Chapter Twenty-Two
I prepare as much as I can. I dress my hair, wear the pearl cuirass, and find the cleanest of Okeanos’s clothing.
After changing my mind three times, I even bring out Vesuvius.
He is of little help.
“Unless you’ve called me forth to parade before me the body of my enemy and to let me watch while you hang him up for the nations to ridicule, I have no interest in your company,” he says, looking me up and down with a grimace. “You look terrible.”
I ignore his insults. “I am about to meet my people as their god. Any advice you have to give would be helpful. How do I access the power of a god? How do I channel it to their needs?”
“Everything is bought with a price,” he says, circling me as if he is judging a new purchase.
“And what is your price for this information?” I ask, setting my jaw with distaste.
“Tell me something interesting,” he suggests. “Tell me something I won’t already know.”
I weigh my options. I think Vesuvius is trapped in this pearl and that he cannot harm my plans or tell them to another, but I am not entirely certain of it. I choose something I think cannot harm me.
“Markanos visited me here this morning.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Interesting. Will you wed again, Drowned Queen? Are you entertaining suitors?”
I remain silent and he gives me a close-mouthed smile.
“Very well, then let me say it again and we shall see if your weak mind can catch my meaning. Everything is bought with a price. If you need something for your folk, then you will pay for it. A small price for a small thing, a great sacrifice for a great thing.”
“As if you would sacrifice for anything,” I scoff.
He leans in close so that if he had a corporeal form I would be smelling his breath in my face. I do not flinch back, though every bit of me wants to.
“You’ll never know the sacrifices I’ve made, little queen.
You have not the mind to appreciate them, but let me spell out one my predecessor chose and see if it enlightens you.
She was a weak god, but perhaps you can strive to her mediocre level.
Her people were set upon by raiders one night and scattered.
She built them a great light in a tower that would guide their ships home but burn up any enemy ship it touched.
The price was steep. To make the light stay lit only for her people, and to make it deadly to all others, she had to feel the fire in her bones the entire time it burned.
They say she screamed in agony, roped to the altar of her temple for a full three days as her priests poured water over her again and again as it hissed up in clouds of steam.
I wish I’d seen it. Not that it would have stayed my hand. ”
I am thinking of Okeanos’s Lighthouse despite myself. Would his ten tasks have ever been enough? Or would he have had to suffer perpetually for it, too?
“And you—of course—would never choose such a sacrifice,” I say. I can’t quite help myself. He brings out the worst in me.
His lip twists with scorn. “You constantly underestimate me. I was a sight to behold in my prime that would have left you weak and trembling with desire.”
And that’s why you don’t taunt the vile. They always find a way to twist it back upon you.
“She’d do it again, of course,” I say, trying to be generous. “And so would any god. To save their people.”
He snorts, flicking his gaze to mine as if we are sharing a joke.
“You have your dead husband’s pearls. Open any one of them and make that same lackwit comment, and watch them tell you the same thing.
Their folk are dead thousands upon thousands of years now.
Would they save them again, having lived so long and seen so much?
Never. They were just people. No more worthy than the ones I burned up.
No more worthy than the thousands of others that creep across the great shoulders of the earth like bugs across a carcass.
They are nothing but a tide to turn and direct as suits you, to nurture and grow or devastate as the turn of your temper dictates.
You are a god now, Drowned Queen. Consider thinking like one. ”
I frown. I am determined I will never be so coldhearted as he.
“As for the technique. You cannot know what you must give until you know what you need.” He waves a hand dismissively.
“Then the cost will equal the act. Unless you judge it wrong. If you choose too small a thing to exchange, then the working will collapse. Too great a thing, and you’ll have…
strange results. That, I look forward to. ”
This time his smile is false as fool’s gold and it is all teeth.
“Do they still speak of the rain of fish in Quetorum in your time?”
I shake my head and his smile grows. “That came from a god choosing too great a sacrifice when his people’s nets came in empty. They say godhood is not for the overly dramatic, though I’ve always thought it was wasted on anyone else.”
