Chapter Twenty #2
“She looks so innocent for a murderer,” he says, frowning. “You’re certain she’s the heir?”
“She opened the pearls, didn’t she? Is that his blood smeared on her face, do you think?”
I rub my cheek with one hand. They’re all speaking over one another and they aren’t as clear and defined as Vesuvius was. Some of these souls are wispy and barely there, their voices so faint they could be the wind, while others seem close and living.
Hurriedly, watching in every direction at once so that they don’t touch me, I start to shove the cuirass into my belt pouch. It’s not going to fit. Not all of it. I twist and jam, trying to push it in, spirits winking out one by one.
They are murmuring together, but I don’t want to hear these things. I work faster, jamming them into my belt pouch by the handful until I have only a few left and I cannot possibly fit those into the overfull leather bag.
They’ve grown quiet, those who are left, watching me owlishly.
I spread these pearls left out on the rock, out of breath, frantic. I grab a sharp-edged stone the size of my fist, and try to smash them with it. I’m hammering and hammering until I can hardly see through my tears and fury. They’re not what I thought they were. I’m not who I thought I was.
And they are not breaking.
They are not even chipping.
“That’s what I did, too, when I found out,” a female voice says when I pause. “I tried to smash them all.”
“Found out what?” I ask, without thinking, my hands shaking so hard that the rock clatters.
“That I was a god and a miserable one at that.”
I look up. She’s crouched across from me—the only one left.
I think I recognize her. Her statue down at the dock is submerged up to the chin at high tide, but low tide reveals all but her barnacle-encrusted feet.
Her statue wears a regal wrapped-cloth dress, but her soul’s version is nearly translucent and stitched with herons picked out with silver thread.
I can well believe she was a goddess. Her dark brown skin gleams flawlessly as if she has been polished.
“It doesn’t work,” she tells me aridly. “They aren’t real pearls.”
“Nothing about this is real,” I say, wiping my eyes on my damp tunic to avoid my hands.
She laughs. “You only wish that were true. A word of advice: You don’t have to put them in your bag to dismiss us. You can just wipe the tears off the pearl and stop touching it. I learned that the hard way. Took me a month. But then, I was always more stubborn than sensible. Most of us are.”
I feel my face go hot. I’m sensible enough, thank you.
“So, you were also a god,” I say, my eyes narrowing. “Do you know what comes next?”
“Next?” Her smile is mocking and she spreads her hands. “Now you rule. Over the sea. Over the people. Over the islands. And you try not to fail, for there’s no one to call for help if you do.”
“How do I rule?” I ask, insistent. “How do other gods rule?”
She shakes her head as if my question is stupid. “Fish. Answer prayers. Keep the worst away.”
My confusion must show on my face, because she sighs and shifts, settling down to sit beside me with her arms hugging her legs as she looks out to sea.
“You’re the sea now, girl. Not symbolically—though of course that, too—but you are literally the sea, as Okeanos was before you. What is done to the sea is done to you. What is done to you is done to the sea.
“If you fish and catch, then your people will find bounty. If you fish and catch nothing, they’ll have lean years. If you rage and scream, they will endure storms and heavy seas. If you are sunny, so will their lives be.
“If you are set upon and wounded but not slain, then they will be wounded, too, by fleets or raiders, disease or despair, it matters not—they’ll be as ruined as you are to the same degree unless you can turn the tides again.”
I feel a lump in my throat. Oke bore that terrible wound. And my people were beset by both a storm and an invasion. I had never considered that the two might be related.
“It is a terrible thing to be a god,” she says, not noticing how still I am. “No mortal can ever be ready for the task. But that is who you are now, so go—be the sea. Be the God of the Sea. And try not to ruin it before someone else wrests the role from your snatching hands.”
She starts to fade. I grab at her, but I am too late and she winks out like a dying candle.
With a sigh, I give her up and gather the rest of the pearls in my palms.
Oke’s island is like a shell when the hermit crab has crawled away to find a new home. The waves wash in and out. The sand drifts where it wills. There is nothing here but the lonely echo of the wind.
