by A. L. Knorr
But I had never really felt the pull of the siren’s curse the way my mother had. Either it was different for me as an elemental, or my time had not come for its power to work on me. Now I never would, and that was all right by me.
Emun and Jozef came in carrying more bags and paused to listen.
“I feel like dark clouds were hanging over my head and they just moved away,” Mom said as we stood in the foyer. “I feel like I didn’t even realize that the clouds were there until now. They’ve been there for so long that I didn’t realize the sky could look any different.”
Jozef stepped closer to my Mom, his face dreamy as he listened to her talk.
“My thoughts are clear, my memories are intact, and best of all, I have no fear anymore. It’s just gone.”
I swallowed down a lump in my throat as Nike and Antoni entered the house last, carrying their bags.
“What are we talking about?” Antoni asked, setting his bag down and straightening.
“Whether Mira feels different,” Emun replied, taking off his jacket and hooking it on the hatstand beside him. His eyes found Nike. “Do you feel different?”
Nike hesitated. “I do,” she said slowly. Her eyes drifted to my mother’s and held them.
“But?”
“But I always was a little different from other sirens, and my desire to get underwater for good is as strong as ever. And…” she trailed off, eyes still on Mom.
“We need to go to Okeanos,” injected Mom.
I looked at her with surprise, but she and Nike were looking at each other like an understanding had passed between them. Like it was something they’d both felt for a while now.
Finally, Mom’s eyes passed to me. “Would you like to come?”
“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” said Nike, brightening. “It’ll give Targa a chance to see where her mother is from.”
I loved the idea, and part of me marveled at how I hadn’t thought of it yet myself. “Absolutely, I do. We might never be as close as we are now.” In fact, we had been closer when we’d been in Africa, but it wouldn’t have been right to leave the non-Mer hanging out in a strange city for a few days while we went for an aquatic jaunt.
“It won’t be the way it was,” Mom said, finally. Her expression softened. “But now is the perfect time to go.” There was something in her eyes I couldn’t put my finger on. A knowing she wouldn’t voice. Nike had that same look, like there were shutters behind her eyes giving just a hint of some warm unknown source of light.
I glanced at Antoni. He smiled at me. “It’s a great idea. Go. I’ll hang out with Emun until you get back.”
“Uh, you mean you’ll hang out with Jozef until we get back,” Emun replied, and I realized his eyes were also lit with the fire of curiosity. “I wouldn’t miss seeing Okeanos for all the classic cars in America!”
That settled it. After a good meal and a rest, Mom, Nike, Emun, and I slipped into the waters at the Drakief’s private boathouse and began the journey toward the Azores. It was a journey that would take most of the night, yet somehow no one bothered to suggest waiting until morning. There was an eagerness connecting us.
It felt wonderful to be in my siren form again. The last of the stress from our desert journey crumbled and broke away as the saltwater soothed my skin and my soul. Though we traveled together, the four of us drifted apart. We didn’t converse, and weren’t always even within yelling distance. Even Emun seemed like a kind of peace had stolen over him. In an adjacent way, the curse had been hanging over him, too.
When our heads broke the surface beyond Mount Califas, the eastern horizon was painted with pale peaches, greens, and indigos.
“That’s it,” Mom said as she bobbed beside me, her wet hair gleaming and her eyes dark in the early morning light.
Mount Califas was as she had described it. Steep, very tall, and what might have been bare cliffs once were now completely encrusted with vegetation. The base of Califas nearest us was a clutter of black rocks and breaking surf. Nike led us in a large semi-circle to a section of white beach where we found our footing and walked up on the sandy soil of Okeanos.
I was going to ask if this was the same section of beach Claudius had come to before he’d kicked all the sirens off their own land, but I could tell from Nike’s grim expression as she looked around that it was. As the light bloomed with the sunrise, my eyes found dark spots in the mountainside that might have been the entrances to caves, but they were so grown over it was difficult to tell for sure.
