Leave Your Skins by the Shore

LEAVE YOUR SKINS BY THE SHORE

by Natasha King

There’ll be a price, the siren told Blue. Trust that it’ll be paid.

Blue hardened their heart. They crouched in the moonless dark, and thought of the corpses that had festered all day in the square, and nodded.

You are very young, yet, said the siren, taking Blue’s burden in her massive jaws and releasing it to the black water with ponderous crocodilian grace. And this sea is new to you. The silt behind your ears is from a warmer clime, hatchling. A few weeks on our shore is not enough time to know you long for something.

She was many times larger than Blue, ridged in gleaming armor; but Blue crouched before her without fear. Now she watched the two bodies with their soft limbs and shattered bones drift out on the midnight tide. Turning one tawny eye upon small and scrawny Blue, she  smiled. Give it another decade or so.

•••

The hunter arrived from the city and gave his name as Everett, saying he’d come to thin out the shoals causing the town all this trouble.

“Big crocodile problem up and down the coast, as it happens,” he explained, shaking the mayor’s hand. “They’re offering a bounty for the hides. So, our mutual benefit.”

The mayor frowned to hear of decrees issued by distant, inland offices. “Trouble? No one’s been killed by the sirens in many decades. We keep off the beach after dark when they come ashore.”

Every night the sirens’ lilting music floated in from the dunes, up the narrow shore road and through the town streets. They swam back out on the morning tide, and at high noon could be spotted floating a hundred yards out: tails moving lazily, stout legs tucked against their sides, rough-scale backs glittering in the sun.

“A little more my benefit than yours, then,” said Everett.

He winked at Blue, who’d ventured to the end of the street to investigate the rattle of his weathered cart. The cart held great rolled maps from the city; Everett himself carried a mechanically-wound harpoon gun and a glimmering silver net edged with sharp weights. Blue weighed his narrow smile, but its easy humor didn’t warm his eyes, and Blue felt in their bones that Everett meant trouble.

The townspeople preferred to cut sunset a wide berth; Saffri, the baker’s daughter, had told Blue that she’d once stayed too late on the shore and been chased a half-mile through the dunes by something quick and heavy and low to the ground, with yellow eyes and a wet sickle of a mouth. But Everett stalked the beach well into the humid twilight, and worked by lantern in the evenings with his parchment maps over one knee, scribbling notes and crossing out coordinates in red wax pencil. He hung vellum scrolls illustrated with the signs of siren nests—snapped shore-grasses, sand disturbed by short blunt claws—from lampposts in the square. 

Blue, who slept in a little room off the side of the community hall in exchange for sweeping the streets twice a day, scowled at the signage. They pulled it down during their evening rounds, leaving it piled in front of the traveler’s lodge for Everett to find the next day.

“Can you tell them to knock it off?” Everett complained, as he rehung a vivid rendering of the large soft pearls of the eggs. Blue leaned against the wall of the nearest building and glared, their lips pursed in unvoiced disapproval.

The mayor shrugged. “Blue’s harmless, just strange.” He lowered his voice slightly. “You can probably tell they aren’t from round these parts. They passed through when they were quite small and we decided to take them in, as a town.”

“Charity case, eh?” Everett pretended not to notice Blue glowering in their direction.

“They had no one left to care for them. What could we do?”

“They’re making my job a lot harder.”

“Well, we try to indulge their little games. Besides, I doubt your posters are going to persuade anyone to hunt around for these nests. So long as we take the boats out at dawn and bring the catch in before dark, the sirens don’t bother us. Most of the folk here don’t feel we're in any danger.”

Everett fished a cigarette out of his pocket. “Well, I’m not aiming to be some kind of hero. Just here to make a living.”

He jabbed the cigarette at Blue. “If you’re not going to be useful, better for you to stay out of my way.”

As a matter of fact Blue would have liked to see as little of Everett as possible, but they found this easier wished than done. For years they’d treated the shore as refuge, prowling through the long ribs of the dunes, lingering in the sound of gulls and waves, the lack of strident voices. Now they were apt to come across Everett stamping through the tawny beach-grass. Usually he was carrying driftwood or a peculiar bone or old fishing nets tangled with rotting flotsam. Once, he held a crumpled mass the color of ivory, which he brandished smugly in Blue’s direction.

