Marie-Josèphe huddled miserably on deck, a blanket around her shoulders. She had tried to persuade Louis that Sherzad had not deliberately run the ship aground. She did not believe it herself, so her protestations only convinced the King she knew what Sherzad had planned.
What does he expect, she wondered, but betrayal for betrayal?
One good thing had come of the stranding. As the tide went out and the flagship settled, the groan of insulted timber replaced the erratic pitching. Lucien slept for the first time since the voyage began. His white-gold hair gleamed in the starlight. To Marie-Josèphe’s great relief, the sword cut on his throat was neither deep nor long.
Nothing had changed. The ship was not badly damaged. The captain said it would float free at high tide.
And then what? Marie-Josèphe wondered. They’ll never trust Sherzad to guide them, they’ll never trust me. Will they torture her, or kill her, or return her to Versailles and give her to Pope Innocent?
A quiet song floated through the night. Sherzad sang a lullaby that the sea people sing to their babies.
Marie-Josèphe matched her voice to Sherzad’s. Dew collected in droplets on the blanket and on her hair and on the ship’s gleaming paint and gilt.
Nearly asleep, Marie-Josèphe caught herself. She raised her head, fully awake, singing softly.
The guard near the bow nodded, caught himself, checked his pistol, nodded again. He had orders to shoot Sherzad if she tried to escape. He nodded a third time. He snored.
Marie-Josèphe slipped from beneath the blanket. She stealthily picked up Lucien’s sword-cane and twisted its handle. The sound of its release was as loud as the crash of the ship against the rock. Yet no one responded.
She drew the broken blade. A handsbreadth of steel remained, its edge transparently sharp. In her stocking feet, singing the soothing lullaby, Marie-Josèphe crept across the deck. She passed the guard and climbed onto the bowsprit. She crept along it, afraid the rustling of her petticoat, or her awkwardness in her long skirts, would awaken the guard. Sherzad’s song charmed him into sleep. The sea woman’s song enfolded her.
Sherzad’s eyes gleamed red.
“Carry my life in your heart,” Marie-Josèphe whispered.
She slipped the broken blade beneath a cord of the net. The cord parted at the touch of the steel. She cut another cable, and a third. The sword was never meant to slice through cable. The harsh mesh dulled it quickly. She sawed harder. Sherzad grew excited, agitated, writhing, pushing her foot through the hole in the net, tearing at the mesh with her claws. Sherzad’s song faltered and dissolved into a moan. Behind them, the musketeer snorted and woke.
“No!” he cried.
Sherzad shrieked in triumph. She burst through the net and tumbled into the sea. A pistol ball screamed past Marie-Josèphe’s ear and sizzled into the water. Marie-Josèphe caught her breath and clutched the broken sword in one hand, the bowsprit in another. She gazed into the darkness, terrified that Sherzad had been hit.
A splash sprayed Marie-Josèphe’s face with cool salty droplets. Sherzad laughed, cried a challenge, and vanished.
The ship creaked and shifted. Marie-Josèphe clung to the bowsprit, shaken, intoxicated.
“Come onto the deck, Mlle de la Croix.”
She obeyed the King, crawling backwards, embarrassed that His Majesty and his men could see her legs all the way to her knees. When she reached the deck and turned around, two musketeers held their pistols on her; three sailors stood ready with pikes.
“Give His Majesty my sword, if you please.” Lucien was bareheaded, unperturbed, wide awake. “Pass it hilt first.”
Her life, perhaps Lucien’s, depended on capitulation without threat, even with a broken sword. She did as Lucien said. Louis accepted her surrender.
The sailors led Marie-Josèphe away.
Shut up in the locker with the slimy seaweed-covered anchor chain, Marie-Josèphe lost track of time. She thought it must be day again, then night; but when the ship shifted and moaned beneath her, she knew it was only dawn.
Have they left the ship to break up on the rocks? she wondered. She hoped they had taken Lucien away with them. Anyone who disliked the sea so intensely should not have to drown.
The pumps groaned and rushed. The ship floated free. As the ship settled into the water, Sherzad’s voice travelled through the sea and touched the planks, resounding like a drum. Astonished, overjoyed, Marie-Josèphe replied. Sherzad spoke again, begging her to answer. Hurry, hurry, she cried, I cannot bear to wait for you much longer.
Desperate, Marie-Josèphe pounded on the bulkhead until her scratched hands bruised.
The hatch opened. Light poured in, dazzling her.
