by A. L. Knorr
My gaze followed her as she made her way toward the steps leading down. She put a hand on the rock beside the stairway and paused for a moment, then she looked back over her shoulder and her eyes fell on my face. She smiled––a dazzling grin full of mischief, then turned and disappeared into the stairwell. It had happened so quickly that I thought I might have imagined it, but no, she’d smiled at me.
When the last of the sirens except the Foniádes had left the room, I stood up from the stone seat I’d found and gave my mother a hopeful look.
But she beckoned the Foniádes closer to listen to her.
“At the southeastern border,” my mother said, her first words as the new Sovereign, “We found two Atlanteans stealing from Us. Enya allowed them to graze within our borders, but this will not do for Our reign. The new edict is that no Atlanteans are permitted to poach in Our territory. Find those two, for I am certain they will have returned by now. Bring them to me.”
The Foniádes turned and left with that command. I fought the urge to shrink against the wall as they passed, but they took no notice of me.
Apollyona stood with her back to me, still, appearing to be lost in thought.
“Mother?” My voice seemed small and lost in that cave.
Apollyona looked over her shoulder then, as though only now remembering that she had a daughter. She squared her shoulders and beckoned. “What is it, Bel?”
I wanted to run to her, I wanted to throw my arms around her, and for some inexplicable reason, I wanted to let siren tears fall until I felt better. But Apollyona despised those kinds of ‘displays of weakness,’ as she’d called them, and what I wanted more than anything was to please my mother. So I approached with my hands clasped in front of me, slowly, outwardly calm.
“What is happening?” I asked.
She looked down at me, the jewels glittering from her head and the necklace at her throat giving her more of a queenly aura than any human queen I’d seen in paintings when we’d been on land, even though her robe was simple and her feet were bare.
“I’m your Sovereign,” she replied. “Go and acquaint yourself with your new home. Stay out of trouble.”
That was it? I blinked at her, confused.
She set a hand on my shoulder and her voice warmed a fraction. “You are too young to need a gem. Come and see me then.” With that, she kissed the top of my head, the only bit of affection I’d received from her or anyone since entering Okeanos. “Now go and meet your sister sirens. I have things to do.”
With that, she turned away and left the room through an archway behind the throne. I longed to go after her, to see what she had to do as Sovereign, to learn everything about my new home, about the Foniádes, and about the blue-haired siren. More than these things, I just wanted to be with her, as her daughter. My mother had never been perfect, and she had not educated me well, but she loved me in her way. She was my first love, and I felt I’d lost her at an age when I barely understood my own nature. I wanted Polly back.
But it was not to be the way it had been, and the most painful lesson of my young life was that everything changes, and once changed, will never go back to the way it was before, no matter how much one might want it.
I wished bitterly that I had paid more attention to everything Polly had ever said to me when it had just been the two of us. I wished I’d soaked up the moments spent with her, relished the sound of her voice when she’d spoken, listened to the sound of her heart on the rare moments when she’d held me. I lost something I thought I could never lose, and no one warned me it was coming––not even Polly.
In many ways it hit me like a death––Apollyona’s ascension to Sovereignty. Polly was dead, and the siren sitting on the throne looked and sounded a lot like her in character, but was nothing like her in deed.
I became everyone’s daughter, and no one’s daughter—everyone’s responsibility, and no one’s responsibility—for the remainder of my childhood.
Three
Life in Okeanos as a pre-pubescent siren was safe, easy, and protected. Years passed, and I approached the time when I would need to have my first mating cycle. Only after I’d completed one full cycle would I be given my gemstone.
I’ve since learned that sirens, even the ones who made their home in Okeanos, are nomadic by nature. The territory of Okeanos was massive, larger than most European countries, and sirens had the run of it. It was not unusual for a siren to disappear for months on end, reappearing to recount her adventures to her fellow sirens before disappearing again. Wandering and exploring was in our nature, and there were so few predators who might attack us that we roamed broadly and solitarily, afraid of nothing.
Even the large sharks of the ocean were unlikely to attack us, though I didn’t learn why until much later in my life, and thanks to a certain oceanographer. The only predators we needed to fear were so rare that hardly any siren had ever seen either one––the giant squid and the kraken.
Exploring the underwater world of Okeanos was a never-ending source of joy and learning for me, but second to that was the exploration of the caves of Califas. They were an engineering marvel, for it was clear that the caves––while they might have begun as a natural phenomenon––had been developed and built out centuries, maybe even millennia, ago.
The cave network within the mountain range was vast: stretching outward to every corner of the world, but above and below it as well. Apollyona’s throne room lay just beneath the highest peak of Califas, which jutted from the sea like a monstrous castle covered in verdant green life. Waterfalls streamed from its face, splashing into rocky pools and lagoons of crystal waters filled with every kind of food a siren could want. Beaches crusted some edges while large boulders lay upon others. From its highest cliff, one could see the surrounding islands and blue waters extending into what seemed like eternity.
