by Peter
“Ys is old wives’ tales. And so is Ahez. And I’ve seen them both. Please, Gaëtan. At worst, it won’t work and I’ll look like a fool.”
Gaëtan’s voice is sombre. “The worst is if it works. You’ll be dead.” But his gaze is still angry, and his hands clenched in his lap; and she knows she’s won, that he’ll give her what she wants.
ANGRY OR NOT, Gaëtan still insists on coming with her – he drives her in his battered old Citroën on the small country roads to Douarnenez, and parks the car below a flickering lamplight.
Françoise walks down the dunes, keeping her gaze on the vast expanse of the ocean. In her hands she holds her only weapons: in her left hand, the paper with the pattern Gaëtan made her trace two hours ago; in her right hand, the sonographs the radiologist gave her this morning – the last scrap of science and reason that’s left to her, the only seawall she can build against Ys and the goddess.
It’s like being in her dream once more: the cold, white sand crunching under her sandals; the stars and the moon shining on the canvas of the sky; and the roar of the waves filling her ears to bursting. As she reaches the bottom of the beach – the strip of wet sand left by the retreating tide, where it’s easier to draw patterns – the baby moves within her, kicking against the skin of her belly.
Soon, she thinks. Soon. Either way, it will soon be over, and the knot of fear within her chest will vanish.
Gaëtan is standing by her side, one hand on her shoulder. “You know there’s still time—” he starts.
She shakes her head. “It’s too late for that. Five months ago was the last time I had a choice in the matter, Gaëtan.”
He shrugs, angrily. “Go on, then.”
Françoise kneels in the sand, carefully, oh so carefully. She lays the cream envelope with the sonographs by her side; and positions the paper with the pattern so that the moonlight falls full onto it, leaving no shadow on its lines. To draw her pattern, she’s brought a Celtic dagger with a triskell on the hilt – bought in a souvenir shop on the way to the beach.
Gaëtan is kneeling as well, staring intently at the pattern. His right hand closes over Françoise’s hand, just over the dagger’s hilt. “This is how you draw,” he says.
His fingers moves, drawing Françoise’s hand with them. The dagger goes down, sinks into the sand – there’s some resistance, but it seems to melt away before Gaëtan’s controlled gestures.
He draws line upon line, the beginning of the pattern – curves that meet to form walls and streets. And as he draws, he speaks: “We come here to summon Ys out of the sea. May Saint Corentin, who saved King Gradlon from the waves, watch over us; may the church bells toll not for our deaths. We come here to summon Ys out of the sea.”
And, as he finishes his speech, he draws one last line, and completes his half of the pattern. Slowly, carefully, he opens his hand, leaving Françoise alone in holding the dagger.
Her turn.
She whispers, “We come here to summon Ys out of the sea. May Saint Corentin, who saved King Gradlon...” She closes her eyes for a moment, feeling the weight of the dagger in her hand – a last chance to abandon, to leave the ritual incomplete.
But it’s too late for that.
With the same meticulousness she once applied to her blueprints – the same controlled gestures that allowed her to draw the goddess from memory – she starts drawing on the sand.
Now there’s no other noise but the breath of the sea – and, in counterpoint to it, the soft sounds she makes as she adds line upon line, curves that arc under her to form a triple spiral, curves that branch and split, the pattern blossoming like a flower under her fingers.
She remembers Gaëtan’s explanations: here are the seawalls of Ys, and the breach that the waves made when Ahez, drunk with her own power, opened the gates to the ocean’s anger; here are the twisting streets and avenues where revellers would dance until night’s end, and the palace where Ahez brought her lovers – and, at the end of the spiral, here is the ravine where her trusted servants would throw the lovers’ bodies in the morning. Here is...
There’s no time anymore where she is; no sense of her own body or of the baby growing within. Her world has shrunk to the pen and the darkened lines she draws, each one falling into place with the inevitability of a bell-toll.
When she begins on the last few lines, Gaëtan’s voice starts speaking the words of power: the Breton words that summon Ahez and Ys from their resting-place beneath the waves.
