The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

QUEEN CHRISTINA AND THE WINDSURFER Alison Fell

The big ferry steamed past the mouth of the bay, stately, discoing, lit up like a castle. In the broad white wake Poseidon’s daughter lurked unseen, as one by one coke cans plopped into the waves around her. She watched a pretty German girl stretch out her long brown neck to be kissed; watched how the German boy lifted the glossy sheet of hair and twisted it up on to the crown of her head while he touched his lips to her nape. The hair was toffee-dark with the wheaty sheen of sun, and straight as the farthest horizon.

Swamped with envy, Poseidon’s daughter rolled on to her back, and sighed, and sank. Down in the green deeps of the palace nothing was straight, and everything was uncertain and wavered: or so thought Poseidon's daughter as she combed out her tough black curls in the mirror, and glowered her thick brows, and blew small rainbow bubbles of disgust.

Presently she swam up to her mother and circled hopefully, waiting for an opening.

‘Am I pretty, Mother?’ she demanded at last, with as much petulance as she dared, for Amphitrite was harassed and crusty and had little patience with such energetic despairs.

Amphitrite glanced up from her housework and frowned. It was the holiday season again: six million tourists to shit and piss in the sea. From strayed missiles to ham sandwiches, everything fell from the air and the water rotted it, and try as she might to sweep and sort, to recycle and dispose, the Mediterranean was fast becoming a garbage bin. Amphitrite hurled three thonged sandals and a Daytona Beach T-shirt into a large cockle-shell, and for a moment thought rancorously of Aphrodite—she who rose from the foam and never did a day’s work thereafter.

'Any young girl with clean hair is pretty,’ she said testily, thrusting a broom at her daughter, and her daughter, silenced, took it and the two women set to work in concert, sighing, as women do.

On the beach of Plati Yialos, in Nicos’ Taverna, Hanni the windsurfer was watching television. Hanni the windsurfer was salt-streaked and golden; his jeans were cut off at the knee and the snakelets of his hair were crystalline blond. At night Hanni camped on the beach and ate water-melons filled with rum, and each morning early he would run to the shore and mount his surfboard in one bold bound, and the sail would take the wind and the light board leave the surface and skip from wave-crest to wave-crest until it was virtually flying.

Poseidon’s daughter had watched all this, daily, from the first flush of summer to the harsh height of it, had watched Hanni’s mouth taste the wind and the wind trickle through his hair, watched also the slim girls with cigarettes in their mouths who on the sunburned beach shielded their eyes with their hands and gazed out to sea, waiting for his return . . . had slipped, finally—in love and frustration— under the keel of his board where, clinging on by the tips of her fingers, she had flown beneath him for mile upon ardent mile, all green and unseen in the dappled shadow of the sail.

Down in the deeps Poseidon’s daughter swept and swept and the white sand flew in clouds and the startled inkfish scuttled off to safety.

‘Am I as pretty as . . . ?’ she brooded, frowning so fiercely that she was no longer pretty at all. 'Am I as pretty as . . . ?’

At last the question weighed so heavily that she threw down her broom and entered the throne-room and asked without preamble, 'Who is the most perfect woman in the world, Father?’

From the uncomfortable heights of his throne Poseidon listened unwillingly, tapping his foot on a ramp of seaweed. Above the waves a new moon was rising and at the palace gates his golden sea-horses pranced and whinnied, eager to be off.

‘Why, Aphrodite,’ he said absently, and then, with a guilty glance over his shoulder, he corrected himself. ‘I mean Amphitrite, of course.’

‘But apart from her?’ said his daughter crossly.

Poseidon stroked his long beard for a moment, considering. ‘Helen?’ he pondered, but in truth he had hardly given the matter a thought for the last few centuries. ‘Why don’t you ask your uncle,’ he suggested at last. ‘Zeus always did have an eye for the ladies.’ Then, relieved to have discharged his fatherly duty, he bade his daughter a quick good night and, jumping into his waiting chariot, drove at full speed around the curve of the coast. At the flat rock of Krissopigi Poseidon slithered out of the sea and trained his telescope on the farthest moons of Uranus: Miranda, where blue snows of nitrogen arched and plumed from furious geysers; Triton, with its sheer cliffs of ice more than twenty miles high. As his eye strained to pick out the lovely details, his thoughts strayed to his brother, and he let out an involuntary sigh which stirred the waves to a tumult and spattered the lens of his telescope with spray. For, try as he might to accept his destiny, he could not help feeling that his own inheritance was in every way inferior. However you looked at it, water was simply not as virile an element as earth or time, as fire or air. Down in the green gloom it was easy to become dispirited, whereas out here the air was sharp and the stars so still and clear you could have cut them out with scissors and pinned them to your breast for all eternity.

