by A. L. Knorr
There was no sign of Nike. I didn’t know how long I had been lost in the visions, but apparently too long to keep her waiting.
Lifting a trembling hand to my eyes, I wiped the moisture from my eyes and the sweat from my brow as I sat up. My scalp was hot and damp from perspiration, like I’d been fighting that battle alongside my ancestor. Looking up at her again, fresh siren tears coursed down my cheeks and there was no stopping them.
“Now, you understand,” came the familiar voice of Polly, her shadow darkening the door of the Hall.
I could not find the words to answer her. Disgust and shock still coursed through my veins. Disgust at the fighting and the blood, and shock at how different the Mer seemed at that time, how much things had changed.
“So many,” I panted, my mouth parched, “tritons.”
Footsteps on the stone preceded her and she knelt down beside me, a hand on my shoulder. She handed me a cup.
“Drink,” she said, her whispered word sounding lost in the great cavern of memory.
Taking the cup with a shaking hand, I straightened and gulped back the cool, fresh water. Tears continued streaming down my face. “Why did you not tell me? Why did you not tell us?”
“You had to see it for yourself.” She stroked my sweaty hair back from my forehead. “And these memories are for the Sovereign to bear; they are a burden your sirens should not have to carry. They trust you, and you must be worthy of that trust.”
That Polly had not been asked into the Hall of Anamna by her Sovereign passed through my mind only fleetingly. In that moment, I felt like a little girl who wanted her mother’s comfort. I was glad she was there.
“You see what our ancestors had, how they behaved?”
“Like mercenaries. They fought like soldiers, and the tritons…” My voice was still a dry rasp. I shook my head, wiping with futility at the continuous stream of tears running down my face and neck. “The tritons, they were so powerful, so beautiful. Where have all the tritons gone?”
Polly sat down on the stones next to me, something that I had never seen her do, even when I was young. Her dark eyes were heavy with sadness. “I don’t know. They’ve been gone a very, very long time. But, Sybellen,” she squeezed my shoulder with her hand, “if an attack like that came today…”
“That battle happened thousands of years ago, and we won. It was a different time, a different era. Different Atlanteans.”
Polly drew back a little with surprise. “You saw how much they hate us. Just because they are weak now does not mean we should let down our guard.”
But my mind was on the tritons, on their huge, muscular bodies glistening in the caves as they destroyed wave after wave of invading Atlantean. And those voices, the depth of sound they could produce. Such a being had never been imagined in all of my daydreaming.
“An entire gender of our species has disappeared, and I need to know why,” I said, getting to my feet. My body felt tired and sore, as though I’d lived through the battle for Okeanos myself. I looked up at the image of Sisinyxa again and gave the mosaic a nod of gratitude. I rounded on Polly, who had also risen to her feet and now stood behind me. “The sirens of the Pacific, they must know something. Do you not think?”
Without waiting for an answer and caught up in my idea, I strode from the Hall of Anamna and called for the Foniádes to gather all of the sirens to the throne room.
“I will address the citizens of Okeanos within the hour, and I wish all who can come to attend.”
Nodding, they scattered to make the call to my people.
“What are you going to do, Sybellen?” Polly asked as she took the steps down from the throne and came to stand in the center of the throne room.
“Either locate the tritons, or if there are none to be found, find out what happened to them. I’ll use the Hall of Anamna to learn what I can, but I want us searching the oceans as well.”
“And the law about Atlanteans? You’ll retract it?” A gleam came into her eye, hungry, but it did not make sense to me to give her what she wanted.
“You’ve become obsessed by your hatred of them. It makes no sense to hate today’s Atlanteans for something their ancestors did almost five thousand years ago. By that logic, no single nation would peacefully interact with any other. You must forget your desire for vengeance. It is foolish.”
Her face changed, her expression hardening. “They are diseased scum, a plague upon the oceans and a festering thorn in our side. It is your duty to cleanse the waters of the Atlantic of this scourge. Too long have we failed in our duty and I cannot fathom why any Sovereign before us has not already seen to this task. I would have accomplished it with a bit more time.”
