The Moon and the Sun

Epilogue

In Paris, on midwinter night, Yves de la Croix strode through sleet and darkness to his tiny house. He dropped his heavy cloak, lit a candle, opened the secret door, and stepped into the library.

He opened his satchel, drew out his most recent discovery, and unwrapped it from its covering of oiled silk.

In the illuminated manuscript, sea people leaped and played in waves of cerulean blue and sunlight of pure gold. He admired the illustrations, closed the book carefully, and placed it on the shelf next to Marie-Josèphe’s exquisite opera score, now bound in calfskin, M. Boursin’s dreadful cookbook, and the sheaf of Madame’s letters.

Candlelight gleamed on the sea monster medal, and on the frames of two of Marie-Josèphe’s drawings: One of Sherzad, the other of the male sea monster, haloed with scraps of gilt and broken glass.

The skeleton of the male sea monster lay in a reliquary of ebony, inlaid all over with mother-of-pearl.

For now, I must protect the sea people with secrecy, Yves thought. For now. But not forever.

Lucien’s Breton ship sailed through moonlight. Lucien stood at its stern. The wake glowed, a widening arrow of luminescence.

Lucien feared the return of his seasickness. He had endured the Atlantic crossing better than he ever dared hope. The choppy waters of France’s north coast brought misery to him, but the soft calm sea of the Tropic of Cancer caused him little distress.

I shall worry about hurricanes, Lucien thought, when I have a hurricane to face.

Marie-Josèphe joined him, sat on the deck beside him, and laid her hand along the side of his face. He kissed her palm.

I cannot regret my decisions, he thought. I’m too proud—too arrogant—to rue leaving court, if His Majesty believes he can find a better adviser, which he cannot. I cannot live in Brittany with my fortunes so reduced.

He missed his position, and his wealth. He maintained his dignity; he could not have behaved in any other way and kept it.

Returning home to Brittany had been difficult. Lucien could not, by the terms of His Majesty’s order, make any claim on the resources of his former title. His own pride prevented him from asking his father for help. All Marie-Josèphe’s dowry, and most of Haleeda’s gift of pearls, had gone to fitting out the ship and buying a small stud farm, where Jacques now had charge of Zachi and Zelis and the other Arabians, and Hercules the cat had charge of the mice in the stable.

Returning to Brittany had been difficult, leaving it again even harder. He worried about his home, placed under the control of M. du Maine.

Lucien still battled fits of despair, and yet they came less and less frequently.

With all I have lost, he thought, I wonder at my joy.

He smiled.

“Tell me,” Marie-Josèphe said.

“I believed I had finished with adventures,” he said. “I planned my life at court, and a quiet retirement in Barenton after my nephew came of age. Yet here I am, on a mad quest. Why not seek new fortunes, with men from my homeland, still loyal to me? Why not sail away to fight pirates, with the woman I love?”

She smiled, and twined her finger in a lock of his fair hair. He had put aside his perrukes. He let his hair grow and tied it back with a white ribbon. His clothing was of plainer stuff than satin or velvet, worn with only a little Spanish lace. He never wore blue.

Marie-Josèphe giggled.

“Tell me,” Lucien said.

“I wish I could see Versailles—just for a moment—to see your sweet brother paying court to His Majesty.”

Lucien laughed. Marie-Josèphe’s description was true, and fair. She was as fond of Lucien’s preposterous brother as Lucien was himself. But Guy was no courtier.

“If Guy makes himself sufficiently impossible,” Lucien said, “and sufficiently annoys the King, His Majesty might persuade my nephew to become count de Chrétien, even as I planned.”

“The King might persuade himself he’s been a fool—” Marie-Josèphe exclaimed.

“Shh, shh, he is the King.”

“—and beg you to return. Then I’ll have to share your attention with him. I’m selfish. I want you to myself as long as I may have you.”

Lucien smiled. He gazed back across the wake, which rippled like milk in the moonlight.

He gripped the rail and peered more closely.

A ship appeared in the moonlit dark.

“You may have to share me with pirates,” Lucien said, his voice grim.

The pursuing ship drew closer.

The Breton ship sailed valiantly, but it would never outdistance the larger, faster hunter. Nor could Lucien’s ship hope to vanish in darkness, for the full moon illuminated the sea.

We shall have to fight them, Lucien thought. If it is British, it will take us as spoils of war. If a privateer, as I suspect, it will simply take us.

