The Sea King’s Daughter

I

DON’T CALL ME ARIADNE. THAT’S NOT MY NAME ANYmore.

I changed it legally a few years ago. Not that anyone had ever used it, even Mother. She called me Sandy, like everyone else, even when she was mad at me.

I must have been about ten years old before it really hit me that Sandy wasn’t my real name. That was the day the package arrived-a fascinating package, big and battered and plastered all over with bright foreign stamps. The package itself looked foreign, with its thin shiny paper and unusual string. It was addressed to Miss Ariadne Frederick.

I was disappointed. I had hoped it was for me. I didn’t know any Ariadne Frederick. My last name was Bishop.

I knew it wasn’t really-at least I knew Jim Bishop was my stepfather. Mother had left my other father when I was a baby, not because he didn’t love us, but because he loved something else more. I couldn’t get it into my juvenile brain precisely what it was he loved-some strange, hard-to-pronounce word that was my father’s job. That was incomprehensible to me. How could a person love his work more than he loved a person? Mother tried to explain; I remember her soft, anxious voice going on and on, while I fidgeted, picking at the scab on my knee and wishing she would stop talking so I could go back to the baseball game down the street.

It may seem strange that I had forgotten my own name. A psychiatrist wouldn’t find it strange; he would say I wanted to forget it. Maybe so. But I think the explanation is simpler. Children have a culture of their own; they are no more interested in adult values than an Australian aborigine is interested in the rules of Emily Post. I wasn’t interested in the name, or in the forgotten father who had given it to me.

I remember thinking it was a weird name, not one I’d have wanted to claim. People didn’t have names like that, except in the boring stories we had to read for English. My friends had sensible names, like Debby and Jan and Penny.

Mother arrived while I was inspecting the package. She always tried to be there when I got home from school, but the lines at the grocery store had been longer than usual that day. I went to help her carry in the bags, and then I saw that she was standing quite still, staring down at the big battered parcel. She had the most peculiar look on her face. I know now that what I saw was a struggle, internal but intense, and when I said casually, “Hey, I guess the mailman made a mistake,” the struggle showed in a facial contortion so extreme that I mistook it for physical pain. I asked her what was the matter.

It was several seconds before she answered.

“He didn’t make a mistake. It’s for you. Have you forgotten?”

If I felt chagrin at being reminded that the weird name was my own, it was quickly forgotten in delight. The package was for me, that was the important thing.

I dismembered it there in the garage, too excited to notice Mother’s silence. She stood watching while I tore the wrappings off and removed the lid. The interior of the box was filled with scraps of newspaper. Even in my anxiety to reach the object buried within, I realized that the paper was unusual. The language wasn’t English. Even the writing was funny, not like English print.

My groping hands found a hard surface among the shreds of paper. I pulled out the object and held it up. My first thought was that someone had played a mean trick on me. This wasn’t a present. It was a joke, a piece of junk.

The object was a statue, about a foot high, made of white stone. The arms were missing and so was the nose. The stone was stained and chipped and worn. At first I couldn’t even decide whether it was supposed to be a man or a woman. It wore a long robe, carved in stiff pleats; but I knew that men used to wear long robes, and this object had an air of extreme age. Yet as I continued to stare, disgusted and disappointed, some quality of the small, marred face got through to me, and I felt sure that the subject was female.

Not that I cared. I was about to set the thing down, with a decided thump, when Mother’s hand caught mine.

“Be careful. It is probably valuable.”

“Valuable! This dirty, beat-up, old-”

“Very old. Over two thousand years old.”

I sat back on my heels and looked at the statue again. I felt more respect for it; the difference between ten and two thousand has to command a certain awe. The more I looked, the more the thing got to me. Even the disfigurement of the nose could not destroy the haunting quality of the face. The mouth was curved in an odd, disquieting little smile, and the sunken eye sockets seemed to stare directly into my eyes.

Mother was on her knees, digging with both hands among the crumpled papers. She leaned back with a short, high-pitched laugh.

