Lost Voices (33 page)

When she pulled herself back up Catarina was gazing at her.

“You have to go back, Luce. The sooner the better. It’s a waste of time for you to worry about me. The way things are now . . . You have the tribe to think about.” 282 i LOST VOICES

“No!” Luce was surprised by the anger in her voice, the intensity. “Of course I won’t leave you, Cat. I’m going to look after you until you’re better, and then we can swim south together.” Catarina glowered at her with a bewildering mixture of emotions; Luce wasn’t sure if Cat was feeling tenderness, or fury, or shock, but her gray eyes flared and she tried to sit up.

She couldn’t do it, though.

“Absolutely not. You’re queen now, Luce. You can’t just leave. You have to accept your responsibility.” Luce found herself grinning bitterly.

“Is that an order, Cat?” She still felt dizzy. Dots of green light flocked across her eyes; she saw Catarina grimace on the far side of a moving field of chartreuse. “And anyway, how can
anyone
be queen in a tribe where every single mermaid just broke the timahk? I’d have to expel everyone. I’d be the queen of a bunch of rocks and some larvae . . .” She heard herself laugh, but somehow she couldn’t feel it. “Anais wants to be queen. She’s the
perfect
queen for them. After what they did to you!”

“I deserved it.” Luce opened her mouth to object, but Catarina waved her to silence; Luce was annoyed but also secretly glad to see Cat’s old imperiousness coming back to her.

“ Luce, really. Did you see what I did? Anais can’t be queen. She could never be the true queen, not if you were living within a thousand miles of her! But she’s right, that I am unworthy to be protected by the timahk . . .” Luce just felt impatient now.

“You know what? I’ve seen you do that before, Cat. After the Coast Guard boat, when I was still metaskaza and you tricked me into singing with you? I saw you with that boy then, and I knew you were breaking the timahk.
Dishonoring
us.” Luce i 283

looked straight into Catarina’s eyes. She felt so weak, balanced precariously on a strange force of life that seemed to push up from somewhere below her. “I knew you were breaking the timahk, but I didn’t
care
.” There was a moment’s silence.

“ Luce!” It came out in a kind of howl. “Oh, you’re too innocent, you don’t understand . . .” Luce just stared at her. Catarina was beside herself, the words coming up as if she were gagging on them. “ Luce, there are reasons why, why we can’t ever permit ourselves to do what I did, what I’ve kept doing! How long do you think it would have been before I gave in to temptation, and let one of them survive? Do you think I didn’t
want
to? That I didn’t fantasize about it? Saving a human boy, and having him as my own? Oh, Luce.
Everyone
in our tribe is disgraced. All except you! But you can you can restore their honor. If you’ll only do what you have to do, and lead them . . .”

Catarina was in hysterics, her eyes squeezed tight, so she didn’t see the blood rush into Luce’s face. She didn’t see Luce bite her lip and turn suddenly away, didn’t hear her heart drum-ming painfully. Shouldn’t she tell Cat the truth and confess that she’d done the very thing Catarina hated herself for even daydreaming about?

“Even Marina . . .” Catarina was moaning. “Our great queen, our
voice
. . . There was a human boy, seventeen, with the sparkling all around him, in the wreckage of a ship we brought down. And even she succumbed, Luce! She carried him ashore.

She started visiting him secretly. I was her lieutenant, her right hand, the way you were . . .” Catarina laughed horribly now, tears streaming from her closed eyes. Her words fell rhythmically, joined to the beat of the sea, and there was a trace of sing-284 i LOST VOICES

ing in them. “The way you were to me before I really understood that you’d made me into a false queen! I noticed that Marina was missing too often, and I followed her.
Now
do you understand?” Luce was mesmerized by the story, and so weak that she tipped back down to lie on the rocks beside Catarina. But she couldn’t tell where this was all going. She shook her head, and her dizziness slopped like water in a tipped basin.

