Kindred
Chapter Six
Note: I find it really weird that I seem to hit zeitgeists so often. I swear I did not know Wreck-It Ralph was going to have cohabiting princesses before I started writing this fic.
…..
To call King Triton the king of the sea was a misnomer. Specifically, he was the king of that warm blue body of water commonly known as the Pacific ocean, though he had no jurisdiction over the depths of the abyss and the mermaids that have evolved to live there.
Mermaids rarely left the oceans they were born in, and King Triton's subjects were no exception. They had evolved to live in the temperate, somewhat calm waters of the Pacific, and they were more likely to be spotted by humans frolicking in the gentle waves. They were the template for what humans thought all mermaids looked like; humanlike, smooth-skinned and slender as the dolphins they played with under the waves.
Ariel had seen a deep-sea mermaid once; it had come to the surface to die, as it was old and blind and didn't really know where it was. The sight frightened her badly enough to have nightmares for weeks afterwards; the creature was pale as bone, with bulging eyes and a distended jaw that opened and closed without words. Its tail was long and whiplike with several trailing threads attached, and its head held just a few long strands of silver hair.
Some officials were summoned from the castle, and they escorted the creature to a safe place for it to pass on in peace. Ariel had wanted to comfort the poor thing, because she was a kind soul after all, but she was far too frightened to approach it.
"They're just different from us," her oldest sister had told her that night, when she woke up screaming. "Life is hard down there, they had to adapt. That's why they look the way they do."
Triton's court was visited by delegates of two other mermaid nations, and although Ariel was not permitted to attend court at the time she was able to spy from the balcony as the delegates spoke with her father.
She would look back on the delegate from the waters known as the Indian ocean fondly, for she had been the most beautiful mermaid Ariel had ever seen or ever would see. She was just half the size of the average Pacific mermaid, beautifully clothed in diaphanous sea leaves, pearls and polished stones. Her tail was not one strong appendage as theirs were, but a floating set of lace-like fins in shades of green and gold. She did not swim, but gauged the currents and allowed herself to be carried by them. The court had been charmed by her, none more than Ariel herself. She longed to visit the Indian ocean herself, but this idea was laughed off.
"You'd get washed away," they chuckled when she asked. "The currents are too strong to swim against even for full grown mermaids!"
The delegate from the Atlantic ocean was even stranger. She dwarfed Ariel's father, although she looked enormously fat she clearly had a lot of muscle underneath the blubber that protected her from the cold stormy waters she was born in. She swam slowly, almost lazily, but she could swim at astonishing speed when she wanted to. Even in the warm waters of King Tritons' court, she was covered in sealskin cloaks, and she carried a strange weapon studded with the tusks of walruses.
Ariel knew there were mermaids at the polar regions of the world; she knew there were only a few families that had chosen to live there, and there was next to no information about them beyond the old family names. Supposedly the ones in the South were tiny, no bigger than seahorses, and couldn't swim at all but merely floated in the frigid waters. There was nothing known about the northerners, beyond the fact that they existed.
She knew, too, that there were mermaids that lived deep into human territory, in lakes and rivers, even in swamps. At one time, long before she'd ever seen her first human, she had tried to swim into an estuary to see how far she could get. Her rather romantic notion was to get upstream and meet one of these freshwater mermaids, learn about them and their lives. However, she never even got past the first waterfall.
…..
Trying to keep up with conversations was difficult.
It was hard enough when the princesses kept talking about things she didn't understand, referencing objects she hadn't discovered, and talking about places she had never heard of. It was twice as difficult when the princesses talking were Merida or Tiana. Even when she knew they were speaking English, their accents and strange turn-of-phrases rendered the conversation so incomprehensible they might as well have been speaking Creole or Gaelic.
Even the princesses that principally spoke the same language as Ariel had other languages too. Aurora, Snow, Elsa and Anna spoke German, though only Aurora spoke it fluently. Ella and Belle spoke French fluently, Rapunzel spoke both French and Occitan. Jasmine spoke just enough Mandarin to carry out a conversation with Mulan, and likewise Mulan spoke just enough Arabic to do the same.