“Not even a note,” she said, as if to herself. “How typical.”

I paid no attention to the comment, which was obviously not addressed to me. I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that this was some kind of practical joke. I turned the statue upside down, thinking there might be a note, or a rude remark, on the base. Sure enough, something was written there in black ink. It wasn’t a word; the shapes looked more like code than letters of the alphabet.

I showed it to Mother. She gave another of those funny little laughs.

“Ariadne,” she said. “Just like him! How could he know? It might be anyone-Aphrodite or Hera, or an anonymous worshiper.”

“Ariadne? This is supposed to be me?”

This time Mother’s laugh sounded more like her own. She was wearing jeans-she had a nice trim figure in those days-and she sat down on the garage floor with her legs crossed and the statue on her lap.

“The writing is in Greek,” she explained. “It’s a Greek statue-archaic Greek, about five hundred B.C. Ariadne was a princess who lived on an island near Greece, even earlier than that-a thousand years earlier. She was like a fairytale princess to those ancient Greeks. They told stories about her, and I suppose they did make statues of her. But no one can tell who this statue is supposed to represent. It must be his idea of-no, not a joke, he never jokes-of an appropriate gift for a little girl. I wonder what reminded him of your existence.”

I had lost her again. She said “you,” but she wasn’t talking to me.

I joggled her elbow. “Who?” I asked. “Who sent it?”

“Your father,” she said. “Now, Sandy, don’t look so blank. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten about him too; I told you the whole story years ago, you must remember-”

Her voice was getting high and shrill. I couldn’t figure out why she was upset-I thought I was the one who should be mad, getting such a dumb present-but I didn’t want her to be upset, so I said quickly,

“Oh, sure. I remember. It was silly of me not to think of him right away.”

She put her arm around me and pulled me against her. It was an uncomfortable position; my face was squashed against her shoulder, so I couldn’t see her face. I could see the statue, though. She was holding it against her breast with the other hand, holding it pressed against her as she was holding me.

“Why should you remember?” she said softly. “I’m sorry. I had no right to snap at you. I was angry for you, not at you.”

“You were mad at him,” I said intelligently.

“Yes. And that isn’t fair either.” She let me go. I sat upright, relieved to see that she was smiling faintly. “I should be amused,” she went on. “This is just the sort of thing your father would do. All these years ignoring our existence, and then, out of the blue, a completely inappropriate gift. I wonder if he remembers how old you are. He certainly doesn’t remember your birth date. But, you see, that’s the sort of man he is. He isn’t interested in living people, and the only dates he can remember are dates before Christ. He didn’t let us go because he disliked us; it was just that he liked-”

“His job more,” I interrupted. The discussion was beginning to bore me. “You told me. He’s a-a archae-”

“Archaeologist. A classical archaeologist. That means that he studies about ancient Greece.”

“And that’s where the statue came from. Are those Greek newspapers?”

“Yes. Presumably he’s in Athens now. I suppose he found this in an antique shop and decided to send it to you. You should be flattered. It’s really a lovely thing. Someday you will be proud to own it.”

“I don’t think it’s lovely. It’s all banged up, and I’ll bet it never was pretty, even when it was new. I’d rather have a new football.” I stood up. “I’m going for a bike ride now, okay?”

“Okay.” She looked up at me, smiling and shaking her head. “Atalanta would have been more appropriate,” she said obscurely. “Heredity is the most mysterious thing. How did that man and I ever breed a female Olympic star?”

That was my first introduction to Ariadne. I didn’t meet her again for years, not until I studied the Greek myths in high school. Nobody knew I was her namesake, and I was careful not to tell them. Privately I thought she was a pretty feeble character. A traitor, in fact. She betrayed her country and her father for her boyfriend, and then he walked off and left her flat. All she could do was sit and cry until some god came along and made her his mistress.

Atalanta wasn’t much better. Imagine letting some man con you out of winning a race by throwing goodies along the way! My personal hunch is that Atalanta wanted to lose. She had outrun a lot of prospective husbands, and being an old maid wasn’t acceptable in those days.

