“Well, you know what they say, my love,” Miranda whispered as she kissed him on the forehead then slipped out of her dress and walked down into the pool with her mother. “Be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.”
Then, right before his eyes, her legs blurred together, and she grew a mermaid tail.
“You see, Mother was the Little Mermaid. But once she got married and I was born, that title passed to me.” Miranda waved a little beauty queen wave and then blew Halder a kiss.
It worked more like a left hook, because Halder’s eyes just rolled up in his head and he fell over on his side on the bench with a thump.
“Well, that went fairly well, don’t you think?” said Helmi with one of her trademark giggles.
“Perfectly!” Miranda laughed. “A double shot of espresso in the morning, and he’ll be fine.”
Judas Calls
The Manor House dock was deserted. Then a figure slipped out of the shadows and pulled a radiophone from his pocket. The old sailor looked over his shoulder cautiously before he spoke into the phone. “You told me to contact you if she was ever with another man.”
“She is seeing someone? Who?” Vasili asked.
“An American fish doctor and veterinarian for sea mammals.”
“The kind of man she would be naturally drawn to at first,” Vasili mused. “Do you think it’s really serious or just a casual encounter for a day or two?” he asked.
“I would not call you unless I felt it was something more,” the old sailor snapped. “I would not betray the duchess at all if you did not have my daughter!” he hissed into the phone. “He, of course, like any man, is in love with her. But she seems to be as infatuated with him as he is with her.”
“What makes you think so?”
“She took him to the Manor House, and he spent the night. No one outside of the staff and Princess Miranda’s advocates has ever been taken to the Manor House. And even they have never been invited to spend the night.”
“Then he must die,” Vasili stated flatly.
“What you do is your business, sir. I want to know nothing about it.”
“It is your business now,” Vasili snapped.
“You made me swear to call you if she met someone and it became serious, and I have. Our business together is done.”
“I say when it is done or not! I say if your daughter will live or die.”
“I am not a murderer,” the old sailor hissed back.
“Neither was Judas, but he was the cause of Christ’s death just the same. So I suggest you find a way to make this man have an accident, or you will find your daughter and your grandson floating in the Aegean Sea!” Certain that his threat had hit home, Vasili hung up.
The Face of Evil
“Who is Vasili?” Holger asked. He was sitting in his hotel room. It was ten in the morning, and he’d been surprised to get Mr. Canute Bruun of Bruun & Gottorp to the telephone so easily.
“Vasili Thermopolis,” Mr. Bruun answered.
“The Greek billionaire?”
“The Hag’s whipping boy!” Bruun grunted. “He must have done it. I warned the duchess—once she was married, he would kill her if he could. It was his sworn duty to the Hag.”
“The Hag, as in the Sea Hag? The creature mentioned in the document that is supposed to be Medea?” Holger was struggling to keep his sanity with all the living myths from the past three thousand years leaving tread marks on his personal life. “How does an attorney from a Danish law firm in the twenty-first century, know about, let alone believe in all this nonsense!” Holger shouted.
“As the Regent Duke of Egeskov, you now have the right and the need to know many things, Dr. Thorson, or Your Grace, as your title now requires,” Bruun said quietly.
“Now wait a second!” Holger snapped.
“No, with all due respect, I think you need to wait and hear what I have to tell you, and then we can continue our conversation from there.” There was an awkward pause as Bruun let the finality of that statement sink in.
“Okay,” Holger growled slowly after realizing nothing more would be said until he was really ready to listen.
“You and your brother were born in America, but your parents were both Danish. From what your brother told me, you grew up around all the Danish folklore and fairytales, only some of them aren’t fairytales. I can’t tell you too much about Queen Helmi before she married King Valdemar the first—”
“King Valdemar the first married princess Sofia of Sweden,” Holger interrupted him. “His ancestry is our family obsession. We’re descended from a bastard line of his,” Holger explained.