“Ur pales kaer tost d’ar sklujoù
Eno, en aour hag en perlez,
Evel an heol a bar Ahez.”
A beautiful palace by the seawalls
There, in gold and in pearls
Like the sun gleams Ahez
His voice echoes in the silence, as if he were speaking above a bottomless chasm. He starts speaking them again – and again and again, the Breton words echoing each other until they become a string of meaningless syllables.
Françoise has been counting carefully, as he told her to; on the ninth repetition, she joins him. Her voice rises to mingle with Gaëtan’s: thin, reedy, as fragile as a stream of smoke carried by the wind – and yet every word vibrates in the air, quivers as if drawing on some immeasurable power.
“Ur pales kaer tost d’ar sklujoù
Eno, en aour hag en perlez,
Evel an heol a bar Ahez.”
Their words echo in the silence. At last, at long last, she rises, the pattern under her complete – and she’s back in her body now, the sand’s coldness seeping into her legs, her heart beating faster and faster within her chest – and there’s a second, weaker heartbeat entwined with hers.
Slowly, she rises, tucks the dagger into her trousers pocket. There’s utter silence on the beach now, but it’s the silence before a storm. Moonlight falls upon the lines she’s drawn – and remains trapped within them, until the whole pattern glows white.
“Françoise,” Gaëtan says behind her. There’s fear in his voice.
She doesn’t speak. She picks up the sonographs and goes down to the sea, until the waves lap at her feet – a deeper cold than that of the sand. She waits – knowing what is coming.
Far, far away, bells start tolling: the bells of Ys, answering her call. And in their wake the whole surface of the ocean is trembling, shaking like some great beast trying to dislodge a burden. Dark shadows coalesce under the sea, growing larger with each passing moment.
And then they’re no longer shadows, but the bulks of buildings rising above the surface: massive stone walls encrusted with kelp, surrounding broken-down and rotted gates. The faded remnants of tabards adorn both sides of the gates – the drawings so eaten away Françoise can’t make out their details.
The wind blows into her face the familiar smell of brine and decay, of algae and rotting wood: the smell of Ys.
Gaëtan, standing beside her, doesn’t speak. Shock is etched on every line of his face.
“Let’s go,” Françoise whispers – for there is something about the drowned city that commands silence, even when you are its summoner.
Gaëtan is looking at her and at the gates; at her and at the shimmering pattern drawn on the sand. “It shouldn’t have worked,” he says, but his voice is very soft, already defeated. At length he shakes his head, and walks beside her as they enter the city of Ys.
INSIDE, SKELETONS LIE in the streets, their arms still extended as if they could keep the sea at bay. A few crabs and lobsters scuttle away from them, the click-click of their legs on stone the only noise that breaks the silence.
Françoise holds the sonographs under her arms – the cardboard envelope is wet and decomposing, as if the atmosphere of Ys spreads rot to everything it touches. Gaëtan walks slowly, carefully. She can imagine how he feels – he, never one to take unconsidered risks, who now finds himself thrust into the legends of his childhood.
She doesn’t think, or dwell overmuch on what could go wrong – that way lies despair, and perdition. But she can’t
help hearing the baby’s faint heartbeat – and imagining his blood draining from his limbs.
There’s no one in the streets, no revellers to greet them, no merchants plying their trades on the deserted marketplace – not even ghosts to flitter between the ruined buildings. Ys is a dead city. No, worse than that: the husk of a city, since long deserted by both the dead and the living. But it hums with power: with an insistent beat that seeps through the soles of Françoise’s shoes, with a rhythm that is the roar of the waves and the voice of the storm – and also a lament for all the lives lost to the ocean. As she walks, the rhythm penetrates deeper into her body, insinuating itself into her womb until it mingles with her baby’s heartbeat.
Françoise knows where she’s going: all she has to do is retrace her steps of the dream, to follow the streets until they widen into a large plaza; to walk between the six kelp-eaten statues that guard the entrance to the palace, between the gates torn off their hinges by the onslaught of the waves.