I learned that crevices in the face of Califas had been excavated and installed with reflective tiles, working to pull the sunlight deep into the interior for hundreds of vertical feet— even beneath the waterline—before the reflective tiles petered out and all became darkness. In the deepest caverns, piles of these broken mirrors and pieces of colored tiles lay in mossy, slime-coated heaps. Decayed and brittle tiling and grouting tools lay scattered about, as though whoever had installed them had simply run out of energy or resources and had to abandon the project.
I was told that Okeanos was very, very old, and had existed like this for at least five thousand years. It had gone through periods of emptiness, where no one occupied its halls and caverns, and it had gone through periods of development, being undertaken––we surmised––by enterprising sirens with a vision. There were places under the mountains beyond Califas that had been mined and still had yellow dust and veins of a yellow glittery mineral threading through the stone. These mines lay abandoned and no one seemed interested in bringing them to life again, for all our doings were directed by Apollyona, and before her Odenyalis, neither of whom was interested in mining. Why should any siren have to mine anything? The Atlantic gave us all the food we needed and Okeanos was an underwater utopia. When a siren bound for land needed money to start a human life and search for a mate, Califas had treasure stored in its deep caves. When sirens found things of value on the ocean floor, they brought it to these caves. No one guarded it because no one needed to. Sirens did not have the kind of greed that plagued men––wanting more than they could ever use. The treasure of the ocean floors belonged to all of us, and we could take what we needed when we needed it.
I had heard stories of sirens using their voices to procure money from unfortunate humans who were so unlucky as to be in the way, but this activity had been discouraged by not only Odenyalis but Sovereigns before her. Apollyona did not speak of it specifically, so sirens continued for the most part to take treasure from the ocean rather than from humans.
The borders of Okeanos were patrolled by the Foniádes in shifts. There were not so many of these fearsome sirens––a few dozen
at most––however, any siren roaming near the ends of Okeanos territory was required to keep an eye out for Atlantean trespassers.
For a time, I became obsessed with the Foniádes, and wished I had been born like them. They were so fierce, so different from the rest of us, and when I was young, I thought of them as superior. Their tails had gray backs, white bellies, sometimes with black tips on the ends of their fins––shark-like characteristics. They swam faster, and they were larger, stronger, and more aggressive than the rest of us. I wondered aloud why there were so few sirens born like this and was answered by a nearby mermaid who’d heard me.
“It’s the law of the ocean. Humans call it the food chain,” she said, approaching to converse about it. “There are multitudes of the smallest kinds of fish in the water, but have you ever noticed that the larger the species is, the fewer they are in number? It’s why no one ever sees the kraken; it’s the largest, and there must only be a few,” she guessed. “Maybe even only one.”
This concept seemed so clever to me at the time. My human education had halted when Apollyona had taken me back to Okeanos with her, although my siren education had begun. There were no classrooms or teachers. Instead, the ocean was my classroom and every older siren my teacher. The older, more experienced mermaids taught the younger ones what they had learned while they were last on land. The schooling of young sirens relied on the verbal sharing of stories. We were not organized, we were not industrious, we were not even particularly sociable, but somehow young sirens received a cobbled together education with the more intelligent ones curious enough to seek out knowledge, sometimes endlessly plaguing the older sirens with questions––I was among this number.
Just as there were rooms in Califas for treasure, so were there rooms for other oddities found on the ocean floor, less valuable but certainly not less interesting things. Things like books, maps, eating and drinking tools, sailing tools and equipment, sculptures and other pieces of art, parts of ships, bolts and bolts of fabric (some of which were used to make the simple robes worn by those who wished), vats of soggy food like salted beef and pork, and crates and crates of alcohol. Anything that had ever been transported by ship overhead, a portion of it inevitably ended up on the ocean floor. There were weapons, too, plenty of them and of all kinds––both of human origin and (as I learned later) Mer-made. There were spears, swords, tridents, and knives and cutlasses of all shapes and kinds. Most of them were rusted beyond usefulness, but I thought perhaps they told of how warlike the Mer must have been once. In the time of my youth, most Mer carried a small knife, which came in handy when hunting, salvaging, and eating. Only the Foniádes carried spears and tridents, but I’d never seen them actually use these weapons.
Curiosity meant that most sirens eventually found their way through all the nooks and crannies of Okeanos, drawing every last ounce of education offered.
As my puberty grew close, it was the coming and going of sirens––some returning with daughters––that captured my imagination next. I knew my time was coming and I felt a growing reluctance to face it. I made a study of the sirens who returned, picking up on what emotions I could and looking intently at them as they went into the simple ceremony of receiving their gem from Apollyona and being welcomed back to Okeanos. They seemed to me to have survived an ordeal. Some of them looked downright haggard, and took a long time to lose the weariness they returned with. Some of them seemed happy enough to return, and these sirens, I noticed, were of the simple-minded kind, the kind who did not appear to be as inquisitive as some…like me, like my mother, and like the blue-haired siren.
It seemed that the character and biological makeup of sirens could be as varied as those of the humans who lived above our heads and beyond our borders, perhaps even more so.
