So today I went to the first beach. The pendulum had indicated a point on Cape Cod, right at the "elbow". I blew the map up and dowsed again, and it pointed out an island, which turned out to be - wonder of wonders - an actual well-known wildlife sanctuary. Ferries run out to Monomoy Island on a daily basis. There are miles of bird sanctuaries, and a seal sanctuary (which humans aren't allowed near, although we did see a dead seal on the beach where we parked). I hadn't heard of Monomoy, but Bella had, and she asked to come with me and offered to drive me out. So we started out this morning at 6 a.m. - it's a 4-hour drive - in order to catch the ferry over.

We were the only people going out besides the serious hip-wader-clad fishermen, and they all wanted to go to the mud flats where the fishing was better. We told the ferryman that we just wanted to be dropped off on a private stretch of beach, and picked up 4 hours later. He cooperatively marooned us on a lovely shore flanked by flocks of nesting birds, me with my crane bag and large wicker trash can with straps in which I carry my water drum, and Bella with painting equipment. She did watercolors and fished while I did what I had to do.

I had made an offering bowl out of rye bread dough the night before, and I filled it with local-brew ale and placed it on the beach, right where the tide was coming in. I got the idea that this wasn't enough of an offering, but I wasn't sure what to do. Whoever she was, she was holding back. Messing further with the bottle cap from the ale, I accidentally gashed my knuckles and bloodied the bowl of beer, and bam! She was there. Crawling up from the surf, the ugliest mermaid I'd ever seen. Not that I'd actually seen any real ones before, of course.

She looked nothing like any mermaid pictured in fairytale books. It brought home to me that Aegir and his clan were sea-etins, not some sort of faery or elf. She would have been tall if she had been standing upright instead of wriggling up in the surf, and was powerfully built in the shoulders, less like a slender girl and more like an Olympic swimmer. Her breasts were long, hanging dugs, under necklaces of teeth and fishbone. She had a fishtail, but it looked like that of a shark, with a fin protruding between her shoulder blades. She had very long hair, the dark rusty red of dried blood, that swirled around her in the water like seaweed. Her face was broad and rather flat, with a very wide mouth that was full of rows of sharp pointed teeth, and it gave her a grin like a manticore. Her eyes were the steel-grey of the foggy sea behind us, and shifted exactly with its coloration the entire time that she was there. The pupils were slitted. "Come here," she purred, "and let me clean the blood off your fingers for you."

I wasn't quite that brave, but I held my hand in the seawater and let the red stain float over to where she lowered her face and lapped at it. Her tongue was bluish-purple in the grey surf. She moved from the blood to the ale, drank it, and ate the bowl in three bites. Her fingers were clawed. Her hips wriggled as she moved in the shallow water, and I could only stare stupidly. I swallowed and retreated back to where my drum stood in the sand, and asked politely what she would deign to teach me.

She laughed at me, and told me to find my pulse with my fingers, and then follow it with the drumbeat. The rest of the interaction was not as interesting from a personal standpoint; I spent the whole time trying to concentrate on what she was telling me to do. She gave me a power song, or rather she put something in my head and the drumbeat that allowed a power song to come to me. She told me that there would be a very important thing just around the curve of the shore that I must take home, something that would be incorporated into a fetish for me, that I would know it when I saw it. I was thinking it would be a seashell, but when I rounded the curve there were a gazillion horseshoe crabs mating in the surf. One of them had been eaten by seagulls and the cleaned-out shell was laying on the sand; I knew immediately that I should take it home.

For all that she was clearly a salt-water creature, I gathered from what she told me that she was about the sea's relationship to the rivers that emptied into it. As such, she was also about blood, which are the rivers of your body, and empty into the heart which is its ocean. Each of the other Nine Ladies would also be about the sea's relationship to something, although sometimes that was vague and subtle.