It was a beautiful day. The sun was warm, the sea was still, what little wind there was blew gently. There was no trace of the chaos that had just wracked this shore.
He sat down upon his old rock. The sun on his back warmed him to his core. He closed his eyes. Perhaps Chiara really would save Calypso. Then they could all stay here, together. He frowned. Something tugged at his memory, but he could not catch it. Nevermind. Maybe everything would be well. Maybe he could come to love the dragon, as he said he would. Maybe….
He opened his eyes again. The sea was still calm. But he was not fooled. “I know you’re here,” he said.
There was no reply at first. He’d surprised her, no doubt. Then the surface of the sea rippled. A familiar green head broke through, close to the shore. Even from this distance he could tell she was glaring at him.
“Hello again,” he said. “Have you come back to finish your war with me?”
She bobbed in the water, looking for all the world like a seal. “I am not here to fight, Caliban.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Pisces,” he said. He hadn’t been able to say Peisinoe when he was small. It had always made her laugh. Later, when Prospero told him it was the name for the sign of the fish, he’d laughed as well. But there was no smile on either of their faces today, no matter how pleasantly they spoke to each other.
She stared at him, silent once more. He shrugged his shoulders in irritation. All these unearthly beings were getting on his nerves. Between dragons, spirits, and mermaids he was beginning to miss Naples.
“What is it you want, then? I’m not much in the mood for conversation,” he said at last.
“Listen to you. There’s nothing wild about you anymore.”
“No, there isn’t. You’re right. But here I am, all the same. This is my home. The dragon…I mean Chiara…says she will free the staff. When she does, I will claim it. I will not leave you again.”
He only realized that he’d made the decision when he spoke the words. Of course he would be king. It was his fate. It was his birthright. His face twisted at the irony. After all this time he found that he was just like Ferdinand. He was born to be king. It was what his mother had always said. It was the specter he’d been running from his whole life. Well, now he would take it up, just as he had taken up Prospero’s cloak.
“Oh, aren’t we fortunate?” The mermaid’s voice, usually so smooth and gentle, was rough with sarcasm. “The queen is dead, or soon will be at any rate. Long live the king.”
He shook his head. “Calypso will not die,” he replied.
“Somebody will,” she said.
Fatigue swept over him. “No, Pisces. I said I will be king. The island does not need to take a life.”
Peisinoe looked at him pityingly. “It’s too late for that, Caliban. The island must be restored. The price must be paid.”
“The price,” he repeated. Anger began to crisp along his frayed nerves. “My mother is dead. Prospero is dead. The island has no right to demand any more lives. It will be healed. Now go away, Pisces,” he finished. It took all his effort not to fling a stone at her head.
“You poor human man,” Peisinoe said. Then she slipped away beneath the waves.
He looked out at the empty sea, letting the stillness calm him. He sat for some time. Nothing disturbed him, not even a seabird. That was strange. It was a fair day. Where had all the small living things gone?
The rocks crunched behind him. He turned, and then leapt up. Calypso was coming toward him. She staggered, still under some of the effects of the poppy. In her good hand she carried the cormorant cape. She used the staff to steady herself. Somehow that struck Caliban as ridiculous.
But at least she was Calypso. “You should not be up,” he said, arriving at her side in three bounds. He tried to steer her back to the cave, but she shook him off.
“I want to be up,” she said. At least that’s what he thought she said. She was speaking in Greek again. Realizing this, she tried to switch back to Italian. “I have your…” She waved the cape, unsure of the word. “For you,” she finished. Then she tried to put it around his shoulders.
“Thank you,” he said, helping her. The cape felt silly again. Calypso swayed slightly. “Sit here,” he said, trying to guide her to the rock.
“No,” she answered, shaking his arm away again. “I don’t want to sit. I want to go to the place.”
“The place,” he repeatedly blankly.
Her face rippled in frustration, almost becoming Sycorax, but sliding back into Calypso. “The dragon girl, she told you to bring me to the highest place…” Her voice trailed off, unsure. “To the place of the making,” she corrected herself.