But if I am to be a god now, I will determine to be the best god there ever was.
I cross the threshold of the cottage into what was once Okeanos’s home and life. I remember him standing beside me at the table scaling fish. His hands had worked with sure efficiency despite his pain.
“I did not expect to survive the encounter,” I whisper to myself as I dry the remaining pearls on a stray cloth, watching their spirits wink out one by one, and then fling the pearls on the table, emptying my belt pouch of all but the black one.
“I did not expect to really take his place. And yet here I am.”
I remember Oke sitting on that chest talking to me. I remember sharing that bed. I feel sick all over again.
Something shining catches my eye and I frown, snatching up a string of pearls Oke has left on the bed. I jam them hurriedly into one of the chests. I can’t deal with even more of them. The ones I have are bad enough.
I wash hastily and dress in a fresh tunic, throwing the ragged, bloodstained chiton in the corner to deal with later.
I do not want to fulfill Okeanos’s last wish.
I don’t even know why. I don’t hate him in the same way that I did before.
It’s hard to hate a man you’ve killed. His blood that spilled hot across the blankets and painted my skin has left me hollow, spent, like the heart of a tree where a fire has burned but not reached the outer rings.
I am charred and crumbling while without I am perfectly whole.
But I square my shoulders, pull out the book, draw down the lever, and hurry down into the darkness on my own.
The room has not changed. There are treasures in small alcoves and on plinths.
Little scraps of crowns and scepters, swords and goblets.
I am ignorant of their history or purpose beyond the obvious, and whoever placed them here seemed to attach such historic significance or perhaps honor to them that they have not cleaned them or polished them.
Some are broken and were not repaired. Oke said that it was all here when he arrived.
I could ask the pearls, perhaps, but I never want to see another god again, living or dead.
Perhaps Okeanos wandered these same rooms after he killed Vesuvius and raised himself up as a god. I wonder what he thought of the water clock the first time he saw it.
I wonder if he felt as small as I do right now. But I can’t imagine him feeling small. He always seemed steady to me—even when he was wounded and bleeding, even in death.
As if my presence has triggered it, the clock begins to move and the water pours into the mouth of the sea god’s serpent, spinning him so that he falls headfirst into the water and turns back up again, but though the clock cycles as if to turn the hour, the little rays on the top of the clock stay exactly the same. Four blacked out. Six white.
I frown. There were only three rays blacked out last time I was here and clearly they are not keeping track of the hours that pass. Oke mentioned something about four when he was telling me to find something hidden in this clock. He told me four were complete.
Interestingly, the face of the clock’s statue is still missing—gouged out in lurid chunks—but its body has warped to a more androgynous form. Or perhaps that is only my perception shifting it. Down here, away from everything else, it is so hard to tell.
I examine the clock, running my hands around the base of it. There are no hidden catches that I can find. No secret riddles. No lever or button or anything else that I can see. But I know there’s something here somewhere, or Oke would not have asked me to look for it.
I could ask Vesuvius, perhaps. But his laughing triumph still echoes in my mind and twists my stomach. Vesuvius must only be let out as a last resort. I do not want to become like him and I fear it may already be too late.
I’ll simply have to figure this out for myself. Oke would not have sent me here if he thought it was too difficult a puzzle to solve on my own.
I study the base of the clock where a series of small images are carved in the clock’s base.
Birds, fish, the sun, the moon, stars, boats, the images are endless, but when I find the little wave carved into it I remember Okeanos’s words, “Your safety lies in the sea,” and when I press the wave symbol, there’s a click and a drawer slides out a finger’s width.
I pry the drawer open the rest of the way and within I find three rolls of parchment. I unroll the first right there on the floor and immediately wish I had not.
It is so delicate that the edges flake, leaving little fibers along the mosaic floor. Drawn on the parchment in intricate detail is a lighthouse.
It is depicted from the side and then the top, and then a separate sketch is drawn of every floor of the ten it is meant to have.
I have never seen the like. It looks almost like a living thing, gripping the rock with its tentacles, flaring fins soaring above the eyelike light.
