by S.E. Diemer
She came now, and she had not changed from the vision of my memory. She stood leaning on the ghost of a cane. I could see through her, see the crackling flames behind her. She cast about, took in the state of the lighthouse, likely wondered why I was performing the spell here, rather than within the now-ruined cottage, and she shook her head.
"Why have you summoned me, girl?"
"I needed advice," I replied guardedly, and I realized as I spoke those words that I did not want advice from my grandmother. What could I tell her? That my resolve was weakening, that the curse was weakening, because of a beautiful girl?
That was it, wasn't it? When I closed my eyes, I saw Nor's face. When I dreamed, I dreamed of her, and when she had not come that morning, I felt a small part of myself shriveling up, growing small…dying.
My grandmother watched me work my jaw with an impassive face. "Well? Spit it out, girly," she said at last, though not unkindly. I folded my hands in my lap and stared down at my fingers.
"A seal got through the net."
"It's bound to happen." She shrugged wearily, closing her eyes. "Did you kill it?"
"Kill it?" I choked out. I shook my head, eyes gaping. "No…" I couldn't fathom such a thing. With a pang, I realized I could not fathom my existence without Nor.
"That's what you must do, when they enter the bay. Better to die, make a meal for you, then serve Galo, trapped forevermore. That's not an existence we would wish on our worst enemies." She spoke to me as she'd spoken to my mother: imperious, as if a child sat before her, not a grown woman with her own mind.
I watched my grandmother for a long moment, and I found I could feel nothing but disgust for her. "Be gone," I whispered, and when she opened her mouth, outraged, she vanished. She'd been about to scold me, surely. Call me weak-hearted, just as she'd called my mother. I remembered that now.
I put my head in my hands and breathed steadily for several long moments. I was so tired.
A knock at the door.
I sat, frozen, fear moving through my blood like ice.
Again, there it was—a knock at the door.
I rose, mouth open. I didn't know what to do.
Knock, knock, knock.
I opened the door.
She stood there, eyes wide and brown and beautiful, staring up at me as if she had never left. Her mouth was set in a firm, hard line, and she did not smile like before.
"He made me come," she said simply, "to ask the question. Will you take his offer, Meriel?"
I stared past her to the meadow, to the beach, to her little coracle on the sand. I took her by the wrist and drew her inside.
We stared at one another for a long moment, and I knew I was much too close to her, breathing in the salt of her, the warmth of her. She leaned against the door and looked up at me through thick lashes, pressing her fingers against the wood my grandmother had lashed together to form a gateway through which I could never escape.
"You," I said, and licked my lips, closed my eyes. "You're making me want you. With magic."
She sighed, then, breathed out, and I looked at her. Her own eyes shone; there were tears there. I watched them fall.
"I am not bewitching you. How could I bewitch a witch?" she whispered back. "Maybe this has nothing to do with magic, Meriel."
"You're magic," I told her, and when the words had left my mouth, I knew how true they were, how deeply true. She was magic to me, the sort of spell I could never make, could never understand.
She stepped forward. It was tentative, uncertain, when she put her hands up through the space between us, drew them around my neck as if I might be easily broken and she did not wish to break me. She leaned against me, and tilting on her tiptoes, she pressed her mouth to mine.
Her lips were salty, her tongue hot and smooth and soft, and I realized my hands were upon her waist long after I had placed them there. Heat rushed through me, and I felt my toes upturn, and then I stepped forward, pressing her to me, wrapping my arms around her so tightly that her breath rushed out, and she laughed a little against my mouth, a laugh of delight, deep and soft. I loosed my arms, gentle, then, and I pressed my lips against hers, my tongue against hers, and our teeth clicked. I was graceless, desperate, and when I shoved her against the bulk of the door, picked up her leg, put my hand beneath her bottom, I heard a sound like a whine, a sad, pathetic thing that gusted from my own lungs. I was starved, and she knew it, and she loved it, for her lips raked my skin, and her tongue trailed down my neck, and her hands were suddenly sharp as her nails scratched down my back when I pressed her harder against the wood, fumbling with my fingers, uncertain how to revere something so lovely.
