by A. L. Knorr
“These waves have names?” I blinked at him, feeling my mind stretch. The idea of naming an oceanic feature such as a wave had never occurred to me. “Did you name them?”
Jozef laughed and came to stand near me where I stared at a wall full of the small scientific drawings. “No, I didn’t name them. I just studied them. What you’ve found here are the world’s sexiest waves,” he said. “These waves are known worldwide by surfers and I’m not entirely sure who named them. Probably the locals did, and it caught on.”
“Surfers?”
His brown eyes found mine. “You don’t know surfing?”
I listened intently as Jozef described how humans had taken to riding the waves close to the beach on top of a thin piece of wood made just for the purpose. Amazed at the ingenuity this took, I had a difficult time picturing the activity until Jozef took me over to a coffee table and found color photographs of people surfing.
“Do you surf?” I asked.
He showed his teeth in a boyish grin that warmed my heart. “I have tried it and it’s enjoyable, but for someone like me, well, let’s say I’m more interested in what goes on under the surface. When it comes to the ocean, I see hours of study, not so much the play.”
He led me to another wall where there was another collection of wave drawings, much simpler than the surfing waves. Here he’d drawn a diagram which I wouldn’t have known was a wave if he hadn’t been there to explain it to me.
An oscillating line across the width of the page in blue, drawings of circles in green placed along the first line, and red arrows shooting out from each circle did not resemble any wave I had ever seen.
“Trochoidal Wave or Gerstner Wave,” I read aloud from the label beneath the drawing. “František Josef Gerstner.”
“That’s who I was named after, in case you’re wondering. Franz was a physicist and engineer. He published a book called Theory of Waves in 1804.” Jozef pointed to another drawing, this one much simpler. “This one, the Stokes Wave, was named for Irishman George Gabriel Stokes…”
Jozef went on to show me numerous wave styles, some which looked more like quilt patterns than wave-action, which he’d studied at school and rendered lovingly into a science-based art form. Then we moved to another wall where there were more drawings of animals, and another of plants. Jozef’s love for the ocean shone through his eyes, resonated in his voice, and vibrated outward from his heart like heat from a fire. All the while, his voice plucked at me the way a harpist plucks her instrument, making my heart sing.
Jozef paused in his commentating about a drawing of a starfish and looked at me suddenly and with a tinge of alarm. “Am I boring you?”
“You couldn’t,” I said quickly, and could not have meant it more.
He had one arm up and resting on the wall beside the drawing. We’d both been looking up as he talked, but suddenly, when he looked down, I realized how close we were standing.
For a breathless moment, we simply looked at one another and Jozef blinked slowly. Between the shutters of his eyelid coming down and going up again, his expression changed. His eye color seemed to darken, his thoughts seemed to flicker between one thing and another. His gaze dropped to my lips.
I wondered if my heartbeat was as loud to him as it was to me. I listened for his but couldn’t hear it. Then I realized that yes, I could. It was just that it was beating in sync with mine.
Abruptly, he tore his gaze away and dropped his arm. “I fear I am being very self-absorbed,” he said, his cheeks growing pink underneath his tanned skin. “Believe me, it isn’t my habit to drone on endlessly about myself and my studies. I just don’t often have such an interested audience.”
A knock at the double doors made us turn as Gabriela came bustling in, carrying a tray. The room filled with the mouth-watering scent of hot bread. My stomach gurgled noisily and I realized I was ravenous. It had been a long time since I had tasted baking. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to taste bread and jam again, to sip hot tea and milk the way I had in London when I was very little, and in Gdansk, much later.
“Just a spot of Earl Grey,” Gabriela said in her charming accent as she set the tray down on the largest coffee table in the center of the room, and moved bits of china about. “And some freshly baked scones with clotted cream and strawberry preserve. It’s my mother’s recipe.”
She prattled on as Jozef and I moved over to the couches and sat across from one another.
“You’re a wonder,” Jozef told Gabriela, and she flushed crimson to the roots of her graying hair.
He kissed the back of her hand and she bobbed a curtsy, sending me a smile, but her attention was almost solely for Jozef. She adored him and it was obvious. She backed out of the room and closed the doors, leaving us to devour the scones and wash them down with the tea.
We hardly spoke as we ate, until Jozef looked at me bashfully, a spot of cream at the corner of his mouth. He licked it away. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”
“Me neither,” I said through a mouthful of scone. Whatever Gabriela was, an accomplished baker was among her talents.
When we’d finished eating, I asked Jozef what had been nagging at me since I first met him out in the ocean.
“I have met with a few Atlanteans here and there throughout my life,” I said, “but none of them were like you.”
“No?” He sat back against the couch and settled his tea cup and saucer on one knee. “What were they like?”
“They were pitiful creatures, malnourished, many of them looked ill and infested with parasites of one kind or another.”
A look of understanding crossed Jozef’s face. “I can assure you, the Atlanteans in my circle share very little in common with the ones you crossed paths with in the deep.” His dark eyes were sad. “The wanderers are afraid of me,” he explained, “so though I’ve made attempts to talk with them on the rare occasion that I run across them during my observations, they tend to avoid me.
