A Sea of Sorrow

by Libbie Hawker

  “Promise me, then,” Ligeia said. “Promise me that you will take care. That you will keep your strength and stop this nonsense. Thelxiope has given us a gift, and we must make the most of what she has offered. We must live, and when the seas calm, you must sing, that Akheloios might have a hope of finding his way.”

  “I swear it,” Aglaope said. “For Thelxiope.”

  “For you, too,” Ligeia said. “For your own sake, above all else. Keep your faith, my love. Keep your dreams of a better life, and do not look back when it comes. Not for me.”

  She ate more after that, and drank as much as she was able to catch in her cups when the rain fell, and she sang—not upon her spire to call for ships that could not cross the rough seas, but hymns and prayers to the gods, as she ought to have been all this time. For more rain and fresh water to fill the cistern, for the strength they would need to last the winter through on the little food they had. For Akheloios to come, and swiftly, upon his ship.

  And while she had feared that with Thelxiope’s death, she would be more alone than ever, she found that Ligeia did not argue as she once had. That when she spoke of her dreams, of flying and Circe’s hall filled with Odysseus-Akheloios and his men, all eager and anxious for the seas to calm that they might set sail again, her mother listened instead of chiding.

  “I pray you are right about this man,” Ligeia said. “If there is any of the Giant-Killer’s ichor in his blood, so distantly born as he is, surely that will help his cause.”

  “You do not believe he is Akheloios himself?” Aglaope asked.

  Ligeia lifted a shoulder, bent over the salt-crusted shreds of cloaks and blankets she worked to turn into a mat to place beneath their worn furs and fleeces. “The gods take many forms, that much is true. But until I have seen him for myself, I cannot say with certainty. He does not sound like any of the men who have come before.”

  “But they have all been different,” Aglaope said. “Butes-Akheloios did not look like the Akheloios I knew, when he came to you during my childhood. Or so Grandmother said.”

  “No,” Ligeia agreed. “And your father’s form was altogether different again. But Akheloios has always been lean and tall, strong to fight his way through the waves and survive. A man like your Odysseus—I am less certain of his mastery over the water. And do not forget that more men than Akheloios have thrown themselves into the sea, hoping to swim to our island—always, without Akheloios’s strength, they have failed.”

  “And none have ever threaded their way through our rocks, their ship unscathed,” Aglaope said, sighing. “But what if he held his ship away, like Circe’s women do? Still near enough that we might swim back together, but safe.”

  “That will be in the gods’ hands, my love. Whether they are lured by our song too near or sail by. Whether they hear us at all. Whether the gods will allow you the escape you dream of at Akheloios’s side. Swimming toward our rocks is one thing, but escaping the waves crashing against them with only the strength of your arms and legs to propel you forward, that is another.”

  “I will tell him what to do, if he will only come,” Aglaope said. “I will tell him where to hold his ship if the waves are too rough, and we will find a way. We must.”

  “Without the wood of the wreck to wash up on the beach, he cannot build a ship to sail away in,” Ligeia reminded her. “We have so little left, we will be lucky to keep the fire burning until spring. If he swims this far, there may be no returning.”

  Aglaope frowned, watching her mother work the fabric scraps. If it came to that, they would burn the mats upon which they slept, even the fleeces, too and all the rest of the scraps of cloth and hide—even those that lined her nest upon the spire. And then they would have to hope that a ship would come to replenish their supplies, just to keep them warm and sheltered from the wind and rain and sun.

  “The gods have always sent us what we needed,” she said, though whether it was for her own reassurance or her mother’s sake, she was not certain. Even as she said the words, she felt no certainty at all.

  Before, a goddess-witch had not been working against them, begging the gods for what favors they owed and determined to see Aglaope and her sisters suffer for what she imagined as a slight. Before, the only punishment they had been fated to endure was for their failure to find their lady when she was taken beneath the earth. But who knew what power Circe had, truly? Power enough to keep Akheloios at her side. Enough to keep her falcons trained and fed and her maids obedient and happy to do Thelxiope harm.