Back at the palace there was the habitual fuss and bother as Amphitrite made ready for the night. Libations had to be offered up; potions had to be ground and bound and mixed with ambergris and applied to her face and hands; silver hairpins fell from her hair and had to be retrieved from the soft white sand. Restraining her vast impatience, Poseidon s daughter did her duty, combing and soothing, until at last her mother’s head drooped on the pillow. Then with a flick of her tail she fled the bedroom and swam fast towards the shore.

With her nose just above the wooden landing-stage of Nicos’ Taverna, she could easily spy on Hanni in the lit interior. A television blared from a high shelf above the bar. The film was black and white and old, and accompanied by the scratchings of an invisible orchestra, but Hanni s full brooding attention was fixed on it. From her secret vantage-point Poseidon’s daughter watched two ringleted young men make merry swordplay in more snow than she had ever seen, even on the highest summit of Mount Olympus. Later, one of the two young men was revealed as a woman, and then the old men in the cafe slapped their thighs and all the small ouzo bottles romped and rolled on the cafe tables, and when Poseidon’s daughter whispered Hanni s name to the lapping waves it was a small sound, quite drowned in the uproar of wolf-whistles. ’

Before the sun rose next morning Poseidon’s daughter was arrowing towards the high cliff of Kastro, where her uncle Zeus received minor deities and petitioning mortals in the first light of dawn. But as the sun rose red over the eastern seas she scanned the high rock and the lemon groves and saw only the silent cocoons of several sleeping-bags, and a stray goat rooting hopefully among the scattered rucksacks.

Back at Plati Yialos, the sand was brazen yellow and the first tourists were stumbling on to the terrace of the taverna, calling for foreign breakfasts. A small snort from the mouth of the bay signalled the arrival of the first boat-load of day-trippers, who presently clambered out on to the jetty by the church and marched in a straggling crocodile along the curving sands, past the few Greeks at their fishing nets, towards the small blue tent where Hanni, patient and cross-legged, awaited prospective pupils. ’

‘Kalamares!’ cried the English, conscious of the need for politeness in foreign lands, and if the Greeks were surprised to be thus greeted with the word for octopus, with the great tact of their nation they gave no sign of it. ‘Guten Morgen!’ cried the Germans with Goethe in their knapsacks. ‘Ciao!’ bubbled the Italians in their slight and slippery swimsuits.

At last, scanning the throng, Poseidon's daughter caught sight of her uncle exercising on a stone jetty at the far end of the beach, where the Germans congregated. His biceps glistened with oil, his stomach was pulled in tautly, and his grey-black hair was gelled straight back from his noble forehead. All around him the Germans threw down their rucksacks, cast off their clothes and thundered mother-naked into the surf.

‘Uncle Zeus,’ cried Poseidon’s daughter from the waves. ‘Who is the most perfect woman in the world?’

‘Don’t “Uncle” me,’ hissed Zeus, swivelling his pectorals towards a naked Nordic girl who stood knee-deep in the surf with her face turned up to the sun. ‘The name’s Stavros.’

Poseidon’s daughter was undaunted, however, and, tugging at his ankle, repeated her question.

‘Well, Greta Garbo, of course,’ said Zeus, with a jealous glance at Hanni’s tent, which was by now quite surrounded by Euro-beauties, so that nothing could be glimpsed of Hanni but the topmost tuft of his blond hair and a faint blue curl of cigarette smoke. He had been lobbied, recently, to make Garbo an immortal, although just at that moment he could see little advantage in immortality and indeed would gladly have exchanged the entire inheritance of Kronos and Ouranos for one sole afternoon inside the sleek hide of that taciturn youth.

Disconsolate, Poseidon’s daughter swam ever-widening circles in the broad bay. Under the surface ripples of light wavered over the rocks, and the anemones opened sleepy brilliant eyes to watch her pass. By now it was almost lunchtime; the caiques with their ballast of water-melons rode at anchor by the quay, and charcoal flared under the griddle on the taverna terrace.

On a promontory near the entrance to the bay she spied her aunt, Athena the owl-eyed, battering squid against a rock to tenderize it. Filled with that urge to confess which love inspires in us, and eager to indulge in the compensatory thrills of chatter, Poseidon’s daughter swam up strongly and surfaced in the hot noon air. Besides—although she herself had no spinsterly aspirations—she genuinely did admire her aunt, who, unlike her mother Amphitrite, had proved that she would be a doormat to no man on earth or in heaven.

‘Aunt Athena,’ she murmured languorously, lying along a wave and all prepared for confidences.