I rounded on her. “Because it’s genocide! Yes, they were our enemy at one time. They lost their entire civilization, tens of thousands of their people. Their leader went about it the wrong way, but Nestor is dead, and Atlanteans of today are pitiful and sickly. All they wanted was a home.”
“Yes, and they invaded ours, almost took it from us!”
“If Sisinyxa had made some kind of treaty with them, helped them find a new home, they never would have invaded in the first place. Treating them like the enemy is no way of moving forward. An eye for an eye is not our way.”
Sirens began to appear in the stairwells and stream into the room.
Polly shut her mouth and stepped back, fuming privately. She would never have said what she had said to me in the presence of other sirens, and she’d only said this much because she felt that as my mother and previous Sovereign, she had a right to. But she’d given up her right to advise me the day she took the throne and opted out of being my caretaker.
Sirens streamed into the throne room, filling up the enormous cave with the sounds of their breathing and bare feet. I saw the blue head of Nike among the crowd as she wove her way closer to me.
“Something very important has been kept from you,” I began, stepping up to be level with the throne but not sitting down. “You’ve been led to believe that there is no such thing as a male Mer, that they’re impossible. But tritons once filled the halls and waters of Okeanos. They were brave, and beautiful. They were our defenders and our lovers. Male children born within these very halls were once common.”
Murmurs filled the cave, sounds of wonder and surprise, and questions.
“Something happened to our tritons long ago and now we must mate with humans to maintain our species, and so every one of us must brave the curse. But it wasn’t always this way. Once, we lived here in peace, never having to venture onto land unless we wanted to. Once, both sirens and tritons made up the Mer population, not sirens alone. I’m looking for volunteers. Brave sirens who are willing to scour the oceans, both our own and the remote Pacific. In all likelihood you’ll be gone for years. We need to find the reason for this change, otherwise we’ll always be slaves to the Dyás. I’ll not force anyone, but I will ask. Anyone who wants to undergo such a search, please step forward.”
Four sirens were already making their way to the front. By the time they were standing in front of me, expressions resolute, another two had joined. A few moments later, two more stepped into the line, flanking the others.
Targa, Emun, and Antoni were staring at me, shock reflected in their eyes. A light sheen of sweat glistened from Emun’s brow and he wiped it away with his sleeve.
“That was intense just to listen to,” Emun said. “I cannot imagine what the experience of that memory was like.”
“It must have been horrible,” Targa said with a shudder.
Antoni, who’d been standing by the window, crossed to her and sat beside her, putting his arm over the back of the couch behind her again.
Targa continued, “But now I understand what you said about me recording your story with my phone. The Hall of Anamna was like a secret archive just for you.”
“What did you do with the volunteers?” Antoni asked.
“I sent the eight sirens on a mission to find out what happened to
the tritons, or better yet, find proof that they still existed,” I explained. My gaze slid to Emun. “One hundred and fifty year later, the proof came to me…in the form of my own son.”
Emun’s eyes were shining, full of emotion. I wondered how it felt to him to be possibly the very last of his kind.
Sliding forward on my seat, I stretched my back and glanced at the window where it had grown dark. Sera would be calling us for dinner soon.
“It was clear to me through Sisinyxa’s memories,” I continued, “that sirens and tritons once mated with each other, resulting in offspring of both genders. But at some point in history, the tritons died out with no apparent cause. I divided the sirens willing to go into pairs and sent two to the North Atlantic, two to the South Atlantic, two to the Pacific by way of the Indian Ocean, and two to the North Pacific. These eight returned with no news, so every twenty years or so I sent out another group. But later groups failed to return.”
Targa’s eyes widened. “They didn’t come back ever?”
I shook my head. “No, and it got worse than that. Many other sirens who left the borders of Okeanos, such as on a mating cycle, never came home, either. But before I get to that part, I have to tell you about Jozef.”
