Conclave Read online

  Conclave

  A Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy

  By Lee Murray, Jan Goldie, Piper Mejia and Celine Murray

  Conclave

  Leapy Sheep

  PO Box 6133

  Brookfield

  Tauranga, New Zealand

  This edition published in April 2014.

  ISBN 978-0-473-28198-4 print

  ISBN 978-0-473-28199-1 epub

  ISBN 978-0-473-28200-4 mobi

  © Lee Murray, Jan Goldie, Piper Mejia and Celine Murray

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except for brief quotations used in reviews.

  These novellas are works of fiction. Names, characters, places or incidences are products of the authors’ imaginations, or are used fictitiously.

  Original Cover Design by Jan Morrison, www.janmorrison.weebly.com

  Jan Morrison is an Otago School of Fine and Applied Art graduate from the early 1970’s who has worked in a variety of media. She honed her draughtsmanship skills working for architects in New Zealand and England, and has been site artist on many digs in Belize, Central America, studying and drawing ancient Mayan temples and artefacts.

  As a public artist in New Zealand, she creates images that the public relate to and enjoy, and the extent of the positive response to her work is a testament to her success. These images, often from the local natural environment, are presented in such a way that the public finds that this contact with their environment is an unusual experience of discovery and delight. She runs her own art business and lives by the sea in Tauranga, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand.

  Contents

  A Mer-tale, by Jan Goldie

  The Fence, by Piper Mejia

  Conclave Seven, by Lee Murray

  Peach and Araxi, by Celine Murray

  Contributors

  A Mer-Tale

  Jan Goldie

  Prologue: One thousand years ago. Earth.

  The ocean is paused for the day ahead. A pale pink and gold sky brightens, widens and breathes light across the shivering water, infusing it with a life of its own. A pod of orcas breaks the watery mirror into a spectrum of colour and transforms it with foam and splash. Before long, they are out of sight.

  Somewhere above, a low growl crescendos to a roar, like an approaching train. Black dots grow in size until they block out the light. Their descent causes a subtle vibration across the sea, as if the waters of Earth are trembling in fright. Soon the thick, bitter stench of fuel fills the air and the shapes draw closer, now oblong blobs of molten metal hurtling downwards. They speed faster and faster until, just before impact, thousands of parachutes stay their headlong rush, leaving them hovering fifty metres above the ocean’s crown. The noise lowers to a hum.

  They hover, like hot air balloons above a meadow. More than five hundred sleek, black hulls gleam in the light of the morning sun, set out in orderly rows, as if they are new cars on the lot.

  At exactly one hour and one minute after their arrival, a thin, black hose slithers from the side of each vessel and disappears into the water below. Thirty-one minutes later, the hoses withdraw, sucked back up into their invisible interiors, like push button tape measures.

  As one, the parachutes snap away from their bonds and the ships tilt their noses toward the depths and dive, their svelte submarine grace propelling them below the surface in seconds.

  The silky parachutes float on the surface, like puddles of milk. Then they, too, begin to sink, until nothing is left but the glassy surface of the open sea.

  1

  I tiptoe along the hallway, keeping to the centre of the carpet runner. My fingers trace brocade wallpaper and familiar picture frames, but my eyes fix on the unpredictable floorboards to either side of the soft runner. A squeaky one to my left… I step over it. That creaky couplet to my right… I work my way around them. I’m exposed here, like an antelope chancing an open savannah. The lush carpet with its soft pink and brown swirls cushions my footsteps, and with each step I come closer to learning the truth.

  I’m almost at the kitchen. Only the storeroom after that and I’ll be there. But the kitchen will be my biggest challenge. If Anna hasn’t stepped outside then I’m in trouble.

  “I’ll be back in a minute, Murdoch.”

  It’s Anna. I freeze. Her solid, flat-heeled footsteps echo across the kitchen’s wooden floor as she strides in from the courtyard to dump a pile of freshly cut herbs on the counter. The kitchen fills with the earthy scent of basil. I can hear Jaes and Murdoch chatting out in the courtyard. They must be deciding on our daily boot camp. I’m surprised Murdoch hasn’t tracked me down to join in.

