Читать книгу Water: The Mermaid Legacy Book One - Natasha Hardy - Страница 11

Two old willow trees wept silently into the still, clear water, their shade providing a haven in which thick lush grass grew in great mushroom mounds.

Luke, Josh and I’d cycled down to fish at the dam that served as drinking water for the livestock. It was on the very edge of the “adventure zone” bordering the lush green plain that swept sharply upwards into Injisuthi’s peaks and ridges.

“Right, you’re on worm patrol,” announced Luke before showing me how to sift the mud at the edge of the pool through my fingers looking for insect larvae.

While I shuffled awkwardly through the shallows looking for larvae, mud squelching through my toes and knees cramping, I couldn’t help but feel that the boys were taking advantage of my enthusiasm as they stretched out in the springy grass under the trees, chatting about sport.

I should have minded, but the cool water underfoot and hot sun beating on my back was sheer bliss. Bright yellow weaver birds warbled cheerfully as they wove ball-shaped nests from willow leaves, their fussy partners chirping bossily. Glittering dragonflies flirted with the water as the crickets and other critters all sang their joy at surviving another day in Africa.

Eventually, a handful of worms later, and after I’d squeamishly threaded a wriggling one onto my hook and been shown how to throw the line into the water, I settled beside the boys, watching the gossamer-thin lines bobbing gently on the glassy surface.

I stole a glance at Josh before broaching the subject that had been nagging incessantly for an explanation.

“So, um, Luke and I heard our parents speaking about a camping trip they went on, looking for the jade pools, and Luke said you might know more about it, and what the local tribe has to do with it?” I blurted out in a rush.

His eyebrows shot up as he turned to Luke, accusation burning in his eyes.

Luke shrugged, looking a little guilty. “I know we’re not supposed to talk about it, Josh, but, well… I’ve been wondering about it too. And I thought…” He trailed off, looking sheepish at Josh’s furious expression.

“Why aren’t you allowed to talk about it?” I asked.

Josh shook his head, his mouth tightening into a flat angry line.

“Aw come on, Josh,” Luke complained “you can trust her. They’re just stories anyway.”

“Stories?!” Josh snorted an angry laugh. “The problem is that those stories have caused a lot of trouble for my people, Luke!”

“She ran away, Josh,” Luke interrupted him, rolling his eyes.

“Wait… who ran away?” I interrupted them.

“Talita.”

I stared at Luke in confusion.

“Your Dad’s long ago girlfriend.”

“Oh, why?”

Luke turned to Josh and waited.

He sighed, an unfamiliar frown creasing his forehead. “You have to promise me that you will keep everything I’m telling you a secret.”

“Why?” I asked, bewildered.

“Because the explanation that the town has accepted for Talita’s disappearance has resulted in my grandfather and most of the tribe being ostracised and I don’t want to be the one to start up vicious rumours again,” he replied angrily.

“OK, Josh, I won’t mention it to anyone else, but why has the town turned on your tribe?”

Josh took a deep breath, staring at his fishing line as he spoke. “At the time your parents went on their fated camping trip, our people lived on a very valuable piece of land. Some people from outside had identified a possible gold vein that ran beneath it. The government had granted them mining rights but under the condition that the land was uninhabited. We’d been there for generations and, despite the threats and then the promises of the people who wanted us to leave the land, we refused to go.” He shook his head angrily.

“And then Talita –” he spat her name out “– disappeared, and our tribe was blamed. They said –” he used his fingers to make quotation marks “– the ‘mootie man’ of our tribe had murdered her and used her for his witchdoctor medicine.” He let out a short disbelieving bark of cynical laughter.

“But didn’t our parents tell them what really happened?” I asked.

Josh shook his head. “They tried, but they were just kids and their story was so far-fetched…” Josh trailed off.

I glanced at Luke, who was staring at his fishing line too, his mouth turned down at the corners and a frown entrenched on his forehead.

“So what happened?”

“Our tribe was removed by force and relocated to the barren wasteland on the other side of the river where they live now,” Josh replied quietly.

“But didn’t they fight it?” I asked incredulous, and horrified at how his people had been treated. “Didn’t the other townspeople fight it?”

Josh shook his head. “It was the middle of Apartheid, Alex, you know how violent the secret police were. The few that knew about it and did speak up either shut up when the police went to visit them, or disappeared.”

“It’s horrible, Josh,” I told him quietly, putting my hand on his arm, “but why are you afraid of the real story now? I mean, it happened years ago and things have changed…”

“For us maybe,” he agreed, smiling at me sadly and covering my hand briefly with his. “For the older folk…” He shook his head. “They can’t forget, Alex, and I don’t want to be the one to open old wounds.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, because the ugly scar on our country’s history still pulsed with the memories of the hateful crimes that had been committed all those years ago.

