He whispered in some unhallowed grove, and the winds brought his words into her dreams.
“Daughter,” he said, and “Dear heart,” and “Beloved.” Immediately, her dreaming mind did recognize that voice, but Eõrsebet found herself poisoned by some sedative potion and unable to awaken.
“Thou wouldst have darkness, which I have already gifted to thee, rather than look upon my face. Thou wouldst be drowned, against our marriage, and this request will I also honor. You shall be drowned, my sweet Eõrsebet, and so set free. But, in good conscience, I cannot commit thy soul to this garrison’s well, no. I will see thee to far more majestic waters.”
This is the secret that doomed the old lobster, and if it is known to any others within Poseidon’s mansions, they have wisely kept it to themselves.
“Now, my second gift to thee, Eõrsebet,” the boyar spoke within the confines of her dream. “For all eternity wilt thou wander the deep places of the world, carried to and fro by the whims of the tides. Thou wilt be of the water, and the water will be thy womb. But thou shalt hunger, as do those strigoi who must feed from off the living. Yet only once in every year may thee leave the sustaining waters to slake thine thirst on the blood you will ever more crave. And, even then, you may not wander far from the shore. This is my gift, daughter, in lieu of matrimony, though I fancy it makes of thee another sort of wife.”
So Eõrsebet’s prison was opened, and a coach made ready to receive her. But, before her departure, the jailer branded the girl’s back with such unnameable symbols as the dark gods had insisted to István she should hereafter wear, if the curse were to be lasting and irrevocable. She was dressed in a fine gown of golden threads, and driven away from the boyar’s keep, down from the mountains and into Wallachia. The coach saw her through to gates of Bucharest and to a bridge spanning the Dâmbovia River. Shackled in irons, she was cast upon the waters.
She has long since forgotten the drowning, the short fall from the bridge and the shock of hitting the icy torrent below. She cannot now recall the fire as her lungs filled, or the brief panic before her dissolution and rebirth. The Dâmbovia carried her to the Arge at Oltenia, which bore her forth to the Danube, her wide, rolling road towards the Black Sea, just south of the ancient city of Constana.
This small inland sea was her first tomb, and for many decades it seemed to her a boundless vault of wonders, as tombs go. She found a voice she’d not had in life, and with it she trilled raging storms and canted days when the waters grew so becalmed all sails hung limp upon their masts. She sang to sailors and to fishermen from Sevastopol to Varna, from the coasts of Georgia to the port of Odessa. She appeared, sometimes, to suicides, inviting them, and with her melodies she did draw to their deaths men and woman and children, and even cattle and wild beasts, when the mood found her.
Sometimes, she would feel István’s eyes upon her again, for his evil doings and services had earned him strange powers and another sort of undeath. From broken minarets, where he now had only rats and beetles and quick green lizards for company, he watched her with eyes turned black as coal. And finding that gaze intolerable, his siren would seek out some convenient undertow and sink down and down, passing into silty, anoxic nights so dense that not even his eyes could penetrate them.
Once a year, and only once a year, she stepped from the waves and walked waterfronts and streets and alleyways, as any woman would. She chose her victims carefully, and stole away the salty crimson oceans locked up inside each and every one.
And this was the round and rut of her existence, until the thing that death and István’s spite and sorcery had fashioned of Eõrsebet found her way to the narrow straits of the Bosphorous. By this route, she came, slowly, to the Turkish Sea of Marmara and, finally, past Gallipoli and through the Dardanelles into the Aegean. But this was all so very long ago, as I have said, in the days and nights before she became a shade drifting through the perpetual Atlantic twilight, an oceanic phantom of kelp and driftwood.
She followed dolphins and