Siren (3 page)

Always he was confused by her strange ways. He had been in many places of the world that still practiced pagan beliefs, but he came from a Christian homeland and had been taught from birth to believe in only one God. Yet here was Siren, a creature of the gods. If asked, she would speak of the King of Storms and the King of the Sea, or she might call them gods instead of kings. It seemed all the same to her.

Nor did she understand the passing of years, or count them. He had asked her how long he had been with her, and she only looked at him as if his words were of a language that made no sense. She did not count years, nor seasons, and knew nothing of months, yet she was aware of passing days and the phases of the moon.

From where they were, he could see the sea bottom rising at a sharp slope toward the lightness above them. "We must be near land," he observed. "I want to see."

As he swam to the surface, Siren came along beside him. In the brilliant blue of a summer day, what looked like an island with tall white cliffs like the chalk of Dover gleamed in bright sun.

"Do not go there," Siren said, touching his arm.

"Why not?"

"There will be humans."

That seemed to him a good reason to go. He started to launch himself toward the island, but an odd reluctance overwhelmed him, and he stopped in the water, as if he could not make himself go further. Or perhaps it was simply that he once more encountered that odd fear that nothing he was experiencing was real. How one could be dead and yet dream or imagine, he could not think. Yet how could any of this exist?

He sighed and turned back into the sea, relinquishing those old longings once more.

"I would like to walk on land again." It was more than a wish. It was a hungry longing, to touch feet to earth, to see another human being, or hear a human voice. But he did not wish to say so.

"It is not water," she replied.

That, he guessed, meant she thought land was inferior, for she had said it was a place she could go. "I know it is not. But I was born a human, and men are made to walk on land. It is something I miss."

Siren's beautiful face took on a grim look, with thinned lips. Her dancing hair stilled in the water. "We will go," she said.

When they surfaced again, the bright afternoon was gone, and they found instead the world was enveloped in a damp, gray dawn, with only a sliver of the reddish sun peeking between the distant sea and a thin layer of clouds. The gleaming white cliffs were gone, replaced by cliffs of dark and jagged rock rising out of the water, and a sheltered, sandy cove between them. In the shallow water, they waded and emerged into the crisp air. In another life, he would have been cold enough to shiver. He laughed aloud, for the breeze merely lapped his bare flesh. He knew it was chilly, but it felt like nothing.

Beyond the strand line, the sand dunes created a barrier, and behind it, a shallow pool, studded on its shores with jewels of wild flowers among golden rushes and tufts of grass. As they walked, he picked the flowers and tied their stems into a long chain, which he placed around Siren's neck.

"Why is this thing?" she asked, fingering it and lifting the blossoms to smell.

"Because it is pretty, for a beautiful woman."

"Why?" She leaned her head far to the side as if she sought to see him from another angle.

He smiled. Siren never asked why. Yet he understood this was one of those things she couldn't comprehend. He bent down from his tall height to her rather unimpressive one and kissed her on the lips. "Men give them to their loves," he said.

She fingered the crude garland thoughtfully. "Men are strange creatures."

"Men might find you unusual," he replied, tracing his hand over the line of her jaw to her hair, which he smoothed back from her shoulders. "But they would find you very beautiful."

She frowned in that way that said she did not comprehend. "I am for you, John Wall."

The words confused him as they always did. Somehow, from Siren's point of view, this seemed to explain everything. But it did not to him.

"I think I miss my homeland," he said. This, he thought, must be Devon or Cornwall, or at least some place on the South Coast of England, and he had come from Yorkshire. "A man is made to live with his feet on land. All sailors dream of the time when they no longer sail the seas, but go home, perhaps to a small cottage, or even a townhouse in the city. You are of the sea, I understand. Yet I know you love to breathe the air and feel the slap of the waves on your skin. Could you not live on land, Siren?"

"Sirens may live on land, though they are not suited to it. It is not a good place for them."

"But you could if you wanted to, couldn't you?"

"I could. But it is not water. On land, a Siren lives no longer than men do. If a Siren's blood touches earth, she dies. It is a horrible thing."

He saw her shudder.

An odd, tinkling bell sort of laughter broke through his concentration on her troubling beauty, and he looked up to the source, the cliff above them. Two young girls in their white summer frocks and one very tall, skinny boy looked down at them.

"Mermaids!" said the smaller girl.

Like a flash, Siren disappeared into the sea. John Wall stared at the children, the first humans he had seen in a long time.

The older one clamped hands over the little one's eyes, but she continued her own staring.

"Mermen, more like," said the boy. "You shouldn't look, Eliza."

They spoke English. It sent his heart spinning at its sound. Then he realized why they were staring, and looked down at his own nakedness. He turned swiftly and dove into the water like Siren, vanishing as quickly as a startled sea otter.

So that was why. A man could not go about among other humans without clothes.

Nor could he ever explain where he had been. How could he explain that his ship wrecked off the southeastern coast of Africa, but he had come ashore thousands of miles away in southern England? And when was this? They would think him insane. Or a liar.

Something sank in his heart as he began to realize he could not go home. Could not be with men, dance with ladies, hug little children, ever again. He swam away with Siren, and asked no more about setting foot on land.

But no matter what he did, no matter the distractions beneath the ever-complicated sea, he knew the hunger he had felt when he saw the children on the cliff would not go away.

Chapter 4

It was a compulsion that drove John Wall to follow the Siren as she dove deep into the ocean. He could not let her from his sight, for more and more he understood he was nothing without her. Something in that gnawed at his soul.