“Promise, Alexandra,” Josh said quietly, “promise me you’ll keep all of this a secret.”

I nodded. “Sure, Josh,” I replied.

He gazed at me a moment longer before nodding slightly to himself, as if satisfied that he believed me.

He examined his toes, wriggling them into the mud and clouding the water.

“This story goes far beyond Talita’s disappearance. Although that is the most recent interaction this town has had with the magic within Injisuthi, these mountains have been shrouded in mystery for decades,” he said, looking at me intently. “The first record we have of them is from my grandfather’s tribal stories which were passed down from his grandfather. Our tribe lived a good one hundred kilometres from the Injisuthi, where the town is situated now.”

I nodded my encouragement.

“They were very friendly with another tribe that lived much closer to Injisuthi, in her skirt folds, over there.”

He pointed to a sweep of mountains that rose aggressively into rock-capped peaks. I imagined for a moment living in their shadow, Josh’s story taking shape in my mind’s eye.

“Because of their knowledge of the forests and mountains, the mountain tribes that inhabited the foothills of Injisuthi had managed to accumulate much wealth helping various groups of travellers to cross the mountain range. In those days, this area was wild bush veld, lions and especially leopard were everywhere.”

He paused, his eyes drifting to the same plains I’d been looking at.

“One day they were betrayed by their own chief to slavers who had heard of their women’s extraordinary beauty. After many weeks of killing, the slavers cornered the mountain tribe in a deep valley, where they found themselves trapped between their enemies and a cliff face with a mighty waterfall and a deep pool. A great battle began, as the men of the mountain tribe and the other tribes they’d managed to get to help them fought off the slavers. Days and nights passed and still the fighting continued, but with no food and inferior weapons the mountain tribe began to fall. One night when almost all of their warriors had been killed and with their enemies prepared to strike, the mountain people disappeared.”

I was staring at Josh, holding my breath, completely enthralled.

“What happened to them?”

Josh’s expression was intensely serious.

“Some people say their ancestors rescued them by taking them into the stars. Others say they committed suicide by drowning themselves. Some say there was a secret way out of the valley only they knew of.”

He paused dramatically.

“And some say that ‘fish-people’ came to them through the waterfall pool and took them away to safety.”

“Fish-people?”

Luke and Josh both examined my expression carefully, as Josh nodded seriously.

“Like in swimming underwater without oxygen?” I whispered.

Josh nodded.

A chill raced up my spine in spite of the warm afternoon sunshine. I fought to fix the mask of normality on my face, staring at my fishing line intently, because inside I was screaming in terror as snapshots of my nightmare forced an unwelcome entry into daylight.

I’d been underwater for five minutes, and hadn’t drowned.

The memory of that capsule of time had, until now, eluded me in my waking hours. I’d spent countless hours in my therapist’s office trying to remember the sequence of events that’d led up to Brent’s drowning, the theory being that once I faced the horror, I’d be able to move on. None of the techniques she’d applied had worked, the memory remaining vague and wavey, just out of my reach.

Now, cocooned in sunshine and the smell of summer, I was having tiny, fragmented memories of that time.

I remembered the throb of the creepy crawly, the taste of chlorine in my mouth. There’d been a silky sensation on my exposed skin, as if the water were more than just liquid. For a moment I remembered the pain. It wasn’t like my nightmare though, I didn’t feel the pain as I did in the nightmare, but I remembered it, as one remembers a toothache.

It was what I didn’t remember that was the most significant. In all that time, I’d never once worried or even thought about the need for oxygen…

“What does this have to do with our parents’ trip into the Injisuthi?” Luke’s question jolted me back to reality

“Your parents went camping in Injisuthi twenty years ago,” Josh replied.

“Allan and Maryka –” he pointed at Luke, “and Tom and Talita –” he pointed at me “were meant to spend two weeks hiking through the Injisuthi. They were our age, and from everything I’ve heard, very happy, normal teenagers.” He paused, his eyes glinting with the excitement of the tale. “Four days into the trip, Tom came running into town in the early morning shouting for help at the top of his voice. He claimed Talita had disappeared and was worried that she’d been swept downriver. There’d been a massive storm the night before, and they had been camping near the river. Tom woke at about midnight, to find Talita gone.”

“So she was washed downstream?” Luke asked.

Josh shook his head. “That’s what everyone thought initially, but there were issues with that story. The others had been less than a metre away from her, so unless she’d got out of her sleeping bag and wandered towards the river, the others should have been washed away too.”

“So what happened?” I asked, still feeling shaken by the intense response I’d had to the story of the fish-people.

“Our people say she was taken… by them,” he replied, his voice laden with intrigue.

“Why would they take her?” I asked.