An explosion of screaming seabirds drew our attention to a crust of flat rock a little less than a quarter of the way up the mountainside.
“Look!” Emun’s voice was an excited whisper.
A siren had appeared on the ledge as the last of the birds flew away. She was naked but her curly black hair was dry and little wisps of it blew in the light breeze. Her pretty frame made a sharp silhouette against the rock behind her for this siren was much darker, darker even than Nike.
I heard a sharp intake of breath and glanced at Mom. She was looking at the siren just above us without surprise, as though she had known someone would be here.
The siren looked down at us. It was too dim and she was too far away to see her expression clearly. A moment later, she disappeared.
Movement at the base of Califas drew my eye, and there was another siren, this one milky white with long auburn hair and wearing a simple shift dress. She emerged from the cave at the base of Califas, picking her way over stones and shrubs. Another siren appeared behind her, and another. A very young siren appeared from another cave entrance farther down the beach. She paused and eyed us, said something to someone invisible behind her, and then came out and walked toward us. She was followed by more sirens. Suddenly there were dozens of them, coming steadily out of the belly of the mountain and joining us on the beach.
As they drew close, I saw some of them were weeping in the siren way, no sound, just an endless flow of tears. Their expressions varied from neutral to happy to awe and even a kind of ecstasy. They closed around us, putting my mother and me at the center. Nike took a few steps back, taking herself out of the little circle forming on the beach.
Emun, standing several feet to the side of Mom and me, was getting his own little encircling crowd. Siren hands found his skin and stroked him, as if making sure he was real. Fingers touched his face and a few voices murmured wonderingly in a language I didn’t recognize. Emun glanced over at me and cocked a kind of awkward crooked smile. His eyes said he wasn’t quite sure what to think, but that it was okay. These sirens had never seen a triton; to them he’d always been a creature of myth, and now he was standing there naked and dripping. His dark hair hung nearly to his shoulders, his blue eyes as dark as ever as he looked into their faces. He let them touch, and those sirens who had already convinced themselves that he was real, moved aside to make room for others who wanted to put tender and questing hands on him.
Suddenly, she was there, the black siren with the long body and huge thick curls. She stood in front of Mira, with eyes only for my mother. It came to me suddenly, that they knew each other and my mother had even told me once about her. She could only be one siren.
“Polarisin?” I said.
Her beautiful dark eyes came away from Mom’s face and she smiled at me.
“You look just like your mother,” she said, and her voice was a warm cat’s tongue to my ear.
The murmur of voices died down as the last of the sirens came to the beach and joined the strange party. Sirens of all ethnicities and––from the sound of it, languages––had come to Okeanos. They’d been pulled by some invisible tether.
Mom stepped close to Polarisin and put her fingers to the tall siren’s throat. She kissed Polarisin’s cheeks and dipped her head in a respectful bow.
It jarred me, and another realization came rushing in upon me as Mom and Polarisin said the words that many sirens had said before as the mantle of Sovereignty passed from one to the other. All of the Mer around
us had felt what was to come, they had felt the changing of the guard, the transition of power from one Sovereign to another. But I had not felt it. Somehow, I was one of them and yet different, the way Nike was.
In my periphery, I found the white-haired sorceress and watched her. It occurred to me that maybe I had been in the presence of another elemental all along, and just not known it. We were the same as our people, but different. We were part of something, and yet separate from it. I wondered at this difference, wondered at it because though salt gave the powers of Sovereignty, I had never felt that my elemental status had come from salt, but rather from somewhere else, somewhere broader, somewhere inclusive of the ocean but also beyond it. Maybe, like Georjie had theorized, my powers had come from that magic imbued by Gaia, nature itself.
This realization shook me as I stood there on the sand, and the sirens began to mill around Polarisin, kissing her cheeks and whispering to her. I was an elemental, and nature had chosen to release me from whatever bond held sirens together. It had chosen to bond me to other beings instead, other elementals. It had to be why I couldn’t feel my mother’s Sovereignty, and I couldn’t feel it passing to Polarisin now, the way the rest of the Mer could.