And yet it is terribly beautiful, delicately worked, gorgeously rendered.
Flowering tracery windows of epic proportion fill the walls.
When occupied, the whole house would be lit like a crystal spire gleaming out into the night. It snatches my breath clean away.
And it hits me like a fist to the chest. This is the place of safety he’s been trying to build for his people.
This is the refuge he was trying to convince me to construct with him.
I should have known this would be his last request. I frown at it, annoyed, for it cost him his life and his godhood, and in that moment I had thought was so intimate, as he lay there dying, it was this for which he yearned.
I cannot make out the labeling. It is in a language and script I’ve never read.
But I recognize it from one of the books I’d seen in the library above.
And there are notes below in a sharp, masculine hand that bear the words Curse of the Great Lighthouse and a repeat of the list I found before. The list of ten terrible tasks.
Win a god’s oath.
Wed the drowned queen.
Collect the dead to serve.
Fill a thimble with riches.
Heal the crown of the sea.
Turn the betrayer’s heart.
Mend time with golden stitches.
Drink the ocean dry.
Spin moonlight into silver.
Split the seven seas in twain.
Oke has completed four of those, just as he said. Which means the rest are mine to tackle if I mean to honor his mad request.
I shake my head and return to the upper level of the cottage, carrying with me the only weapon I found below—a strange bronze trident—verdant green all over from corrosion.
It’s not much of a weapon, but it’s the best I can do.
I lean it against the wall beside my bed and go to the bookshelf, and in a matter of minutes I find the book, Curse of the Great Lighthouse, which I had believed to be a fictional tale.
It details that a great lighthouse was lost beneath the sea when the gods together cursed a race of sailors and their greatest achievement—a lighthouse of such grandeur it blocked the paths of magic and bargain, offering a sanctuary to all who would avoid the strength of both blessing and cursing.
It speaks of the jealousy of the gods and their determination to be turned away from no door—not even the door of a single human sanctuary.
They sank the lighthouse and buried it beneath the waves forever, exacting terrible punishments upon the sailors who had built it.
There is a section toward the end that strikes a chord. I read it twice over.
“It is said that the Great Lighthouse will never return to us again except by an act of wondrous and terrible magic that might draw it up from the depths of the sea. But who could achieve such a wonder? For to do such a thing would require the power of a god. And no god would bless a place where they are not welcome.”
I applaud Oke’s reasoning, but there is no way to give him what he wants.
These tasks are labeled impossible for a reason.
And I have a people to rule over and help to prosper and save.
I do not have time—nor his ambition—for something so whimsical as raising a lighthouse.
If he had hoped I would take up his mantle, he must think again.
I need something useful to occupy me, something to take my mind off death and great works of magic and dead souls, so I fix the pearl cuirass, threading the beads one by one back onto their string.
But it does nothing to solve the roiling storm in my heart or the doubt creeping in.
When I reach Vesuvius’s pearl, I pause, hold it up, and sigh.
It does not go on the strings with the others.
It remains in my belt pouch. I cannot explain why, only that it must be so.
It’s long past noon when I curl up in the bed again. I just need a moment to rest, just a moment to escape being myself.
I curl around the pearl cuirass the way that Oke curled around the weapon that killed him and I choke on a silent sob of shame before I shake myself out of it.
Tomorrow, I will go and see my people. I will catalog their troubles and needs, and I will set about righting them. That, alone, will make up for murder. For what could be a greater end than the salvation of my people? I must not lose sight of all I have gained.
But though I try to comfort myself with that, I do not sleep. The crushing weight of guilt presses on me as if someone has carved my god statue already and has laid it over me.
I am stained and ruined, my heart in tatters, my conscience shredded. When I die, there will be no pearl. How could there be when I’ve ruined any soul I might have had?
But I am not ready to bend. Not to sorrow and not to shame.
Tomorrow, I must rise and find a way to be a better god than Okeanos ever was, and if I do not know how, then I will simply learn. After all, I did not know how to kill a god and I achieved that. Certainly I can learn how to be one.
I tell myself this over and over and over until eventually I fall into a fitful sleep.