Ocean's Triumph

by Carlton, Demelza

  Several men laughed, including William.

  "Fighting a dragon. Now that sounds like a battle worth singing about. At least for an hour or so, after I've had some whisky. You lads get back up to Settlement or you'll miss dinner."

  I waited in my dark tunnel for the sounds above to fade. It took perhaps fifteen minutes before I could no longer hear their voices, and another five before I dared to emerge into the shallow pool. Sunlight turned it a glowing aquamarine, warming the waters so all I wanted to do was stretch out and luxuriate in the unexpected warmth. I sighed blissfully. No wonder Dubhan had chosen this cave for his home – a warm bath at the top, plenty of fish in the ocean that he didn't have to share with anyone and an island to himself, if I'd judged the ages of the island buildings correctly.

  Footsteps nearby forced my eyes open. As William came into view, I dived for my tunnel. I heard his shout behind me, but I only moved faster to get away from him. If he saw me like this, I'd have to kill him. No witness to our existence was permitted to live.

  I reached the cave where I'd slept and huddled on the ledge. There must have been sinkholes on the surface that led to my cave, for I heard his voice clearly.

  "Wait. Please. I've never seen a dragon before. Damn it. Come out!"

  I laughed quietly to myself. If he believed the creature he'd seen was a dragon, all the better for both of us.

  Twelve

  I let rip with the mother of all belches, which echoed around the cave like some sort of roaring beast. I smothered a giggle. Merry would have been shocked.

  I probably shouldn't have eaten so much tuna, but the big fish's flesh had been so juicy, and it'd been so long since I'd had fresh fish. I didn't want to waste it, either, though the seabirds made quick work of his carcass.

  "That's not a dragon. That's the wind rushing into the caves from the cliffs below!" a male voice scoffed loudly.

  I blushed in embarrassment. Even if they hadn't known the noise was me, someone had still heard it. I crept up the tunnel to the surface, hoping to hear better if I could get closer.

  "The coolies swore there's a dragon in this cave. I thought they were joking, but I saw it yesterday, Jackson. I swear it. A water dragon with a long, blue-green tail, just like they said. It's real!" William insisted.

  My heart sank. He'd seen me clearly enough to describe my tail. I hadn't moved quickly enough yesterday.

  Jackson roared with laughter. "Did they tell you what their mythical dragon's called? Apalala. Apparently it was a friend of Buddha's, the deity they worship. They're pulling your leg, man, laughing their heads off at your expense. Tell them to keep their japes for the new administrator. Fresh out of the colonial training course, they're ripe for crazy stories. Not seasoned men like us. From ghosts to dragons – pull yourself together, man!"

  I could just see the two men standing on the ledge at the entrance to the Grotto. I lay still in the darkness, hoping they couldn't see me.

  Jackson walked away and I heard the chugging sound of a motorcycle engine. The sound puttered away, but William hadn't moved. Instead, he stared into the shallow water as if he could will his mythical dragon into being.

  "Right, Apalala, is it?" He dropped to the ground and dangled his legs over the ledge, perhaps a foot above the water. "I know what I saw yesterday and I bet you're laughing your damn head off at me now. The manager's calling me crazy. Are you in it with the coolies, making a damn fool of me?" He threw a stone into the pool, splashing water high enough to hit his shoes. He cursed. "I know I'm a fool. Don't need a dragon to tell me that. Fool to take a job here, a fool to stay and a damn fool for everything in between. Everything was fine until that bloody ship sank. I should have known then this was a mistake and headed home. It probably wouldn't have worked, though. I'll never get her out of my head. Never." He jumped up and stalked out of sight. I heard him kick his Triumph into life and motor away.

  I crawled into the pool. The warmth didn't touch me today. I drew my tail up to my chest and cried my heart out. Of course I couldn't feed William to the sharks. I loved him too much.

  Thirteen

  Late that night, under cover of darkness, I swam back to Flying Fish Cove. The ladies in the White House were entertaining as only they could – the sound of their giggles, moans and mock-orgasmic screams drifted into the night. I wondered how many men used their services a night – with only a dozen or so ladies and over a thousand single men on the island, they'd be kept busy.

