The Sea King’s Daughter

by Barbara Michaels

  The smell of the frying fish made me realize how hungry I was, so I opened a can of baked beans and ate that, cold, while the fish cooked. It improved my disposition slightly. I looked at Frederick and for a second I almost felt sorry for him. Not that he wasn’t perfectly happy with his cold stew and his boring book, but he looked so alone.

  “Want some fish?” I asked.

  “I have eaten.” He didn’t look up from his book.

  “Nothing that did you any good. It’s ridiculous the way we’ve been living on this canned junk. The bay is full of sea food and there are some nice-looking vegetables in the shops. From now on I’m going to the village every afternoon and buy stuff to cook for supper.”

  He didn’t answer, but his nose quivered a little when I pushed a plate of fish and tomatoes under it. He reached for a fork.

  I grabbed the book out of his hand. He started to expostulate. I said severely, “I refuse to waste good food on a man who isn’t giving it his full attention. Anyhow, I want to talk to you.”

  “Mph,” said Frederick, or words to that effect. He took a bite of fish and burned his mouth and swore.

  “Tsk, tsk,” I said. “Such language.”

  “You might have mentioned-”

  “That it was hot? You’re a brilliant scholar; I assumed you could figure that out yourself.”

  Frederick blew on the next bite. He managed to look dignified and disagreeable even when performing this homely act.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Lots of things. For a starter, who was that woman?”

  “Woman?” He frowned. For a minute I thought he was putting on an act. Then I realized he wasn’t that good an actor.

  “Oh,” he said, his brow clearing. “That woman. I have no idea. She reminded me momentarily of someone I knew-briefly-many years ago. It could not possibly be the same person.”

  He fell silent, staring at the fish poised on his fork. Whatever his relationship with that someone he had known years ago, the memory of it was not a happy one. His face looked almost human; there was pain and regret in its lines. Then he shook his head and went on eating.

  “Even if she were the same,” he said, as if to himself, “it would not matter. It was in the past. Over. Finished.”

  “You sound like Jim,” I said, watching him curiously. “He was telling me tonight how people have to forget the past.”

  “An unorthodox attitude for an archaeologist,” said Frederick dryly.

  “You know what he means.”

  “Quite possibly I do. The past is a subject for scholarly study, not for emotion. Now-is there any other topic you wish to discuss? I am anxious to finish my chapter. Vermeule’s arguments are so puerile-”

  “Don’t you want to talk about the-the underwater business? We have a lot of plans to make, seems to me.”

  “I have made plans. For the time being you will continue to work at the dig in the morning. After lunch, while the men take their infernal siesta, you will dive. If you are late in returning, I will complain to Nicholas about the irresponsibility of modern youth. That will hide our real intent.”

  He looked so pleased at this childish stratagem that I almost laughed.

  “No,” I said patiently. “I told you, I won’t dive alone. Especially not right after lunch! These are strange waters to me. I don’t know what the hell is out there.”

  “I see. In that case we will have to get in a few hours before we go to the dig. The sun rises before six-”

  I groaned. Frederick ignored me.

  “And all day Sunday,” he went on. “Perhaps in a few days you will feel more competent and can continue alone.”

  There was no point in arguing with him. I shrugged.

  “Okay. You’ll have to wake me up; I don’t get up before dawn willingly. Now suppose you tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

  “Anything that is not a natural formation.”

  “That’s a lot of help. Jars, I suppose. What about anchors?”

  “The question of anchors is interesting.” Frederick ’s face brightened. “It has been claimed that before the seventh century B.C. ships did not carry anchors. That seems to be extremely poor reasoning. There must have been some method of stopping a ship, and the pierced stone, tied to a cable or rope, would seem an obvious solution that would occur to the most primitive mind. A triangular stone, with a hole in the center, has been identified by one authority as a Minoan anchor. Certainly metal anchors were not used until-”

  I sighed ostentatiously and interrupted.