“I don’t think I do. Understand. Catarina . . .” Cat’s terrible laugh came again. “I followed her; I saw them together; I couldn’t believe my eyes. If you realized what she meant to me! I couldn’t bring myself to denounce her, though I knew that I should. Instead I confronted her. I gave her an ulti-matum. Her lover had the indication, after all. Why shouldn’t he join us?” Luce remembered what Catarina had told them all on the day when Anais had first joined the tribe.

“You told her she had to change him into a merman. Or else you’d tell everyone?”

Catarina let out a long, droning sigh, a sigh that was half a sob. When she spoke again it was almost an incantation. Her accent was thicker than Luce had ever heard it.

“Change him or drown him. Yes. I told her there was no other choice. I told her I’d kill him for her if it hurt her too much to do it. She knew how wrong it was to fall in love with a human, of course. She was ashamed of herself, and she agreed that I was right to demand that of her. She agreed! When she swam off to meet him that night I persuaded myself that I’d done the right thing . . . You understand?”

“You told us she couldn’t do it. You said it almost killed her . . .” Luce’s voice merged with the rhythm of Catarina’s i 285

now. Catarina’s tears picked up the dusky glow from outside, reflecting it back in twin lines of blue neon.

“I found her the next morning, lying at the edge of a beach where humans came sometimes. Crazy, anyone could have seen her, but she was too weak to move. I carried her to a hidden cove. I didn’t want the tribe to see the condition she was in, start asking questions. She was weeping, on and on. She said he hadn’t changed. She’d sung until both their hearts were broken from the cruelty in her voice, but still he hadn’t changed . . .” Luce could feel the hot seep of tears, but they didn’t seem to be her own. The tears belonged to Marina.

“So she killed him?”

“I asked her that, of course. I thought she was weeping so terribly because he was dead, and I began to regret that I’d forced her . . . She told me not to worry. She told me it was all resolved. Those were her words but in Russian.” There was silence and a dim phosphorescent pallor in the rocks above them.

Luce had decided that must be the end of the story when Catarina spoke again.

“She crawled on shore that night. He was there, and he held her while she screamed, but he didn’t bring her back to the water.”

Luce thought she understood now. “You heard her, Catarina?”

“I heard her. I saw her in his arms at the very end. I shouted at him to carry her to the sea and he refused. He was in a rage.

He said he was certain she’d survive the transformation back, that she belonged with him on land . . .” It was hard to know if the sound that came from Catarina now was laughter or sobs. “I 286 i LOST VOICES

could have enchanted him, made him walk into the water, but I didn’t know how to make him bring her along. By the time he stopped yelling at me, she was dead. And I I never saw my tribe again. I couldn’t look at them.”

There was a long silence. Luce wanted to know what Catarina had done to the man who’d kept Queen Marina out of the water, but after a moment’s consideration she decided not to ask. Cat had told her enough.

“So, Luce . . .” She could hear Catarina straining to raise herself, and Luce opened her stinging eyes to see Catarina half smiling above her in the dimness. Still, Luce was astonished by what came next. “So, now you understand why I saved your life the night we met. Even though I knew perfectly from the first moment that you were a threat to me . . . That voice! Now you see why I needed you anyway.”

Luce gaped at her in bewilderment. Was Catarina losing her mind?

“I don’t actually know what you’re talking about, Cat.

But I’m really not a threat. I
promise
. . .”

“I won’t live as a false queen, Luce. How do you imagine I could bear to rule, knowing my place was rightfully yours? Although that’s beside the point now.” Catarina gazed searchingly down at her. “You really don’t understand? Luce, when I heard your song it made me believe that Marina might have been able to forgive me for what I did to her. It gave me hope that in her last moments . . .” Catarina shook her head, and her hair brushed Luce’s wet cheeks.

“I went after you, though I was endangering myself by doing it, though I had every reason to leave you where you were. I i 287

needed, more than anything, to keep hearing you sing, to keep feeling . . . that forgiveness. You remind me of Marina sometimes. Crazy but so brave . . . You’ll be a very great queen, Luce, if you can just keep yourself from from giving in to those desires, that longing, the way Marina and I both did. Every time I’ve ever looked at you I’ve wanted to warn you, but I couldn’t, not without letting you see my own corruption. How could I possibly show that to someone so pure- hearted? But, maybe, since you’re so young . . .”