“Eggs,” he called. “I just destroyed three clutches at the southern edge of the shore. You lot keep checking back in laying season and you’ll cull the population on your own eventually. Put me out of a job, too. But maybe I’m an altruist after all.”

Blue backed away from the death clutched in Everett’s hand, the death smeared on the soles of his heavy boots. The leathery shells still leaked yolk: bright ruddy gold, a sunset come home to roost.

Hatched, the baby sirens would’ve been slender and sleek, dark as ink, tumbling in the surf. Hatched, they would’ve crowded Blue’s skinny arms and nipped Blue’s hair and fingertips; dived under the swell of the tide alongside Blue, in the sighing sea, under the moon; warbled with fragile lungs the first of their songs in farewell, as they left Blue treading water in their wake. Crushed, they were nothing but yolk and bloodied sunlight.

“Don’t have the stomach for this sort of thing, huh?” Everett showed that narrow grin again. Hung from his shoulder, the harpoon gun glittered, vicious and elegant.

Blue tore their eyes from the eggs. They had thought it hurt to be left behind, to watch soft-skinned and land-limbed and lonesome, while the young sirens swam out to their families each hatching season. They knew this now to be worse. 

Everett whistled. “I’m surprised, kid. You seem ruthless enough. You might have this lot fooled, but in my line of work we learn to read someone’s eyes. I think you could pull a trigger.”

A week into Everett’s hunting, the loud clamor of gulls at mid-morning lured the rest of the townsfolk to the square, where he was unlashing a great green-gray corpse from a makeshift sledge.

“I’ll be damned,” Saffri whispered to Blue, who stood in the shadow of the community hall with their fist pressed against their mouth. “He actually got one.”

The siren lay on her back, her underbelly pale and smooth-scaled in stark contrast to the dull ridged armor covering the rest of her body. The harpoon had already been wrenched out, leaving a dark wound in her throat. Scarlet-black blood trickled slowly up her chin. Her long jaws hung agape, strung irregularly with yellowing fangs, the great bone-crushing muscles slack in death.

“Don’t be shy,” called Everett to the crowd. He lifted her head, straining a little under the weight, to show her clouded eyes, set high and close together into the bone of her brow, dull amber behind a translucent membrane like isinglass.

No one in town had ever seen a dead siren. Faces twitched in dismay; several people covered their noses with handkerchiefs or sleeves, catching the turn in the air as rot overtook the sharp salt scent of the sea. The mayor shook Everett’s hand, but his eyes kept drifting uneasily back to the immense landbound body, bloating and graceless, above which the crows were already wheeling.

Everett spent most of the afternoon cutting the armored hide away from the siren corpse. Schoolchildren dodged their classes to watch, squealing at the red gleam of tendon in the sunlight, until the teachers hurried them away.

“I don’t need to sleep with this thing under my mattress to keep anyone else from running off with the bounty, do I?” he asked the mayor. He’d sluiced bucket after bucket of salt water over the flensed hide and then draped it over the rear of his cart to dry.

“Oh, we haven’t had thieves in over a decade,” said the mayor, cheering up at the thought. “Made an example of the last two and it’s had a lasting effect.”

“What’d they steal?” said Everett, coiling harpoon lines around his arm.

“Never had a chance to steal anything, not before we put a stop to their plotting. We have a sense round here for ill intent. You can tell by the look of folks, most times.”

The townspeople bolted their doors tightly that night, but even through the walls and the shuttered windows they could hear the sirens grieving: low bass notes, a throaty, elegiac melody, echoing and re-echoing.

Blue lay awake in their narrow bed and cried soundlessly, remembering what the stones of the square had looked like with blood running thick between them. It was old memory made new, razor-sharp like the tongue of a whelk. They shivered as it rasped against the inside of their skull. Finally drove them from bed and out to wander in the singing dark.

Blue’s parents had been human, with warm blood and soft, unarmored throats. They’d told Blue stories of places Blue couldn’t remember: hot silty rivers, mud that smelled of salt, trees with snake-like roots, crocodiles with their eyes gleaming crimson at night.

Now Blue’s parents were memories, and the sea beyond the milky dunes was always cold like the shock of a bad dream. But there were still crocodiles.

Morning found the streets unswept and Blue standing over the skinned siren corpse, batting away the crows that swooped down to investigate its sunken eyesockets. The mayor politely and pointedly inquired as to what Everett intended to do with this great red wet body now dominating the square.