  “Pierced stones. They are not going to be very conspicuous. How about masts?”

  “They used them, of course. Whether they would survive-”

  “These amphorae you talked about. Would they be the same shape as the ones we found on the dig?”

  “Yes. Long, two-handled, with a narrow neck and a pointed base.”

  “What else?”

  “There could be,” said Frederick, “anything down there.”

  “Well, I guess that gives me something to go on with. Suppose I do find something. How do I mark the spot so I can find it the next time I dive?”

  “I have given that matter some thought. An inflatable globule of some sort is the obvious answer; yet I am reluctant to leave a marker that might alert others. The process of triangulation…”

  He went on talking, but I stopped listening. The conversation had become pointless and rather pathetic. We were like a couple of kids making solemn plans to build a rocket ship. Neither of us knew the first thing about what we were doing.

  “We’ll start tomorrow, then,” I said, collecting the dishes. There was no use being Women’s Lib about the housework; if I had been a man, Frederick would still have expected me to do it.

  I had my back turned when he said unexpectedly, “You don’t believe you will find anything, do you?”

  “Huh?” I turned. “I didn’t say-”

  “Your conviction is implicit in every word you have said.” His eyes narrowed. “Nor can I blame you. You seem to have the rudiments of a logical mind; a pity it hasn’t been trained. I suppose I must show you this. It was found in the bay.”

  He held out his hand.

  The light wasn’t good. For a second I had the horrible impression that his palm had turned hard and shiny. Midas? Then I saw that he was holding something, a flat, irregular object that covered his palm from the wrist to the base of his fingers. It shone with the glint of gold-the one substance that does not corrode, in soil or seawater.

  I snatched at it. He snarled a warning, but there was no need, it wasn’t as fragile as it looked. The underlying metal was badly corroded; it showed green and rotten around the ragged edges, but the flat top surface was covered with a hard, shiny substance like black plastic. Into this black surface tiny golden figures of animals and flowers and men had been set. There was a cat, with a bird in its mouth; two lotus blossoms; and a man, a hunter, with a long spear and one of the man-tall, figure-eight Minoan shields. The tiny figures were done with such delicacy and vigor that you could sense the agonized struggle of the bird and the lithe ferocity of the cat.

  Frederick didn’t have to tell me what it was. I had seen the daggers from the Shaft Graves at Mycenae in the Athens Museum. This was part of the blade of another such inlaid dagger. The daggers in Athens had been found on the mainland, but they were believed to be of Cretan workmanship. They had been found only in royal graves-rare imports, so highly prized that they were buried with their dead owners.

  “Okay,” I said, with a long breath. “I don’t know whether I believe in your ships. But you’ve convinced me; there’s something down there.”

  Chapter 6

  I

  BY FOLLOWING A PATH ACROSS THE HEADLAND WE were able to reach the bay of the villa and save swimming time. I was thinking about Frederick when I proposed the land route, but I was also remembering Jim’s warning. I could at least minimize the time I spent in the water under Frederick �
��s unreliable supervision.

  As we walked along the path, the roof of the villa came into sight on our left.

  “I wonder if we’re trespassing,” I said. “Maybe that’s their private bay down there.”

  “The sea is open to all,” said Frederick vaguely.

  “Well, we can but try. If we get warned off, or shot at, it’s your problem.”

  Frederick didn’t answer; the question didn’t seem to concern him. We turned toward the cliff, which was lower here than it was on our section of the coast, and climbed down to the water.

