by E. G. Foley
# # #
It was evening and well past high tide when Sapphira finally made it home.
Still a bit shaken up from her day’s adventure, she was relieved to arrive safely in the kingdom’s bustling capital of Coral City.
Thankfully, when she reached the royal palace, it wasn’t in an uproar over her absence, as she had dreaded. Life seemed to be going on as normal.
By now, the feasting was over and music lilted from the great hall. The trumpet fish were playing, and soon, the sea turtles would perform their aquatic dance, as usual. Sapphira had always found their ballets rather boring, but King Nereus enjoyed it, so the whole court had to sit and watch.
Desperate to consult Professor Pomodori about the artifact before Father caught wind of her return, she risked only a brief peek through a round hole in one the coral walls overlooking the throne room.
Everything down there seemed normal, too. Showy-finned courtiers paraded around in their finery, mingling and flirting. Black moray eels snaked among the tops of the coral columns, shining down a romantic glitter of starlight from the gold spots splashed across their electric bodies.
Her father, the bearded and muscular King Nereus, sat on his giant clamshell throne, deep in conversation with some haughty-looking official.
Commander Tyndaris, head of the royal guard—a stern, rugged warrior who had trained her in fighting—was posted by the king’s throne in his blue and silver uniform. The merman’s sharp gaze scanned the great hall continually, but it stopped when he spotted Sapphira peeking through the window.
His dark eyebrows drew together, and he sent her a where-have-you-been? glare. When she lifted a finger to her lips, imploring him not to say anything, the warrior smirked. Getting into trouble again, are we, Princess? his knowing stare seemed to ask.
But Tyndaris looked away without revealing her presence.
Good man. Grateful for his discretion, Sapphira sneaked away from the window and headed for the royal tutor’s cave.
Steering clear of the sandy central colonnade where her countrymen liked to promenade and socialize in the evenings, she went briskly across the low, grassy meadows, where various schools of silver- and yellow-striped and peach-colored fish grazed.
Starfish sprawled here and there among the waving grasses. Octopi used their arms to climb from rock to rock, while the knobby-headed rockfish, so ugly they were cute, lumped about the bottom here and there, trying to blend in.
Hurrying on toward her destination, just when she thought she was in the clear, she was spotted by the Barnacle.
Ugh.
Princess Liliana, her little sister, named for the sea lilies, was out exercising her spotted seahorse pony, Wallace. Riding around and around the meadow and practicing her pony tricks, the eight-year-old suddenly spotted her long-absent elder sister and gasped.
“There you are!” Instantly whirling Wallace around, Lil came charging over to her, blond braids flying over her shoulders, a grin splashed across her heart-shaped face. “You missed supper! You’re in trouble.”
Sapphira sent her a scowl and muttered, “What else is new?”
“Where’ve you been all day?” Liliana turned Wallace around and rode along beside her while Sapphira hurried on toward Professor Pomodori’s cave. “Oh, look, you scraped your scales! What happened?”
“Nothing. Please tell me Father didn’t ask about me?”
Lil snorted. “Oh, of course. He never even noticed your empty seat beside him at the state dinner.”
Sapphira groaned. “That was tonight? I forgot all about it!”
“Obviously,” the Barnacle replied, trying to sound very grown up.
“Help me, would you?” Sapphira pleaded. “Go charm Father for me. Sweet-talk him like you do. Please, so he doesn’t throttle me? I can’t afford to get into trouble again. I can’t talk now, either. I have to go and see Pro-Pom.”
That was their nickname for Professor Pomodori.
“Very well,” Lil conceded. “But it’ll cost you.”
“Are you joking?” Sapphira exclaimed. “How many sand dollars have you already wrung out of me this month—”
“I don’t want your money this time,” Lil interrupted.
“What then, you little brigand?”
“Next time you go on an adventure, take me with you,” Lil said with an earnest stare.
Sapphira let out an impatient sigh. “Liliana! You’re too little.”
