‘Birdie’ by Brenda Carre

On that wind-tossed autumn night off the coast of Inach Isle, the Vision ran aground on the Pinnacles. No rain — just a fetch like a fist. 

Lord Calibari and two of his merfolk came that night to save me. Demons came too, as they will to a place of death and dying. As the Vision splintered down faster than a mind might believe, Calibari and his sisters defied death to pull me and three sailors to dry land with their strong-webbed fingers. 

We were saved temporarily — if you could call it so — from the merciless hunger of the demons.

Yet I was pregnant.

Once ashore, grief-struck, terrified, I went into labour. The sailors who’d flotsamed ashore with me deserted. Base and miserable souls. I birthed my boy on the shingle here by the sea, on a bed of dry seagrass tugged from the high tide line. 

Lord Calibari’s two sisters shed their sea fins to help me, their green faces fierce in the light of a storm-angered moon. Calibari himself stood naked as a lightning bolt, watching for trouble at the edge of the seastrand, those rare-seen land legs of his a white glimmer in the dark.

I looked at the one sister as she gripped my shoulders. I saw the other’s hands between my knees as she knelt ready to deliver my babe. I bit against a piece of manzanita driftwood and pushed my babe out. 

His first wails were drowned by the roar of the waves and the scream of the wind beyond this haven. 

He was born, ugly as a little rook, and already peckish.

“A lusty son,” said my deliverer, her chuckle and hiss so like the tickle of the tide against the lee. She wiped him with seagrass, and her sister helped me deliver the afterbirth. 

“We need to lead them astray — the demons,” hissed that sister, so lithe and sturdy, muscled like a warrior, with breasts almost as flat as a man’s. 

The merwoman used a braided hank of my hair to tie off the cord. She used the blades of her teeth to bite into the cord and lift my son free at last. The cold salt of the sea stemmed my bleeding but dampened the seagrass they’d pulled around me. 

Stars’ Light, I was cold. Birth blood still soaked the shingle.

Of the afterbirth, the sister said, “We must take this through the swells to Judder’s Point. Away — away, and leave it there. A chance it might lure the devourer demons there, and away from you and the babe.” 

A faint hope. 

“I-I know,” I stuttered, taking my son, now tightly wrapped in seagrass. 

“We have honoured our debt to you, Birdie of Isla. We must go,” she said, looking with surprising tenderness at my babe. Was she a mother too, I wondered.