“I know,” Canute replied. “That’s what makes this all the more interesting. You see, King Valdemar did not die in his forties. He abdicated his throne in secret to his eldest son, faked his death, and then married Princess Helmi before she took up the royal mantle and assumed her duties as the queen.”
“Princess Helmi? Who is she? I’ve never heard of her,” Holger snorted in disbelief.
“Oh, you’ve heard of her many times, I can assure you. You just know her by her common name,” Bruun replied, and Holger could feel the smile in his voice over the phone.
“What is her common name?” he asked.
“The Little Mermaid,” Bruun replied.
A sigh was the most Holger could muster in reply.
“Only the true story of the Little Mermaid had a very different ending than the one Han’s Christian Anderson told. In fact, her story hasn’t ended yet.”
Holger’s head was reeling and his brain felt numb. He took a deep breath and then asked Canute to continue. He sat and listened for the next several hours, without more than a gasp or a gulp in reply, to the story of a young prince whose father died before he was born, the mermaid he fell in love with, and their heir.
Bruun told Holger how Valdemar had been fostered in a foreign court and survived an assassination attempt that claimed four other heirs to the throne. He then escaped to sail across the sea and raise an army, all by the time he was sixteen.
After ten years of civil war, Valdemar found himself the chosen monarch, supported by the Knights Templar, and was married to a princess to bring peace to the land.
All of that Holger knew, but not in such great detail. What Holger—and the rest of world—didn’t know, was to what extent the roll of the Knights Templar had played in Valdemar’s life. After years as a good king and a devoted knight of the Order, he turned to them in his time of need when he chose to leave his throne behind and pursue his love for the Little Mermaid.
In the twelfth century, the entire world believed in mermaids. The Knights Templar, steeped in the mystic and ancient teachings, paid homage and often offered sacrificial offerings to Poseidon before a voyage on their vast fleet of merchant ships. They considered it a fine idea to solidify a relationship between the Order and the House of Poseidon, or Aegir, as he was called in the Nordic lands. The Templars were also the first bankers of the medieval world and gladly took the deposit of the princely sum Valdemar transferred from the royal treasury before he abdicated. They also recorded the land grants and deeds he made for himself in his new identity as the Duke of Egeskov.
Holger listened, fascinated by the stories Bruun related of Valdemar’s life after he descended into the sea to dwell with the Little Mermaid. A magic ring from the kings of Atlantis with a Trident engraved upon it allowed Valdemar to come and go from the sea at will. And Holger felt the weight of that very same ring on his finger, as the story was told to him.
He listened to stories about the Little Mermaid ascending to the throne of Poseidon and becoming Queen of the Oceans with King Valdemar at her side.
Canute also told him stories of the birth of Miranda and about creatures called corylians, and stories of how Valdemar had lived for hundreds of years. The story of his life finely came to an end as Bruun told of his untimely death in the Battle of Krakatau in 1883, when the bitter envy and conflict with the Hag and Helmi lit
erally exploded.
The Hag had found Helmi’s happiness—her marriage to her prince—more than she could abide. With increasing revulsion, the Hag had watched Helmi take up the throne, give birth to a child and heir, and restore hope and happiness throughout the oceans, while she was exiled to the deep, alone in her misery. The Hag wanted to rule the oceans and see all immortals as miserable as she had been for so long.
The Hag—Medea—was actually the granddaughter of Poseidon through a mortal princess, and she hated the fact that her immortality had not come from him by birth. It was through Cronos, the overthrown Titan, Poseidon’s father and her great-grandfather, that she had been made immortal. But that kind of immortality was corrupted magic and did not give her immortal youth and beauty.
The Hag looked thousands of years older than she actually was. So her search for allies of great power was often hampered by their revulsion of her, and only the most evil and corrupted beings would aid her in her attempt to free the Titans. She had almost succeeded in unleashing them from Tartarus after discovering the lost Scepter of Atlantis, which was equal in power to the Trident itself. Her attempt had been a great war of earth powers deep beneath the waves.