Targa’s eyes opened wide. “Finally! I’ve been dying to know why you wanted him here. Was he a past mate? And when did you know him from? He can’t be that much over forty.”
I smiled at my daughter. “He’s well over forty, I can assure you.”
Fourteen
Decades passed. It was a time of peace and prosperity for us. Sad-looking Atlanteans sometimes passed through our territory, and we allowed them to feed and rest there. I had sent the volunteers to search the world’s oceans for evidence of tritons, knowing it was a massive job, and I did not expect to see any of those sirens for five years.
I spent time in the Hall of Anamna, digging in memories to pinpoint when tritons had gone extinct. But though the Hall of Anamna was a place full of memory and information, it did not give up its treasures on a whim. I could not go to a portrait and ask it to reveal to me answers I was seeking. Rather, the portraits gave to me what they chose to. At times, the eyes of a Sovereign would gleam and welcome me, invite me in. I would enter the memory and take from it what I could. But even though I moved forward in time sequentially, it was difficult identify the critical point. The Sovereigns of the time noticed the declining triton population, forcing sirens to range abroad and mate with human men to maintain their numbers. But the Mer did not know what to do about the problem. As generations came and went, eventually there were no tritons at all. Those who remembered the tritons eventually died and there were no sirens left who had known any in the flesh. Generations passed and new generations began to believe tritons were a myth. After all, there were no triton portraits immortalized in the Hall of Anamna. To those who had never seen a triton, and didn’t know anyone who had seen a triton, it was not difficult to believe that the citizenry of Okeanos had always been entirely female. Sirens returned with daughters, and those sirens went on mating cycles and returned with daughters.
I was able to determine when the aquamarine gemstones appeared, and sirens began to wear them––a few hundred years after the Atlantean disaster––but I was not able to discern why it had happened.
The searchers returned with reports of no tritons to be found and I resolved to send out volunteers every twenty years or so. Frustrated in my quest for answers, I spent less and less time in the Hall of Anamna, and more and more time abroad in my territory, exploring, the way I had so enjoyed in my youth. As for why Sisinyxa had chosen to show me the battle for Okeanos––it gave me an understanding of why Atlanteans to this day were malnourished and sickly nomads without any organization or strong leader. Nestor had amassed the entire population of Atlanteans, and they’d been destroyed. The few stragglers who survived produced a line of poor wanderers who no longer had a home on land or at sea.
Sometime in the mid-nineteen-seventies, something happened that changed my perspective on modern Atlanteans.
I had taken it upon myself to swim the entire border of Okeanos because I thought the Sovereign should be well acquainted with the nature of these borders. Since I had first swum over the apotreptikó when I was young and entering Okeanos for the first time, I had been curious to learn whether this black wasteland of barren and jagged rocks actually circled the entire mountain range of Okeanos. I had always assumed it did, for how else had sirens of past generations decided where the border actually lay?
Swimming the territory slowly gave me a chance to observe and learn in a way that couldn’t be done at high speed, so I took my time. One of the Foniádes would join me for a time, swimming along patiently at my side before leaving and sending another. I hadn’t given them the order to do this for I didn’t feel the need for company; they simply didn’t know what else to do with themselves and the Sovereign was their priority. It was the times between their visits that I enjoyed the most, for it gave me the opportunity to interact with animals in a way that might seem strange to the Foniádes, who tended to see sea life mainly as food. I found such beauty in these creatures, and though I also ate fish, I found myself thanking the fish for sustaining me. This sentimentality or spirituality was not normal for a mermaid, as far as I knew. But then, sirens were as varied in character as humans, so who knew what went on in the hearts and minds of other mermaids.
During one of these solitary times, I heard unusual sounds coming through the water. Pausing to listen, I cocked my head, trying to identify what kind of animal might sound like what I was hearing. Shaking my head, I realized that it couldn’t be an animal, it had to be a ship with humans on board because the sound was steady and grinding.
