by A. L. Knorr
When he didn’t move for a long time, I came to stand beside him.
“We used to put a Christmas tree there,” he pointed to the corner nearest the large front window, “so people could see the lights from the front yard.”
“I’m failing to understand how you can be here, Emun,” I said, my mind still whirling at this impossibility.
He looked at me, his lips parting to answer when a voice interrupted us.
“Hello, Miss Novak. I see we have a visitor.”
We turned to see Adalbert standing across the foyer, a curious expression on his face. “Will your guest be staying for dinner, or needing a room prepared?”
Emun and I shared a glance.
“Adalbert, this is Emun,” I began.
Emun smiled and gave Adalbert a nod, which was returned. There was nothing in Adalbert’s expression other than an intention to offer pleasant hospitality to our guest.
“He will stay for dinner, and he will need a room as well,” I said. “Thank you for asking.”
“Very good.” Adalbert continued on his way.
“Let’s go to Martinius’s office. It’s private there, and we can talk.”
Emun followed me up the stairs. “Martinius…” he said, thoughtfully.
“He would be your,” I paused, wracking my brains, “great-great-nephew. The great-great-grandson of your twin, Michal.”
Emun seemed to agree to this but his bewildered expression made me think I knew more than he did about his own family tree. I took Emun through the narrow stairway leading to the top floor where everything was smaller and older. Opening the door to Martinius’s office, I flicked on the light. The fireplace was cold but the wooden box nearby was full of firewood, and I set about making a fire.
Emun closed the door and looked around the room. “This place has not changed either.”
“Was this your father’s office?”
He shook his head. “He worked out of the office at the port. This was more of a playroom for me and my brother, not that we spent a lot of time here after we could walk and run. We preferred to be outside on warm days, or in the sitting room with the rest of the family on cold ones.”
Stacking the firewood, I took a match from the box and lit a piece of twisted newspaper. Holding the flame to the logs, I waited for it to catch.
“Let me help you with that,” Emun said, coming to crouch beside me. “It works better if you stack some kindling underneath so the oxygen can circulate.” He restacked the logs, making a kind of teepee shape and sliding thinner pieces underneath. Taking a fresh match, he struck it and lit the kindling. Coaxing it to life with his breath, the flames caught and grew, flickering and snapping.
“Thanks. I haven’t made too many fires in my life.”
He smiled. “It just takes a bit of practice. I’ve lit more fires on beaches from driftwood than one could count.”
We retreated to the couch and sat in a silence that wasn’t exactly awkward, but heavy with expectation nonetheless.
“I don’t understand how you can be alive, Emun,” I began.
The black slashes of his brows twitched with surprise. “Given what we are, I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I knew that having siren blood gives male offspring immunity from the influence of a siren’s voice, but I wasn’t aware they also inherited the long lifespan.”
He looked at me askance. “Tritons are no different from sirens in this matter. Why would they be?”
The word struck me like a blow to the forehead. “Tritons?” The flesh of my arms felt cold as the hairs stood up.
His expression softened. “You were not aware that we exist. That’s been true of most of the sirens I’ve met.”
I shook my head, numb. “My mother explained that the gene is passed only from mother to daughter.”
“Your mother is mistaken, but it is an error easily made. Only one siren I’ve met, a very old one, knew what I was. It was she who explained that what human fairytales call mermen, are in reality called tritons. I have never actually met another triton. We seem to be in short supply.”
I had no words, as digesting this information appeared to have stolen my powers of speech.
“Who is your mother?” he asked.
“Mira MacAuley. We are Atlantic Canadians.”
“I do not know the name. Might you introduce us?”
Oh, how I wished I could. “She’s gone to the ocean, only a few weeks ago, actually.”
“I see.” He searched my face. “You mean, for a salt-cycle?”
I nodded, my throat closed. I wondered if I’d ever get over the urge to cry when my mother came up in conversation.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Thank you.” These simple words meant a lot to me coming from Emun. Emun’s own mother had abandoned him and his family, and though Emun was supposed to have died and therefore not suffered from the loss, it was clearly not the case. “So, you survived the shipwreck?”
Emun smiled. “Yes and no. I did drown that night, just like everyone else on board. The difference was that I came back to life.”
Dumbfounded, I gaped at him again.
“I was just a child, only six at the time. I had no idea what had happened. I thought maybe I had gone to hell at first. It was something my grandmother sometimes talked about. It wasn’t until I was older that I pieced together what I could remember and came up with an explanation of what had happened.” He paused. “Are you all right? You look unwell.”
“You had to die to change,” I replied, thickly.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Me too,” was all I could manage.
“We are unusual, then,” he said with a secretive smile, “and perhaps bonded in some way, no?”
I agreed. “Where did you go, what did you do?”
“That is a story long in the telling. Once I became accustomed to my new form, I searched for my mother, as any child would do. I understood that she was like me, that I was what I was because of her and not because of my father, unlike my twin who was like my father in every way. I had always been linked with her—we shared a melancholy longing for the sea and a withdrawn nature. Even when I was young, I understood her better than anyone else in our family did, even my father, who loved her greatly.”
