The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  There was a moment when their hands twined, and the argument was over as quickly as it had begun.

  Then Denaero said in an altered voice, “Something’s coming,” and dragged her sister into the shadow under the rock.

  A turtle was cruising along the borders of the reef, a very large turtle. Nathan was visited by the notion that it was the same one Ezroc and Keerye had met way back in Widewater time. All turtles look old—it goes with their physiognomy—but this one looked even older, an almost prehistoric figure, with a face both wise and wizened and eyes that sidled to and fro under their horny lids. His shell was stubbled with barnacles and scored from the attacks of shark and sea scorpion; the tip of his tail had been bitten off. His broad flippers moved slowly as though inhibited by age or arthritis. But as he drew level with the mermaids’ hiding place he halted, sculling backward, though no sound or movement had betrayed them.

  “Denaero!” he called, as if to the sea at large. “I seek a mermaid named Denaero!”

  There was a tiny pause—a pause for hesitation, speculation, doubt.

  Then Denaero’s voice issued from beneath the rock. “Who’s asking?”

  “I come from the albatross, Ezroc son of Tilarc. I have an urgent message for Denaero, Rhadamu’s daughter.”

  “I am she.” Denaero slid from the shadows alone, her hair clouding about her head. In one hand she carried a small dagger obtained from somewhere; the blade was shaped like an elongated leaf and glinted as if chipped from crystal. Carrying the weapon transformed her: suddenly she was no longer the half child, half woman Nathan had known but a deadly, alien creature.

  He thought: That’s what fear does to people. That’s what war does.

  “There are many mermaids in the sea,” said the turtle. “You fit the description, but so might a dozen others. How do I know you speak truth, and I can trust you?”

  “How do I know I can trust you?” Denaero countered. “I am wanted by the High King my father, or I would be if he knew I was still alive. There should be a reward for my capture. It’s just an oversight that there isn’t. You might be setting a trap for me.”

  “You are Denaero,” the turtle said. “Ezroc told me you were spirited and contrary. You are indeed Denaero. Greeting, merwoman. I have a message—”

  “Greeting,” Denaero said perfunctorily. “What message? You said it was urgent.”

  “Ezroc said to tell you the northfolk are coming. They do not wait on Rhadamu’s pleasure. The Spotted One leads an army south—I have seen them myself. There are perhaps three thousand selkies, with as many other creatures following. Seabirds fly above them in such numbers they are like a stormcloud riding down the sky. The selkies bear arms, though they rarely do so—arms they have stored a long time in secret places on the Great Ice. They have longswords of silverflint and pikes of hammerhorn, and arrows tipped with stingray barbs that will travel fast and far through the water. They may be unaccustomed to such weaponry but they have kept in practice, and they know they must fight for their lives. Carrionfish follow them; icthauryon and hydrosaurs are in their train. They smell bloodshed to come.”

  “I do not… want… bloodshed,” Denaero said. “I must get word to my father, but … Tell Ezroc to meet me here. He must bring a selkie—not Nokosha, one more like Keerye—one who will help. We will need a lungbreather in case Nathan does not come.”

  I’ll be there, Nathan vowed. Somehow.

  “We have to try the plan …”

  “What plan?” the turtle asked.

  “Ezroc knows. Tell him—it’s our only chance to stop the war. I’ll see him here. Tell him …”

  “I will,” said the turtle. “But wars are easy to start, and very hard to stop. Once the killing begins …”

  “It must not,” said Denaero with all the determination of someone gambling on a forlorn hope. “Please go swiftly—as swiftly as you can.”

  “Don’t worry,” said the turtle. “I’m faster than you’d think, or the sharks would have had me years ago. May the tides of fortune go with you!”

  He swam off at surprising speed, and Miyara emerged from the crevasse beside her sister.

  “You can’t stop it,” she said. “What are we going to do?”

  And, in mitigation: “At least Father will have to put off my wedding.”

  “You must find a way to warn him,” Denaero said. “I can’t: I’m dead. It’s up to you.”

