Sherzad swam to the steps and clambered over the sharp corners to lie on the rim beside Marie-Josèphe.
“Dear Sherzad, you frighten me so when you leap like that...”
Sherzad turned her attention to the man in white. Now and again she found some kindness in his face, though he wore the gold cross that terrified Sherzad’s heart.
Can I draw him to my cause? Sherzad wondered. Or is his attachment to murdering us too strong?
Marie-Josèphe spoke, like a child, for her untrained voice produced single notes.
Sherzad replied with a trill of harmonies, fixed her gaze upon the Pope, and began.
She sang of her kind’s first encounter with the golden cross.
The people of the sea gained some respite by fleeing, by choosing birth islands far out in the middle of the ocean, by removing themselves to great mats of seaweed too dense for ships to traverse.
They did not move their mating place. Its indigo depths lay between treacherous shallows. All the families gathered there, on a single day each year, then dispersed again. Surely the men of land could not find them.
One year, a great storm preceded Midsummer’s Day. The sea people gloried in it, riding the immense waves, diving through the spume, submerging, when the weather became too violent, to drift into lethargy and sleep. When the storm broke, the sea people rose to the surface and swam in the bright hot sun. Leaving the adolescents in charge of the children, the adults gathered for their mating.
Marie-Josèphe stopped singing, stopped speaking. Sherzad gripped her wrist, pricking her with her sharp claws, snarling in disgust at her cowardice. Tell them, she said, you must tell them. How will they know we are people, if they don’t believe we feel joy?
The mating haze crept over them. They crowded together, swimming in a contracting circle; they created a great whirlpool with their delight. They swam against each other, sliding and touching, arousing themselves, arousing each other, losing themselves in their ecstasy.
Marie-Josèphe faced the Pope squarely and spoke as Sherzad sang.
In the midst of the haze, a lost ship staggered toward the mating orgy, its sails tattered from the storm. Among the rips and tears of the galleon’s mainsail, painted in sunlight, a cross burned.
The men of land spied the people of the sea in their mating haze. The ship pitched toward the gathering. The men of land were jealous of the sea people’s pleasure, rapturous and terrified at their discovery of such a mass of demons. Their ship plunged into the orgy, through clusters of joyous sea people unaware of the ship’s presence.
The ship crushed sea people, who did not even try to escape. The sailors flung casks over the side, screaming, Demons! demons!
The casks exploded, blowing splinters, nails, fragments of chain across the waves.
The sea folk came to themselves as their pleasure turned to agony and their blood swirled in the water. The whirlpool, cut by the ship, vanished into the depths. Panicked youths saw their families die before them, as they held the terrified, crying babies.
The Pope stared stonily at Sherzad. No kindness came into his face; he showed no more pity than the priest who stood in the lost ship’s stern, holding up a cross of the sunlight metal, proclaiming his responsibility for the devastation of wounded and dying sea folk.
“I am the Hammer of Demons, the scourge of Lucifer,” Marie-Josèphe sang.
The Pope rose. Sherzad loosed Marie-Josèphe’s wrist. Marie-Josèphe clutched the bars of the cage to steady herself. The spectators burst into applause at the pathos and tragedy of the story.
“I didn’t make it up,” Marie-Josèphe whispered. “How could I make it up?”
“I must have the creature in my keeping,” the Pope said.
24
The gold sunbursts, the gilded candle-stands covered with fresh flowers, the scent of orange blossoms and heavy perfume, the elaborate hangings and the exquisite paintings oppressed Marie-Josèphe. Following Madame and Lotte, she hesitated at the entryway of Apollo’s salon. The press of courtiers forced her into the room, and the crowd held her immobile.
The usher knocked his staff against the floor.
“His Majesty the King.”
All the men removed their flamboyant hats. The courtiers made way for their monarch. Marie-Josèphe remained with Madame and Lotte, too close to the front of the crowd and too much in public view to have any chance of creeping out, of fleeing to Sherzad. Sherzad’s voice whispered to her, but she could not tell if she heard it truly, or only imagined it in the crush and noise and smell and heat.
This must be the first time I’ve been too warm at Versailles, she thought.