“No!” Marie-Josèphe cried, too distressed, too furious to pretend Lorraine did not exist. “She hasn’t enough room in this tiny cage.”
“His Majesty gives the sea monster more space than he gives his courtiers.”
Sherzad swam back to her, leaping again, coming down perilously close to the platform. Her gold eyes shone with wild rage and desperation.
“Brava!” cried Lorraine.
“If you please, Mlle de la Croix,” Chartres said, “give us our story.”
Sherzad swam across the pool, turned at the last instant, and swam across again. The prison tormented her. She dove to the inlet and struggled with the grating. It never moved. The fountain contained nothing she could use as a tool or a pry, for the bits of metal littering its bottom were all soft and useless; the gray metal and the sun-colored metal alike bent in her hands.
Marie-Josèphe called to her; Sherzad ignored her. She swam back and forth, as fast and as hard as she could in the small space, not nearly as fast as she could swim in the open ocean. She keened and cried into the murky water. A fish swam past. She snatched it and ripped it to bits. Scales flickered and floated away.
She leaped. With her powerful legs she propelled her body entirely out of the water. She let herself fall with a great splash. Water washed over the steps and gushed above the stone rim, soaking Marie-Josèphe’s feet. Marie-Josèphe drew back with a cry of dismay. Sherzad could not understand why she never wanted to keep her feet wet.
Beyond the bars of the cage, the land people in their strange chaotic coverings gathered to listen to her. Most stood—Sherzad wondered how they could bear the pain of standing—but a few sat. Marie-Josèphe had tried to explain why this was; she had begged Sherzad to lower her eyes when the toothless man looked at her. Sherzad found no reason to do so.
The toothless man’s picture sat in his place today. The people of land made pictures with colors on surfaces, poor flat representations of their subjects. They should set someone to sing the image of absent guests.
Sherzad leaped again. The land people exclaimed and slapped their hands together. She leaped again, and again they covered her with a wave of meaningless noise. Meaningless to her, but significant to them, their way of showing interest or approval.
The small man came into the tent. Sherzad snarled and dived. She no longer hoped to trust him. He had smeared that nasty black stuff on Marie-Josèphe’s arm. Did he want to kill her? She would claw him if she got the chance, for trying to hurt Marie-Josèphe. She wished she could warn her friend, but she would have to explain how Marie-Josèphe came to be healed. She did not dare.
All the land people suddenly stood up. The man in white, with the gold cross, came into the tent. All the land people bowed until he sat beside the picture of the toothless one. Marie-Josèphe ran out and knelt and kissed his hand. The action puzzled Sherzad, for the man in white responded to the kiss without pleasure, and Marie-Josèphe gained no pleasure from kissing him.
Marie-Josèphe returned to the Fountain and sang, begging Sherzad to tell a story. Sherzad leaped again, testing the reaction of the land people. She landed dangerously near the rim of the Fountain, splashing hard. The land people made a considerable noise.
Sherzad swam to the steps and clambered over the sharp corners to lie on the rim beside Marie-Josèphe.
“Dear Sherzad, you frighten me so when you leap like that…”
Sherzad turned her attention to the man in white. Now and again she found some kindness in his face, though he wore the gold cross that terrified Sherzad’s heart.
Can I draw him to my cause? Sherzad wondered. Or is his attachment to murdering us too strong?
Marie-Josèphe spoke, like a child, for her untrained voice produced single notes. Sherzad replied with a trill of harmonies, fixed her gaze upon the Pope, and began.
She sang of her kind’s first encounter with the golden cross.
The people of the sea gained some respite by fleeing, by choosing birth islands far out in the middle of the ocean, by removing themselves to great mats of seaweed too dense for ships to traverse.
They did not move their mating place. Its indigo depths lay between treacherous shallows. All the families gathered there, on a single day each year, then dispersed again. Surely the men of land could not find them.
One year, a great storm preceded Midsummer’s Day. The sea people gloried in it, riding the immense waves, diving through the spume, submerging, when the weather became too violent, to drift into lethargy and sleep. When the storm broke, the sea people rose to the surface and swam in the bright hot sun. Leaving the adolescents in charge of the children, the adults gathered for their mating.
Marie-Josèphe stopped singing, stopped speaking. Sherzad gripped her wrist, pricking her with her sharp claws, snarling in disgust at her cowardice. Tell them, she said, you must tell them. How will they know we are people, if they don’t believe we feel joy?
The mating haze crept over them. They crowded together, swimming in a contracting circle; they created a great whirlpool with their delight. They swam against each other, sliding and touching, arousing themselves, arousing each other, losing themselves in their ecstasy.
Marie-Josèphe faced the Pope squarely and spoke as Sherzad sang.
In the midst of the haze, a lost ship staggered toward the mating orgy, its sails tattered from the storm. Among the rips and tears of the galleon’s mainsail, painted in sunlight, a cross burned.
The men of land spied the people of the sea in their mating haze. The ship pitched toward the gathering. The men of land were jealous of the sea people’s pleasure, rapturous and terrified at their discovery of such a mass of demons. Their ship plunged into the orgy, through clusters of joyous sea people unaware of the ship’s presence.
The ship crushed sea people, who did not even try to escape. The sailors flung casks over the side, screaming, Demons! demons!
The casks exploded, blowing splinters, nails, fragments of chain across the waves. The sea folk came to themselves as their pleasure turned to agony and their blood swirled in the water. The whirlpool, cut by the ship, vanished into the depths. Panicked youths saw their families die before them, as they held the terrified, crying babies.
The Pope stared stonily at Sherzad. No kindness came into his face; he showed no more pity than the priest who stood in the lost ship’s stern, holding up a cross of the sunlight metal, proclaiming his responsibility for the devastation of wounded and dying sea folk.
“I am the Hammer of Demons, the scourge of Lucifer,” Marie-Josèphe sang.
The Pope rose. Sherzad loosed Marie-Josèphe’s wrist. Marie-Josèphe clutched the bars of the cage to steady herself. The spectators burst into applause at the pathos and tragedy of the story.
“I didn’t make it up,” Marie-Josèphe whispered. “How could I make it up?”
“I must have the creature in my keeping,” the Pope said.
24
The gold sunbursts, the gilded candle-stands covered with fresh flowers, the scent of orange blossoms and heavy perfume, the elaborate hangings and the exquisite paintings oppressed Marie-Josèphe. Following Madame and Lotte, she hesitated at the entryway of Apollo’s salon. The press of courtiers forced her into the room, and the crowd held her immobile.
The usher knocked his staff against the floor.
“His Majesty the King.”
All the men removed their flamboyant hats. The courtiers made way for their monarch. Marie-Josèphe remained with Madame and Lotte, too close to the front of the crowd and too much in public view to have any chance of creeping out, of fleeing to Sherzad. Sherzad’s voice whispered to her, but she could not tell if she heard it truly, or only imagined it in the crush and noise and smell and heat.