Way down, below the ocean, where I want to be, she may be...
The city of Tritonis had a name, unlike the unnamed polis around the Olympian Spa, the small port which was also pointedly not named, and the uncivilized but not uncivil Centaur Fields and the quiet but extensive olive orchards, farms, and vineries that suppored the Spa and the nearby clusters of buildings.
Tritonis also had spires and what appeared to be temples -- something that the Olympian Spa itself peculiarly lacked. Then again, there had been a singular temple on a hill overlooking the harbor, back at the port. They hadn't stopped to see it. The underwater polis was lit, somehow, though with the sun-chariot now returned to the stables on the mountain at the Spa, it clearly wasn't sunlight, and the Moon had also followed the Sun into its night's rest. This would have made Jules and Derrick giggle to themselves (no matter how undignified that would be coming from centaur males who looked like grown warriors) except for the explanation that they'd seen when pulling the chariot of the sun -- the travel was a symbolic journey that connected the mystical lands of the Olympus of the Spa, to the mechanical reality of the human realm.
The light over the city came from a single crystal that cast a pale blue shine, and gave light enough to see, if not to read small print. It created shadows, but where people were gathered, there was a gentler and more amber light from small glowing fish-shaped lamps. The Aphrodite's Dream glided well above the city which was situated a thousand fathoms below the surface, on the side of an undersea mountain a nautical mile from the vortex of Charybdis. The steering oars were extended out by the Shipmaster, forcing the galley to plane deeper and towards a palatial dwelling in a vale between two temples.
It took perhaps another half-hour, before they heard a deep horn blow a complex note, and they could make out the people working to bring them in to an underwater "dock" that was in many ways similar to the ones above, but made from carved stone rather than the wood which would not survive the seas.
"Gentlemen," the Shipmaster said, "Thank you all for your work at the oars. Masters Syrinx and Veltfedder, you worked hard and your penalty has been met; should you choose to go back to the surface, you may join us on our return or take the Morpheo back when she returns tomorrow afternoon. Mr. Jark, Mr. Tweezle, you have one more round trip to go before you're free."
Syrinx and Veltfedder were a satyr and a human, respectively, and the iron collars they wore, evaporated into a cloud of bubbles. Jark and Tweezle were something like Satyrs, but with goat-heads and more humanlike legs.
Derrick moved around a bit until he was comfortable with his new eel-like hind-body. Jules, still coiled, had begun talking with the more limpet-like-than-ever Mr. Patella, commenting on the shell he'd grown.
"You seem to be more octopus than sea snail," Jules said. "Except that the shell is very much what I'd expect."
A brilliantly colored dolphinfish about the size of a small horse swam up to them and spoke, in the voice of the god Anteros.
"Hello again, darlings. I've talked with my siblings and we've decided that you should meet up one more time with your wife, Mr. Rance Patella. She is visiting the temple of Poseidon, which she mistakes for a museum, and muttering about her ungrateful daughter. And your daughter Brittany is more interested in learning to sing from the Sirens, it seems, than visiting the shops with her mother. She's been taking lessons all day. So, your wife would not recognize you in this form unless you chose to tell her who you are."
"Really?"
"The ocean depths of her soul are more of a pond, really."
"I still love her, though."
"You should go talk to her," Derrick said. "You look nothing like the boring man she was complaining about, and your voice is not the same."
"She still won't want to be physical with you, though," Anteros said. "She's a bit of a cold fish."
The Shipmaster unloaded three boxes from the cargo net. "If you could, gentlemen, these need to go to the Temple of Poseidon immediately, and I can add another two obuls to your bonus pay if you can carry them there."
This seemed reasonable enough. Anteros-the-fish led the two hippocampotaurs and the siphon-powered Patella along the street and toward the temple in question. They had an interesting time starting out -- hippocampus is bad enough, but with a human torso instead of a head, it was rather clumsy in the water, until they caught the knack of it. Patella, on the other tentacle, was able to swim without effort, carrying the framework of his "legs" with him. In the distance and growing louder as they came closer to the temple, they heard singing, mostly female, and strangely, not unpleasant. Most of the ancient Greek songs that survived to modern times were declamatory hymns or part of the plays performed for Dionysus, but the rower's chants had not been bad, and while it wasn't sophisticated polyrhythm and counter-melodies, and certainly not rock-and-roll, they were still pretty good - a call-and-response turned into a round, then a minor-keyed lament came up.