  “How? If I tell him I’ve seen you—”

  “Say you got it from a smallfish, or a passing ray, or whatever. Use your imagination! Even if he doesn’t believe you, he’ll think about it— he’ll check up—look into it. Go—go now!”

  “What will you do?”

  “Wait for the others,” Denaero said. “We have a Plan.” She gave it an audible capital letter.

  “What plan?”

  “Never mind. Just go!” Denaero prodded her impatiently out into the open water. When she was alone, she retreated close to the rocks, waiting with her hands pressed against her cheeks, staring out to sea as though willing Nathan or Ezroc to appear.

  I’ll be there, Nathan called, but he had no voice, no power, and the dark of the sea swallowed him, and he woke on other shores.

  nnie had had lunch with Pobjoy twice now, but because Nathan was working he hadn’t realized, and she wasn’t yet ready to mention it. He would ask questions to which she had no answers, and as it was, she wasn’t sure there was anything to answer questions about. After all, it was only lunch … two lunches. Annie’s knowledge of the etiquette of dating was very hazy. She had been with Daniel Ward from when she was eighteen until he died, and apart from her disastrous friendship with Michael Addison there had been no one since. Lunch, she decided, didn’t rate very high on the dating scale. Lunch was a preliminary, a way of testing the water. A lunch invitation could be purely platonic in intent both from the viewpoint of the luncher and the lunchee. It wasn’t like dinner, which happened in the evening, with the inevitable sexual undertones of any date that ends up in the dark. And Pobjoy hadn’t attempted to hold her hand or take her arm, hadn’t kissed her, not even on the cheek, although he had stared at her very hard a couple of times, a deep-in-the-eyes stare that might have meant something, or might just have been part of his standard interrogation technique. He has no charm and no sense of humor, she concluded partway through the second of the lunches. He’s determined to set limits on his imagination in case it takes him somewhere he’s afraid to go.

  But he had something—a gravity, an intensity, a vulnerable streak hiding behind the grim armor of his outward persona. And by the end of that same lunch Annie had begun to wonder if the missing elements—charm, humor, imagination—were in there somewhere, left over from a more carefree past, creaking from lack of use.

  “I come from an army family,” Pobjoy told her. “Father, grandfather, and so on back into history. There was a Pobjoy with Gordon at Khartoum, another at Rourke’s Drift. Wherever there was a last stand, we were there. I was meant to follow in the ancestral footsteps, but there wasn’t enough money for Sandhurst and I decided to take a different route. Teenage rebellion. Didn’t go down at all well with my relatives.”

  “Your act of teenage rebellion,” Annie said, groping for clarification, “was joining the police force?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Most people,” Annie pointed out, carefully, “play their music too loud, take drugs, drink too much, have sex with the wrong partners, run away to sea, whatever. Were you never tempted to do any of that?”

  “I’ve been known to drink too much,” he admitted. “I smoked for a bit. Tried a couple of spliffs.”

  “But you didn’t inhale?”

  “Yes I did. I—you’re taking the piss.”

  “Just a little,” Annie said.

  He relaxed, laughed a bit—just a bit—asked her: “What about you? Did you do any of that stuff?”

  “A few. I didn’t run away to sea, though I thought about it. As a child, anyway.
I wanted to be a pirate or a smuggler, but I was stuck in the wrong century, and besides, I wasn’t sure I’d be brave enough. So I read books—lots and lots of books—where I could be a pirate, and a smuggler, and run away, and when I closed the book I was safe back home again.”

  “Is that why you sell books now?” Pobjoy asked.

  “It isn’t why I started. I trained in IT—that was the kind of work I was looking for when I first came to Eade. Bartlemy owns the shop: he said he wanted someone with computer skills to manage it. So I did, and … it suits me. I sell imagination, adventure, otherworlds. All the things you don’t believe in.”

  “I’m a policeman,” he said. “It’s my job not to believe in things.”

  But he said it quite gently.

  Later, back in front of her computer screen, Annie’s mind wandered, though she wasn’t sure where to. Around four she popped into the deli to arrange coffee with Lily Bagot. Lily had survived being married to Dave, who hit her, and going out with nice-but-dull Neil, acquired via an ad in the newspaper, and now she had Franco the toyboy and was happily scandalizing the village. If anyone knew about dating, it would be Lily.