“Stop that noise.” The King stood before her. “You’ve exhausted my patience three times over.”
“Can’t you hear her? I freed her—she’ll keep her promise, she’ll lead me to your treasure.”
“I hear nothing. She has disappeared.”
“Shh. Listen.”
The King listened in skeptical silence. The ship rocked and complained around them; the pumps rumbled. Beneath the noise, Sherzad sang in a delicate low register.
“She promises. She says, The sand is covered with gold and jewels. She gives them to you, for my sake, despite your betrayals and your broken promises. Afterwards… she declares war on the men of land.”
“I wonder,” Louis said, “if she’s declared war on you.”
The King would never forgive her, treasure or not. Nor could Lucien hope to return to his proper place in the King’s esteem. Marie-Josèphe wondered if Lucien would ever forgive her.
On deck, Lucien peered into the dawn brilliance of the sea, searching for Sherzad. He had locked his dulled and broken sword in its sheath. He leaned on it and grasped the rail as well, preparing for seasickness.
Marie-Josèphe joined him.
Lucien glanced up. “You are perfectly magnificent.”
She sank down beside him and took his hand.
The captain bowed to His Majesty. “The ship may return to Le Havre, Your Majesty,” he said, “but I can’t answer for any hard sailing.”
Marie-Josèphe searched the horizon and the silver sparks of sunlight. She called Sherzad, but heard no answer. She’s out there, Marie-Josèphe thought. It’s so hard to find anything on the whole wide sea—
“Very well,” His Majesty said. “Return to Le Havre.”
A distant splash marred the perfect pattern of the surface of the sea.
“There!” Marie-Josèphe cried. “She’s there.”
“It’s only a fish,” the captain muttered. If the lure of treasure could not overcome his fears, the will of the King did. The captain sailed his ship in pursuit of Sherzad, though he set a sailor on the bow with a sounding-line. When Sherzad led them to a cove, he refused to take the ship inside.
“It’s treacherous, Your Majesty,” he said. “Look at the chart, the wind. We’d go in. We’d never come out.”
Marie-Josèphe fidgeted unhappily while the sailors lowered the skiff. They objected to her presence, even to Lucien’s, but the King climbed into the skiff and commanded Marie-Josèphe to accompany him, and he said nothing when Lucien climbed down the ladder too.
He believes my friend will be even more miserable in a smaller boat, Marie-Josèphe thought uncharitably. To her relief, Lucien’s discomfort eased.
The sailors rowed nervously after Sherzad. They whispered to each other, when they thought their passengers could not hear. They were afraid of Sherzad, afraid of more duplicity, afraid of ambush. Marie-Josèphe could not blame them. What’s more, she would not have blamed Sherzad if the sea woman fulfilled the sailor’s fears.
She caught only an occasional glimpse of the sea woman. Sherzad was frightened, too, of nets and guns, of explosive charges to stun her back into captivity. She hovered by the mouth of the cove, ready to flee at any threat.
In dangerous water among submerged fingers of stone, Marie-Josèphe stopped the skiff. At the mouth of the cove, Sherzad leaped from the water, flicked her tails in the air, dove, and disappeared.
“Here,” Marie-Josèphe said.
Sailors stripped and splashed over the side.
“Send all your men into the water.”
“Your Majesty,” the captain said, “the rest cannot swim. They must keep their strength—and their lives—to row us back.”
His Majesty acceded with reluctant grace. “Very well.”
The divers submerged, and ascended, and vanished again. Soon they were shivering. One surfaced coughing and half drowned. Louis allowed him five minutes’ rest.
“The sea monster has played you an ugly trick, Mlle de la Croix,” the King said.
“The treasure fleet is here,” Marie-Josèphe said.
“Dive again,” the King said to the exhausted sailor.
Marie-Josèphe sang to Sherzad, asking for more direction. She received no answer.
“She’s gone. Perhaps I’ll never see her again.” She wept. Only the touch of Lucien’s hand kept her heart from breaking.
As far away as she could see, a tiny splash burst from the ocean, and another, and a third, all in a group. Suddenly frightened, Marie-Josèphe trembled.
The exhausted sailor splashed through the surface, thrashing, kicking, shouting incoherently. His mates surfaced with him. The rowers thrust pikes and oars over the side, fearing sharks.
“For His Majesty’s glory!”
The divers raised their arms. The weight of handsful of gold and jewels pushed them back underwater. They struggled to the skiff and poured their treasures in a heap before the King.
