Another strong push of current curled around the column and Jafo peeked around the front, then wished he hadn’t. “A soton!”
The great gray creature had at least thirty tentacles, all of them twice the length of any full-grown merman. It was angling straight for the entryway of the pintu and Jafo knew from having learned about them in his education that it had no bones and therefore would easily be able to pour itself through the door. Into where Daria and Ajibo were. And there was no way he’d make it the length of the portico in time to distract the monster.
That was when he remembered the hole in the wall that he always swam out of when preparing to stargaze. It seemed like aeons past that he’d played in the pintu and gone to the roof, sticking his eyes out of the water to see the stars in the night sky. Such childish things from a different life were no longer distractions he had time for.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Pana before thrusting her toward the soton.
He didn’t wait to see if it took the bait, swimming up as fast as he could to the hole in the front portion of that side’s wall. He went through it and at first couldn’t see Ajibo and Daria. Then the tidakam’s glow made its presence known just behind the altar near the back wall as the soton swished past the entry toward Pana’s body. Jafo used the distraction to swim to Ajibo, who held a frightened Daria in his arms, hidden in the shadows quite well save for the pink glow. He’d have to see about wrapping that thing up in the future so it didn’t give their position away in times like this.
Times like this, when a deadly soton was writhing its way into the pintu.
“Hurry,” Jafo said, his hand on Ajibo’s forearm. Ajibo nodded, but the soton seemed to know exactly what Jafo’s course had been, for it slithered along the top portion of the front wall and then into the corner, effectively sealing off the hole in the adjacent wall. It was the only spot, other than the door, where they could get out of the building.
“Now what?” Ajibo asked.
Jafo stared at him. “You’re older than I am!”
“You’re the Protector!”
“My father was in the patrols once,” Daria supplied.
Jafo narrowed his eyes. “If you’re the military man here, some battle suggestions would be helpful!” He kept glancing at the soton, but it wasn’t moving from its perch.
“We got attacked by a nagala on my first day,” Ajibo explained sheepishly. “All but me and Talo died. That’s the extent of my military experience.”
Jafo wanted to bang his head against the wall.
“What happened to Pana?”
“Some tiny little pisada pierced her heart.”
Ajibo’s eyebrow twitched.
“Do you know what it was?”
“Was the end tipped with a triangular shaped piece of metal or stone?”
Jafo thought back to the one that had sailed by as he cowered in the corner with Pana. “Yes, the front of it bore such an object.”
“It is called an arrow. The mechanisms which fire them were recently introduced into the patrols. Well, it was recent five years ago.”
Jafo’s entire attention was on the soton now. It seemed to be waiting for them to make a move. Whatever that move was, Jafo was pretty sure it’d turn them into soton food. He looked wildly around, praying for some hole he’d never found before to make itself known. But there was none; he knew the pintu as well as he knew his own tail.
He glanced down at his new tail. Not anymore.
The tidakam glowed more brightly and the soton stirred. Jafo grabbed the thing from Daria’s hands, feeling like he should just smash it. But the moment his palms touched it, it glowed even brighter and an odd feeling encased his fingers. A sudden thought occurred to him: he’d used the tidakam to heal.
Would he be able to use it…to kill?
* * *
The dari nodded and smiled, then crouched and opened her arms to Mateo. “Grandmother!” he cried as he ran into them and held onto her neck. She rose back to full height, towering over Sirena, cradling the child.
“Grandmother?” Sirena stared at Aea. She was so beautiful, so amazingly perfect. “You are Mateo’s grandmother?”
“I am. And you, Ima, are his Protector.”
Sirena frowned. “How did that happen?”
“He wishes it so.”
A groan from the other side of the cave interrupted Sirena’s confusion. “Omaro!” She ran to him, the glowing tidakam still so bright she had to tuck it against her side to see properly. Kneeling by his side, she laid her left hand upon his arm.
“Please, Aea, will you not help him?”