  I need advice, Annie decided. Bartlemy was her usual source when she wanted to discuss something, but she didn’t think he’d be very expert on the twenty-first-century dating game, or its impact on teenage offspring.

  The next morning, over coffee in the shop, she told Lily about Pob-joy.

  “He’s a cop,” Lily said in a discouraging tone. “He wanted to arrest Hazel when that cup got stolen. And Nathan. How could you be going out with him?”

  “I’m not going out with him,” Annie said. “It was just lunch. Anyway, it was all a mistake, him wanting to arrest the kids. And he was right about the murders, wasn’t he? And he was wonderful when Nathan was kidnapped by that boy from his school.”

  “All right,” Lily conceded. “But you have to watch out for cops. My second cousin in London married one. He worked Vice. After fifteen years of marriage he left her for a hooker. It just goes to show.”

  “James isn’t like that at all,” Annie said, blushing faintly because she’d used his name. First-name terms may be the norm in contemporary society, but not for policemen.

  “Have you told Nathan yet?”

  “N-no. There isn’t really anything to tell.”

  “Have you—you know?”

  “No!”

  “It’s bloody difficult with kids around,” Lily remarked sapiently. “I thought Hazel would get used to Franco, but she hasn’t. You find yourself sneaking into the bedroom in the middle of the night trying not to be heard, like when we were the kids, dodging our parents. You’d have thought we’d have left all that behind by now. It’s weird. Like—what’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Irony?” Annie supplied.

  “I expect so. It’s all the wrong way ’round, isn’t it? I wish Hazel had a steady; it would give her something else to think about. I love her so much, but she’s always been a strange, secretive girl. I mean, at her age I’d been with Nick Cowley for nearly a year. You don’t think she and Nathan—?”

  “No,” Annie said. “Not yet.”

  “Of course, he wouldn’t go for her.” Lily sighed. “He’s so good looking, so clever … Hazel’s sort of—bright but not bright, if you see what I mean. Not good at the school stuff, but she’s a smart girl.”

  “We think she’s really special,” Annie said, now completely sidetracked and uncomfortably aware she sounded like an American soap opera. That was the thing about children: they took over your life, they even took over conversations that were supposed to be about something else. “I know Nathan loves her a lot. I’m just not sure what kind of love it is. I don’t think he’s sure, either.”

  “It’s their hormones,” Lily said, as everyone does. “And ours. Life’s a muddle, isn’t it?”

  Which, Annie thought later, really said it all.

  “WHAT’S A Leviathan?” Nathan asked his mother over supper that evening.

  “Sea monster,” Annie said. “A very large one. I think it’s meant to wake at the end of the world—or maybe that’s the Kraken. I’ve a feeling it might be biblical, but I don’t know the Bible as well as I should. Could be in Revelation. Are you planning to get up one morning covered in Leviathan-spit? Only I don’t want the washing machine blocked up again.”

  “I’m not sure it can have spit if it’s underwater,” Nathan said. “D’you know what it looks like?”

  “No, I don’t. I’ve always thought of sea monsters as pretty standard—big marine dragons with lots of spiky fins, or finny spikes— but I imagine it could be a sort of giant squid. Or something with lots of heads, like the Lernean Hydra.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The one Heracles met: remember? Every time he cut one head off, it grew two more. Keep that in mind if you’re thinking of confronting one. You don’t want to start cutting off heads.”

  “Mm.”

  “How much danger are you in?” Annie asked, dropping the flippancy for a moment.

  “Well,” Nathan said candidly, “I’m in the middle of a war, but I think I might be able to stop it. I’ve got a plan—a diversion—but I have to get back there. It’s been two nights now …”

  “You will,” Annie said, not certain whether she was glad or sorry, or just chronically terrified for him. “You always do. Am I allowed to ask what’s going on? Where does the Leviathan come in?”

  “Someone referred to it, and the priestesses were afraid. That means the Goddess is afraid. She’s the Queen of the Sea—like Nenufar, only worse—so if there’s a sea monster she’s scared of, it might be a good thing. Or it might mean the Leviathan is so horrifying even the bad guys are afraid of it.”

