There were once five daughters of a fisherman. They were all lovely, tall and graceful. They lived by the sea, and the sea was their life. They each were sworn to love their father, and had each taken an oath never to get married to men of the sea, for the sea was a jealous mistress, and never returned her lovers to the arms of their wives. And yet, inevitably, each one succumbed to the souls of sailors, each began to love and after beginning, could not stop.They waited always with unease when their lovers went to sea, and held each other in fear when storms blew up. With their waiting hours they didn't know what to do, so they finally began to go down to the sea, and wait upon the shore. But the shore often receded, as tides came and went, and the water might almost drown them if there was a storm. And so, slowly but surely, they began to move toward a dusky part of the beaches, where the rocks went down to meet the sea, and there they perched upon the great boulders, which acted as piers when the men came in in their fishing boats, wet and sodden and carrying fish. They came to the piers, and the women leapt to the unsteady vessels, and they came to shore to unload their catch after a night upon the water, or an evening in the wind.
The boulders, as they cascaded down to sea, became known to the girls as the Piers, and there, on their five chosen rocks, they would wait after the cleaning and the sewing and cooking was (mostly) done.
The youngest had fallen in love with a pearl diver. It was dangerous work, and he was a dangerous soul. But she loved him, and he her. And when he found his cache of pearls he would be very rich, and they would buy a large ship and sail around the world together. So they had dreamt, and so, of course, it would be. The night was rough, but the moon was out. The coves were full with water, but the tide was out. These were the nights he left to dive for pearls, and these were the nights she moved down to the Piers to wait upon him.
She curled there, in the grasp of a damp rock, her wraps about her to ward off the chill, and listened to the dangerous rumble of the waves upon the rocks. There, deep in the deep of it, the ocean had stolen her mother - her mother, who when her father had not returned from a fishing trip for a week, had thrown herself from one of the high cliffs in despair. And there, too, lay her uncle, her grandfather, and his grandfather. Their bones mouldering. Perhaps it would be her fate too, someday, she thought, but tucked the thought away, as the feeling of being on the edge of something very high, with the water crashing out so deep and strongly, came upon her. She was on the edge of the world here, on the edge of the thing deeper and greater than the highest mountains and the lowest valleys, and within it her lover swam.
She was finally lulled to sleep by the crashing waves, unwisely, as she had been admonished not to do so many times by her sisters. She was trapped upon the rock, as the waves buffetted about her, and she would not last here. She knew the tide came up above the rock, and in such waters she was not safe with the currents. She realized that perhaps her thoughts were right, and fear gripped her; great fear, demon fear, running through her veins like acid and fire, and then, just as quickly, icy numb. If she was to survive, which of course she could not, she would have to swim. And that as quickly as she could. The tide was going in, it might push her toward the shore - and if she washed up broken, she would at the very least be broken upon the shore.
She undressed, the full moon shining upon her white white skin as if it was a reflection of the moon itself, smiling at her, as if she was a night sea creater like all the rest the moon watched. But she was not a sea creature. She was alive, very alive like a human. And nothing else.
She dived into water like a silver fish, at once pulled by the currents out, and then pushed, mercilessly, back in. She had waited so many hours on the Piers, but nothing could have prepared her for what was below them. Black and dark and fear. And through the water she made out the moon, and her own hands like ghosts against the dark, drowning waters. It was as if she was already dead. What was below? Nothing. And above? Impossibility.
She was pushed against the ragged edge of a stone, which felt like torn metal in the cold, and she surfaced for a moment, the edge of the sea that met the air seemed more frightening for a moment, like another world of unknown, the blank mask of something that from underneath looked huge and unfathomable, but from above was covered as if by a wall of silver, from which anything could erupt, from which anything could arise - and into which anything could fall and never return. She began to swim, terrified, toward the dark shore, shining where the surf hit it, but showing little else.
After minutes of struggle, she realized dumbly that she would not make it. But she did not stop. Better to die fighting... better to die... she slipped beneath the waves more and more, sucked down by a fierce tide, until she only had sips of air between long hours of water. Until, fighting like a fish on the shore, she drank instead of breathed, until she felt herself dieing, the white moon still smiling upon her white flesh delightedly. Her pearl diver nowhere to be seen.
Her head banged the rock of the Pier, she could not raise it. A voice called to her, but she couldn't hear it. A dark hand lifted her onto the rocks, a dark seaweed-covered hand lifted her, and gasping in the air as if it could not breathe, it put her high upon the Pier, where the moon reflected her like silver. And the dark face, covered in mire, with it's waving hair and its eyes, just like hers, crying seasalt tears, ducked beneath the surface, breathing there, and then, crawled upon the stone, to caress her hair for one moment, her hair the color that the creature's had once been. Until it slipped, quiet, back into the water, and disappeared beneath the Piers, until the waves crashed up to the rock, where the girl lay, but could not touch her with its foamy fingers.
The pearl diver came home that night to find her upon the rock, not quite dead, and tenderly, he laid his pearl on the bottom of the boat, and rowed home. He put her in his bed, and covered her with his body, and she woke that morning in the arms of him, in the arms of life.
He left the sea that day. He left the sea, and they moved to another shore, where he did not dive for pearls anymore, but instead grew wheat and corn and other things on the edge of the sea, on the edge of the water, planting in the ground the pearls of life, instead of harvesting the pearls of things by death, and watching with wonder as the pearls became the food and the houses and the clothing of his family, the happiness of his pearl, his wife, the sparkling eyes of his children and the sweet-smelling fur of their cat.
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