“We open it here, together. Are you ready then?”
I refused to feel fear, when joy was so close. “Yes, I am ready.”
Vesta placed her hand upon my heart and the unnatural fire that burned when I arrived grew between us. I felt the heat, but it did not burn me. Then at last the white light burst from the flame.
“Call her now, Oren Gale, call her to you.”
The whiteness burned inside me like my soul was aflame. “Cybilla!” I called out in agony. “Cybilla, please come to me!” I could not maintain this gate long. I began to sing my words of love, the words that comforted my heart, but it was not enough. I fell to the ground.
“No!” Cybilla screamed. I could hear her beside me. I succeeded only to die in her arms.
“He passed all of your tests! Why did you do this?” Cybilla cried out.
“I did not do this, Child. This was not the way it was supposed to happen.”
“Where is his flask? Were is the water from my mother?”
“It is still in the flame.”
Cybilla lay my head down gently. I heard her cry out in agony, but she returned a moment later. I felt her fingers on my face as she tipped the flask between my lips. “Oh swallow, Oren, please! You must do this! Do not leave me here alone!”
I felt the cold water in my mouth, but I do not know if I swallowed it. I do know I could feel the life return to my body. Cybilla had her hand on my heart. I slid mine over hers. She gasped and she began to cry.
“Oren, I missed you. I was so afraid you would never come. I love you, don’t leave me.”
“I will never leave you.” I whispered as I opened my eyes and looked at her. There she was, my heart, my soul, my song. I pushed myself to sitting and gazed at her. It was hard to tear my eyes from her perfect face, but as I reached out to sweep the hair from her forehead, I noticed the angry red marks on her hand. “You reached into the fire?”
“You needed the water.”
“Come to me, Cybilla,” The Mother called.
We both rose. Cybilla stepped forward. The Mother took Cybilla’s injured hand and gently ran her own hand over it. “You risked yourself to save him. Your task is completed. Oren, give me the flask.”
It was nearly empty, but I handed it her as she asked. She poured the last drops over Cybilla’s hand and closed it between her own. Cybilla flinched, but her hand was perfect once again.
“Go now. Live.”
“Thank you, Great Mother,” Cybilla said as she took my hand and held it tight.
“One last thing, Oren Gale. You made a promise to another. She desperately wants what you and Cybilla have found. Write your song. It shall be what the story was for you and when that man plays the flute for her, she will be released to the world of men.”
“You have my promise, my lady.”
Vesta stepped back onto the platform where the fire burned. The flames rose and the colors swirled until they burst into white light and the gate opened once again. For a moment I could see Folquet waiting for her on the other side.
And the gate closed.
“Come, my love,” I told her, “let’s go home.”
She was still with me in the morning.
* * *
“I’ve heard that one before.”
“I know. I’m sorry. When you changed your mind, I panicked. I didn’t have another story ready to tell.”
“It’s a good story, a nice story. Love worth dying for is romantic.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Would you have done that for me?”
“Of course. I would collect all the stars from the sky for you to wear on a chain if that was what you wanted.”
“That is impossible!” she laughed.
“Nothing is impossible.”
“So what happened next? Did Oren write a song for Dia? Did she find true love too?”
“Oren was a man of his word, of course he wrote the song.”
“Will you tell me the story?”
“Is that what you want next?”
“Yes.”
“As you wish.”
* * *
Mare da Sogno
(Sea of Dreams)
UN:
“Papa, what is that song about? Why do you always sing that when we prepare the boat?”
My father laughed. “You should learn more Italian, Sebastien.”
“I can’t, Papa!” I whined. “They make us learn English in school and it’s so hard. I can’t learn another language. Anyway, Mama didn’t speak Italian.”
“Well, Mama was French, but you are French and Italian. I should teach you. Now that Mama is gone, we may be in Italy more of the time.”
“You want to leave here?” I gasped. “But what about Uncle Phillipe and Adrienne?”
“We’ll still see them, but we can’t live with them forever, Son. We will have to move on.”
I was eleven then. I did not want to think about moving away, not so soon after Mama died. I sat sullen and quiet for a good while as my father worked. But the busier his hands were, the less he noticed me and once I was forgotten, he began to whistle again. The same song, the one that started the whole terrible conversation.
“Can you just tell me about the song?” I asked him again.
“It’s about a Nymph, one of the Daughters of the Eternal Water who longed to find love and fell in love with a man.”
“A Nymph? There is no such thing!” I laughed.
But my father was serious when he answered me. “There are many mysteries in this world Bastien. Never mock the old ways. People forget their Gods, but that does not make the Gods go away. The waters can be cruel, but I sing this song and the Nymphs see me home safely.”
I remember leaning against the fish barrels watching him work. I did not rebut him, but I didn’t believe him either because if there were Gods, why did they take my Mama away?
I wouldn’t believe. I refused to believe.