So, she had heard them. That was unsettling. He did not think anything could penetrate the poppy haze. Perhaps Ariel was right. He could not control her.
“This way, then,” he said. “It’s a long walk. The ground can be rough. But we’ll go slowly.”
She nodded, her face pinched with determination. “Let’s go,” she said.
It was difficult, nearly impossible. It wasn’t just that he and Calypso had to tramp over brush and stones; they also had to fight their way through trees that still remembered their ancient hurt. Both of them were cruelly lashed by the leafless branches. They were driven to a marshy area, which they were forced to skirt around. It felt as though the island was doing everything it could to stop them. And frequently they did stop. Calypso often grew faint and had to rest.
At one point Sycorax came out and began yelling curses at one particular tree. It was immediately blighted. From a great ancient thing it crumpled into a twisted, wilted, blackened lump. It looked like a heap of dead snakes. Caliban grabbed the girl by the arms and shook her. He was terrified, and so desperate to call back Calypso that he made her teeth rattle. She fell down, stunned by the force of his shaking, then she vomited up what meager food she had left in her stomach.
He was horrified with himself. But the face that lifted its gaze to meet his was Calypso’s. In the midst of his guilt, he was tremendously relieved.
And he knew, as much as it disgusted him, that he’d shake her again if Sycorax came back.
They had to rest longer, until Calypso said the dizziness had passed. Caliban looked at her anxiously. He could tell that his concern annoyed her. He cast about for something to say.
She stared at the dead tree in front of her. “I do not like her,” she said. She turned to Caliban. “My grandmother. I do not like her. I see, with her, why the people of my home call “witch.” I see why they throw stones.”
It was hard to argue with her. “She wasn’t always like that, Calypso,” he said. “She loved me. She was always kind to me.”
Calypso shrugged. “It is easy, I think, to love the child. But my mother…” She looked away. “Sycorax, my grandmother, did not love her, I think. So my mother…” She let her sentence fall away, unfinished. It didn’t matter. Caliban knew what she meant to say. It was hard to imagine what would have made Sycorax abandon his sister.
He flinched. Parents did abandon their children. They even sent them into the ocean to become dragons.
“We walk again,” Calypso said, dragging herself back to her feet.
He led the way once more. Soon they had to fight their way through thorn bushes. By the time they cleared their way past them, they were both bleeding on their arms and faces. One of Calypso’s eyes was swelling from a particularly nasty scratch on her eyelid. She was lucky it hadn’t blinded her.
At last, impossibly, they came to the summit, to the place where the tree once stood. The blasted stump was there, the ground around it stripped bare. The earth had been burned away, and the skeleton stone exposed. He was not welcome here. No one was, no mortal or magical being. It was a place of pain.
And it remembered Sycorax. The ground heaved beneath their feet, as though the island wanted to toss them off into the sea. They clutched each other while they lay on the bare stone. Caliban stared up into the sky. The
sun was nearly overhead. It should not be much longer before Chiara returned.
Calypso’s face was white with strain. She began to mutter incoherently. He held her in his arms, wishing that he’d brought more of the poppy powder with him. It had been foolish to leave it. Maybe he could not control her, but at least he could have eased her suffering.
There was nothing he could do about it now. The island shook again, like an irritated dog. Lightning licked around the sky, strangely white against the clear blue. He kept expecting Ariel to appear, but the spirit stayed away. Chiara must have frightened him more than he’d revealed. Well, so much the better.
Again the island rattled its bones. He heard trees falling in the distance. Calypso moaned and covered her head with her good hand. Caliban tried to make soothing noises. They were useless.
More lightning crackled. It passed so closely over their heads that their hair stood on end. Calypso’s muttering grew worse.
“He will not win…it is mine to take…this power…he will suffer…I will make him…be strong…I will have it again…” She grew more restless, her speech less comprehensible. She went back to moaning, and then she began to cry.