I understood by then, however, why Mother had referred to me as Atalanta, and made that cryptic remark about heredity. Mother is short and getting a little-plump is the word we use. She has no more muscles than an amoeba. She’s bright, though; has her M.A. Now I am not academically inclined, to put it politely. I never had trouble with schoolwork, not after Jim laid down the law: “A B average, or no after-school activities.” But I never did more than I had to do to make that average, and maybe a little extra, just to be on the safe side.

The activities? Track. Swim team. Basketball. Hockey. I tried out for the boys’ baseball team, and caused the biggest flap in the history of Morningside Junior High; that was a few years before the sexist bias in sports made headlines. Jim backed me up. He thought it was funny, since I was taller and better coordinated than most of the boys on the team. But Mother got upset; so I had to let it drop. I wasn’t that crazy about baseball anyway.

In high school I really wanted to try out for the football team. I’m a little light, but I could have played quarterback. Mother burst into tears every time I mentioned the subject, so I gave that up too. I went to practice one afternoon, just to show the coach what he was missing, and completed twenty passes out of twenty-two, with eleven guys doing their best to cripple me and my receivers. They were nice guys; most of them were friends of mine. The center, Randy Sullivan, told me the coach cried after I left. He was probably exaggerating, though.

Jim, my stepfather, is a former All-American.

No, I’m not trying to say that heredity doesn’t count. I’m saying that the question of identity is very complex. What makes you the person you are? How much of you is bred in the bone, de fined in embryo by a bunch of minuscule cells; and how much comes from your environment-friends, parents, physical factors such as diet and freedom from rat bites? Environmental influences aren’t that simple either. Maybe the most important ones are the implicit, unstated assumptions you carry with you, like a heavy knapsack-or like wings. Some of them can drag you down, and some can lift you up, let you fly.

These are old questions. They’ve been argued by biologists and sociologists and psychologists for years. I don’t suppose the answers will ever be definitely settled. But… What if thosearen’t the only things that make a man or woman? What if there are other influences that shape one’s life? Influences that once lived and then died and crumbled into dust-and lived again? Silent inner forces from a past so distant that even the metal of its artifacts has crumbled into dust?

II

I heard from my father, off and on, during the twelve years that followed the arrival of the package. (I thought of him, and spoke of him, when I had to, as “Father.” Jim was always “Dad.”) The communications were just as peculiar as the first one. One was a reprint of a scholarly article he had written, filled with Greek quotations and references to stirrup cups and Late Helladic IIIb. I didn’t even try to read it. The craziest gift of all was an elaborate embroidered, lace-festooned modern Greek costume, complete with coin-trimmed headdress and red boots-for a child about six years old. I was fifteen at the time. Mother laughed till she cried over that…

By the time I went off to college the communications had petered out. There had been no more scholarly articles.

It was pure accident that I learned why. The dentist was running late that morning, and there was nothing to read in the waiting room except issues of Healthy Teeth and an old copy of Saturday Review, or Harper’s, or something of that ilk. I forget which one. I was thumbing through it when the face jumped up out of the page at me.

I didn’t exactly recognize it. I couldn’t have, because I had never seen a picture of my father. If Mother had any, she had never shown them to me. I didn’t know that the man in the photograph was my father until I started reading the article. But even before I saw the name the face was inexplicably familiar.

The article was very amusing if you enjoy the kind of humor that consists of cutting someone else down. The author started out by referring to Professor Frederick’s distinguished past career, and then tore him to pieces. Professor Frederick, it seemed, had gone off the deep end. He believed in the Atlantis myth.

I had heard of Atlantis. It was a wonderful island, a kind of earthly paradise, which sank into the depths of the ocean after being wracked by violent earthquakes and floods. The story is in Plato, than whom there could hardly be a more respectable writer, but scholars used to believe that Plato made up the whole thing. I had a friend, though, who was into mysticism and Rosicrucianism and all that; she thought the Atlanteans had inspired the Egyptians and Mayans and the other early civilizations. According to her and her fellow mystics, there really was an island of Atlantis, and the remains of the palaces and temples are still down there, draped with seaweed, at the bottom of the Atlantic. I had seen some science-fiction movies about it, too.