"Here," she said, and she took my hand, closed her fingers around mine, and guided my palm up and along her thigh where her skin was hot and soft and wet. I closed my eyes, and I stopped. Every thing that I was strained against the pause, crying out, screaming and roaring within me. She stopped, too, and I heard our breath between us, sharp and short and hard.
"What is it?" she whispered, haltingly, but she knew. I knew.
"I can't do this," I told her, and I gritted my teeth, satisfied to feel pain thunder up and through my skull, bringing a red clarity.
Still, I did not move my hand.
"Why can't you?" she asked, panting against me. She moved her body, brought her hips down upon my fingers, brushed her lips against my jaw. "There is no law against this. This does not break the curse. Everything you do remains safe, Meriel. This will not damn you."
And then, she whispered, "Please."
When I closed my eyes, I saw my grandmother's disapproving face; my mother's weak, bitter one; the sad line of sea creatures stretched along the shore; the way that Galo held his head in his hands every afternoon and remained still, for hours, in despair. When I closed my eyes, I saw my long, lonely years of monotony, the times that I fell asleep listening to the roar of the sea and the wind and wishing for… I didn't even know what I wished for sometimes. Other times, I did know, and there was a drumming of blood within me that called for something I could never attain. Freedom.
I closed my eyes, and when I did, this all flashed by in an instant. And when I opened them again, there she was, in front of me, in my arms, bare skin against my hand, eyes wide and beautiful and wild and not the least bit human. She was a monster, I was a monster, and when I bent my head and kissed her again, tasting the salt of an ocean that was prison and home to us both, I forgot everything else but that kiss, but Nor.
It didn't matter. Nothing mattered, and when we found the bed, when I pressed down on top of her and in her and for her, our blood rushed with the same pull of tide and shore, and when she cried out, I cried out. The wind that roared and whipped the sea up into a frenzy carried our voices away into the great nothingness of blue.
I changed.
I became something that did not yet have a name. I felt, for the first time, the only time, that I was important.
At dark, she said my name, kissed my neck, bowed beneath me.
I did not know what love felt like, had never known. I wondered if I knew it now.
~*~
She left my bed that night. I woke with the shifting of the thin mattress, watched her in the dark as she gathered up her underthings, her skirt, her blouse, and put them on slowly. She left the cottage without looking back at me, and I followed her.
Nor went down to the edge of the sea, her small form bright beneath the tiniest fragment of moon that hung in the sky, suspended. She straightened herself at the shore, stood tall and unbending. I watched the mass of sea people on the bay's edge, watched as she looked to them, as they looked to her, as the only sound that roared about us was the sing of water and wind and the howling of an approaching storm.
I walked across the meadow, drawing on my nightgown, shivering in the cold. I stood beside Nor.
"Why do you do this?" I asked her. For my entire life, and lo
ng before, the sea people had stood facing the ocean in silence all night, every night.
Nor said, "Because we must."
She stared at the water and offered me no more words.
"But why must you, Nor?" I asked her, and I reached out and touched her arm.
"Because we miss it," she whispered so quietly.
Together, we stared at the ocean, and I felt myself unraveling.
"Then you should go back. Step into the water and—”
“I won’t abandon him.” Her eyes flashed. “I came here of my own choosing, as did we all. To help him. To stand with him. To save him, if we can.”
“To save him…” I repeated her words, marveled at the weight of them. “I thought he forced you—”
“No. We chose this. As you, Meriel, have also chosen.” Her voice trembled, and she lowered her gaze to the shifting sand at our feet.
“I have never thought of it as a choice, Nor. I don't know why I do…what I do," I said then, gulping down air, squeezing my eyes shut against the pain before me and within me.
"We all do what we feel we must," she said gently.
