Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #222

by TTA Press Authors

  "My child,” the goddess says, and she's smiling. “The city of Ys will have its heir at last."

  An heir to nothing. An heir to rotten wood, to algae-encrusted panels, to a city of fish and octopi and bleached skeletons. An heir with no heart.

  He won't be born, Françoise thinks. He won't live. She tries to scream at the goddess, but it's not working. She can't open her mouth; her lips are stuck, frozen.

  "Your reward will be great, never fear,” the goddess says. Her face is as pale as those of drowned sailors, and her lips purple, as if she were perpetually cold.

  I fear. But the words still won't come.

  The goddess waves a hand, dismissive. She's seen all that she needs to see; and Françoise can go back, back into the waking world.

  * * * *

  She wakes up to a bleary light filtering through the slits of her shutters. Someone is insistently knocking on the door—and a glance at the alarm clock tells her it's eleven a.m., and that once more she's overslept. She ought to be too nauseous with the pregnancy to get much sleep, but the dreams with the goddess are screwing up her body's rhythm.

  She gets up—too fast, the world is spinning around her. She steadies herself on the bedside table, waiting for the feeling to subside. Her stomach aches fiercely.

  "A minute!” she calls, as she puts on her dressing-gown, and sheathes her feet in slippers.

  Through the Judas hole of the door, she can only see a dark silhouette, but she'd know that posture anywhere—a little embarrassed, as if he were intruding 0n a party he's not been invited to.

  Gaetan.

  She throws the door open. “You're back,” she says.

  "I just got your message—” He stops, abruptly. His grey eyes stare at her, taking in, no doubt, the bulge of her belly and her puffy face. “I'd hoped you were joking.” His voice is bleak.

  "You know me better than that, don't you?” Françoise asks.

  Gaetan shrugs, steps inside, his beige trench coat dripping water on the floor. Raining again. Not an unusual occurrence in Brittany. “Been a long time,” he says.

  He sits on the sofa while she tries to explain what has happened—when she gets to Douarnenez and the goddess walking out of the sea, her voice stumbles, trails off. Gaetan looks at her, his face gentle: the same face he must show to the malnourished Africans who come to him as their last hope. He doesn't judge—doesn't scream or accuse her like Stéphane—and somewhere in her she finds the strength to go on.

  After she's done, Gaetan slowly puts the glass on the table, and steeples his fingers together, raising them to his mouth. “Ys,” he says. “What have you got yourself into?"

  "Like I had a choice.” Françoise can't quite keep the acidity out of her voice.

  "Sorry.” Gaetan hasn't moved—he's still thinking, it seems. It's never been like him to act or speak rashly. “It's an old tale around here, you know."

  Françoise knows. That's the reason why she came back here. “You haven't seen these,” she says. She goes to her working desk, and picks up the sketches of the goddess, with the drowned city in the background.

  Gaetan lays them on the low table before him, carefully sliding his glass out of the way. “I see.” He runs his fingers on the goddess's face, very carefully. “You always had a talent for drawing. You shouldn't have chosen the machines over the landscapes and animals, you know."

  It's an old, old tale; an old, old decision made ten years ago, and that she's never regretted. Except ... except that the mere remembrance of the goddess's face is enough to scatter the formulas she made her living by; to render any blueprint, no matter how detailed, utterly meaningless. “Not the point,” she says, finally—knowing that whatever happens next, she cannot go back to being an engineer.

  "No, I guess not. Still...” He looks up at her, sharply. “You haven't talked about Stéphane."

  "Stéphane ... took it badly,” she says, finally.

  Gaetan's face goes as still as sculptured stone. He doesn't say anything; he doesn't need to.

  "You never liked him,” Françoise says, to fill the silence—a silence that seems to have the edge of a drawn blade.

  "No,” Gaetan says. “Let's leave it at that, shall we?” He turns his gaze back to the sketches, with visible difficulty. “You know who your goddess is."

  Françoise shrugs. She's looked around on the Internet, but there wasn't much about the city of Ys. Or rather, it was always the same legend. “The Princess of Ys,” she said. “She who took a new lover every night—and who had them killed every morning. She whose arrogance drowned the city beneath the waves."

  Gaetan nods. “Ahez,” he says.

  "To me she's the goddess.” And it's true. Such things as her don't seem as though they should have a name, a handle back to the familiar. She cannot be tamed; she cannot be vanquished. She will not be cheated.

  Gaetan is tapping his fingers against the sketches, repeatedly jabbing his index into the eyes of the goddess. “They say Princess Ahez became a spirit of the sea after she drowned.” He's speaking carefully, inserting every word with the meticulous care of a builder constructing an edifice on unstable ground. “They say you can still hear her voice in the Bay of Douarnenez, singing a lament for Ys—damn it, this kind of thing just shouldn't be happening, Françoise!"

  Françoise shrugs. She rubs her hands on her belly, wondering if she's imagining the heartbeat coursing through her extended skin—a beat that's already slowing down, already faltering.

  "Tell that to him, will you?” she says. “Tell him he shouldn't be alive.” Not that it will ever get to be much of a problem, anyway—it's not as if he has much chance of surviving his birth.

