by S.E. Diemer
He came striding down the staircase now. He was dressed in loose pants and a dirty white shirt. His hair rose around his head like a writhing creature. He said something to Nor. She sighed and shook her head, did not look the least bit afraid. I wondered if I would be afraid, confronted by that angry old god with teeth sharper than those of the shark men. He said something else, and the sea people backed away from Nor, but she simply shook her head again, folded her arms.
Galo turned and stood along the far wall, looking through a window. I could see the view through that window, knew it looked out upon the bay, and, past that, to my own island.
I covered the stone with my hands and put it away.
I drew water from the magicked well and washed my face in it. It was so cold, I shuddered, put my hands upon the well rim, stood for a long moment, letting the waves of chill pass through and away from me. The salt breeze was blowing from the north today, and my mother had often foretold omens by the wind's direction. North was ill tidings, always ill tidings, she'd whispered to me so many times, spinning a circle about herself as if it could protect her.
Nor came a second time that day, so my mother might have been right.
"I brought you dinner," she explained, not even greeting me but brushing past. I stood on the hillock before the shore, staring at her, open-mouthed. "Do you like biscuits?” she said. “I brought you biscuits and a good, fish gravy."
"My answer is still no," I told her, following after her, pressing my hands together to keep my fingers from shaking. "I will not ever answer his demands otherwise.'"
"I did not ask you to, did I?" She glanced up from setting my table, and her eyes were flashing, and her wide smile turned her lips up at the corners, almost teasing.
"Why else would you have come?"
"To keep you company," she replied, and spread a bright red-and-white checked cloth over the table. It hid the cracks and the smooth-scrubbed surface, made the room look almost cheerful.
"Come, sup with me," she said then.
I did.
~*~
That night, when I walked out to the shore, to my tree trunk, to my vigil, my thoughts chased after themselves in my head, and I almost tripped, climbing up the bark to stand at my usual, well-worn crook.
The dinner had been very good.
I shielded my eyes against the almost new moon, even though it shed too little light to truly obscure my vision. I watched the processional of sea people making its way down to the shore. They stood, one beside the other, all the way around the bay, and they raised up their faces to the scent of the surf and the stars, and they trained their eyes to the deep blue waters, and they did not move, did not speak, did nothing but stare with a longing I could almost understand.
This was the first night I found Nor among them.
I looked for her, but I was too far for faces. I felt Galo's presence at the center of the line, felt it because of his tie to my family and me. And there, beside him, was Nor. I don't know how I knew her—not by sight—but I knew her, and she stood just as still and silent as her brothers and sisters, which surprised me, and I didn't really know why. I supposed I had expected her to be different from the others, for she was already different to me than all the others.
I dreaded the new moon. Tomorrow.
I did not sleep. I tossed and I turned, and--once or twice--I rose to peek out of my curtained window. The threadbare cloth did little to block the light during the day, or even during the night, if the moon was bright, but it made me feel secure in the fact that--no matter what--the lighthouse was shielded from the nighttime gazes of the sea people. I didn't know what I was afraid of, why my skin chilled when they made their nightly line and watched the ocean.
My mother's stories were loud in my head tonight, though, and I remembered how she said they waited and watched for weakness, waiting to destroy me so that they could set themselves free.
I was exhausted by morning.
"You do not look well," said Nor when she arrived, when she dragged her coracle up on the shore, met me at the edge of the grass and the sand. I sat, tiredly, my head in my hands, and when she bent down beside me, I did not move away from her, though she sat much too close, the warmth of her body hot against my leg.
When I made no reply, she handed me an apple, sun-ripened and hard, and a piece of thick, crumbly bread.
"Breakfast," she said, and did not look at me but, rather, back the way she had come, toward the town. I ate in silence.
With her hands clasped in her lap, her hair disheveled and tossed in whichever direction the wind teased it, she looked calm and content, though wild. I envied the townspeople sometimes, and I felt shame for that envy. She was prisoner to an old, forgotten god, kept from her home, probably never to see it again, and yet…the way she sat, poised, calm, clear like a full moon night, she seemed much happier than me, the witch who contained them all, the jailer with the magic key.
I could not finish my breakfast, dropped the half-eaten piece of bread to the ground as I rose. An angry gull swooped in, audacious enough to land beside Nor, and scooped crumbs down its gullet before either of us could protest. It took off with great sweeps of white wings and flew out to sea.
"They are despicable, vermin," I spat out, recognizing from some far, removed place that my mother had spoken the very same words in the very same voice.
"He was only hungry," said Nor, upturning her eyes to me, face drawn.
She left without asking the question.
~*~
Even though the moon was new, I could sense where it hung in the sky, suspended and ponderous, out of reach and dark to us. I shivered within my cloak, drew it closer about myself, as if I could bind safety to me with its worn, patched fabric. It smelled of seaweed and salt, fish and sweat, and it smelled like my grandmother and my mother, and I suppose that, now, it smelled of me. There was nothing to differentiate my scent from that of my mother's or my grandmother's, and that--for some reason--filled my heart with alarm. I was already nervous from the moon's dark ascension in the sky, and when I climbed the tree trunk, waiting for the procession, my heart beat a rhythm that the waves could not drown.
