Sound of Sirens: (Tales of Skylge #1)

by Jen Minkman

  On Saturday, the festival will start. Both Currents and Skylgers perform during Oorol. Boundaries fade away, although we are never allowed to witness the light shows they organize in Upper Brandaris. All the people on stage will sing, dance, act, and make music without the help of electricity. This festival is ancient – it used to belong to just us. In the old language, Oorol means ‘everywhere’. This entire island has been turned into a giant theater for ten wonderful days since the days of yore.

  “We circle around like holy clouds, round and round we drift our ways,” I whisper, remembering the lyrics to one of the songs we listened to yesterday. I can’t wait to hear the LP again.

  I can’t wait to see Royce again.

  “Hey, Enna.” My brother’s voice jolts me from my daydream. When I look over my shoulder, I see Sytse climbing the slope of the dyke protecting our small village from the sea water. “You okay out here?”

  “Sure.” I can see in his eyes that he’s seeing something in mine. “I’m not sad today.”

  Sytse cocks his head a little. “There’s something different about you.”

  No shit. I’m secretly seeing a Current guy and I found a book that turned my life upside down in one single afternoon.

  “Just looking forward to the festival, I guess,” I mumble evasively.

  “Me too,” he nods. “Did I tell you that the Skelta invited some Frisian artists from the mainland?”

  “Really?” My mouth falls open. No foreigners ever come to our shores – we always sail out to meet them instead. “How?”

  “Just...” Sytse pauses, an expression crossing his face that I can’t quite interpret. “He asked our captain to relay a message.”

  “Well, that’s fantastic!” I enthuse, smiling up at him. “What will they do? Acting? Dancing?”

  “Singing, mostly.” He smiles back. “It’s going to be a memorable performance, I promise you that.”

  Together, we stare out over the sea. The stillness of the moment almost convinces me to ask Sytse what he was doing out there, in Stortum. But something is holding me back. Maybe it’s the fact that I have things to hide of my own, lately.

  “I’m going to bed,” I finally say when a pale barely-there sliver of moon rises above the horizon. “I have an early start tomorrow.”

  “Sweet dreams,” Sytse says, pulling me into a hug before I turn around and walk down to our little house full of big secrets.

  9.

  The next day at school, I am strangely withdrawn. Not that I am usually the biggest chatterbox in all of Brandaris, but even the teachers seem to notice that I’m abnormally quiet. But I can’t help it – my stomach feels like a bunched-up bundle of nerves and my heart flutters like an anxious bird.

  I’ve never felt like this before. And the stupid thing is that I don’t even really like Royce that much as a person. What’s more, I don’t trust him either. But the fact that he wants to meet up with me again and his genuine worry about me walking back home in the dark two nights ago make me forget all of that. I feel special because of him, and I haven’t felt like that in a very long time. I think the last time was when I sang one of my own songs for my mom and it drove her to tears. Yeah, I enjoy making people cry. I am such a freak, right? But I knew back then that my mother’s tears were different from her usual Sadness-induced crying – I deeply touched her heart. And I realize I want to do the same thing to Royce. To feel alive and powerful again.

  All through calculus, I go through the impending secret date in my mind. What will I say? What can I bring with me? Should I play him some of my own records? I wonder what he’ll think of them. Maybe he won’t even be there after all – he has to prepare for the festival this weekend. He’s playing several gigs, and the first recital will be on Monday.

  As background chatter to my main concern of the day is a voice repeating one number over and over again in my head. 1323 – the year in which the Tower was built. Irrefutable proof that the wrong history was written by the victors. I wonder what Dani will discover once she goes home to read in the book after school. She didn’t have time to read more than a few pages before bed last night and it’s been driving her crazy.

  “I’ll drop by after eight, okay?” she says once we leave the building. “We can spend all night talking. Oorol doesn’t start until noon, so we can sleep in.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” I reply. We won’t be cycling home together today, because I need to wait for Alke. I promised to help him with his German. He has a re-sit at four o’clock, together with all the others who failed their preliminaries in April.