  Could Circe turn Akheloios against them altogether? Could she persuade him never to leave her side?

  Of that, Aglaope was not certain, no matter how confidently she might have spoken otherwise. And as their food dwindled, and Ligeia ate less and less to be certain Aglaope would have enough to see her through and sing, still, when the water calmed enough for ships to pass again, her worries only grew.

  “Have another bite,” she urged, pushing the salted meat from her own portion into her mother’s hands. “And more water, too.”

  Ligeia shook her head, her lips pressed thin. “It is you who must eat. You who must survive. Without your song, there is no hope for me at all.”

  “You are not so hoarse that you could not sing, still,” Aglaope said, though she did not know if it was true. After long years of singing upon the spire, and climbing up and down its height, Ligeia had been more than grateful to give up her place to her daughter and her much sweeter voice when she had come of age.

  Ligeia smiled sadly. “I have not the strength to climb the spire, day in and day out. Not any longer. And with so little to live upon this last year, I surely have not grown stronger. Even caring for Thelxiope had begun to be too much, though I would never have let her know it.”

  Nor had she let Aglaope know it. Her mother had always bent to her work without so much as a sniff of complaint. And until that moment, it had not occurred to her to think Ligeia might have weakened so much.

  “But you must live,” Aglaope told her. “We must both live to see the day Akheloios returns to us.”

  Ligeia smoothed back her hair and kissed her forehead. “It is my dearest wish to see you made happy and free, if that is your fate. But whether I live or die—that is for the gods to decide, and if it is my choice, I would rather be certain that it is you who survives.”

  * * *

  VI

  They were both weak by the time the seas had calmed at last, and Anthousa appeared again, bobbing in her skiff just out of reach, an unwelcome herald of the finer weather and Persephone’s return to the lands above—though there was nothing upon the island to bask and grow in the glow of Demeter’s joy. And with so little rain to replenish their water, they were fortunate to have as much left as they’d had when winter had first come.

  Not enough to last them both through the summer.

  Not nearly enough.

  “Have you survived, Sirens?” Circe’s handmaiden called out. “My mistress would know if her work is done for her by the winter storms!”

  Aglaope climbed slowly up the spire, her stomach all but empty and growling with hunger. Bone broth and seaweed was all they had left, and the broth was weak and briny. But still, she had strength enough for this—to prove that she lived.

  Anthousa flashed a grin at the sight of her when she had settled herself in her nest. “You look weak and wasted, Siren. Tired and broken. Is there only one of you left? I cannot imagine you will last much longer, looking like that. And my lady will be certain she warns her guests against you before she allows them to set sail. Stop their ears with wax by her own hand, if she must, to be certain they will not hear your song.”

  Aglaope did not dare to respond, remembering too well how Anthousa had used her falcons and the trouble and pain it had brought. If only she had been wise enough to keep silent before, perhaps Thelxiope would not have been killed in such a way.

  But she would have died still, all the same. That much she could not deny, as much as s
he might have wished to. Perhaps it would have taken longer, and they all might have suffered more, but Thelxiope would not have survived the winter—could not have survived the winter, without dooming them all. It had taken her moons to accept what Ligeia had known at once: Thelxiope’s murder had been more favor than curse.

  So Aglaope only hummed, warming her voice, and made herself as comfortable as she could within her much more leanly padded nest, for they were perilously close to running out of their meager stock of fuel, as well as their water, and she had stripped the spire of all she did not need to feed their fire on the coldest nights.

  “Not much longer,” Anthousa said. “And my lady need never worry over your kind again. I am not certain you have the strength to sing at all, even now.”

  Aglaope smiled, took a breath, and proved her wrong.

  The days wore on, the waters kind and gentle, though Anthousa did not come so often to taunt them. Perhaps she knew there was no reason for it—certainly there were no seabirds circling overhead, or looking to build their nests. Not anymore. And now that Aglaope refused to be goaded, it was clear the woman had grown bored by the duty as well.