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Athena in a voice that knew everything and tolerated much of it. ‘You’re in love with that beach-bum.’ Raising her eyes to heaven, she slapped the squid hard against the rock and pronounced, ‘For youthful folly it is the most hopeless thing to entangle itself in empty imaginings. The more obstinately it clings to such unreal fantasies, the more certainly will humiliation overtake it.’ And then she patted Poseidon’s daughter kindly enough and saw her off with a firm admonition to look to her studies and develop herself.

That night, when he had drunk too well and was dreamy with retsina, Hanni the windsurfer wandered down to the shore and stretched his fine frame out on his surfboard. Flat on his back he watched the moon rise: his mouth was open, his hands dangled in the wavelets. Presently, lulled by the soft sound of the wind in the tamarisk trees, he fell into a deep sleep. Hidden by a wreath of sea-wrack, Poseidon's daughter gazed on him longingly, until at last, astonished by her own temerity, she tugged lightly at the prow and drew the board down from the sand until it floated entire in the shallows.

Now, of all the talents that the gods had apportioned to Poseidon’s daughter, the only one she had taken pains to nurture was the capacity to see into dreams. And so she lay below the board, watching, nibbling at Hanni’s fingertips like a hungry minnow. Meanwhile, Hanni dreamt on, oblivious: dreamt of a full sail, of waves like white stallions. Stealthily, so as not to wake him, Poseidon’s daughter pressed her wet lips to his dry ones, and hoisted herself on to the board, mouthing words of love. But in the dream she saw that the words blew like froth or spume from her lips, and seaweed streaked her white face, and Hanni shrank back from this apparition from the deeps and shuddered piteously in his sleep. Fearful that he would fall splashing into the shallows, Poseidon’s daughter steadied the board with her hand, until the dreamer sighed and settled again. The wind of the dream recovered and blew breath into the quickening sail, and now there was a woman with her straight back braced against the mast, but it was not she, not Poseidon’s daughter, not a thick-browed girl with stormy curls, but a woman of cool bones and superior deep eyes, and she knew then, most certainly, that this was the most perfect woman in the world. And as the dreamer stretched out his arms to the lovely paragon, Poseidon’s daughter dived ever deeper into the bitter waters of her jealousy, and she would have given all the world to wrap her own form around the woman like a cloak, so that it would be her face Hanni sought and her body his arms reached out to with such speechless longing.

Of all the skills the gods possessed, it was Zeus alone who knew the trick of snipping the rope that holds the dream to the dreamer. Once—or so her aunt Athena had told her—incensed by the intrusion of aeroplanes into the peaceful Attic skies, Zeus had made fearful mischief. Looking above him, he saw that each plane towed the dreams of its passengers behind it, like a trawler tows its netted catchy Inside the blond fuselage the travellers, having kicked off their shoes and bound velvet masks over their eyes, had slept their way across the troubled Gulf across Syria and Turkey, so that when the plane turned north-west and struck out across the Ionian Sea their dreams were in full flight—or rather in full dive- for although it is commonly believed that dreams rise up from the dreamer like word-balloons in a cartoon strip, the truth of the matter is that by their very nature they seek out those slower watery elements which blur boundaries and mix one thing up with another, and although, in these rapid times, few are the dreams that find err way there, those that do so live and leap most happily, like dolphins, in the shifting seas. So it happened that when Zeus took his silver scissors and snipped at the cords, the dreams were cast out across the sea and drifted there, higgledy-pigg edy, like waterskiers who have lost hold of their tow-rope, and the plane flew on with its perfectly straight jet-trail and its perfectly empty-headed passengers, nd some of the dreams Zeus seized by their tails and flung like thunderbolts, so that they fell into the orange groves of Lebanon or shrivelled unnoticed on the salt strands of the Red Sea. Only much later, when the passengers had scattered to their various destinations and slept several nights of empty sleep, did the dreams which survived swim blindly back towards their owners. But as fortune or Zeus would have it, there was no way of telling which dream belonged to a Catholic mission-nurse en route from Calcutta, and which to an investment analyst from Kyoto, so that the dreams were forced to seek parents quite at random, like orphaned penguin chicks on the rocky shelves of Patagonia. And Zeus, seeing the broker fall on his knees to ask forgiveness, and the angel-faced Sister take out options on holy relics, laughed so loud in his lemon grove that the rock of Kastro shivered, and cracks appeared in the stepped white streets of the village, and memorial urns fell marvellously asunder in the chapel. Or so her aunt Athena had told her; Athena who had no patience with capriciousness and who made no secret of her opinion that in all respects she was better suited than Zeus to command the company of the gods.

