Chapter Twenty-Three #2
I lie miserable in the water, so hot I think I will melt away when I listen to the prayer of a priest from Saint Flagra’s Nation and relieve them of their terrible drought.
I am so certain that day that I am dying that I whisper my thoughts to the sky and hope they carry to the Nightwaters, where Lieve dwells.
But by evening I am recovered and I sleep in my bed as if nothing ever happened.
I would gladly pay the same price to turn the hearts of those rulers. If only I knew how.
I hear murmurs of war coming in every port and on every ship.
It feels like my chance to keep us out of it is slipping away while I am caught up in all these other tasks.
Their worried voices dance across the surface of my waters and I feel them in my very bones, but I know they are fully committed to preparations now.
To extract them would mean their ruin and maybe even their deaths.
Worst of all is the sea serpent.
It is possibly a month into my tenure as God of the Sea when I’m arrested by a prayer.
I am fishing—with the men all gone and having sold their surplus of fish to pay for this useless war, there’s nothing left for the women and children unless I fish for them.
I feel sometimes like I am always fishing.
I dream of fish at night. I see them when I try to look at the books.
I’ve put away my pearls and the dress and everything else and all I do is fish in that old raggedy tunic and think of how Oke told me he was a fisherman.
The Fisher King. It’s becoming glaringly obvious why he claimed that title.
Today, I am fishing tuna. After that first seven-day, I learned I can toss them back and only save one small one for my own supper. I’m pulling up a glorious yellowfin tuna when I hear the prayer.
“God of the Sea, save us!”
I have learned the trick of moving quickly from one place to another, and it’s a simple thing to put one hand in the water and the other into the shape of a bowl and twist it to find the supplicant. I expect someone drowning or in trouble.
Things are not quite so simple when I arrive.
There’s a ship on her side, wallowing in the waves, her sailors scattered all out behind her in a trail.
It is they who plead for my help. Squeezing the ship’s middle is the largest serpent I’ve ever seen.
It’s much narrower than it is long, but even then it’s as wide as a sixth part of the ship.
As it squeezes, timbers pop free, the masts break, and more people are tossed into the sea.
This is certainly a job for a god. If only I knew how to manage it. I stand up in my fishing boat and try to get a better look. The head is deep below the heaving water. We’re only seeing rings of body right now.
I have the strange bronze trident with me.
I hope it will be enough to kill a serpent.
If it was Vesuvius’s weapon, then it is a god weapon, but I don’t know if that still means it is special if the god in question is dead.
I brace it in one hand and start to steer the boat toward the disaster with the other.
I will have to leap from the boat onto the creature’s coils and stab it, I suppose, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll have to swim down and find its head and stab it somewhere more vulnerable.
I can’t see any other way to deal with this monster.
I’m about to lunge forward and begin when she speaks into my mind.
Will you harm me, God of the Sea? She sounds uncertain.
Not if you leave my people alone, I tell it back.
Your people? Glorian of Growing Things has taken great bites out of your entire eastern coast. I hear half of it belongs now to her and not to you at all.
And Alexandros the Toolmaker arrives to take his own piece of the northern one.
You are squeezed and soon will be broken, ready to pop with a little more pressure.
The creature laughs. You will have no people, Drowned Queen. Even I have heard that.
I am so stunned that I hardly know what to say, but I’m not as stunned as the sea serpent believes I am.
She is so pleased she has surprised me that she does not notice how close my boat has drawn to her shining scales, or how I am bracing my trident to strike.
She lifts her head from the water and brackish fluid pours through the tendrils of her beard and foams around her curving jaw.
She opens her mouth to scoop me up, but I kick the tiller hard, and as my little boat surges to the side, I plunge Vesuvius’s trident through her skin and into her throat.
And just like I killed a god, I kill a sea serpent, though not nearly as neatly.
She drags me through the water as I twist the trident, plunging me under, wrapping her tail around my side and squeezing, squeezing, squeezing until I think I might burst. The fight is a blur of desperation and intent, but to my credit, I remember I am the sea.
When she squeezes me, I squeeze back, my waters gripping and throttling her as she throttles me until I manage to twist my trident into place and drive it through her eye.
When her grip on me falls lax, it’s all I can do to rip my trident free and drag myself back into the little fishing boat.
I cannot breathe properly. My ribs slowly find their places and pop back into them and around me are the cries of the living as they rush to rescue the dead and the horrible smell of bursting bubbles filled with a rotting seaweed scent that are the only reminder that these waters churned with a living, breathing monster just moments ago.
This is madness. All of it.
I drag myself back to my island somehow and pull my broken body up onto shore and lie upon the rocks until finally I can breathe and my limbs—to my surprise—function properly again.
I could have sworn I had a broken shoulder and clavicle, and at least a half dozen ribs, but they are all functional by midnight and painless by morning.
I hope the people made it to safety once the sea serpent was dragged from their hull. A good god would have stayed and been sure. A good god wouldn’t have been too damaged to help. A good god would have never let it happen in the first place.
But me? I make a terrible god. Worse, I am realizing, than Okeanos. Worse than Glorian. Worse than Aurelius. Possibly even worse than Vesuvius, and that is a very great claim indeed.
I am the very worst of gods.
My only comfort is that the sea seems to love me.
When all has gone wrong, I lay drifting in the water.
I won’t lie and pretend this part is not excellent.
It is the balm to my aching soul, the sweet in all the bitterness.
I close my eyes and feel the movement of the humpback whales in their pods, feel the dart and dash of the dolphins, and the great joy of the anemones on the reefs.
And for a moment, I am blissful. I dance with the bubbles that roil up where the seals dive and moan.
I laugh with the hoot of the sea lion. I fall into sonorous rhythm with the penguin in his march.
I snap at nothing with the shark. I am the sea.
I feel the great inky quaking of the monsters of the depths and I bid them go back to sleep. I feel them only when they murmur, but I sense them always—great creatures who sleep deep in the beneath, underpinning all the ocean with their power. I am their sea, too.
Sometimes I feel something more out there far off in the ocean—that same murky sense of dread and pain I felt the first time and from which I shy away.
I do not want to know what gives off such terrible misery.
I am afraid that if I find out, it will become my responsibility to fix it, and that whatever the solution is will most certainly mean my taking on that vast well of pain.
I have had enough pain. I am ready to live without it for quite some time.
I can try it again later, when things are less fraught with trouble.
And once—only once—I think I might sense the Lighthouse just under the skim of sand in the deep Pleitas Trench.
It, too, is far away and it feels like a wind chime sounds, haunting me all day and well into the night—enough that I draw out Oke’s notes again and read of his Lighthouse project and wonder if he was a dreamer, or a madman, or merely a visionary slain before his work was done.
It has become clear to me that he was, in fact, trying to build a paradise-like refuge for his people.
And that he was not lying to me about any of the claims he made.
And maybe, just maybe, I might give him his wish after all and find a way to draw this Lighthouse back up from beneath the waves.
For just a moment, I think of Oke’s distant gaze and I think we could have shared this—that I would not have had to bear the burden of it alone—had I not been so certain that he was lying to me and that his death was vital to changing the course of things.
The thought guts me and I must thrust it away as I do every time the conclusion creeps closer—the knowledge I’ll not be able to avoid forever, the understanding that I already see even if I’m struggling to accept.
I was wrong.
I killed for no good reason.
For the god I hoped to supplant was only replaced with a worse god… and that one is me.