by Cheri Lasota
“I know your fate. And his.”
Alpheus waited for her reaction, but when she jutted out her chin in defiance, he dug his fingers into her shoulders until she cried out from the pain.
“Do you want to know where his stars will lead him, Arethusa?” he screamed in her ear. “Do you want to see?”
He whirled her around and shoved her hard. She tripped on her cloak and fell to the deck, scraping her chin. But Alpheus’s strong hands grabbed her, pulled her to her feet, dragged her across the deck to the stern, past the gawking, silent sailors.
He thrust her against the stern railing. The blow knocked the breath from her body. She gasped as Alpheus’s hand came up around the back of her neck and forced her to look over the rail.
“What is the name of this ship, Arethusa?” he yelled. Her eyes opened wide as the word Morte floated before her in gold-leaf lettering.
“No.” She pushed away from the rail with all her strength and backed away from him. “He lives.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you only know how to lie!”
“Or perhaps I am the only one unafraid to tell you the truth. He will die, Arethusa, and you will come to him too late. What will you do then? Who will protect you now that your father is dead?”
“I don’t believe you.” She shook her head. “I won’t—”
“Need to see more, do you? I’ll show you everything. Everything you’ve ever feared.”
As she retreated, he stamped toward her, but when her back ran up against the starboard rail, he took hold of her head. His fingers bored into her skull, and with a jolt, the vision shifted.
The ship’s masts and sails faded to strange, swaying shadows. Squinting through the gloom, she saw the masts turn to trees, the decking transform to shrubs and night flowers. She knelt on a stone above a stream, the moonlight pressing her down with its gravity. She felt the presence of her mother inside her, saw a young man kneeling before her, and it was Fernando Estrela who looked out through his eyes, a farewell resting on his lips.
“Per ardua ad astra...”
“I will come back,” she heard herself saying. “I promise.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Maria...”
Arethusa felt another presence filling the air, forcing her away from the water’s edge. When she looked back, she saw her mother and father kneeling there, as they had been when they were young, when they met in Agualva and said their goodbyes for the last time.
The pressure crescendoed. Alpheus stood suddenly amid the ghostly trees. For a moment, they locked eyes—the hunter and the hunted. And then, he was running. Arethusa did not hesitate. She scrambled up and took off into the night, her cloak billowing behind her. She fled through fields and forests, running like mad, until she no longer knew where she was.
With Alpheus fast on her heels, she bolted out onto a desolate beach, a bleak graveyard of rock and driftwood and waves. The waters churned with violent fury, and Artemis rose from across the sea.
Alpheus was gaining on her tired footsteps. She heard him a few paces behind, his breath not even rough from exertion. Her limbs were failing. Exhaustion heaved in her chest. She heard his footfalls, felt the pull of his hand on her cloak.
“Artemis, have mercy!” Arethusa cried out.
She fell, her body collapsing, melting into a sea of herself, until even the tears of her fear tasted of brine. She slipped across the sand and a wave took her up, embracing her like a mother. But Alpheus was there, too, a formless being shifting through the currents, surrounding her, fusing with her body, filling her up until she feared she would cease to exist and be scattered to nothing.
The moonlight grew stronger, pulsing through the black waves. Artemis blazed with a brilliance like the sun’s, and a stream of light shot down through the sea, bursting through her burning skin. Arethusa felt herself rising through the waves. She broke the surface without a voice to even gasp. What once was her body was now a translucent mirror of herself, as if her reflection had melted into a looking glass.
Off in the distance, an ancient ship sailed toward night. She glided forward, a wave-girl rising from the sea, and when her foot finally touched the deck, a voice called out, “My lady Isolde, come away from the wind.”
She pivoted from the rail, feeling her body take human shape once again, and there before her stood Tristan, his golden hair and soft eyes eerie in the moonlight. Her heart pounded at the sight of him standing so tall and proud, no scars or bruises marring his smooth face.