A closed carriage drove Marie-Josèphe and Lucien to Versailles, at the end of a procession of wagons filled with treasure. His Majesty led in an open caleche. Aztec gold covered him like armor and decked the harness of his horses and spilled out to the wheels. A hundred musketeers guarded the convoy. People lined the road and cheered their King and stared at the treasure in wonder.
Marie-Josèphe peeked past the heavy curtain. Dust and shouts filtered into the carriage.
“He must admit he was wrong,” Marie-Josèphe said. “And we were right.”
“No,” Lucien said. “Right, wrong—what’s important is that we defied him.”
“But that’s nonsense.”
“He can’t afford to forgive us.” Lucien sighed theatrically. “I accept His Majesty’s wrath… As long as he doesn’t sentence us to the galleys—and send us to sea for the rest of our lives.”
Marie-Josèphe managed to return his smile. Lucien twisted the handle of his sword-cane and drew the broken blade.
“It served me well,” he said.
“And Sherzad. And me.”
He sheathed it and locked it. In the dimness of the carriage, his clear grey gaze touched Marie-Josèphe as gently as he had held her hand.
Marie-Josèphe moved from her side of the carriage to his. She took his hand, drew off his glove, and removed his rings. She hesitated when she reached the heavy sapphire, but he did not stop her. She slipped His Majesty’s ring from Lucien’s finger. She pressed her cheek against his palm.
They leaned toward each other. They kissed.
Marie-Josèphe drew back, touching her lips with her fingertips, amazed that such a simple touch could reach all the way to her center.
Misinterpreting her surprise, Lucien smiled sadly. “Even your kiss can’t change me to a tall prince, with dainty feet.”
“If it did, I’d say, Where is Lucien? Give me back my Lucien!”
He laughed, with no trace of sadness.
Guards took Lucien away as soon as the carriage reached the chateau. They conducted Marie-Josèphe to her attic room and left her with only Hercules for company. If Yves was in his bedroom she could not speak to him through two locked doors and the dressing-room.
Hercules miaowed for cream, despite the mouse stomachs and mouse tails left over from his hunts.
“You may ask for cream in prison,” Marie-Josèphe said, “but you may hope prison rats are tasty.”
She comforted herself with her last sight of Sherzad, leaping with joy in the sea, and with her memory of Lucien’s kiss.
His Majesty will forgive us, she thought. He’ll forgive me because I was right, and because he loved my mother. He’ll forgive Yves because Yves is his son. And he’ll forgive Lucien because he never had a better friend, a friend who defied him once, to help him.
She spared no more thoughts for the soul of Louis the Great.
The key turned in the lock; the door opened. Marie-Josèphe leaped to her feet, her heart pounding.
A scullery maid slipped inside, put down a tray laden with wine and bread and a pitcher of cream, and faced her. Haleed had put away her finery and tied a cloth over her hair.
Marie-Josèphe flung herself into Haleed’s arms.
No one who took a second look at her could ever mistake her for a scullery maid, Marie-Josèphe thought. But… no one at Versailles ever takes a second look—or a first—at a scullery maid.
They sat together on the window seat. Hercules butted his head against Haleed’s hand until she gave him his cream.
“What are you doing here?” Marie-Josèphe whispered. “If His Majesty finds out, he’ll be angry—”
“I don’t mind, I don’t care,” Haleed said, “for I’m leaving Versailles, leaving Paris, leaving France in a moment. As soon as I change these awful clothes!” She grew somber. “I cannot help you, Mlle Marie, but I had to see you.”
“I’ve failed you, sister.” Marie-Josèphe took the parchment of Haleed’s manumission from her drawing box and gazed at it sadly. “I never had a moment to ask Yves to sign it. To make him sign it!”
Haleed took the parchment. “He’ll sign it.” She kissed Marie-Josèphe. “I’m sorry I cannot free you.”
“Only the King can do that. Sister, I’m so afraid for you. Where will you go? What will you do?”
“Never fear. I am rich, I will be free. I can make my way in the world. I’ll go home to Turkey. I’ll find my family, and a prince.”
“Turkey! When you marry they’ll put you in a hareem, with another wife—”
Haleed sat back and regarded her quizzically. “Sister, how is it different from France, except that my sister wives will be acknowledged instead of hidden and lied about and put aside at whim?”
“But it—I—” She fell silent, unable to answer, terrified for her sister.
“How is it different from Martinique?” Haleed said.