“How should I know?” he replied, shrugging his shoulders.

“It came out later that she was being abused by her father, and others thought she’d committed suicide instead, you know, thrown herself into the rushing river.” Luke filled me in on the little he knew before turning back to Josh. “So your grandfather really believed they took her?” There was huge scepticism in his voice.

“Stranger things have happened, Luke,” Josh replied defensively.

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like Mokele-mbembe.”

Luke burst out laughing, shaking his head and muttering about stupid superstitions.

“The what?” I asked Josh.

“Mokele-mbembe is supposedly Africa’s version of Nessie, the Loch Ness monster,” Luke butted in still giggling.

“There are dozens of cave paintings proving its existence, Luke,” Josh replied angrily.

Luke laughed again. “Well, at least you have that with Mokele-mbembe, what do you have on the fish-people? Nothing.”

“So what you’re saying is that you won’t believe it unless you see it?” I asked him, not liking the way he was treating Josh at all.

“Yeah something like that,” Luke replied.

“So then, the wind doesn’t exist?” I shot back, my voice laden with sarcasm.

He laughed, some of the tension easing. “What does the wind have to do with anything?”

“Well, you can’t see the wind,” I replied, smiling to take the bite out of my words.

“Of course you can,” he replied, still smugly assured of his argument.

“No she’s right,” Josh interrupted him, “you can only see the effects of the wind, not the wind itself, so by your argument the wind doesn’t exist.”

Luke harrumphed, looking fed up. I didn’t want to upset him, the tentative thread of friendship still a lifeline I was holding on to.

“What if we go and look for evidence,” I suggested, trying to placate both of them.

“Where?” Luke asked, sounding incredulous.

“Well, for one we could try the internet,” I suggested. “Surely if the fish-people have actually been around for hundreds of years there would be some reports or sightings of them. If there’s nothing on the net, they probably don’t exist.”

“Not a bad idea,” he replied thoughtfully, “but I’m going for a swim first.”

“Me too,” said Josh, leaping up and packing his fishing gear away.

I trailed behind the boys, my mind spinning with the intriguing legend Josh had related.

I didn’t doubt that the possibility existed for such creatures to inhabit the planet with us. The few times my family had gone to the beach, I’d been utterly fascinated with the sea, spending ages staring at the ever-changing blue and wondering what secrets it held. From a tiny child I’d had dozens of books on ocean life, and as many documentaries, each new piece of information sparking more and more questions about the creatures that inhabited the alien world that covered most of the planet.

It was, in my mind at least, entirely possible that humans weren’t the only sentient life on earth, and that there were creatures equally as intelligent as humans that lived in the ocean. After all, we know so little about that world, only able to spend, at most, an hour or so under the water.

The question I couldn’t answer was what on earth they were doing four hundred kilometres from the sea?

Luke and Josh were already cannonballing into the pool when I got back to the house. I changed quickly into my pale yellow bikini, shuffling to the pool wrapped in a towel before stepping cautiously into the water.

I blushed as Josh whistled at me.

‘Looking good there, Ally Cat.”

I didn’t jump into water any more, mainly because that’s how I’d got into trouble that day with Brent but, more recently, because I preferred my bikini to stay on the newly developed curves of my body.

Before Brent’s accident, swimming had been a sort of refuge for me. I’d competed nationally in swimming competitions and, when I wasn’t training or doing homework, I was in the pool, floating on my back, or diving underwater, the thick silence a relaxing haven from the world above.

I remembered games I’d played as a kid, pretending to be a dolphin, or a ray, or some other oceanic creature, longing to be able to stay submerged for longer than the short time I could hold my breath.

As a child I’d had vivid dreams of swimming in the ocean, completely submerged, twirling and spiralling in the currents, drifting in the great kelp forests that looked, to me at least, as comforting as a lullaby as they swayed in the tide.

Now, though, I was wary of water. It held a dark fascination for me, one I was too afraid to entertain.

Josh and Luke had pulled lilos into the pool, Luke pushing a spare one towards me. We climbed, laughing, onto them, slipping and splashing each other as we did so.

The boys had been sidetracked from the legend of the fish-people by a local rugby game that was on that afternoon. They spent a good ten minutes discussing tactics and team strategy before the conversation lapsed enough for me to change the subject back to the legend.

“Josh,” I started, swishing my hand in the water so that my lilo faced him better, “what are the fish-people supposed to look like?”

Luke laughed. “You really believe there might be some half-fish half-human thing in the mountains?” he asked incredulously.

“It’s not impossible,” I replied with as much dignity as I could muster. “Anyway, while you guys watch rugby, I’m going to do some internet research, and it would help if I had an idea of what they’re supposed to look like.”