My brows shot up in surprise at this. An Atlantean avoiding a fellow Atlantean?
“It’s something that used to bother me a lot in my youth, but now…” he shrugged a shoulder, “it’s how they choose to live. Even if it doesn’t make sense to me, it’s their decision. They don’t realize that they would suffer less if they spent more time on land. It’s the sunlight. We need it for immunity.”
This was not the case for sirens. I surmised that Atlanteans had to be closer to humans genetically. Humans needed sunlight to be healthy, too.
Jozef’s expression was far away. “They remind me a little of some of the homeless people in the big cities. Most of them approach to ask for food or money, but some of them have nothing but fear in their eyes, and stay away. Even if you try to help them, they will not allow you to get close enough to offer it.”
Jozef made it sound as though he’d lived the life of a human more than an ocean creature.
“But you were born in the ocean, correct?” I asked.
His eyes cut back to mine and he smiled, a dimple cratering in his left cheek. “Of course not,” he said softly. “No Atlantean that I know was born in the wild.”
Once again, my sense of reality was fractured. Jozef was unusual enough when held against the standards Atlanteans had set in my experience, but now he was telling me that he was not actually that unusual among his kind.
“I was born on the island of Sardinia, because at the time, my father believed he might find the ruins of Atlantis there. While my obsession has been to study the ocean and all of its mysteries, my father continued the work of my grandfather, and his grandfather before that––to find Atlantis. This search dictated much of the movement of my early life, and led to the separation of my mother and father.” Jozef took a deep breath and I detected some pain in him on this subject. “When my father could not interest me in picking up the task after him, he sent me to boarding school in Pennsylvania where I could prepare to pursue a university degree in oceanography.”
He spread one h
and and shrugged up a shoulder as if to say, and here I am.
“My father has his faults,” he continued, “but he did his best to give me what I wanted. He had me tutored in many languages, the ones he wanted me to know, but also the ones I wanted to know. He wanted me prepared from a young age to be equipped to enter the search for Atlantis. So though I studied oceanography, he ensured I took courses in classical languages, ancient history, anthropology. My life has been spent with my face in a book, or in a lab, or in the ocean itself—always learning.”
I nodded, and could relate to his thirst for knowledge. “I love learning, too.”
“I believe it. Your curiosity is apparent.” He flashed a set of strong white teeth.
“Next year I have promised myself I will study the art and science of salvaging again, because there have been leaps and bounds of technological improvements made since the last time I studied it.” He swallowed his remaining tea and leaned forward to set the cup and saucer on the table. “But that is more than enough about me, I have been talking about myself nonstop since we met and know nothing about you.” He shook a friendly finger in my direction. “Don’t think I’ll let you get away from here without telling me more about yourself.”
Suddenly, I felt the twangs of anxiety linking me to my people. I thought about the Foniádes who would have looked for me as their shift changed. While I’d been languishing in the sound of Jozef’s voice and letting my imagination be carried away by his stories and art, those in Okeanos were wondering what had happened to their Sovereign. A form of panic rose in my chest.
I stood up and nearly spilled the rest of my tea. Setting it on the coffee table, I turned to go.
“I’m late,” I said, my breath coming quickly now and my heart rate ramping up. As a siren, I could go anywhere I wished and do as I pleased. No one would care if I disappeared for years, but as Sovereign, I had responsibilities.
Jozef got to his feet, eyes troubled and expression disappointed. “Just like that, you’re going to go?”
I made my way to the double doors and pushed through them, heading back the way we came. The sound of his voice pulled at me; he was genuinely disappointed that I had to leave, and knowing that sirens were not the best at mimicking the human social graces Jozef would have been brought up with, I stopped and turned back toward him suddenly.
He halted midstride as I faced him, our faces mere inches from one another. Without thinking, I stood on tip-toe and pressed my lips to his cheek.
His eyes widened and the tips of his fingers touched my elbows reactively.
“I am sorry.” I looked him straight in the eye. “I do have to go. I forgot myself. Thank you, for the tea, and… everything.”
I turned away and flew down the stairs, heading for the back door. I heard Jozef on the steps behind me, following me out the door and down the gravel path. It took him a long time to say anything, but he finally spoke when we reached the boathouse.
“But…will I see you again?” His voice cracked and he sounded distraught. The sound reverberated inside me as well and I paused in stripping off the clothes he’d given me.
Straightening to face him, the shirt he’d given me falling off one shoulder and the shorts already a puddle on the wooden floor of the boathouse, I took his face between my palms and wanted nothing more than to see that face every day.
“Yes,” I said fiercely, and his brown eyes flooded with relief. “Yes, you will see me again.”
With one last kiss, quick and chaste, on his lips, I left his clothing in a heap on the floor of the boathouse and slipped into the water.
