I force the knife’s hilt into my mouth, biting down hard so I don’t lose it in the sea, and charge ahead with furious strokes, my muscles burning with exertion. Eventually, I reach them.
The screeching darkness hovers over Anassa’s body, bone-coloured hands scratching her face as she fights to stay afloat, screaming and crying and gargling, her skin so red it’s almost blue. Wild rivulets of blood flow from her cheek, tinting the silver waters pink. She’s losing. For a moment, I consider leaving her to it.
I could do nothing. While I promised not to kill her earlier, I did not say anything about risking my neck to save her. Maybe this shadow fiend will be easier to deal with after it finishes her off. Or maybe it will be harder, then; for all I know, taking her life could strengthen it. If that thing followed us here to kill us,Iwon’t be safe until it’s dealt with. I can’t trust this spectre’s appetite to be sated after just one kill.
The moment passes. My decision is made.
I take my knife in both hands, pedalling faster with my legs to keep me from submerging. As a wave lifts me up, I use the momentum to plunge myself into the darkness, stabbing as I go. I don’t question how or why I can cut a shadow; my knife has found purchase on the spectre’s back, and that’s enough for me. Releasing my left hand, I grab the spectre by the throat, tilting it backward and away from Anassa. It screams, trying to turn around to face me. Up close, it reeks of rotting roses, sweet and sour like poison. I keep going, stabbing and slicing, frantically pedalling to keep myself upright, burying my knife to the hilt and twisting it, until –
A different sound, like dry bark ripping from an old oak, cracking the tree in two.
Then, a dying rasp, so coherent that it gives me pause. ‘O happy dagger, this is thy sheath: there rust, and let me die.’ It sounds almost like a young girl, relieved, thankful.
Perhaps I set her free from her rose-scented prison of existence.
I wait to see if it’s a trick to gain my sympathy, attack me. But nothing. Only silence and my thundering heart as the shadow vanishes, leaving a leather rectangle behind, pierced through with my knife. I grab it with one hand, instantly recoiling – I can almost hear echoes of screaming, screaming that sounds like a name – and dislodge it from my blade. It floats sadly for a second, then sinks into the foamy depths. There is a strange residue left on my fingers, black as tar but not as sticky. Oily, almost, carrying a sense of wrongness I can’t name. I wash it in the waters, rubbing my hands, my knife. Finally, it evaporates. The rose scent dissipates, replaced by the sea’s salty ordinariness.
I lie back in the waters to slow my breath, waiting for Anassa to thank me.
After a while, it becomes obvious that she won’t. Fine. Ungrateful woman. I rise up to let her know she can find her own way ashore … and understand what’s wrong about her silence.
Anassa is not screaming any more; she’s drowning. Her pale hands are all that’s left of her over the water’s surface, her own fingers charred black from where she grappled with the shadow.
This time I don’t need a moment to decide. Taking the deepest breath I can, I dive into the moonlit waters with my eyes open, feeling the sting of salt. That sinking shipwreck of a queen stands out in her black dress, a chthonic reed descending into Tartaros. Not if I can help it. I pedal faster, wrapping my knife-holding hand around her slender waist, thanking the gods she weighs as much as my hair wet. With my other hand, I propel us upward, until weboth resurface. Cold, delicious air attacks my nostrils, and I open my mouth wide, my breathing laboured.
Anassa doesn’t cough. She doesn’t breathe, doesn’t open her eyes.
It’s possible I’ve saved her twice for nothing. She’s already gone.
But as I look into her waxy face, the angry crimson streak carving a path of caked blood from underneath her eye to her jaw, I know I can’t allow her body to become food for the fish. Dead or alive, she should be brought ashore. Someone needs to give her a due burial, sing her a lament. Everyone deserves a proper send-off, even Agamemnon. I shake the thought and steel myself for one last round of physical exertion, grab Anassa once more by the waist and bite into my knife again, to free my hands. I slowly swim us back, bringing her with me.
I’m getting tired. My knife’s blade reflects the moons above, shining an almost blinding silver. My eyes blur and fail me, filling my vision with strange shapes, colourful afterimages and shifting shadows. At one point, as I adjust Anassa’s limp body so I can use my other hand to swim, I swear I see a big, black-spotted cat perched upon the same boulder I climbed on earlier. The cat stands up and stares at me, ivory fur glistening in the moonlight, mouth open – with teeth that look as sharp as my knife. The black spots on its fur hurt to look at, as if I’m glimpsing a carnage of constellations, orphaned dark circles where stars should have been. As if this cat devoured these stars, and now is poised to feast on us.
The piercing needles from before return, waking me up, filling me with an anger hot enough to break the sky. I don’t know why, but my whole being screams that thiscat iswrong, as wrong as that screeching shadow. And she should not leer at us so, like we’re her dinner slowly making our way to her stomach.
I growl at her, unable to do more with my knife in my mouth. The steel reverberates in my teeth like a rattlesnake. As if I wished it so to scare her off, a stab of lightning cracks above, followed by thunder. The boulder shakes. The cliffs ahead too, so much that I worry it will cause an avalanche, burying me under rocks with Anassa’s dead body. But the shaking stops, thankfully.
When I look back to the boulder, the cat is gone. Vanished. The rock is empty, proof that I imagined the whole thing. I chide myself for putting stock in hallucinations and continue my arduous swim, with Anassa’s empty shell in tow, until I reach the shore. I deposit her on that volcanic sand that’s almost the same colour as her hair, and collapse beside her, heaving.
There is a fire in my ribs, a salty sorrow in my teeth, and entirely too much bile on my lungs, getting worse with every breath. I turn the other way and retch, my shoulders shaking from exhaustion. I’m not crying; this is merely the salt, leaving my body.
When I’m able to compose myself again, I turn around to face what’s left of Anassa.
Her eyes are open.
9. Anassa
This time, I must surely be dead. Because an angel weeps for me, blonde curls bouncing on her shoulders, tinted celestial silver from her opal halo. Such radiance! It’s dizzying to look at; I blink and her halo multiplies, as if strands of pearls surround her.
Oh, why does my shiny angel look so sad?
I want to tell her I’m unworthy of her tears but my voice is locked within my body, a feather trapped inside a wooden box buried in sand. I try to reach for it, my hands grasping at my collarbone, yet all that comes up my throat is grains of sand and water.
Water … I’m drowning …
No, that’s not right, I drowned. That awful thing descended upon me, a raven rhomphaia from the heavens bringing darkened judgement, tumbling with me amid the stars until we fell into the sea … And then … The sand dunes of my memories have scattered, nigh impossible to reconstruct. I remember fighting to find my footing but there was nothing to grab on to, only the buoyancy of waves – but that was not enough because that wraith’s claws had found my face and the pain was akin to being lit on fire from within. And oh, that sound! Torn pages from a living, screaming book, curling upon themselves as they kept burning, burning, repeating the same words as theymelted … I thought the pain would never end. I thought I was condemned to suffer for eternity.
Yet all I feel right now is hollow, emptied from the inside, as if I’m but a scarecrow filled with sand. My hands fly upward to my throat, my face …