The sound stopped, and was followed by scratching and clicking. I began to swim toward it, leaving the kelp forest and venturing out into a broad and open plain. It was almost like a desert, but this desert was colored by bright coral and large, slow-moving purple and gray fish. Following the sounds over these rolling plains revealed a humanoid shape in the distance, very close to the ocean floor and nearly upside down. It was an Atlantean, but even from a distance there was something very different about this Atlantean.
Curious, I approached.
It was a male, a large one, and healthy. This alone gave cause to widen my eyes and make me pause. He had none of the gauntness I had come to attribute to the Atlantean species, and he was dressed in clothing and equipped with gear unfamiliar to me. He wore a strange, close-fitting black suit which ended just above the knee and elbow joints. His hair was brown and short, and his beard was trimmed quite close to the skin. This was in stark contrast to the Atlanteans I had seen previously. Those had long ropy hair and were infected with sea lice, the males smaller than me, spindly of limb and thick of beard.
This Atlantean wore a belt upon which were fastened odd looking tools. Against his back was a bright silver spear. I was not familiar with modern spearguns, but the shape of it mimicked some of the older weapons we’d found scattered on the seabed, so I knew what it was. His bare webbed feet kept him steady and there was a strange thing strapped to his face. I’d never seen goggles before, though I had seen old brass helmets with face plates, so I knew he was wearing the odd-looking thing on his face to protect his eyes.
He was working some tool, which was drilling into the ocean floor. Noticing the small transparent bag at his waist containing a notebook and pen, I could contain my curiosity no longer.
“What are you doing?”
He started violently, head jerking up and mouth opening wide in a silent scream. He yanked the goggles away from his eyes and put them on the top of his head.
“Good grief!” He took a few deep breaths, still floating upside down. “You might want to consider making some noise so you don’t give anyone a heart attack,” he said. His voice had a pleasant, gravelly quality.
He righted himself, leaving the tool he’d been working stuck in the rock, to look at me pr
operly. His dark eyes studied me intently.
“Hello,” he said, finally, a friendly but cautious smile lingering at the corners of his mouth. “I’m Jozef. Who are you?”
“I’m Bel,” I replied, moving closer.
He drifted backward as I drifted forward and I could feel a low hum of tension in the water around him. He wasn’t sure what to think of me. My eyes drifted down to the strange tool sticking into the ground and back up to him, skimming over his person and his clothing and equipment.
“You’re healthy,” I said, noting the color of his skin––golden brown from the sun. Atlantean skin was more like human skin than ours, reacting to the sun’s rays by darkening in color.
He gave a bemused laugh. “Thank you? I’m well fed.”
He took a few breaths before adding, like he felt it was what he was supposed to say but he wasn’t quite certain it was right under the circumstances, “You’re healthy, too.”
“What are you doing?” I gestured to the tool.
“Taking samples,” he replied. “I’m an oceanographer.”
I must have expressed a look of puzzlement because he went on to explain.
“It’s the study of all things to do with the ocean. Right now, I’m studying the theory of plate tectonics, gathering data and samples to take back to my lab.”
“Your lab?”
“Laboratory, where I…study…things,” he paused between words, still watching me as intently as I was watching him.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’ve never been this close to a mermaid before. It’s a bit overwhelming. I apologize for staring.”
The tension emanating from him was easing, and I could hear his heartbeat as it slowed to a more relaxed rhythm. The scent he left in the water now was no longer of anxiety, and he smelled surprisingly pleasant.
“Show me?” I asked.
“Certainly!” He showed me how he was using a boring drill to penetrate deep into the rock and retrieve a cylindrical sample of whatever was below the surface of the ocean floor. “Ten years ago,” he explained while he was showing me how the drill worked, “a professor at Princeton University in America presented a theory that layers deep in the earth move very slowly with respect to one another. This movement is why the continents broke apart, new land masses formed. and new oceanic basins appeared. By taking some samples, I may be able to help determine where these various plates might be.”