Seventeen
Once I had spent those first few hours with Jozef, it was impossible to get him out of my head and my heart. I continued the task I’d set for myself, to understand the boundaries of Okeanos. During my alone time, I slipped off to meet with Jozef, sometimes joining him on his underwater data-gathering missions, and other times going all the way to Gibraltar to spend only a few hours with him. At first, my journey around Okeanos allowed me to visit easily, but as I progressed around our borders, the space between me and Gibraltar became too far to traverse reasonably. So, I told my Foniádes to give me more time between shift changes to allow me to spend a few days, and then even weeks with Jozef. The chemistry between us continued to grow, and I became accustomed to the idea of wealthy and educated Atlanteans making their homes on land and living like humans.
It took me nearly two years to swim the perimeter of Okeanos. I learned that the apotreptikó did not surround us completely, but rather lay in patches, which altogether might total less than half of our borders. In retrospect, I learned more about the surrounding ocean from Jozef than I had from my own discovery project. I learned that disastrous earthquakes many thousands of years ago helped to form the oceanic crust and that these large-scale events happened in cycles, changing the terrain both above and below water, and even altering the climate. Learning these things humbled me, and left me with a continuous amazement of the natural world.
The day I returned to Califas, Nike greeted me on the stairs leading to the freshwater pools, where I longed to take a cleansing soak. She touched the space between my collarbones in deference and then threw her arms around me in a hug.
“You’ve been missed, Sovereign.” Her body seemed to tremble against mine she held me so tightly.
Hugging her back, I frowned, picking up low-level anxiety coming off her in waves. “Are you all right?”
She released me and nodded, but her gray eyes were troubled. “May I join you at the pools? I assume that’s where you’re going.”
“Of course.”
It wasn’t until after Nike and I had spent an hour soaking in the mentally clarifying freshwater that she opened herself to me.
“Our numbers are dwindling,” she said, leaning against the soft curves of a blue moss-covered stone. “Sirens who left on mating cycles over ten years ago have not returned.”
“Sirens can take that long and longer, Nike,” I chided, “you know that. Have you spoken to Lia about your concern?”
Agliaia was an older siren who’d taken on (at my request) the job of marking down the names of every Okeanos citizen on a wall in one of the caves. Young sirens coming in for the first time were marked when their mothers brought them back. Sometimes the mother would know her daughter’s precise birth date, other times she had only a season and a year. Sirens were not nearly so orderly and precise about putting events into writing for posterity as humans were. When it came to this task, a rough idea of ages and timelines were considered ‘good enough.’ It was an improvement, as far as I could tell, for in the Hall of Anamna only the names of the Sovereigns had been immortalized in the tile. The current Sovereign had to guess the date of their reign by observing clothing, customs, technologies of the time, languages, and other markers when visiting a memory. We were, after all, sea-creatures––only partially human. And as such we were only partially driven by human ambitions. The rest of our makeup was entirely primal––to survive and procreate without giving away our secret was our standard of success.
Nike was nodding. “I visited her, and she confirmed that few have returned from their mating cycles.”
“Was she concerned?”
Nike gave me a withering look. “Lia isn’t concerned about anything. She’s got the metabolism of a manatee and the personality to match.”
“So, why do you think that sirens are staying away so long?”
Nike’s brows furrowed and she didn’t answer for a long time, until finally, she gave the anti-climactic, “I don’t know.”
“But you don’t think it’s a coincidence. Otherwise you wouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, I would not be concerned if it were only a few sirens, but according to Lia’s records, of the fifty sirens who have left for a mating-cycle in the last fifteen years, only four have returned.”
This statistic set my alarm bells ringing. I sat upright in the water. “Four out of fifty?”
Nike sighed and gazed at me lovingly. “Finally, I got through to you. Do you see now, why I am concerned?”
“I do. Why didn’t you say so sooner?”
“You haven’t been around lately.” Her voice was laced with curiosity, and a little reproach. “Are you going to tell me where you’ve been?”
“I was swimming our perimeter, you know that. I told everyone it was something I wanted to do.”
“Yes, but even dawdling at the speed of a turtle wouldn’t have taken you two years to swim the entire thing.”
“How do you know?” I replied, slyly. “Have you ever done it?”
“Well, no…but,” she eyed me suspiciously, “there is more to it, isn’t there?”
I let out a long breath and settled back against the stone again. There was no reason to keep my relationship a secret, even if it was unusual. I was Sovereign, and I could do what I liked. If one of my people came to me and said they’d mated with an Atlantean, I would have been surprised, but I wouldn’t have forbidden it. In fact, some cross-breeding of our two nations might be just the thing to start fostering some peace between us.
“I met someone interesting,” I explained. “An Atlantean.”
“Really. You found an Atlantean interesting?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because, according to your mother, they’re the scourge of the seas. Diseased and unintelligent, poachers and scavengers.”
“I’m not my mother. And you don’t think that about them, either.”
“Maybe not all of them, but generally, they’ve not shown to be a desirable lot.”
“This one is,” I said a little too dreamily for Nike’s liking. “Very desirable. He’s healthy and beautiful, and so intelligent. He’s nothing like the others of his species who make their homes underwater. He says it’s because Atlanteans need more direct sunlight.”