The blood drained from Marie-Josèphe’s face, leaving her cold and faint.
“Oh,” she said. “Sister, do you mean…”
“I mean we are sisters—how could you not know? Our father owned my mother, she was his, he did as he pleased, without a thought to what would please her. Or what would horrify her.”
Marie-Josèphe’s shoulders slumped. She stared at her hands, limp in her lap.
“Do you hate him terribly? Did she? Do you hate me?”
“I don’t hate him. It is fate. I love you, Mlle Marie, though I’ll never see you again.”
“I love you too, Mlle Haleed, even if I never see you again.”
Haleed pressed a knotted kerchief into Marie-Josèphe’s hand.
“Your pearls!”
“Not all of them! We promised to share our fortunes. I must go.”
They kissed each other. Haleed slipped out the door. She was gone, to embrace an unknown fate that frightened Marie-Josèphe even more than her own.
Lucien dreaded the approaching interview. The King was too angry with him, too disappointed, to put his fate in the hands of his guards or his jailers. Lucien had every material thing he wanted, clean linen and food and wine. He was treated with scrupulous courtesy. His back hurt only in its ordinary way.
He had everything but liberty, communication, the comfort of intimacy. He hung suspended at a great height, waiting only for Louis to let him fall. He hoped he would not take Marie-Josèphe with him to the depths.
The musketeers took Lucien to the guard room outside His Majesty’s private chamber, where Marie-Josèphe and Yves already waited.
How strange, Lucien thought. The joy of seeing her is equal to the ecstasy of her touch.
He took her hand. Together, they went to face the King.
Treasure filled the room, stacked and tumbled in heaps like an ancient dragon’s hoard. Gold bracelets and pectorals and armor lay in jumbled piles, with headdresses, medallions, and strange flared cylinders. Impassive jade statues clustered on the parquet. One of them eerily resembled Lucien’s father.
His Majesty gazed into the eye sockets of a crystal skull. Pope Innocent sat beside him, indifferent to the treasure, counting a rosary of ordinary beads. The beads tapped against a wooden box in his lap: Marie-Josèphe’s drawing box. A table piled with books and papers stood beside him.
The King picked up a gold pectoral, lowered it over his head, and arranged the curls of his black wig. The wide flare of gold covered his chest.
The strange eyes of gold statues stared from every direction. Louis regarded his prisoners in silence.
“I loved you all.” To Marie-Josèphe he said, “You pleased me with your beauty and your charm and your music.” To Yves he said, “I marveled at your discoveries. I was proud to be your sire.” After a long pause, he turned to Lucien. “I valued your wit, your bravery, your loyalty. I valued the truth you told me.”
He flung the skull to the floor. “You betrayed me.” The crystal smashed. Shards exploded across the parquet.
“Father de la Croix.”
“Yes.” Yves cleared his throat. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I give you to His Holiness, and I command you to obey him without question.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Yves whispered.
“Mlle de la Croix.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Her voice was as strong and as pure as the sea woman’s song.
“You’ve offended me and my holy cousin as well. You must accept punishment from us both.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Innocent made her wait until he had finished the rosary.
“I forbid you this ridiculous desire to compose music,” Innocent said. “Not to save your modesty, for you are lost, but as a punishment. You must be silent.”
Marie-Josèphe stared at the floor.
“Very well,” Louis said. “Though it’s a shame, for she might have been very good if she were a man. Mlle de la Croix, my punishment is this. You desire a husband, and children. I thought to forbid these to you, to send you to a convent.”
Marie-Josèphe paled.
I’ll break it down, Lucien thought. I’ll lay siege to the walls as if it were a prison, an enemy city in war—
“But that is too simple a solution,” Louis said.
He turned away from Marie-Josèphe and addressed himself to Lucien.
“You will leave court.”
I was right not to hope for a lesser punishment, Lucien thought.
“You will resign the governorship of Brittany to M. du Maine. You will resign your title and your lands to your brother.”
Lucien’s plans for the good of his family trembled in his hands.
“And you will marry Mlle de la Croix. You may live on the dowry I promised her. If you do not give her children, you will break her heart. If you do give her children, you will dishonor your sworn word, to the woman you love—as you dishonored it to me.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Lucien’s pride finally failed him. He could barely speak.
“I’ve condescended to spare your lives—but I wish never to see any of you again.” He nodded graciously to Innocent. “Here is your priest, cousin.”
“Did the sea woman repent?” Innocent asked.
