Work Text:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
Here is the story they tell:
Once upon a time, there was a mermaid who knew there was only one way to gain a soul.
When he is still small, the prince goes down to the sea more days than not. He likes it better there than the palace, or so his wet nurse reports dutifully to his mother the queen in private. He likes the emptiness of the shore, and the clean salt smell in the air. He likes speaking to the sailors, wrapping his mouth around their rough speech and learning to climb their ropes and growing their calluses upon his hands.
He likes their stories: kelpies, sirens, mermaids, undines.
His father the king tells him, "Sailors are a long time at sea, son." He tries to say it kindly. "There's not much to do upon a ship. They—" He sighs, goes to run a hand through his hair before he remembers the crown. "A man has—son, you've been spoken to, haven't you? About…the facts of life?"
The prince bobs his head, and the king remembers that the boy does spend time with sailors. He scratches at his head, under the crown. "Well, son, when a man's at sea for a long time, he has… needs. Do you understand? If a man needs… something, he may not care if, if it's actually there or not… he may just, uh, imagine—"
"I understand," says the prince, and his eyes are as clear as water.
When the prince grows big enough, he asks for a ship of his own, and a crew. His parents confer together, in the flickering warmth of the lamps in their bedroom; his mother the queen, her eyes brown and worried, decides eventually that the company of other men will be good for the boy.
His father the king sends someone, discreetly, to look over the ship after the prince returns home, after a few weeks at sea. The man finds discarded bottles of rum in the hold, and on the deck melted wax stains of candles that have burnt late into the night, and the king sighs with relief.
Only.
The prince's sailors do not speak of this. It seems, in some way, wrong. They have no word for it, because all the worship they have been taught is locked to the land, dry priests in dry churches, graves six feet under the soil. They have no word for it, because they are told that a God is a steady rock, shade under trees, land flowing with milk and honey.
Late into the night, the songs flicker and die, and the candles stutter into silence. Around them, the waves lick gently and insistently at the sides of the ship, and the stars beat down, scattered across the sky a thousand fathoms deep. Eventually, the sailors stumble to their cabins, the sea's hissing voice lulling them into an uneasy slumber.
All but the prince.
He leans across the side of the ship, each night, staring across the glittering trail the moon leaves on the water. Looking into it, as if searching for the face of an old friend.
The prince grows older, his features sharper, and stubble shades in the outlines of his cheeks. His father the king sits down with him one day and tells him, as if imparting news of a great tragedy, that it is time for him to marry.
"Yes," says the prince.
The king, startled, clears his throat. "Ah. I know, on your… travels, son, you may have met. Women. Women of some… ill repute. I feel it’s my duty to tell you, son, that all of this may have to come to an end. Women—the type you marry, I mean—are rather, uh, insistent—"
"I understand," says the prince.
"You do?" says his father.
The prince nods. He's never, thinks his father with a nervousness he himself doesn't quite comprehend, really changed from the boy he was.
They send messages across the continent, to every kingdom his mother the queen can think of and then more. The princesses arrive in droves: tall and slim ones with hair the color of gold, small and boxy ones with eyes the color of the sky, princesses who own land that reaches from one shining shore to another, princesses with breasts that swell like waves, princesses with smiles brighter than the sun.
The prince ignores them all.
Until one sweeps into the ballroom one night, and the hall falls suddenly silent. She has hair like dried red kelp on the shore, eyes like shifting and stormy waters, and when she smiles, for a brief and terrified moment, the king could swear her teeth are pointed and long and thin as needles.
She curtsies to the room and does not give her name; the prince stands and bows to her, as courteously as he has been taught. And beneath that, something more.
She never speaks. The prince says she is from a foreign land, has never been taught the words of the common tongue; the king knows there is a protest, knows something is wrong, sees her swirling sea-green eyes, cannot quite say what it is that is not as it should be.
The prince does not sail out to deep waters any more. Instead, he walks with her along the rocky shore, his hand in hers, his face caught in her gaze like fish trapped in a net. The king sends his man to follow them, and the man reports back, says she and the prince wash their two white feet in the water, nothing more, nothing less.
His father the king sits on his throne, his face in his hands, his head spinning and swirling. His mother the queen is not so becalmed; she consults the bards, the singers, the poets, those who know the stories of such things, and goes to the king with the tales she has found.
The next day, they announce the wedding, and the king cannot tell whether the shivers he feels are relief or fear.
They have hardly seen the prince for weeks. He appears at feasts every so often, shies away from the light and heat of the candles, disappears into the dark with she whose eyes glint gold and green in the reflections. His ship vanishes in the night and is found tied up at the docks again the next morning; he cannot be the one sailing it, though, for a single man could not captain and steer that ship singlehandedly. When his wet nurse comes to wake him in the morning, she reports that his pillow is soaked through, though they cannot imagine how.
The day before the wedding, the prince asks permission to go out to the sea with she who will soon be his bride. The king is taken aback; the prince has never asked before, only gone without a word, and so he agrees readily, drunk on respect, never wondering why the prince may be asking permission, or on whose behalf.
There are none, of course, who see what happens next.
Only the pale clouds, scudding across the sky as if they were frightened. Only the scuttling crabs on the sand, whose hard black eyes and reaching legs have long been witness to what they will never repeat. Only the ragged grey rocks, and the waves that crash against them, endlessly, endlessly wearing the hard granite into soft sweet sand, steady rock into foam drifting on the waves, spreading outward from the ripples of the splash.
Here is the story they tell:
Once upon a time, there was a mermaid who knew there was only one way to gain a soul.