  I hadn’t slept too well the night before. I had lain awake for a long time, thinking about what Frederick had told me. In spite of my doubts and reservations, the lure of hidden treasure had infected me. The description of the ships, tumbled and scattered across the ocean floor like bones in a marine graveyard, was so fantastic it sounded like a scene out of Jules Verne. Yet Frederick ’s theories made sense. The southern coast of Thera, the nearest part of the island to the motherland of Crete, would be the logical place for a major port. Some archaeologists believed that the capital city must have been in the center of the island, which had collapsed into the caldera. But this assumption seemed to be based on the Atlantis legend, as recorded by Plato; and with all due respect to Plato, the details of his story were highly questionable. It simply didn’t make sense to have a big city in the middle of an island when the sea was the main highroad of communication. In Crete the cities were on the coast or within easy reach of the coastline. I didn’t believe Plato’s account of a man-made channel three hundred feet wide and a hundred feet deep that allowed ships to reach a central harbor.

  The central part of the island wasn’t the only part that had subsided. There was another caldera on the south coast, according to maps I had seen. That’s where the main harbors must have been, on the lee side of the island, the part nearest to Crete.

  So when I slid into the water I wouldn’t have been surprised to see submerged towers and mammoth walls, with fish swimming in and out of the empty window frames. I knew better-but I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  I was using a snorkel but no air tanks, because I didn’t have them or any means of filling them. I couldn’t bring my own tanks; they were too bulky to carry and they would have been useless anyway, without a compressor to refill them.

  Frederick had done nothing about supplying these necessary items, and his vagueness on the subject was a point against his claims. It was almost as if he were afraid to give me the equipment that would prove or disprove his story. I could see the difficulty; as soon as he started making inquiries about scuba gear, the port authorities in Phira would learn about it. Frederick claimed “they” were suspicious and antagonistic already. He might be exaggerating, but I had read about divers in Greece and Turkey having trouble with government officials. And there was no use telling him he should have thought about these things before he planned the project.

  However, my preliminary survey had convinced me that I could do a lot of exploring without scuba gear. The water was fairly shallow and warm. In fact it felt warmer than the cool morning air, and it closed around me like welcoming arms.

  The beauty of it hit me first, the way it always does. This sea floor didn’t have the luxuriant junglelike vegetation of the reefs off Florida, but the translucence of the water gave objects a pristine, shimmery look, as if they were encased in clear plastic. Sunlight sifted down through the cool green depths and danced on the sandy bottom. It was surprisingly clean; there was almost no marine growth and no mud. Not that the bottom was level-far from it. There were patches of relatively smooth sand, black or white, the black being lava sand. But most of the surface was a jumble of rocks and stones. With a little imagination you could believe you were seeing the ruins of a city strewn across the acres of the bay. Tumbled heaps might have been fallen towers; rock ridges looked like the remains of walls, with gaping holes for doors and windows. But I knew that what I saw was not man-made. The rubble consisted of pumice and magma ejected from the volcano, mixed with fragments of broken lava flow and stones from the collapsed cliffs. Some of them, worn smooth by water, resembled worked stones to an astonishing degree. There had been reports of sunken quays in another part of the island-long strips of stone so straight it was hard to believe they had been shaped by nature. But they were beach rock, natural concrete formed by water running over limestone and the silica of lava and pumice.

  There was only one way of searching the area systematically, and that was to swim a sort of grid pattern, back and forth. It would take a long time because I would have to check every suspicious-looking formation.

  The sun was fully up by that time, and the eastern sky was a tapestry of blazing colors. I waved at Frederick, who was sitting hunched up on a rock looking like an irritated albatross. He gave me a limp flap of the hand, and I went down again. I struck out for the mouth of the bay, keeping fairly close to the south coastline. The water got deeper as I went on; at the mouth of the bay it was about fifty feet. I could work down there, but not for long. The rock walls came down sheer into the water, but they were uneven; I could climb out if I had to. I decided to go on out a little farther.

  I was swimming with my face in the water watching the scene below. There was considerable activity, fish of all sizes scuttling around. The visibility was excellent.

  All of a sudden there was nothing down there. A few fish, yes. But no bottom, only a gaping black gulf. The edge was as sharp as the rim of the Grand Canyon, and I had a feeling the bottom was almost as far down.

