by Bia
A scream echoed across the sea.
A single, resolute shout of pain, but an expected pain; pain to be endured for the moment it was there and gotten over with.
Still, it scattered up the gulls, sending them crowing into the darkness.
The seventh Atlantican princess was born during a new moon, and the tide was low, the water shallow, keeping close to the shore. As though it was afraid to venture too far out.
You didn't need to be human to put a special importance on the number seven.
But that wasn't important to Athena right now. In fact, any sort of significance given to numbers or symbols or prophecies burst like so many bubbles in a wave when the little girl crawled up into her arms. Her small hands closed around Athena's much larger palms, palms which had never seemed so big. This princess was small even for an infant.
Mermaid mothers are left in peace to give birth, not so much out of modesty (they had to remove their seashells) but to give no one but the water itself permission to meet its new inhabitant, accept it and engulf it.
The tradition was kept upright and never broken, not even for a queen.
Sometimes a mother took days of solitude in a forsaken cave before she would swim back to her family.
Athena was grateful for the days. And the nights. Even the moon left her alone.
She let herself fall back onto the moss-covered rock as she held her newborn daughter, closed her eyes, felt over the tiny body, grazed the small, still slightly curled tailfin, covered in spidery film. Like with every other one of her daughters, she first wanted to feel her child, take in the reality of this small bundle of life, postpone the glory of actually looking at her. She knew herself well in this respect - even with Aquata, it had been the same way.
Her daughter cawed, mumbled, coughed, unused to drawing breath from water. The merqueen felt her crawl onto her heaving belly, hands-only, the limp fin dragging behind her like a seal on land. She ran a hand through the baby's hair - tousled, oddly thick - and forced herself to breathe evenly, radiate quiet and calm.
Allowed herself to relax.
She was happy, of course. Indescribably happy. It was pointless even to describe that happiness.You could multiply it by seven, and still the joy you felt at the birth of your own child could never be described.
Happy, ecstatic, proud.
But so, so tired.
Everything below her navel ached.
It was selfish, absurdly so, but: she wished the newborn girl would soak up a bit of that pain, or they could divide it equally among themselves, the two survivors of a birth, and be invalids together for a while before returning to the castle.
It's a good thing newborn mer don't scream.
The little mermaid cawed. It sounded like neither approval nor disapproval. Athena let her hands run over the baby's face, still not looking. The silence of the cave shrouded them, a liquid blanket.
With impatient, determined tugs of the forearms, the baby girl crawled up Athena's chest as she lay on the rock, until she was high enough to look into her mother's face.
The queen opened her eyes.
There was no sense in preparing, there never was - the girl was too beautiful.
Red hair, a stunningly vivid red, more lush than any coral. Athena couldn't believe such a red could actually exist, but there it was, given to her new and youngest daughter.
And very large, deep blue eyes, looking at her mother - no, through her mother, penetrating as water itself - with an expression of pure curiosity, even incredulity, at the sheer fact of being alive.
Athena had these sudden, unfocused flickers of images in her mind - the sun, huge and deep dark red as it rose on the horizon, turning the sea pink - the ocean at dusk, open, clear, indigo water.
Sandy beaches, jutting rocks. Seashells.
She didn't know what to make of these visions.
But they spelled a name, a name framed in impressions, faint as footsteps on the sand, but nevertheless there.
"Ariel," she mumbled to herself, to the cave, to the water at large, and to the girl.
And the girl had her name.
Her mother had no idea what the name meant, if it meant anything but the visions.
But it was her daughter's name.
Letting Ariel finally suckle at her breast, Athena fell asleep.
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