Anjuli and the Sea

Let me tell you about my home.

In all of Ducotta there is no more beautiful place than the plains that lead down to the sea.  Tall green grasses sway in the breeze like the undulating waves of the ocean, so everywhere you go things are lush and rolling.

Great storms sweep up from the sea sometimes, and then the beauty comes with a great and terrible fist.  They say the goddess of the seas is a woman with hair like the long grasses, eyes the color of the sky during a storm, and skin like the deep of the ocean.  I have never seen her.  I’m not sure I believe in goddesses.  I think the sea is just the sea, and that is power enough.

I have always loved the sea.  My father was a fisherman, and from a young age I went out with him on his boat.  My father had no sons, only daughters.  Twelve of them.  That’s a lot of girls to help Mother around the house, she didn’t need all of us.

So Anka and I always went out with Father to help him fish.  Anka was the second oldest and I was the third, Anjuli.

The sea winds made Anka and I rough and unlovely.  We grew up in boys’ clothes, doing boys’ work, and neither of us had much hope of catching a husband.  I did not mind, really, I didn’t have much interest in housework or child rearing.  If I got a husband I’d have to learn to do all that, and I wouldn’t be able to go out to sea.

The sea.  It’s what I miss the most.  There is so much land here in Airidan, so much dry land.  Everyone here is amazed at the powers I have, the power to call forth the wind and rain . . . but ah, if only they could see me and the sea in Ducotta . . . .

I do not think there is a sea goddess there, because if there was, surely she would have objected to the things I could do.  The storms I could create.  The way the waters rose and fell at my command.  No, there was no goddess with the grass for her hair.  There was just the sea, and me.

I left Ducotta, for if the sea alone has enough power, the two of us together had more than enough.  More than we ought to.  I loved the sea, but when I loved it too much and the storms came, it hurt the people who lived there.  It destroyed houses and flooded the land.  It capsized boats and drowned fishermen.

I did not mean to make it do that.  But it’s hard to deny, when the winds are listening to your heart, and the waves to your soul, and all cry out for the beauty of the storm.  The sky turns green and the waves foam white.  Everything is dark and majestic in the heart of the storm.  The thunder calls triumphantly from the sky while the lightning shoots through the dark in brilliant flashes of living light.

I have never felt so alive as when I stood in the sea and the storms raged.  I forgot myself.  I forgot that humans are so fragile.

Will you hate me if I tell you, I killed my father?  I killed Anka and all my sisters.  And my mother, too.  I drowned them in the waves of the sea.  My father’s boat, smashed to pieces, my family’s home, torn apart by the winds.  Such destruction, all for my love of the sea.

It’s why I left Ducotta.  It is why I can never go back.

I miss it.

It calls to me.

Sometimes I dream that I have returned, and I am the sea, and I am washing the entire world away.

Back up to Tales of the Queens