Catarina didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.

Luce understood all too well.

“ Catarina . . .” This insistence that she would be a queen was ludicrous, anyway. Who would obey her? “I’ll never be queen. Not of any tribe. I don’t even want to, and I’m too weird for anyone to want me that way. You hear the stuff Anais says about me, like I’m just this complete loser freak . . .” Catarina smiled, but when she tried to reach out and stroke Luce’s hair her face abruptly contorted from pain. Luce was appalled with herself. How could she have forgotten that Cat’s left wrist was broken?

“You still don’t understand, Luce. You’re such a child sometimes!” Catarina’s voice was suddenly tight with agony, so Luce suppressed the urge to take offense at this. “I’ve been coming to your cave. I’ve been listening to you. And you’re certainly the greatest singer I’ve heard since Marina died. I sometimes wonder if you might even be better than she was, and I never would have believed . . .”

Luce was embarrassed by this, and at the same time she hated to think that Catarina had been suffering for hours while she just slept and did nothing to help her.

288 i LOST VOICES

“Um, Cat? I need to figure out a way to set your wrist. If I can find a couple of good pieces of driftwood and some net or something . . .” Luce’s words came out too fast.

Catarina smiled, although her pain made it tighten into a grimace. “That would be very kind of you, Luce. And something to eat? We’ll be able to talk more calmly once we’ve both had some dinner.” Luce nodded.

“Wait here. Try to sleep. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Luce felt nervous about leaving Catarina on her own, but there was no other way. They were both giddy from hunger.

* * *

It took longer than she’d hoped to find everything they needed. There were no mussels but plenty of oysters, so Luce found a plastic grocery bag strangling some seaweed and un-tangled it to carry them back. The seaweed looked good here, too, and the driftwood was easy enough, but for a long time she couldn’t find anything that would work as a makeshift wrapping for the cast. This was one time when it would have been helpful to have Anais’s piles of stolen clothes on hand. Eventually Luce decided that the snarled plastic grocery bags she saw here and there were the best thing she could find for now, and she tucked a few of them away with the oysters.

She had to tell Catarina the truth, Luce realized. If she could make Catarina accept that she’d already broken the timahk herself, in the worst possible way that she’d actually rescued a boy, not just fantasized about it, that she was even guiltier than Cat was herself then, just possibly, Catarina would get over her shame enough to let Luce travel south with her. She hated to think of how Catarina would look at her as i 289

she told the story, but still . . . it was the only decent thing she could do.

Before she swam back into the high crevice between the cliffs Luce paused to stare out at the sea which was always so familiar even when it was strange but where she was always utterly lost even when she knew exactly where she was. In the faintly dusky sky she could just make out a pale scattering of stars. She listened to their buzzing voices, which sounded like tiny metallic wings whirring to hold them in place; she thought the stars might be like crickets, singing with the friction of their bodies instead of with their throats. She thought that, after dinner, she might try to describe the sound to Catarina, and she turned between the cliffs carried by a sudden feeling of elation. A clean stroke of freedom would carry them both away from here.

The cave was empty. Luce called again and again, although the space was so small that there was no corner where her friend could possibly be hiding.

Catarina was gone, and Luce was all alone.

After a while Luce curled up with her head leaning on a rock, wondering why she wasn’t consumed by despair. Instead she felt an inexplicable sense of peace. She was cradled in music. The rocks around her chanted like slow, growling bells, and each curl of the water stroked her fins with silky notes. She’d been so afraid of leaving her tribe, but she understood that she never would have heard the music resonating out of every crook of the world if she hadn’t taken so many risks. She’d opened her heart to that music in solitude, and it had come to her. And even now that her tribe was broken, her friends dead or vanished, Luce realized the world’s voice sounded hopeful, vital, full of the soft vibrancy of pure being.

290 i LOST VOICES

Gently she sang back, letting her voice glide into complex harmonies with all the inhuman voices humming around her. A crystalline sphere of water floated up between her hands, raised itself nearer Luce almost wondered if it could see her then stroked against her lips. It felt like a kiss.

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