulders and, when the sea reached my chin, I just took a deep breath, and kept on walking.

  At the last moment I filled myself with air. I sucked it in until I felt I was mostly air and my body a ghostly thing. The sea rose over my face and I opened and closed my eyes to accustom them to the salt. There was a rush in my ears and all the din and heat dropped away. A few more paces and I was at the edge of the drop, where the sand stopped and fell away into dark water and the kelp forests.

  Straightways I stepped off the drop and into the dappled place. My sack was stuffed with stones and shells for ballast, and I sank to the seabed and settled cross-legged into the sand and grit. I gazed upward through giantess’s ribbons of wrack and waving weed. Above me, the sun rolled over the water’s surface like a silver ball, and shot its cold light into the warm depths, reaching down even to where I sat as far away from the surface as I could. Below me, the sand shifted and sea-beetles wriggled up and out into the water, swimming here in the speckled world just as they fly above.

  Half a furlong into the kelp-forest the water darkens and starts to drag at the weed. In some places the sea-meadow is pushed flat and the whole sea seems to be rushing past. I feel the drag of it. At times it seems to want to pull me away. When that happens I stuff more stones into my sack to stop myself sailing off like an untethered boat in a storm. Mostly though it’s peaceful, and the best place to think.

  The cove’s creatures were good companions to me then, and almost as diverting as stories. This day a red crab unfolded itself inside some nearby bones and made a dash for the cover of its rocks, dragging a ragged lump of flesh behind itself like a smuggler’s hoard. Its eyes, standing on their tall stalks, waggled over its shoulder as it sidled to its snug and folded itself away into the rock. There were times I’d felt that if I could become that crab or some other sort of creature, I would. I would move and talk in their simple way, eat and drink as they do without all the growing and tending and seasonal hungers. I would live among them without being insulted and told to go away. I knew this day for the first time that though they were my companions the creatures could never be my friends. They just didn’t understand.

  How can a person be in-between themselves? You’re always just you, aren’t you? It’s not like there’s a you here and a you there — and you’re also in the middle somewhere. You can’t be on the way to yourself; you’re always just right where you are. Aren’t you?

  I don’t know how long I sat in the drop, but suddenly I knew I wasn’t alone. Urchins, seahorses, red crabs and such don’t trouble my solitude. Only something like me can do that; something warm-blooded and with a type of sense and loyalty. A seal can trouble me, an otter too — and other creatures that come and go but I never see up close, like whales passing on the other side of the wrack. My breath was almost gone now and I felt my body straining toward the air but there was something there, something hidden in the kelp and it was something human-like. I leant forward and stared deep into the forest.

  A stillness among the moving curl and tangle of wrack drew my eye. A long shadow rocked in there. Two wild, black eyes were watching me as I watched. A mottled body stretched away back into the speckled light, two tiny hands parted the kelp and I saw the tail, sinuous, and a face. Its mouth parted in what looked like a grin and bubbles rose from its lips and nose as if it tried to talk. Then as quickly as it came it turned and slipped like a ghost back into the forest of dim beams and rays.

  Only a year before I would have run to tell Auntie Ushag but all that had changed. I didn’t know any longer how to talk to her. She would only roll her eyes and tell me to go away. After all the trouble over a dream, I wasn’t about to lure her jibes and temper again. My breath rushed out of me and I emptied my sack and rose to the sun.

  I can’t help seeing what I see. It’s in me to notice things. I don’t mean to.

  I sweated that summer through in the heat of my need to know everything my aunt wouldn’t tell. I needled and poked and kept on until she told me I put the lie to the old saying that it’s better to be quarrelling than lonesome. She said that lately she envied lonely people. If she wouldn’t start talking, there were others who wouldn’t stop. I had an eye for them.

  Monthly market days in Shipton were the only days my aunt and I mixed with the others. It was there I’d overheard the talk about us. Why would the Marreys choose to live out there in that wild and shattered place, the earwigs muttered, two women alone and far from human kind? Nothing but the sea to look upon, they told each other slipping me pitying looks that made me want to bang their heads together. Nobody but each other…and the girl growing up now, they whispered casting cold eyes upon Auntie Ushag.

  Last market day of the fall I overheard them in the baker’s snug. That Neen Marrey looks to have grown into a sweet girl, one said and they all made what would have been sounds of agreement were they not all three-sheets-to-the-wind. As it was they sounded like a coven, cackling and spitting and slapping the table. I pressed closer into the wall shadows to hear more. Baker’s Cushie said, what she needs is company of her own age and Ushag should be ashamed hiding her away in that dark corner of the island to rot and lose all her chances…the young one’s like a shy little wood-violet. The table of women shrieked like gulls trailing the boats.

  You know, she went on loudly, full of herself now she had them all listening. I’ve heard that violets grow sweeter when grown near something bitter…like onions. The onions draw to themselves the foulness in the soil, see, leaving all the sweetness to the violets. She made a vinegar-mouth, and then as if she couldn’t wait, she spat ale and almost burst. That would explain a lot about those two, now wouldn’t it?

  Their nasty whispering made me angry. They had a neat way of tucking their point inside something soft-seeming and neighbourly. The cutting-edge was hidden in a joke or a piece of advice. It was like bei
ng sliced by a tiny blade hidden in a goose-feather; it took a moment to realise the wound. Every market-day there was a barb for my aunt, and one for me. We were nothing but a type of pastime to them and it made me even angrier that in one thing their nasty whispers were right. I would have given just about anything to have a friend who wasn’t a cow.

  In the face of Market-Shipton I watched my aunt clamp her mouth into its tight line and fold her scarred, brown arms across her chest. She bargained hard and was fair and honest, but she tried no market friendships. She never drank with the women, and we left as soon as trade was done. Everybody thought her too proud by half and just asking for a fall, but if she heard any of the barely hidden talk she never mentioned it.

  Not me, though. I heard most things. It’s in me to listen and I don’t see why I shouldn’t. How do you ever find things out otherwise? I overheard Mr Owney in the pub say that Pa was a drinker who’d killed Mam by mistake. One year, he said, a year of the Hunger, Colm ploughed her under with the dead greens after putting away two bottles all by himself. She’d fainted in the bottom field and all unknowing he went right over her, horses and ploughshares and feet and all.

  Well, he said, it was twilight when the eyes are easily fooled. Everybody smiled. And she was always a little, brown woman. Easy to miss, flat on the ground and in that light. Everybody laughed.

  Then Colm Breda drowned all right, Mr Owney sighed shaking his head. Poor fella fell in a whisky vat — and died trying to drink his way out! It took some time after this for their merriment to die down.

  I despised them. They didn’t even try to make a good story. This one was just plain wrong; Pa drowned a whole year before Mam disappeared. Men from Merton found his boat and his woollen in the Breda weave still in mostly one piece, and brought them back to us. I don’t understand people sometimes. They can be dumb as dirt and crueller than any creature.

  Some folk say Pa married a merrow and that, being able in the water and full of jealousy, Mam went after him and was drowned by his new wife and her minnows. They say Carrick’s men have always bred with the merrows. They say that’s why they live in such numbers in our waters; they all have family ashore.