Scene two

The woman is in bed, propped up on pillows with blanket wrapped around her. The prince comes in with food and drink. She is awake now and not sobbing but tears are still running down her face. He asks her what has distressed her.


She tells him about the Danish whale hunt that happens every year in a nearby fjord. The whales are rounded up, herded into a cove and then killed until the sea is red. The cry and scream as they panic and try to escape or help each other. She managed to save a few but most died. In her exhaustion and grief she was washed ashore.


The prince looks at her in disbelief. How, he asks, could you have helped? She looks into his eyes and tells him that that he has captured a mermaid, a guardian of the sea. She looks deeper into his eyes and he feels his true self revealed to her. Mermaids can see the truth, and their eyes act as a truth potion. Any human who looks into a mermaid's eyes will have to tell  the truth

She asks if he hunts whales. He tells her that he has banned the practice from his small princedom. While he has done this for years, until now he did not feel the pain that the whales and dolphins must experience as their pod it being destroyed.


The prince tells the mermaid to sleep and heal. He tucks the blankets around her and whispers that she is safe, as she falls into an exhausted sleep.

Here is the true story



A solitary man is walking slowly down a Danish beach. He is a poor “prince” who owns land with miles of shore. This prince is unique among the Danish princes. He is against the hunting of whales and keeps the whaling vessels away from his coves and off his shore. With little money, it is difficult to guard the animals he loves so dearly, but he continues to prevent the hunting in his coves. He sees a something tangled in a fishing net and hears quite sobs. He runs over the there is a beautiful young woman tangled in the fishing net crying. She is wearing a sarong of some beautiful shimmery material that is tattered and dirty.


She is crying about the dolphins killed in the Danish hunt, sobbing that she could not save them. She is barely coherent and bleeding from several wounds, so he wraps her in his cloak and carries her home.

I am still young in mermaid years, only 250, but I was much younger when the princes told the stories of capturing a mermaid’s heart. The stories echoed in the rocks and the water and we heard them deep within the sea. All sounds come to us that way. We can hear the sounds of rocks being moved, or water being diverted, of people building or tearing down, as well as the songs and stories of the sons and daughters of the land. We know when babies are born and when elders die. The rocks and the water tell us.



Of course it does not hurt that we also speak the language of the sea and can converse with all that live within the waters. Though is it true that each mermaid has a certain alignment with specific creatures. I am more likely to talk with an octopus than a shark, but that is because I enjoy the octopus sense of humor. This is why I heard the story as a young mermaid…octopi like to chat.


Perhaps it began when the princesses decided to impress the princes, or perhaps it was the other way around, but by the time the story traveled to us the competition was already in place and competitors were on their way. Some were princesses wanting to be mer-people for a day so they could tell the tale, but most were princes wanting to capture the heart of someone they could then brag about. There were even stories that mermaids were immortal, which inspired a few Kings searching for us to restore their lost youth.


We can live forever, but we are not immortal, and we certainly do not hand out the gift of immortality in a random fashion. Oh yes, the stories are true, loving a mermaid, or rather having one love you, can bring a bit of that gift, but our hearts are not easily won and cannot be bought or stolen. But the princes of man did not know this, or did not care to believe it. And so they came to the sea looking for us the way they searched for gold and silver in the earth mines, thinking they could hunt us they way they had learned to hunt whales. But we listened to the words of the rocks and water and we were prepared.