But before they could be distracted or ask what the singing was, Anteros-fish stopped them.
"Here. Glaucus, I see you over there. Come show these fellows to the priest, I can't go into the temple right now," the deity-containing-fish said.
Glaucus was a semi-standard "Merman" who looked about 35, his beard and hair a bit long and shaggy. He was, of course, massively muscled, but no more than the brothers and the shell-wearing Patella. His tail was long and eel-ish rather than fish-ish. He gave them a critical once-over, then said "this way" and swam toward the temple, down a narrow alley that lit up as they got closer.
"In here is the delivery door," he said. "So, you're centaurs, right? Looks like you got my wife's little blessing. The limpet, I don't recognize what's on him."
"Same thing plus something they called 'ship's biscuit'," Derrick said. "I think it was a synergistic potion interaction, myself."
"Agreed," Jules said. "The ... Oh hello,"
A triton in a man's chiton swam up to them. "Is this from the Dream? Good, you're late, we're running out of hors d'ouvres."
"And you are?"
"This is Under-priest Scampson," Glaucus said. "Scampi, these guys are Spa guests, don't start wit' them."
The triton gave them a closer look. "Oh. I see. Lord Poseidon will probably want to meet them, since they're actually part horse, and he's the patron of that."
"Not sure what that connection is," Jules admitted, "Derrick is better at the ancient stories."
"I think it's because he has three different main attributes," Derrick said. "Like Scampson said, he is the patron of horses. When they were first freed from Kronos' belly, he had a strong attraction to Demeter, the goddess of harvest, plants, nature, and all those good things. She told him to create the most beautiful animal on earth, and she might consider talking to him. So he made a lot of different animals, and eventually he made the horse, but by then he didn't really want Demeter any more. So he's the god of Horses, and one of the distant fathers of some of the Centaurs. He's also the god of earthquakes and volcanoes, since they were associated with oceans, but it actually works because he is connected to the concept of flow and rhythm, and earthquakes happen because the earth's crust flows, very slowly. And of course oceans, and the storms that come from the oceans."
"That's very good," the priest said. "You even know the mystery of the slow movement."
"Humans figured that out over a century ago. Science figured out some of the details."
"Science? Knowledge? I'm not sure what you mean." Scampson looked, well, a bit fish-eyed. Glaucus, however, swam in the background, watching, without expression.
"Humans, some of us anyway, learn about the world around us by observing, making models of what we observe to explain what's happening, discussing and arguing about them until we are more confident that they're not just stupidly wrong, and we come up with ways to test the models, and we continue carefully observing, until we have some confidence that what our models say really matches the things we observe. We've thrown away so many bad ideas that way."
"Where does this leave the gods?" Scampson was beginning to puff up a bit. Jules interjected when he saw that Derrick was trying to answer that without being offensive.
"Science doesn't consider the actions of gods. We barely consider the results of the actions of humans, which has gotten us in trouble sometimes. Beings who have agency and authority and power over the things around them, they don't really work with the model of our Earth, which follows a very strict set of rules."
"Which depend on the reinforcement of the fire-wheels and their kin," Scampson said.
"Yes, but we can't tell the difference. When you're building a bridge or a building that you don't want to fall down, you don't want to have to consider all the many gods and spirits that might choose to affect it. On Earth, you have to rely on things staying the same as they were."
"And yet here you are, not only centaurs, but part-Triton as well, thanks to the intervention of these gods and spirits."
"But this isn't Earth. When we get back there, we'll be subject to Earth rules again. We were told that we'd return to being humans, that all the magical gifts would only be part of our memories," Derrick said. "Which is a little sad, but also, what we take from here will motivate us to do things to change the problems humans have brought on ourselves."
"You'll need to speak to Prometheus," Scampson said. Glaucus coughed, wanting to stop this conversation at that point.
"Where do you want these boxes? Our friend Patella needs to speak to one of the guests in the temple."
"Hm. Yes. Over here," the Triton priest said, swimming towards a long table. They placed the boxes on the ground next to the table as directed.
"I will escort you to the pronaos, where the guests are being entertained," Scampson said. He led them up an incline that only hinted at having stairs, through a wide opening in the ceiling, now the floor of the temple.