  Anna runs her hands under the tap and plods back outside. “Once you’ve finished, you better go and get your cousin, Jaes. She needs a workout too.”

  What did she mean by that? I’m as strong as a swordfish and twice as fast. Anna chats with her brother for a while, and then I hear the sound of the peg basket drawn along the wire of the washing line. She’s back on schedule.

  Anna likes things to run on time. Washing out of the machine by 10am and on the line to dry in the incessant blasts of coastal wind that give my bed sheets a fine coating of salt.

  I edge forward, passing the gaping hole that is the kitchen’s enormous entry, and quicken my steps as I pass the storeroom. I’m almost there.

  Uncle’s study is on the right and, as I approach the ornate door, I notice it is slightly ajar. I can hear Uncle pacing inside. I sneak to the opening, careful not to lean on the door. Carefully, I peek through the gap.

  The phone blares. I jump, almost lose my balance and just manage to fold myself against the wall as Uncle strides past the gap to grab the home line.

  “Hello?”

  He listens. I catch my breath.

  “No, I don’t think that will be necessary, but thank you.” His voice is clipped and quiet.

  With the phone in the left hand corner of the room, this might be my only chance to catch a direct look at Uncle’s desk. He’ll have his back to me. I steel myself, plant my feet and swivel ‘til I’m directly in front of the door. Then, pushing it with one finger, enough to mimic the action of a small breeze, I take a peek.

  Uncle faces the window, his broad back a wall of tension. He’s dressed entirely in black. To the right, I can see his huge desk. There it is. A message in a bottle.

  I can’t believe Jaes was right. An actual message in a bottle. Not a letter. That would be far too practical. Not an email, by the winds, that would be too modern. No. Here, at Conclave Manor, it seems we’ve taken to communicating by something even slower than snail mail—sea snail mail?

  The bottle stands to attention on Uncle’s carved coral desk, like a lone soldier on guard. I can make out a scroll, secured with a wax seal the colour of dried blood, trapped within its blurry, glass exterior. The bottle is green, opaque and solid. How will Uncle get the message out? I shake my head. What are we, pirates? For reef’s sake, couldn’t they use a phone? Perhaps it came from a far-off pod asking for help. The Sprats aren’t operating in our waters now. Perhaps they’ve moved to other areas and are terrorising other people like us? But, surely, news like that could be communicated using human technology. It isn’t as if we don’t have access to it.

  “Right. Well, thanks for letting me know.” Uncle’s voice startles me, and I realise I’ll be in full view when he turns around. I backtrack along the hallway, slip into the reading room and throw myself down into my favourite wicker chair, hands drawing comfort from its smooth mahogany arms and deep, squashy cushions. That was close. If he’d seen me lurking outside the door I would have got an earful.

  I breathe out my nerves and roll my shoulders. The reading room smells li
ke old books and dusty newspapers. Magazines crowd tables in high piles. I reach for the nearest, National Geographic. Turning to the bookmarked story, I stifle a giggle. ‘Mermaid—the Myth.’ Sometimes, I feel like emailing them a video of me to say, ‘Hey, science guys, look, a tail!’ But I know I never would. It’s an unspoken rule that we no longer commune with humans. No good has ever come of it.

  The low hum of an appliance sounds from the kitchen. Anna is whisking something up for lunch. The scent of cinnamon wafts down the hall.

  A loud crash brings me upright. I leap to my feet and race for the door, then stop in realisation.

  So, that’s how you get a message out of a bottle.

  2

  We Mer are real. There’s nothing mythological about us. We’ve inhabited Earth’s seas for millions of years. But about one thousand years ago, all that changed. The Spratonites arrived and suddenly we were kicked out of our own home. Now we slum it in the human world.

  The last time Tellurians and Spratonites battled, I was ten years old. The same age Jaes is now. Uncle came back from that fight a changed man. His patrol made it to the Spratonite stronghold deep beneath the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean. He returned wounded, and to this day he won’t tell us what happened or what he saw.