  Just as I’m sitting down on a bench in the schoolyard to unwrap some cookies I brought as a snack, Alke pops up behind me.

  “Hey, Enna.” He takes a seat next to me, his textbook in his hand. “How’s life? You excited about the festival?”

  “Of course,” I reply with a smile. “I’m a lover of the arts, you know that.”

  Alke grins. “I picked Oorol as a topic for my oral exam. Maybe we can talk about it in German?”

  “Klar!” I nod, and start asking him questions in my best German. I sound different from Mrs. Atsma – she learned the German language of Nethersaxony, but I mostly learned it from listening to Marlene Dietrich. I hope it won’t ruin Alke’s pronunciation, but quite frankly, there’s not that much to ruin in the first place. His German is pretty horrible.

  “Und Twarres ist auch dabei,” he mentions at some point. “Am Montag.”

  I blink in surprise. “A band called Twarres is coming on Monday?” I repeat in Anglian. “That’s the first time I’ve heard of them. Who are they?”

  “Oh.” Alke looks a little bit caught. “They’re a Frisian band. I own a couple of their records.”

  He’s talking about the band from the mainland – the same one Sytse mentioned to me. “How do you know about that?” I inquire with a frown.

  “Someone mentioned it,” Alke replies vaguely, his eyes guarded.

  “Someone,” I repeat flatly. Why does Alke look as though he’s spilled the beans? “Well, cool. It must be quite a talented bunch if the Skelta invited them personally.”

  That makes Alke look even more shocked. “Hey, I should probably go,” he says all of a sudden, looking at an imaginary watch on his wrist. “I don’t want to be late. Thanks again, you’re the best.”

  “Don’t mention it.” I stare after him in utter surprise as he starts across the school yard. Well, that was weird. I can’t wait till Monday to actually see those Frisians play. But first things first – I’m due home to pick up my Jyoti LP for my appointment in Stortum.

  It feels different to be out in broad daylight on the deserted road leading to the abandoned village. I have the LP in a shopping bag dangling from the left handlebar and slowly peddle toward Royce’s cottage while looking around furtively. No one’s here – no curious classmates who followed me to see what I’m up to, and no Sytse or any shady friends of his. If I do bump into someone, I have my excuse ready – I’m doing research for my history project.

  A small sigh of relief escapes my lips when I spot Royce’s car tucked away behind a row of bushes next to the cottage. Up till this point I was afraid he’d be a no-show, but he’s here, and he’s waiting for me. Or at the very least, he’s waiting for my LP.

  I lock my bike and knock on the door. It takes quite a while for Royce to answer the door, and when he does, I see he’s only wearing old, low-slung jeans and a sleeveless white shirt. Trying not to gawk at the strong muscles in his arms too much, I peer up into his blue eyes and say: “Hi. Were you busy?”

  He chuckles. It makes his lips curl up in a smile that makes me blush a little. “Kind of. What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You’re dressed as though you were busy with a paint job or something.” I walk past him when he steps aside and drop the bag on the couch.

  “This is my off-time outfit,” he says, still with that seductive, tiny smirk around his lips. “Are you disappointed that I’m
not impeccably dressed to exude the Bolton grandeur?”

  “Hah.” He sounds like he doesn’t take his own family tradition that seriously. “No. Just surprised. Don’t let me cramp your style, please.”

  Royce gestures at the piano. Little lights are blinking on top of the case. “Actually, I was busy composing.”

  “Oh? I didn’t hear any music when I was outside.”

  He holds up a black item that, to me, looks like a set of ear warmers. “Headphones. They help me to lose myself in the music.”

  I follow the rope dangling from the black ear warmers with my eyes. It’s plugged into a hole at the front of the electric piano. “You can hear the piano through those things?” I say in awe.

  “Yeah. You can plug them into the amp, too. That’s how I usually listen to LPs when I’m alone.”

  “Ah.” I feel a tiny pang of sadness in my heart. “So you can’t really lose yourself in Jyoti’s music with me around?”