The design was very much like the Greek temples that Derrick and Jules remembered: an outer, open "wall" of columns held up a ceiling with a triangular-slanted roof, which they had to assume was there because it wasn't visible from below. The columns continued around the rectangle shape of the edifice. There was room for three or four chariots to pass between the columns and an inner set of columns, into which walls merged. From their vantage, the walls reached from floor to ceiling, and there was an enclosure on three sides, with a pair of columns spaced in the middle to create three openings. The outer two were completely obscured by some sort of seaweed growth, the inner opening less thickly blocked, with the seaweed growing from urns rather than framed stone boxes like the outer sections.
At closer examination, all the columns were made from some sort of dark colored stone, covered in faintly glowing shells and coral, red and blue. The floors were white marble, kept clean of debris by a random scattering of shellfish that moved across the floor slowly but methodically. Their shells were the same curved, stellate-ribbed shapes as the one Rance Patella now had protecting his back. They could be seen moving up and down the columns of the inner section and even across the ceiling.
"Your namesakes, Mr. Patella. These creatures feed on lichen, moss and other plants, and leave behind a thin layer that solidifies into a shining surface like pearl."
Patella looked at them, a bit bemused. "So that's why I have the shells."
"That, and possibly the tenacity with which you cling to a marriage that your spouse never fully committed to," a woman's voice said. A Triton-like female, wearing a more complex chiton than those worn by most of the people they'd seen, swam toward them, emerging from the seaweed-screened opening. "I am Hippothoe, the Nereid of swift horses... or waves, of course. You two are my very distant grandchildren. Mr. Patella, I come with a message from Hera, who asks that you consider carefully what you will do when you meet your wife. The goddess of marriage has great respect for your sacrifices, but the gods of love have asked her to allow things to change, if it is the wish of your wife and yourself."
"Then let us get you to her," Scampson said, and gestured toward the leftward "corridor" between the outer columnade and the walls of the inner temple. "The pronaos is directly opposite the opisthodomos -- that room in there," he gestured. "We don't really have an official use for that room. I've been using it to host visitors and to store the heavier things that we use infrequently."
The naiad swam along with them, one hand on Jules' back, the other on Derrick's, where their human torso met with the hippocamp shoulders. She said nothing aloud, but they heard her speaking through the complex technomagical system that Hephaustus had given them.
+ Please be careful of the machinations of the Olympians. Apollo and Hephaustus have plans that they haven't given as deep a consideration as perhaps they should. The costs to you and your family might be greater than you would like. Grandfather Nereus, the ruler of the sea who shares that office with Poseidon, has asked me to tell you where Prometheus can be found. If you wish it, consult with him to find the best path for yourselves. +
At that, she disappeared from between them, only the surge of water betraying that she had swum away rather than dissolving into nothingness.
When they reached the end of the wall, to their right was an area identical to the one they'd come up in, but without the opening to the under-temple. There were perhaps ten or twelve Tritons and a few sea-changed humans with the scales and fin-ears and webbed hands that they'd seen in the port town, talking quietly. The pronaos, the area enclosed on three sides with walls, and with the two columns, was more open, and while there were a few urns with seaweed, it was a more decorative species, and there were jewel-like sea-horses moving through the fronds and blades of the plant. A pale blue light shone from the ceiling of the temple inside the walls, and it lit the area well enough.
In the distance, the sound of singing was more audible here than it had been in the back of the temple. Derrick quirked an ear and tried to decide whether or not it was getting closer, and what frequencies were involved. Meanwhile, Jules had begun a deep thrumming note of his own, which Derrick copied when he found that it was pushing away the element of stupefied fascination that came with the song.
Glaucus nodded to them both. "You seem to be doing well. Do you require my continued services as an escort? If not, I will be on my way."
"Go ahead, don't let us keep you unless you want to stick around," Jules replied. "We're going to stay for Rance. Give our regards to your lady and thank her for her help with the water-breathing."
"She'll be glad to hear that, if she's not in the monster-mind. Be careful of Circe and her wiles, lads. She has some of the oldest magic."
"No intentions to raise the wrath of any goddess of magic," Derrick said. Jules nodded.
"Nor did I, but I made the mistake of asking her for a love draught so that Scylla would be willing to hear my offers to wed... and she decided that she'd rather it be her than Scylla that I should wed. And now my nymph is a part-time monster."
"That ... was one of the stories they told. How do we know which ones are true, when they contradict?" Derrick said, hoping that there would be a better answer this time.