“No, Your Holiness.”
“She declared war on the men of land,” Marie-Josèphe said. “And then she disappeared.”
“I should excommunicate you all.”
Yves fell to his knees.
“I shall not. Father de la Croix, you will have use for your priestly authority. Holy Mother Church faces a terrible threat. The sea monsters—”
“They’re people, Your Holiness!” Marie-Josèphe said.
“Yes,” said Innocent.
Lucien was as surprised as Marie-Josèphe and Yves, that the holy man would admit something so damaging to his influence.
“Your Holiness,” Yves said, “they’re nearly extinct because of the Church. Instead of offering them the word of God—”
“That is why—”
“—we tormented them as demons—”
“—history must be—”
“—and we preyed on them as cattle. I—” Yves cut off his words when he realized he had interrupted Innocent.
“—corrected.” Innocent nodded. “History must be corrected,” he said again.
Innocent opened the drawing box. He drew out a handful of pages: Marie-Josèphe’s dissection sketches. He crumpled one. He thrust its edge into the candle flame. It burned to his fingers. He dropped the ashes in a golden Aztec dish.
“Father de la Croix, your penance is this. You will search out every mention of the sea monsters.”
He snatched M. Boursin’s book from the table beside him, and flung it to the floor.
“Every book.”
He scattered a sheaf of letters, the current prize of the King’s Black Cabinet, waiting to be read, many addressed by Madame’s bold handwriting.
“Every letter.”
He ripped a handful of pages from the current volume of M. de Dangeau’s journal.
“Every chronicle of this self-indulgent celebration of the monsters. This week of Carrousel must vanish utterly.”
He flung down a handful of broadsheets, the Stories of Sherzad.
“Every painting, every myth, every memory of the creatures. The decree of the Church that raised them from demons to beasts.”
He handed Yves a roll of vellum, inscribed with black ink and illuminated with gold and scarlet.
“You will erase the existence of the sea monsters from our conscience. And from our posterity. You will do as you know you should.”
Yves bowed his head. He unrolled the vellum and held it to the candle flame. It smoked, contorted, burned. The stench of burning leather filled the chamber. With blistered fingers, Yves dropped the ashes into the Aztec dish.
Innocent rose.
“Who gives this woman?”
Yves remained silent.
“I do,” His Majesty said.
I am married, Marie-Josèphe thought. Married by the Prince of Rome, given in marriage by the King of France and Navarre… and I’m perfectly indifferent to the honor. I care only that I love Lucien, and he loves me.
But he did not look like a man in love. Sitting on the window-seat while she packed her few things, absently stroking the cat, he stared into space. Marie-Josèphe readied a basket for Hercules, who watched suspiciously.
“You may live apart from me,” Lucien said.
Marie-Josèphe stared at him, stunned.
“You’ll have your dowry, your liberty, time for your studies. I must leave court—I’ll never trouble you—”
“You’ll be my husband, in all ways!”
“But, my love,” he said, “I’m no longer M. le comte de Chrétien. Only ordinary Lucien de Barenton.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do. I have nothing. I can give you nothing. No title, no comfort—no children.”
“We’ll have more than nothing—I promise you! But I’d choose nothing, with you, over everything, with anyone else. Nothing, with you, is liberty and affection, consideration and love.” She took his hands, stripped of their rings. “I’d find only joy in a child with your spirit. But I’ll never torment you.” She stroked her fingertip along his eyebrow, down his cheek. “I will hope for you to change your mind.”
Lucien kissed her palm, her lips. He drew back reluctantly, sharing her anticipation.
Yves strode in, carrying his bag and Marie-Josèphe’s drawing box. He was smiling. Lucien tried to remember the last time he had seen Yves smile. On the dock, at Le Havre, such a long time and such a short time ago, when he gave the captive sea monster to the King. ”Are you ready?” Yves said.
“Marie-Josèphe,” Lucien said, provoked, “how can we be happy? My position is gone. My resources. You’re forbidden music—”
“Innocent thought to torment me, but all my music belonged to Sherzad,” Marie-Josèphe said to Lucien. “He never noticed that what I want is to study and learn and discover… And the King gave me what I love most.”
Lucien glared at Yves, who shrugged.
“I have what I wished for, as well,” he said. “To spend all my life searching for knowledge—”
“To destroy it!”
“To… do with it as I know I should. To employ intelligent obedience.”
Marie-Josèphe looked from Yves to Lucien.
“Does His Majesty know what he’s done?”