  I gave the brothel a wide berth, sticking to the shadows where their lights didn't penetrate. An owl swooped for bats around one of the lights on their veranda, but I didn't pause to watch. My target was a far bigger bird – and not a bird at all.

  The road to Rocky Point was deserted but for some ambling crabs, which suited me just fine. William's house was dark, so there was no one awake to notice me tiptoe up the steps and through a side door. My sure steps took me straight to his bedroom, though his snoring could have guided me there. He hadn't snored this loudly on the ship – he'd barely snored at all, except when he'd had a bit of alcohol.

  I scanned the bedroom and found the empty bottle of whisky, half under the bed. I didn't understand how he could drink the harsh, burning liquid, but I'd seen enough of humans to know that some used alcohol to burn away the pain in their lives. My heart ached for the man I'd known – how had life driven him to hurt so much that he needed to dull the pain with whisky? What had happened to him in the intervening years we'd been apart?

  I reached out to caress his sleeping face. The stubble on his cheeks rasped under my fingers, reminding me of our first kiss on the Trevessa. Kisses. I wanted one from him now.

  I leaned over, inhaling as if drawing courage from the very air around me. I parted my lips as I gazed at his...open, unseeing eyes. For a moment, it seemed that his eyes met mine, but he didn't see me. His eyelids drifted shut and he grunted as he rolled over onto his side, away from me.

  I bit my lip, forcing myself to back away from the bed. Every fibre in my body wanted to slip between the sheets beside him, but I knew I couldn't. The one time I'd joined him in his bunk on the Trevessa was a mistake I wouldn't repeat. Even now I still felt the pain of him pushing me away that morning – and he'd already dismissed me from his home once.

  Another step. Another.

  I bumped into his nightstand and caught the falling book before it hit the floor. It was my copy of Captain Foster's book about their voyage in the lifeboats after the Trevessa sank. The book had been open, face-down on the nightstand as if he'd been reading it as he drank himself into a stupor. Now I knew why.

  I'd read the harrowing account once. Never again. It was a miracle they'd survived, but some part of the William I'd known hadn't made it to shore. As I left his house and headed for the ocean, I desperately prayed that I was wrong and the ocean hadn't taken his loving heart.

  Fourteen

  Once in the water, I let the swell carry me. I needed to feel the power of the ocean caressing me as William might never do again.

  "Come play with us, Sirena," a dolphin voice chirped.

  I opened my eyes to find a pod of spinner dolphins surrounded me. "How do you know my name?"

  Laughter bubbled through the pod. "Sirena of the Gold line, daughter of Sephira the Elder. The whole ocean knows your name and your voice. You sing so sweetly you can charm humans into believing you are one of them, letting you live among them. And the Elder Council banished you, but now they desperately want you back to teach them your secrets. Fish with us before you return to land-life."

  The rumours were true. Dolphins were worse gossips than humans. Yet they had a light-hearted playfulness that humans and my kind lacked. And I was hungry. "I will," I replied.

  There was more playing than fishing in what we did, but I hadn't laughed so hard in a long time. Spinner dolphins are known for their aerobatics and I could leap with the best of them. It did my heart good to enjoy the moment with the marine mammals, though I intended to return to my g
randfather's cave before daylight.

  When the sun rose, the light caught the yellow fins on the fish I'd caught for breakfast and I dived for the cave entrance, swimming slowly up the carved passages until I surfaced in the cavern that had become my home.

  "...don't know why they don't just scrap the hot bowl engine and replace it with something more modern that doesn't break down every other day. Every day, I swear it's only a matter of time before one of the coolies comes down from Ross Hill to tell me I need to fix the water pumps to keep the supply running to South Point..." William's voice said, a little muffled by the vegetation growing around the sinkholes to the surface.

  I dropped my fish on the ledge and swam for the pool above.