"Well, that's the thing. This isn't your Earth. The weave of the fates is made of stronger threads, but they're not bound as tightly. They can all be true," Glaucus said, a bit impatiently.
The centaur brothers exchanged glances, a bit of shock and possible fear communicating between them.
"You've both got a stronger weave than that, so don't worry yourselves," Glaucus said.
The Triton swam at a polite pace to the entrance-way and then faster, heading north towards the palatial building where the galleon had docked.
"Rance? May we call you Rance?" Derrick asked, turning to the man they'd been asked to escort.
"It's better than Limpet," the shell-man said. He pulled the leg-frames from where he'd held them against his body while swimming, and in a strange dance of tentacles, threaded himself into them again, restoring his legs.
"Do you know what you want to do?"
"I'm going to go into the porch thing there, and listen to whatever it is that they're telling my wife."
"Feel free to call us if you need anything. We're going to wait out here," Derrick said.
They watched him as he swam into the pronaos, and took a 'seat' in a position near a group of fish-person humans.
"Setting up a macro to let me know if he calls us," Derrick said, letting his harness and gemstone array manifest again. The gems that had been set along his hind legs and flanks were still there, just in different places. "Have you got information on Prometheus?"
"Not at all," Jules said. "I know what you told me about him on the way here. There's nothing in the guides from the Spa and only a very superficial context about him in the history archive. Gave fire to humans, punished for it."
"Yeah, we know our side of that story but not the other sides."
"Well, what compares with it?" Jules asked. He noticed that they had begun to catch the attention of the Tritons around them, but it was too late to switch to their silent radio speech mode, which would have made them look even stranger anyway.
"There's several similar stories, but the only one I remember from class was that Loki and Prometheus were both chained in torment. They both did something that their fellows couldn't forgive."
"How so?"
"According to everything I've read the Norse pantheon, the Aesir anyway, were a bunch of liars, crooks, and thugs, didn't pay their bills, liked to upsell their brilliance, cheated their construction workers."
"So like the Don.." Jules started to say, but was cut off.
"Nah, more honest than that. They had a few standout guys, but their king Odin was the one who sold his eye to the well of prophecy in order to learn the runes, and the future. And he didn't like the future he saw. The Norns, their name for the Fates, had set up a cycle, similar to the cycle of the seasons. Odin and his wife decided to break that cycle." Derrick decided to speak in a louder voice, so the eavesdroppers could hear.
"Loki was the god of mischief, sure, but his main job was to be the agent of change. So he did something that thwarted their scheme, and set it up so their blind son Hodr, who was the winter and darkness, killed Baldr, who was summer and the sun and everything wonderful. They killed Hodr, then Odin sent Thor to try to coerce Hel, the goddess of death, who had both Hodr and Baldr in a really nice meadow where Hodr had sight, and they were playing dice together. Well, Hel, who was Loki's daughter, refused to let Baldr go unless Hodr was also let go, and Thor didn't want Hodr to come along, so she said that every living creature had to weep for Baldr for her to let him go."
"And someone didn't."
"Yeah, they went out and talked to everyone. Fire giants, ice giants, trolls, humans, animals, birds, trees. Everyone wept. Except for this old lady. Who it turns out was Loki in shape-shifted disguise."
"Right. Because he wouldn't mourn because it was his scheme in the first place, and his daughter knew it."
"So they put Loki in chains and put a nasty snake with acid venom over his head, and made it drip the stuff into his eyes. His wife was allowed to catch the venom in a bowl and dump it, because she shamed Odin and his wife. But when she had to empty the bowl, the snake would put out an extra-large load, and Loki would have to re-grow his burned-out eyes until the next time."
About half of the nearby Tritons stopped their own conversation and came closer.
"So Prometheus, in the story they compared, isn't a trickster as such. He and his brother are Titans, the ones who were around before the Olympians took over. They had created humans, according to the story. Because they lacked the defenses and offenses that had been given out to the animals, instead they taught everything they could to them about working together and being civilized, including how to properly worship the gods, when the gods demanded it."
+ You remember how that wrecked things, from what Apollo and Hephaustus told us? It wasn't what they were here to do, right? + Jules said on their radio connection.
Derrick didn't answer that out loud, but smiled a bit, which could be mistaken for him approving of that particular teaching.