And then she and Gaëtan are inside, walking down corridors. The smell of mould is overbearing now, and Françoise can feel the beginnings of nausea in her throat. There’s another smell, too: underlying everything, sweet and cloying, like a perfume worn for too long.
She knows who it belongs to. She wonders if the goddess has seen them come – but of course she has. Nothing in Ys escapes her overbearing power. She’ll be at the centre, waiting for them – toying with their growing fear, revelling in their anguish.
No. Françoise mustn’t think about this. She’ll focus on the song in her mind and in her womb, the insidious song of Ys – and she won’t think at all. She won’t...
In silence they worm their way deeper into the cankered palace, stepping on moss and algae and the threadbare remnants of tapestries. Till at last they reach one last set of great gates – but those are of rusted metal, and the soldiers and sailors engraved on their panels are still visible, although badly marred by the sea.
The gates are closed – have been closed for a long time, the hinges buried under kelp and rust, the panels hanging askew. Françoise stops, the fatigue she’s been ignoring so far creeping into the marrow of her bones.
Gaëtan has stopped too; he’s running his fingers on the metal – pushing, desultorily, but the doors won’t budge.
“What now?” he mouths.
The song is stronger now, draining Françoise of all thoughts – but at the same time lifting her into a different place, the same haven outside time as when she was drawing the pattern on the beach.
There are no closed doors in that place.
Françoise tucks the envelope with the sonographs under her arm, and lays both hands on the panels and pushes. Something rumbles, deep within the belly of the city – a pain that is somehow in her own womb – and then the gates yield, and open with a loud creak.
Inside, the goddess is waiting for them.
The dream once more: the rotten chairs beside the rotten trestle tables, the warm stones under her feet. And, at the far end of the room, the goddess sitting in the chair on the dais, smiling as Françoise draws nearer.
“You are brave,” she says, and her voice is that of the sea before the storm. “And foolish. Few dare to summon Ys from beneath the waves.” She smiles again, revealing teeth the colour of nacre. “And fewer still return alive.” She moves, with fluid, inhuman speed; comes to stand by Gaëtan, who has frozen, three steps below the empty chair. “But you brought a gift, I see.”
Françoise drags her voice from an impossibly faraway place. “He’s not yours.”
“I choose as I please, and every man that comes into Ys is mine,” the goddess says. She walks around Gaëtan, tilting his head upwards, watching him as she might watch a slave on the selling-block. Abruptly there’s a mask in her hand – a mask of black silk that seems to waver between her fingers.
That legend, too, Gaëtan told her. At dawn, after the goddess has had her pleasure, the mask will tighten until the man beneath dies of suffocation – one more sacrifice to slake her unending thirst.
Françoise is moving, without conscious thought – extending a hand and catching the mask before the goddess can put it on Gaëtan’s face. The mask clings to her fingers: cold and slimy, like the scales of a fish, but writhing against her skin like a maddened snake.
She meets the goddess’s cold gaze – the same blinding radiance that silenced her within the dream. But now there’s power in Françoise – the remnants of the magic she used to summon Ys – and the light is strong, but she can still see.
“You dare,” the goddess hisses. “You whom I picked among mortals to be honoured—”
“I don’t want to be honoured,” Françoise says, slowly. The mask is crawling upwards, extending coils around the palm of her hand. She’s about to say “I don’t want your child”, but that would be a lie – she kept the baby, after all, clung to him rather than to Stéphane. “What I want you can’t give.”
The goddess smiles. She hasn’t moved – she’s still standing there, at the heart of her city, secure in her power. “Who are you to judge what I can and can’t give?”
The mask is at her wrist now – it leaves a tingling sensation where it passes, as if it had briefly cut off the flow of blood in her body. Françoise tries not to think of what will happen when it reaches her neck – tries not to fear. Instead, as calmly as she can, she extends the envelope to the goddess. When she moves, the mask doesn’t fall off, doesn’t move in the slightest – except to continue its inexorable climb upwards.