In the dark, she moved her hand until it was in mine, curling her fingers about my own.
~*~
"It's been three days," she said when she kissed me. "I can feel him. He's calling me back."
"Don't go," I whispered, swallowed. "Please don't go."
"I cannot ignore his summons." She traced her fingers along my collarbones, down my ribs, over my hips. I shivered and moved closer to her, pillowing my head over her heart.
"When will you return?" I asked her, curling my fingers about her waist, feeling her pulse beat beneath my skin.
"Soon," she said, and she kissed my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my heart.
Nor rose, dressed, left the cottage. I lay on the mattress, crippled, unable to breathe. When she left, I felt myself leaving, felt some piece of me remove itself and launch out upon the waters.
I had not tended the nets for three days. I remembered that—no, I was well aware of that—and I raked my fingers through my hair, put on a clean shift, climbed out of bed.
The nets had at least twenty small breaks, but none large enough to permit an animal to pass through. I stared at the sea for a very long time. I called up the magic, but I was frustrated as I began to slowly make the repairs. Angry. I did not want to do this thing, this chore. I hated it; I hated it passionately, deeply, and I broke away from the energies, felt them ricochet about and finally lodge into a small boulder at the edge of the water.
Disgusted, I turned away and stalked back indoors.
"Show me Nor," I whispered to my stone. I knelt beside the bed, and I waited.
She was in Galo's house, and she sat beside him. He lay on the thick carpet before the empty fireplace. I stared in horror.
The old man wept, wept piteously, burying his face in her lap as she stroked his hair and stared ahead, eyes empty, blank, though she wept, too.
I threw the stone away from me, heard it breaking as it hit the lighthouse wall, shattering into tiny pieces that could never be magicked back together. I breathed out and put my face in my hands, and I felt my body shaking.
"I don't know what to do," I wailed, and the words sounded broken. They were taken up by the wind that whistled through the open door, carried out and away from me, over the open sea. "I don't know what to do," I whispered then, and I kept the words close. They whirled about me as I stood, as I hugged myself, as I paced the floor of the lighthouse over and over and over again, feeling the familiar wood beneath my bare feet, feeling the grooves I knew by heart beneath my toes and then my knees, when I knelt down again beside my bed, pressed my fingers to the sheets, to the threadbare blanket that had covered us both, Nor and me.
If I left.
If I left…
If I…left.
I would never see Nor again.
Galo would shatter the curse, would call up his sea army, would destroy the world.
I would break my mother's heart. My grandmother's heart. I would destroy the world.
Wouldn't I?
I spread my fingers over the sheets, counted them as I had when I was a child. One, two, three, four, five… I swallowed and pressed them harder against the mattress, so hard I felt it creak beneath me as I stood up, as I drew my hands together, as if in prayer.
But I wasn't sorry, and I wouldn't pretend I was.
I turned, and I left the lighthouse, standing uncertain at the edge of the beach.
"First, he'll set fire to the world, burn the crops, bring diseases," my mother had said, and I heard her voice in the wind now, the damnation, all the stories she'd spun for me when I was little, the nightmares I had had each night feeding off of her words. "He will laugh as man dies. He has no pity."
I had seen him weep.
"They are monsters," she'd told me over and over and over again, making me repeat it until my tongue was tired.
Wasn't I a monster, too?
I rubbed my shoulders, and then I took a step forward. I felt the magic settle about me as I pulled and pulled.
And then, before me, there was Nor's coracle, summoned by my spell, bobbing empty up and down at the edge of the water.
I stood in the sand. I felt the tide come up and touch my bare feet, felt it run over my skin, so cold. I let out my breath in a hiss.
I closed my eyes, balled my hands into fists, and I stumbled into the boat, feeling my feet leave land for the first time…in my life.