Everett shrugged. “I just need to turn in the hide,” he said. “Feed the rest to your dogs.”

The street dogs refused to go near the corpse, and the stench from the square soon grew unbearable. On the second night, the music seemed to echo even closer, lacing the town streets as though the sirens prowled right beyond the sealed windows and doors.

The next morning, the mayor ordered the dead siren loaded back onto the sledge and dragged down to the shore. As dawn crawled across the sky, a few of the fishermen towed the corpse out past the breakers and cut it loose. It bobbed atop the waves, floating rapidly out to sea. In the distance, the nearest siren shoal could be glimpsed, their armor ridges glinting pink in the filmy light, their gold eyes half-lidded and lazy.

Blue watched from the crest of a dune, near where the fishing boats were usually tied. Beside them on the sand lounged a long, low shape, wine-dark and ridged all along its length.

There’ll be a price, the siren rasped from beside Blue, as the boat cut through the waves. She’d said the same thing on a moonless night ten years ago, when she’d first found Blue crouched wordless and rust-red at the tideline.

Now the pale sand coated her snout like crushed velvet, and she let Blue wait in silent hope for long minutes before she added, It’ll be paid soon enough.

Blue leaned against the old siren’s armored neck, sheltered from the wind by her jutting dorsal scales, and watched the fishing boat release its rot-swelled cargo to the tide. They thought of blood scrubbed so deep into the stones of the square that it remained, invisible, for years. They thought of the ache in their chest when they stood in the dunes: the wind’s thrum, the vast sea sprawling, the foam and the crash and the blue-black horizon. They thought of what Everett had said. Ruthless, Everett had said, knowing nothing at all. His smile had made Blue want to bare their teeth.

The smell of rot faded by noon, but the townspeople still murmured in dissatisfaction. Dark streaks of blood lingered accusingly in the square. A sudden outbreak of skin rashes and itching lungs that afternoon led many to complain about the dust Everett had tracked in from the city.

“How many bounties is he after?” Saffri muttered to Blue. Her hands were cracked and patchy from the rash; she’d been forbidden from working the dough for the morning loaves. “I don’t fancy seeing another one of the horrid things skinned out in the open like that.”

That night a gibbous moon rose fang-yellow and melody trailed Blue like a footprint across the town. The street dogs sniffed at Blue’s ankles and promptly slunk away with their ears down against their skulls.

Outside the traveler’s lodge, Everett’s cart stood unattended. The hide, when Blue pulled it from the cart, weighed as much as they did; they let it drape over their shoulder, hot and heavy and stinking of blood. Buzzing flies trailed them through the empty streets, down the shore road. The hide burdened their steps with the same ponderous gait the sirens adopted on land: that slow drag of millennia, that inexorable sense of belonging which Blue had watched from a distance and craved. In the ten years since the town took Blue in, there’d been no day they’d gone hungry, and no day they didn’t feel starved to the bone.

The tide had come in. Blue walked into the gentle surf, feeling the curve of the berm beneath their soles, contours they knew from years of walking the beach before dawn. They stood at the edge of the last ridge where the foreshore dropped down. The dark water pulled at their waist, stirred the piteous relic of the hide until it rippled like a live thing.

“Stop!” Lantern light spilled over their shoulders as Everett ran down the beach after them. He splashed into the water, holding the lantern high. “Are you out of your mind? Do you want to draw the entire shoal?”

Blue turned, breathing hard. They hauled the decaying hide close against their body and fought the insistent tug of the current.

“The mayor told me about your parents.” The lantern lit the lines of Everett’s face. “Guess thievery runs in the blood. Listen. That hide represents a payday for me, you get it? Maybe you’re some kind of sympathizer, well, to each their own. But flinging it into the sea won’t bring the damn thing back to life, you’ll just cheat me out of my livelihood.”

Blue said nothing. They’d been a small child when they walked the shore road down to the water for the first time, chased by sandflies and rot then as now. They knew well enough that dragging a body into the sea did not bring it back to life. Well enough, they knew.

“I need the money,” said Everett, low and furious. “I have debts to pay, do you understand?”