  What I do know about that terrible day is that we lost more than two hundred souls in less than two hours and, although the Sprats had been regularly plaguing our family out of their waters for hundreds of years, from that day on they’ve left us alone.

  We lost more than lives that afternoon. We lost hope. We could no longer safely live at sea for any length of time. Soon after, we moved here, to Conclave Manor.

  Up until then Jaes and I had lived in a community, a place full of family and friends. No matter what happened, there was always someone to talk to or give you a hug. Even though I’d lost my mum and dad years before, I felt loved there and listened to. People indulged my constant need to chat and question, and Jaes, cute and irresistible at five years old, was spoiled rotten. But when three quarters of those people disappeared in a single afternoon and most of the rest scattered in fear, Jaes and I were left with Uncle.

  Even before the battle, Uncle had never been someone I warmed to. My late father’s brother, he used to be broad and stocky like my dad, but a heavy brow lined with bushy eyebrows and a tendency to grunt made him look and sound like a cave man. Let’s say, if I saw him coming, I swam the other way.

  After the battle, he scared me. His recuperation took months and soon after, he contracted Blight. A sickness affecting our men more than our women, Blight has a debilitative effect on the lungs and gills. Even now, he wheezes when he speaks and he’s often in pain. The Blight is a bit like the Sprats, unexplainable and incurable. It hits us seemingly at random. While his wound eventually healed, Blight has hung around to torment him. It has reduced his lung capacity and affected his ability to swim. He can’t dive deeply and the long stints in human form make him grumpy and irritable. Anna makes him soothing herbal tonics and if he takes these regularly he’s better, but he’s stubborn and insists he’s tough enough not to bother.

  I’ve watched him deteriorate, in body and spirit. Over time, the lines in his face have deepened and he’s turned in upon himself, curled top to tail, like a desiccated sea slug. It’s as if the Sprats and the disease paired up to hit him with a double blow. They took a chisel and carved a piece off him, honed the sharp bits into edges and knocked out all the soft parts. He thinks I don’t see behind the lashing out or lecturing, those moments when he’s staring into the middle distance, a million miles under the sea.

  I guess, after all that’s happened, moving us to somewhere safe gave him something to do, distracted him from all the darkness, from himself. In fact, Conclave probably saved him as much as it did us.

  His son, Jaes, inherited all of his father’s caveman looks but none of his moodiness. A tubby ray of sunshine, even at five years old, he insisted on looking on the bright side. When Uncle handed us our suitcases to leave, my cousin squeezed my hand and kept me close. Jaes always stepped in with a smile, diffusing the tension between me and Uncle. He’s like the glue trying to hold all the broken pieces of us together.

  Truthfully, though, I’m not sure Uncle can be fixed. I’m not talking about Blight. There is something held captive behind his eyes, and it makes me shudder. He’s seen the Sprat stronghold, and that experience has shadowed him ever since.

  I wish he would talk about it. I have so many questions. Like, who’s sending you messages in a bottle? Are we about to be attacked? And the big one, which I know he’ll never ever talk about with me… How did my parents die? Did they fight to the death, heroes at the end? Shouldn’t he tell me something like that? They were my parents. What right does he have to hold a chunk of my life hostage, locked away and buttoned down, because it’s too painful for him to talk about? What about my pain? My memories of my parents are growing cloudy. The clearest is the day they left. I remember it because it was my fifth birthday. Jaes was newly born, a squirming blue-faced baby cradled constantly and snapping up all the attention. My mum and dad invited the whole pod over to our tiny home to celebrate. I’d opened my first present and had my hands on a shiny new doll when the alarms went off and all hell broke loose.

  My mum and dad rushed off to prepare, then marched to the nearby beach. My uncle and aunty stayed with Jaes and me. As I watched my parents dive into the tropical waters, I had no clue it was the last time I’d see them.

  “Can I open the rest of my presents now?” I asked. Aunty smiled and held my hand, but Uncle stared out over the ocean, Jaes in his arms, then strode back into the house. Aunty disappeared one month later, when the patrol she joined in search of my parents simply never returned.