"So Prometheus and Epimetheus hadn't fought on either side during the Titans war against Olympus. They were allowed to keep going. But Prometheus got upset when the Zeus decided to give the Pyxis with all the curses to Epimetheus' wife Pandora, because they had deliberately gifted the woman with insatiable curiosity. So she opened the jar -- not a box -- and everything got out, plagues, wars, misery, all the strifes. Prometheus pointed out that the humans now cursed the gods and that they were right to do so, because having the gods and titans living RIGHT there among them, was hurting them so much."
"Zeus listened to that?"
"Well yeah. He didn't have Odin's crazy one-eyed view of the future. So he decided to let Prometheus -- who was well known for being scrupulously fair -- make the boundaries between the gods and men. Prometheus did all the work on it, and announced the rules at a big party. The gods all agreed on their power, not to manifest directly into human life, only to guide. They divided up responsibilities, and how worship would work. Prometheus had the gods choose which parts of the sacrifice they should take. Thing is... he knew that the humans needed meat to eat, while the gods just enjoyed the smell of barbecue and had their own food, nectar and ambrosia. So he made up the bundles, one part for the priests, one part for the gods, and one part for the rest of the humans humans. The human part he wrapped in cowhide, the priest part he put into the stomach, and the god part was mostly bones and the inedible parts and fat and SOME of the meat, and then he let Zeus choose. And Zeus chose the fatty bundle."
"Wait, isn't that the part that makes really good soup?"
"Yes, yes it is, but only if you are willing to take the time to make it."
"So, what happened?"
"Well, they burned the part of the sacrifice that goes to the gods, and the smell was amazing but it didn't have the steaks. Zeus decided that Prometheus had cheated, so he decided that if he couldn't have barbecue, neither could the humans, and took away fire."
"What."
"The only way they had fire was to save it from naturally occurring sources. They ended up eating raw meat, not the healthiest thing, and the gods just used divine fire to make their offering burn but didn't let the humans use it."
The Tritons around them were listening closer. This wasn't the way the story had been told by Olympus, but it wasn't too far off from what the Nymphs and Nereids had told the sea-peoples in private. But the human perspective was different.
"So how is this like Loki?"
"It is and it isn't. Loki was forcing the pantheon to accept that things are going to change, while Prometheus was enacting the change, by giving fire to the humans. If you want the mechanistic explanation, he taught them how to re-kindle fire using a fire-drill. In the mythic form, Prometheus snuck into the Stables of the Sun and stole a bit of fire from the Chariot."
"Oh. Yeah, you can't put that out or the whole world goes dark."
"Precisely. So humans had fire, and Zeus made Hermes tell him who did it because god of thievery."
"Right. So were there snakes?"
"Nah, Prometheus was chained to a mountain, and a giant eagle came by every morning and ripped out his liver and ate it in front of him. Since the liver was one of the pieces that the humans could give as sacrifice to the Gods or not. This was Zeus being ironic. Because Prometheus is immortal and it grew back."
"Wow that's ... "
"Yes," Derrick said. "And he knew Prometheus would understand."
"So what happened?"
"Eventually Heracles was allowed to free Prometheus."
"With Zeus permission?"
"Of course."
The Tritons around them made a sort of quiet applause at the story, returning to their own conversations.
+ And that's why they're similar but not the same story at all, + Derrick said on the radio-band. + The Asgardians were fighting against the fates, while the Olympians were more upset that their prerogatives were treated with disrespect. Which eventually ended up badly for them, when they were reminded why they had been sent in the first place, as we were told. +
Meanwhile in the pronaos, the tour guide, a Tritoness was giving a lesson on the history of the temple. She wore the same chlamys and trident-pin as the one that Rance had seen on the docks in the port city.
"The same quarries where the forge-god brings forth stone whence he takes out gold and silver, provide us with the stone for the temple walls, the columns that support it, and the roof and floors. The quarry-workers chose the crystal spires without flaws and cracks, without unwanted inclusions, and over the course of nearly a century, removed them from their place in the rock to bring them here. As you saw at the Temple of Athena, the stone, while it lasts a good long time, still cracks and breaks after a few centuries, and we are currently quarrying for replacements for that temple, but these are still quite strong."
The Tritoness looked over at Patella. "You are one of the quarry-men, are you not? What is your name?"
"Not that I know of," Patella answered. "I worked a quarry elsewhere, for a while, but not here. Call me Limpet."