~ ~
“You need a haircut, Bastien,” Adrienne started as she laid her head upon her arm on the table and looked up at me.
“My hair is perfectly fine,” I answered, absently running my fingers through the top of it, knowing she was right.
“I hate being on holiday. Brignoles is so boring compared to Lyon. I don’t get why you come back here, surely you have something better to do than sit around this house and listen to my father talk about his bank. Maybe we can go down to Toulon or San Tropez one day, that would be fun. I haven’t been to the beach in a long time.”
“You do realize it’s winter?”
“Don’t spoil it. The beach in winter is still better than Brignoles any time of year. My friends were all going skiing over the break. I wanted to go too but no, Papa said I had to come home. He’s such an ogre sometimes,” she laughed as she rolled her eyes.
Toulon. A thousand thoughts rattled around in my head but as usual none made their way to my lips.
“You should find a girlfriend, Bastien, seriously.”
“What?” I gasped, my attention abruptly snapped back to my cousin grinning up at me as she lazed across the table.
“You could bring her here for the holidays and someone might actually talk to me.”
“You could get a boyfriend.”
“Who said I didn’t have a boyfriend?” she quipped, but before I could answer she kept right on talking. “I could have a boyfriend if I wanted one. The problem is that I like Italian men. I think Papa would have a heart attack if I were to bring home an Italian boyfriend. But we were not talking about me, we were talking about how desperately you need a girlfriend.”
“I’m not that desperate,” I objected to no avail.
“She’d probably teach you to dress better and make you get a haircut.”
“My hair is perfectly fine...” I began to insist at the same moment that Uncle Phillipe pulled the door open and greeted us with a booming Merry Christmas and an
armload of everything from gifts to bread.
Adrienne ran to the door and joyfully greeted the father she’d called an ogre just moments before and while this was the only family I had, the greeting was not the same for me that it was for Adrienne. I shook my uncle’s hand and tried to relieve him of some of his burdens as my cousin talked incessantly. At last he handed her a package and asked her to put it under the tree and he sighed a little as she darted away.
“How is work going Sebastien?” he asked.
“Good, really good,” I answered with as much enthusiasm as I could fake while the truth was that I hated my bank office job as much as I hated the rest of my miserable life.
“You could use a hair cut. It’s important to look professional when you are handling peoples’ livelihood.”
“You see! I told you!” Adrienne laughed as she snuck up behind me and ran her fingers into my hair. “Papa, can we open one gift after dinner, please?”
“Twenty years old and she’s still asking the same question she asked at four!” Uncle Phillipe laughed. “Of course, Little Princess, of course you can.”
The dinner was served and afterward we went to the sitting room where Uncle Phillipe poured sweet wine and Adrienne picked through the packages under the tree until she found the one I brought for her.
“This one! I want this one tonight!” she squealed as she clutched the small box, then she laid it in her lap and dug out a small package for me and one for her father.
But as she tore the paper away, I thought about the gift she was about to open. It was a necklace of sea green chalcedony beads, perfect in their imperfection, some clear and some milky just like the sea. Ever changing, different each time you looked at it and however the light hit it. It was the sea. Perhaps it was the wrong gift. The sea was not part of Adrienne the way it was part of me. It was not her life and her death the way it was mine. It did not steal everything away from her and still call her back. She did not long for it and fear it as I did.
I could still hear it call my name... ‘Sebastien,’ it whispered to me as I woke an orphan on an unknown shore...
Adrienne gushed when she held the necklace in her hands.
I did not realize tears were running down my cheeks until she tried to hug me.
She pulled away quickly and slid the package she’d handed me back off my lap. “I think maybe this is not the right gift for you. Here, take this one instead...”
But I put it aside and said I would wait for the morning.
We drank the wine and went off to our beds.
DEUX:
It was my room and it wasn’t.
It was full of memories, but none of them were happy.
My mother and Auntie Sabine were taking the train to Paris to attend the wedding of their cousin Matthieu. My father and I were going to spend the days they were gone with Uncle Phillipe and Adrienne. My father and my uncle had little in common aside from their wives, and though I was just a boy, it still registered that my uncle didn’t like my father, my father’s life and by default, me. He tolerated us for the sake of his wife, but we were not his caste of people.
My father was an Italian merchant from Genova. He owned two boats. He ran his fishing business from one and his trading business from the other. He sailed the ports from Marseille to Sicily, from Corsica to Civitavecchia, from Oristan to Toulon.
Toulon.
We lived in a small house in Toulon. He met my mother there and he up and moved all his business to France to be with her. We weren’t wealthy like Uncle Phillipe, but we weren’t poor. We were a family. We had love in abundance.
That was the only time in my life I was happy.
The day my mother got on that train, was the beginning of all the endings. The kiss goodbye was only supposed to be for four days, not forever. Adrienne and I both lost our mothers in a crash that killed over one hundred people.
And my father and I stayed in Uncle Phillipe’s house for almost a year as we all tried to hide our grief and recover from such a great loss.