  “Call Uncle Barty,” Annie said. “Or Google.”

  After supper Nathan tried both. Googling elicited reams of information, including biblical sources—Job, not Revelation—several conflicting physical descriptions based largely on fiction, and random accounts of how the Leviathan would wake at the last trumpet and swallow whole continents, armies of seraphim and demons, and anyone else who got in the way.

  Bartlemy was more specific. “We don’t know what it looks like,” he said, “but it’s meant to be the largest monster in history or legend, even bigger than the Midgard Serpent, which is twined around the world with its tail in its mouth. God told Job, in one of those anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better conversations between mortal and immortal, that he could catch Leviathan on a hook. There are scholars who take that to imply that this was a challenge even for a deity, and Leviathan must therefore be a creature big enough to devour the gods themselves. According to others, it has slept since the beginning of Time and will not wake till the end, when the forces of Good and Evil come face-to-face in the final great battle. Or not, as the case may be. The last-battle idea is a little out of fashion now. We favor a slow death for the universe, or possibly a reversal of the Big Bang. Whatever option you go for, hopefully it’s a long way off. However, things will be different in otherworlds.”

  “There’s a battle brewing,” Nathan said, “but it isn’t exactly Good versus Evil. Sort of a mix on both sides.”

  “It always is,” Bartlemy said. “Were you planning to raise the Leviathan in order to put them off?”

  “Something like that. But I’ve got other ideas as well—probably just as useless. D’you know what would happen if I did?”

  “That’s rather the problem,” said Bartlemy. “You see, no one ever has raised the Leviathan, or at least not in this universe. Any description of what might follow falls into the realm of story or prophecy, and prophecy is a very uncertain guide to the future. Look at all those Greek kings who consulted the oracle at Delphi, adjusted their actions accordingly, and thus brought about the very fate they were trying to avoid. Besides, prophecy is often wrong. You just don’t get to hear about the inaccurate ones. If I were you, I’d let sleeping monsters lie. For one thing, it would prob
ably take a whole orchestra to wake a Leviathan. With nuclear weapons. The bigger they are, the deeper they sleep.”

  Nathan went to bed with that thought, hanging Hazel’s vial around his neck, but he couldn’t sleep and for the third night running he felt he was going nowhere. In spite of previous experience he was always worried he’d be unable to get back to his dreamworld adventure and finish what he’d started. He got up in the middle of the night and climbed up to the Den, out through the skylight onto the roof. The star was there— the Grandir’s star—looking down at him, a fixed pinpoint of light. He found himself thinking of the shamans.

  Mirror mirror of the night

  Who is evil in thy Sight?

  The verse had been in the language of the merfolk, but in his head it slipped easily into English, sounding like something from a children’s fairy tale. He began making up his own verse:

  Twinkle twinkle little star

  How I wonder what you are

  Up above the world so high

  Watching with your single Eye.

  This rhyming stuff is easy, he decided, huddling himself into his jacket against the chill of the winter night. You, too, can be a priestess—or priest—of the dark; all it takes is a flair for poetry. Not the Shakespearean kind, more the birthday-greeting-card variety.

  And now he remembered that it wasn’t just the countdown to war, it was the countdown to Christmas, and he hadn’t done his Christmas shopping yet, and why was it girls were so difficult to buy presents for? He found himself thinking about another star—one that didn’t belong in the sky—the star the three kings had followed, till it came to rest above a stable where a newborn baby lay in the straw. Was it blasphemy to wonder if that star, too, had come from another cosmos, and in a high tower beyond the Gate another Grandir had looked up at pictures on the ceiling—pictures of a sleeping infant who might be part of some ineffable plan to save a world? For no reason that he could explain the thought made Nathan’s blood run cold. Supposing the whole of Christianity had mushroomed from that plan, just as the Grail legend had wrapped itself around the Cup of the Thorns and spread throughout the multiverse. Supposing Jesus himself had simply been a boy with a job to do, who had listened to a voice from an alternative universe and called it God. It was too terrifying to contemplate.