“Squids’ feet, I’m nearly nine!” she retorted.
“Fine! Just go butter up Father for me. Otherwise, I’ll probably be restricted to the palace till the next new moon.”
“Well, if you are, then we can play together the whole time,” the little mermaid said sweetly.
“Oh, you Barnacle.” Sapphira could not help but give her only sibling a fond smile, though in general, she found her a pain in the gills. She turned away. “I have to go. Arrivederci.”
“Ciao!” Lil shot back. With a chirrup to her seahorse, she took off over the meadows, riding back toward the palace, hopefully to make some headway with the king.
Wearily pushing aside thoughts of her coming punishment, Sapphira returned her attention to the task at hand, knocking twice on her tutor’s door before letting herself in. “Professor?”
As she glided into his dim, cozy bachelor’s cave, she found it as cluttered as ever. A chaotic jumble of trinkets and treasures of all kinds lined the stone shelves: ancient clay jars, pewter mugs, a silver teapot and some chipped china cups; a Spanish conquistador’s helmet, quite rusty; an odd brocade shoe that he had found somewhere; a globe, a compass; a small marble sculpture of an athlete; and, strangely enough, the skull of some land animal with horns.
She shook her head at his eccentricity.
Quickly scanning the cave’s interior, she did not see her tutor at his round table eating supper, nor was he dozing in his net hammock.
Instead, not too surprisingly, she found the old, gray-haired, green-tailed merman fast asleep at his writing desk, his favorite mako’s tooth pen still resting in his hand.
Sapphira swam over to his desk, laid hold of his shoulder, and gave him a shake. “Professor, wake up! I need to talk to you.”
He spluttered awake, blinking and blowing bubbles. He lifted his head and looked at her. “Oh, good morning, er, evening, Your Highness.”
“I have to show you something. It’s really important!”
“Aha.” He put on his spectacles. “I expect it involves a perfectly good excuse for why you skipped your lessons today?”
“I know, I know, I shouldn’t have. But never mind that! I found something. I thought you might know what it is.” She reached into her satchel then set the orb down on the desk in front of him.
He stopped abruptly and stared at the strange object, leaning closer to peer at it. “Where did you get this?”
“Um, near the canyon,” she said with a wince, bracing herself.
“Calypso Deep?” Paling, he shot up out of his chair and proceeded to have the conniption she could’ve predicted. “Sapphira! How could you do such a thing? You’re not allowed anywhere near there!”
“But Professor—”
“If your father finds out— Sweet Poseidon. What am I going to do with you? You sneak out on your studies, and that is where you go?”
“It was educational!”
“You could’ve been bitten in half!”
“I wasn’t!” Seeing him this upset simply over the location, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him about the rock monsters. “If I were a prince, no one would think twice about my going there,” she said indignantly. “I had everything under control, I assure you. Now, please, tell me whatever you can about this artifact! Can you identify it?”
He glared at her, then sat down with a huff to study the orb more closely. Grumbling, he picked up his pen and used the blunt end to examine the orb.
Sapphira bent closer. In her haste to get home, this was her first good look at it, too. “We
ll?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Except perhaps… Hmm. Let me check my books,” he mumbled, his indignation over her truancy already fading in his growing fascination with the orb.
“Any ideas?”
“Er, maybe. Not sure… Let’s just hope I’m wrong,” he mumbled.
“Why do you say that?”
He didn’t answer.
She looked over his shoulder. “It’s old, isn’t it?”
“Very,” he said, pulling his sea candle closer.
“Greek? Roman?”
He shook his white, bushy head. “Older.”
“Egyptian?” she whispered reverently. “Look at those little hieroglyphs. Can you read them?”
“No. It’s not Egyptian.”
“Phoenician?”
“No.” His voice had turned grim. “Even older than that.”