  Royce puts the headphones down and shakes his head. “It’s no problem. I like sharing her music with someone who gets her.”

  His words truly make me blush this time, so I quickly turn around to make my way to the turntable. “Your friends don’t? Get her, I mean?”

  “They’re more into trance music. You know. Local stuff.” He walks over to me and I can feel my skin tingle as he stands next to me to put the record on the player. “My mother introduced me to Jyoti’s and Maya’s music, and now she’s gone and this is all I have left of her, in a way. She’ll never hear these new songs.”

  For the first time, I don’t see his attempt to get his hands on my LP as just the whim of some spoilt, Current brat. These two artists form a link to his mother, much like Kathleen Ferrier will forever remind me of my mom. And I’d probably go through as much trouble as Royce to own all of her music, too.

  “Maybe she does listen,” I offer softly. “Don’t you believe in a life after death?”

  Royce hesitates for a moment before his mouth sets into a grim line. “We call Brandan a saint because his Light saved us from death by the Sirens,” he answers. “If someone is so preoccupied with averting death and making earthly life as comfortable as possible, I can’t believe he took life after death very seriously.”

  “You don’t pray to him?”

  “No. I have nothing to say to him. He’s gone. His Light is all that remains, and the Baeles-Weards want us to honor St. Brandan’s Fire to safeguard our life on the island, not to make sure we go somewhere nice after we die.”

  I swallow. He sounds so lost and so convinced about the truth at the same time. “Our people believe that the streams and the trees and the sea are inhabited by a spiritual presence,” I say, my voice small but steady. “And the people we love will become a part of that spirit when life is over. Freda and Fosta are the male and female principle in nature. Our God and Goddess. But when the Nixen take one of us, that person is lost forever, because they take our bodies as well as our souls.”

  “Well, that settles it then,” Royce says, his voice flat. “My mom was taken by the Sirens. She’s gone. And so is yours.”

  Tears well up in my eyes. “Don’t say that,” I whisper, sounding choked.

  His hand gently slips around my upper arm and he turns me sideways to face him. His blue eyes are dark with pain and regret. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “That was uncalled for. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  I look up at him, shyly taking a quick step back when he raises his hand to wipe my tears away. That’s just way too intimate. This whole discussion is, in fact. “Let’s just listen to the LP, okay?”

  Royce hesitates for a few seconds, then nods. “Yeah, let’s.”

  We sit down on the couch. This time, I don’t try to scoot away from him as far as possible. I don’t feel the need to. As the first song starts to play, I close my eyes and imagine my mother sitting by the seaside, her brown eyes forever sad and her blonde hair dancing in the wind. In this moment, she is here with me. She’s not lost forever, and she is watching over me as a winged creature of the Heavens, sent down by Freda. Maybe the Nixen have allowed her to come back to me as the faithful albatross that visits me so often. Maybe we don’t know what the real truth is, because the strange book we found showed me that we might have been wrong about other things, too.

  “What else did you bring?” Royce’s smooth voice breaks the silence enveloping us after side B has spun to an end.

  My eyes flutter open. “W-what?” I stutter dumbly.

  He points to the shopping bag. “Looks like there’s more music in there.”

  “Ah, yes.” I suddenly feel nervous about bringing my own stuff. Why would Royce want to listen to music I picked? “Well, I was just curious what Kathleen Ferrier would sound like on your equipment.”

  He smiles, and his eyes no longer seem hard like iron. The songs have brought him peace. I think music is his religion, in a way. “Go ahead. Put your record on,” he says invitingly.

  I comply. While fiddling with the controls to change the speed to 78, I already start humming Ye Banks and Braes. I push the button that start the turntable and lifts the arm, and then I wait.

  When Kathleen’s voice floods the room, I stand there in awe. The sound is still crackly, but the usual buzz of the diaphragm is strangely absent. Kathleen doesn’t sound tinny or harsh when she sings loudly – it’s as if she is standing right in the room with me.

  Slowly, I shuffle back to the couch, sitting down on the cushions very quietly. When I shoot a sideward glance at Royce, he looks mesmerized. He likes it – he likes ‘my’ music too. It makes me glow inside, and I no longer care why.