"Do you mind if I use you to explain? We weren't able to meet with the quarry workers."
"Not at all," he replied. "Please, feel free."
"The limpets are the small shelled animals that clean the temples. There is a Titanide race formed from the same template, and Limpet here is a fine example of that race. They are quite strong, immensely tenacious, and with their many tentacles, they are able to feel the weaknesses of the stone by the way sound moves through it. They lack the glistening shells and sparkling scales of many of the Triton and Mer-people, but they are honored for their skills and for the way they keep our city from falling apart in the ocean's turbulence."
"Now, for those of you who are willing and have no religious objection, I will take you into the Naos, the actual ritual area of the temple. If you enter, you will be expected to follow the formulas of respect. Because many of our surface guests follow faiths that forbid even the appearance of worshiping other beings than their specific deity, we recommend that you only enter if you are not so proscribed. You will be able to watch from here, if you wish."
She led about half of the people into the Naos, and most of the ones left, went to watch as the group approached a large, painted statue of Poseidon.
Outside, two women and a man turned to talk to Patella.
"Mr. Limpet?"
"Just Limpet is enough," he said. "Or call me Rance."
The fish-man looked like a warrior, almost like a Spartan from the movies, muscular and gleaming along his fine-scaled golden body, with the perizoma loincloth cut as small as he could get away with. The woman looked like a true Spartan woman as well, muscular and trim and a bit masculine, though she wore a chiton cut to the calf.
The remaining woman was his wife Angela, looking much as she had on the surface, though younger, and in a long-cut chiton. She did not seem to recognize him at all, and was unwilling to look to long at his face. Unsurprising, given that his face had doubtless changed and might not even be human, and his body was very different. For a moment he wished he had a mirror.
He'd been athletic back when they were married. His family had quarried marble until he was in his teens, but his father had retired and he'd had to leave it behind when they moved to a different part of the world. But Angela had complained that seeing his muscle made her feel too weak, and he'd stopped any kind of working out when his job at the company got more busy, and his position as chief financial officer for a multi-million dollar corporation began to require more of his time. So he'd become smaller. He had lost his youthful vigor to the demands of the demons of finance, something he thought was only symbolism before this vacation. And yet, now here he was, muscled like the statue of a warrior, armored in shells in fact, and Angela was just as unnerved as she had been when she finally saw him without his outer clothing, the day of their honeymoon.
"Limpet," she said, pensive. "That's funny. My husband Torrance's last name translates to Limpet as well."
"How strange," he replied. The other man stuck his hand out, in 'shake-my-hand-weakling' fashion. Rance gripped the human-in-fishman-form hand, and let it tighten as the fellow tried to prove his strength, but didn't retaliate; he simply didn't allow it to grip harder, returning it with just enough force. The man grinned and said, "Good grip."
"I've been rowing lately, so I had to develop a proper grip," Rance said.
"Theo Barker," the fish-man said. "This is my girlfriend Elora."
"Honor to meet you," Rance replied.
"I'm Angela," his wife said. "You seem familiar somehow."
"I do?"
"There's something very peaceful about you. I appreciated that in my husband, but we've become distant -- he had his business and I had my charities, and we stopped talking. It was an arranged marriage," she confessed.
Theo Barker looked shocked and uncomfortable at that admission, while Elora just nodded. "Those can be difficult," she said. "My sister had one."
"Do you?" Theo asked her. "I mean, did your parents set up one for you?"
"They did, but he and I both refused. I don't like him, he's a bully. Did your husband bully you, Angela?"
"Oh no, never. He ... well. I am from a different time, but my daughter has more experience with the modern views, and we talked about this."
Rance tilted his head. "You spoke with her about ...?"
"Oh. Sexuality -- she had a class that discussed it and she had to explain it to me in great detail. I think she was trying to meddle, to be honest. But she was right about one thing. I used to hate myself, thought I was a cold fish, but it turns out there's a name for it. I'm asexual and aromantic -- I am not built for the dramas of love nor do I enjoy sex all that much. It was all right, when we were trying for our daughter, but afterwards it was just embarrassing to think about."
"Were you ever hurt? I mean, did your husband hurt you?" Rance asked. If he had, he mighthave to kill himself.