With Valdemar’s counsel, however, Helmi had finally been victorious. But the price for victory in defeating the Titans and sealing them back into Tartarus was the 1883 eruption of Krakatau that killed over 36,000 people, hundreds of thousands of sea creatures, and also King Valdemar.
Holger listened to how Bruun’s great-great-grandfather had created Gottorp & Bruun as a legal arm of the Knights Templar and taken over the management of the affairs of the Duchy of Egeskov. Then he listened to the story of Bruun’s grandfather Frederick and Miranda. “My grandfather was a very tall, handsome man,” Bruun continued. “He was widowed in World War I. The German’s sank the ferry my grandmother was sailing on from Copenhagen to Funen, a fact that only fed his unnatural fear of the ocean and his deathly aversion to all seafood. That was the reason Grandfather and the Duchess Miranda never married.
“They kept company for over twenty years,” he explained. “She stayed eternally young and beautiful, and he grew old gracefully wearing the narwhal ring she had given him. He looked barely forty-five at age seventy. But his fear of the sea was stronger than his fear of death, even with the promise of long life from the ring. Still, Miranda did not abandon the hope that he would someday lose that fear and join her in the sea.
“For centuries, any major archeological art or mystical trinket of any value that found its way to the black market was purchased secretly by the agents of the Knights Templar. One such trinket that turned up for sale, by a precocious and prosperous young man in Mykonos, was brought to the attention of Queen Helmi.
“After World War I, she became aware that what went on in the world of man had begun to seriously affect her realm, and her worries for Miranda’s safety forced her to interact with the Order directly for the first time in almost a thousand years.
“The locket came into our hands a decade after World War II, more than seventy years after the explosion of Krakatau. It was a gold and emerald locket with the portrait of young King Valdemar the first inside. That fact alone immediately garnered the interest of the Order, and an official purchased it as a gift to Queen Helmi as a token of the Order’s esteem, and in loving memory of her king, Valdemar. Theirs was quite a love story of its own,” Bruun added.
“What the Knights Templar didn’t know at the time was that the locket had been part of the royal wedding gifts from King Valdemar to Princess Sofia. It was one of the few gifts that were not recovered from the treasure ship that was sunk by the Hag when she created the storm that brought Prince Valdemar and the Little Mermaid together. That particular locket,” Bruun explained, “was last seen around the Hag’s neck as she was banished into the depths of the abyssal plains by the Little Mermaid for sinking the treasure ship.”
“But the Battle of Krakatau would have happened long after that,” Holger interjected. “She could have lost it any time over those centuries.”
“No, she couldn’t,” clarified Bruun. “The Hag was cursed and exiled to the dark waters. If she had risen above one thousand feet, her body would have been ripped apart and her body parts scattered to the farthest reaches of the ocean.
“The entire Battle of Krakatau took place a thousand feet beneath the waves. The magic it took to seal the Titans back in Tartarus shattered all the oldest spells throughout the seas. We assumed that Medea was sealed beneath hundreds of feet of rock and sand like King Valdemar. But Valdemar was not immortal, and the Hag is. She survived and escaped, and with her banishment spell shattered, she was free to roam and hide wherever she wanted. Queen Helmi needed to be in the physical presence of the Hag to reinstate the curse or carry out its sentence.
“So the Order immediately set up a network to watch Vasili. He continued to sell rare jewels and antiquities every few years for the next few decades.
“King Valdemar had used the treasures of Poseidon to make the duchy fantastically wealthy and the Knights Templar extremely powerful, and we are very much alive and well today. Not as a secret order of warrior priests in a lost fortress, but as lawyers, bankers, accountants, and museum curators all around the globe, collecting and preserving the wealth and the knowledge of mankind, so that the best it has to offer is protected and available to the world when the time is right or the need is there.
“Vasili was using the treasure hoard of the Hag to create a vast empire to rival the largest corporations in the world. But when it came to the Knights Templar, he had a long way to go to catch up.