“My lady? What troubles you?” Tristan beckoned to her and gathered a warm cloak around her shoulders. She reached up to touch his face, but an invisible force seemed to hold her hand still. His ethereal eyes gazed down on her with empathy. “Is it Ireland you long for, my lady, or do you fear to marry a man you have not met?”
“It is nothing.” When she answered, the words were not her own. Her voice was lighter, sweeter, not breathy from misuse, but tinged with a resigned sorrow. She was playing the role of Isolde the Fair, and the realization inexplicably filled her with terror. “I wish for a sip of wine to take the chill from the air.”
“I will fetch you a bottle at once, my lady.”
Tristan bowed to her. She noticed, then, that his clothing was that of a medieval knight. But when he descended below, he never came back. It was Diogo who brought the wine, and he held it out to her with a smile like Tristan’s, open and kind and beautiful.
He tilted his head. “Shall we drink together, my love?”
He brought out two cups from behind his back and sat beside her on a water cask lashed to the deck. She watched him as he poured the wine and held it out to her.
She took the glass unwillingly. Her hand seemed to move on its own.
He poured wine into his own cup and raised it high. “To us—together at last.”
She felt herself raising the cup to her lips, but she couldn’t drink. She struggled against the strong force that dictated her movements. Her hand shook from the resistance, but she held steady against it.
Diogo’s face became Alpheus’s and twisted into rage. “Drink!”
When she refused, Diogo knocked her cup to the deck, spilling blood-pools of wine onto the planks. He grabbed her by the cloak and she shut her eyes against the violence she knew was sure to come.
“You’ll soon see how meaningless your loyalty is.”
The air around her changed again. When she opened her eyes, she was in a hospital ward. Rows of narrow beds filled the cold, white room. A doctor and nurse were leaving, one of them mumbling, “Send for the priest.”
“Last Rites?”
A slow nod.
Last Rites... Arethusa did not have to guess at what Alpheus would show her next.
Isabel and Tristan remained in the tomb-like quiet. Isabel sat on a stool at his bedside, holding his hand, tears streaming down her face. Arethusa called out to them, but they did not seem to hear her.
“Keep watch for me,” Tristan said, his voice faltering. “The window.”
“No. She won’t come.” Isabel shook her head. “She is forbidden to sail.”
Tristan wet his cracked lips. “There will be a flag.”
“Stop it.” Isabel tightened her grasp on his hand.
“Listen to me. If the flag is white, it means she’s come for me.” Tristan grimaced and took a shallow breath. “And if it’s black...”
“She isn’t coming—”
He ignored Isabel’s words, talking over her. “My uncle has gone to fetch her. He knows...”
“Knows?”
Tristan swallowed hard, and a visible shudder coursed through his body. “That I will die without her.”
Isabel jolted to her feet and turned her face away. But Arethusa saw it all: the pain on the girl’s face, the jealousy she could not show him. Isabel paced the room as Tristan’s uneven breathing filled the air with desperation.
“Please help me, Isabel,” he said. “I cannot look with m
y own eyes.”
Isabel stormed toward the window at the far end of the room. Arethusa followed. She glimpsed the Lady Fair out in the bay even as she saw Isabel’s eyes widen in shock.
“No.” The word was inaudible but Arethusa saw it rest on the girl’s tongue like a death-knell.
“Can you see the ship?”
Tristan’s voice was so feeble Arethusa almost didn’t hear him. A tempest of fury gathered in Isabel’s eyes. And now the word No! was on Arethusa’s tongue, but Isabel could not hear it.
“I see the ship,” Isabel said, a mad joy distorting her features. “And the flag that waves is black!”
“No!” Arethusa screamed, as she crouched on the floor and covered her head with her hands. But no one heard her, not even Tristan.
She felt a breath of air. Isabel’s skirts touched by her as she fled the room. Arethusa feared to rise, feared to see Tristan’s last moments when his grief would overtake him, when he would give up his life at this last betrayal.
The room was silent. Arethusa rose, her eyes fixed on the Lady Fair, anchored out in the bay. A lighter boat rowed to shore.