But although Zeus was both boastful and unpredictable, he could also be generous, and it was with this hope in her heart that Poseidon’s daughter swam for the second time to the white rock of Kastro to throw herself upon her uncle’s magnanimity and beg from him the trick of dream-conjuring.

Under the lemon trees Zeus opened his eyes; beside him the lovely German girl stirred in her sleeping-bag, and her lovely mouth murmured the name ‘Stavros’. Zeus stroked the silky pelt on his chest and was well pleased with the night’s work. When he saw the rough head of his ragamuffin niece break the surface of the bay he laughed indulgently.

‘What now?’ he cried, throwing a handful of figs at her. For a daughter of the meek and myopic Poseidon she was certainly demanding.

Affecting not to notice the sleeping girl, Poseidon’s daughter drew herself up and made her request with as much dignity as she could muster.

‘Stop wanting, start having,’ said Zeus, flicking the silver scissors casually up into the air, where they hung suspended. Poseidon’s daughter leapt like a porpoise to catch them, but not until she had made a solemn promise to return them after seven nights did the scissors fall into her eager hand.

And so every night for seven nights Poseidon’s daughter waited and watched by the jetty, and each time the foreign woman flickered into Hanni’s dreams she took the silver scissors and cut her out completely. And Hanni snorted with distress in his sleep, and in the mornings was fretful and clumsy, like a woman at her monthly time, and took to sitting crouched under the tamarisk trees, surly and unspeaking. But if the beauties who had clustered around him so admiringly were disgruntled and drifted off in search of more responseful men, so too was Poseidon’s daughter farther from her goal than ever. For although she could cut the Nordic woman out of Hanni’s dreams and scatter her images as far as Africa, try as she might she could find no way of filling the gaps that the woman’s face had left. For her own dream was not clear enough, was boundaryless and wavered, and would not be fitted in.

From her rock promontory Athena saw her niece swim asymmetrical and distraught towards the high rock of Kastro, saw also the dangerous flash of the silver scissors in the light of the setting sun; and from her erratic path in the sea Poseidon’s daughter saw the clean-cut limbs of her aunt Athena, who knew how to develop herself. Athena set down her weighing-scales and stopped bargaining with the fishermen, and called her niece to her. But as she listened to the girl’s unhappy tale, and as she stroked the stormy curls on the unhappy head, all the time her eyes rested with longing on the silver scissors, and despite itself her mind filled with plans to steal them from Zeus, although—or so she persuaded herself—her only desire in so doing would be to put an end to his ungodly nonsense. In her mind s eye all Attica lay before her, just and fair as her own daughter-city of Athens, and the vision glittered as her voice spoke comfort and resolution to Poseidon’s daughter. She spoke of the power of the will, and how it must be tended like the melon seed in its earthy bed or the speckled egg in the belly of the heron, and she waxed long and lyrical in this vein until she had quite forgotten her less honourable intentions.

Finally, remembering herself, she said, ‘But you are young yet and only learning. So I will pit the power of my own will behind yours and, believe me, we will send Hanni the dream that he deserves. Only you must give the silver scissors to me now, for safe-keeping.’

At first Poseidon’s daughter demurred, saying that she had made her uncle a solemn promise, but the fireflies winking at her from the juniper bushes said that indeed she was young and weren’t promises for adults to keep, and finally she was persuaded and handed over the silver scissors.

That night Poseidon’s daughter did not go to the jetty but slept soundly in her palace bed, and in her dream her aunt Athena was a wise and whiskered fish which plied peacefully in and out of the windows.

Athena, meanwhile, took up her knapsack and hiked through the spinifex under the whitest of moons until she looked down upon the silvered rock of Kastro and the sleeping form of Zeus. Zeus lay outstretched on a marble boulder, his arms flung above his head like a child who has never known fear. Under cover of a cloud which shadowed the moon. Athena crept up on the sleeping figure and knelt beside him. She gazed at his right hand, at the soft palm upturned, at the squat thumb, and lastly at the elongated pointing forefinger, the finger of pride, the finger which stabbed out such arbitrary commands. Then, full of resolve to separate the finger from its knuckle and the god from his pride, she took the silver scissors from her knapsack.

But before the blade encountered the golden skin, Zeus, without opening an eye, let out a great snort of triumph and seized Athena’s wrist, so that her ambitions were quite confounded.

Athena, however, was above all a states woman, and possessed at all times an understanding of the political weaknesses of her opponents; understood, for instance, that Zeus could ill afford to see the citizens of Athens roused against him.

And so she folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head with all appearance of meekness while Zeus paced the lemon grove till the red dust rose, and in his heart wrath struggled with expediency.

