The Sea King’s Daughter

by Barbara Michaels

  The dentist had two emergencies that morning. I finished the article and then went back and reread parts of it. What I couldn’t figure out was why the author was so antagonistic to my father. He had been one of the first to support the Atlantis-Crete identification, long before it was fashionable. Now it appeared that he had been right all along. Yet the author had nothing good to say about him. I decided that maybe the man had met Professor Frederick somewhere and had taken a violent dislike to his face, or his habit of eating peas with a knife, or something. After all, my mother hadn’t been able to get along with him, and she was a pretty tolerant woman.

  However, the tone of the article set my teeth on edge. Every sentence held a veiled insult or an open sneer. The ultimate effect was exactly the opposite of what the author intended: my sympathies were with the victim, not the attacker.

  Don’t imagine that the article was a big turning point in my life. I didn’t develop a sudden passion for classical archaeology or burn to defend my poor abused father. I didn’t think more kindly of him; I rather suspected he had brought the abuse on himself.

  Yet that article was the first of two coincidences (if they were coincidences) that were to change my life. The second occurred a year later. Jim and I found our Spanish galleon.

  I’m an excellent swimmer. I don’t claim any credit for it; most people would be good if they had spent as much time in the water as I have, with a coach like my dad. I’m not Olympic class, but I’m good, and I took to scuba gear the way the Ugly Duckling took to being a swan.

  No, the Ugly Duckling reference is not meant to be a subtle description of myself. Swimming is a good way to develop the body, and my figure is all right. I look healthy. Reddish-blond hair (hence my nickname), green eyes, and the usual number of other features-nothing extraordinary, one way or the other.

  Where was I? Oh, yes, the Spanish galleon.

  The part of Florida where I live, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Miami, has seen hundreds of shipwrecks. There’s a reef out from our beach that has murdered ships for centuries. If Columbus had come this way, the Santa María might not have made it back to Spain. We call it Devil’s Reef. The Spaniards called it El Diablo, and they knew it well.

  After the conquistadores conquered Mexico and Peru, they started looting on a scale that makes other conquerors look like amateurs. Tons of gold and silver and jewels were carried away to Spain. Every year the treasure fleet assembled in Cuba, convoys of six to ten ships. They planned to set sail for Spain in June, before the hurricane season. Some fleets carried as much as thirty million dollars’ worth of treasure. They crossed the Florida Straits and followed the coastline north until they hit the Gulf Stream; then they turned eastward for the long, hazardous crossing.

  Some of them never made it. Pirates and storms took their toll, but the greatest danger came from the condition of the ships themselves. Clumsy, topheavy, loaded to the gunwales with treasure, they were difficult to maneuver in any weather, and doomed in a hurricane. The coastline they hugged on their way north has some of the worst reefs in the world, and navigational skills were not highly developed. I don’t know what percentage of the great galleons were lost during that period, but I know that the coast is thick with the wrecks of ships driven off course and ripped apart by the jagged rocks. Devil’s Reef claimed its share.

  So why are the wrecks still there? Why isn’t everybody bringing up gold bars and pieces of eight?

  There are a lot of reasons. Sometimes a vessel sank straight down into deep water. If the depth is great enough, salvage operations become prohibitively expensive. Most of the time it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact location of a wreck, even when survivors described it to Spanish authorities. When a ship struck a reef, it was usually traveling at high speed, driven by winds. A projecting spike of coral would rip off the bottom, but the ship itself might be driven on over the reef, scattering cargo from the wound as it went. The remains could be strewn over hundreds of yards of territory, and as time passed, the hand of nature smoothed over the intrusive material. Heavy objects sank into sand or mud. Chemicals in seawater corroded metal. Marine organisms ate wood and clustered on other materials. Within a few years nothing would be recognizable-just lumps and bumps, indistinguishable from natural formations except to a highly trained eye. And it isn’t all fun and games down there. Sharks, barracuda, moray eels, and other live hazards have to be handled with care. Sharp edges of coral and rusty beer cans add their kicks. Then there are the so-called “diving diseases”-nitrogen narcosis, oxygen poisoning, air embolism, and caisson disease, popularly known as the bends, to mention only a few. Treasure hunting is a chancy profession. The big discoveries make headlines, but most people spend their whole lives looking in vain. The successful strikes are usually the result of back-breaking work, long months of research in dusty colonial archives, and luck.