The moment came when I was the only Mer on the beach who had yet to greet Polarisin as the new Sovereign. Thinking that I had to perform the deferential ritual or risk insulting her, I lifted a hand and reached for her throat.
She looked down at me with those luminous dark eyes, and her hand came up and caught mine in mid-air. I looked at her with surprise as she held my hand. She lowered it, and reached for my other hand so that we were standing hand in hand.
“Not you,” she said, and I was jarred again to see tears filling the new Sovereign’s eyes. They overspilled her lids and tracked down her cheeks. She released one of my hands and touched my face tenderly, then she bent and kissed first one cheek then the other. She released me and stepped back, wiping the moisture off her face.
“You’ll always be one of us,” she said and her head tilted a little before she went on, “but you are also diachorîso, set apart.” She gestured widely at the crowd of silent Mer around us. “When our gemstones turned to water, all sirens were afraid, until we realized that it came with a…a falling away. A freedom settled over us that we had not felt before in our lives. I came here without fully understanding why. The Salt called us, so we came. We were joined by others along the way, who also felt this call.”
“But, you’re from the Pacific,” I stuttered, “how did you get here so fast?” After all the curse had been broken not yet for a full three days.
“I might be from the Pacific, but a siren can travel the world, no? I was not far away when I felt the Salt invite me.” She tilted her head to indicate the others. “These are the sirens who were close by, and thousands more are on their way. They’ll arrive over the coming months.” She cocked a dark slash of eyebrow. “I would like to be able to tell them what happened, why they’ve come. Even the Salt has not given me its reasons. Perhaps you can help me understand?”
She wanted the story. None of these sirens knew what had happened to their gemstones, why they’d suddenly dissolved. They only knew it was a good thing, and somehow, they knew that it was because of me. Perhaps because they could feel that I was outside of the invisible netting that connected them all.
I looked at my Mom, then Nike, and then Emun. They were listening with interest but also waiting for my reply. I looked at Polarisin again and smiled. “Yes, of course. I’ll tell you the story.”
Polarisin took my hand and tucked it into her elbow as she steered back toward Mount Califas. “Good,” she said. “And perhaps I’ll have someone with artistic skill immortalize it inside this mountain. It seems we were once creators of fine mosaics.” She smiled and a little dimple appeared in her cheek. “The art has fallen into a little…disrepair, let’s say. And I aim to restore it.”
“I’m very happy to hear that,” I said, smiling back.
Epilogue
Mom and I sat on the end of the wooden pier jutting from the public beach that lay between the Novak manor and the Gdansk harbor. The sounds of a busy beach on a warm day hummed on behind us as we faced the Baltic horizon.
“So, what did it say?” my mom asked, bumping me with her shoulder.
“What did what say?” I replied innocently.
“The letter from Lusi, what else.” If an eye-roll had a tone, my Mom’s voice was infused with it. “No need to be coy.”
I reached into the kangaroo pocket in the front of my tanktop and handed her a crumpled envelope. When we’d arrived home in Gdansk, Adalbert had said that Lusi had been by a few days earlier wanting to see me. But rather than waiting for some undetermined amount of time for us to come home, she’d scrawled a letter and asked him to give it to me. It was this letter I handed to my mother now.
Mom unfolded it and read aloud. “Dear Targa, I don’t know how you did it, but you have, and one day I want to hear all about it. I’m sad I can’t stay and wait to see you in person, but duty calls. Speaking of ‘calls,’ the next time you ring me I won’t be so resistant. I promise. Signed, Lusi.” Mom folded the letter up and gave it back to me. “What was so private about that?”
I shrugged. “Nothing, really.”
The truth was that I didn’t fully understand myself why I found myself treasuring this rather messily hand-written letter from Lusi. Maybe it was because she could be the oldest known siren in the world, maybe it was because I found my mind drifting to her from time to time, wondering if she’d ever tell me her story.