“I must not interfere, Sirena. But you can help him.”
“I? But I cannot heal injuries this extensive.”
“Alone, perhaps not. But you have the tidakam.”
Sirena looked down to where the sphere was mostly hiding in between her arm and her body.
“It is one of only two. The Protector of Mateo’s twin has the other.”
“Twin.” Sirena leapt to her feet. “Then there is a merling!”
“Indeed.”
Sirena pulled the tidakam out from hiding and held it in her right hand, palm upturned. Closing her eyes out of necessity, she reached her left hand out to hold it over Omaro’s quivering form. But she had no idea what to do. What to think. What to say.
“Open your mind, Sirena.”
She gulped, knowing full well that if she couldn’t do this, Omaro would die. And then where would she be, a petite unwanted ima supposedly acting as Protector for a prophesied child? Impossible situation. She needed a strong man like Omaro to defend and protect them both and she knew it.
The tidakam felt warm to her hand. After a few seconds, it began vibrating. And then all doubt was replaced by peace and understanding and she envisioned the bright pink light coming forth from the sphere and blanketing Omaro’s body. It bathed the man in its glow in her mind, surrounding him lovingly. Heal what ails this man, good of heart and stout of mind. Bring him back to his son. She opened her eyes, no longer blinded by the light. “Bring him back to his destiny.”
As though she had willed it into being, a column of pink connected the tidakam to a cocoon of light which hid Omaro’s slumped form from view. She waited, not knowing what would or wouldn’t happen. If she tried and failed, would Mateo ever forgive her? Would Aea? Never in all her nineteen years had Aea appeared in form, nor spoken to her with her voice. It had always been inside Sirena’s mind, leading her on more than one occasion to doubt her own sanity. Yet now the dari was here, holding Mateo in her arms and also, apparently, was the child’s grandmother.
Even as the pink light around Omaro began to swirl, pulsing in an ebb and flow of energy, a thought occurred to Sirena. If Aea was his grandmother, that meant…it could only mean…Mateo wasn’t just something the daris had prophesied. He was a dari!
Aea’s voice floated to her from somewhere that felt far away. “Not entirely, but we share blood.”
No surprise that Aea read her mind, of course, but the revelation that Mateo wasn’t all meran nearly broke the strand of concentration still pointed at healing Omaro. Sirena redoubled her efforts, focusing solely on healing Omaro’s injuries. After several minutes the pink light began to dissipate, glittering as it melted back into the clear air around them. The column of light retracted into the tidakam and the glow gradually reduced in brilliance until returning to the faint pink it’d been when it had first risen from the underground lake.
Sirena felt completely drained and sank to the floor at Omaro’s side. Mateo ran up to her and she barely lifted her arms in time to catch the enthusiastic hug. “Thank you for saving Father, Protector!” he said into her neck.
“I do not know yet that he will live,” Sirena stated. But as she looked closely at Omaro, she could see his dark skin already looked much healthier than it had, and that indeed every bruise and scar and bit of swollen tissue was gone. His breathing was steady rather than ragged. But still he remained unconscious. T
o her left, a pair of legs appeared. She looked up. “Aea, what have I done?”
“What you were born to do, Ima,” Aea replied. “Now that you have seen your own ability, and because I cannot linger indefinitely, I must ask you this question and you must consider your answer carefully.”
Sirena nodded for her to proceed.
“Do you agree to become Mateo’s Protector?”
She’d been afraid that was going to be the question. Mateo’s head rested on her shoulder and he didn’t say anything, but his arms tightened around her neck; he wasn’t about to let go. She knew full well what a Protector was. Her mother had explained it to her once while lamenting that Sirena didn’t have one. But Protectors were always men, or at least, they had been historically. To protect someone with your life meant you had to have strength and training and a cunning enough mind to do whatever it took to keep your charge safe.