  “I want to hear you play,” I say abruptly once the song is over. Somehow, I want to stop him from commenting on the record. Maybe a part of me is still afraid he won’t get it, or he’ll say the wrong thing.

  “You’ll hear me play on Monday,” he says with an indulgent smile. “At Oorol.”

  Stubbornly, I shake my head. “I want to hear what you were working on before I came here.”

  Royce frowns, looking a bit taken aback. “Well, I’m not done yet. I’m still working on stuff.”

  I smirk. “Do I detect a hint of perfectionism in your refusal?”

  He bursts out laughing. The sound echoes off the walls as he gives me a surprised little smile. “Someone ever told you that you’re too cheeky for your own good, Enna?”

  “Well – yeah. They have, in fact.” I bite my lip.

  Royce rakes a hand through his floppy, black hair before patting me on the knee with it. “You’re cute,” he says.

  It’s impossible to hear whether he means cute in a little sister kind-of-way or cute in a sort-of-hot-kind-of-way, but his warm hand on my knee makes me go so horribly red that he can’t possibly miss what I am hoping his words mean. Paralyzed, I stare into his blue eyes and wish the ground would open up and swallow me whole.

  “Maybe I should go,” I squeak before he can say anything. “It’s getting late.”

  “Yeah.” His voice sounds a bit rough. “Maybe you should.”

  Avoiding his inquisitive eyes, I jump up from the couch and rush toward the turntable to take my records. With trembling fingers, I fix my gaze on the door and dump Kathleen and Jyoti in my bag.

  “See you later,” I mumble, chancing a quick look in Royce’s direction.

  He’s standing in the middle of the room, watching me with a mixture of amusement and keen interest. “When?” he inquires softly.

  I panic when he takes a step closer to me. “Tomorrow,” I blurt out. “Evening.”

  Royce cocks an eyebrow. “After the opening of Oorol?”

  Crap, that’s actually quite late. “Yeah,” I say, not willing to back down. “Ten or so?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Good. Bye now.” I storm out the door and slam it so hard that I’m afraid I’ll rouse the spirits of dead Stortumers.

  What the hell am I doing? In fact, what am I even thinking? I should stop d
eluding myself into thinking that Royce could possibly be interested in me that way. He’s twenty and I am only seventeen. He’s in college. He’s a Current celebrity. And I am a stupid little Skylger girl for agreeing to meet up with him yet again.

  10.

  When I get home, I’m afraid Dad or Sytse will be able to see it in my eyes – how flustered and confused and revved-up I am. But if so, they don’t comment. They’re both sitting in the kitchen peeling potatoes and cutting vegetables.

  “Can you pour us a mug too?” my brother pipes up when I walk over to the stove to make some tea. “You’re home late.”

  “Yeah, I was helping Alke with his German test,” I lie. “So I was busy. Dani is dropping by tonight so we can work on my own assignments, though.”

  “Relax,” Sytse grins. “You have all weekend to do your homework. I’m not going to play the evil big brother and scold you or anything.”

  This is the bad thing about lying – you always want to make the lie sound too perfect so you end up saying too much. “Thanks,” I mutter, lighting the gas stove and watching the kettle as it heats up.

  When Dani shows up here after dinner, I will have to focus on the anthology and nothing else. No more daydreaming about Royce. I don’t even want to tell my best friend how silly I’m being – she already warned me before.

  As I sip from my hot tea and stare out the window, I see storm clouds drifting in. Let’s hope the rain will fall during the night, not tomorrow afternoon during the opening ceremony. The Currents are always seated under a big tarp covering the main bleachers, while we are gathered on the town square, out in the open. That’s just the way of the world.

  Once we sit down for dinner, the mashed potatoes, onions, and carrots topped with mackerel feel like a brick in my stomach. I can’t eat more than a few bites before giving up. “I’ll save it for later,” I mumble when I see my father’s worried look. “I’m not that hungry yet.”