“This is truly fascinating,” said Emun, getting up from his seat and beginning to pace. “What you’re describing is an entire Mer culture, an organized nation that existed beneath the waves.”
He locked eyes with Targa and then cut to Antoni. He stopped pacing and began talking with his hands.
“What she’s describing, it sounds just like where we were, where all the gems had been kept for God knows how long. It must have been Califas, not Atlantis, like we thought.” He raked his hands through his hair. “I have so many questions, I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Yeah, like how come it was abandoned?” Targa shifted on the couch to sit cross-legged. “It looked like no one had been there in years.”
“Decades, even,” added Antoni.
“And who stashed the gems there? Were they forgotten?” Targa shrugged her shoulders up in bewilderment. “I mean, I know aquamarines aren’t the most valuable of all the stones, but that was a lot of jewels just sitting deep underground, not being useful to anyone.”
“And protected by some kind of magic, don’t forget,” added Antoni.
“I thought it was just a myth,” Emun muttered quietly, speaking more to himself.
“So you had heard of Okeanos?” I had wondered what Emun knew of the place of my youth. He was, after all, a century and a half old. “But you’d never been there before.”
“Well, to someone who doesn’t know where it is you could easily pass through those mountains and never know what was beneath them. The place is completely hidden unless you know to go underground. I’ve been around long enough to have heard the name in passing, but I thought it either wasn’t real, had been destroyed long ago, or was just a ruin. Turns out, now I’ve actually been there, fought Atlanteans there!”
“So, what happened to the population that lived there?” Targa turned a concerned gaze on me. “It was your home once––our home. And all things considered, it wasn’t that long ago that you actually lived there. Not even two hundred years since the events you’ve told us about so far. So, what went wrong?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I said with a smile. “I haven’t even gotten to the place where I’ve given birth to Emun yet. May I continue?”
“Sorry, please. Go ahead.” Targa settled back against the couch and Emun made his way back to his chair.
“I explained that Apollyona dropped her mothering duties once she became Sovereign,” I continued, jumping into the next important milestone in my history, “and so for a time I was left to figure things out on my own. But when I got a little older and was on the doorstep of puberty, a special siren came looking for me. It was as if she knew that there were gaps in my understanding, and had been waiting for the right moment to take me under her wing.”
“Was it the one with the blue hair?” asked Targa, her expression hopeful. “You must have mentioned her for a reason.”
I nodded. “Yes, it was the unusual one with the blue hair. You are right. Her name was Annikephoros…”
Four
“You are Polly’s daughter, are you not?” The voice was soft and unfamiliar, but when I turned to see the speaker, I recognized her. This was Nike, and the only one of the Okeanos sirens I had ever heard refer to my mother by her human name. Sovereigns were respectfully referred to by their full name, which––as Apollyona had pointed out more than once––was given to her by that mysterious oceanic force we called simply ‘the Salt.’
“Bel,” I replied. “You’re… Annikephoros.” It took me a moment to recall her siren name, but I didn’t want to make the mistake of calling her Nike, in case she had the same preferences as my mother. I had come to learn over the years that Nike was a sorceress, though I’d never seen her do anything magical. After the day of Apollyona’s coronation, and the smile Nike had sent my way, she had never approached me to talk, and was even downright elusive. I believe now she was only biding her time until I had grown up.
She put my concerns to rest immediately. “Call me Nike.”
She swam closer and I got my first close look at the only siren sorceress I knew of. She had unusual coloring, both on her upper human half and her siren half. Her hair was a most unusual shade of blue. Most si
ren hair was no different than human hair in color and texture, as far as I’d seen––browns, blacks, reds, golds and yellows. Nike’s eyes shifted in color, but settled most often into a pale gray. Her skin appeared white in the sunlight but then seemed tan in the shadows, like it had some of the color-changing cells that other ocean-creatures had. I had seen some marvelous camouflaging properties on display by different kinds of fish and octopus, and I wondered if she could hide herself against any backdrop. Her hair and variable eyes––along with slightly more pointed ears––set Nike apart. She wore her aquamarine jewel at her throat, set in a thin metal claw and tied with a chain. It sat in the hollow of her neck, the place I was supposed to touch to show my deference.
I lifted a hand to reach forward, but she smiled and waved my gesture aside. “That’s not necessary.”
We swam side by side for a time, until I asked her what she was doing this far from Mount Califas. We were still within the borders of Okeanos, but we were approaching the kelp forests in the south, which marked the edges of the middle ring.
Okeanos, I was told by one of the Foniádes, was roughly circular and had three concentric rings. The outer ring was mostly flat and lay next to the apotreptikó, the middle ring was distinguished in parts by rolling hills and thick ropy forests of kelp which ran from sea floor all the way to the surface, and the center held the Califas range of mountains with Mt. Califas at the epicenter.
“I came looking for you, young Bel.”
I was so startled that I came to a stop. “Me? Why?”
“I thought you might have…questions.” Her gray eyes slid to mine as we resumed swimming.
