Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

I went back to the cellars because I didn’t know where else to go. I did not belong anywhere now. I sat curled for hours next to one of the beer vats, numb and quiet, until I heard the chattering voices of cooking staff come to fetch a barrel for supper: I did not want to meet anyone, so I unkinked myself and went farther down the hallway until I found a small heavy door slightly ajar, old but with freshly oiled hinges that made no sound as I slid through.

I came into a vast, dim place, heavy with green and the smell of water. Not a garden: an enormous twilight conservatory in the guts of the oldest part of the palace. Even through my despair I could see the marvel of the place, feel its mystery. There were trees standing forty feet tall in porcelain tubs as big as our room upstairs. Light seeped through narrow windows above the treetops. There were wooden frames thick with ivy that bloomed in lightly perfumed purple and orange and blue. Everything felt old and unused, sliding toward ruin, with the particular heavy beauty of a rotting temple. The humid air, the taste of jasmine on my tongue, the stone walls that I could sense although I could not see them under so much green—everything collided inside me and mixed with my own madness to make me feel wild, curious, adrenalized as if I’d eaten too many of the dried granzi leaves that Brax liked to indulge in sometimes when we were off duty. The narrow path that twisted off between the potted trees was laid in the unmistakable patterns of desert tile. I followed the colors toward the sound of rain, and the sound turned into a fountain, a flat-bottomed circle lined with more bright tiles. Strings of water fell into it from a dozen ducts in the ceiling high overhead, onto the pool and the upraised face of the woman in it.

She was dancing. From the look of her, she’d been at it a while: Her hair was flung in sodden ropes against her dark skin, and the tips of her fingers were wrinkled, paler than the rest of her when she reached them up to grasp at the droplets in the air. She breathed in the hard, shallow gasps of someone who has taken her body almost as far as it can go. Her eyes were rolled up, showing white, and her mouth hung half-open. She whirled and kicked to a rhythm that pounded through her so strongly I could feel it as a backbeat to the juddering of my heart. Faster, faster she turned, and the water turned with her and flung itself back into the pool. I knew what I was seeing. It was more than a dance, it was a transportation, a transmigration, as if she could take the whole world into herself if she only reached a little higher, if she only turned once more. I knew how it must feel within her, burning, building, until her body shuddered one final time and she shouted, her head still back and her arms clawed up as if she would seize the ceiling and pull it down over her. Her eyes opened, bright blue against the brown. She saw me as she fell.

Bless her, I thought, at least I’m not that alone.

Her shout still echoed around the chamber, or at least I could still hear it in my head; but she was silent, lying on her side in the water, blue eyes watching me. I eased myself down onto one of the tiled benches bordering the walkway, to show her that I was not a threat or an idle gawper. There was a shawl bundled at the other end of the bench, and I was careful not to touch it. After a minute she rolled onto her back in the shallow pool and turned her blue gaze up to the high windows. Neither of us spoke. I was relaxed and completely attentive to everything she did: a breath, a finger moved, a lick at a drop of water caught on her lip. When she finally pulled herself up to her knees, I was there with the shawl and an arm to help her raise herself the rest of the way. She draped the shawl around her shoulders but did not try to cover herself; she seemed unaware of being naked and wet with a stranger. I stood back when she stepped out of the pool.

She looked me up and down. She was medium tall, older by a few years, whip thin with oversized calf muscles and strong biceps. An old scar ran along one rib. The skin on her hands was rough. I pictured her in one of the kitchens, or perhaps tending the smokehouse where the sides of beef and boar had to be raised onto their high hooks.

“I hope you closed the door behind you,” she said absently, in a dry and crackly voice.

“The door? Oh… yes, it’s closed. No one will come in.”

“You did.”

“Yes. But no one else will come.”

“They might.”

“I won’t let them.”

She looked me up and down. “You’re a guard,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So you’d kill anyone who tried to get in.”

“I’d meet them at the door and send them on their way. If they tried to come in further, I’d stop them.”

She drew a wrinkled finger across her throat.

“Not necessarily,” I replied. “I might not have to kill them.”

“Oh,” she said. “I would. I wouldn’t know how to stop them any other way. I don’t know much about the middle ground.”