“But you never found her?”
“No, and I gave up looking for her sometime in my mid-thirties, a very long time ago now. I did not pick up the search again until a few months ago, when I had reason to try harder.”
“To try harder? What changed?”
He gave a dry chuckle and rubbed the back of his head, mussing the glossy black strands of his long hair. “A chance encounter with a stranger in an American bar. He gave me a missing piece of the puzzle, and a swollen head and sore jaw to go along with it.”
“You were in America?”
“It was my home for many years, and I have property there even now, on the coast of Maine.”
I gave a delighted laugh. “We are practically neighbors! Or were, rather. My home town is across the border to the north, a little city called Saltford.”
He didn’t look surprised. “I guessed from your accent that you were northeastern. I have lived a great many places and done a great many jobs, but always my heart comes back to the Atlantic.”
I could relate to this. In my limited life experience as a siren, I had swum in the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic. I could not imagine any ocean could rival the power of its dark and churning depths, its salty authority.
“One of my hobbies is vintage cars, and I had journeyed to Boston for a car show.”
I wondered if he’d gone alone, and if he had family or children, but I didn’t interrupt him.
“The evening after the final day of the show, I went to one of the collegiate bars in the Boston harbor for a drink. I was sitting at the bar when a stranger bellied up next to me. He smelled like a distillery and was unsteady on his feet. Nevertheless, the bartender served him and he proceeded t
o consume three more bourbons. Just as I was about to leave, he reached into the chest pocket of his shirt and pulled out a piece of jewelry. I could not look away from it, because it reminded me so much of a pendant my father had had made for my mother as a gift.”
“The aquamarine pendant that was stolen!”
He nodded. “The very same.”
“So it was Sybellen’s, after all. The museum did not know to whom it belonged, although I just found proof it belonged to the Novak family.”
“It is hers still, though I wish I had known the significance of it when I was little, it would have made all the difference. While the jewelry he had was not identical to the one my father had had made, it was similar enough that I felt compelled to ask him about it.”
“What did he say about it?”
His expression became perplexed. “I am still trying to unravel what it meant, and how much of it was just the ramblings of a drunkard. He told me that he’d stolen it from a mermaid.”
I let out a disbelieving breath and could not have torn my gaze from Emun’s face if the mansion had caught fire.
“He was slurring his words but I understood enough to realize that I had to come back to Poland and look for the pendant. He told me that he’d taken the gem from the mermaid so that the siren’s curse would come over her and she’d be lost to the sea, the way she deserved. You can imagine my shock at such a statement.”
Could I ever. “On so many levels,” I said. “The siren’s curse? And what could she have possibly done to him to deserve the theft, and how could he have lifted something from any siren? Unless maybe she was asleep or drugged, no man would find it easy to steal from a mermaid.”
“You are correct, but this particular man was immune to the siren’s voice.”
“The son of a siren?” That made it even more unbelievable. Why would he be so malignant to his own kind?
But Emun was shaking his head no. “Not the son of a siren, an Atlantean.”
“Whoa, a what now?” My jaw had dropped in amazement. “As in, a citizen of Atlantis? The mythical city Plato wrote about?”
Emun smiled. “What makes you think it is a myth? You’re a siren, is it such a stretch to think that Atlantis was real, and that some of its people may have survived?”
“I guess if you put it that way, no.” The experience in Saltford in the summer had done much to expand my perceptions of what was possible, showing me that myths and legends were likely based on something that might very well have been real at one point. “Okay, so this Atlantean stole a mermaid’s necklace so that she’d be vulnerable to the ocean? Why?”
“It took buying him yet another drink, the poor sod, and a lot of patience, but the story I pried from his addled wits interlocked like a puzzle piece with something I recalled from my youth, which it is important for you to hear first.” He got up and put another log on the fire, as it was already dwindling. Sitting down again, he said, “My mother was a tortured soul. I didn’t understand why at the time, I just knew she was in pain, and it was getting worse. I also knew that it was driving my father to desperation. One day, my father had taken me to the shipping offices at the harbor. Sometimes he did that because his employees liked to see us as we grew up, and my father liked to expose us to the business that we would one day inherit. Michal and I liked to watch the ships coming in and out of the harbor. On this day, Michal was at home, and I had gone with my father, who was particularly distracted. I was too young to appreciate all the stress he was under, but I could feel his agitation, that is until a man came into the shipping office. He was very excited, and asked to see my father immediately. My father was in a meeting, but this man demanded to see him and that my father himself would have the secretary’s head if he was not let in at once. The secretary interrupted the meeting and my father came rushing out. The strange man gave my father an envelope and they embraced. My father’s eyes were moist and he was so excited. It’s why I remember the day so well. I had never seen tears in my father’s eyes before. Some papers and money were exchanged and the man left.
“My father immediately dismissed the meeting and asked for his secretary to take me home. I was affected by all the excitement and I remember crying because I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to go with my father wherever he was going because I hadn’t seen him so happy in a very long time. I knew that something big had happened and I didn’t want to be left out.”