I took the oar and clumsily pushed off from the shore, even as I began to hear the breaking behind me. I heard the scream of stone against stone, and I did not look back, but I saw the tall shadow of the lighthouse in the water as it began to sway, back and forth, back and forth, and it was falling apart, crumbling. The roar surrounded me as I paddled, and the storm that had hovered hit at last as I felt the spell shatter, as the lighthouse fell down, as the net began to unravel.
I paddled as the rain hit, paddled hard when the swells began to grow, tossing the coracle back and forth, filling it with water and emptying it in the same heartbeat. I gritted my teeth, and I pushed against the sea as the last wisps of the net unwound themselves, as I felt the net vanish. The roar of the wind and the howl of the sea surrounded me, and I wept in the salt water, in the rainwater, my tears mingling with all of the water, water everywhere.
Somehow, eventually, I reached the shore. The sea people were gathered there, and they stared at me with open mouths as my boat pitched itself upon the sand. I fell as I climbed out, felt the solidity of sand and land beneath my hands and let out a great wail that was lost in the bellow of the people as they raised their heads to the sky, to the great, gathered storm clouds, and threw up a cheer that dwarfed the music of the storm.
And then, Nor.
She ran down the shore, her eyes wide, wild, and she helped me rise, her hands soft against my skin. Always so soft. Tears streaked down her long nose, and when she kissed me, she tasted of their salt. Galo appeared behind her. He was skeletal, a shadow, and he stared at me with haunted eyes.
One by one, the sea people began to walk into the water.
Galo brushed past me, limping, and when he entered the sea, as the white foam dripped over his legs, he let loose a cry of pain. But then he sank below the water, was consumed by the water, and was gone, but I saw something large and dark moving through the bay, just below the surface.
I couldn’t breathe.
But then I looked at Nor, and she took my hand, and she kissed it. She stood with me for a long moment, but it was not long enough, would never be long enough.
She mouthed two words before she turned and embraced the water with her brothers and sisters—people who had never belonged here; people I had watched in my stone, watched mourning the sea night after night; people who were not people—now going home.
What Nor said was, “Thank you.”
FIN
The following is an excerpt from Sarah Diemer’s novel The Dark Wife, the YA, lesbian retelling of the Persephone myth. The Dark Wife is available wherever you purchase your eBooks, and in print format.
It was not sudden, how the room behind me grew dark, throwing long shadows from the torchlight upon the balcony floor. It was a gradual thing, and I almost failed to notice it, but for the silence. No one laughed or spoke; there was no clink of goblet or twang of lyre. Everything, everything fell to a silence that crawled into my ears and roared.
I shook my head, straightened, peered again around the column at the great room. All throughout the palace, a deep quiet crept, cold as a chill. I saw the gods and goddesses shudder, and then the darkness fell like a curtain, became complete. The stars themselves were blotted out for three terrible heartbeats.
There was the sound of footsteps upon the marble, and the light returned.
“Hades has come.” I heard the whisper—Athena’s whisper—and I started. Hades? I stood on the tips of my toes, trying to catch a glimpse.
All of us there had been touched by Zeus’ cruelty, in some form or another. We were meaningless to him, toys to be played with and tossed. But the story of Zeus’s ultimate betrayal was well known.
Zeus and Poseidon and Hades were created from the earth in the time before time—the time of the Titans. They cast lots to determine which of them would rule the kingdom of the sea, the kingdom of the dead, and the kingdom of the sky. Poseidon and Zeus chose the longest straws, so Hades was left with no choice but to reign over the kingdom of the dead, the Underworld.
It did not come to light until later that Zeus had fixed the proceedings to make certain he would get his way—to become ruler of the greatest kingdom, as well as all of the gods. He would never have risked a fair game of chance. Could never have hidden away his splendor in that world of endless darkness.
I shivered, wrapping my arms about my middle. Hades rarely appeared at Olympus, choosing to spend his time, instead, sequestered away in that place of shadows, alone.
My eyes searched the murmuring crowd. Though I was uncertain as to Hades’ appearance, I assumed I would recognize the god of the Underworld when I saw him.