The Merfolk

Oyster Cove is a village by the sea; the hills behind it are bare, the water before it is salt. The rocks stand like a dog's teeth — at ebb tide they bare a row of black fangs, at flood they swallow them whole. The fisherman Shen A-jiao lives in the last tumbled cottage nearest the water; his window faces the sea, and he mends nets by day and listens to the waves by night.

His grandfather, Old Shen the Peg, was a soft-hearted man. One autumn at the great ebb, the old man went among the rocks gathering periwinkles and found a merfolk lying in a shallow pool — a great rotten patch along its tail, stinking of brine, with sea-crows wheeling down to peck. The old man drove off the birds, dressed the wound with coarse salt, and kept the pool filled with seawater for three days, till the creature could swish its tail again. On the night it left, the merfolk rose half out of the water and looked at him, then dipped a finger in its tears and pressed a single pearl into his palm. The pearl was cold as ice and bright as a star; the old man felt a numbness in his palm, and the pearl sank into the lines of his hand, leaving only a pale-green mark, like a birth-stain.

That mark passed, across a generation, to A-jiao's hand.

At thirty, A-jiao lost his wife in childbirth; she left him a daughter, A-ling. The child was frail from birth and coughed each autumn, her nights like a broken bellows. Old Zhou the village doctor stroked his beard and said a cold root had grown in her lungs; she must be slowly sustained on swallows' nests and old mountain ginseng from the south, a hundred pieces of silver at least, to live through the winter. A-jiao sold his boat, pawned his grandfather's net, and borrowed from every kinsman, yet still fell short. That winter hung over his head like a closing lid.

On the fifteenth of the eighth month came the great tide. The moon was absurdly large, and the sea was laid with a sheet of white. A-jiao mended his net on the rocks, the mesh leaking moonlight. Suddenly a shape rose from the waves — half out of the water, long hair hanging like weed, a thread of silver scale bound at the wrist, faintly bright in the moon. She did not come ashore; she watched, across three feet of surf, his open palm, and the mark upon it.

Then she wept.

The tears fell into the sea and did not spread, but coiled into pearls — one, two, three — and the waves pushed them to the wet sand at his feet. A-jiao crouched to gather them; each was the size of a foxnut, warm and luminous in his hand. The merfolk spoke, her voice like wind through an empty urn beneath the water: "The mark upon your honored grandfather's palm — I have kept it forty years. Now I repay in tears."

A-jiao wanted to ask, but did not know where to begin.

After that she came at every great tide. Sometimes she sat on the highest rock, the waves beating to her waist; sometimes she lay in the shallows, only half a face showing. She spoke little, only watched A-jiao and wept slowly; the tears became pearls, and the pearls became his. A-ling's medicine money was thus stretched day by day. The child never knew where the pearls came from, only that her father had lately good luck, always finding fine clam-pearls by the rocks. A-jiao said nothing.

They were good pearls; the jeweler in town knew their worth, and the price rose daily. The wind, in the end, carried the word out.

Butcher Tu was the village brute — round-bellied, small-eyed, hard-hearted. He crouched behind the rocks one night and saw the merfolk weep her pearls, and his eyes went green. The next day he shouldered into A-jiao's house and sat on the threshold: "Fish and shellfish from the sea, taken is the law of heaven. You eat alone and treat your brothers as strangers?" When A-jiao refused, Tu gathered three or four idlers, armed with a coarse hemp net, and waited for the night she came.

She came, as expected. The men surged in, the hemp net dropped over her, and they penned her in the shallow pool. She beat her tail against the rock and shed several scales; the water ran red. She did not look at the others, only across the net at A-jiao, and in her eyes was no fear, only one thing he knew — the same softness his grandfather had once shown her.

A-jiao's face went the color of clay. Tu roared beside him: "Make her cry! Fill the basket!" The merfolk wept indeed, but the tears fell into the mud of the net's mesh, and the pearls they coiled were small and dim, without the light of the moon.

A-jiao stood a long while, then drew his fish-gutting knife and cut the net-rope through.

"Your grandfather saved me," the merfolk said softly, "and today you have saved me once more."

Tu hopped and cursed, held back by the idlers, and went off in a string of oaths. The pool stilled; the merfolk swished her tail and sank, and did not rise again.

A-ling's sickness, by the next spring, mended day by day. A-jiao brought out the pearls he had saved, sold them through a hand, and counted — exactly enough for the medicine, not a coin more, not a coin less. He understood at last her words, "repay in tears" — her tears were numbered, and when they were spent, there were no more.

Years passed. A-jiao grew old, his hair gone white, yet still he sat alone on the rocks and watched the tides turn. Once, at a great ebb, he felt in a crevice a single pearl, far smaller than before, filmed with a thin mist, like a tear not yet dried. He knew it was her last.

The pearls spent, the one hidden. The sea is the same sea, the moon the same moon, and never again has half a shape risen from the waves.