“His Majesty always knows,” Lucien said.
“We’re cruel in our happiness, sister,” Yves said. “Lucien has lost everything—”
“The King has lost Lucien!” Marie-Josèphe said. “And Lucien has gained me.”
Epilogue In Paris, on Midwinter Night, Yves de la Croix strode through sleet and darkness to his tiny house. He dropped his heavy cloak, lit a candle, opened the secret door, and stepped into the library.
He opened his satchel, drew out his most recent discovery, and unwrapped it from its covering of oiled silk.
In the illuminated manuscript, sea people leaped and played in waves of cerulean blue and sunlight of pure gold. He admired the illustrations, closed the book carefully, and placed it on the shelf next to Marie-Josèphe’s exquisite opera score, now bound in calfskin, M. Boursin’s dreadful cookbook, and the sheaf of Madame’s letters.
Candlelight gleamed on the sea monster medal, and on the frames of two of Marie-Josèphe’s drawings: One of Sherzad, the other of the male sea monster, haloed with scraps of gilt and broken glass.
The skeleton of the male sea monster lay in a reliquary of ebony, inlaid all over with mother-of-pearl.
For now, I must protect the sea people with secrecy, Yves thought. For now. But not forever.
Lucien’s Breton ship sailed through moonlight. Lucien stood at its stern. The wake glowed, a widening arrow of luminescence.
Lucien feared the return of his seasickness. He had endured the Atlantic crossing better than he ever dared hope. The choppy waters of France’s north coast brought misery to him, but the soft calm sea of the Tropic of Cancer caused him little distress.
I shall worry about hurricanes, Lucien thought, when I have a hurricane to face.
Marie-Josèphe joined him, sat on the deck beside him, and laid her hand along the side of his face. He kissed her palm.
I cannot regret my decisions, he thought. I’m too proud—too arrogant—to rue leaving court, if His Majesty believes he can find a better adviser, which he cannot. I cannot live in Brittany with my fortunes so reduced.
He missed his position, and his wealth. He maintained his dignity; he could not have behaved in any other way and kept it.
Returning home to Brittany had been difficult. Lucien could not, by the terms of His Majesty’s order, make any claim on the resources of his former title. His own pride prevented him from asking his father for help. All Marie-Josèphe’s dowry, and most of Haleed’s gift of pearls, had gone to fitting out the ship and buying a small stud farm, where Jacques now had charge of Zachi and Zelis and the other Arabians, and Hercules the cat had charge of the mice in the stable.
Returning to Brittany had been difficult, leaving it again even harder. He worried about his home, placed under the control of M. du Maine.
Lucien still battled fits of despair, and yet they came less and less frequently.
With all I have lost, he thought, I wonder at my joy.
He smiled.
“Tell me,” Marie-Josèphe said.
“I believed I had finished with adventures,” he said. “I planned my life at court, and a quiet retirement in Barenton after my nephew came of age. Yet here I am, on a mad quest. Why not seek new fortunes, with men from my homeland, still loyal to me? Why not sail away to fight pirates, with the woman I love?”
She smiled, and twined her finger in a lock of his fair hair. He had put aside his perrukes. He let his hair grow and tied it back with a white ribbon. His clothing was of plainer stuff than satin or velvet, worn with only a little Spanish lace. He never wore blue.
Marie-Josèphe giggled.
“Tell me,” Lucien said.
“I wish I could see Versailles—just for a moment—to see your sweet brother paying court to His Majesty.”
Lucien laughed. Marie-Josèphe’s description was true, and fair. She was as fond of Lucien’s preposterous brother as Lucien was himself. But Guy was no courtier.
“If Guy makes himself sufficiently impossible,” Lucien said, “and sufficiently annoys the King, His Majesty might persuade my nephew to become count de Chrétien, even as I planned.”
“The King might persuade himself he’s been a fool—” Marie-Josèphe exclaimed.
“Shh, shh, he is the King.”
“—and beg you to return. Then I’ll have to share your attention with him. I’m selfish. I want you to myself as long as I may have you.”
Lucien smiled. He gazed back across the wake, which rippled like milk in the moonlight.
He gripped the rail and peered more closely.
A ship appeared in the moonlit dark.
“You may have to share me with pirates,” Lucien said, his voice grim.
The pursuing ship drew closer.
The Breton ship sailed valiantly, but it would never outdistance the larger, faster hunter. Nor could Lucien’s ship hope to vanish in darkness, for the full moon illuminated the sea.