“Valdemar had sent jewels, treasure, and knowledge to the Templar’s church of Osterlars on Bornholm Island for almost seven hundred years. His contributions funded the Dutch East Indies Trading Company among other things, and this should give you an idea of how the Oceanus Foundation was funded as well. The trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was laid over a hundred years ago and could never have been accomplished without the permission, or the active participation, of Queen Helmi and her consort, King Valdemar. But I digress,” Canute added. “That is another long and amazing story we shall save for another time.
“Meanwhile, Vasili began to make his sales. We knew the pattern well, and recognized the kind and quality of the jewels and antiquities he was acquiring. We just waited, and we watched.
“Despite Queen Helmi’s hatred of the Hag and our recommendations that we undermine or remove Vasili all together, she insisted he be left alone. She did ask that we maintain our watch on his activities in hopes of tracing him back to the Hag.
“Every time we thought we were close to finding the Hag, all our agents would wind up dead. Even in the oceans, where we should have had the advantage, all our men were attacked by sharks or barracudas and killed. Queen Helmi did not want Miranda burdened with the knowledge of the Hag’s survival. She was afraid the princess, being young and hasty as she put it, would become bitter with revenge and tear apart the sea to find her father’s murderer. That was something Helmi wanted to do herself. But there was some kind of old magic still at work that protected the Hag, some fragment from Tartarus still in her possession, and Helmi wanted her daughter nowhere near it.
“Then, one night in 1967, a dashing thirtyish Vasili ran into Duchess Miranda of Egeskov and her “guardian,” my then-youthful, seventy year old grandfather, at the cleanup and salvage operations for the wreck of the supertanker, the Torrey Canyon, off the Cornwall Coast. Miranda had never heard of Vasili before, because most of her contact with the world above came through my grandfather, and she had no reason to be suspicious. Grandfather, of course, knew who Vasili was and immediately sent word to the office. But Vasili knew nothing of our organization, and no one suspected that he would react so quickly and with such deadly vengeance toward my grandfather, once he met Miranda.
“Even a womanizing Greek billionaire was not immune to Miranda’s beauty and charm. He fell hopelessly under her spell. He had to poss
ess her. He sensed that my grandfather was more than an elderly guardian and had him killed, making it appear to be a tragic accident. Vasili positioned himself to be there to console the grieving young duchess, but Miranda sought the sea to ease her sorrow and disappeared where there was no way for Vasili to find her.
“After years of searching, he finally gave up until they met again at the site of another ecological disaster in 1993. This time Vasili courted Miranda and won her affection, after telling her his wife had died of cancer. When she discovered this to be a lie, the Duchess Miranda confronted him, and then, once again, she disappeared. Vasili deluded himself in to believing his marriage was all that stood between them and arranged for the death of his wife to free him. He was greatly mistaken, and Miranda arranged to avoid him at all cost, which only fed his obsession. We feared he would snap once the news of her marriage to your brother reached Vasili.
“Just as we had agents that followed his every move, he had his own that followed the duchess. Any time she arrived at her estates in Denmark, the Faeroe Islands, or Bermuda, he knew. Vasili was the one who caused the chain on your bathysphere to snap, but the Princess Miranda saved your brother and took him to safety.”
Holger hissed softly at that revelation. Desperate to hear the truth about Halder, he kept his anger in check.
“When your brother’s name was entered into the records of nobility several months later, Vasili knew the truth. His hopes of somehow, someday winning Miranda’s hand in marriage were destroyed.
“Princess Miranda and Duke Halder knew they were being hunted and remained in the sea and on the move. They believed that, in time, with their longevity, they would outlive the problem, and they turned their concerns elsewhere.
“Under Duke Halder’s guidance, the Oceanus Foundation was changed into a major force for environmental protection and oceanographic research. He laid out an extensive step-by-step process that we have followed faithfully.
All The Mermaids In The Sea Page 26