He laughed again, before tipping out of his lilo and swimming to the edge of the pool. “I’m going to make lunch while you two dreamers make up stories.” He pulled himself out of the pool.

I turned back to Josh.

“Sorry about that.” He waved his hand in Luke’s direction. “He’s been a bit grumpy the last few days hasn’t he?”

I grinned and nodded.

“Yeah, it’s just ‘cause he can’t go on this youth camp because…”

“I’m here?” I guessed.

Josh blushed, looking sheepish. “Yeah, there’s this girl he’s interested in… anyway, he shouldn’t take it out on you.”

“So the fish-people?” I asked, wanting desperately to change the subject.

“Well, I’ve never actually seen one myself,” he admitted, “but they’re apparently very humanlike, except that they can breathe underwater.”

I hadn’t expected that. My mental picture of them had been a typical mermaid picture – a human torso and head, and fishlike tail.

“You mean they have legs?”

He nodded, grinning. “Yup, apparently you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from normal humans, except that they’re supposedly really beautiful, unless of course you find yourself underwater with one of them.”

“What happens underwater?” I asked, feeling breathlessly frightened and strangely excited at the same time.

“Well, apart from their ability to breathe underwater –” he dropped his voice to a whisper, looking furtively around him “– legend has it that they are carnivorous.”

“As in they eat fish?” I asked, trying to dispel the underlying menace that sparked a bubble of excited nervousness in the pit of my stomach.

He shook his head, leaning towards me across the shimmering strip of water that separated our lilos. I leaned toward him, almost holding my breath in anticipation.

“When they are in the water,” he whispered, “another side of them takes over… a predatory side.”

I nodded leaning towards him. “So if you were anywhere near them, you would become…”

“PREY”

The sudden volume of his voice, combined with him launching himself onto me and tipping me into the water, paled next to the fear that engulfed me as the water closed over my head.

Josh had wrapped his arms and legs around me and was pulling me towards the bottom of the pool, a big stupid grin all over his face.

Panic ripped through me as everything seemed to move in slow motion, the bubbles of air rising from Josh’s mouth as he laughed at me, expanding outward in ever widening, glistening rings, the ineffective thrashing of my arms and legs as I struggled to reach the surface a backdrop to the pain that was arcing up my neck.

We surfaced, what must have been only a few seconds later, Josh still giggling as I turned on him.

“Are you insane?” I gasped, most of the volume I’d intended to be in my voice fading as my whole body began to shake.

He laughed. “Come on, Alex, you were taking it all so seriously, I thought you’d appreciate a bit of humour.”

I turned and waded out of the water, trying to contain the unexpected fury that burnt red hot at my centre. I knew this feeling, even though I tried to deny it: it was the same feeling I’d had that day in the pool with Brent. An illogical and violent reaction to being unable to move in the water.

I stood with my towel clutched around my body, sucking great lungfuls of air in as I desperately willed my pounding heart to slow and the panic that tunnelled my vision to ebb.

Josh didn’t seem to notice and was still chortling as he walked through the wide-flung sliding doors into the house and flopped onto the couch facing the TV.

I eventually managed to put one foot in front of the other and wobble my way into the house.

Luke looked up from the kitchen table where he was making himself a massive sandwich.

“Hey,” he said, frowning, “it looks like you scratched yourself.” He pointed at my neck.

Josh twisted around in the couch to see.

“Sorry, Alex, that must have been me.”

My hand automatically flew to my neck and came away red, wet and sticky.

“I’d better go and clean this up,” I muttered, stumbling off to the bathroom.

Safely locked in the bathroom, and with the shower beginning to envelop me in steam as it warmed up, I stood in front of the mirror and gingerly wiped the little droplets of blood off my neck with some tissue.

The skin of my neck was perfectly intact.

My stomach flipped nervously as I allowed my fingertips to carefully explore my neck, working from my hairline up towards my temples. An intense stinging in the crease behind my ears, and a flicker of the pain I’d felt in the pool, was enough for me to know that this was the source of the blood.

I was too frightened to do much except stare at myself in the mirror, my eyes pulled open wide enough to show white all the way around my irises, because I’d had this experience before. In the chaos after Brent had been pulled from the pool no one had been paying much attention to me until the paramedics had arrived. One of them had taken me aside and asked my parents terse questions about why my still water-slick body was covered in rivulets of blood. It had taken the paramedic a few minutes to find the source of it: tiny, inexplicable gashes behind my ears.

Standing beneath the warm shower I eventually found the courage to feel behind my ears again.

The sensation was odd at first, my brain unable to make sense of the information my fingertips were telling it. It was as if the crease behind my ears had widened.

Not by much. If someone else were to look at it they probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. But there was a difference because the creases that had once been only a hair’s breadth wide were now triple that, and the texture had changed from soft skin to rigid gristle.