He closed the gap between them, one hand crushing around their arm. As with everyone else in the town, his skin had begun to scab and roughen with strange blisters. Blue looked over their shoulder at the sea, where Everett’s lanternlight shone on tiny discs of scarlet light scattered in pairs, low stars that watched and waited.

Everett saw it too. The lantern rattled as his breath caught loudly in his jaw. “Eyeshine. They’re already here—”

Blue caught Everett’s other arm and flung themself backward. They felt a tipping of weight, the slow crest and tumble of gravity, and all of them—Blue, Everett, and the flayed skin of the dead siren—went over into the sea.

In eight feet of water, Blue was cradled by the current. Shapes as cold as the ocean moved slowly past, and leathery scales brushed against their bare arms and legs. Something took the siren hide gently in its jaws and pulled it from Blue’s grip.

Between one blink and the next, Blue found that the sea no longer stung their eyes. The darkness distilled itself into deep gray forms moving in the pale gray water. A siren had Everett’s arm in her jaws and was rolling, spinning dancer-like below the waves, dragging him round with her as blood bloomed basalt-dark around her teeth.

Blue opened their own mouth and tasted brine and copper. The frigid tide was suddenly warm against their skin: an embrace, a welcoming, a tenderness that made their throat ache. They swam for the surface, past countless armored bodies that shifted to let them through.

There’ll be a price, the siren had said. If you want to be turned. For all the ten years Blue had known her, she had been ancient and dark-scaled and cloudy-eyed. Decades of scars crossed her snout; decades of memory weighted the rumble of her song. When she lumbered into the waves and the water lifted her in its palm, she belonged to the sea in a way Blue hadn’t belonged to anything in a long time. Always she’d refused, when Blue asked before. But in that morning’s hazy light, the siren had swung her great bone-crushing head toward Blue and said, you can start by bringing me the man who killed my child.

The waves had whisked away the lantern, but Blue neither noticed nor needed it. The dunes now gleamed silver-bright in their vision. They walked out of the water and slowly, inexorably, up the shore road.

Saffri, who should have long since been indoors and in bed, intercepted Blue at the door to the community hall.

“There you are,” she whispered. She was too young to remember when Blue and their parents had arrived at the town with nothing but empty bellies and the clothes on their backs, but in the decade since, she’d been Blue’s closest approximation to a friend. Blue felt a pang of something that was nearly regret. But regret did not bring back all the corpses that had ever rotted in the square. Once upon a time the townsfolk had decided Blue’s grief was a cheap price to pay for their own suspicions, their own self-satisfied comfort, and never had any of them looked back in regret.

Don’t be afraid, child. Once upon a time the mayor had taken Blue’s hands in his, had smiled as if his teeth hadn’t ground out the execution order. We’ll take care of you.

“You know it’s not safe to be out,” said Saffri. “And why are you soaked? Were you in the ocean?”

Blue lifted their head and pinned Saffri with eyes gone gold as a harvest moon, flickering beneath the sweep of a nictitating membrane. Down Blue’s arms, streaks had appeared where ridges of scaled hide were beginning to overtake the skin.

Our children slaughtered. Speared, crushed in the egg. So maybe we are ready, little one, to grant the gift you have wanted for so long.

“What’s happening to you?” whispered Saffri.

Blue lifted a finger to the air on which the mourning sound no longer floated. The first night after Everett’s kill, Blue had rolled out of bed and followed the elegy down to the sea, closer and closer til it thrummed in their bones, rang in their blunt human teeth. They’d stood ankle-deep in the water, breathing the song, drinking it, the sound of grief lilting in the summer air—but to Blue there had never been any kind of belonging that came without grief.

There’ll be a price for what you’ve asked. For what we’ve given you. The siren’s eyes had burned like sun on sand. Can’t hatch a clutch of just one. Bad luck. 

“The sirens,” said Saffri slowly. “Their cursed singing. But...that isn’t fair. It was Everett who killed the siren. Why are you the one to pay for it?”

Sing to the rest of them what we’ve sung to you, little one, and you’ll never be alone again.

“I’m not,” said Blue, in a voice that echoed like the distant, ancient music of the shore. Behind bolted doors and windows, the townspeople dreamed of coastlines shifting, of ancient cradling waters, unaware of the bones and muscle warping within their sleeping bodies. Blue reached out and touched Saffri’s hand, where the skin had just begun to split into rows of scales as dark and glossy as the waiting sea.