Siren (2 page)

"Come," she sang sweetly, and her warm, long fingers caressed his shaggily bearded cheeks.

So, yes, he was dead. An odd sort of peace settled over him. And this must be some sort of heaven. Whatever it was, it was a good way to go.

The Siren raked her kisses over his body, as burning as fingernails bringing blood. He drew the Siren into a fierce embrace as he hungrily kissed the flesh of her bared throat and allowed his hands full rein to claim every part of her lusciously curved body.

The Siren wrapped her long legs about his body. He gave himself up to passion as ruthlessly eager as a sailor too long at sea. They spun through the caressing water as their bodies joined. Entering her was like magic, like no woman he'd ever known. His own passion surged into wildness, and she met it with ferocity of her own, thrust after thrust in exquisite torture as he descended into thick and mindless need. He felt her come, forcing his own release as he roared into the ocean depths, and was spent at last. His useless mind spiraled slowly away from him, and he did not care.

He breathed—or thought he did, for his chest heaved. The rainbow-colored water softened its hues, and they drifted through a watery nothingness, still locked in a quiet embrace. The Siren's long, long tresses wrapped round them, moving like gentle, caressing hands, and her beautiful green eyes slowly, lazily began to open.

Slender, graceful fingers trailed over the crumple of his dark beard.

"Many years I have called for you, John Wall. But you did not come."

"I am a man. A man does not so easily give up his life."

The Siren raked a slow gaze over him regarding him inscrutably, with her head cocked to one side. Her hair gleamed like strands coppery bronze in bright sun, floating and dancing about her as she spiraled like a lazy otter away from him into free water. John followed, mildly amused that he moved so smoothly through the water as if he had been born to live beneath the waves.

"Am I dead?" he asked her again.

"You are not the same, John Wall."

"But not dead, then? But what?"

"Not dead. Not the same."

"So I can see." He glanced over his nude body, noting again how fast and easily he propelled himself, and he thought of the strange feeling of water moving in and out through his lungs. "A man does not breathe water. How is it I can do that?"

The Siren canted her head as she regarded him with a puzzled frown. "You cannot breathe air beneath the sea."

He slowed, his jaw gaping, but the Siren kept swimming as if she had not said anything odd at all. He began to suspect he was only beginning to discover the oddities of his strange new situation. And it was true, there was no air to breathe here.

"Wait," he called, and she looked back at him, her reddish eyebrows arching. "Do you have a name, Siren?"

"Siren."

Did her furrowed brow mean she was losing patience with him? He pursued his questions anyway. "I know you are a Siren. I have figured that out, but what is it you are called?"

"Siren."

"Then are you the only Siren?"

"There are many."

"Then, what are the others called?"

"Siren." Again she turned back to her swimming, her slender legs propelling her so that he had to work to keep up.

"Not to be obtuse or anything, but do you not have a name that is yours alone?"

"Do you, John Wall?"

He supposed that probably he didn't. He might argue that not all men were called Man, but it seemed pointless.

As the Siren increased her speed again, he thought it wise to do the same rather than risk losing her. So with a shrug and a rather lopsided smile he kept going through the water.

In the far distance, the water seemed dark and forbidding. Fear invaded for a moment, remembering a distant memory of falling overboard as a very young man, snagged in lines that carried him deep, ever darker, pressure pounding in his ears and against his head in excruciating pain, until he freed himself and swam for the surface.

He snuffed the fear. Here, the water world was not the same. No fierce pressure threatening to burst his skull like an overripe melon, no smothering darkness. He could look up and see the whitish light penetrating above him, but there was no sense that he must force his way through the water, any more than he did air. Yet he could remain suspended, or rise or dive, with the careless grace of a dolphin.

He wondered what it was like above. He had left his world in the deepest darkness of a storm at night. Not too far away, the Coast of Africa loomed in all its threatening glory, and for a brief moment, regret seized him as he wondered if his sailors lived or died.

But he was dead now, living a glorious death. He could not reach back into their world—of that, at least, he understood.

Once more John Wall resigned himself to accepting the surroundings, which he was fairly sure he didn't want to change. He mused briefly at the sudden and strange attachment he felt for this woman—if she was indeed a human—a feeling of intense longing and desire to be only with her. He had never been one for such attachments, holding only his beloved clipper ship,
Telesto
, as his mistress.

From the time he had first comprehended who he was, he had wanted more. It had all been so clear, once. He'd struggled, saved, risked his life, all to own his own ship, to grow wealthy, and in the end, die in a fine house of his own. All that was gone, in one whirling storm.

He smiled and sighed. With no more than a swish of his legs and a twist of his body, he flowed through the water after the Siren, chasing her like an eager puppy after its owner.

She called it her Summer Sea. He became Siren's constant companion as they floated and swam in it. She took him to her garden on the steep underwater slope of an ancient volcano that reminded him of Mount Etna, seen from the sea, but belched no fire, and its top had long since eroded away beneath the water.

Here, corals seemed like brilliant flowers blooming in pinks and blues, here, branching like shrubs in winter, there, leafing like cabbage. Sea anemones swayed like distorted ostrich plumes in a chaotic breeze. Striped and spotted fish with feathery fins swam through the reef, and rays with Eagle-sized wingspans glided along the bottom.

She showed him the thick-stemmed kelp she called her food. He wrinkled his nose, tasting it with reluctance, and discovered he craved its sweet-salt flavor. They ate nothing else, yet each time it tasted like something different he had never eaten before.

