Adrift: A Little Mermaid Retelling

36: Daniel

We traveled for days, trying to stay off the roads. We took to walking at night. Mostly, we went in silence.

I did my best to hide my frustration at that. We had shared so much of our lives—so many little secrets and jokes. Having been separated for so long, it was cruel indeed for her to be robbed of her voice right after our reunion. There was so much I wanted to ask her, so much I wanted to tell, but in light of her loss I found myself keeping my own silence, too.

When we did converse, Hali did her best with gestures and little sounds, but she often became frustrated and embarrassed, and I became frustrated, too. I wanted to be the answer to all of her problems. It is the curse of a man in love. We wish to be the salve for every wound, and instead are faced again and again with our own inadequacy.

Damn the man who'd taken her voice from her. By cutting out her tongue, he robbed us of so much. The stories we might have told were choked; the dreams we might have shared were left unspoken. And, more than that, I knew that he had taken something from her she valued more than any story or any whispered hope: her song.

So we traveled mostly without speaking, sometimes walking hand in hand, and after a time, the silence felt like its own kind of intimacy.

We came upon the little cottage after we had traveled far, farther than I had ever gone to the east of the Reachlands. It was an ugly, ramshackle place,driftwood-gray and dotted with a rainbow of lichen and stains. The walls, in poor repair, did little to keep out the wind, and the roof leaked; the windows were slits, and the floor was nothing but dirt. There was just the one room. I thought it some settler's temporary residence, lived in but briefly before he must have moved on.

It was situated on the outskirts of a town very far from Annisport, all the way on the other side of Three Sisters' Bay. There, no one would know us.

The town was called Seaside, creatively named for being so close to the Bay, and it was mostly a fishing village. It was surrounded as Annisport had been by plantations, although most of the folk on this side of the Bay were poorer than those established around the port city. I inquired at the town's sole tavern, and, as no one could recall who had owned the cottage and no one raised an objection, I paid the small tax on the land with what little gold I had on me and took it over.

It was easy enough to find work in Seaside, although there was not much money to go around. I took small jobs as a farm hand, helping on two different plantations as the need arose, although neither could employ me full time. I also apprenticed myself to an old fisherman named Nort, whose health had begun to fail. Nort could not pay me in gold, but I took a share of the fish that we brought in. Some of it I sold, and some of it we ate. It was a fair arrangement.

I kept myself busy working in the village, and Halimeda refused to be idle at home. She cleaned and cooked and sewed, all of which surprised me; she must have learned these pursuits in her time as Captain Remmer's wife, for she had never done such things in her time at the Allore manor.

The folk of Seaside looked upon her with curiosity, but not hostility. They thought her born into her muteness. Perhaps the most frustrating part of it was that they had a tendency to treat her as if her mind were impaired as well as her voice, but as time wore on, Hali made it clear that she was as sharp as anyone. She let them believe her mute, and I let them believe it, too. It kept us safe.

We began to make a life for ourselves. At first, we cooked our wretched little meals on flat stones by a makeshift hearth that smoked up the cottage, and we slept on the hard ground near the coals. Eventually, we were able to repair the walls and reshingle the roof. Then, we built a real hearth. I tilled up a plot of land for a garden, which Hali diligently planted and tended.

After a year or so, we were able to build on a second room so we no longer had to sleep on the floor near the cookfire. Our bed was a shelf built onto the wall, piled with blankets and furs. It was poor, very poor indeed compared to the life we had had back on the plantation. Even I, a servant at the time, had lived much more richly than we did now.

But we were together, and our poverty was alleviated by the fact that we had one another.