From the article I learned that the Atlantis theory has become more respectable in recent years. The island couldn’t have been in the Atlantic Ocean, because deep-sea soundings have proved that the ocean floor has been under water for millions of years. But the island that disappeared in a sudden catastrophe could have been somewhere else, and as far back as the late nineteenth century, scholars began to wonder if the basis of Plato’s story might not be found in the Minoan civilization.

We studied the Minoans for a week in World History, preceded by Prehistoric Man (three days) and the Egyptians (two weeks), and followed by the Greeks (two months). So I knew who the Minoans were. They lived on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean, two thousand years before Christ; they built elaborate palaces, with plumbing and bathtubs. They had a king called Minos, whose daughter was named Ariadne, and a great scientist named Daedalus, who built the Labyrinth. What I didn’t know-or if I had known, I had forgotten-was that Minoan civilization had ended around 1500 B.C., when the great palaces were destroyed in a violent catastrophe.

A thousand years passed between King Minos and Plato, plenty long enough for the true facts to be forgotten and legends to grow like coral. The location of the island was lost. The storytellers moved it out into the Atlantic, where there was more room for a civilization whose accomplishments had been magnified by generations of literary liars.

It was a plausible theory, but that is all it was until a few years ago, when archaeologists began digging on the island of Thera, north of Crete. They found the remains of Minoan houses buried under thick layers of volcanic ash. Thera is the largest island of a group of islands named Santorini, which are the remnants of a volcano. Back in 1500 B.C., or thereabouts, the volcano blew itself to pieces. The entire crater collapsed into the sea, forming a deep bay, or caldera, and the remainder of the island was buried under ash and pumice-like Pompeii, only deeper.

The Atlantis story suddenly looked pretty good. Not only was Thera, with its Minoan colony, annihilated, but tidal waves and earthquakes sparked by the vast explosion hit Crete, sixty miles away, with devastating force. The Minoans were merchant sailors, and all their big cities were on the coast. I was familiar with the effects of wave action, so I could imagine what waves fifty feet high would do to the Cretan palaces. And there were other side effects of the eruption-earthquakes, falls of windblown ash that rendered the soil infertile for years, local land collapses that drowned harbors and cities. The daughter colony and the mother island had both died in that unimaginable cataclysm. It was no wonder that the memory of it would linger even after the names had been forgotten.

As I have said, I’m not academically inclined. But the idea of sunken palaces fascinated me. I’ve always loved the water. Living in Florida, with a sports buff as a stepfather, I grew up practically amphibious, and Jim and I spent our summers looking for sunken Spanish galleons. The article expanded my imagination; I could see myself swimming through the columned porticoes, gathering the golden diadems of drowned queens.

The dentist had two emergencies that morning. I finished the article and then went back and reread parts of it. What I couldn’t figure out was why the author was so antagonistic to my father. He had been one of the first to support the Atlantis-Crete identification, long before it was fashionable. Now it appeared that he had been right all along. Yet the author had nothing good to say about him. I decided that maybe the man had met Professor Frederick somewhere and had taken a violent dislike to his face, or his habit of eating peas with a knife, or something. After all, my mother hadn’t been able to get along with him, and she was a pretty tolerant woman.

However, the tone of the article set my teeth on edge. Every sentence held a veiled insult or an open sneer. The ultimate effect was exactly the opposite of what the author intended: my sympathies were with the victim, not the attacker.

Don’t imagine that the article was a big turning point in my life. I didn’t develop a sudden passion for classical archaeology or burn to defend my poor abused father. I didn’t think more kindly of him; I rather suspected he had brought the abuse on himself.

Yet that article was the first of two coincidences (if they were coincidences) that were to change my life. The second occurred a year later. Jim and I found our Spanish galleon.