“You are asking yourself, is it true?”
She whipped around. Tristan had disappeared, and it was Alpheus who lay there, his legs stretched out on the bed, his hands behind his head.
“Will he die, you wonder? I will answer for you. It has already begun.”
His words were a painful reminder of her own near-death at Diogo’s hands. Arethusa’s hands went instinctively up to her neck, her fear like the tightening of Diogo’s rough hands against her windpipe.
“Don’t you dare touch him.” She let out a guttural cry of frustration. “Why do you do this? Why can’t you leave us alone?”
“You forget I am Alpheus.”
“You are not Alpheus. You are an evil, a falsehood.”
She said the words without thinking, but they made him instantly sit upright. Shock spread across his haughty smile. She stared hard at him. His face began to move without moving, transforming, shifting until she could no longer distinguish the familiar features of Diogo in his countenance.
When he lunged from the bed, Arethusa jumped back. Behind her was the open door. She whipped her skirts around and careened into a long, deserted hallway. An unnatural cry split the air, the shriek of a predator that reverberated down to her bones. He was coming.
She bolted down the stairs, flinging out the heavy doors that opened onto the busy plaza that faced the sea. But it was not cobblestones that scuffed underfoot but planks. The bright daylight of São Miguel left her vision. The dark ghost of the Sea Nymph took its place.
The grand lady had become a ship of horrors. Faces moved in the dark. Small, winged creatures surrounded her, lining the rails on every deck. Their skin was black and leathery in the unearthly light. Arethusa could not see the ocean beyond their bodies.
Through the windless silence, she heard strange sounds, animal sounds. She advanced up toward a figure standing on the forward deck, knowing in her heart that it would be her mother. But when Mãe turned, her face was no longer her own. Dark lines crept over her skin. Her hands grew claw-like as they reached toward Arethusa. In her eyes, once so clear with sapphire blue, there burned a madness, fathomless black.
As she gazed at this thing before her, Arethusa realized that it was not Mãe and it never had been. This thing was something other, something spirit.
“What is your name?” Arethusa demanded.
A twisted smile distorted the features.
“I am Maria Maré.” The smile deepened. “I am Arethusa.”
“No,” Arethusa said, with just as much conviction. A moment stood between them, and Arethusa searched her mind. If this thing was not of the Goddess and it was not of God, then it could only be a creature of evil. It had been working on Mãe in life and on Arethusa in her grief, and both of them had been deceived. Arethusa knew then the creature’s name.
“You are Deceiver.”
The unnatural smile withdrew and the creature’s body began to change. Its limbs stretched full-length and massive wings unfurled from its back. The dress turned to the color of new ash and pulled taut into a skin of leathery scales. The creature shrieked in an almost human cry and rose up to disappear among the line of spirits rounding the deck.
Arethusa felt a familiar wind sweep up, infusing the air with power and fear. Beyond the prow, toward the sea’s horizon, a pale orange-green light swirled up through the clouds, funneling like a tornado in the sky.
Soundlessly, the light-cloud burst like a meteor toward the ship. In a blinding explosion, it fractured onto the deck in front of Arethusa, knocking her off her feet.
As the spinning lights faded, a dark body appeared in the center. The creature rose until it towered over the others, its leathery wings encasing its taut, black flesh. The protruding bones of its hideous face faded in and out of the thick smoke emanating from its body.
“Curse you!” Arethusa cried out, cowering before him in fear.
“You cannot curse me.” The deep timbre of its voice rumbled like an earthquake. “I am already damned.”
“Who are you?” She couldn’t keep the tremors from her voice. “What are you?”
In its face, she glimpsed an impassable void. Its smile was monstrous.
“I am ancient. Old as the world’s beginning, powerful beyond reckoning.”
She rose to her feet, willing courage into her voice. “But you are not Alpheus.”
The creature said nothing.
