Entry 41, Rook's Pardon harbor ledger, ninth of March: one herring net lost, cut clean at the headrope, no knot left. Entries 42 through 47 say the same. The name Rook's Pardon is a clerk's error from two centuries back, set down for a word that meant "rock's bargain," and the village has kept it. In March gales she hangs in the backwash under the breakwater, upright, tail hooked around a piling. Torso and face are human: heavy jaw, low brow, black hair plastered flat. A cape of dried kelp blades covers her shoulders, pinned at the breastbone with a fishbone. The left lobe of her tail has a V cut in it, sharp-edged, the size of a man's palm. She saws through netting with the edge of a split mussel shell and does not hurry.
By May the sea has gone slack and fog sits on Underwife Sound, another clerk's mistake, for Under Wick, which nobody has fixed. She moves there. At slack water she floats on her back and hums, a note low enough that it is felt in the planks of a moored boat before it is heard. In fog she comes within an oar's length of a hull and looks at whoever is aboard, amber eyes wide and unblinking, then goes under without a ripple. Nobody in the village will sell, lend or leave a comb where she can see it. Bertil Haaks, who mends nets on the quay, keeps his in a tin and carries the tin home each night.
July is hot and flat, and she is seen least. She is tracked by what she leaves: mussel shells split along the hinge and stacked in piles on Gannet Slab, herring spines laid in a row beside them, a smear of crab carapace. The slab shows above water for two hours at low tide, and the pile is gone by the next. Boats set their nets a quarter mile off it and haul before dusk. She eats shellfish, herring and small crab, and is not known to touch anything above the waterline.
In October the first southwest gale comes up and she is back under the breakwater, though not as before. The V in her tail has healed to a round scar. Her hair, black in March, is streaked white at the temples. She takes one net a storm instead of six, and the cuts are slower. Haaks watches from the quay with the tin under his arm. "Leave her the one," he says. "She only ever takes the one."
- Classification
- Aquatic humanoid with a fish tail
- Habitat
- Cold rocky coasts and fog-bound sounds
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft long, tail included
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Cold coastal waters
- Binomial
- Pisciphora lunata
- Diet
- Shellfish, herring, small crab
- Temperament
- Wary, territorial, patient