But what of Poseidon's daughter, then, with the night over and the butterfly-blue morning just beginning, the morning when Athena would pit wits and will behind her quest for Hanni? She stretched out her limbs in her cockle-shell bed, imagining how Hanni too would be waking now, stretching his lissom brown form, rubbing sleep from eyes slaty-green as a lizard’s back; in luxurious superstition she mimicked every move he might make, down to the tiniest moue of the mouth and the most exquisite twitch of the toe.

When the conch shell sounded at the palace gate Poseidon’s daughter could hardly contain her excitement. However, it was not her aunt Athena who was ushered in but—with much pomp and ceremony and pawing of horses—her eminent uncle Zeus. Zeus waved aside the deferences that were due to him and fixed a ferocious eye on his unruly niece, who, seeing the silver scissors safe once again in his belt, threw herself at his feet and was much afraid.

'Forgive me, Uncle,’ she cried piteously.

Grasping her thick curls, Zeus gave vent to his temper.

'So you’re discontented with your lot?’ he bellowed, jerking her head this way and that. 'For a dream of mortality you would make fools of us all?’

'Forgive me, Uncle,’ cried Poseidon’s daughter, 'but I am young and foolish and in love.’ And she sobbed and sobbed until her hot tears poured over her uncle’s sandalled feet.

Somewhat mollified, Zeus slapped her lightly on the cheek. 'To live for such a brief time and float up like a dry leaf? Is this what you wanted?’

‘Yes, Uncle, forgive me for my foolishness,’ she sobbed.

At last Zeus picked her up and, stroking the tears from her reddened cheeks, said, ‘Indeed you are young and foolish, my dear. But’—and now his lids drooped and his smile, if she had but noticed, was the smile of the panther before the pounce—‘unlike Poseidon and Amphitrite, you are at least ardent in your discontent. And this moves me to grant your wishes.’

Hearing this, Poseidon’s daughter threw herself once more at Zeus’s feet, but this time the tears she wept were tears of gratitude for his generosity.

‘So up, my dear, and away to your Hanni,’ purred Zeus. And taking his silver scissors he cut meticulously around her edges, leaving a mermaid-shaped gap in the sea for her hapless parents to mourn over.

Like an arrow Poseidon’s daughter sped to the beach of Plati Yialos, where Hanni the windsurfer breakfasted moodily and alone. Up came her head from the tossing waves; her sharp eyes saw, and her sharp nose scented. On the shore the sand was smooth and yellow and stretched a mile on either side, and there was a dog-rose hedge which lilted pink in the wind and smelled of heaven.

Out of the foam came her tail, shaking off the last salty drops. Then she lay down on the sand to dry, as she had seen mortals do. Her tail, being the thinnest part of her, dried first, and the wind tickled it up and played with it. Then her belly and breasts dried and narrowed and the wind, having more purchase, blew her body straight up until she stood, as it were, on her narrow wet head, until finally, all dry and thin as paper, she floated up entirely.

Poseidon’s daughter felt loose and tumbled and free, soaring in arcs as the wind willed her, and so happy was she with this fine flight that she did not hear the rumble of Zeus’s laughter in the wind that tossed her. Presently, however, when she turned her will against the wind and sought to swoop low over Hanni’s tent, she found that there was no weight in her, and although three seals in their halfsleep saw her flutter in the air helplessly, like a rag, later each remembered it as a dream and told nobody.

Meanwhile on the bright beach Hanni the windsurfer noticed nothing but the freshening of the air and the quickening of the wind, noticed not at all, as he ran down the shelf of the sand and sprang on to his surfboard, the sliver of celluloid which lay drying on the shore, glossy and transparent as a stranded jellyfish.

Only Athena on her rock promontory saw the trick that Zeus had played, and wrung her hands at the cruel fate of Poseidon’s daughter. And turning her gaze vengefully on the belling sail of the surfboard and the mortal man who was the source of so much trouble, she sent up from the deeps in a great turmoil of waters a galleon fit for an emissary from Spain, and on the deck with her back to the mast was a grave-eyed dream of a woman with her face coolly empty and her fine straight hair adrift on the wind.

Hanni, seeing this vision erupt before him, spurred his surfboard until his sails filled and his board scudded, and with a soaring heart he set off in fleet pursuit across the blue Ionian sea. And for weeks afterwards the old men in the taverna, knowing nothing of Poseidon’s daughter or the self-shaped gap she had left in the sea, speculated on the melancholy of the Nordic races and the madness the sun makes in them, and how poor Hanni with the heat in his head sped like a white stallion towards Turkey and was never seen again.