“What could be older than Phoenician?” she asked, but he failed to answer, drifting off into his own world, as he was wont to do. He turned tail and sped across his study to his bookshelves, muttering to himself. “It can’t be. No, it’s quite impossible… It was all destroyed…”
“Professor?”
Deep in thought, he swam back and forth, up and down before his bookshelves, pulling out several scallop shell tomes, the etched pages clinking and tinkling as he hurriedly flipped through them.
While he consulted various texts, Sapphira picked up the magnifying glass on his desk and examined the orb more closely. Its smooth silver surface was etched with hieroglyphs she’d never seen before. Odd-looking letters and lines and dots.
It was then she realized that the orb was not just one smooth ball, but was made of several interlocking parts. Fine, barely visible seams connected sections of the metal.
Tilting her head curiously, she tried to wiggle them apart to see if anything was inside. Though she was careful, it still didn’t budge, so she used both hands to try to twist it.
Aha! To her surprise, it worked. The parts were a little creaky, but she soon found the various layers of the orb could be moved, both horizontally and vertically. Click, click, click. She twisted the rows and curved columns into different combinations and grinned, intrigued by her discovery.
“Oh, this is terrible,” Pro-Pom whispered on the other side of the room. He lowered his book, staring uneasily at the orb in her hands. “It’s as I suspected. That thing came from the drowned world. The cursed empire.”
She looked over at him in surprise. “Surely you don’t mean…?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “Atlantis.”
At that moment, the orb vibrated in her hands. She shrieked abruptly and dropped it on the desk.
“What’s the matter?” he exclaimed.
“It’s doing something! Look!”
His eyes widened as the orb seemingly came to life. Barely noticeable before, little crystal buttons like chips of colored glass embedded in it began lighting up in a sequence that was anything but random. Next it began emitting a peculiar, low-frequency hum; she could feel the sound buzzing in her innards.
Her tutor looked at her, aghast. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know! Nothing! I was just…playing with it!”
“You don’t play with an Atlantean orb, Sapphira!”
“Why?” she cried.
“Do you want to start another Noah’s Flood?”
Then the thing began changing shape.
“Professor!”
“Make it stop!” he cried. “Undo whatever you just did!”
Perhaps she could slide the segments back into their original arrangement. Heart pounding, she reached for it, only to yank her hand back with a startled cry when the spherical sides of the orb began unfolding themselves into wedge-shaped segments with a series of sharp, metallic clicks.
One after the other, the segments tipped back flat to form a saucer shape, revealing still more writings and buttons inside.
“Hurry!” he ordered.
“But…” She could only stare, at a loss, as the disk now levitated itself off the desk and then began spinning slowly in place, causing a bubbling wake of water around it like a miniature whirlpool.
It began pulsating with another sound, whirling faster. It seemed to be giving off some sort of energy. The items on her tutor’s desk went whisking away, as though caught up in a vortex.
“Grab it!” he ordered.
“You grab it!” she retorted.
“You’re the one that brought it here!”
“Fine.” Scowling, she dove onto the disk and grabbed it with both hands. It spun her around with a dizzying corkscrew motion and zoomed about with a will of its own, knocking her around her tutor’s home.
But she held on stubbornly, refusing to let go of the thing, pressing buttons in blind, frantic hope.
Suddenly, it stopped.
The hum ceased. The lights quit blinking. She righted herself, heart pounding, as the disk began folding itself back neatly into a smooth, innocent silver ball once again.
“Whew,” she said at last, dizzy from the wild ride. “What just happened?”
“Oh, Sapphira,” he said in a low tone, and shook his head gravely. “I fear you’ve brought ruin on us all.”
“What?” She looked at him, dismayed.
“How exactly did you— Wait, no. Don’t tell me,” he said, clearly shaken. “The less I know about this, the better. Just get rid of the dashed thing. Now! You must return to the canyon this very night, and throw that cursed thing back into the abyss.”
“Tonight? But…it’s getting dark. The sharks will’ve started coming out.”
