The tears we merfolk weep harden into pearls.
People adore that legend. Fisherwomen tell it to their daughters, peddlers tell it to their customers, and even the Bureau's ledgers carry a line: mer-pearl, finest grade, glows under moonlight. Everything they say is true except one thing — they think the pearls are treasure. The pearls are a ledger. One pearl for every parting I failed to prevent.
When I was young, I wept lightly. A weaving shuttle snapped: one pearl. A companion strayed into a fishing net: one pearl. The sea kept time in those days. The tides rose and fell like an old man's breathing, and the tide gate of the Dragon Palace opened and closed without missing a single watch in a thousand years. When the sea keeps time, few partings are final, and pearls gather slowly.
Everything changed with the lightning, three hundred years ago.
Everyone says that bolt struck upward into heaven. But we live on the seafloor. We saw the place it departed from. That night the whole seabed lit up for one instant, as if something in the very deepest deep had opened its eyes. Afterward the moon began to blacken, and the tides lost their rhythm.
From the shore you cannot hear it. You only think today's tide came a little early, tomorrow's ebbed a little fast. But down below, the broken tide-sound is a dirge sung off-key, day and night without end. The Dragon Palace's tide gate winds tighter and tighter; the old Dragon King behind it has not shown himself for a long, long time. The sea-patrol yakshas are replaced batch after batch, each fiercer than the last — too fierce for patrolling, as if they were searching for something.
When tides go wrong, ships go down.
Since then I have stopped counting days and count only pearls. A fishing boat capsized on the reef: one pearl. A merchant convoy fed to the storm, cargo and crew: one pearl. Last winter, an entire relief fleet out of Seagaze Station never came home: I wept eleven. I string them together, and they hang heavy through every corridor of my grotto. My sisters say I weep too much. Merfolk do not age, they say, unless they weep themselves dry; keep this up, and one day I will weep my last tear into a pearl and become a reef that can no longer hear the tide.
But I cannot stop. Because no one else keeps the count. Too many names go down with the ships, and the human world builds too few stones for them. The Bureau's registers record yao, never people. The Dragon Palace's registers record treasures, never debts. Only I remember. I can name the grief behind every pearl I carry — except the one in the deepest chamber.
That pearl is heavier than the others, and darker. Moonlight touches it and refuses to glow. I wept it on the night of the lightning, three hundred years ago. I woke up holding it, weeping — and I cannot, no matter how I try, remember who it was I was seeing off that night.
My old neighbour of the Jade-Wave Pool tells me to throw it away. Easy for that one to say: it has nine heads and can spare a few, while a mermaid gets one heart to spend on a whole lifetime. Besides — the neighbour has not been right lately either. At night it presses itself against the pool floor, listening, and after listening it swims toward the Dragon Palace. It says what is locked behind the tide gate is not water.
Not water, I asked. Then what?
All nine mouths smiled at once, and all nine declined to answer.
So, child walking west: if you dive into my sea, follow the pearl-light to find me. I am gentle with strong swimmers. I ask only one thing of you. When you reach the far, far west, ask a question on my behalf — that bolt of lightning that left our seabed three hundred years ago: what did it take with it?
And on the day the tides come true again, if the pearl in my deepest chamber finally melts — I will remember his face then, won't I?