  Gaetan says nothing for a while, then asks, “You want my advice?"

  Françoise sits on a chair, facing him. “Why not?” At least it will be constructive, not like Stéphane's anger.

  "Go away,” Gaetan says. “Get as far as you can from Quimper, as far as you can from the sea. Ahez's power lies in the sea. You should be safe."

  Should. She stares at him, and sees what he's not telling her. “You're not sure."

  "No,” Gaetan says. He shrugs. “I'm not an expert in magic and ghosts, and beings risen from the sea. I'm just a doctor."

  "You're all I have,” Francoise says, finally—the words she never told him after she started going out with Stéphane.

  "Yeah,” Gaetan says. “Some leftovers."

  Francoise rubs a hand on her belly again, feeling distinctly the chill that emanates from it: the coldness of beings drowned beneath the waves. “Even if it worked ... I can't run away from the sea all my life, Gaetan."

  "You mean you don't want to run away, full stop."

  A hard certainty rises within her—the same harshness that she felt when the obstetrician told her about the congenital heart defect. “No,” she says. “I don't want to run away."

  "Then what do you intend to do?” Gaetan's voice is brimming with anger. “She's immortal, Françoise. She was a sorceress who could summon the devil himself in the heyday of Ys. You're—"

  She knows what she is, all of it. Or does she? Once she was a student, then an engineer and a bride. Now she's none of this—just a woman pregnant with a baby that's not hers. “I'm what I am,” she says, finally. “But I know one other thing she is, Gaetan, one power she doesn't have: she's barren."

  Gaetan cocks his head. “Not quite barren,” he says. “She can create life."

  "Life needs to be sustained,” Françoise says, a growing certainty within her. She remembers the rotting planks of the palace in Ys—remembers the cold, cold radiance of the goddess. “She can't do that. She can't nurture anything.” Hell, she cannot even create—not a proper baby with a functioning heart.

  "She can still blast you out of existence if she feels like it."

  Françoise says nothing.

  At length Gaetan says, “You're crazy, you know.” But he's capitulated already—she hears it in his voice. He doesn't speak for a while. “Your
dreams—you can't speak in them."

  "No. I can't do anything."

  "She's summoned you,” Gaetan says. He's not the doctor any more, but the folklorist, the boy who'd seek out old wives and listen to their talk for hours on end. “That's why. You come to Ys only at her bidding. You have no power of your own."

  Françoise stares at him. She says, slowly, the idea taking shape as she's speaking, “Then I'll come to her. I'll summon her myself."

  His face twists. “She'll still be—she's power incarnate, Françoise. Maybe you'll be able to speak, but that's not going to change the outcome."

  Françoise thinks of the sonographs and of Stéphane's angry words—of her blueprints folded away in her Paris flat, the meaningless remnants of her old life. “There's no choice. I can't go on like this, Gaetan. I can't—” She's crying now, tears running down her face, leaving tingling marks on her cheeks. “I can't—go—on."

  Gaetan's arms close around her. He holds her against his chest, briefly, awkwardly, a bulwark against the great sobs that shake her chest.

  "I'm sorry,” she says, finally, when she's spent all her tears. “I don't know what came over me."

  Gaetan pulls away from her. His gaze is fathomless. “You've hoarded them for too long,” he says.

  "I'm sorry,” Françoise says, again. She spreads out her hands—feeling empty, drained of tears and of every other emotion. “But if there's a way out—and that's the only one there seems to be—I'll take it. I have to."

  "You're assuming I can tell you how to summon Ahez,” Gaetan says, carefully.

  She can read the signs; she knows what he's dangling before her: a possibility that he can give her, but that he doesn't approve of. It's clear in the set of his jaw, in the slightly aloof way he holds himself. “But you can, can't you?"

  He won't meet her gaze. “I can tell you what I learnt of Ys,” he says at last. “There's a song and a pattern to be drawn in the sand, for those who would open the gates of the drowned city...” He checks himself with a start. “It's an old wives’ tale, Françoise. I've never seen it work."

  "Ys is an old wives’ tale. And so is Ahez. And I've seen them both. Please, Gaetan. At worst, it won't work and I'll look like a fool."

  Gaetan'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, Gaetan still insists on coming with her. He drives her in his battered old Citroen 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 Gaetan made her trace two hours ago; in her right hand, the sonographs the obstetrician 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.

  Gaetan is standing by her side, one hand on her shoulder. “You know there's still time..."

  She shakes her head. “It's too late for that. Five months ago was the last time I had a choice in the matter, Gaetan."

  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.

  Gaetan 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 move, 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 Gaetan'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 Gaetan'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 any more where she is; no sense of her own body or of the baby growing within. Her world has shrunk to the dagger and the darkened lines she draws, each one falling into place with the inevitability of a bell-toll.

  When she starts on the last few lines, Gaetan'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 Gaetan'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,” Gaetan 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.

  Gaetan, 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.

  Gaetan 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 tuckes the sonographs under her arm—the cardboard envelope is wet and decomposing, as if the atmosphere of Ys spread rot to everything it touched. Gaetan 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, long since 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.