Mustn’t think about it. She knew the consequences when she drew her pattern in the sand; knew them and accepted them.
So she says to the goddess, in a voice that she keeps devoid of all emotions, “This is what you made.”
The goddess stares at the envelope as if trying to decide what kind of trap it holds. Then, apparently deciding Françoise cannot harm her, she takes the envelope from Françoise’s hands, and opens it.
Slowly, the goddess lifts the sonographs to the light, looks at them, lays them aside on the steps of the dais. From the envelope she takes the last paper – the diagnosis typed by the radiologist, and looks at it.
Silence fills the room, as if the whole city were holding its breath. Even the mask on Françoise’s arm has stopped crawling.
“This is a lie,” the goddess says, and her voice is the lash of a whip. Shadows move across her face, like storm-clouds blown by the wind.
Françoise shrugs, with a calm she doesn’t feel. “Why would I?” She reaches out with one hand towards the mask, attempts to pull it from her arm. Her fingers stick to it, but it will not budge. Not surprising.
“You would cast my child from your womb.”
Françoise shakes her head. “I could have. Much, much earlier. But I didn’t.” And the part of her that can’t choke back its anger and frustration says, “I don’t see why the child should pay for the arrogance of his creator.”
“You dare judge me?” The goddess’s radiance becomes blinding; the mask tightens around Françoise’s arm, sending a wave of pain up her arm, pain so strong that Françoise bits her lips not to cry out. She fights an overwhelming urge to crawl into the dirt – it doesn’t work, because abruptly she’s kneeling on the floor, with only shaking arms to hold up her torso. She has to abase herself before the goddess; before her glory and her magic. She, Françoise, is nothing; a failure, a flawed womb. An artist turning to science out of greed; an engineer drawing meaningless blueprints; a woman who used her friend’s feelings for her to bring him into Ys.
“If this child will not survive its birth,” the goddess is saying, “you will have another. I will not be cheated.” Not by you, she’s saying without words. Not by a mere mortal.
A wave of power buffets Françoise, bringing with it the smell of wind and brine; of wet sand and rotten wood. Within her, the power of the goddess is rising – Françoise’s belly aches as if fingers of ice were tearing it apart. Her baby is twisting and turning, kicking desperat
ely against the confines of the womb, voicelessly screaming not to be unmade, but it’s too late.
She wants to curl up on herself and make the pain go away; she wants to lie down, even if it’s on slimy stone, and wait until the contractions of her belly have faded, and nothing remains but numbness. But she can’t move. The only way to move is towards the algae-encrusted floor, to grovel before the goddess.
Gaëtan was right. It was folly to come here; folly to hope to stand against Ahez.
Françoise’s arms hurt. She’s going to have to yield. There’s no other choice. She—
Yield.
She’s a womb, an empty place for the goddess to fill. She has been chosen, picked out from the crowd of tourists on the beach – chosen for the greatest of honours, and now chosen again, to bear a child that will be perfect. She should be glad beyond reason.
Yield.
The mask is crawling upwards again – it’s at her shoulder now, flowing towards her neck, towards her face. She knows, without being able to articulate the thought, that when it covers her face she will be lost – drowned forever under the silk.
Everything is scattering, everything is stripped away by the power of the goddess – the power of the ocean that drowns sailors, of the storm-tossed seas and their irresistible siren song. She can’t hold on to anything. She – has to—
There’s nothing left at her core now; only a hollow begging to be filled.
And yet ... and yet in the silence, in the emptiness of her mind is the song of Ys, and the pattern she drew in the sand; in the silence of her mind, she is kneeling on the beach with the dagger still in her hand, and watching the drowned city rise from the depths to answer her call.
Slowly, she raises her head, biting her lips not to scream at the pain within her – the pain that sings yield yield yield. Blood floods her mouth with the taste of salt, but she’s staring at the face of the goddess – and the light isn’t blinding, she can see the green eyes dissecting her like an insect. She can–