In the first case, all his and Marie-Josèphe’s resources would be forfeit. In the second, they would lose their lives or worse.

The master of the ship called for weapons to be handed out. A sailor brought Lucien cutlass and pistol. Lucien kept the cutlass; though he preserved his sword-cane, he would not re-forge the blade unless he returned to Damascus. He offered the pistol to Marie-Josèphe.

“Could you shoot at a man?”

“If need be.” Marie-Josèphe glanced toward the pursuing ship. She caught her breath. “Lucien, look—”

The ship’s sails filled with wind, but the ship had ceased to make way. It shuddered.

“It’s run aground,” Lucien said, but he thought, How is it possible? For the ships sailed along the indigo depths between Great Exuma and Andros Island.

“No,” Marie-Josèphe said.

The moon hovered at the horizon, full and bright. The great current of stars flowed across the surface of the sky.

Sherzad swam free in the wild wide ocean. Her baby clung to her, listening to the songs of its young cousins, learning the music of their passage through the sea. She stroked her long webbed fingers over her baby’s back, over the little one’s warmth. Her baby had learned so quickly how to swim, how to breathe, how to fall into languor. She welcomed her introduction to the sea.

Sherzad’s brothers and sisters had survived the assault on the mating haze in which she was captured, but their mother and their uncle and their aunt, the elders of their family, all had died. Sherzad grieved, singing phrases of her mother’s death-song, singing an image of her mother to look upon her granddaughter, Sherzad’s child.

Her brothers and sisters swam past her, arced around, dove beneath her, all anxious to make their way to the depthless ocean trench where the sea people gathered for the mating haze.

Sherzad, too, anticipated the approaching Midsummer Day. At the gathering, the other families would rejoice at Sherzad’s return; they would admire and welcome her child. All the children would play with the tame giant octopuses, and tease the dolphins. The adults would join the whirlpool of the mating haze. For a time, the haze would ease their grief.

But never again would they mate beneath the sun. They could no longer risk the enormous danger. They were too vulnerable to the men of land. Too few sea people remained, to withstand another assault.

This year they would gather at sunset, as Midsummer Night coincided with the dark of the moon. On the shortest night of the year, in moonless dark, they would dare to rise together to the surface of the sea. Amidst the waves, whispering songs, they would bathe in luminescence. Their bodies glowing in the darkness, they would come together and experience the brief bliss of their mating haze.

They would not gather again for fourteen years, when the dark of the moon next accompanied Midsummer Night.

Before Sherzad could turn her desires and her course toward the meeting place, she must discharge another obligation.

Far ahead, two ships plunged across the waves, digging their keels into the domain of the sea people. The first ship fled, the second pursued, gaining rapidly. Sherzad’s younger sister sang of an encounter she had witnessed between two ships. They battered the air and the ocean with their noise for half a day; their iron balls plunged into the water, sending the sea people in a dive to safety.

In the end the two ships sank each other, and all the men of land drowned.

Sherzad’s sister laughed, and hoped these two new ships would ride the same wave. She hoped all the ships of land would destroy each other, if the sea people did not destroy them first.

The sea people stalked the ships. Soon they swam beneath the barnacled bottom of the pursuer. Sherzad sang at it, feeling it out with her voice, searching and questioning, finding nothing of interest and nothing worth saving. In the past, she would have swum away.

She gave her baby to her young brother to guard, and swam closer to the pursuer.

Sherzad and her companions plunged their spears of narwhal tusk into the bottom of the galleon. The ivory bit into the wood. Holding the tusks, they rode along with the ship.

Sherzad shouted at the planks. Her focused voice crashed against them. She shouted again. Her spear quivered in the quaking wood.

Sherzad and her brothers and sisters shouted together. The wood cracked and split.

The bottom of the ship disintegrated.

Men shrieked and dove into the water. Sherzad and the others made sure they never surfaced.

Waves washed over the deck. Singing their triumph, the sea people called their allies. A shadow rose, flickering all over with tiny sparks. The octopus stretched its tentacles into the moonlight and entwined them around the mainmast, and inexorably pulled the ship into the depths.

The skiff scraped upon the beach of a tiny cay. Marie-Josèphe and Lucien climbed out onto white sand that shone in the light of the full moon.

“I do not like to leave you here alone, sir, madame.” The master of the Breton ship was still shaken by the sinking of the privateer. “There are krakens, and sirens. And snakes—”

“Never fear,” Lucien said.

