“We cannot survive on hope alone,” Aglaope grumbled. “Nor joy, either. Not if there is nothing else to fill our bellies.”
“Hush, now,” her mother said. “If we are fated to starve after all these years, we’ll be with our goddess again, and that’s nothing to fear. Better beneath the earth with our lady than above it, punished ever after by her mother’s grief.”
Aglaope wanted to argue, but her grandmother caught her eye, the slightest shake of her silver-haired head all the reminder she needed to save her strength. Instead, she left them both beside the fire to climb the stone spire, as she’d been told.
Her legs and arms trembled with the effort even after she had settled at its worn top, padded with feathers and furs like one of the sea birds’ nests, where her mother, and her grandmother, and her grandmother’s mother had once sat. And at least it gave her more to look at than the black rock and the sad, lonely flame of the dying fire. She would never tire of the sight of the rising sun gilding the wine-dark waters. Aglaope let herself drink in its beauty before she searched the horizon more dutifully for any sign of mast, sail, or ship.
But of course, there was nothing. Nothing but open water and the barest hint of a smudge where Circe’s island lay in the distance, visible only from the highest rocks. There had been no sign of any ship for months now, and if no ship came before the winter seas rose up, furious and unfriendly, there would be no more ships for months to come. No ships, and no food or wine or fresh water but for what the gods granted them in rain, and no men or corpses who might be rescued from the water, either. Between the undertow and the waves crashing against the sheer rocks, fishing was impossible. They could rely upon only what was washed up on their meager, rocky shore when the tide pulled back far enough that they might reach it at all. Like the body of Circe’s unfortunate handmaiden, and the spare ropes of seaweed that had made up most of their food over the course of the last year.
Aglaope hummed softly, warming her voice, and forced herself not to hope for what it was clear would never come. The secret dream she had dreamed, ever since she was a child. The dream that one day a ship might hear her song and sail through the hazards of the rocks to arrive unbroken, with a worthy hero upon her deck to carry Aglaope away.
Every day, sunrise to sunset, Aglaope sang. Not to the ships that did not come, but hymns and prayers to the gods above and below. She sang for food and water more than anything else, but sometimes, despite herself, her song turned to other needs as well.
Akheloios, come to me...
She was well into her fertile years, now, though her bleeding only came in times of plenty, when the rains fell and they drank their fill of sweet, fresh water as it spilled from the clouds. When the ships wrecked every other moon instead of every six. When her stomach was full of dried meats and cheeses and heady wine, and her body warmed with every caress of the winds.
But Akheloios did not come even then. Season after season she sang to him, her father, the god who had gifted them with the sweet water of life and every daughter since. Always he had come before her—to her mother and her grandmother, to her grandmother’s mother, and her grandmother’s grandmother—in the shape of some shipwrecked man, rising up out of the sea unmarked and strong and beautiful. She remembered Akheloios’s coming, even in her childhood, before she had been old enough to bleed. Her mother’s stomach had swelled with his child, the babe kicking inside her belly, eager to be born, though Akheloios himself had fashioned a craft of little more than scraps and sailed away again. She remembered, too, the wailing cry of the baby all day long, lusty at first, with her Siren lungs ready to sing, then growing thinner and thinner as time went on and the ships came too slowly, too few to feed them.
“Not all Akheloios’s children are strong enough to live,” her mother had told her, when the baby’s cries had turned to sad chirps and cheeps, no louder than a seabird’s chick. “It is a hard life on our island, and only those of us touched by his immortality can survive it. I fear your sister is not so blessed.”
They had done all they could to help her. Grandmother had fasted, and even Aglaope had given up her bone broth and the last shreds of dried meat to her mother, that the baby might have milk to see her through. And then, too, she had climbed the spire every day to sing and sing, to beg the gods for another ship, for food enough that her sister might live.
But then, as now, she had found no sails upon the horizon. And they had all grown weak, until her mother had refused the seaweed and the small bit of egg Aglaope had stolen from a nest. “You must eat,” she said. “You must have the strength to sing, or it will not matter at all if the babe lives to see the dawn again, for we will, all four of us, die before long.”
So Aglaope had eaten, and kept her strength even as her sister shriveled and stilled. And then the life Akheloios had given them became her strength as well. That she might sing, and sing, and sing, day after day, moon after moon, season after season, always waiting and praying and hoping that Akheloios might come again, now, for her.
For without a daughter of her own, a strong young girl to take her place upon the spire when she was weakened by age, it would not matter if they survived to see another dawn.
There would be no Siren left to sing.
And without song, they would have no nourishment at all.
“Tell me the story again,” she asked her grandmother that night, after Circe’s broad-shouldered handmaiden—Anthousa, she called herself, when she had first come, seeking vengeance—had sailed off with her falcons, and Aglaope had climbed down shakily from her spire once more. “Tell me of Grandfather’s coming, before mother was born.”
Thelxiope smiled, her gaze going distant as her mind traveled back. Stories were another small nourishment, though her mother would never admit as much, scolding her for wasting her voice on the telling when she tried to share her own. But for her grandmother, remembering those days, getting lost in them as she told her tales—it was the only peace Aglaope could give her when the sea winked at them with nothing but the sunlight that promised another hungry night.
“He was a fine, tall man,” Thelxiope said. “And my song then was more beautiful even than yours, my dear one. So beautiful, he could not tear his eyes from mine as he threw himself into the sea from his ship and swam hard for our rocks.”