Gálvez’s Mermaids
[Short Story] During the revolutionary war, an imprisoned Spanish soldier is sent on a daring mission.
There was a lovely view of Pensacola Bay from atop Fort San Miguel. Less so from beneath it. I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with smugglers, traitors, and even some rotted ghoul that had broken free from its crypt during the siege.
My crimes were of the bedroom, as seemed often the case. Fresh off our victory in the reconquista of Florida, I’d gone to the bay to wash off the stench of our siege. With a sprig of lavender in my hand and a hymn on my lips, I cleansed my body and soul. Yet when I returned for my uniform, what should I find but El Capitán’s wife lying naked on the shore.
Yes, you do not believe me. Neither did the tribunal. But I swear on my God and country, a woman’s company has never tempted me. Especially company from that vaca.
They dragged me to a sunless room. A priest followed me inside.
“Have you come to perform my last rites, Father?”
The priest shook his head with a soft smile. “I do not perform rites, my child.”
“What sort of priest doesn’t…” I paused. “Dios mío. The Inquisition.”
The priest set a sheaf of parchment on the table. “You were raised in the Basilica de San Agustín, no?”
I nodded. Although I’d prayed those records were lost with the church and the rest of Florida.
“Do you still suffer from your…affliction?”
I froze, for I had only ever confessed these sins to Father Delgado and God. “I do, Father.”
“I see.” He almost looked relieved. “Sometimes such desires fade for boys raised in the church. The touch of a woman cures them.”
“Many women have touched me, Father. And I have not been cured.”
“Then perhaps God created you this way for a purpose. Are you familiar with the sirens of San Agustín?”
All Florida knew of Governor Gálvez’s mermaids. During stormy evenings, you could sometimes hear them sing.
“They are lending aid to the colonists’ revolution,” the priest continued, “keeping the coasts clear of British ships. But some privateers from Hispaniola are fishing them from the bay. Their captain seems…immune to their calls. Otherwise, the wily spirits’ songs pay no heed to allegiance. Every man we send to their aid is lured beneath the sea. Such are the risks of fighting alongside fair folk.”
“Indeed, Father.” I crossed myself.
“Yet your affliction may also immunize you.”
“Is this a test, Father? The Inquisition asks me to help fair folk? And even worse, Protestants.”
“The Inquisition’s powers wane in this new world. Yet we still possess the power to end your life…or to save it.”
I understood exactly what he meant.
~
El Capitán grimaced as I left the fort with the priest and my ecclesiastical pardon. Three soldiers held his wife back. God was certainly strange with His gifts and His curses.
We snuck into San Agustín on a cart of convalescents. The coquina walls of Castillo De San Marcos rose along the shoreline. We disembarked at Matanzas Bay, where a little rowboat waited.
“The privateer captain—El Toro, he is called—is your target.”
“I am supposed to kill him on my own? Father, I am only a cook.”
“Then you can use a knife,” he said, handing me a poniard. “I am told it’s easier from the back.”
~
With the poniard in my mouth, I scaled the privateers’ hull. A barnacle sliced open my palms, and I wailed like a neglected kettle at the sight of my own blood.
Under ordinary circumstances, I would have been spotted. But the privateers had stuffed their ears with wax and cloth. Well, all except one.
While the crew labored bare-chested in the Florida heat, El Toro wore a silk doublet weighed down by countless gold medallions. His most ostentatious ornament was a Taíno headband, upon which he’d grafted a pair of bull horns. It was clear that privateering was not this ship’s only business. The British did not pay with plunder.
My dress was not so different from the privateers. I walked among them as if I belonged. It wasn’t very hard. In some ways, I’d been doing it my whole life.
“Help…” someone called from below. The voice was groggy and dry.
A mermaid thrashed inside a fishing net. Until then, I had only ever glimpsed their tails in the bay. Her top half was human only in shape. She possessed a condor’s eyes and beak, and her hair was wild like kelp.
Against my better judgment, I stopped to cut the fishing net loose, hacking through the thick fibers with only the point of my poniard.
Once the bindings broke and dropped the mermaid into the bay, she tried to entice me with her songs.
“Jorge. Come with me, Jorge.”
I resisted her charms. Even if I could not explain how she knew my name.
“Come to the sea, Jorge,” she said. “You will be loved in the sea.”
“Begone, fiendish creature.” I swiveled around, only to find a very large privateer standing behind me. “Oh, Dios mío.”
He answered my prayer with a swift bludgeon to the head.
~
I woke with a splash of seawater. They’d taken me to a cabin in the ship’s bowels. The shelves were full of clay pots shaped like dead gods and jars filled with pickling river snakes.
“We know the Inquisition commands the sirens,” El Toro said as he tossed the bucket away. “She did not charm you, so you must be comrades.”
