Iza’s fingers brush the jagged edges of the limestone as she swims into the darkness. She kicks as hard as she can, her lungs beginning to buck. She purses her lips tight, her chest burning as her body chants, Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!
Her shoulder scrapes against the top of the tunnel leading into the cave, and she pushes at the wall until finally she feels her ears pop and her fingers touch air. The young man helps pull her onto a large flat rock in the middle of the cave.
On a bright day the sun dances through the water, throwing the entire room the most brilliant shade of blue Iza’s ever seen, brighter than the bluest parrot fish in the reef. Now, as the storm begins to clear off, every now and then moonlight bubbles through.
Iza pushes herself to her feet and reaches out a hand until she can touch the wall to steady herself. The light bouncing through the water seems to make the entire cave dance and twirl and spin, and it makes her feel off balance.
She stares at the man, who just stands there. He glances at Iza’s body, and then sharply away into the darkness. Iza looks down and realizes what he must have seen—her thin white nightgown almost transparent, the richness of her skin shining through it. With each breath it pulls tight against her.
For a heartbeat she wonders what it would have been like for them before the Return. If this had been some other night so many years ago and they’d both ended up in a hidden cave of blue light. Iza wonders how many lovers have rendezvoused here in the reflection of waves.
She tries to pluck the fabric away from her body, but it gets tangled in her belt, and so she unbuckles it, holding the machete in her hand. She has no idea what happened to her gun.
Iza crosses her arms over her chest. “The pirates,” she finally says. Her voice sounds dull in the cave, and she shakes her head to dislodge the water from her ears. “You told me you escaped from them.”
“I told you I jumped from their boat in the night and swam to the island. That was true,” he says.
She curls her hands into fists, clenching the machete tighter. “You’re one of them.”
“No,” he says. “I am them. The ship is my ship. The men are my men. I have made all this happen.”
“Why?” Iza can barely even whisper the word.
“Your father is a ruthless man,” the pirate says. “And this isla is too valuable.”
“My father is fair—,” Iza tells him, always his greatest defender.
“He uses his power to control people!” The pirate cuts Iza off, shouting so that his words echo around her.
“You have to be ruthless to survive,” Iza says, her voice low. It’s her father’s mantra.
“If that’s true, then why do you blame me for attacking? For being just as ruthless?”
Iza opens her mouth, and then closes it. “There were innocent people,” she finally says. “You’re going to end up killing the entire island.”
“No, I’m not,” the pirate says. “My men won’t let the infection spread past the landhuizen. In a few days they’ll kill the lihémorto, and Curaçao will return to normal.”
“My father will never allow it.”
“Your father will be dead!” the pirate yells, his breath hot against Iza’s face like a slap. She stumbles under the weight of it. He seems to regret the words as soon as they leave his mouth, and he reaches for her hand, wrapping his fingers around her.
“I am not like your father,” he says, stepping closer to her. “You have to understand,” he continues. “I don’t like this. I don’t want this. I want the world to go back to the way it was before. I want it to be fair. That’s all I’m trying to do is make it fair again.”
Iza thinks about her mother tossing bougainvillea petals into the waves. All she wanted was for life to go back to the way it was before the Return, and Iza realizes that’s what she’s been waiting for as well.
And it’s never going to happen.
“My father’s men are loyal to him. The homber mata won’t follow you. They’ll avenge his death,” Iza growls, ripping her hand free and pushing back against the cave wall.
“ The homber mata will follow your father’s heir,” the pirate says, stepping forward. “They will follow you. And you will follow me. And in return I will keep you safe.”
The pirate takes another step forward. He brushes his fingers against her chin.
Iza feels his chest against hers. “Mi bunita,” he whispers.
Iza’s toes curl against the ragged edges of the rock. The water in the cave pulses like a dull heartbeat—in and out, in and out. She thinks about all the old romance novels she’s read. All the times the pirate rescued the damsel in distress and she learned to love him for it.
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited to make you my own,” he says, twining his hand in her hair and pulling her head back. Prickles of pain itch against her scalp.
Her throat feels awkward and bare.
Iza tries her best to pull away from his kiss. “How long?” she asks. “How do you know me?”
The pirate grins. He leans toward her, the heat of his mouth barely brushing Iza’s forehead, her temple, her ear. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
20. BEFORE
“Look,” her father said. He took Iza’s smaller hand in his and gently pushed her fingertips into the warm salty water. They were at an aquarium, standing with the other tourists around a low shallow tank filled with starfish and anemone and sea urchins.