  Our find was one of the rare exceptions. In our case, it was pure luck.

  Jim always said there was a wreck somewhere offshore. We had been picking up stray coins for years-blackened, irregular scraps of metal that bore no resemblance to the gold doubloons of historical fiction. Once I found half a dozen pieces of eight on the sandy bottom, thirty feet out. That discovery moved Jim to some halfhearted research, but he didn’t get far; like me, he is not academically inclined, and the records are all in archaic Spanish. So we weren’t expecting anything that day in June when we went for our morning swim. We hadn’t been to the beach for several days. The weather had been bad, and the night before we had had a humdinger of an early tropical storm, with high winds and heavy rain.

  It was a gorgeous day. The beach was covered with debris, but the air sparkled. I went down seventy-five feet offshore, and I spotted the cannon immediately, by its shape. It was too regular to be a natural formation. But I couldn’t believe it. I had been in that area a dozen times before. Apparently the storm had swept the sea bottom like a big broom, removing a deep layer of sand.

  There were three other cannon behind the first. Then I saw it. It looked like a jagged greenish-brown rock, but the minute my eyes lit on it I felt a funny prickle run down my back. I swam over to it. There were coins all over the bottom around it, silver coins, some lying singly, some stuck together in clumps. I had read about finds like this, and I knew that the big lump also consisted of coins-hundreds of them, welded together by chemical action.

  I don’t know how I got it out. We found out later the darned thing weighed over thirty pounds. All I remember is doing a war dance with Jim. We were both whooping and jumping up and down and smacking each other’s hands.

  Jim called the museum right away and the state archaeological service took over, but they let us work along with the pros. The historians figured that the ship was one of the galleons from the plate fleet of 1735. It had carried a couple of million dollars’ worth of gold and silver coins. Of course we didn’t find nearly that much; the cargo had been scattered and washed away over two hundred years.

  But it was a fabulous summer. Mother couldn’t hassle me about getting a job, not with an opportunity like that available, so I spent most of the summer in the water, which is just the way I wanted to spend it.

  I also enjoyed the publicity we got. Most of it was from local papers, but some of the national magazines sent photographers, and there was one smashing picture of me in the National Geographic article. I was back in school for my senior year when the issue came out, and I had to take a certain amount of ribbing. “Pretty young Sandy Bishop, the discoverer of the wreck…” Theyposed me lying languorously on the beach, half buried in silver coins.

  I managed to live that one down, and by February everybody had forgotten about the article-everybody except me. I caught myself daydreaming when I should have been studying, remembering the glory of it all, and wondering if that was the last exciting thing that would ever happen to me. The weather was bad-it is bad in February, even in Florida -and I was not looking forward to graduation, assuming I would graduate, which
was not at all certain, thanks to a particularly boring Soc course and a professor who was giving me a hard time. I knew I had to make it, though. Jim and Mother were worried about money.

  Worried about money, after finding millions of dollars worth of treasure? Most people would read that sentence with an incredulous smile. If a professional treasure hunter read it he would smile, too-a wry, pained smile of sympathy. I know of one pro who dumped his coins back into the ocean after getting his tax bill. There are complicated laws governing the way the find is divided-it isn’t a case of “finders keepers.” The value of the treasure depends on what you can get for it on the open market, but you pay taxes on the basis of a standard determined by the mysterious gentlemen from internal revenue. The problem got so complicated I never did understand all the ramifications, but poor Jim used to sit for hours, brooding over the masses of accumulated legal forms, holding his head in his hands and groaning softly. Eventually we might make money out of the discovery, but it would take years to settle the accounts, and there were times when Jim thought it would be easier to donate the coins to a museum. The point is that at that moment we were hard-up; and I knew I had to get out and stop sponging off my parents. Work, in other words. It was a depressing thought.