“I am the Inquisition’s prisoner. They sent me here because I have certain…proclivities. Perhaps we are alike that way.”
When I gazed into his eyes, there was no spark of sympathy.
He buried a fist in my stomach. “We are nothing alike, maricón.”
And so, I became El Toro’s prisoner. When my despair became unbearable, I sang my hymns, just like Pablo and Silas in the Philippi prison. Father Delgado had taught me to sing when the basilica walls seemed suffocating. You can cage the bird, my child, he’d said, but not the song.
“Y la limpia concepción,” I sang, “de la reina de los cielos.”
For a moment, I thought I’d felt God’s presence. Footsteps beside me. A gaze from above. But when I opened my eyes, it was El Toro standing over me. He’d wandered into the room, eyes wide and mouth open.
“Was that you singing, maricón?”
“Please, I—”
“Torturer!” he shouted. “I want this man’s screams to echo across the sea.”
The man who’d bludgeoned me unconscious entered the room. He had an enormous belly with no less than three different slave brands burned into his back.
“And you.” El Toro turned to me. “If you ever sing again, I will hold your tongue to the fire until it shrivels to the size of your prick.”
So. Father Delgado was wrong. A song could be caged.
~
My torturer had learned well from his masters. Not that he had much opportunity to demonstrate his skill. I fainted from a single thumb screw. The mere sight of the strapado made me vomit. The toca water cloth—well, that one wasn’t so bad. I could hold my breath for quite a while.
Soon, my cries were joined by those of mermaids.
“Captain’s brilliant,” someone said through the door. “We must’ve caught a score of them today. All it took was using the merfolk as bait.”
One night, my torturer shuffled into the room with a mermaid slung across his shoulders. To my surprise, the man did not grab his thumb screws, but bandages. He was treating her injuries!
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Without healing, she will die and turn to seafoam. No corpse, no silver.”
“Ah, so you deny them even the mercy of death.”
“It was not always this way. The captain fought for freedom before British coin enthralled him.” He gestured to the mermaid, still thrashing in the net. “Now, even the sea is not safe from people catchers.”
“You fight for the wrong side,” I offered.
He shook his head. “The colonists have people catchers, too.”
“Something is different here. The empires send their ships, but the sea washes the old world away. Maybe this war is about freedoms that even the people fighting it cannot imagine.”
He smiled. “A romantic idea.”
“Ideas are the only romance I’m allowed.”
With gentle hands, he opened the stopper and spritzed some snake water over the mermaid. His eyes glowed silver. The water glowed the same color as he spread it like a potter molding his clay.
My eyes widened. “You’re fair folk?”
“Simbi,” he said. “A river spirit of the Kongo.”
“Is that how your captain resists the mermaids? He’s one of you?”
“I know not what the captain is.”
He brought the mermaid to me and unlocked my chains. Then, he handed me my poniard.
“There is not enough magic in my old skins to heal her fully. She will die if we do not return her to the sea.”
Outside, the captured mermaids hung off the hull like rotting fruit. The injured siren fell with a splash as I tossed her overboard. The alarm was slow to spread across the crew, given their self-imposed deafness.
I swam past their nets. And then where? I wondered. We were out in the open ocean. It was all for nothing anyway. Webbed hands grabbed my blouse and pulled me beneath the waves.
~
The mermaid kingdom appeared within the sunless sea not through sight, but through sound. Their bridges were all of the musical variety. They built roads across caves and kelp forests out of winding verses, which circled choruses as if they were monuments.
Symphonies coalesced into resonant cathedrals, each brick given life by an unceasing choir. I felt like Juan the Apostle shown the door to heaven. Maybe the angels were never in the sky. Maybe they were in the sea.
A single voice took hold. Deeper than all the others. It seemed to reverberate for leagues.
“I am Chalchiuhtlicue, queen of the western oceans and their merfolk.”
Who was I to receive such an audience, I wondered. Though it would not last long. The mermaids pulled me down. Deeper and deeper. My chest began to burn.
“My alliance with the mortal Gálvez was not won through gold or conquest, but through love.”
Well, I supposed that made sense. Governor Gálvez had won the Creoles’ loyalty in a similar fashion. But why tell this to a dying man?
“Our union bore a child. A babe born with our gift of song and man’s gift to walk upon the shore. One day, the Inquisition took him.”
Ah, so it was revenge. A life for a life. If only I could explain that the Inquisition had coerced me into their service.
Yet it was too late. The deep was taking me.
“They locked him in a church beside the sea. Where only the faintest hint of our songs could reach.”
I let go. Opened my mouth so my lungs filled with water. Then I exhaled, and the water left. The pressure on my chest was gone. It was a miracle. I breathed water as if it were air.
“But now our pain is over, for my son has returned to the sea.”
“I am your—” I blinked, admiring how strange it felt to speak underwater. “You are my mother? Governor Gálvez is my father?”