The moon affected my powers but never so strongly as on the new and full nights. On the full moon, I was drunk from the energies. The shining net, suspended underwater, glowed so brightly that the entire bay shone from it. But on the new…
No living creature got past the nets. Save for on a new moon night.
Nor had come on the last new moon.
I rubbed my eyes tiredly, remembered the night, a month past, clear as glass, as if it were only a moment ago. I slept badly on the nights leading up to the new moon, tossing and turning as I thought about how best to keep my lineage's oath, how best to thwart Galo's plans. But the more I thought, the more I worried, and the more I worried, the worse I slept. And then, the night came, and I was exhausted and nervous and shaky and absolutely terrified that I would be the disappointment of my family, a line of women who had sacrificed their lives to a curse.
I didn't want to be a disappointment. So I did my best. But sometimes my best fell short. Like last month.
It had been such a cold, black night. A storm had kicked up during the afternoon, and when I came out to keep my vigil, the rain lanced down slantwise, and I could not see, save for the breaking waves. A slowly creeping mist hung suspended over the water.
The seal bolted through the net. I know that much but not how. She might have gotten spooked in the water. Maybe a shark chased her. But, however she did it, she came through, sliced through the silver strands of the net, and I crumpled when she did, for the net was tied to me like all other parts of the island. I cried out from the pain, hand over my heart, falling to my knees in the roar and rush of the gale. I could feel her, that seal, darting through the bay toward the shore, and I knew that Galo called to her. I did my best, in that biting rain, to repair the break, and I mourned
the fact that yet another sea creature had lost its freedom.
My mother had told me that Galo called to the sea always and that all of its creatures wanted nothing more than to please him and answer his call. That's why it was so important to be vigilant, to never falter, to repair the nets whenever there was the mere whisper of a break. Every new creature that rose from the seas to be transformed by Galo was another nail in the coffin of humanity--a fact my mother had told me day in and day out. What she didn't say, but what was understood, was that every creature that got through the net was our responsibility, our failing.
Now another new moon had come. I had never let a creature through before, had never wavered enough to truly fail, until Nor. It had been a great failing. Galo was using her to get to me. I knew it. I scrubbed at my face, tried to peer through the mist.
Sometimes, I dreamed of what Galo must have been like before he assumed his human shape. The stories my mother had told me to frighten me were always fresh in my mind, dripping with dark water, clouding the bright days. I rubbed at my eyes again and climbed the tree trunk. My skin rose in gooseflesh, and I was chilled, strung taut like a bow and twice as tight.
Galo called to the sea creatures. He always called to the sea creatures. I glanced uneasily over my shoulder at the night, listened to the ever-present shush of waves on the side of the island that looked out to the sea. They battered the rocks there, the waves, the rocks that held up my lighthouse.
What if…what if Galo ever called up a monster? What if Galo called up something so gargantuan, so sinister, that no amount of magic could combat it, no net keep it out? What if the lighthouse, a massive structure, was dwarfed by its great bulk? What if it blocked out the stars—
I started so violently that I almost fell off of the tree when a loud splash sounded ahead of me in the mist. Fish often leapt up; sometimes dolphins came nosing around the bay, but my imagination traced dark grooves back to my worries and fears, and the hair upon my neck stood up. I felt myself quake.
I had been alone for so long that I never thought about what it was to be with someone, that reassurance of companionship that I would have, in that moment, given my heart for.
I heard it again.
This time, soft, small splashes came across the water, sounding eerie in the misty stillness. Oars. A boat. Someone had come from the town, at night, on a boat. This had never happened before.
The sea people, all of them, since the curse began, came together at night, along the beach. All night. Every night. It had never changed, was as dependable as the seasons spinning on or the moon waxing and waning. I climbed down from the tree, filled with dread. My mother had taught me that changes were never good. I had always believed her.
The coracle was shadowed in the wake of the mist, and when it edged up and onto my shore, I stared. Nor, small and sleek, leapt out of the boat, careful to keep her feet from the lapping waves, and dragged her small craft up further onto the sands.
"Hello," she said, quietly, staring up at me, eyes unblinking. "Good evening."
"What…" I said, and licked my lips, cleared my throat. I carefully folded my arms over my chest. "What are you doing here?"
She shrugged her shoulders, and, in the darkness, I could not see her expression. "I have been here a month now."
I watched her.
"Don’t you ever want this to stop?" she whispered.
I was surprised by the question. I knew that there was no good answer to give her. Yes, I wanted it to stop. Every day, I wanted it to stop. I wanted it to be over. Sometimes I thought about what it might have been like if I'd been born to another mother, if I had not been raised on an island to nurse a curse that was not my own. Sometimes I watched the seagulls and felt a welling of desire in me so fierce that it burned like a fire, a tongue of flame that licked my skin and spoke a single, sibilant word in my ear, over and over and over again: freedom.
Nor had not moved but simply gazed at me, hands clasped and folded before her, standing on the sands of my small, lonely beach.
"What are you doing to me?" I asked her. My voice cracked.