Pocahontas' Algonquian tongue was far too difficult for even the multilingual princesses to attempt beyond a few phrases, and Merida's Gaelic was similarly confusing. Ariel couldn't even wrap her tongue around words like Tibik-kìzisor Délámhach.
Sitting in the kitchen with Tiana in the evenings, as they all tended to do at some times, was often an exercise in Ariel being silent, just trying to understand what was being said. If Belle or Ella happened to be there too, their tendency to lapse into French halfway through left Ariel baffled. It was like they forgot she was there.
She shouldn't have been surprised to find that the princesses were very different from each other, just as mermaids were from each other, but she was anyway.
One afternoon, Mulan had volunteered to make lunch for them all, neatly kicking Tiana out of the kitchen for a while. Ariel fretted a little; she had just about cracked the art of using a fork (not a dinglehopper, she reminded herself once again) but she had seen Mulan use those little sticks to eat with and how was she supposed to do that?
But by the time Mulan served up her dish, she discovered she wasn't the only one.
Ella and Aurora, normally so graceful, fumbled indelicately with the sticks. Snow chose to use them with both hands, and although it looked childish it didn't stop Rapunzel or Anna from copying her after trying to get it right and failing. Jasmine already knew how, and Elsa managed to get it right after the first attempt. Tiana swapped them out straight away for a fork, Merida and Pocahontas resorted to stabbing their food and holding their bowls close to their mouths (having already proven they didn't give a monkey's about typical princess manners).
"It's not that difficult," Jasmine shrugged when Ella sighed heavily and readjusted her grip for the tenth time. "Just keep the bottom one still and move the top one."
"I'm trying," Ella said through gritted teeth.
"You can get a fork, I won't take it personally," Mulan offered.
"No, this is a skill worth developing," Aurora said smoothly, though her stickful of food was trickling back into her bowl.
"Itsh good," Merida mumbled through a mouthful of rice. She was almost finished, her stabbing having worked out well for her.
"How are you getting on, Ariel?" Belle suddenly asked, and they all turned towards her.
Truth be told, she had gotten caught up in examining the little gold markings on the black lacquered wood of the sticks and wondering if she would get away with asking for a set to take with her. She hadn't even taken a single bite.
"F-fine," she stuttered, and attempted to take a mouthful but dropped one of the sticks right away.
"It's okay if you can't figure it out," Mulan assured her. "We start learning to use them as children back home. There's also a whole lot of rules to follow."
"What kind of rules?" Belle asked.
"Let's just say we've already broken all of them," Mulan quipped.
"It's a good sight better than having to go through five different forks," Elsa grumbled, and Anna nodded vigorously.
"It's so confusing," Ariel spoke up, agreeing. "I didn't even know what to do with a fork when I first went on land..."
She trailed off uncomfortably, because once again everyone had turned to look at her. Their expressions were amused, but deep down she wondered if they pitied her for her ignorance.
"What do you use to eat underwater?" Belle asked, and at least she could be depended on for genuine curiosity.
"We don't use anything, really..." Ariel mumbled softly.
"You eat with your hands? That's sensible," Pocahontas said.
"No, I mean we don't eat," Ariel corrected. "Not the way humans do."
"What do you mean?" Tiana asked, folding her arms and leaning in.
"Well..." she started, very aware that her face was flushed red. "We filter-feed. We have organs built into our tails for that purpose..."
They were well hidden, those organs. They closed over for swimming, and couldn't be seen under the scales most of the time, but at night as the mermaids slept they fanned out to dredge what they could from the ocean.
"But you have a mouth," Belle said. She had that little glint in her eye that said her interest had been peaked. "And I assume a working esophagus...how are you eating now?"
"My father made me fully human," Ariel answered. "I never used my mouth for eating, or that other thing... we don't really need them underwater, they're just there."
"Oh, so they're vestigial," Belle exclaimed. Her bowl was still half-full, but when she got like this it was like she no longer felt hunger or tiredness.
"I don't know what that means."
"It's...um.."