"Oh, no. Not at all, I mean, he managed to make it feel good, he was very patient, and I wanted to have a child. Then when Brittany was born, I was sick for weeks, and couldn't even nurse. I didn't ... attach ... properly, I had post-partum depression. Rance found a wet-nurse who was able to feed her properly and who helped me adjust. But I couldn't stand to touch him afterwards, and I know that was hurtful to him."
It had been, and he'd felt unaccountable rage over it, but he never expressed it to her. He'd taken himself elsewhere, smashed old pots that he'd purchased for that purpose, broken rocks with a sledge, even punched a bag bare-handed until his fists were sore, but he never let it show to her. He would not inflict that guilt on her.
"He didn't yell at you?" Elora asked. "I would have yelled at you."
"No, he was always gentle and understanding. I don't deserve him. I tried to make things as nice as possible, but I kept remembering. Brittany was a good girl, until she hit her teens, then she turned into a horrid brat, but he never lost his temper with her either. She got better in time. He quietly made sure she had birth control, so she wouldn't ruin her life by acting out, and he only suggested ... the sexual things ... on our anniversary. I suppose I should tell him this. I've been so upset with myself lately that I think I've been something of a shrew. I used to like cuddling, but ... I don't know why, but it makes me feel queasy now. And I keep finding myself saying hurtful things that I mean at the moment, but then I regret them later."
"You need therapy, lady," Theo said. "You should get help."
That was a bit abrupt, and Rance stared at him.
"I wish I could find help. Brittany keeps telling me that I act like I've got some sort of repressed memory or something. But I did have therapy, maybe not the right kind, the doctor was all Freudian, but ... I don't have repressed memories. My parents, my grandparents, my neighbors when I was a child, none of them have this kind of thing."
"Have you thought of asking someone here?" Rance said. "One of the people at the Spa? They seem insightful."
"Are you from there? One of the staff?"
"I'm a guest. I may know your husband. Sort of a grey, nebbishy fellow with watery eyes and an unhappy expression?"
"YES! That's him! He wasn't like that when we were younger, but even then he had resting funeral face. Unless he was smiling, he looked like the entire world had just taken a huge dump in his breakfast cereal."
Rance felt himself laughing. They flinched a bit.
"Wow you have a lot of teeth," Theo said, in shock. "It's like a belt sander only with shark teeth."
"I haven't seen what I look like," Rance said. "I took a different boat to get here."
"Well, after we took the cordial on the boat, the tour guides used some sort of magical chant to create a mirror out of the water. You should ask her to do that for you when they finish," Angela said, patting him on the arm, then pulling back again.
"I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to ..."
"It's all right," he replied. "I have a question though. Would you stay married if you didn't have to be?"
"I'm not sure what you mean?"
"Are you happy being married? I mean, I'm sure he provides well for you."
"Oh, he does, but I have my own money as well. My parents left quite a bit behind. He never asked -- he was always too busy trying to comfort me, and then his company made him go to America while we were stuck in England. He offered to bring us over but I wouldn't have known what to do with Brittany, and I didn't want to distract him."
In the temple naos, a series of notes were blown on horns, which somehow still sounded underwater like they would have on the surface. They turned to look and there was a knife-flash as a fish was killed, the blood feathering out into the water, and then it was suddenly gone. Theo and Elora went over to the door to watch inside, leaving Limpet alone with his wife-who-didn't-know-him.
"So," Rance said, a bit disturbed by the sight and wanting to distract himself, "You never said. Are you happy?"
"Not really. I mean, I enjoy administering the charities, but I could do that without being married. His contributions are only part of it, and I doubt he'd pull out of them."
"Would you want to be divorced?"
"No, but I could be separated. We were, at times, and we haven't lived the traditional wedded life, as I've said."
"Then why haven't you done that?"
She looked a bit ashamed. "I don't want him to be alone, even though I admit to being lousy company. I do miss being companionable. I feel guilty. He was a vital man, handsome even, and he had so many friends, I was surprised he didn't take up with one of them. I wish he had done."
"Friends? His male friends you mean?"
"Oh, I always knew he'd been intimate with one of them. Tracey, I think his name was. He admitted it to me on a drunken phone call one night, and I was just embarrassed, because how do you tell your husband that his best friend wanted to come along on the honeymoon and admitted it?"
"I don't know if that's in any guidebook to proper manners," Rance said, drily.
"You even SOUND like Torrance, that's his sense of humor."
