Atema helped disassemble the stands, standing side by side with the now-uncostumed Bertam the Barbarian and Sybil of Secrets, grunting as they lifted the seat-boards off their metal frames and onto wooden carts to carry back to the storage wagons. They couldn’t lift the tent flaps yet, or audience members might see the performers in normal clothes, so they sweated and wheezed in the humid cloud of sweat and body odor so lovingly cultivated by the audience in the hours prior.
After perhaps half an hour, when Atema was sure almost all the townsfolk would be back in their homes, she hopped onto the partially deconstructed stage, from one board to another, and hopped back down on the other side of the tent, at the back flap that now lay open to the night, although shielded from the rest of the town by a ring of storage wagons.
The cold, dry air rushed over her face as Atema passed the threshold and stood on the sand outside. She breathed in the quiet and shivered as the wind slid through her baggy linen outfit and against her skin. Six stagehands waited for her, the tank looming dark over them like a monument. Atema nodded to them, and they nodded to her. One of them handed her a lantern. Then they walked down to the pool at the center of the oasis.
The stagehands stood at the sides of the tank, silently pushing it forward on its creaking wooden cart. Atema led by the bobbing light of the lantern, hood pulled over her head against the wind, feet shushing against the dusty stone road.
In the tank, the mermaid played. It did not laugh or shout, lest the inhabitants of the town hear her, but swirled around the tank with an energy more ferocious than during the show, leaping up and plunging back down with deep, full splashes, kicking off the sides of the tank with slaps of the tail that rocked the cart. It spun around the sides of it until water spilled over the sides of the tank, and when Atema shone the lantern back, the mermaid had created a whirlpool, and the red light gleamed off her teeth as she grinned and spun.
The mermaid had teeth as long as a knife and a jaw that could unhinge to fit a man’s head whole. She had a laugh to make gnarled old oaks weep with wonder, but Reed didn’t allow her to laugh in front of an audience, so they wouldn’t see those teeth. Instead, she smiled demurely without opening her mouth, and the audience loved it. What whimsical thoughts hid behind that face? What did she think of them as she swept her dark eyes over the stands? It was a beautiful mystery, just like all the beautiful parts of her that were not her teeth.
No one spoke as they led the tank through the main street of the town, between the dark-windowed houses, under the shaggy, rustling heads of palm trees. The only sounds were the mermaid throwing herself around her tank, the creaking of the cart, and the party’s hushed footsteps. Eventually, they reached the pool around which the oasis was formed, and the mermaid needed no invitation to leap out of her tank with cart-rocking force and dive into it. The stagehands hauled the tank at the water’s edge, unscrewed a plug at the bottom of the tank, and they watched as water gushed back into the pool from which we’d filled the tank when they arrived in town.
As the last of the water trickled out, they used the same hole to pour out the pebbles and decorative plants onto the ground, and one of the stagehands filled a barrel with fresh water from the pool.
“Thanks, I’ve got it from here,” Atema said, waving the stagehands off. The black-clad workers took the lantern from her and began to push the tank back up the street. She sat down on the water’s edge and leaned back on her palms. The mermaid dove and twirled in the pool, which was only a little wider than her tank and swirling with silt to veil her like a sandstorm as she careened through it. Up and down, left and right, circling the pond one way and then the next, throwing herself into a quadruple-flip out of the water and back into it.
Atema imagined what it would be like to be able to move with such speed, such grace, such power. She imagined skimming just beneath the waves, launching herself out of the water, falling and knowing that the water would be there to catch her, knowing that she was made to exult among the waves. What the hell were humans made for, anyways? Crawling around muddy fields, flipping dirt over dirt, throwing seeds on the ground and pissing on them to make them taller. Tanning leather, killing rats, giving birth, killing each other.
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The mermaid’s silhouette as she twirled out of the water and back in was a sliver of perfection entirely unlike anything Atema ever saw during a show. Sitting here by this muddy pond and watching the mermaid in the water reminded her of afternoons spent the same way in her father’s palace of orange stone under the cliffs, drawing and writing bad poetry in her cracked sealskin journal, feeling the waves seep over her feet and leave grains of sand there. The mermaid had been different then. Not more beautiful. Not more strong. But more something. More vivid, perhaps. The light shone clearer off her skin. Not that it wasn’t clear now. But it had been more right. Her laugh was purer, more textured, more whole. Her fingers had been rougher and softer. She had smelled of brine, of fish, of the thick knots of kelp that floated just under the water. Now she smelled of nothing.
The mermaid started to sing. It was a song Atema had often heard from the mermaid, a fast song in a minor key with many notes, many words going up and down and up and down, all in an ethereal register that gave it the impression of floating, bobbing up and down above deep waters or empty skies. It is the language of the waves, the mermaid had told Atema once, when they still lived at the palace and the mermaid still spoke. One day, when your face is cracked and browned, your hair gnarled white like salt, you will know the words I speak.
Atema supposed she would never understand it now. Perhaps she would never see the ocean again and wander these parched lands until the day she died. Certainly she would never see her father again, nor the sunburned castle of her youth. Still, she was far better off than the mermaid.
As she sang, the mermaid circled the pond in smaller and smaller circles until she was drifting, then floating in the center, upright as if she was standing on the bottom, still that same high, pure voice singing the song of the sea. Atema got up and stood next to the barrel a stagehands had filled with pond water. It sat in a little square cart specifically designed to hold it.
The mermaid drifted to the edge of the pond, still upright as if something else was pulling her forward. She was still singing very quietly, and looked only at the waning moon, black eyes glistening. She wearily leapt out of the pond and landed in the barrel, catching the rim with both hands and easing herself down so her tail wouldn’t hit the botom. The mermaid nodded to Atema, a human gesture that had once looked awkward and foreign on her, like an accent, but that she had adopted more and more frequently ever since leaving the coast. She could speak Vulgar, but her mouth hadn’t been designed for it, and so she’d spoken aloud less and less until nowadays she communicated almost solely through body language.
The cart creaked as the mermaid sank into the barrel. Atema twirled it around without ceremony and began pushing it back up the path to the caravan.
“Another long march starting tomorrow,” she said. The mermaid looked up now into the clear sky dotted with the uncountable host of stars. She was utterly still and silent, not even bumping against the sides of the barrel as the cart rattled and jolted against the sandy pavestones. “Three days til we reach the next oasis.”
The mermaid said nothing, but her mouth traced unreadable words as her eyes remained fixed above. A prayer, perhaps? A lament? A curse or a blessing? Even after all the years Atema had spent in the her company, the mermaid still felt as unknowable as a thundercloud. Sometimes Atema thought about a row of flat boulders near her father’s palace, where the mermaids would soak in the sun and sing songs to the waves. Sometimes, if Atema listened closely, she could hear the rhythm of the ocean’s response. She would perch on the rocks next to the mermaids guess the meaning of each wave, but the mermaids would only laugh and tousle her hair with their long firm fingers, which were just a little too long to fit on her head. Atema had known then as she did now that she would never speak the language of the waves. Perhaps, as the mermaid had suggested, she would understand it from the mouths of mermaids, in a register humans were designed to hear, but not from the waves themselves, and how could a land-treader speak the language of those which she did not understand?
After some time spent with the mermaid staring into the sky and Atema silently trudging forward, the mermaid sank into her barrel, crossed her elbows on the rim of the barrel, and lay her head down. Atema pushed the barrel the rest of the way into her wagon, looked down at the mermaid's slumped form under the dim moonlight filtering through the wagon cover, then eased herself onto her own cot and wrapped herself in her own thin blanket to sleep.