He vanishes then as if he’s grown tired of me, and I am left alone to go and find what manner of sacrifice will be required to restore my people.
I know this will be hard, but I am a woman who does hard things. I always have been, and knowing it will be a challenge doesn’t daunt me. This is what I’ve worked so hard for and now it will finally fruit.
I make my way down to the docks, feeling the loneliness of my position.
I half wonder if Okeanos was pleased to take a wife if only to fill the air with a sound other than that of screaming gulls.
If he was, I suppose he changed his mind about that around the time his wife plunged a spear through him.
But I see him everywhere here. On the path.
On the dock. On the little boat he’s left for me, tied up to the pier.
He told me he went back to save my people after we fought.
We will see about that. Maybe he paid a price too small and that was why their attackers succeeded.
Or maybe he didn’t try to pay at all. Maybe he lied to me.
Maybe he was saving it all for his obsession with an ancient Lighthouse sunk beneath the waves.
I step into the water, determined to make the shift to my people’s islands—and I gasp.
The sea opens to me the moment my foot steps into it and I am stunned all over again.
It embraces me, singing to me, speaking to me, and in it I hear whispers like snatches of voices…
like prayers? I cannot pick one from another in the flood of them, only an insistent battering like a great wind beating on the door of my house.
Somewhere far off, I feel a sense of ill or infection but that, too, I cannot quite pinpoint.
It is like emerging from a cave into a sunlit courtyard packed with people.
There are too many emotions and sensations to absorb them all at once.
I twist my hand urgently, panic flaring at my heightened senses, and the stomach-twisting feeling of shifting from one place to another is almost a relief.
I stand quickly when I’ve reached my destination and hurry out of the water and up a moss-clad rock upon the shore. Dead trees lay tangled around it, their white digits reaching bone-like to the sky. This is not where I intended. I have shifted somehow while I was insensible.
The coastline here has a ragged hunger to its uneven edges. The sea in this place chops viciously at the land, eating it by bites season after season. I snort. Perhaps I came here because I was hungry and this is the result. But my attempt at a joke does nothing to make me feel at ease.
Until I realize that I don’t need anyone to tell me where I am. I dip a toe back into the water and I feel the sea again. It tells me everything.
I am on the shores of Talasa. Up there is the temple dedicated to Okeanos.
I am home.
I can’t help myself; I turn to where Lieve was lost in the sea like metal turns to a lodestone.
But this time the sea is me, and I shudder as I feel the memory of his last thrashing as he fought the high waves.
I buckle and bend to cup his form as he sinks deeper, his lungs full of me, his fingers clawing runnels through me.
I swallow and force my mind onward. But I cannot help but wonder if, during our first meeting, Oke was experiencing this haunted, filthy feeling having just lived through the deaths of so many in his sea.
It takes all my willpower to turn from the pounding surf and mount the steps to the temple. I do not know why I take this path, only that it seems the obvious one. After all, who should the God of the Sea inquire of her people from if not her priests?
But the island is deserted. No one is on the docks. The devastated homes have not been repaired. Gulls pick at the refuse still surrounding them.
When I reach the top of the steps and find the temple and look up at the glorious statue of Okeanos—a true likeness and yet not; resplendent, and yet far too perfect for the god I knew—I notice something I’ve never seen before.
There is a little lighthouse pattern carved around the bottom of the dais on which the statue stands. Was that always there?
So intent am I upon it that I almost startle out of my skin when a wide-eyed child taps me on the shoulder. She’s holding the hand of a man and they’re dressed in the clothing of the temple. The girl holds out a white bundle to me.
“You look lost,” the man says. Deep lines mar his face, but he isn’t old. He’s barely older than me and I think he is the child’s father. She carries his likeness.
“Are you a priest of Okeanos? Of the sea?” I correct myself.
“I was,” he says, looking away sadly. “On the isle of Calypsala. But I heard the others had abandoned this temple.” He shrugs. “It seemed wrong to not have a caretaker here.”
“A waste,” I agree, and I can’t keep the tears out of my voice. “Where is everyone?”