“Sharks are far less dangerous than the disaster that thing could bring down upon us.” He put his spectacles back on and shook his head ominously.
“So you know what it is, then?” she asked meekly, frightened by his dire tone.
“An Atlantean sphere!” he whispered, nodding and looking just as scared as her. “I suspected from the moment you showed me, but that little demonstration just now removed all doubt. You have to get it out of here, Sapphira. It cannot stay in Poseidonia. It’s too dangerous. If the legends are true, then what we just witnessed was only the smallest demonstration of its power.”
“Is it some sort of weapon?”
“No more questions. Just do as you’re told for once and get rid of the dashed thing before anyone else finds out it was here!”
Sapphira stared at him in wide-eyed confusion, fear rising up from her bones. She swallowed hard. “All right. I’ll go now.”
He nodded in relief. “Take Tyndaris with you for protection out there, but no one else. He’ll defend you with his life, and he at least is trustworthy. But, above all, you must never breathe a word of this to anyone, Sapphira. If news got out that a real Atlantean sphere has been found, it will draw every power-mad tyrant in the seas to this kingdom, and possibly from the landers’ world, as well.”
Her eyes widened.
Pro-Pom began picking up his scattered books and papers. “Our safest course is simply to throw it back into the abyss…and pretend none of this ever happened.”
She nodded in fright. “I understand. Make some excuse to Father if he asks for me, will you?”
Her tutor nodded grimly. She put the orb of doom back into her satchel, then swam to the door, head down.
With one hand on the door latch, Sapphira turned back before leaving. “Professor—I’m sorry. I-I truly didn’t mean any harm. I didn’t know.”
His face softened. “I know, child. Just do as I said, and all will be well.”
She nodded in regret, then let herself out and pulled the door shut behind her.
Outside his cave, she leaned against the door for a moment. A flurry of tiny silver bubbles accompanied her unsettled sigh.
In the distance, the lights of the coral palace gleamed, its fanciful pink spires reaching for the moonlight that now played along the surface of the waves.
Gazing at her home, she couldn’t
believe she had put the whole kingdom in danger. She felt like such a fool. No wonder Father doubts my abilities. Ah, well. I’d better go fetch Tyndaris.
She cringed at the thought of having to confess to someone she respected so much about the trouble she’d caused. But she’d swum only a few strokes when a thought made her pause. But what if I throw the orb back into Calypso Deep and the rock monsters come back and get it?
That would virtually guarantee the Atlantean artifact ended up in the wrong hands—the hands of whoever had made those creatures. She shook her head with a frown. I can’t risk that. There’s got to be a better hiding place.
Preferably somewhere close by. That way she could keep an eye on it. Then, after some time had passed, when she was sure those bizarre rock monsters were long gone, then she could do as her tutor had said and throw it back into the Calypso Deep.
In the meanwhile, she knew the perfect hiding place. It was her own secret refuge, the ancient ruins of a sunken temple, where she had often gone to be alone and play or dream and hide ever since she was a child.
A thousand years ago, the Roman temple had slipped into the sea during an earthquake. It still sat at an angle to this day on its remote mountaintop in a sleepy rural province on the western edge of her father’s kingdom, off the coast of Sicily.
After visiting the place for years, Sapphira could personally vouch for the fact that no one had ever bothered her there. It was too deep for humans to reach, and the merfolk had long since forgotten all about it. What did they care about some old, decaying pile of rubble made by landers?
Yes, she concluded. The orb would undoubtedly be safe there, at least for a while, until she could dispose of it properly.
She saw no need to tell Professor Pomodori about her change of plans. He didn’t want to know, anyway; he had said so himself.
Her mind made up, Sapphira nodded. I’ll hide it there and never tell a soul.
But as she swam off to stash the orb inside the sunken temple, she failed to take one small thing into account.
Word had a way of traveling far and fast in the underwater world, as the whales well knew. Their messages traveled for hundreds of miles at a time, and a few of them had seen her in the deep.