"I am Torrance."
She stopped cold. Now that he had admitted it, she couldn't help but see that it was true.
"I've been unburdening myself about my husband and my relationship to a stranger and it's been my husband all along?"
"Sorry. I was told not to tell you, but I couldn't keep up the pretense," Rance said, gently.
She couldn't blush, because of the differences between fish-person and surface-person, but she did seem embarrassed, and looked away, wrapping her arms around herself.
He let one of his tentacles loose and curled it gently around her. She didn't flinch away.
"I really am sorry," he said. "But, could you have said any of that to me directly?"
"Not if I knew. I suppose it's easier now. Do you plan to divorce me now?"
"Only if you ask me to. I want us to be friends and compatriots, like you said, even if you can't be what you think a good wife should be."
She stroked the tentacle. "This is new." She finally met his gaze. She couldn't go back, but maybe they could go forward.
"Rance, I want you to take a lover."
"Do you want to watch?" He smiled, but without the many teeth.
"Eww, no. Maybe. No, probably not. I want you to be happy. I kept you from being happy for so long."
"Well. I can't be with Tracey. One, he's married, two, we weren't all that attracted, just experimenting together. And three, he's nuts."
Angela laughed. It was refreshing. It had been too long. They stayed quiet together for a moment.
"So, how shall we do this?" she asked.
"We've slept apart for quite a long time. Technically, if I took a lover into my bed, I wouldn't be taking a lover into YOUR bed, which is, I think, the vilest betrayal."
She nodded, stroking his face now that she felt safer. "If I ever want to sleep with anyone it would be you, anyway. I just... don't want to. I don't think I ever will. I want to be with you but not in that way."
He nodded, feeling something very tight un-knotting inside his heart.
"I thought you didn't love me."
"I'm sorry I don't love you in all the ways you wanted."
The people in the Naos began to process towards the door. She held back, waiting for him to say something.
"If you want to stay married, I will. Even if I end up with a lover or lovers, I won't marry someone else, they'll have to understand that," Rance said.
"Would it be another woman? I'd rather it wasn't."
"Not if I can help it, you women are too complex," he said. She laughed. She'd used that line on him a number of times, 'women are more complex than men' to reply to any question he might have had about why she was doing anything he didn't understand. After all, they lived together, they weren't total strangers, just not lovers, for the last twenty years. And maybe it could continue.
The priest (not Scampson) led the procession to the pronaos, the onlookers moving back to the sides as he and two under-priests led the congregants to the outer area, the 'peristasis' of the temple. They continued to the right, under-priests carrying the body of the tuna on the trident as they returned to the back of the temple.
"And, that's the end of this portion of the tour," the tour guide said. "Oh, Limpet, you're still here. Would you like to accompany us to the next part of the tour?"
"I would, actually," he said. "But I haven't seen what I actually look like, could you show me?"
She looked at the procession as the last member of the congregation turned the corner.
"We have time." A muttered incantation, and her hands swirling in a flat plane, created a sort of mirror disk which reflected him standing next to Angela. He was much taller than his normal self, and as he had suspected, much more muscular in his human part than the minotaur had been. He looked rather like his uncle Reg had looked, really; the man had been a physical culturist, as they called it, and had actually modeled for a few modern statues using the marble from their quarry. Back when they still had the quarry.
His legs looked rather strange, and the shell did look a bit like Greek armor, but his head was the oddest part. He had a shell on his head rather than hair. His face was still human, but his eyes were larger, and except for the odd shape to the pupils they could be mistaken for being innocent. His skin, where it showed, was a deep purple color at the moment, but it changed with his emotions. He smiled, and realized that his smile was too wide and that his teeth were too many and made out of iron, which should have been wrong.
"I'm going to miss this when we get back," he said.
"I almost wish we didn't have to go back," Angela said. "I'd love to work at the Spa. I really got along with the woman at the Hearthstone, she was so kind."
Derrick and Jules grinned at each other, eavesdropping the conversation as the tour group came out of the pronous and began collecting for the next part of the tour.
"You should be able to go back with the tour ship, or catch the Galleon," Jules said. "And it seems you guys are in better shapes than you were before."
"OK, I release you both," Rance said. "Go back and tell the meddling gods that I'll be fine now."
"That won't stop them meddling," Derrick said. "Now, dearest brother, how are we going to find that Titan for our foresightful chat?"