Belle trailed off, and then fired off some rapid French to Ella. Ella paused for a moment with her chopsticks by her mouth, before giving her the word she was looking for.
"It's a holdover," Belle continued. "From when your ancestors lived on land. Are all mermaids filter-feeders?"
"I don't know," Ariel told her. "My father's subjects certainly were...and we had a visitor from another ocean once, she definitely was."
She paused herself, thinking. She was somewhat sure, though, that the visitor from the Atlantic had been a particularly voracious carnivore that ate with her mouth like the other mammals that populated her ocean. She had a lot of weight to keep up in such cold waters, filter-feeding would have never kept her going.
It really only hit her then just how alien she was to the rest of them. For all their language differences, and the different ways they ate their food, they were ultimately human. Ariel was something else entirely, no longer a mermaid but not fully human either.
…..
Belle invited her to have tea with her in the library later, and although Ariel was still feeling a little on edge since lunch she agreed. Belle was always kind, even if her enthusiasm over Ariel's differences could be overwhelming. When Ariel arrived and knocked, Belle didn't even look up from her book until she cleared her throat.
"Oh!" Belle exclaimed. "Sorry, I was distracted...and I never even made any tea..."
"That's okay," Ariel said, sitting in the window seat across from her. "To tell you the truth, I don't really like tea."
"You've been drinking it for months," Belle deadpanned.
"I was just being polite."
The two of them collapsed into a giggling fit.
"What are you reading, anyway?" Ariel asked as her giggles subsided.
"Oh, well what we discussed at lunch got me thinking, so I went back to my book," Belle answered, oblivious to the way Ariel tensed.
I know I'm different. You don't need to prove it any further.
"You know every culture has its own version of mermaids?" Belle continued. "I mean, you're the first any of us have met in person, but they're everywhere you find water. And they're all different from each other."
"Really? In what way?"
Despite herself, Ariel was interested in Belle's findings.
"According to Merida, there are horselike creatures that live in freshwater that tempt humans to ride them, and then they drown them, possibly for food. She also said something about seals that changed into women and lived with humans on the seashore. I can't tell how much of that is just superstition, her people have a lot of stories like that."
It was true, if what Merida told them was correct then the lands she came from were incredibly dangerous. If mermaids had adapted to appear horselike it was probably because the humans there knew better than to approach a strange woman in the water.
"Aurora said something about a woman with a snake's tail who lives in fountains looking for a man who will promise never to visit her on a Saturday," Belle continued. "Snow remembered that same story, which means it's pretty far reaching, their kingdoms are nowhere near each other."
"Why a snake's tail?" Ariel asked.
"Who knows? It might just be a translation problem."
"I did see a mermaid with a snakelike tail once," Ariel said, suddenly remembering. "But she was from the deepest part of the ocean... she needed a tail like that to swim down there."
"Hm...you think her subspecies might have made it to Aurora's kingdom?"
"I doubt it," Ariel laughed. "Even if they did, I don't think they would have found any man willing to visit on any day. They don't look like humans."
"Don't underestimate unmarried men," Belle quipped. "Elsa was able to tell me something about rusalka...they're not quite mermaids but supposedly they live near water. According to her they are the spirits of girls who died violent deaths, and they try to lure men and children into the water to drown them."
"I hope you know I've never known a single mermaid that deliberately tried to drown anyone," Ariel huffed.
"I know," Belle laughed. "But it's human nature to assume something they don't understand is dangerous."
"Who knows, maybe they are," Ariel sighed. "I've never met an inland mermaid. I wouldn't even know what to say if I did."
"There's a first time for everything," Belle said. "You are the first mermaid we've met, you could be the first ocean mermaid an inland mermaid has ever met...didn't you say you could go on diplomatic visits?"
"Yes, I did."
"Well, there's a very large river near our palace back home. If there are any mermaids in my country, they'd probably be there. Why not try and find some?"
Why not indeed?
The first time she'd tried to find other mermaids, she had been foiled by the lack of strength in her tail and her gills being unsuited to freshwater breathing. This time, she could try on her own two human feet and hold her breath as the humans did. Perhaps it would work.