Waking Storms (19 page)

“She’s
supposed
to be our queen,” Violet explained with an audible note of resentment. “She just won’t do it. Maybe she’ll listen to you, if you tell her? I mean they did try to kill Luce just now, when she raided our cave to get the knife, so now she probably hates us even more than she did already...”

Nausicaa was glancing back and forth between them, a quizzical smile on her face. Luce thought she should say something. “It’s a really long story, Nausicaa. You’re probably way too exhausted to want to hear it now.”

“All the stories are long,” Nausicaa observed dryly.

“Once you’ve had a rest I’ll take you back to my cave, and if you want I’ll tell you about it tomorrow...” Luce went on.

“All the stories are so long that they”—Nausicaa paused, and her hand drew a circle on the air—“that in the end, they become the
same
story. So I may already know yours, Queen Luce.”

Luce didn’t quite know what to say to that.

“Just Luce. Okay? And this is Violet.” Luce suddenly noticed other shining heads popping up in the water around them. “Um, Nausicaa? We should probably get out of here.”

Nausicaa shook her head and held up one hand with a casually majestic gesture. “We will wait, please. I will speak to them.” Anais’s golden head emerged directly face to face with Nausicaa, her expression savage. They were no more than five feet apart, and Luce thought how bizarre they looked together; this close to Nausicaa’s dark patina, Anais’s brash blond beauty seemed phony and brittle, like something made of tinsel and plastic. After a moment Anais registered Nausicaa’s devastating calm, and something wavered in her eyes. She glanced around for her followers; Luce noticed then that Jenna was missing and that Samantha was cowering pitifully behind a rock. Nausicaa waited in silence for so long that Luce could hear the blood surging in her veins.

“It is your cave, where Luce stole the knife?” Nausicaa said at last. “You think this is a cause for an argument?” Luce was glad to notice that Anais was visibly flustered. There was something about Nausicaa that she simply didn’t know how to deal with.

“Like anything around here is any of your business!” Anais tried sneering, but it sounded false and whiny. “I don’t think I owe you an
explanation.
Just get out of our way now, okay?”

“She stole the knife so that she could save me from the net. She has only done what you should have done. She has
timay.”
It took Luce a moment to understand that this was Nausicaa’s way of saying that Luce had only been obeying the timahk; three seconds later Anais seemed to realize the same thing.

“Oh my God! Did everybody hear that? She can’t even say
timahk
right, and she thinks she can tell us what to do!” Anais’s sneer sounded more genuine now, and a few mermaids laughed.

Nausicaa wasn’t fazed at all. “To say
timahk
is a corruption. A change that has come over the word from many hundreds of years. The Greek word is said
‘timay.’
”

“Like you know Greek!” Anais almost squealed it. Luce saw Nausicaa’s slow, unending smile, a smile that seemed to cross whole oceans, and suddenly felt sure that Nausicaa knew Greek as well as she knew the sea itself.

Everyone seemed to be waiting, with inexplicable anxiety, for Nausicaa to answer back. She didn’t bother, just gazed at them all with the same merciless calm, the slightly ironic smile.

“Anyway,
retard,”
Anais snapped at last in a tone that suggested she was desperately trying to cover the silence, “I’m queen here! And I say you’ve got to get lost, like you
and
Luce had better get out of Alaska right now and never come back, or I’ll make sure you’re both sorry!”

“You are queen?” Nausicaa didn’t even sound sarcastic, just coolly disbelieving. “If you can outrank Luce, you must be a singer such as our world has never heard before.” Anais opened her mouth, then shut it again, and to Luce’s surprise a handful of mermaids laughed openly. Luce wanted to warn them to stop. Anais would definitely find a way to get back at them later. “Luce? You will come with me?” Luce saw Nausicaa’s outstretched hand, and took it. No one tried to stop them as they swam away.

***

Luce wanted to be sure Dorian had made it safely home, but there was no way she could do that with Nausicaa right beside her. For the first time in weeks Luce found herself feeling a little ashamed of her forbidden romance. Nausicaa believed that Luce was honorable, after all, worthy of deep respect; somehow it would be unbearable to disappoint her. They stopped at Luce’s dining beach and ate, both of them too tired out to talk much, and Luce was pleased to see that Nausicaa didn’t mind the two little larvae at all. Instead she crooned to them and fed them oysters and petted their hair. They warbled around her, splashing and giggling at the attention.