We shall have to fight them, Lucien thought. If it is British, it will take us as spoils of war. If a privateer, as I suspect, it will simply take us.
In the first case, all his and Marie-Josèphe’s resources would be forfeit. In the second, they would lose their lives or worse.
The master of the ship called for weapons to be handed out. A sailor brought Lucien cutlass and pistol. Lucien kept the cutlass; though he preserved his sword-cane, he would not re-forge the blade unless he returned to Damascus. He offered the pistol to Marie-Josèphe.
“Could you shoot at a man?”
“If need be.” Marie-Josèphe glanced toward the pursuing ship. She caught her breath. “Lucien, look—”
The ship’s sails filled with wind, but the ship had ceased to make way. It shuddered.
“It’s run aground,” Lucien said, but he thought, How is it possible? For the ships sailed along the indigo depths between Great Exuma and Andros Island.
“No,” Marie-Josèphe said.
The moon hovered at the horizon, full and bright. The great current of stars flowed across the surface of the sky.
Sherzad swam free in the wild wide ocean. Her baby clung to her, listening to the songs of its young cousins, learning the music of their passage through the sea. She stroked her long webbed fingers over her baby’s back, over the little one’s warmth. Her baby had learned so quickly how to swim, how to breathe, how to fall into languor. She welcomed her introduction to the sea.
Sherzad’s brothers and sisters had survived the assault on the mating haze in which she was captured, but their mother and their uncle and their aunt, the elders of their family, all had died. Sherzad grieved, singing phrases of her mother’s death-song, singing an image of her mother to look upon her granddaughter, Sherzad’s child.
Her brothers and sisters swam past her, arced around, dove beneath her, all anxious to make their way to the depthless ocean trench where the sea people gathered for the mating haze.
Sherzad, too, anticipated the approaching Midsummer Day. At the gathering, the other families would rejoice at Sherzad’s return; they would admire and welcome her child. All the children would play with the tame giant octopuses, and tease the dolphins. The adults would join the whirlpool of the mating haze. For a time, the haze would ease their grief.
But never again would they mate beneath the sun. They could no longer risk the enormous danger. They were too vulnerable to the men of land. Too few sea people remained, to withstand another assault.
This year they would gather at sunset, as Midsummer Night coincided with the dark of the moon. On the shortest night of the year, in moonless dark, they would dare to rise together to the surface of the sea. Amidst the waves, whispering songs, they would bathe in luminescence. Their bodies glowing in the darkness, they would come together and experience the brief bliss of their mating haze.
They would not gather again for fourteen years, when the dark of the moon next accompanied Midsummer Night.
Before Sherzad could turn her desires and her course toward the meeting place, she must discharge another obligation.
Far ahead, two ships plunged across the waves, digging their keels into the domain of the sea people. The first ship fled, the second pursued, gaining rapidly. Sherzad’s younger sister sang of an encounter she had witnessed between two ships. They battered the air and the ocean with their noise for half a day; their iron balls plunged into the water, sending the sea people in a dive to safety.
In the end the two ships sank each other, and all the men of land drowned.
Sherzad’s sister laughed, and hoped these two new ships would ride the same wave. She hoped all the ships of land would destroy each other, if the sea people did not destroy them first.
The sea people stalked the ships. Soon they swam beneath the barnacled bottom of the pursuer. Sherzad sang at it, feeling it out with her voice, searching and questioning, finding nothing of interest and nothing worth saving. In the past, she would have swum away.
She gave her baby to her young brother to guard, and swam closer to the pursuer.
Sherzad and her companions plunged their spears of narwhal tusk into the bottom of the galleon. The ivory bit into the wood. Holding the tusks, they rode along with the ship.
Sherzad shouted at the planks. Her focused voice crashed against them. She shouted again. Her spear quivered in the quaking wood.
Sherzad and her brothers and sisters shouted together. The wood cracked and split.
The bottom of the ship disintegrated.
Men shrieked and dove into the water. Sherzad and the others made sure they never surfaced.
Waves washed over the deck. Singing their triumph, the sea people called their allies. A shadow rose, flickering all over with tiny sparks. The octopus stretched its tentacles into the moonlight and entwined them around the mainmast, and inexorably pulled the ship into the depths.
The skiff scraped upon the beach of a tiny cay. Marie-Josèphe and Lucien climbed out onto white sand that shone in the light of the full moon.
