The Island of Excess Love (18 page)

“I have been in touch with a priestess … who once … was used to

Feed the dragon which guarded their orchard of golden apples,

sprinkling its food with moist honey and sedative poppy-seeds.

Now this enchantress claims that her spells can liberate

One's heart, or can inject love-pangs, just as she wishes;

Can stop the flow of rivers, send the stars flying backwards,

Conjure ghosts in the night: she can make the earth cry out

Under one's feet, and elm trees come trooping down from the mountains.”

“Not bad Virgilese,” Hex allows. “‘Inject love-pangs.'”

“Yes.”

We row through until dawn, the stars disappearing, the sun rising as if it's erupting from the core of the earth. I blink into the red light streaking the horizon.

I wish I could inject love-pangs into Hex's heart and send the stars flying backwards. Why did I share a bed with the king of the Island of Excess Love? Even if I was under a spell, what I did was wrong. I would not be able to forgive Hex if he did the same thing to me. And yet … And yet, somehow it feels inevitable. But is that only an excuse for my betrayal?

“Do you know the color blue never existed in ancient times?” Hex says, startling me so that I almost stop rowing. He's addressing me? It's not exactly an acceptance of my apology but at least he's speaking.

I gather myself and register what he's just said. “What do you mean it never existed? What about the sky? And the sea?”

“It went unnamed in the ancient texts. Homer said the ‘wine-dark sea,' never once ‘the blue sea.'”

“Maybe he was just avoiding clichés,” I try to joke. Hex ignores me. “What about blue eyes?” I try not to remember the king's.

“It's not in the literature. Anywhere. Until later,” he says. “Virgil says indigo-colored rain cloud, for example, and ‘dark-blue chariot.' But not Homer. If you see something all the time, if it's omnipresent, you don't have to name it.”

“I don't understand.”

“Sometimes we don't see what's most constant and beautiful around us. We take it for granted.”

He's trying to tell me something. My heart feels like an empty amphora filling with the nectar of relief. “Yes,” I say. “And when it's gone, and night comes, or an Earth Shaker, it's hard sometimes to imagine that a blue sky ever existed at all.”

He motions toward the sky over our heads. “A little gray now, but there it is.”

“And here you are,” I say.

We're silent again. I don't know if this was just a brief reprieve; I imagine so. What can I say to keep him engaged?

Venice comes over with bottles of water and some berries. The smell of the juice makes my mouth water but my stomach is queasy. I suppose it's from the motion of the boat. “Are you guys okay?”

“Fine.”

“Really?”

“Getting a little tired, I guess,” I admit.

Hex grunts and my brother goes to wake Ez and Ash.

“Thanks for taking the shift,” Ez says as I stand, stretching out my cramped limbs, and hand him my oars. “You feel all right?”

“Hex spoke to me,” I whisper. Even saying it makes my heart fill again.

“What did he say?”

“Um, that blue never existed in ancient times?”

“What the hell? Blue's a primary color. Of course it did.”

“He has some theory about not seeing what's there all the time.”

Ez frowns. “I guess he was trying to make a point.”

“I guess.”

“At least he talked.”

Ash has taken Hex's place and I watch Hex move toward the stern of the boat. His shoulders are hunched as if he's protecting his heart and his black hair falls over his face, the way, when he held me, it once fell over mine.

“Go talk to him some more,” Ez says.

I feel like a thirteen-year-old getting boyfriend advice, which I never did since I liked girls and didn't want anyone to know. If I'd had Ez around I would have talked to him. “What should I say?”

“Remember when Venice said that thing about storytelling helping us see the outcome?”

That seems so long ago, back at the pink house, before the ghost ship and the Island of Excess Love and the Island of the Shades, the death of the king, the death of Merk, whose body I was not even able to bury. The death of Hex's trust in me.

Is grief like the blue of the sky and sea? You can't even see it anymore when it's all you have come to know.

But the king said, “Storytelling helps determine action.”

“Tell Hex a story, storyteller,” says Ez. “Tell us all a story. We need one.”

 

12

 

THE RETURN

 

T
HIS IS THE STORY
I tell them. I don't know for sure if my visions of the future are true, but this is what I see:

*   *   *

When my friends and I arrive home we pray to whatever deities we may still have a shred of belief in, that the pink house is intact, protected by some fog-spell, like the one Venice once used to keep himself from being found out, so the Giant did not see it.

The six of us and Argos drag ourselves up the shore. It is our hope that sustains us; we are weak from so long without food and much water. The feasts at the Island of Excess Love were not real, only scraps enchanted to resemble stews and cakes and wine. Wine did not make us drunk; it was the magic of the king that did that.

But the magic of the king burned with him. Venice could not have hidden a whole house from a Giant, even if he had the opportunity to focus on this feat during the journey to the Shades and back again.

The pink house is ruined.

The whole facade is gone so it resembles the dollhouse I used to play with as a child. The father who raised me made it and I liked to preside over that tiny world, where every choice was mine. But now I am as powerless as the dolls I played with.

Windows are smashed, walls have crumbled, the roof has caved in. The garden has been trampled, destroyed. The Giant is nowhere to be seen and if my friends and I were not so weak with hunger and devastation we would register gratitude for this.

Only the water in the spring is clear-bright as always, tasting of leaves and sunshine. This is still hallowed ground. We fall to our knees in supplication to the dryads and drink.

A few rogue dandelions grow by the spring and we eat the leaves, chewing slowly, savoring the bitter tang. Then we go back to the house, Hex leading us with his sword drawn.

Hex, Ez, Ash, Acacia, and Venice holding Argos tiptoe over the creaking floorboards and up what is left of the staircase. I take up the rear, glancing back behind me as I go. There is nowhere for a Giant to hide but we still proceed with caution and our hearts startle at every sound. A monster could appear or the stairs could collapse beneath us but we need to survey the extent of the damage.