It wasn’t just exhaustion that kept her from talking to Nausicaa, Luce realized. She felt shy around this dark, powerful mermaid in a way that she hadn’t felt with anyone since the days when she was just a helpless human girl.

“That
queen,”
Nausicaa said after a while. Her tone made it clear how ridiculous she thought it was to call Anais that. “Why do they not drive her away? Anyone can see that she is
sika.”

Luce was confused. “Are you saying—I mean—are you calling Anais a psycho?”

Nausicaa looked blank for a second, then cracked up laughing. It was the first time Luce had heard her sound
young,
although she had the face and body of an exquisite fifteen-year-old girl.

“Not
psycho.
How strange, I always think, that the English for ‘crazy’ is almost the same as
‘psyche,’
the Greek name for soul. Do you all believe here that to have a soul at all is to be insane? She has no soul.
Sika:
a cold one. You must see it when you look at her, so.” And here Nausicaa gave Luce the sidelong glance that would reveal the secret past that had changed her. Luce flinched at having Nausicaa gaze at her that way, but Nausicaa’s face remained so impassive that after a moment Luce relaxed. And then she understood what Nausicaa was trying to tell her.

The dark shimmering of the indication always hung thickly around Anais’s head. But unlike every other mermaid in the tribe, with Anais that sparkling didn’t seem to contain a story. You could gaze at her sideways until your head throbbed from the effort and not see anything more than a few hazy winks of boring, everyday events. She had the mark, it seemed, but not the deep emotional wounds that the mark implied. Luce had always wondered why that was and what it meant.

“You mean because you can’t see anything
happening
to her? I never understood that. Do you—I mean—you know what that’s about?”

Nausicaa looked surprised. “You don’t know this, Luce? This tribe does not know? Have the mermaids truly forgotten so much? That would explain why they allow her to stay here, like a poisonous snake sleeping beside them. A wiser tribe would never permit it.”

“I thought you could only throw a mermaid out if she broke the timahk! Anais has broken it a bunch of times now, actually, but at first—”

“Not
sika.
No one should allow
sika
to remain. They will always cause terrible dangers. They will destroy any tribe that welcomes them...”

“But I don’t understand...” Luce fell silent, wondering. Nausicaa looked deep into her eyes. Her gaze had a green and black brilliance that reminded Luce of a field of fireflies.

“You must remember this feeling, Luce? Of your time of changing? You lay on the cliff, just as the Unnamed Twins once did, and you felt...” Luce didn’t know what twins Nausicaa was talking about, but she remembered the feeling perfectly.

“I felt like I was turning cold. At first it was just my body, but then it was my heart and everything—My body changed into water. I could feel the moonlight shining
through
me.”

“Yes.” Nausicaa nodded, her snaky black hair surging with the wind. “You
turned
cold. All the way to the quick. And yet in such a cold sea as this you have recovered so much warmth of spirit.”

“But then...”

“A
sika,
like this Anais, she does not
turn
cold. She is cold to start with. Cold to the quick from birth. So there can be no vision to see of her
turning
cold. It is her essence, and her danger. She can care for nothing,” Nausicaa added with calm finality.

Luce was quiet for a minute, and Nausicaa went back to nibbling seaweed. Would it make any difference if Nausicaa explained this to the tribe? Luce had a depressing intuition that it wouldn’t.

“Nausicaa?” Luce asked suddenly. “Do you come from Greece?”

Nausicaa glanced up, smiling. There was such deep acceptance in that smile that Luce thrilled at the sight of it.

“I do. It was long ago.”

“How long ago?” Luce felt oddly embarrassed as she asked this, as if it was somehow a terribly personal question.

“Oh, Luce,” Nausicaa sighed. “How can I know? Why should I look for numbers in the sky? Long ago. But if I guess for you, I will say, perhaps three thousand years.”