  3

  Uncle has closed and probably locked his study door. I make my way past the kitchen and head upstairs one creaking step at a time. Almost at the top, I stop and turn to catch the view through the large windows arching over our massive front door. From here, you can see right over the ocean to the horizon. The crash of the waves on the cliff below is a constant background beat. There’s not a soul in sight.

  I picture the world below the waves, the cool blue-green emptiness, like an endless ballroom of bubbled glass lit by bands of light from above. When you’re down there, using gills instead of lungs, there’s a kind of heavy silence all around you and within you. Up above, my body lives in the air and on the land as if it is a guest. But down below, I’m part of the water and She is part of me. The ocean is around me and in me and of me. She weighs me down and lifts me up. She is mine and I am Hers.

  What do humans see when they look at the ocean? Some kind of watery lid? A surface of rippling grey, changing with the day’s light, transformed by a breeze. They don’t know how shallow that seems.

  Don’t get me wrong, I like walking on two legs, and that feels natural too. But I wonder about the old days when our people lived most of their lives beneath the sea. Were they very different to us?

  I make it across the landing before the pain hits me. A ripping, thumping ache in my chest and down over my abdomen. I lean over, clutching myself, and try to breathe through the sensation. Not this again! I edge down the hall towards my room, praying no one has noticed, and by the time I reach the doorway, the pain is easing, spreading out and dissolving, like ripples on a pond. I fall on my bed and stare at the ceiling.

  We Tellurians, and Mer in general, have always been scarce. Many have only one child per family and scarcely one in three Merwomen are able to reproduce. It’s a shame. I’d love to have sisters. In such a big house with so few people, it gets boring. And when you’re under ‘lock and key’ for your own protection and forbidden the human contact you watch on YouTube, it’s near insufferable. My social life sucks. It’s a tsunami of suck. Sucksville central.

  For one thing, there’s no one to moan to. I’d give my right gill to vent about the state of the world’s oceans to someone my age who has breathe
d in the smell of a two-month-old oil leak and imbibed fertiliser run-off. But as it stands, the only creature willing to listen to my rants would be a dolphin and they’re not as smart as humans make them out to be. Definitely not as cute. I’m talking dull and dangerous.

  So, I’m left talking to myself or my guardians. Anna and Murdoch Aegis are pretty decent but they’re so ancient. Anna has had grey hair for as long as I can remember and Murdock smokes a pipe! It’s like they’re from another age.

  A member of the Aegis pod has always been part of the Tellurian pod. They’ve been with us as guards and maids and nannies. Anna is our housekeeper and Murdoch is the handyman. Apparently, their family made a pact with mine centuries ago, promising to protect and defend the oceans of Earth alongside us. I don’t know the boring details.

  Anna and Murdoch aren’t too bad. They’re definitely more approachable than Uncle. They let me use the internet, within reason—so I can see what I’m missing. They leave me alone to swim, within the confines of our protected waters. They have great taste in seafood. They always throw nice birthday parties for my cousin Jaes and me, even though we never invite anyone. They probably do it to distract me from the fact that it is also the anniversary of my parents’ deaths. But when it comes to the important stuff, like debate or questions, Anna and Murdoch are closed books. I’m talking slammed closed and thrown back on the shelf. It’s like talking to a grouper, all you get is bottom lip and eyeball.

  Uncle is behind their reticence. He thinks I’m unaware of his megalomaniacal nature, but I wasn’t born yesterday. He’s a rule freak, keeping the Tellurian family safe from the Spratonites and in the process driving us all nuts. His main motivation, of course, is to keep the family’s breeding hopes safe. Potentially, that’s me, the breeding cow. The question is, will I be the one in three who can mother a sprog and if so, who will I breed with? There are other pods out there, but as far as I know, we have no contact with them. It’s not as if I have handsome princes knocking on my door. On my darkest days, I wonder if he’ll force a union with Jaes. It makes me feel sick, but I know how important the family is to Uncle and I wouldn’t put it beyond him. Uncle’s the angriest person I know, he’s sad, unpredictable and never smiles, but no one can call him impractical. He knows what needs to be done and makes it happen.