  William's legs dangled off the ledge as they had yesterday, but his voice meandered instead of sounding angry. "That's the funny thing about water supply. You never think about it unless there isn't much of it and you have to work out how to get it. I mean, here we are in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by water, but if the water pump breaks, none of that's any good. We'd have nothing we can drink.

  "It was like that in the lifeboat, too. The shipping company put big, tin tanks of water in their lifeboats, with lids that you had to screw off to get into them. But when you put twenty men in a boat, it doesn't go very far. We had fourteen gallons of water on our boat when the Trevessa sank – less than a gallon for each man, enough for two days and we were at sea for three weeks.

  "The first time it rained, the captain insisted we take down the sail. I thought he was crazy and said so, but he made us hold it out like a cover over the boat to catch water. And when he poured it all into the empty water tank, I realised he knew what he was doing. It was the strangest thing. Sitting in an open boat in the middle of the ocean and a cheer would go up with the first drops of rain. We'd sit there getting soaking wet, licking the water off our faces and squeezing the rain out of our hair into tins so we could drink it. It sounds absolutely foul and it probably tasted it, but to me the brackish water I squeezed out of my beard was ambrosia." He laughed and slapped his thigh.

  I settled on the floor of the tunnel, listening avidly to his tale. His animated voice reminded me of the tales he'd told me on the Trevessa, which I hadn't understood at the time.

  "After that, I helped them hammer funnels out of the empty milk tins – my God, after a week, how we hated condensed milk, but there was nothing else but impossibly hard, dry biscuits to stave off starvation, so we choked it down all the same and tried not to heave it back up again over the side, though many did. The seas were rough the whole way. I think I was one of the only ones who didn't get seasick.

  "Anyway, they weren't the sort of funnels you normally use. If dragons use funnels. Do dragons use funnels? What do you use them for? I imagine you probably don't." William laughed again. "Here I am, talking about beards and funnels and you're probably not even listening anymore. Apalala? Is that your name? Are you still there?"

  I didn't dare move.

  "Apalala. Strange name for a dragon. Is that really your name or just something the coolies made up? The friend of some Eastern god, they say you are, and that the coolies are your people. You're here to protect them or something. This is no place for a dragon now – it's British territory and even this rock is a British colony. The patron saint of England is said to have slayed a dragon, though some say he needed a woman to tame it first. He probably used her for bait to distract the dragon while he ambushed it.

  "Beautiful women are always a distraction. Maybe even enough to tempt a dragon. All it takes to distract me today is the memory of a woman. I always was chasing the next adventure, never wanting to be where I was. And now...my next adventure is to sort out the work assignments for the Settlement power station and the two old wood-fired boilers. The Settlement doesn't run without power, and I'll have everyone running to my door come dusk if the lights don't come on. Maybe...maybe I'll come back to talk to you later, dragon, or tomorrow on my run to check the pumps at Waterfall."

  William's legs swung out of sight and I heard him fire up the Triumph.

  Despite my growling stomach, I didn't move from the tunnel. From Maria the human to Apalala the dragon, I was once more William's silent confidant and the smile it brought to my lips wouldn't leave.

  Fifteen

  The following day, I listened for the whine of his motorcycle on the road for Waterfall. The moment I heard it, I darted up the tunnel to the pool, eager to see him or at least hear his voice again.

  The engine sputtered to a halt in the clearing. His footsteps crunched across the ground and I caught myself wiggling in excitement. I giggled quietly, watching the bubbles float to the surface of the pool.

  One foot appeared on the ledge, followed by one leg, then the other.

  "Apalala? You here? Did I ever introduce myself before? I'm William McGregor, chief engineer of the guano mine on this godforsaken rock. Excepting yourself, of course. Does being an Eastern deity's friend make you one, too? I don't know much about Eastern religions. The gods all seem to have such peculiar names. Like Apalala. Strange name for a dragon. It puts me in mind of music – with a name like that, I'd imagine you sing. A singing dragon. Do you only sing on land, or do you gurgle tunes in the water, too?"

  I snorted with laughter, unable to help myself. A cloud of bubbles rose, bursting just below his feet.