While not completely out of shape by any estimation, Sirena was small and had enough trouble lifting a five-year old child into her arms, never mind fighting off anyone who might wish to do him harm. She was largely uneducated save for whatever her mother had seen fit to teach her, which had always left Sirena questioning the veracity of Mother’s words. She considered herself neither strong nor cunning as a result.
“You underestimate yourself!”Aea spat vehemently, startling Sirena and making her jump. Aea paced away and then turned back to face her. “You are treating yourself the way all men treat women. You are giving in to the belief that women aren’t just as capable as they are!”
“But Aea, I am not as capable as…” she gestured to Omaro. “He is larger, stronger.”
“Physically, yes, it is true. But women can accomplish the same feats as men, for we have the ingenuity to overcome physical difficulties in ways they have not yet dreamed.” She crouched down in front of them and Mateo turned in Sirena’s arms to listen. “Ima, there are worlds with great machinery, much like the fisher, in complexity. There are inventions which have made life easier for the peoples on these worlds, and all because they wished to find other less physical and brutish ways of doing things.”
Aea rose and began to pace back and forth as she warmed to the subject. Sirena briefly wondered if this was going to be like one of her mother’s infamous lectures.
“When merans figured out they needed to cook food to stave off disease, they learned to use fire to that end. When merans realized they could more easily use ruslis for food by stabbing at them from a distance with a pisada, thereby reducing their risk of injury from the two horns,” her fingers formed a V atop her head that made Mateo giggle, “they invented the pisa and then the pisada.” She stopped and faced them. “Do you not see, Sirena, that it is the necessity for being able to do something you cannot, which allows you to find new ways of doing those things?”
Sirena digested this information. “I do understand,” she finally said, “but I have only myself to rely upon.”
Aea shook her head. “Perhaps he was right,” she lamented, and then sighed. “Perhaps it is hopeless trying to get women to force themselves into equality here on land.” Perplexed, Sirena frowned as Aea added, “His damn mers did it already but I can’t even get a formed ima to listen to me.”
“Mers?” Sirena repeated.
“Huh?” Omaro grunted. She glanced down to find him slowly rising to consciousness.
“Father!” Mateo yelled – right into Sirena’s ear – and he launched himself from her arms onto Omaro’s body as he moved to sit up, knocking him right back into the wall with an “Oof!”
Omaro’s eyes met hers, then looked up and widened comically. Sirena smirked. “I take it,” she said lightly as she rose to her feet, “that you’ve never seen a dari before.” Never mind that it was her own first time.
He was captivated, and Sirena couldn’t blame him. But Mateo vied for his attention and the moment his eyes were averted, Aea disappeared.
“Where’d she—what happened?” Omaro asked, returning the fierce hug his son had him wrapped in.
Don’t forget, you have a choice to make, Aea whispered into her mind. Will you be the Protector of the prophesied child? Or leave him for this oaf to see him through to maturity?
Oaf?
Sirena looked at Omaro. Yes, she probably would have considered him as such herself but it seemed so wrong to hear a dari say that about a meran when the daris were the ones who created them to begin with. Omaro looked right back at her with expectancy and a great deal of confusion.
She had no idea what her answer to Aea was going to be. Before she could even contemplate what becoming Mateo’s Protector meant, she had to explain things to Omaro. And hope by all the daris that he wouldn’t once again take Mateo and run from her when she’d finished.
Chapter Seven
“A soton cannot fire arrows,” Ajibo told him as Jafo looked back and forth between the tidakam and the creature.
“It has to be a mer?”
Ajibo nodded. “Yes, with the contraption I spoke of. Our kapte called it a bow.”
“That would be helpful if we could find you one.”
“I hadn’t learned how to shoot it yet; only the kapte had one.”
Banging his head against the wall sounded more inviting than ever. “Perhaps whoever shot the arrow,” Jafo thought aloud, “was aiming for the soton.”
“Then they are either very inexperienced using a bow, or your theory is incorrect.”
“Thanks,” Jafo replied sarcastically. It seemed becoming an imo hadn’t erased that tendency, which his mother had been trying to scold out of him for years.
