I wipe my eyes roughly, drag myself to my feet, and snatch up the pearl necklace from the ground where it has worked its way free of my belt in the night. In my haste, the string breaks and I’m on my knees in a moment, scooping up pearls in my hands, fishing them out of puddles, frantically searching for every last one as if saving his pearls can atone for taking his life.
I hate myself.
I’m half sobbing, half laughing with the irony of what a terrible murderer I make, but then I freeze.
Souls spill out of the pearls I touch, drifting up, growing, and then popping to life like bubbles in the surf.
I shuffle back, gasping as they emerge, one after another. Some are very human-looking, dressed like the statues I’ve seen around the island. Others are strangely monstrous like Vesuvius, waving tentacles or thrashing on the shore in ways that suggest they were meant to remain underwater.
I’d thought idly of whether all Oke’s pearls might be prisons and I’d never really believed… but they must be and I’m holding a string of hundreds of them. And he gave them to me when he lay dying.
“Hark. Okeanos is dead,” one of the souls says, sounding worried. He peers down at me as if studying a strange creature pulled from the depths. He’s a man—I think—though his beard seems more like the body of a jellyfish than a thing made of hair. Long, slender tendrils flow from his beard weightlessly as if he is underwater. “His heir parades herself before us. Is she hale enough of mind, think ye?”
I’m frozen in fear as I look from face to face. There are too many to keep track of at once.
Another is speaking, a beautiful woman like the shadows between the waves. “There will be a hard age ahead for the people of the sea. We’re only ever as strong as our god, and this one is not stout.”
“What about the work?” a third asks anxiously, crowding in. They’re all peering at me, studying me. “The great work?”
I step backward another step, but they follow as quickly as I move. I’m breathing a little too quickly, feeling a little too pressed. Are they all dead gods?
One looks like a man drowned. He wears a crown that’s very like the one in my great-grandfather’s portrait. I lock eyes with him and he squints as if I am a puzzle he is working out.
“She looks so innocent for a murderer,” he says, frowning. “You’re certain she’s the heir?”
“She opened the pearls, didn’t she? Is that his blood smeared on her face, do you think?”
I rub my cheek with one hand. They’re all speaking over one another and they aren’t as clear and defined as Vesuvius was. Some of these souls are wispy and barely there, their voices so faint they could be the wind, while others seem close and living.
Hurriedly, watching in every direction at once so that they don’t touch me, I start to shove the cuirass into my belt pouch. It’s not going to fit. Not all of it. I twist and jam, trying to push it in, spirits winking out one by one.
They are murmuring together, but I don’t want to hear these things. I work faster, jamming them into my belt pouch by the handful until I have only a few left and I cannot possibly fit those into the overfull leather bag.
They’ve grown quiet, those who are left, watching me owlishly.
I spread these pearls left out on the rock, out of breath, frantic. I grab a sharp-edged stone the size of my fist, and tryto smash them with it. I’m hammering and hammering until I can hardly see through my tears and fury. They’re not what I thought they were. I’m not who I thought I was.
And they are not breaking.
They are not even chipping.
“That’s what I did, too, when I found out,” a female voice says when I pause. “I tried to smash them all.”
“Found out what?” I ask, without thinking, my hands shaking so hard that the rock clatters.
“That I was a god and a miserable one at that.”
I look up. She’s crouched across from me—the only one left. I think I recognize her. Her statue down at the dock is submerged up to the chin at high tide, but low tide reveals all but her barnacle-encrusted feet. Her statue wears a regal wrapped-cloth dress, but her soul’s version is nearly translucent and stitched with herons picked out with silver thread. I can well believe she was a goddess. Her dark brown skin gleams flawlessly as if she has been polished.
“It doesn’t work,” she tells me aridly. “They aren’t real pearls.”
“Nothing about this is real,” I say, wiping my eyes on my damp tunic to avoid my hands.
She laughs. “You only wish that were true. A word of advice: You don’t have to put them in your bag to dismiss us. You can just wipe the tears off the pearl and stop touching it. I learned that the hard way. Took me a month. But then, I was always more stubborn than sensible. Most of us are.”
I feel my face go hot. I’m sensible enough, thank you.
“So, you were also a god,” I say, my eyes narrowing. “Do you know what comes next?”