  I was considering my prospects one evening in February. I had a single room that year, so there was nobody there but me and an unfinished, overdue Soc paper, which lay on the desk staring accusingly at me. I had just had a talk with my adviser about job prospects. They were as grim as the weather. I was preparing to be a Phys. Ed. teacher, not because the prospect of coaching fat little girls appealed to me, but because there isn’t much else you could do with my skills, or lack thereof. Assuming I could latch on to a job for the following year, it wouldn’t start until September; and that meant a summer of clerking in the drugstore or waiting on tables. The idea was less than alluring, especially after all the fun I had had the previous summer.

  So, when I heard the knock on the door, I was glad to have something interrupt my gloomy thoughts. I was a little surprised, because I had stuck up a big sign-“Term Paper. Do not interrupt on pain of death”-and usually my friends were pretty good about that sort of thing. At that point, though, I’d have even welcomed an enemy.

  Maybe that’s who it was-an enemy. I knew him right away, although he had changed a lot since the picture in the magazine was taken. I knew him in my blood and bones. It was my father.

  Chapter 2

  I

  I COULD HAVE RESPONDED TO THE APPARITION IN ONE of two ways. I might have said coolly, “Yes?” as if I didn’t know him. Or I might have come up with something coolly ironic-“Well, well, long time no see,” or some other equally witty remark. The key word is cool. I was not cool. I was thunder-struck; and my expression showed it.

  I would have found him easier to deal with if he had been shabby and stooped and defeated. He was shabby, all right; his suit coat didn’t match his pants, and it was worn and spotted, but the impression was one of disinterest, not of poverty. And physically he looked impressive. He was taller than Jim and he didn’t have Jim’s little pot tummy. I couldn’t help making the comparison; it was disloyal, but I couldn’t help it. If you had seen the two of them side by side, you’d have picked this man as the athlete. He had hardly any gray in his thick brown hair. Even his face was young looking. His eyes were a funny, frosty gray; they studied me with detached interest from under heavy dark brows. He didn’t smile. His chin was square. It was my chin. I had never particularly liked the shape of my chin.

  He looked me up and down, with that irritating, impersonal stare. I felt like a horse being appraised by a prospective buyer. Then he said,

  “Ariadne. Yes, I would have recognized you, even without the photograph in National Geographic. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  Still speechless, I stepped back. He came in and closed the door. Then he sat down in the sole armchair the room boasted. Casually, quite at ease, he glanced around. The room was a mess. Papers, books, clothes, sports gear all over. The bed wasn’t made. He didn’t seem to notice. His eyes lit on the photo on the dresser. It was my favorite picture of Mother and Dad, enlarged from a snapshot I had taken. They were in the front yard. It was a breezy day, and Mother’s hair was blowing. She was laughing, and she looked about twenty. Jim had his arm around her. He was laughing too, and he looked like the wonderful guy he is, bald head, pot, and all.

  Something in my father’s expression made me angry. The warmth loosened my tongue.

  “Mother is fine,” I said.

  “I assumed she would be.”

  “Oh, did you?” I sat down on the bed and glared at him. “You certainly never bothered to find out.”

  “Why should I?”

  If he had sounded angry or defensive, I would have had an answer. But he didn’t. He just sounded surprised. Before I could find sufficiently cutting words, he went on, in the same calm voice.

  “It was obvious, even when you were an infant, that you would not be interested in pursuing a scholarly career. Perhaps if you had been a boy I might have communicated with you more regularly.”

  “Male chauvinist,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?” His broad forehead wrinkled. Then it cleared. “No,” he said, in the same dispassionate voice. “It was not your sex, but your lack of intellectual capacity that guided my decision.”