The tidakam’s brightness had not increased, and in spite of the suspicion Jafo had that he could use it to kill – or at the very least, disable – the soton, he was going to save that for a last resort. He knew imos didn’t kill unless it was absolutely necessary. He prayed it wouldn’t become absolutely necessary.
The current moved in an unnatural way. Jafo’s eyes snapped to the soton, but it hadn’t budged. Someone else was near. With any luck it wouldn’t be the soton’s mate looking for a place to lay her thousand egglets.
Jafo closed his eyes and reached out with his mind. He sensed Daria. Ajibo. The soton. Several schools of various fish in the distance. And something else. Something mer. No…more than one. He tried to get a read on who they might be. Hunters going after the soton, maybe, as per his earlier conjecture. They could simply be passing by, or coming to read the etchings on the pintu’s interior walls. Many mers did. A lot of times children came to play among the ruins of the gateway to Ninoj, as he himself had so many times.
He tracked that the mers were coming nearer. They all registered a pale gray on the spectrum he saw within his mind and he wondered what that meant. He recalled Daria had appeared pink, and Ajibo had appeared blue. Pana had been yellow and the soton was black. So why were all six of these mers gray rather than their own individual colors?
“Can you kill that thing?” Ajibo asked, nodding at the glowing tidakam.
“I don’t know.”
“I have fear, Protector and Father.”
Ajibo held his daughter close, gently providing reassurance that, from his tone, Jafo could tell he didn’t really feel. He had to do something. Either to warn the six mers swimming their way of the hiding soton, or to get himself, Ajibo and Daria out of the pintu.
A new thought occurred to him. Perhaps he didn’t have to try to kill the soton. Perhaps he could simply create a new way out of the pintu with the tidakam. The idea of destroying even a small portion of the ancient structure didn’t really leave a good taste in his mouth, but it might distract the soton and keep it from attacking the six approaching mers, and it would also ensure their own escape.
Thus decided, Jafo turned to the back wall. It was covered in sacred writings save for one section that was completely blank. He blanched at the thought of taking any of those sacred words out. Certainly they had been copied many times by scribes, but still…these were the original
s. So…the blank part of the wall, to the right of the four rulers’ chairs, it would be. That put him away from any modicum of safety whatsoever if he actually physically went over there to try what he had in mind.
“Ah, my pet, there you are.”
The voice was foreign to Jafo. His spine stiffened and he turned toward the front of the pintu. Swimming lazily in through the doorway was a large merman nearly all dark gray, with six white spikes on each forearm, and many more edging both sides of his nearly black tail. His hair was as gray as his tail, his skin only slightly lighter. His eyes were equally dark and around his neck was a chain of shells that seemed to be floating there of their own volition without anything holding them together. His fins were solid gray like his tail, but the thing that caught Jafo’s eye was the symbol upon his chest, such a stark white that it almost seemed to glow against the darkness of his skin. The ditan.
The gray man was looking at the soton upon entry, but very soon his head snapped to the left. Damn tidakam gave them away.
“And who do we have here within the sacred pintu of the city?” he drawled, ignoring his ‘pet’ soton and swimming toward the altar behind which Ajibo and Daria still hid.
Jafo knew he had to keep their presence a secret, and so swam forward with the tidakam in his right hand, leaving them shrouded in shadows. “Greetings, stranger.”
“An imo!” The stranger recoiled and the soton’s tentacles shot out toward Jafo.
Jafo veered left, nearly hit a fat tentacle and instead darted right and down to avoid it.
“No, no, my pet, leave him be.” The stranger peered at Jafo, approaching so slowly he was barely moving. Suddenly five more mers swam through the door, coming to a stop at either side of the gray one. Each of them were varying colors of yellow, off-white and orange in a strange mixture that might have formed some kind of pattern when they were lined up if Jafo had felt comfortable enough to stare at them for a while.
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