I let my mind release Lusi for now. It drifted back to the crystal and to Shaloris and to the mysteries of magic that had brought her into her aquamarine cell. It might look sinister on the face of it, but the same magic that had taken her there had also released her. I mused that the mysteries of magic might not be so different from the mysteries of the heart. Each seemed as enigmatic and full of secrets as the other.
“You want to know something strange?” I asked Mom.
“I bet I can guess,” Mom replied, leaning back on her palms and flicking the water out toward the horizon.
I felt surprise steal over my features as I looked at her. “You can?”
“Sure.” She turned her face to the side and tilted her cheekbone roughly in the direction of the beach as if to say, The shenanigans going on behind us.
Blankly, I looked at the beach. Kids screamed happily and ran as an older sibling chased them. The chatter of conversation and laughter filled the air as families and couples sat on blankets and beach towels or at picnic tables, or just in lumps of ankle-deep sand, enjoying the bright warm day of late spring.
Jozef lay on his back on our picnic blanket, an open book crooked over his face. I supposed he must be dozing. Antoni sat on the second blanket we’d brought, his knees bent, his feet on the sand and his arms wrapped around his shins. His shoulders were sloped and relaxed. Emun was standing in the background, his phone held to his ear, his hand moving in the air as he spoke. My gaze found Antoni again. I couldn’t tell where he was looking, thanks to the sunglasses shading his eyes, but after a moment, he lifted one hand in a single, still wave.
I waved back. “I don’t get it,” I told Mom.
“The beach, the people.” Mom lifted one palm and gestured to the scene behind us as a whole. “It’s strange, right?”
“You mean because we’re so used to abandoned beaches with no one around?”
She nodded.
“Well, yeah, it is a bit strange now that you mention it, but it’s a good strange. It’s a strange I could get used to.” I gave Antoni a smile before facing the Baltic again.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“No, I guess it wouldn’t.” I was unlike my mother in this way. She could leave the human life behind for many years and never miss it. Thanks to who she’d fallen in love with, that possibility lay open to her without ever having to break her own heart or anyone else�
�s. I knew she would take it, and soon, but at least the decision wasn’t coming under duress. With no curse, she could do as she liked.
“But that wasn’t what you were talking about, was it?” she asked.
“No.” I looked down in my lap as the memory of the memory bobbed to the surface. “Inside the crystal, right before I…broke it, I thought of Dad.”
Mom looked at me and was silent for a moment. “Did you?”
“Yeah. In fact, he was all I could think about, and there was something weird about the way he just popped into my mind, like my memory didn’t conjure him up consciously. He just…blew through me. You know?”
My mom listened quietly as I told her about the memory from my childhood, the one I shouldn’t have. Her bright blue eyes drifted down to the water and glazed over a little, unfocused as her own memory took her back.
“I remember that night,” she murmured. “It wasn’t often he caught me missing, but it did happen a few times.”
I nodded. I knew. When I was finished telling her my memory, we fell silent. The sounds of laughter and waves and seabirds screaming from high above drifted around us.
“I have something strange to tell you, too,” Mom said, suddenly. “I wasn’t going to say anything about it to you because I thought it was irrelevant. Just a bit of Atlantean trivia, really. But now that I know Nathan visited you inside the crystal, I think I should.”
The way she’d put it jarred me for a moment––that my father had visited me inside the gem, like he was a ghost or a being from the past with consciousness. I didn’t see it that way, but I supposed these things could be interpreted a million different ways by a million different minds.
“Jozef was telling me back in Gibraltar how his father had died, that Loukas had discovered a little late in the game that Atlanteans who spent too much time on land and not enough time in saltwater got a kind of wasting disease.”
“Okay,” I replied, patiently. Waiting for the punchline.
But Mom looked at me expectantly, like I should have had something click by now. When I still looked clueless, she said, “It has symptoms that look a lot like MS.”