Caliban wanted to cry, too, but all his tears were gone.
V.x.
He looked to the sky. The sun was directly above them. The island would shake itself to pieces if they stayed much longer. If Chiara did not return soon, he would leave. This place made Calypso suffer too badly.
As if in summons to his thought, he saw a dark spot appear in the sky.
“She can fly,” he said aloud. He laughed. Chiara had always wanted to fly. He felt giddy with the strangeness of it all. He waved his arm, showing her that he was here, that they were both here. The dark spot came closer and seemed to split apart. At its center was Chiara. There were birds flying with her. As they got nearer, he saw that they were ravens. He had to shield his eyes from the glare.
In another moment she landed. The ravens wheeled around her, brushing her with their wingtips, croaking in their ancient speech. Caliban ran to her, thinking that she was under attack. But the birds lifted away, a flapping, boiling black cloud.
Then he saw her face, and a hum filled his ears and wiped all his thoughts away. The skin was raw, the flesh around her eyes and on her cheeks oozing painfully. Her eyes themselves… he could not even think, at first, about her eyes. They were slitted, serpentine. They were not Chiara’s eyes at all.
“It’s all right, Caliban,” she said, speaking to his obvious thoughts. “It does not hurt anymore, no matter how it may look to you. I am content. Here,” she said, bending down, turning her face from his, “help me stand her up. We need to prop the staff on the stump of the tree.”
The ground beneath them twisted and heaved. “I don’t think it will let us,” he said. He could not look at her face as he spoke.
“It will obey me,” she replied, her voice grim.
And it seemed she was right. The island grew still. Together, they lifted Calypso and placed the end of the staff squarely in the center of the stump. Calypso shuddered and hung limply from her foreign, wooden hand.
“Cut it off,” she whispered. “I don’t want it anymore.”
“Hold her still,” Chiara said. She placed her own left hand over Calypso’s wooden one. Then, from a pocket, she pulled out a knife. It gleamed in the sun, warm, dangerous.
And suddenly he saw what she meant to do.
“No,” he said. “There has to be another way.”
“There isn’t. Don’t fuss, Caliban. My life is my own to give. Help me, or don’t help me. Either way, Calypso will be saved.”
He felt himself sway, watched the color drain from the world. “No,” he repeated. “I won’t lose you again. You’ve already given your life once, Chiara. That should be enough.”
“I agree,” she said, with a hollow laugh. “But it appears that it is not.”
So, Pisces was right. Somebody would die today.
He stared at her helplessly. “How will you do it?” he asked, at last.
“I’ll reverse the spell Sycorax made with her moon-magic. This is magic of the sun, the source of all life. With it my life will feed the life of the tree. Calypso will be restored.”
In a daze he nodded. Calypso leaned heavily against him. He shifted her weight so that he could move as needed.
Calypso woke then, screaming in wordless agony. Chiara tightened her grip on the wooded hand, then drew back her right, the amber knife gleaming in its grasp. With a word she drove it in – through Caliban’s hand, through her own, through the hand of wood, through the heart of the staff. They all cried out in unison.
“Caliban,” Chiara whispered, her mindspeech weak. “What have you done?”
“I’ve made my own choice,” he answered. “My life for yours, for hers. The staff will choose me. I am the closest of Sycorax’s blood. I belong here.”
He smiled into Chiara’s golden eyes. They were as beautiful as the green had been, really. And she had needed him after all. “I have a dragon for a daughter,” he said.
The staff took root in the stump. The shock of it made them all cry out. Caliban, Chiara, Calypso, Sycorax; all became joined with the tree. Together they suffered, and loved, and hoped. Branches began to sprout from the wood of the staff. Its roots drew water. Buds appeared and burst forth into leaf and blossom. The island rejoiced.
And Caliban died.
He died laughing. “It is my birthright!” he shouted. The cormorant cape gleamed in the sun. His eyes blazed with joy. “I have come home,” he said.