I’m an excellent swimmer. I don’t claim any credit for it; most people would be good if they had spent as much time in the water as I have, with a coach like my dad. I’m not Olympic class, but I’m good, and I took to scuba gear the way the Ugly Duckling took to being a swan.

No, the Ugly Duckling reference is not meant to be a subtle description of myself. Swimming is a good way to develop the body, and my figure is all right. I look healthy. Reddish-blond hair (hence my nickname), green eyes, and the usual number of other features-nothing extraordinary, one way or the other.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the Spanish galleon.

The part of Florida where I live, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Miami, has seen hundreds of shipwrecks. There’s a reef out from our beach that has murdered ships for centuries. If Columbus had come this way, the Santa María might not have made it back to Spain. We call it Devil’s Reef. The Spaniards called it El Diablo, and they knew it well.

After the conquistadores conquered Mexico and Peru, they started looting on a scale that makes other conquerors look like amateurs. Tons of gold and silver and jewels were carried away to Spain. Every year the treasure fleet assembled in Cuba, convoys of six to ten ships. They planned to set sail for Spain in June, before the hurricane season. Some fleets carried as much as thirty million dollars’ worth of treasure. They crossed the Florida Straits and followed the coastline north until they hit the Gulf Stream; then they turned eastward for the long, hazardous crossing.

Some of them never made it. Pirates and storms took their toll, but the greatest danger came from the condition of the ships themselves. Clumsy, topheavy, loaded to the gunwales with treasure, they were difficult to maneuver in any weather, and doomed in a hurricane. The coastline they hugged on their way north has some of the worst reefs in the world, and navigational skills were not highly developed. I don’t know what percentage of the great galleons were lost during that period, but I know that the coast is thick with the wrecks of ships driven off course and ripped apart by the jagged rocks. Devil’s Reef claimed its share.

So why are the wrecks still there? Why isn’t everybody bringing up gold bars and pieces of eight?

There are a lot of reasons. Sometimes a vessel sank straight down into deep water. If the depth is great enough, salvage operations become prohibitively expensive. Most of the time it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact location of a wreck, even when survivors described it to Spanish authorities. When a ship struck a reef, it was usually traveling at high speed, driven by winds. A projecting spike of coral would rip off the bottom, but the ship itself might be driven on over the reef, scattering cargo from the wound as it went. The remains could be strewn over hundreds of yards of territory, and as time passed, the hand of nature smoothed over the intrusive material. Heavy objects sank into sand or mud. Chemicals in seawater corroded metal. Marine organisms ate wood and clustered on other materials. Within a few years nothing would be recognizable-just lumps and bumps, indistinguishable from natural formations except to a highly trained eye. And it isn’t all fun and games down there. Sharks, barracuda, moray eels, and other live hazards have to be handled with care. Sharp edges of coral and rusty beer cans add their kicks. Then there are the so-called “diving diseases”-nitrogen narcosis, oxygen poisoning, air embolism, and caisson disease, popularly known as the bends, to mention only a few. Treasure hunting is a chancy profession. The big discoveries make headlines, but most people spend their whole lives looking in vain. The successful strikes are usually the result of back-breaking work, long months of research in dusty colonial archives, and luck.

Our find was one of the rare exceptions. In our case, it was pure luck.

Jim always said there was a wreck somewhere offshore. We had been picking up stray coins for years-blackened, irregular scraps of metal that bore no resemblance to the gold doubloons of historical fiction. Once I found half a dozen pieces of eight on the sandy bottom, thirty feet out. That discovery moved Jim to some halfhearted research, but he didn’t get far; like me, he is not academically inclined, and the records are all in archaic Spanish. So we weren’t expecting anything that day in June when we went for our morning swim. We hadn’t been to the beach for several days. The weather had been bad, and the night before we had had a humdinger of an early tropical storm, with high winds and heavy rain.

