“He asked you because he wanted to be remembered the way yousaw him—not the way everyone else did,” Jacob said pragmatically. “Maybe he didn’t want to be known as part of Mylea’s history—just as a grandfather.”
Rena wasn’t sure she agreed with him and said so.
“Sometimes, there are good reasons to let go of the past. If we’re constantly looking backward, sometimes we don’t move forward.” Jacob scooted closer to Rena, leaning down so only she could hear him speak. “Once when my dad tried to explain his first encounter with the Prophets, he told me that in the vision, he was in his ship during the Borg attack when my mother died. The Prophets showed him that even though he had physically moved forward in time, he remained trapped in the past.”
“Why would Topa be trapped in the past? He was a hero—one of Mylea’s greatest!”
“I probably sound like an old man when I talk like this, but you have to know that what seems heroic from a distance sometimes isn’t when you’re close up. I lived through a battle in which I saw people at their best and their worst. Many of them were killed or maimed—it was a nightmare. I have friends with similar stories. But to hear the official reports you would have thought we were conquering heroes. Topa’s past might be exactly as heroic as you’ve been told, but it might not. So what you’ve done here is told the truth—your truth. That’s what matters.”
“I don’t know…” Rena said, wrinkling her forehead and contemplating where she might make a few more changes.
Jacob snapped the notebook closed and stuffed it back into her pack. “I do. We’re going to finish checking out this ruin, we’re going to meet Parsh and Halar for lunch. Then tonight we’re going to watch this famous Legend of Astur pageant. An exfiancé of a friend of mine informed me that it’s quite romantic.”
Men.Rolling her eyes, she pulled him off the bench by the hand and dragged him off to see the next cluster of ancient buildings.
Within the last hour, the vestiges of sunset had been wiped away by night. Halar, Parsh, Rena, and Jacob had joined the thousands of visitors spread out over a grassy hillside that formed one of Yyn’s boundaries. The audience faced a large semicircle dais at the base of the hill.
A little giddy from the wine at dinner, Halar chatted more than she normally did, but Rena didn’t believe the wine could be blamed for Parsh’s moony-eyed gazes at her friend. She had never considered them a potential couple, but maybe circumstances had never been right before. The inverse was certainly true: Something that had been right for a long time (her and Kail) could become wrong over time. Thinking of Kail and the ugliness of their breakup, Rena felt grateful that both of her friends had treated Jacob kindly, including them in their plans and conversations; remarkably, Halar had managed to rein in her eagerness at having access to a Sisko. Of course, Rena and Jacob weren’t an official couple,which might make it easier for Halar and Parsh to accept him without seeing him as a replacement for Kail. Rena hadn’t yet defined what she had with Jacob, but the signs were there: occasionally taking her hand, sitting beside her at dinner, the lingering looks when he thought she wasn’t paying attention.
A blanket spread out on the grass, Jacob had arranged himself so that Rena could sit between his legs and lean against him. The intimacy of the seating arrangement simultaneously tantalized and terrified her, but the intuitive trust that had existed between them since the start won her over. Once she was situated, he gathered her long, curly hair into his hand and draped it so it hung over one shoulder; he rested his head on the other. Rena propped her arms on his thighs, dangling her hands off his knees. As always, silence felt comfortable between them. Neither felt obliged to speak for the sake of making noise. Instead, matching the rhythm of her breath with Jacob’s became a soothing meditation. Fully relaxed, she snuggled back into the warmth of his body. He pulled her tight against him. Glancing over at Parsh and Halar, she was pleased to see that Parsh had overcome his usual shyness and had put and arm around Halar’s shoulders. They looked happy.
Soon, the first moon climbed over Yyn’s towering cliffs, blanching them cold, white-gray, signaling that the longest day of the year had passed into memory. As if to hold on to the lost light a little longer, a series of massive bonfires erupted on each side of the dais, coaxing a collective “ah!” from the crowd.
Accompanied by sad, soaring flutes, and stringed belaklavions, dancers, clothed in gauzy lavender, sea green, blush pink, and daylight blue twirled onto the stage, their robes flowing out like sea anemones’ tentacles floating in a tidal pool. Offstage, the narrator’s clear voice introduced the story of Astur, the water spirit who, on solstice morning, had left the ocean in the form of a woman, to search for a young fisherman whose face she had seen when he’d glanced over the side of his boat to retrieve a lost coin. Since the story was conveyed almost entirely through dance, Rena explained the unfolding action to Jacob using the words Topa had told her at a long-ago bedtime.
Astur found her love but couldn’t persuade him to leave his life on land to join her in the sea. Because her father, the King of the Reef, had granted her human form only as long as there was daylight, Astur and her lover attempted to hold back the night by a great fire, hoping to deceive the King. But neither a creature of the sea nor a man of the land could withstand the inferno’s heat: the lovers were consumed by the flames, conveyed by long lengths of shimmering gold fabric on the stage.
At last, the dancer portraying the King of the Reef came onto the stage and lifted a large milky white glass oval off the ground where the fire had turned the sand to glass. In memory of his lost child, he threw the glass high into the air. The crowd—including Rena—held their breath waiting for the inevitable crash.
Instead, on all sides, small flames appeared as thousands of candles ignited instantaneously, as if by magic, creating the illusion of floating in a candlelight sea. Delighted, Rena clapped. This was far more enchanting than the bedtime version she was familiar with.
“And so it is,” the narrator concluded, “that on summer solstice night, sea glass turns to flame as the King of the Reef hopes that his daughter and her lover can live again.”
The stage lights dimmed, ending the pageant, but the candles remained, waves of flickering candlelight flowing as far as Rena could see.
As people started getting up around them and leaving, Jacob leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “What happens now?”
“Parsh sort of explained this to you a while ago, but now that you’ve seen the pageant, it probably makes more sense. The story goes that those couples who capture one of the water spirit’s candles have the King of the Reef’s blessing for one night of marriage. When the sun returns, the spell is broken.”
“Sounds like an excuse for people to make love.”
“It is,” Rena conceded with a smile, “but it’s a romantic one, don’t you think?”
Taking their cues from those around them, Jacob and Rena stood; she folded up their blanket, packed up a pair of wine-glasses they never used, and slipped on her shoes. Halar grabbed her by the sleeve and dragged her out of earshot of both Jacob and Parsh.
“I want Parsh to bring me a candle,” she confided.
Rena blinked her surprise, but quickly gave her approval by enveloping her friend in a big hug. As she broke away from their embrace, she saw Parsh coming toward them, a candle cupped in his palm. She spun Halar around and wished her luck.
When Halar and Parsh had vanished into the crowd, Rena started toward the line of departing audience members, quickly realizing that Jacob wasn’t with her. She scanned the throngs of people. She knew that the odds of finding him in the dark were slim, but she hoped his height would give him away. When he didn’t immediately appear, she began calling for him, feeling a low level of panic start to rise within her. Logic took over. If we accidentally separate, we should meet back at the hostel,she recalled the four of them agreeing yesterday. Since most of the audience appeared content to linger around the candlelit ruins, Rena met little resistance as she raced down the hill and gravel road to the hostel.