I knew what that felt like. I had hated it when my parents had shared whispered discussions or had sent me to my room to allow them to have an adult conversation. Nothing was more titillating for a child than to be in on things they were forbidden to know about.
“My father took me aside,” Emun explained, “and showed me what the man had delivered. He opened the envelope and pulled out a small stone, an aquamarine. It was pretty, but it was rough and uncut and not all that special next to some jewelry that I had seen my grandmother wear. I didn’t understand what the fuss was about.
“‘This doesn’t look like much, my son,’ he’d said, ‘but it will do wonders for your poor mama. I will give it to her tonight. The jeweler has made a special setting for it, just for your mother, and he will make it perfect so that she can wear it close to her body always. She’ll be much happier from now on, you’ll see.’
“He made me promise not to tell my mother what was coming, or anyone else in the family, especially my brother because he was terrible at keeping secrets. I promised, and I became excited too, because I could feel that my mother was growing increasingly unhappy. She hadn’t been herself for a long time, wasn’t speaking very much anymore, and was ill with sadness.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said quietly. “My mother suffered so much before she finally went back to the ocean.”
Emun gave me a compassionate look. “It is a cruel thing, is it not?”
I agreed. “Go on.”
“I allowed the secretary to take me home, since my father was insistent that taking me to the jewelers with him would only slow down the process.”
“But he never did give it to her.” I knew what came next.
Emun shook his head, eyes sad. “She disappeared that night, and by the time my father got home with the completed gift, it was storming. He went completely mad, and only now do I understand that madness better. Desperate to find her, he took me to The Sybellen and assembled as many sailors as he could as quickly as possible. My poor grandparents didn’t understand his madness either, and it terrified my poor grandmother more than anyone.”
I nodded. “I know.”
He paused at this and cocked his head. “You do?”
In answer, I got up and went to the desk where Aleksandra’s diary still sat. I returned to Emun and handed it to him.
He took it from me, running his hands over the leather. “I know this book.” He was so quiet I could hardly hear the words. “I saw my grandmother write in it many times. How incredible that it has survived all this time. But then again, the Novaks were always good at keeping records, and this would be a particularly valuable one.” He looked up at me. “You read it? Do you understand Polish?”
I smiled. “No. Martinius had the excerpt to do with events leading up to the wreck translated into English for me, because I very much wanted to know the story. He gave it to me as a gift before my mother and I left Poland the last time.”
“What an extraordinary man he must have been.”
“It seems like your family might have had more than its fair share of extraordinary men,” I murmured.
“Perhaps.” He let out a long slow breath. “I wish I could have met him.”
“He would have loved that,” I replied. “But please, continue your story before I die of curiosity.”
Emun set the diary on the couch beside his thigh and continued. “Those events when I was just a child, my father going mad, the storm and the shipwreck, my mother going missing, they were traumatic in and of themselves, but I knew there was a piece of information missing. It bother
ed me when I grew old enough to think it through with an adult’s rationality, why it was so important for my father to deliver the gift to my mother that he’d taken it to sea with him in a furious storm. Surely, if someone has gone missing and is believed to have drowned or become stranded somewhere, your first concern should be to get them to safety, not to deliver a piece of jewelry to them. It wasn’t until I met the Atlantean in that Boston harbor bar that a piece of the mystery snapped into place. In his slurring and broken language, he told me me a bunch of strange things––how Atlantis was real, that the ruins can be seen only by satellite if you look at the eye of Africa, and how their territory extended all the way out to the Azores. But what he said that was the most relevant centered around a legend about a triton who fell in love with a siren. Sirens being susceptible to the effects of salt-water, and at the mercy of their salt and land cycles, the triton made his lover a gift.”
“An aquamarine pendant.”
Emun nodded. “The legend doesn’t say whether or not it was a pendant, but whatever form it came in, it was most definitely an aquamarine, one which contained a powerful magic. The magic, it was said, would protect her from the ebb and flow of the siren cycles, allowing her to be with the triton always, rather than having to leave him to go on land.”
“That’s why he called it the siren’s curse.”
“Yes.”
“And you believed him––this drunk stranger?”
Emun’s shoulders lifted. “Why should I not believe him? My father certainly did. I would not doubt that my father paid an inordinate amount of money for that man to retrieve that gem. Where he found it, I would pay an exorbitant sum to know myself.”
“I found the receipt for it. The man who sold it to your father was a fellow by the name of Rainer Veigel, and you are right, Mattis did pay far more than it was worth.”
“Do you have this receipt? I would like to see it.”
I got up and retrieved it from where I’d left it on Martinius’s desk. I handed it to him and watched as his eyes scanned it, lingering at the bottom.
“I haven’t seen that signature in several lifetimes,” he said, his voice quiet and eyes sad. “How strange to see it now. My, what a lot he paid for the little stone.” He shook his head. “I’m sure he would have given more for it. All he had, in fact.”