When night comes we arm ourselves with kitchen knives and huddle together in the large downstairs room where there is the most shelter in spite of the cracked window and the fallen partition that once separated the space into a living and dining area. Hex refuses to rest and keeps watch, pacing the muddy ground in front of the house. I hold Argos, breathing the comfort of his musty fur, and cry myself to sleep as quietly as possible so as not to worry the others.

In the morning we eat more dandelion greens and drink the water and practice our meditations and exercises. When evening comes, Venice calls a meeting and we gather around a fire built in the remains of the fireplace. I sit between Ez and Ash with Argos on my lap, Acacia sits beside Venice, where she seems to always place herself now, and Hex hovers on the outskirts as usual.

“We've all been through a lot,” Venice says. “But we can't give up. We can't run away again.”

Acacia nods her head, her gaze attaching to his face.

“What are we supposed to do?” Ez asks.

“If Bull comes back we're fucked,” Ash adds.

“Not if we have a plan.”

We all look at the dove-eyed boy.

“Tell us your plan, Venice,” I say.

But there is no time for a plan.

The earth shakes with titanic footsteps and we rush from the house as the remaining walls threaten to cave in. Coming toward us from across the ruined land is the blind Giant, Bull, and two almost identical, half-naked Giantesses. They are, for me, my rage and grief and fear. Rage at my blindness—my eye stolen from me, a bargain made and not kept. Grief at the death of so many of my loved ones. Fear of my own betrayal, of Hex's inability to forgive me. These things must be overcome if my friends and I are to survive.

We stand armed with our knives and Hex's single sword, facing the mottled-cheese flesh and rapacious blood maws of the monsters.

In this moment I remember that my small army and I are not just starving, orphaned boys and girls, lost on a destroyed planet. Not victims. We are heroes in our own ways. We are visionaries and warriors and healers and summoners of the elements.

My hair does not stand up chillily on my head; my voice does not stick meatily in my throat.

“This is our home,” I say in a voice both clear and strong, for I am a warrior, my birth father Merk's fearless daughter. “You have to leave.” I would like to tell them a story to convince them but these Giants are not interested in tales, they cannot be soothed by words. They have grown too brutal for that. And, for now at least, so have I.

One of the Giantesses reaches down and plucks Venice by his collar, dangling him there, then depositing him into Bull's hand. I watch my brother disappear in that mitt of flesh and I become a mother wolf protecting her cub. A wolf starved to shaking, ragged, and blinded but refusing to be vanquished. Seeing in her mind's eye her endangered wolfling. I am empowered by what Virgil calls “the fury of desperation.” A battle howl erupts from my throat like a flock of black birds.

Ash climbs up the rickety remains of the house and leaps from it onto the nearest Giantess's back as if he is flying, for Ash is a master of air. The female Giant whips around, bellow-lowing, swatting at him, but he eludes her. Jabs at her with his knife, perforating her flesh with bloody holes.

Argos runs forward and digs his teeth into Bull's homunculus of a toe.

Hex spears Bull's foot with the sword the king gave to him.

The Giants' rage makes their bodies heavier and the earth opens and swallows, taking them down into a sinkhole. Venice and Ash and Argos and Hex are with them.

The waters rise up and the waves roll in from the beach, threatening to drown the Giants in their hellhole. Venice and Ash and Argos and Hex are still trapped there, too.

Then the king comes to me as he once appeared, with his jasmine-twined antlers and his uncharred flesh.

“Words are not your only gift,” he says. “Whether you want it or not, you are action as much as word. And now you must protect not only yourself and your loved ones but what remains of me, in you.”

Not questioning the greater meaning of these words, I close my eyes and lift my face to the sky and reach out my arms. I call on the great seas to hear me. Those seas that protected and hid the secret worlds, that readied themselves against the devastation they saw being wreaked on their shores, preparing for the aquatic reign of the earth.

The seas will hear. The wave will stop.

And then another Giant appears, storming toward the fray. Kutter, the one who was not too brutal to listen to my story, the Giant who listened, and spared my life.

He reaches down and plucks Venice and Ash and Argos and Hex up with his mighty hand and deposits them back on the solid ground.

Ez closes the earth over Bull and the Giantesses because Ez, who sometimes seems to fear his own shadow, is a master of earth.

Hex, who is the king of fire, and more than this—the king of my cloven heart—sets a ring of flame around the pit where the Giants are trapped.

This is how they will be sent to hell and how, finally, when I am forgiven by my beloved, I will return from there.

*   *   *

Hex opens his eyes and I realize he has been awake and listening the whole time. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or afraid.

“Pen the storyteller,” he says. I'm trying to determine if I hear a trace of sarcasm in his tone. “Are you a seeress of the future now, too? Is that what will happen?”

“If we make it happen.”

“And what about the end? Where I forgive you. How will that happen?” His voice sounds weary now, and he looks out across the sea.

The ceaseless motion of the boat is making me queasy. It must be from that. It must be.

“You left me,” I say to Hex, trying to smack the intrusive thought out of my mind. “I didn't know you would return. I was under a spell. You've been drunk and high, you know what it's like.”

He shrugs and pats his imaginary pockets as if searching for a cigarette. “Good times.”

“Hex! Stop. You know what I'm saying.”

Maybe I've reached him because he finally looks me in the eye. “I'm sorry. I was cruel to you. I left without explaining. But Pen, you … you were my source of loyalty.” His voice cracks. “Purity and truth. I couldn't stand to see you any other way. I love you too much.”

“We're the same,” I tell him. “In our imperfection. In our illusions. And in our love.”