The three women held him in their hearts until his last breath. His life passed out to the tree. Then Sycorax was gone, her memory also slipping back into the tree, healing the wound she had made so long ago.
The knife fell out of the tree, and from the joined hands of Calypso and Chiara. But it stayed in Caliban’s flesh. It was part of him, forever piercing, forever held in his grasp. Chiara knelt and touched the blade, the wound. Both were still warm. “His strength was always in his hands,” she whispered. “And in his heart.”
She discovered that her new eyes could not weep. She placed her newly scarred hand against his face, tracing the pattern of birthmarks down his throat. She’d never touched them before, she realized, though she’d always wanted to. “You were beautiful, Caliban,” she whispered. Her eyes grew hotter, but still no soothing tears fell.
Calypso knelt beside her. Her hand was normal again, but scarred as well. “He was my uncle,” she said, wonderingly. “I say, he—” she repeated in Italian.
“I understand,” Chiara said, interrupting her.
“You speak Greek,” Calypso said. She stared at Chiara, then dropped her gaze when their eyes met.
“Apparently,” Chiara replied. “I’m a dragon. I think I speak everything, now.”
Calypso forced herself to look into Chiara’s eyes. “You saved me,” she said.
“Caliban saved you,” Chiara replied.
If Calypso had healed the staff properly, Caliban would still be alive. He would be the island king. They could have lived here together. They could have been content.
But Chiara’s dragon wisdom brushed these foolish thoughts away. If the staff had only been mended, Sycorax’s ghost would still have been uneasy. The island would have remained enslaved. The staff would have corrupted Caliban. Calypso would have been alone, child of a madman.
A circle had no end.
Chiara reached out and touched the tree. It was strong. Its roots were deep. She looked up. Its branches stretched out, giving shelter, giving praise. Caliban’s soul was here. He was not dead. He was only changed. And she knew, as well, that he was truly happy, at last.
She smiled at Calypso. “Help me move his body.”
“Shouldn’t we leave him here?” Calypso asked. “Isn’t this where he belongs?”
“No,” said a voice behind them. They turned. Ariel was there, in rainbow glory. “This is where he lives, now. But the e
arth of him must go back to the earth of the island.”
“His cave,” explained Chiara. Calypso nodded in understanding.
Ariel raised his hand. “No,” Chiara said. “This is a mortal task.”The spirit frowned, then nodded. “Goodbye, brother,” he said. Then he disappeared.
Together, Chiara and Calypso lifted Caliban’s body, heavy and awkward, and between them carried him down to his cave. It was an arduous job. The island no longer fought against them, but the way was still rugged and treacherous. Even when they fell, and they fell often, Chiara refused to use any magic to help. It was her way to honor him, to do this last human thing as he would have wanted it done. They spoke to one another only to plan their way through difficult spots. At last they reached the cave.
They carried him inside and laid him down on his bed of branches. Calypso pulled at a long straw that had become tangled in her hair during their struggle to get to the cave. Deftly she tied a knot in it, twisting it with her clever sailor’s hands. “It’s a bowline,” she said. “The king of knots. It always holds, but when it’s time to leave, it slips free.”
Chiara took the straw and placed the loop of it around the knife embedded in Caliban’s hand. “Come away, now,” she said to Calypso. They left the cave. It took only a word and a gesture to seal the entrance.
V.xi.
Calypso stood on the shore, her back to the cave’s entrance. The ship was gone, of course. And now she had no power. It had been burned out of her in the sun-magic of the tree-making. She felt hollow and weak. She was alone on this island with no hope of escape and no way to survive, other than by her own wits. Her wits were sharp enough, but it was a lonely prospect nonetheless.
But she was not alone. She was alone with a dragon.
She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. The tingling in her right hand was almost gone. She supposed that it was finally remembering how to be flesh. She looked down at the scar that slivered the center of both the back and the palm. It was a thin, neat line. It looked ancient, like the vague memory of a childhood injury. She touched it with her left hand, half expecting it to be still hot. It was not, of course.
Rough Magic Page 18