“Except for the snakes,” Marie-Josèphe said, and laughed with joy and anticipation.

“Come back at dawn,” Lucien said. “I trust we won’t have been eaten by snakes.”

The master bowed; the skiff rowed back to the ship at anchor, out of sight on the other side of the cay.

“Come,” Marie-Josèphe said. “Sit with me.”

They sat on a driftwood log. Marie-Josèphe luxuriated in the warmth of the night. She leaned toward Lucien and kissed him, a long sweet kiss. Her sight blurred for a moment with tears of love and gratitude.

“You have awakened me,” she whispered.

Tonight nothing could frighten her, not snakes, or pirates, and certainly not kraken.

They waited.

Restive, impatient, Lucien gazed out to sea. “This is madness,” he said softly. “They have declared war.”

“Not on me,” she said. “She promised, if she lived, she would meet me here, tonight, at the full moon.”

A breath of song murmured over the waves. Marie-Josèphe leaped up, kicked off her slippers, and ran down the gleaming wet sand to the water.

Ripples washed her toes. The life of the ocean vibrated against the soles of her feet. She sang Sherzad’s name-song.

Sherzad replied.

Marie-Josèphe cried out in delight. She pulled her dress over her head and flung it onto the sand. In her shift, she ran into the sea.

The sea-people swam toward her, sleek and untamed. Sherzad led the band to Marie-Josèphe. She swam around her, splashing cool water onto her face, her arms, her breasts. Marie-Josèphe flung off her soaked shift and let it drift away, a plaything for the younger sea-people. Naked, she waded deeper, till the water washed her legs, her sex.

Sherzad was recovered, healthy, strong, and beautiful. Her hair spread dark and glossy around her.

A baby clung to her. Sherzad floated on her back and sank slowly, encouraging the baby to swim. Laughing and splashing, the child paddled to Marie-Josèphe.

Marie-Josèphe picked her up and cuddled her and kissed her silk-smooth swimming webs and her tiny sharp claws.

“She’s lovely, dear Sherzad, the most handsome baby I’ve ever seen.” She turned. Lucien’s boots and stockings lay on the sand; he stood in water to his knees.

“You are a wild sea creature yourself,” Lucien said. “You are Venus, waiting for your cockle-shell to float by.”

He waded a little deeper, then stopped.

“Come closer to shore, love,” he said, “so I can greet Sherzad and her child. Some other day, I’ll learn to swim.”

She joined him where he stood in the shallows. She sat beside him and leaned happily against him and slipped her wet arm around his waist. The sea-child babbled and splashed and played. Lucien stroked Marie-Josèphe’s hair.

Sherzad dove and vanished. The other sea people followed her, swimming to a treacherous shoal where many ships had met their ends.

When Sherzad surfaced again, moonlight sparkled on the tips of her fingers. She wore lost treasure on her hands; she took the rings off one by one, ruby, diamond, emerald, pearl, and placed them on Marie-Josèphe’s fingers. Her brothers and sisters followed her, all decorated with golden girdles and sapphire pendants, jade beads and diamond bracelets. Their ivory spears gleamed with chains of gold and ropes of amber.

In Sherzad’s stories, Marie-Josèphe thought, the sea people never carried spears. They truly have declared war.

The sea people tipped their spears before her, pouring gold and amber into her lap. Laughing, Sherzad’s baby grasped the shining treasure and waved her tiny fists.

The sea people crowded together around Marie-Josèphe, singing their gratitude for the return of their sister, singing their love.

They dropped the treasure at Marie-Josèphe’s feet, they placed strings of jewels around her neck and around her waist and ankles and arms. They nestled diamond and ruby earrings in Lucien’s hair, and tied them to his hair-ribbon. The younger sea-people brought drifts of shining shells, mixed with golden coins, for though they were willing to share the most beautiful things with Sherzad’s friends, they did not want to give away all their seashells.

Sherzad poured handsful of carved jade necklaces into Lucien’s pockets. She found his calvados, opened the flask and whistled with pleasure and drank it and shared it with her brothers and sisters. When she returned the flask, her brother had filled it with black pearls.

The sea people sang, and bared their sleek mahogany skin. They adorned their friends with their finery, enriching Lucien and Marie-Josèphe beyond measure, trading jewels for the shimmer of clearest moonlight.