She forced herself to look into its malevolent, onyx eyes. Quivering inside them was the liquid fire she had seen so many times in Diogo’s eyes. This creature had used Diogo, possessed him, until he believed himself to be Alpheus. The demon had deceived him. No, he had let himself be deceived. The marquês was no saint, but there had been darker powers working within him, powers far beyond his control.
Yet this thing had also taken hold of her, made her believe herself to be the nymph of Artemis and the queen Isolde. All of it had been false. But it was her own choice to believe, and that belief had changed the lies into truths. What power in a name? And what great power in the mind?
In that moment, what she thought she believed—the legend of Tristan and Isolde, the myth of Alpheus and Arethusa—were no more than a succession of lies. And the love of Tristan... She might lose him forever in this moment, but she could no longer accept the mantles of Arethusa and Isolde. Not for her mother’s sake, not even for Tristan’s.
If this creature had nearly destroyed her with a false name, she would now destroy it with its real name.
“You are a demon. In the name of the Cristo, I will call you by your true name: False Belief.” She smiled. “And my name, demon—and you mark it well—my name is Eva.”
The creature shrank back. A heavy smoke filled her lungs, and the pale green light surrounding them exploded into a burst of screaming fire. She twisted away, but the demon unfurled its wings and lunged at her, talons bared, teeth gnashing with a foul snarl that escaped from the bowels of its body. She cried out as its claws tore at her back. Its touch was hell itself, and her world spun round with fire.
And then a strange silence blanketed the ship. The wind softened, the eerie light paled. She felt the talons’ grasp slipping, their cold terror ebbing away. All at once, the creatures fell into the sea, and all that remained of the demon False Belief was the fire of its eyes.
Arethusa found herself swaying on her knees before she collapsed. A darkness descended for what seemed only a moment, and when next she could see, she felt a hand on her arm. She squinted through bright sunlight and gazed up into the face of Captain Moreland.
“Estás bem?” he said.
And she saw no more.
WHEN ARETHUSA AWAKENED, A FAINT LIGHT FELL across her closed eyelids and the air felt dark and cool. She sensed the presence of another nearby. She blinked and gazed into a large ship’s cabin. Just under the porthole stood a desk filled with maps ye
llowed with age and an ornate compass, its case engraved with wheels and anchors. A gentle rustle to her right alerted her to the presence again. Turning, she saw eyes like Tristan’s, but these were brighter, more brilliant. These eyes were affixed to her, and a faint smile touched the man’s lips.
“I wish you were mine.” Captain Moreland leaned forward and touched her cheek with much familiarity, as though he had been watching her for some time. She ought to have shied away, but this man was no Diogo. Does he think me his Isolde, the one he spoke of in the Angra pub?
“You are too young to look so grave.” He leaned back in his chair, his long, pale hands on his thighs. “Are you better now? You acted so strangely when you stepped aboard, as if you were in a trance. I carried you to my cabin, and it is here that you lay.”
Fear must have flashed across her face, because he tilted his head in a gesture of explanation. “I feared for your safety. You stumbled to the deck as if you were blind, yet you seemed to see without seeing.” He paused, peering at her. “What did you see?”
He had asked in earnest, but she could make no answer. She had glimpsed some part of the spirit world, and she suspected few of the living had ever seen such things. She had opened a doorway to evil as her mother had before her, for she knew her mother had seen the spirit of Alpheus as well. Her curse was believing falsely in a world of her own making. How powerful her beliefs, then, to have created a world in which every action and circumstance fed the illusion.
Padre Salvador had been right. The myths had cursed everyone who believed. And Tristan was still in danger.
“Isolde?” Captain Moreland said. Arethusa’s mind yielded to the present, and she looked into the eyes of yet another who had fallen under the curse.
She motioned for him to come closer, until she knew he thought she would kiss him, for he closed his eyes. But she turned her face to his ear and whispered, “Isolde no longer exists. I am Eva Maré.” She smiled as she whispered her own name, remembering the feel of it, the taste of it. For once, the name did not trouble her.
“What did you say?” Captain Moreland pulled back, clearly astonished that she could speak.