“What?” I roar, and I don’t mean to do it. I don’t. But he wants to kill in the name of his god. He’ll kill and say it was me—or my dead husband, which amounts to the same thing. My fraying temper dissolves like mist in the sun. “You will send no ships.”
“I cannot rescind my orders. I have made promises. I have written irrevocable commands.” He’s white-faced and shaking and he doesn’t meet my eyes—thank the gods. If he did, I might throttle him for what he’s doing.
“Then at least bring back Gheric Rodehands as I ordered Turbote to do the last time I was here. He and his thousand followers might help fill the gap left by the men you’ll send away.”
With the actual leaders of my people in such shambles,the man might be their only hope for a government not intent on murdering its own people.
His hands shake, but still he defies me. “We will never tolerate the heretics on our shores. Trust that we honor you in that. We reject them for all time.”
I leave without another word, leaping into the sea like a diving bird does. I am furious. But what am I to do? Punish them? Force their obedience?
If I do that, then it is not the king who will suffer, it is the very peasants whose cries and prayers have motivated me to feed them.
I am starting to be able to pick out their individual prayers when I am in the sea and they cry to me day and night for help. Just the few weeks since I was their queen are awash with trouble and there is no end to those who reach in faith for help with it. I could go to each one and bless them individually, but the moment I turned to the next in line, the very bounty I gave them would be seized by these corrupt rulers for the war they hope is coming. I cannot solve their individual problems without solving them at the source. This is all a tangled knot I cannot untie.
Frustrated, I slice though the sea, feeling for the prows of the ships, and when I find them being built in the harbors, their waiting weapons stacked high on the shores, I set about stymieing them. Wave after wave I send against the ships. A ship swamps and then another, pounded in their builder’s cradles until they are nothing but splinters. But the next day when I return, the debris is being cleared away andnew timbers brought to replace what was ruined. They will not stop until every mast is broken and every scrap of wood destroyed. And then what? Will I see my islands stripped bare and impoverished to keep them out of this looming war?
I crawl home, spent and bitter, to lie on my bed miserable and alone. An escape from magic, from gods, from those who would speak for gods is beginning to have an appeal after all.
Mortals. What terrible creatures they are. Almost as bad as the gods themselves. Do none of them care that they will break themselves upon the cliffs of war and that—just like the ships—there will be nothing left of them? How many nations have broken that way? How many cultures lost forever due to the arrogance and overreach of their leaders?
And so I listen. Every day I sit on a rock by the water before I go out fishing, and I listen. I do what I can. I find lost fishermen and guide them safely home. I find a missing child swept away by a strange tide. But I am powerless to help with so many things. How can I return a drowned friend? How will I bless a barren womb, repair a spoiled fortune, bring home a shipment of silks safe?
I also read the books Oke left behind. Especially the book about the Lighthouse. He was not wrong to set me to them, for by them I learn how to find the shipment of silks upon the sea, how to nudge a ship just so to avoid a storm—how to push smaller squalls away and bend the current where it must go. Small things, but each one eats at me.
To bend the squall, I give my voice for a day and find myself breathless at every task until I must take to my bed and draw in slow thready gasps thinking I will die of lack of air. To guide the ship, I must lose my own balance for an hour. My twisted ankle is enough sign that I do not operate well without balance.
I wish I knew how to change the hearts of kings and counselors and seduce them into peace over war, but I still have not learned it. I hate the idea that Okeanos might have been able to do just that—that if he were not dead, he might have stopped this from happening in a way I cannot. Bigger works require more from me. When, finally, I can tackle them, I am left trembling and vomiting for six whole days because I shove the red plague from the coastal cities along the Rust Coast.
I lie miserable in the water, so hot I think I will melt away when I listen to the prayer of a priest from Saint Flagra’s Nation and relieve them of their terrible drought. I am so certain that day that I am dying that I whisper my thoughts to the sky and hope they carry to the Nightwaters, where Lieve dwells. But by evening I am recovered and I sleep in my bed as if nothing ever happened.
I would gladly pay the same price to turn the hearts of those rulers. If only I knew how.
I hear murmurs of war coming in every port and on every ship. It feels like my chance to keep us out of it is slipping away while I am caught up in all these other tasks. Their worried voices dance across the surface of my waters and Ifeel them in my very bones, but I know they are fully committed to preparations now. To extract them would mean their ruin and maybe even their deaths.
Worst of all is the sea serpent.
It is possibly a month into my tenure as God of the Sea when I’m arrested by a prayer. I am fishing—with the men all gone and having sold their surplus of fish to pay for this useless war, there’s nothing left for the women and children unless I fish for them. I feel sometimes like I am always fishing. I dream of fish at night. I see them when I try to look at the books. I’ve put away my pearls and the dress and everything else and all I do is fish in that old raggedy tunic and think of how Oke told me he was a fisherman. The Fisher King. It’s becoming glaringly obvious why he claimed that title.
Today, I am fishing tuna. After that first seven-day, I learned Icantoss them back and only save one small one for my own supper. I’m pulling up a glorious yellowfin tuna when I hear the prayer.
“God of the Sea, save us!”
I have learned the trick of moving quickly from one place to another, and it’s a simple thing to put one hand in the water and the other into the shape of a bowl and twist it to find the supplicant. I expect someone drowning or in trouble.
Things are not quite so simple when I arrive.
There’s a ship on her side, wallowing in the waves, her sailors scattered all out behind her in a trail. It is they who plead for my help. Squeezing the ship’s middle is the largestserpent I’ve ever seen. It’s much narrower than it is long, but even then it’s as wide as a sixth part of the ship. As it squeezes, timbers pop free, the masts break, and more people are tossed into the sea.
This is certainly a job for a god. If only I knew how to manage it. I stand up in my fishing boat and try to get a better look. The head is deep below the heaving water. We’re only seeing rings of body right now.
I have the strange bronze trident with me. I hope it will be enough to kill a serpent. If it was Vesuvius’s weapon, then it is a god weapon, but I don’t know if that still means it is special if the god in question is dead. I brace it in one hand and start to steer the boat toward the disaster with the other. I will have to leap from the boat onto the creature’s coils and stab it, I suppose, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll have to swim down and find its head and stab it somewhere more vulnerable. I can’t see any other way to deal with this monster.
I’m about to lunge forward and begin when she speaks into my mind.
Will you harm me, God of the Sea?She sounds uncertain.
Not if you leave my people alone, I tell it back.
