Seducing a Merman
By Charlotte Mistry
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Charlotte Mistry
Discover other titles by Charlotte Mistry at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/charlottemistry
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When Mingxia was a child, she’d made her pocket money by wading into the rivers and streams in the spring and catching the tiny golden minnows that resulted from the crossbreeding of wild fish and escaped ornamental carp.
They were easy to see, glinting like metal on the riverbed, and so she felt she was doing them a favor. Their color made them easy targets: for falcons, for ospreys, for herons, and for bigger, meaner fish. At home she would put them in the shallow pond behind the house to grow bigger before selling them. She would wind up with everything from tiny spotted goldfish to silver-bronze carp as long as her arm.
But now she was an adult, and had little time for fish. There was her elderly mother to feed, and her older brother’s marriage coming up. It was an auspicious match- his bride was a member of the Emperor’s distant branch family, and the marriage was expected to bring them prestige. There was also the matter of her younger sisters and seeing to their education, no matter how they protested.
They were not poor, but neither were they nobility. This was a matter of some discontent among her sisters. To their mother’s consternation, Mingxia’s youngest sister aspired to become a rich man’s concubine so that she could live surrounded by jewels and silks. Mingxia disapproved on principle. Making yourself dependant on someone else was a recipe for trouble.
Her own days were full of work. At the peony teahouse she spent her time bowing, smiling and serving green tea in delicate porcelain cups, along with confectionaries of oranges, mangoes and sweet sticky rice. Her uniform was a brocade coat that verged on impossible to clean. Each morning, it took her an hour to paint her face in the appropriately fine-brushed way. Still, the pay was good.
She would come home each day, feet sore and makeup smudged, and get ready to do it all again come morning. It was an easy job but a dull one. Every day she found herself wondering if there was something more to life than this.
On her day off, Mingxia went down to the river where she’d once netted little fish and stared out over the churning water.
The sky was slate grey, and a storm surge the previous night had turned the lazy flow of the river into a frothing torrent. It reflected her long, dark hair only dimly, and in fragments. Mingxia wondered how the bright little fish had fared without her.
In the distance, the land and sky were almost indistinguishable. Mist blurred them together into a grey mass. It didn’t hold her interest, and Mingxia turned to go, but something caught her eye.
There was a flash of gold on the bank.
Mingxia squinted at it. She thought it was a reflection, perhaps, or a banner torn free of a shop window by the storm.
When she saw it for what it was, she gasped. Her rush down the muddy bank was tottering and unsteady in completely unsuitable shoes, and by the end of it she had mud splashed all up her legs. She didn’t care.
The flash of gold was a man- or half a man. In place of his legs was the long shining sweep of a fish tail, speckled black like the Emperor’s own ornamental carp. A mei ren yu. A merman.
She fell to her knees beside him. She didn’t care about the mud anymore, or her ruined clothes.
He was breathing but unconscious. Narrow frilled gills on his neck fluttered wetly in the open air. His skin was a little darker than hers, dusky bronze to match the gold of his tail. His black hair clung to him in a damp veil.
“Hello, can you hear me?” said Mingxia, but it was no good. He didn’t so much as twitch.
She couldn’t leave him there. That was an impossibility- he’d be washed back into the storm surge unconscious, and even if he could breathe underwater there was too much debris, too many logs and stones. He’d be dashed to pieces.
Or worse, he wouldn’t be washed back in. He’d be found by some other passer-by who would see him as an exhibit. Something to be sold for easy money, or simply as a very large fish for the market.
“What am I going to do with you?” she muttered.
Mingxia thought quickly. She had to move him, but couldn’t carry him; she had to hide the man from prying eyes, then, until she could. She threw down her dirty coat in the mud and covered the mei ren yu with it until he looked like just another muddy lump. Then she went to fetch a cart.
The merman was still there when she returned. It was a struggle to drag him up the bank, and by the time she did they were both soaked in mud and water. She thanked the seven lucky gods that the weather was bad and there was no one to see. She heaved him into the cart, wrapped in her mud-slick coat. Then, she went around to the front of the cart and started pulling.
When they reached Mingxia’s home, she closed the tall gates behind her and breathed a sigh of relief. She set about unloading the man like a sack of wet carpeting. The baths were the best place for him, but she could only drag his limp body, and he left a streak of mud and water behind him. Thankfully, she was alone but for her bed-bound mother in the other wing of the house.
Once she’d managed to get him into room, Mingxia stopped and stretched. He was heavy- and still coated in a film of slimy river mud. She rinsed him off as best she could. It helped, a little, and she upended a bucket of cold water over her own head to wash off the worst of the grime.
She shuddered at the cold, then busied herself stoking a fire under the cauldron of water that would fill the bath. The man was cold to the touch; so cold he almost seemed dead, but his gills still fluttered.
She left him on the tile while she cleaned herself up, and then went through the house mopping up mud. When she got back he was still exactly where she’d left him. Mingxia had a moment of panic where she thought he was dead- but he was the same as ever.
The water had warmed. Mingxia took the cauldron of a kettle by the handle and tipped it. The sunken bath filled with steaming, jasmine-scented water. She tested it with one hand. It was hot but not scalding, and so she crouched down and wrestled the mei ren yu’s limp body into it with a splash.
He sank like a stone. She peered anxiously down at him. His gills seemed to flutter more easily underwater, but he still didn’t move.
Mingxia propped her chin on her hands and looked him over. His skin became shining scales at about the level of his hips, but there were some gold specks above that, trailing up the length of his spine. He had another two sets of gills like narrow dark slashes set along his ribcage, and his long golden tail was stained with two oblong splotches of black scales. His chest was a smooth expanse of skin, and his fingertips ended in thick black nails like the short claws of a carnivorous frog.
Where had he come from? She’d heard old tales of such things from sailors, things that lived in the seas and were almost women, but not quite. She’d never heard of a mei ren yu living in the river waters.
His hand twitched a little, distorted under the surface. Mingxia leaned forward with great interest, but he didn’t move any further and she sat back, disappointed.