"Nothing," she said. I believed her.
I felt paralyzed. Should I invite her in? It was so cold, so wet out here in the dark and the mist. She had come all this way, and she hadn't said why, but there she stood, on my shore, small mouth closed, wide eyes searching mine. I stepped aside, held out one hand, pointing to my lighthouse.
"Come," I told her, and I ushered us both inside.
The night held a strange quality as she hung up her cloak over my cloak upon the peg, drawing out the chair she usually sat in, taking off her wet gloves. There was no fire in the grate because I had already banked it, but I set about asking it to wake up with a few bits of sea grass and a liberal push of magic.
"Do you use magic for everything?" she asked me, voice soft in the quiet of the lighthouse. I nodded, didn't look at her.
"I use it often." I fed the fire a handful of twigs.
"You keep the nets together." It was not a question.
"Yes."
"Why?"
I sat down upon the ground, turning a stick over and over in my hands. I didn't know how to answer her question, felt broken as I tried to think of an answer. I didn't know why I kept up the curse that had been my grandmother's business, why I had listened to my mother's stories and believed them. But I had listened to them. I had believed them, that we were the last wall of goodness between a monster and the annihilation of the human race.
Sometimes, when I saw Galo in my stone, I laughed, put my hand over my mouth, held back a sob. He looked old, worn, tired--as far removed from a monster as a butterfly.
I could not express to Nor these crumpled feelings of rage and despair and pain. They ate up my heart from the inside, greedy jaws devouring all those things that made me myself, Meriel, and spitting out replications of my mother, my grandmother, instead.
So I sat on the floor, and I twisted the stick in my fingers, and I said not a word.
I heard a scrape of wood against wood and looked up just as Nor rose from her chair, as she sank down on the floor beside me.
She was too close. She smelled of salt and soft things. She reached across the small divide between us and took my hand, touched my rough skin with her new, smooth fingers, held my palm in her own as she drew it close, into her lap.
I stared, unable to move. She held my hand tight and close. Her face was hidden by a wave of long, brown hair that swept down and in front of her eyes, concealing her from me. She was so small, so fragile. The fire crackled far, far away as I took in the seal girl's slight form, the arch of her round shoulder under the cheap gray cloth.
"I have decided," she said, words so low, I could almost not hear them, "that we are both prisoners."
"I'm not a—" I began but stopped myself, bowed my head. I did want to lie.
"Don't you ever wish…" she whispered, and she looked up, glanced at me quickly, wildly, and I saw the tears tracing down her cheeks, leaving a groove of silver upon her skin. "Don't you ever wish that it was all over? That things were the way they might have been…if this had never happened?"
I did.
I closed my hand in her lap to form a fist. She dropped her fingers away from me, and I drew back my limb, cradled it close to my chest as if it had been poisoned. I could not look at her. If I looked at her, I would lose my nerve, and I could not lose my nerve.
"You're trying to get me to say yes to him. It won't work."
"That's not—"
"You're all alike," I said, surprised at the words tumbling out of my mouth. My mouth, my mother's words. "Deceitful. Treacherous. You're all alike, and I will not yield to you."
A small part of myself, a lost, lone part, cried out from the dark within me as she rose.
"What part of you thinks this is right?" she asked me then, and I could hear the tears in her voice but dared not look
up at her. "What part of you, Meriel?"
I pointed toward the door, terrified that, if I spoke, I would speak the truth.
The door crashed against the frame when she slammed it behind her. I waited until enough time had passed, until I felt certain her coracle had entered the cold and empty bay. Then, when I knew she had gone, I whispered it into the air, because I could not keep it inside of me any longer.
"No part of me," I told Nor’s ghost, and I sat, hollow, beside the dying fire.
~*~
That had been too close. I needed to strengthen my resolve, my spells, my promise to my mother.
I had no choice. I must do a Calling.
The amount of energy necessary to do a Calling, the amount of magic I would need to spin, was gargantuan. To attempt such a thing on the day after the new moon was lunacy. But I couldn't think about that. I had no choice. I must.
I gathered bits of dried sea grass from the edge of the beach the next morning, and I waited for Nor to come. But she did not. I sat along the beginning of the sand, and I twisted the grasses together nervously and waited. I was disappointed when she did not appear. Which was mad, a mad reaction, and I knew that. When the sea grasses had been braided together, when I rose and made my way back to the lighthouse, I felt relief and pain wash over me.
It was good that she had not come. And, despite myself, I was sad that she hadn't.
I built up the fire, laying my braided grasses in a special pattern in the flames. When all was ready, I drew a circle about myself with chanted words and gestures, and I sat in its center.
"Grandmother," I spoke into the cool calm of the lighthouse. "Come to me."
She came.
I had spoken to my grandmother once before. My own mother had done a Calling when I was small, for the nets had broken nearly beyond her ability to repair, and she needed counsel. What I remembered from that exchange, from my first sight of the woman who was the cause of all of this, was that she was smaller than I had imagined she would be. Shouldn't she have been tall, huge, a wall of power? But, no, she was stooped, and her eyes were rheumy, even in death.