Honestly, I did not know which part of my lineage excited me more. Even if he would never believe me, to share the same blood of the man who’d captured Pensacola was truly an honor. It was a strange feeling. To be proud of who I was.
“We heard your cries. We heard your songs. You could never be your true self on land.”
“Then the mermaid was not trying to kill me. She wanted to bring me home.”
“Many of my daughters have fought for your safety. Such is their love for their baby brother.”
“Yes…” I could feel their songs welcoming me, sweeter than any hymn. Yes. This was home. How had I forgotten? Yet, my thoughts drifted back to the merfolk bound in nets. “Wait, what of the captured mermaids?”
“We shall honor their memory in song. If you return, they will only capture you again. After so long, you are finally free.”
“I am sorry, mother.” I swam back toward the surface. “I will not have my freedom at the price of another’s.”
~
My baptism with the mermaids had left me with no special powers or magic sword. Yet, I was not the same man. Now, I knew that I was loved.
I could not underestimate this El Toro fellow. He’d recognized my song as that of a merfolk. But how?
I did not creep across the deck. No, this time, I was loud.
“El Toro!”
He swiveled his horns toward me. “What a strange fish you are, to jump in the same net twice.”
“You have discovered that I am of the merfolk,” I said as if I’d known myself all along. “But I am also the son of their queen.”
El Toro smiled. “So, you’ll prove all the more valuable when I catch you again.”
I brought my poniard to my chest. “Not if I run myself through. Then the mermaids will leave this coast and even those you’ve caught will prove worthless.”
“And I presume you have another proposal?”
“Yes. We settle our accounts alone. If you best me, then I shall become your prisoner once more. However, if I am the victor, you will release all the fair folk imprisoned on your ship. Do you hear me, El Toro? All of the fair folk.”
He laughed. “Little maricón, are you truly asking—”
“That’s right.” My voice boomed across the deck. “El Toro, I challenge you to a duel!”
The crew offered no reaction to my demand. They just kept staring mutely.
How foolish. I’d forgotten they had stuffed their ears. So, I tossed my sopping glove at the captain’s feet.
Then the deck erupted in gasps.
“Very well, bring me my blade,” El Toro said, miming a cutting gesture.
A deckhand brought him a large saber while I swirled my poniard. And so, our blades met. It was around this time that I realized my mistake. I had never fought with a blade. The closest I’d ever come to fencing was fileting a swordfish.
Grasping my blade with both hands, I swung as hard as I could. The force of my blow caught El Toro by surprise.
With a triumphant lunge, my empty hand struck my opponent’s chest. Oh no. My stomach dropped in time with the splash below. My poniard had fallen into the sea!
I wheeled backward, off balance, then grabbed a fistful of beads from the golden medallions around El Toro’s neck. Together we fell onto the deck.
My hand brushed some kind of strap beneath his blouse. Is he wearing armor? I wondered. Then why does it only cover—
“Oh…”
El Toro climbed to his feet and drew his blade. “You are defeated.”
“Hardly. For I know your weakness. Your horns are false, El Toro. Or should I say…” I chuckled, lowering my voice to a whisper. “La Vaca?”
He spat at my feet. “I’ve already taken your pointy little blade. I’ll chop off your other if you speak another word.”
So, I did not speak another word. Instead, I sang them.
“Alabado y ensalzado.”
I stepped backward. El Toro stepped toward me in turn, as if pulled by the music.
“Sea el divino sacramento.”
“Stop…”
“Then it is your choice. Forfeit as the man you pretend to be or claim your victory and all your crew will learn who you truly are.”
El Toro’s eyes darted. Then, with a feigned trip, the sword clattered onto the deck. I snatched it and raised it overhead.
“I yield!” El Toro cried.
“Now, release the captives.” I underscored the command with a chopping motion.
The water came alive as scores of mermaids dove beneath the sea. The simbi followed and became a serpent.
“I never hid anything,” El Toro whispered. “I became what they expected.”
“Then let us hope when the old world is washed from these lands, whatever comes next is somewhere we can be our true selves.”
~
The mermaids followed me as I paddled back to the shore. “Jorge, stop. They will take you again.”
“I shall not return to Spain, but to the colonies. You have honored your alliance. This war is no longer yours, but it is still mine.”
I was still the son of Gálvez, who’d sworn to protect the coast from British ships. I would warn the colonists and fight alongside them if I must. Only when they’d won their independence would I return home. Not to New Spain or San Agustín, but to the sea.
And this time, I would fight as my true self. A fair folk. A man of forbidden affections. I would share it all.
Only when I’d crossed into Georgia did I recognize the flaw in my new aspirations. I did not speak a word of English.
[Editor’s Note: Copper Frog here. If you enjoyed this story and want to see what happened next in the folklore Revolutionary War, check out the original story from last year, Washington’s Faeries]