  There aren’t too many things in the water that scare me, but that did. I went flapping back from the edge like a kitten on a glass-topped table. When I could see bottom under me I floated for a minute or two, getting my breath back.

  Then I went back to the chasm and dived.

  Not down into it, of course, but near the rim. I had to do it to compensate for that attack of nerves. I’m not ashamed of being afraid; caution is a sign of good sense. But this wasn’t a rational fear. It was fear of the lightless depths, fear of the dark; peering down into the abyss I half expected to see some monstrous bulk heave itself out of the water, trailing tentacles and staring with big evil eyes full of a cruel intelligence… It was ridiculous. I could drown just as fast in five feet of water as in five hundred; and the Kraken is an imaginary monster.

  There was no way I was ever going to get down into those depths. This was part of the outer caldera, and if it was anything like the central bay, it was hundreds of feet deep. Nothing less than a specially designed submarine would ever penetrate the abyss.

  I’d had enough. I wasn’t nervous anymore, but I’d had enough for one day. I went back to the place where Frederick was waiting, and rose up out of the water at his feet, spitting out my mouthpiece and pushing my mask up.

  “Well?” he demanded. “What did you find?”

  Nothing.” I pulled myself up onto the rocks and reached for a towel. “If you mean ruins or wrecks. But there sure is a hell of a big hole out there.”

  “Ah, yes, the outer caldera. Nothing would have survived down there. The pressure must be enormous.”

  I stood up.

  “Let’s go. I’m cold and hungry.”

  As we crossed the plateau back toward the house, I was surprised to find my eyes pricking, almost as if I wanted to cry. I decided it must be fatigue. I had come to terms with my father a long time before, there was no excuse for feeling hurt because he thought of his antiquities first and me second. No, that was a misstatement. He didn’t think of me at all.

  II

  I started the search next morning. It took two hours to make the first crossing of the bay and I was bushed when I finished. The nervous strain was what wore me out; I was so painfully conscious of my ignorance and so afraid I would miss something. The following day I started the second crossing, ten feet beyond the first. Since the bay got wider and the water got deeper, I wasn’t able to finish in two hours.

  T
he job would have been much easier with proper scuba gear. Even though the water wasn’t deep, only about thirty feet, I had to spend a lot of time on the bottom. I could see why Frederick was unwilling to ask about a compressor, but one thing we had to have, and soon, was a boat, or even an inflatable raft-something I could anchor out in the middle of the bay, in case I needed to get out of the water in a hurry. If I did get into trouble, Frederick wasn’t going to be much help perched on a rock fifty yards away.

  So, when he tried to haul me out of the sack on Sunday morning I refused to budge. I had to meet Jim at ten anyhow. Frederick was annoyed when I told him of the appointment, which I had seen no reason to mention earlier. I told him Jim might come looking for me if I didn’t show up, and finally Frederick gave in. He promised to see what he could do about a boat.

  I put on my best flowered shift over my bathing suit, got my mask and flippers, and started for town. I hadn’t gone ten yards before I was dripping with sweat. It was unseasonably hot, even for the Mediterranean. The air was close and breathless, and the sky had a queer hazy look. I was looking forward to getting into the water, and that wasn’t all I was looking forward to. When I saw Jim at one of the tables on the hotel terrace my heart gave a jump.

  He was fully dressed, in old jeans and a blue shirt, and as soon as I was within hailing distance I called out, “I thought we were going swimming.”

  “Have some coffee and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Hot,” I said, mopping my brow.

  “Earthquake weather,” said Jim.

  I gave him a startled look. He grinned.

  “That’s what the men are saying. It’s possible. This area is seismically unstable.”

  “I know all about the history of Thera,” I said. “But I didn’t think-”

  “No problem,” Jim said smugly. “We have quakes all the time in California. Only I’ve never been in the water when the earth shook, and I’m not sure I want to try it.”