Siren had made a bed of sponges in the ancient volcanic crater. Once, in a fit of mischief, he came behind her and pushed her onto it. She laughed as she bounced. He had seen her smile, but never heard her laugh. His heart twisted in a way that told him he could never be apart from her again, and he bounced down on the bed beside her. In a furious passion, they made love, again and again. Then, energy spent, they lay quietly in each other's arms, carelessly caressing.

Her elegant fingers combed through the thickness of his nearly black beard. "Long ago, you had no beard," she said.

He remembered. He had been but a lad of eighteen when first he'd seen the Siren, strolling saucily along the rolling cap of a fierce wave in the midst of a night storm, illuminated in flashes of lightning, her aura lingering in bright colors between the flashes. Still today he could remember his first sound of her voice carrying over the storm. He'd grown his beard soon after that, thinking himself finally a man.

"I will shave it for you if you do not like it," he offered.

"It is nice. Long have I waited for you, John Wall. But it will never grow back."

He frowned at her, suddenly suspicious. "Only dead men grow no hair, Siren."

"In your world. This is my world."

Abruptly, Siren rose from the bed of sponges and swam off rapidly before he could follow. In the thickly vague distance of the ancient mountain's crater, he could see her casting about among the rock debris, and wondered what she sought. She picked up a rock and studied it, then banged it against another, and studied it again. She returned to the sponge bed, her strange trophy in her hand, a black rock that glistened on both sides.

Obsidian. He had seen it in the Yucatan. Its edge was slightly curved inward, and very sharp. He didn't think he wanted it near his face. He shook his head.

"I will not hurt you," she said. She pushed him back against the soft bed and straddled him. With careful, slow strokes, she swept the dark hair of his beard from his face, and it wafted away in the still water.

John ran his hands over his jaw, knowing before he did so there were no nicks. He had stopped shaving long ago, as much because he hated razors as because a beard gave some warmth to his face in the frigid climates near the poles. As she set down the sharp stone, John grabbed her roughly and rubbed his newly shaven cheeks against her skin. She giggled as John nuzzled her over her breasts, and belly, playfully, then passionately.

In the cushioned cradle of her bed of sponges, they rolled about and fondled each other with the eagerness of lovers finding each other for the first time. Every time seemed like the first time to him, and he laughed at the many ways they found to come together. There was no up or down in this strange sea if they did not want it to be so.

Like sea otters, they coupled, rolling and rolling through the water, and flopping off the bouncing bed. Laughing, they came together again, now rolling down the sloping crater, and laughing more when they discovered they could roll up the far side as well. Then in the flash of time it took for passion to grip them, they became silent and lost in the intense waves of an unexpected orgasm.

For a dead man, he was doing all right.

* * *

Together, they explored crevices and valleys beneath the surface, weaving through towering sea plants, scavenging among discarded shells, bobbing up into the air and floating on the surface.

Siren loved above all places those where sea and air met. When storms tossed the waves and made the sea roll turbulently beneath it, or when sun baked the air and made the tips of tiny crests radiate like brilliant diamonds against a velvet so densely blue it made John's throat ache with joy to see it, John loved nothing more than watching his Siren in her exuberant play.

They would float on their backs in the warmth of a bright day, and dolphins would come to cavort with them. Siren had made a harness of kelp and the dolphins nosed into it, then with Siren and her lover holding onto the long ropes, the beautiful creatures would dash through the water and leap into the air, and under the surface at speeds no sailing ship had ever mastered.

When the King of Storms threw his wind and thunder into the air and whipped the waves to giant heights, Siren danced along their caps, daring John to join her. But at that, he just shook his head and watched her mesmerizing dance.

In the far distance, he watched the clipper ships passing, and he wondered where they were going. He had no idea where he was, or when he was. He knew east and west from the sun, although beneath the sea he could not tell even that. But he had no watch, no chronograph, which had gone down with his ship. Nothing that could tell him.

And he longed to know. Where was the world of men?

Siren lured him beneath the waves once more. And once more he made love with the beautiful Siren, and forgot the world of men.

Chapter 3

"You are always looking up," said Siren.

John Wall jolted out of his reverie, and turned his attention back to the beautiful sea being, showing his guilt. He knew it was true, for more and more he thought of home, the sharp wind of winter, the feel of solid earth, even paving stones beneath his feet, and he had always hated them. And he thought of people.

"It is where I came from," he replied. "Would you not miss your home if you had to leave it?" "Your home was a boat. It is now on the sea bottom."

"That is not what I mean. Do you ever go and walk on land, Siren?"

"I have. But I would never wish to live there. No water." Her splayed fingers rippled through the water as if they spoke for themselves.

John sighed. Without her, he would be dead, if he was not actually so, and existing in some sort of limbo. She might tell him he was not, yet he could not understand. How else could all this be true?

He could not understand any of this. He could not understand her. So much like a woman, yet not like any of the human kind. She did not think the way women he knew thought. She loved beautiful things, yet she saw them so differently. She had no use for clothing though she seem to love the strange cloth that was like a transparent, shimmering veil floating about her. He wondered if there had been other lovers, or perhaps some god had given it to her.

He had seen schools of parti-colored fish swim about her, nuzzling her as she caressed their fins the way a mother smoothed her baby's mop of hair. Then they would move on, and it seemed were forgotten by her.

"Are Sirens immortal?" he asked.

"The gods are immortal. I am made by the gods."

What did that mean? That she was immortal because the gods had made her? Or that she was not because she was only a creation of the gods? If he pressed her for more of an answer, he would not get it.