  A funny thing happened then. I looked at him sitting there, perfectly at home, with a daughter he hadn’t seen for almost twenty years-a daughter whom he had rejected because at the age of two she had failed to display sufficient intellectual capacity. He looked-no, not smug, that word is too strong-he looked self-satisfied. He had explained himself, and he expected me to understand, and to agree with his assessment. The notion that he might be wrong-that he might be irritating or cruel or unreasonable-had never entered his head.

  Oddly enough, this didn’t anger me. You can’t feel anger with a blind man because he can’t see. For the first time in the insane interview I relaxed.

  “How could you tell?” I asked curiously. “What tests do you administer to an infant to find out whether she has an aptitude for classical archaeology?”

  He waved the question away with an impatient flick of his hand.

  “That is beside the point, Ariadne. What does matter is that I was mistaken as to your usefulness. Not because my assessment was incorrect, but because circumstances have changed. The field of underwater archaeology has developed since then. Not that I had any reason to suppose that you would develop a talent for that sort of thing-”

  “You should have tried throwing me into a pond,” I suggested.

  Mother had once said my father was the only man she had ever known who had absolutely no sense of humor. My remark wasn’t all that funny, but it should have won a small social smile. The corners of my father’s long, thin lips remained straight.

  “That would not have answered,” he replied, with complete seriousness. “And, as I have said, the field of underwater archaeology has developed since-”

  “Okay, okay,” I interrupted. “I get the point. See here-uh-”

  “You had better call me Frederick. A more intimate appellation would not only be out of place, considering our relationship, but it would prove an embarrassment in the situation I propose to outline.”

  “ Frederick,” I said experimentally. “Fred?”

  “I dislike nicknames.”

  “Well, I don’t. Nobody ever calls me Ariadne. I hate the name. If I call you Frederick, you’ll have to call me Sandy.”

  He considered the suggestion thoughtfully. Then he nodded.

  “Although,” I added, “I don’t know why we should call each other anything. Is this supposed to be the beginning of a new and beautiful relationship? Because I don’t think-”

  “You don’t think,” he interrupted. “If you did, you would understand what I am leading up to. I assure you, I should be more direct if you would stop distracting me with side issue
s.”

  “Oh, I’m not that stupid. You saw the article in Geographic-what were you doing reading a pop mag like that? Anyhow, you decided that your stupid daughter might have a few talents you had not expected. Have you got a specific job in mind, or are you propositioning me generally?”

  “I have a specific job in mind.”

  It was the weirdest conversation. The most peculiar thing about it was that it didn’t seem weird, like the events of a bizarre dream that seem entirely reasonable in the context of the dream. The man’s self-confidence was so complete that it made his behavior seem right, somehow. I had never met anyone like him. Few people have, because most human beings suffer from self-doubt and insecurity, whether they express it openly or try to hide it under blankets of arrogance. Not this guy. Frederick. My father.

  “…I could have obtained all the personnel I needed if those fools in the antiquities service hadn’t refused me permission to dive,” he was saying, as I came out of my reverie.

  “Wait a minute,” I said dizzily. “You mean… Start at the beginning. Where is this dig of yours?”

  “On Thera,” he said impatiently. “One of the islands in the Santorini group. They have assigned me an area where they do not expect me to find anything of importance. Fortunately Mistropolous has just been appointed head of the service and he has some respect for my ideas. But even he-”

  He went on berating the Greek archaeological department, while I tried to sort things out. I suspected I would have to do a lot of sorting with him. He took so much for granted. I pitied his poor students, if he ever taught a class.

  Thanks to the magazine article in the dentist’s office, I knew that Santorini was the volcanic island that had blown itself to pieces in the fifteenth century B.C. Several archaeological expeditions had worked on the main island of Thera; I gathered that Frederick ’s concession was not near any of the places that had produced juicy finds, but off in a corner where, it was fondly hoped, he wouldn’t cause any trouble. I already knew him well enough to suspect that was a vain hope.