The fishing nets on the Vrezhna shingle come in with their cork floats sliced clean away and the mesh left whole. Nothing has been stolen. The floats are found a day later in a neat row on the tideline, always seven, always bleached white, as though laid out to dry. The Vrezhna men have argued about this for as long as anyone has kept boats there, and on the evening I arrive the argument is in full cry on the quay.
One camp holds that the adaro is warning them off the herring shoals. The other says it is merely collecting, and that the row is a collector's pride. Czesław Dobrik, who has mended nets on that quay for fifty years, stands apart from both. He says the adaro leaves the floats because a boat without floats cannot be hauled out in a squall, and the sea-folk would rather a man go home early than drown over fish. Nobody can prove this. Nobody can disprove it either, and the shouting goes on past the lamp-lighting.
I am asked to settle it, and I have seen enough to say something. The adaro I watch from the breakwater at Nodzica is a lean, broad-shouldered male of nearly six feet, silver-gray from the waist up, with a swordfish's long bill jutting from the middle of the brow in place of a nose, and below the waist a shark's heavy tail. A ragged notch is bitten from the upper edge of the bill. It surfaces only when lightning is working over open water, and it rises to ride the flash. Its eyes are a hard electric green, and in the glare they throw back a light of their own. It slices floats with the bill in one stroke, and I counted seven passes before it sank. Rainbows hang in the spray where it breaks the surface, which the Vrezhna say it brings with it from the storm.
My ruling is partial, which satisfies no one. The floats are a count of the boats in the bay, and I believe the adaro is keeping it. Whether it counts them in kindness is not a thing the quay can know. Dobrik's habit is the sensible one: every household there keeps a rind of salt-cured lemon on the sill during thunder, since the sea-folk are said to dislike the smell and pass the door by. I eat one myself that night and can report only that it is very sour. At dawn I leave on the cart road above Nodzica. Looking back from the ridge, I see seven white floats on the tideline, and an eighth beside them that was not there when I came.
- Classification
- Storm-riding sea fey, merfolk kin
- Habitat
- Open coastal waters during thunderstorms
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft long, shark tail included
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Lightning seas off the coast
- Binomial
- Hippocampus salvagor
- Diet
- Herring, mackerel, and squid
- Temperament
- Aloof, orderly, quick to anger