Luce had been prepared, though barely, to hear Nausicaa mention
hundreds
of years. This was almost too much for her.

“Three
thousand
?” It came out high and frantic.

“It might be less,” Nausicaa conceded. She looked amused. “But it was a time of few men on the earth, and there were many fewer ships then, all with oars. There were places where the whales swam so thick that it could be hard to find enough room between them to reach the surface, and everything was clean. I cannot believe, sometimes, that the world has not yet crumbled to dust from so much time passing by.”

“But how have you
survived?
I mean, all that time...” As Luce said this she noticed that Nausicaa’s smile had turned strained.

“Death does not like the taste of me, I suppose.” Nausicaa looked away, and Luce saw something almost grim in her eyes. “I have taken enough risks. I have traveled the world around and again around, more times than I can remember. I know so many languages that I could tell you a story speaking only one word from each. And on many occasions I have come very close to dying, but something always interferes. Today it was you. A new mermaid, but with the courage of one so long in the sea that death has become an empty threat, and with the rare power of singing so that the water will understand her. Yet she will not be called queen. Very little can still make me wonder, Luce. But with you I admit I am curious.”

Luce looked down at the bright crescents of seafoam, the subtle glow of her own hands refracting through the night black water. “You can ask me whatever you want, if you’re curious about me. But I don’t think it’ll be very interesting for you, Nausicaa. I mean, I’ve only been a mermaid since April, and anyway you said you probably already know my story. Remember? You said all the stories turn out to be the same.”

Nausicaa laughed. Her deep olive-bronze skin gave off a richer light than Luce’s, a strong greenish gold. “Perhaps someday someone will change that story. Perhaps
you
will, Luce. Then the story will be new, even for me. I would be very pleased if that were so.”

Luce looked up at her, intrigued. “Change it how?”

“If I could guess that,” Nausicaa observed sardonically, “I might be the one to do the changing.” She suddenly looked bored, and Luce winced at the idea that Nausicaa was already getting tired of her. Still, the conversation made Luce think of another moment several months before, another mermaid murmuring to her in the darkness.

“What you’re saying—it reminds me of my friend Miriam. She thought it was pointless to kill humans, when there were always more of them anyway. She couldn’t understand why we had to keep doing the same things over and over.” Luce felt her stomach seize up. She was painfully anxious to hear what Nausicaa thought about sinking human ships.

“I long ago came to that view myself. Humans are repulsive and senseless, and they work restlessly to destroy the world that carries them. But singing them to their deaths, though we are charged to do it...” Nausicaa shrugged. “A game for the newer ones, and I feel I have done my share. But no doubt you enjoy it.”

“I don’t, actually.” Luce heard her voice break a little, and Nausicaa’s glance sparked at her again.

“From the beginning? You felt this way? Do you think, even, that it is wrong, the vengeance mermaids bring?”

Luce paused and considered this. She couldn’t help being aware that the conversation was veering into dangerous territory, but the impulse to trust Nausicaa was overwhelming. “I mean, I helped sink ships at first, once or twice. But I always felt horrible about it. I kept remembering humans I’d loved.”

Nausicaa was nodding in a slightly impatient way, and Luce realized that this was just another story Nausicaa already knew. “It happens so, sometimes. There are those who still feel with their human hearts, and they cannot bear the task that is given to them.”

Luce was simultaneously bewildered and fascinated.
The task that is given to them?
Who gave it, then? Even more exciting, though, was the information that there were other mermaids somewhere who felt the way she did. If they could all live together...

“Where
are
they?” Luce asked, too eagerly, and Nausicaa looked blank. “I mean, the mermaids who don’t kill. Do they have their own tribe?” Now that, Luce thought, would be a tribe where it would be a tremendous honor to be queen, if they only thought she was good enough. Maybe she could persuade Dorian to run away, and they could start a new life together. Maybe mermaids like that would even accept him.

“Oh.” Now that Nausicaa understood what Luce was asking, she looked a little sad. “There is no such tribe, Luce. Mermaids who feel as you do—they do not choose to live as we must. All that I have ever known or heard of, they pull themselves soon enough from the water and die in the air.”