  But Aglaope dreamed, still, of her wings in the night. And with her dreaming eyes, she saw the restlessness of Odysseus’s crew, and the men working even at night by the bright moonlight to ready their ship to sail. It gave her the strength she needed, though she had little food left, to rise in the mornings and climb the spire. To ready herself for their arrival. And Aglaope thrilled at the knowledge that even Circe’s power had not held Akheloios. That he made ready, eager to sail from her side.

  Eager to see to his daughters, after all this time.

  “It will be any day now,” she promised Ligeia, watching carefully to be sure her mother at least drank the water she had drawn, and chewed upon the fresh seaweed she had found caught in the rocks. “We will be feasting before full summer is upon us, our heads spinning with wine and our stomachs sour with so much rich food.”

  Ligeia smiled, humoring her. “As you say, dear one.”

  “As the gods have shown me,” she assured her. “The men crawl over their ship like so many ants, as desperate as we are to sail again. Circe has lost her power over them, at last.”

  “Or perhaps she knows she need not hold them for much longer, and gives them the illusion of freedom while she holds them carefully back, even still.”

  “We are not so bad off as that,” Aglaope said.

  But Ligeia’s gaze met hers, and she could not avoid the truth in her sunken eyes and too-thin face. “I fear if we must wait much longer, you will greet your Akheloios alone.”

  “Mama—”

  “No,” her mother said. “Promise me, Aglaope, that you will do what you must. That when my time comes, you will not waste what I can give you, but make my strength your own.”

  She grasped her mother’s hand in both of hers and held it tightly. “It will not come to that. You’ll see. He’s coming for us, I know it.”

  “I only hope you have not put too much faith in these dreams.”

  “They are god-sent,” Aglaope said. “When he looks at me, sees me flying overhead, I know it. And if Circe thinks we are no threat, that we are weak, it makes sense that she would send these men upon their way. Even more so if she warns them before they go. She will think we cannot reach them. That they will not dare to come too near without hearing our song. But with Akheloios aboard, their captain and commander, how can they not? He will not need our song to set his course. He knows to come to us.”

  “That much is true,” her mother said, her forehead furrowed in thought. “And by now he must know we have need. That it is your time. And he cannot have been deaf to your hymns all these seasons, even if he does not hear you sing as he passes by, he will have heard your prayers.”

  “And I will sing for him today again,” Aglaope told her, smiling. “As I have for all the days since my bleeding came. And you will see, Mama. You will see that my faith and my dreaming has not been misplaced.”

  That night, when she dreamed of Circe’s island, there were no men inside the hall, no beached ship upon her shore. Just Circe and her women and darkness where there had been lamplight every other night. The witch-goddess paced upon a rocky ledge, staring out across the waters, as if expecting they’d come back.

  Aglaope’s heart soared, then sank again, when she realized fully what it meant. For if Odysseus and his men had set sail—they had not passed her island or heard her song. She had seen no sails upon the horizon, nothing but the bright clear sky and the sun flashing in her eyes off the water.

  And when she woke, she could not bring herself to speak of it to her mother. Not when she saw how carefully she moved, how slowly. Not when she knew Odysseus was the only hope they had left—and if he had somehow passed them by, they had nothing left to dream of but an easy death.

  Aglaope did not sleep well the following night, cursing the itch between her shoulder blades when her dream-wings formed and jerking herself awake. She did not want to fly to Circe’s island and see that all was lost. She wanted to hold on to her last thread of hope—the image of Circe pacing anxiously upon the shore. For if Circe paced and waited, she had reason. Another ship, if not Odysseus’s. A ship Aglaope might yet sing into the rocks before her mother lost faith, for she had no doubt what would happen if no ship came.

  Ligeia would not watch her daughter die as she had her mother. Nor would she allow herself to waste entirely away, until she was too thin and too dry to provide any real strength. She would kill herself first, drive a dagger through her own breast if she must. And Aglaope would be upon the spire, too far away, too busy singing to stop her.