“I do not like to leave you here alone, sir, madame.” The master of the Breton ship was still shaken by the sinking of the privateer. “There are krakens, and sirens. And snakes—”
“Never fear,” Lucien said.
“Except for the snakes,” Marie-Josèphe said, and laughed with joy and anticipation.
“Come back at dawn,” Lucien said. “I trust we won’t have been eaten by snakes.”
The master bowed; the skiff rowed back to the ship at anchor, out of sight on the other side of the cay.
“Come,” Marie-Josèphe said. “Sit with me.”
They sat on a driftwood log. Marie-Josèphe luxuriated in the warmth of the night. She leaned toward Lucien and kissed him, a long sweet kiss. Her sight blurred for a moment with tears of love and gratitude.
“You have awakened me,” she whispered.
Tonight nothing could frighten her, not snakes, or pirates, and certainly not kraken.
They waited.
Restive, impatient, Lucien gazed out to sea. “This is madness,” he said softly. “They have declared war.”
“Not on me,” she said. “She promised, if she lived, she would meet me here, tonight, at the full moon.”
A breath of song murmured over the waves. Marie-Josèphe leaped up, kicked off her slippers, and ran down the gleaming wet sand to the water.
Ripples washed her toes. The life of the ocean vibrated against the soles of her feet. She sang Sherzad’s name-song.
Sherzad replied.
Marie-Josèphe cried out in delight. She pulled her dress over her head and flung it onto the sand. In her shift, she ran into the sea.
The sea-people swam toward her, sleek and untamed. Sherzad led the band to Marie-Josèphe. She swam around her, splashing cool water onto her face, her arms, her breasts. Marie-Josèphe flung off her soaked shift and let it drift away, a plaything for the younger sea-people. Naked, she waded deeper, till the water washed her legs, her sex.
Sherzad was recovered, healthy, strong, and beautiful. Her hair spread dark and glossy around her.
A baby clung to her. Sherzad floated on her back and sank slowly, encouraging the baby to swim. Laughing and splashing, the child paddled to Marie-Josèphe.
Marie-Josèphe picked her up and cuddled her and kissed her silk-smooth swimming webs and her tiny sharp claws.
“She’s lovely, dear Sherzad, the most handsome baby I’ve ever seen.” She turned. Lucien’s boots and stockings lay on the sand; he stood in water to his knees.
“You are a wild sea creature yourself,” Lucien said. “You are Venus, waiting for your cockle-shell to float by.”
He waded a little deeper, then stopped.
“Come closer to shore, love,” he said, “so I can greet Sherzad and her child. Some other day, I’ll learn to swim.”
She joined him where he stood in the shallows. She sat beside him and leaned happily against him and slipped her wet arm around his waist. The sea-child babbled and splashed and played. Lucien stroked Marie-Josèphe’s hair.
Sherzad dove and vanished. The other sea people followed her, swimming to a treacherous shoal where many ships had met their ends.
When Sherzad surfaced again, moonlight sparkled on the tips of her fingers. She wore lost treasure on her hands; she took the rings off one by one, ruby, diamond, emerald, pearl, and placed them on Marie-Josèphe’s fingers. Her brothers and sisters followed her, all decorated with golden girdles and sapphire pendants, jade beads and diamond bracelets. Their ivory spears gleamed with chains of gold and ropes of amber.
In Sherzad’s stories, Marie-Josèphe thought, the sea people never carried spears. They truly have declared war.
The sea people tipped their spears before her, pouring gold and amber into her lap. Laughing, Sherzad’s baby grasped the shining treasure and waved her tiny fists.
The sea people crowded together around Marie-Josèphe, singing their gratitude for the return of their sister, singing their love.
They dropped the treasure at Marie-Josèphe’s feet, they placed strings of jewels around her neck and around her waist and ankles and arms. They nestled diamond and ruby earrings in Lucien’s hair, and tied them to his hair-ribbon. The younger sea-people brought drifts of shining shells, mixed with golden coins, for though they were willing to share the most beautiful things with Sherzad’s friends, they did not want to give away all their seashells.
Sherzad poured handsful of carved jade necklaces into Lucien’s pockets. She found his calvados, opened the flask and whistled with pleasure and drank it and shared it with her brothers and sisters. When she returned the flask, her brother had filled it with black pearls.
The sea people sang, and bared their sleek mahogany skin. They adorned their friends with their finery, enriching Lucien and Marie-Josèphe beyond measure, trading jewels for the shimmer of clearest moonlight.