  "Captain Foster had this romantic notion that music saved us on that lifeboat. It stopped us from going mad and lifted our spirits. Admittedly, some songs were so stupid you just wanted to strangle the man who came up with the daft tune, but they stuck in your head, all the same. One of the seamen had us craving bacon for three weeks at sea – sometimes with the salt in the air and on my lips, I could almost taste it. We all dreamed about it. Even now the words stick in my head – the daft little tune about bacon."

  William cleared his throat a few times before he started to sing:

  "I like ham and eggs

  I like eggs and bacon

  Anybody here says I don't like 'em

  He's jolly well mistaken."

  He laughed. "There now. It still makes me think of bacon. I'll have to ask my cook to make sure to cook some for breakfast tomorrow, or I'll never get the thought out of my head. There we were on a boat in the middle of the ocean, with naught to eat but biscuits so dry we could barely swallow them, singing about bacon."

  He was silent for a few minutes, swinging his legs back and forth. I wanted to reach out to him, to ask him not to go, but as the urge to reveal myself to him increased, so did the nagging voice in the back of my mind that promised one look at me in my true form would be enough for him to run and never come back.

  When he spoke again, his voice was subdued. "There...there was another song, too. One I can't listen to now without shuddering. See, Captain Foster knew me well enough from back home. I'm related to his wife, you see. And I...I wasn't doing so well on the lifeboat. Suffered a bit of a shock when the ship sank and I tried to go in after her. He seemed to be able to read my mind and know when I was giving in to despair. And he and the other lads would pipe up with a rousing chorus of this one song. We'd heard it sung in Sydney and Smith had bought a record of it, so we all knew the chorus." William made a sound that sounded like a sob. "Well, by the time we reached Mauritius, every man of us knew the words and some could even sing harmonies to the bloody tune. Sang it that many times, you see. Always the same words, starting with 'There is somebody waiting for me...'" He sniffed and his tone turned angry. "As if she was. It drove me half-mad, knowing the girl I'd saved from a watery grave was snatched from me by the same ocean. The ocean and her sharks took her away from me.

  "I'd dream that she was in the water, calling for my help, and I'd reach over the side to pull her up, only to be dragged back into the lifeboat by the other men. I couldn't sleep without seeing her face. One night, when everyone except the men on watch was asleep, I drank the only spirits we had aboard – the stuff in the compass. I was desperate
and I hoped even that wee drop could make me forget, even for a moment. But all it did was make me horribly sick. The captain threatened to tie me to the mast like a siren-struck sailor of old if I didn't buck up and show a better example to the other men. And that's when I realised that maybe I wanted to die, but the other men didn't need to see it. We'd already lost two men – two of the firemen, within a day of each other. I'd seen what it did to morale when each of them fell sick and died. Crushed them, it did. But if I leaped over the side in despair, it'd shake them up even more. So I manned up and behaved like I wanted to live. Maybe by the time we got to Rodriguez Island I believed it. I wanted to see if those on the other lifeboat had survived, and I had a job to do here.

  "Speaking of jobs, it looks like there's a ship approaching and they'll want every spare pair of hands on the pier to load it up before the swell makes the cove too dangerous. Maybe next time I visit, you'll tell me a bit about yourself, Apalala. What's a water dragon do all day, when you're not listening to me dribble about shipwrecks and sentimental songs?"

  He didn't wait for me to reply. He lifted his legs back onto the ledge and walked away. I fled to my cave, so I was already curled up in tears when I heard the sound of his Triumph headed back to Settlement.

  I should never have deserted him in the panic the night the Trevessa sank. No vengeance was worth this much pain – and William didn't deserve it.

  Next time he came to visit me, I swore, I'd show myself to him and offer him the comfort I owed him. It was the least I could do.

  Sixteen

  My resolve wavered as the day went on, with each scenario I planned. I'd wait until he started talking and I'd swim into the pool in my human form. No, I'd hide in the bushes and slip out when he needed me most. For one heartsick moment, as I tossed and turned and tried unsuccessfully to find sleep, I entertained the notion of swimming into the pool in my true form, then shifting from tail to legs and rising from the water like Venus.