  At last the sky began to lighten, and Aglaope did not linger beneath her furs, but rose at once, fetching water for them both and seaweed from their stores. She watched Ligeia sleep a moment longer after she had eaten, humming a soft prayer to Persephone, to keep her safe another day. And then, with a grief-filled heart, she forced herself to climb.

  The spire seemed taller that morning, and her limbs heavier somehow, but the salt-crusted stone did not crumble beneath her fingers or toes, and she did not fumble for any holds. Up and up, until she reached her nest. Aglaope’s eyes narrowed at the rose-red dawn, blinking away the dazzle splashing up from the wine-dark water, and as was her habit, she surveyed the horizon—though she was certain this morning she had risen before any sail, for darkness still had not wholly fled the sky.

  Nothing, yet, as she had expected. Nothing, as there had been for so long now, she hardly remembered what it might look like if she found anything at all. But Aglaope warmed her voice, as she did every day, and began to sing all the same.

  Akheloios, come to me...

  There was no hiding her sorrow or her grief or her hopelessness, she realized. As careful as she had been not to speak of her dream, as cautious as she had been in the words she had chosen when Ligeia had asked what more she had seen—the truth would always be in her song, in the hymns she sang to the gods.

  So she sang, begging Akheloios to come, to find them again. She sang for any ship at all, and quickly. She sang for her mother’s sake, and her grandmother’s, praying that Persephone would guard their spirits in death as fiercely as they had been forsaken in their lives. She sang and she sang, and she struggled within herself to find the peace her mother had always had—the faith not in Akheloios and escape, but in the knowledge that she would serve her goddess in the afterlife.

  And then, quite suddenly, her song died.

  For on the horizon, just at the corner of her eye, a dot she had blinked away had grown into a blot, and that blot, when she turned her head just slightly, had become a ship upon the water—red sail full and bright against the blue, cloudless sky.

  “A ship!” she cried, her voice breaking with the strain. “A ship, Mama! A ship!”

  “Sing, girl!” Ligeia called back. “You must sing!”

  She laughed, hardly recognizing the sound as it t
umbled from her lips, and then took up her song again—but brighter now, and stronger, louder. Aglaope sang of the children Akheloios might provide, of the groaning tables filled with more food than a thousand men might eat. She sang of the joy of rescue, of the love she was bursting to give, and the long lonely years she had waited. She sang, and the ship sailed nearer.

  Hurry, she urged them on. Hurry here.

  The scrape and scrabble of rock made her tear her gaze away from the sail, glancing down. And there was Ligeia, weak and frail and climbing, tears in her eyes. “They must not pass us by,” she said, when she had reached the spire’s top, gasping and shaking. “They must not leave us behind.”

  Her mother steadied herself, closing her eyes and straightening her back. She drew one deep breath into her belly, and then another, and Aglaope heard her humming, warming her throat—discordant at first, but slowly shifting, falling nearer and nearer into tune.

  And then they were singing together, her mother’s voice so much richer now, so much darker, but still beautiful. How had she not remembered how much more beautiful it was to sing together? The ship sped toward them, the sail more now than just a splash of red, and the long oars flashing, until she could see the cadence of their strokes, and Aglaope could match her song to their steady strength.

  They sang, and with their voices raised together, their song spreading across the water, spilling from their hearts, it seemed impossible that this ship could escape them. Two Sirens? Singing as one with all their strength, all their power—if the gods had given them any true power at all.

  Aglaope would have laughed again if she had not been so determined to keep singing. But she put all that hope and joy into her song. And she sang of fame and renown for the hero who might sail his ship between her rocks. She sang of glory and gold—oh they had so much gold, found upon their shores, tossed up from the water by the winter storms. And though gold had no true value to them beyond the water a pot might hold, they had kept it still, as gifts to shower upon Akheloios when he came. Aglaope sang of all their treasures, of the prizes they would give to the men who succeeded where so many before had failed. How rich they would be, returning home, with so many precious gifts within their hold!