Soon, the brilliant colors of her Summer Sea came back to them, lighting their way through thick forests of kelp and waving sea grasses. John re-doubled his efforts to please Siren, making love to her whenever and however he could. She had only to beckon and he would come to her. He did not understand who or what she was—a goddess? Not a human, he knew now, for she did not want any part of humankind as far as he could see.

But for all that Siren had become his life and he could think of little else, he thought of the children on the cliff. He thought of the sailors, the bos'n, the ship's carpenter as they strained at the oars of the disappearing long boat on the night
Telesto
broke apart on the reef. He hungered to know what had happened.

And so they swam in the sea and played with dolphins and caught rides on broad-winged rays.

"What happens to the ships that go down?" he asked.

She frowned in that way she had of considering whether she would answer. She did not like it, he had gathered, when he asked about such things as ships and sailors.

"The sea wastes nothing, save perhaps the things of man. Most of them are of no use to the creatures of the sea. Come. I will show you."

They were far from Siren's home where she liked to sleep, in the sunken crater in her bed made of sponges. Here they were in the forbidding world where the sea was sometimes cold, and dark in its depths. They swam along in turquoise water that seemed to be fairly shallow, and its bottom covered in a pale, gritty sand that was almost white, and rose and fell like a rolling prairie. He knew from experience now that there would be islands here and there, some very small, but others larger. He often saw the shadow of a ship passing overhead, but Siren would guide him away from them.

They came upon a structure he recognized immediately as a ship that had sunk, for no coral or undersea plant could produce the curves of a ship. As they approached, he saw what first looked like a man, but was a ruined figurehead, on the sand near the splintered remains of a yardarm. The ship's main deck had rotted and collapsed, exposing timbers like the ribs of a skeleton lying on its side. Its squared off high forecastle and elegantly carved stern that reminded him oddly of an old mansion near his boyhood home, confirmed his first guess of a Spanish galleon.

Curiosity drew him between the gaunt ribs, and a sad pang of empathy struck him, for the men who must have died here. It would be too long ago, he guessed, to find any trace of the men themselves. He looked instead for what they left behind.

He saw only a chaotic jumble of broken and barnacle-encrusted globs, but one he identified as a cannon of the old type, when bronze was still used. The bulwarks were mostly collapsed, little more than dust. They would not have been as sturdy as the hull or the decks, and they would have been more exposed to the open sea, so they would have gone first.

He kicked through the water, and passed through a rotted hole in the deck and meandered in a direction that led him to the captain's cabin beneath the old poop deck. Scores of small, whitish fish scurried out of his way. He had grown used to light being wherever he went with Siren, and the dimness he encountered made him squint, until his eyes became accustomed to the change.

He sifted his fingers through the rough debris of what had once been a deck, and came up with an odd assortment of things the ocean and its scavengers had not found useful. A metal spoon, mostly corroded. A buckle, beneath a thick crust of barnacles. Some bright thing caught a stray beam of light that filtered through rotted boards of the deck that would have been above. He reached into a heap of rubbish and pulled on a chain. Gold, he thought, though in the dim light and obscured by the clinging barnacles, it was hard to tell. He pulled on the chain, and it gave for a moment, then caught again. With his other hand, he scooped away undistinguishable material, and came to a mass of coins embedded in a mass of barnacles. Silver, likely, but black with tarnish, and gold. And then a cross. Gold, and studded with ancient stones. The green of an emerald winked through the crust. The ship must have been returning to Spain from South America.

John traced his fingers over the places in the cross where the metal and stones shone through. He held a gold coin between fingers and thumb, letting them absorb the image of a Spanish cross on one side and a monarch's head in profile on the other. There were letters around the crudely minted coin's edge.

He sighed and placed the cross and coins back where he had found them. Siren was right. All that was so valuable in his homeland had no use here, would never be useful for him again.

They swam away. It was all John could do to not look back.

* * *

It seemed never to be winter or stormy in the water beneath the waves, but John knew the illusion of ever-summer was just that. They surfaced only rarely now, yet he had begun to realize that Siren had a need for air much like his own, or she would have stayed beneath the waves all the time. He knew it had something to do with seeing the children.

He could not get the children out of his mind, hard though he tried. He was an Englishman, and the children had been English, speaking his language, or the language that used to be his. But it did him no good to dwell on it, for he knew the truth that he was changed—no longer the same. What he had become did not matter, as much as the hard truth that he was no longer like his own kind.

Siren took him into the far north, or he believed it must be the north. It might just as easily have been the harsh, bitter ice-bound land at the South Pole. But when he saw sleek seals being pursued by a huge yellow-white blob that became a fast-swimming polar bear, he knew he had guessed right. He watched the brutal catch, and the bear surfacing. She was a young female, with two cubs waiting on a nearby ice floe.

Siren turned away. She ate only of the kelp from her garden in the Summer Sea, and that was what she gave to him, for she would not kill any fish in her sea. Yet daily they saw one species kill another. It was what the creatures of the sea did to survive. Siren had demanded that one thing of the gods, she told him, that she never be forced to eat the flesh of another creature.

John Wall stared at her, dumbfounded. "You could tell the god how you wished to be created, even before you were created?"

"Of course," she replied. She fingered the little flower chain necklace he had made for her, and John smiled back. Odd though it was that the flowers never seemed to fade, he was glad, for what else could he give his love? In the sea, they needed little, except each other.