In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield Page A

undertow:
Ours
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    Pepin’s surviving ships ploughed through. He had come too far to retreat in disgrace. The blood of the deepsmen darkened the waters as sailors lowered themselves on ropes to slash with swords at the lithe figures battering their hulls; as webbed fingers washed up upon the shores and shrieks rang through the water and echoed up the canals, Chioggia fell, then Pellestrina. The lagoon, Venice’s safeguard against the world, was giving way.
    The Venetians had no love for the deepsmen patrolling their rivers, but they had less love for French princes called in to conquer by their treacherous leaders. And as the sailors’ swords flashed and the heads of deepsmen bobbed in the bay, black of eye and slack-jawed, tumbling over and over in the current, the people of Venice united.
    It was one man who turned the battle around. Agnello Participazio was a long-established settler, a fierce Venetian who had organised men to block the channels, removing markers and leaving Venice an impassable maze for the invaders to founder in. The citizens followed him, damming their rivers as best they could, preparing to face Pepin with all their strength.
    Then a naked woman walked out of the sea. Her legs were supple like a sea woman’s, jointed with vertebrae rather than shin bone and thigh bone, and her webbed feet spread like fans on the ground. Men crossed themselves and murmured of Venus, and she stared at them, lifted her head, and spoke to them in their own tongue, saying: “Give me something to wear.” Her teeth chattered in the cold wind, and drying salt sparkled on her rough skin.
    Agnello looked up from his dam, laid down the spear in his hands,and stepped forward to offer her his cloak. She took it with a swift gesture, and cast it around herself like a queen.
    “We must turn back these ships,” she said.
    And Agnello bowed to her, and she reached out and took him by the hand.
    The cloak he had lent her barely covered her body, her twisting unnatural legs and beautiful breasts like a girl’s, her whiter than white skin with veins that darkened as the air of the land warmed her water-chilled flesh. But she would not give it up for a dress, not while Pepin was at the shore. She covered herself as she spoke to Agnello, then leaned down into the water, dipping her ragged head and releasing from her slim throat such heavy calls, louder and deeper than a bull’s bellow, that the landsmen stared at her, speechless.
    At her call, a phalanx of deepsmen swam into view, twenty deep.
    The woman turned to Agnello and said, “Where should they go to block them?”
    Agnello was a level-headed, strong-willed man. He hesitated only a moment before remembering his plan. His instructions were clear and direct: block the Malamocco channel. And the woman lowered her head again, chattered and clicked and moaned into the water.
    The deepsmen turned on the instant; their huge tails raised such a fountain that Agnello’s men found themselves soaked to the skin. The woman addressed herself to Agnello: “I will go with them. You must meet me there.” She stripped the cloak from her shoulders, standing naked as a fish on half-steady legs before his gaze. “Have this ready for me again,” she said, and passed it to him. Then she was gone, lost in the water.
    Deepsmen and landsmen worked together. Mighty stakes barricaded the Malamocco channel, impassable to Pepin’s fleet, and between them the deepsmen slipped, silent as wolves, under the water. Within Venice, the canals were passable again; only to outsiders was the deepsmen’s fury turned. And everywhere, between land and sea, swam the two-tailed, bent-legged woman, white-faced and clear-spoken, turning from Agnello to the deepsmen and back again.
    Pepin held out for six months, trying starvation and patience,force and endurance, to no avail. Venice had become something new: a city that could not be taken by sea. Pepin struggled on, but in the end, he turned away.
    After he had