~ ~
It seemed that I lay there for just a moment before Adrienne knocked on my door. She came in without waiting for an answer. “Sebastien, do you want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
“Come on! You were crying when I opened the package. It’s a beautiful necklace. Why were you crying?”
“Do you ever think about your mother, Adrienne?”
“Not really. I was only five, I hardly remember her. Papa doesn’t talk about her either. You were nearly eleven, do you remember them?”
“I remember some things from when we were a family. I remember the day she left. It was only supposed to be four days.”
“Bastien, can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” I shrugged.
“Are you just a banker to make my father happy?”
I gaped at her. I didn’t know what to say.
“I think you are. I can tell that you don’t like it. I haven’t seen you look happy since the day we brought you back here. That day when you were just fourteen and...”
“Please don’t say it.”
“Can we please talk about him? I loved him so much. I was little, but I loved him more than my own father because he had so much love in him. He used to come and get me from school and he would hold my hand or sometimes he would carry me and he would tell me fanciful stories. He used to talk to me in Italian sometimes. He was so expressive with his hands and his voice that I understood him. And he used to sing to me.”
Tears ran down my cheeks as Adrienne spoke of my father, but I went rigid when she mentioned his singing.
“What did he sing?”
Adrienne pulled the gift that she’d taken from my lap out of the pocket of her robe.” I thought you would like this, but maybe I just wanted to hear it again. He said it was about a Sea Nymph who loved a man. I didn’t know what a Nymph was, I always pictured her as a beautiful Mermaid, with long hair and eyes that changed like the sea.”
The gift was a recording by a man named Oren Gale. The cover was a picture of an ornate fountain. Nine of the ten songs were in English, but the one called Mare da Sogno, Sea of Dreams, was in Italian. That was the song my father always sang.
I had no words for Adrienne. My heart was heavy, and so empty at the same time.
“I think you miss the sea, Sebastien. I think you should go back to her. You can’t stay this sad your whole life, it breaks my heart.”
“Your father took me in when I was an orphan and he gave me a chance to make a good future, to live a secure life.”
“Is a secure life what you want?”
“I don’t know what I want, Adri.”
“Think about it, Bastien. Think very hard. Stop locking your feelings up and find out what is really in your heart or the mermaids saved you for nothing,” she said as she stood from the edge of the bed, leaned over and kissed my cheek, and then she walked out of the room.
The mermaids saved you...
Did they?
That night the dream I forced away came back to me. I saw every detail, I heard every sound. And I knew it was not a dream, it was a memory, saved in my mind, waiting for me to come back.
TROIS:
“Bastien, be sure to tie all the barrels securely, the wind is picking up.”
“I tied them, Papa. Do you think a storm is coming?”
“Yes, but it is far behind us and this wind will push us along,” he said as he ruffled my hair, took the rudder and began to sing the song he always sang when we sailed.
I cast the lines off and stood at the rail as we made our way out of the port at Bastia on our way back to Genova. The wind made the water choppy. The froth spray kicked up like a thousand jewels glistening in the setting sun. My hair whipped my face and I remember that I began to whistle the song my father was singing, but the howl of the wind was so loud that I could hardly hear myself, and then my father’
s voice was lost to me too.
It was just me and the sea.
I didn’t notice the hours passing or sky darkening over us.
I just trimmed the sails and felt the roll of the deck beneath my feet. Time passed unnoticed with the salt spray clinging to my hair and the smell of the water filling my senses.
It all went wrong very quickly.
All I remember was the way she said my name, ‘Sebastien.’
~ ~
I woke with a start.
The sun was shining weakly into the room but the voice was still strong in my memory.
The sea was calling me. She had a beautiful voice, soft and musical, magical in its own way. I needed to go to her. The desire to run from the house and just keep running until my feet were beneath the waves became the whole of me, but it was Christmas Day and I could not justify running away from the only family I had on the holiday.
I slid from the bed and dragged my tablet from my satchel.
The disc that Adrienne gave me was made three years before I was born. I did not have the means to play it, and though Uncle Phillipe did have the equipment in the sitting room, I could not hear it for the first time in so many years in front of him or Adrienne. I knew it would open a floodgate within me, and I needed to keep those feelings private, at least for now.
But my tablet let me search for the song and the singer and the moment I hit play I was a boy again. This time I wished with all of my heart that I had taken the opportunity to learn to speak Italian when my father said he should teach me. I made each attempt such a chore for him that he gave up. I envied Adrienne that she listened to him and understood him just because she loved the sound.
Oh time, why must you be fixed? Why could you not just take me back to those days and let me atone?
I listened to the song over and over, softly, so I would not wake the others. But I wept. I wept for the sound, I wept for the longing to hear my father’s voice. I wept for the sea and how I left her behind because she took the last of where I came from and left me abandoned on a foreign beach. She left me with nothing.