It was a gorgeous day. The beach was covered with debris, but the air sparkled. I went down seventy-five feet offshore, and I spotted the cannon immediately, by its shape. It was too regular to be a natural formation. But I couldn’t believe it. I had been in that area a dozen times before. Apparently the storm had swept the sea bottom like a big broom, removing a deep layer of sand.

There were three other cannon behind the first. Then I saw it. It looked like a jagged greenish-brown rock, but the minute my eyes lit on it I felt a funny prickle run down my back. I swam over to it. There were coins all over the bottom around it, silver coins, some lying singly, some stuck together in clumps. I had read about finds like this, and I knew that the big lump also consisted of coins-hundreds of them, welded together by chemical action.

I don’t know how I got it out. We found out later the darned thing weighed over thirty pounds. All I remember is doing a war dance with Jim. We were both whooping and jumping up and down and smacking each other’s hands.

Jim called the museum right away and the state archaeological service took over, but they let us work along with the pros. The historians figured that the ship was one of the galleons from the plate fleet of 1735. It had carried a couple of million dollars’ worth of gold and silver coins. Of course we didn’t find nearly that much; the cargo had been scattered and washed away over two hundred years.

But it was a fabulous summer. Mother couldn’t hassle me about getting a job, not with an opportunity like that available, so I spent most of the summer in the water, which is just the way I wanted to spend it.

I also enjoyed the publicity we got. Most of it was from local papers, but some of the national magazines sent photographers, and there was one smashing picture of me in the National Geographic article. I was back in school for my senior year when the issue came out, and I had to take a certain amount of ribbing. “Pretty young Sandy Bishop, the discoverer of the wreck…” Theyposed me lying languorously on the beach, half buried in silver coins.

I managed to live that one down, and by February everybody had forgotten about the article-everybody except me. I caught myself daydreaming when I should have been studying, remembering the glory of it all, and wondering if that was the last exciting thing that would ever happen to me. The weather was bad-it is bad in February, even in Florida -and I was not looking forward to graduation, assuming I would graduate, which was not at all certain, thanks to a particularly boring Soc course and a professor who was giving me a hard time. I knew I had to make it, though. Jim and Mother were worried about money.

Worried about money, after finding millions of dollars worth of treasure? Most people would read that sentence with an incredulous smile. If a professional treasure hunter read it he would smile, too-a wry, pained smile of sympathy. I know of one pro who dumped his coins back into the ocean after getting his tax bill. There are complicated laws governing the way the find is divided-it isn’t a case of “finders keepers.” The value of the treasure depends on what you can get for it on the open market, but you pay taxes on the basis of a standard determined by the mysterious gentlemen from internal revenue. The problem got so complicated I never did understand all the ramifications, but poor Jim used to sit for hours, brooding over the masses of accumulated legal forms, holding his head in his hands and groaning softly. Eventually we might make money out of the discovery, but it would take years to settle the accounts, and there were times when Jim thought it would be easier to donate the coins to a museum. The point is that at that moment we were hard-up; and I knew I had to get out and stop sponging off my parents. Work, in other words. It was a depressing thought.

I was considering my prospects one evening in February. I had a single room that year, so there was nobody there but me and an unfinished, overdue Soc paper, which lay on the desk staring accusingly at me. I had just had a talk with my adviser about job prospects. They were as grim as the weather. I was preparing to be a Phys. Ed. teacher, not because the prospect of coaching fat little girls appealed to me, but because there isn’t much else you could do with my skills, or lack thereof. Assuming I could latch on to a job for the following year, it wouldn’t start until September; and that meant a summer of clerking in the drugstore or waiting on tables. The idea was less than alluring, especially after all the fun I had had the previous summer.

So, when I heard the knock on the door, I was glad to have something interrupt my gloomy thoughts. I was a little surprised, because I had stuck up a big sign-“Term Paper. Do not interrupt on pain of death”-and usually my friends were pretty good about that sort of thing. At that point, though, I’d have even welcomed an enemy.

Maybe that’s who it was-an enemy. I knew him right away, although he had changed a lot since the picture in the magazine was taken. I knew him in my blood and bones. It was my father.