“Next?” Her smile is mocking and she spreads her hands. “Now you rule. Over the sea. Over the people. Over the islands. And you try not to fail, for there’s no one to call for help if you do.”
“How do I rule?” I ask, insistent. “How do other gods rule?”
She shakes her head as if my question is stupid. “Fish. Answer prayers. Keep the worst away.”
My confusion must show on my face, because she sighs and shifts, settling down to sit beside me with her arms hugging her legs as she looks out to sea.
“You’re the sea now, girl. Not symbolically—though of course that, too—but you are literally the sea, as Okeanos was before you. What is done to the sea is done to you. What is done to you is done to the sea.
“If you fish and catch, then your people will find bounty. If you fish and catch nothing, they’ll have lean years. If you rage and scream, they will endure storms and heavy seas. If you are sunny, so will their lives be.
“If you are set upon and wounded but not slain, then they will be wounded, too, by fleets or raiders, disease or despair, it matters not—they’ll be as ruined as you are to the same degree unless you can turn the tides again.”
I feel a lump in my throat. Oke bore that terrible wound. And my people were beset by both a storm and an invasion. I had never considered that the two might be related.
“It is a terrible thing to be a god,” she says, not noticing how still I am. “No mortal can ever be ready for the task. But that is who you are now, so go—be the sea. Be the God of the Sea. And try not to ruin it before someone else wrests the role from your snatching hands.”
She starts to fade. I grab at her, but I am too late and she winks out like a dying candle.
With a sigh, I give her up and gather the rest of the pearls in my palms.
Oke’s island is like a shell when the hermit crab has crawled away to find a new home. The waves wash in and out. The sand drifts where it wills. There is nothing here but the lonely echo of the wind.
But if I am to be a god now, I will determine to be the best god there ever was.
I cross the threshold of the cottage into what was once Okeanos’s home and life. I remember him standing beside me at the table scaling fish. His hands had worked with sure efficiency despite his pain.
“I did not expect to survive the encounter,” I whisper to myself as I dry the remaining pearls on a stray cloth, watching their spirits wink out one by one, and then fling the pearls on the table, emptying my belt pouch of all but the black one. “I did not expect to really take his place. And yet here I am.”
I remember Oke sitting on that chest talking to me. I remember sharing that bed. I feel sick all over again.
Something shining catches my eye and I frown, snatchingup a string of pearls Oke has left on the bed. I jam them hurriedly into one of the chests. I can’t deal with even more of them. The ones I have are bad enough.
I wash hastily and dress in a fresh tunic, throwing the ragged, bloodstained chiton in the corner to deal with later.
I do not want to fulfill Okeanos’s last wish. I don’t even know why. I don’t hate him in the same way that I did before. It’s hard to hate a man you’ve killed. His blood that spilled hot across the blankets and painted my skin has left me hollow, spent, like the heart of a tree where a fire has burned but not reached the outer rings. I am charred and crumbling while without I am perfectly whole.
But I square my shoulders, pull out the book, draw down the lever, and hurry down into the darkness on my own.
The room has not changed. There are treasures in small alcoves and on plinths. Little scraps of crowns and scepters, swords and goblets. I am ignorant of their history or purpose beyond the obvious, and whoever placed them here seemed to attach such historic significance or perhaps honor to them that they have not cleaned them or polished them. Some are broken and were not repaired. Oke said that it was all here when he arrived. I could ask the pearls, perhaps, but I never want to see another god again, living or dead.
Perhaps Okeanos wandered these same rooms after he killed Vesuvius and raised himself up as a god. I wonder what he thought of the water clock the first time he saw it.
I wonder if he felt as small as I do right now. But I can’t imagine him feeling small. He always seemed steady tome—even when he was wounded and bleeding, even in death.
As if my presence has triggered it, the clock begins to move and the water pours into the mouth of the sea god’s serpent, spinning him so that he falls headfirst into the water and turns back up again, but though the clock cycles as if to turn the hour, the little rays on the top of the clock stay exactly the same. Four blacked out. Six white.
I frown. There were only three rays blacked out last time I was here and clearly they are not keeping track of the hours that pass. Oke mentioned something about four when he was telling me to find something hidden in this clock. He told me four were complete.
Interestingly, the face of the clock’s statue is still missing—gouged out in lurid chunks—but its body has warped to a more androgynous form. Or perhaps that is only my perception shifting it. Down here, away from everything else, it is so hard to tell.
I examine the clock, running my hands around the base of it. There are no hidden catches that I can find. No secret riddles. No lever or button or anything else that I can see. But I know there’s something here somewhere, or Oke would not have asked me to look for it.
I could ask Vesuvius, perhaps. But his laughing triumph still echoes in my mind and twists my stomach. Vesuvius must only be let out as a last resort. I do not want to become like him and I fear it may already be too late.
I’ll simply have to figure this out for myself. Oke wouldnot have sent me here if he thought it was too difficult a puzzle to solve on my own.
I study the base of the clock where a series of small images are carved in the clock’s base. Birds, fish, the sun, the moon, stars, boats, the images are endless, but when I find the little wave carved into it I remember Okeanos’s words, “Your safety lies in the sea,” and when I press the wave symbol, there’s a click and a drawer slides out a finger’s width.