He’d taken the day off just to spend it with her, to point out all the different types of fish weaving through the large exhibits. Together they’d sat in a huge amphitheater and watched a whale shark lumber around the graceful eagle rays.
Iza spent hours with her eyes wide open, leaning into the pipe-tobacco warmth of her father and listening to him explain how to tell a nurse shark from a hammerhead and a grouper from a jack.
But now that she was close enough to touch the creatures, she wanted to pull her hand back. She was too afraid of the spines and prickles of the sea urchins that looked as sharp as needles.
“It’s okay,” her father said, a laughing rumble to his voice she could feel in her chest. “Trust me.”
Iza tasted the salt in the back of her throat, but whether it was from her tears or the open tanks she didn’t know. She sniffed and pressed her lips together, holding her breath as she let her father brush her hand over the different creatures.
She jumped when she felt the sea urchin, expecting the sharp pinch of pain and not the soft bristle instead. Iza turned her head up to him then. He was smiling at her, and she knew he was proud of her bravery and strength.
She understood then that she wanted to be that little girl in his eyes forever. She would do anything for that feeling again, and she’d spent years chasing after it since.
21. NOW
“The game,” Iza whispers. “Risk. It was yours.”
The pirate smiles even larger. “Strategy,” he says. “That’s how I learned it. Your father should’ve paid attention.”
Iza should have remembered his eyes, but the pirate was so skinny then. So young and full of rage that he hides so well now.
It becomes so clear to Iza how everything is her fault. Her knees go weak, so that the pirate has to loosen his grip on her hair in order to hold her body up. She pushes her fingers to her lips, tasting the dusky saltiness she’d tasted when the old woman had fallen off the dock because of her.
Her father always said Iza needed to be ruthless, but she hadn’t believed him.
She’d thought that the world could be something more. And she’d been the one to give the pirate access to the landhuizen. She’d had a knife at his throat and let him live. All because Iza wanted to believe that her father was wrong.
The pirate wraps his hand around Iza’s wrist, and she glances down at where his dark fingers splay over her pulse. In her head all she can see is Beihito. At the way he looked at her when they fell, as if she were nothing to him. As if he’d never loved her as djé yiu muhé—his daughter.
She looks up at the pirate. He’s wiped out the only man who’d ever found something inside Iza worthy of love.
Iza reaches one hand up and places it behind the pirate’s head. His skin feels like the summer sun, damp with sweat and rough like a tribon’s body. “And my father’s men will follow you because of me?” she asks. Her mouth hovers just against his. “And you’ll protect me?”
He mumbles a yes as she presses her lips to his. Just this once Iza wants to know what it tastes like, this idea that the world can be beautiful and different.
She thinks about the old Risk board, about how the Venezuelan marked an X where Curaçao would have been. She remembers how she would put her thumb over it, wiping out her world. She wonders at how easy it is to erase everything you’ve ever known. Everything you’ve ever thought you were or wanted to be or should be.
As the pirate lets himself go against Iza, as he breathes her in, she pulls Beihito’s machete up and presses it against his neck. Iza digs the blade in deep like she should have done before.
“Then they’ll follow me,” she says as the pirate clutches a hand to his throat, falling backward into the moon-drenched water. “And I’ll protect myself.”
Iza watches his body sink through the waves, his blood like bougainvillea blossoms blooming on the surface. She could do what it takes to survive. She could do what’s necessary to rule her father’s island.
Iza could be ruthless. Just like her father.
“A Thousand Flowers”
Holly: Unicorns are a study in contradictions. They are portrayed as both gentle and fierce, spiritual and animal, healers and death-bringers. In addition to having healing properties, the horn that sits on a unicorn’s brow is thought to be a deadly weapon and the unicorn itself is depicted as so fierce that it would rather die than be taken alive. Although often shown to be gentle, a unicorn will attack its natural enemy, the lion, without provocation. And the unicorn itself is found in medieval manuscripts associated both with celibacy and with desire.
Margo Lanagan’s “A Thousand Flowers” is a masterful story exploring the contradictory nature of the unicorn.
Justine: Much as it saddens me to say so of work by a fellow Australian, this is by far the grossest story in the anthology. Eating brains, you say? So much less gross than Margo Lanagan’s story. Here’s why you should skip this one: B***iality as a defense for unicorns? I think I’m going to be ill.
Holly: Now, Justine, don’t tell me a unicorn story made you feel squeamish? I thought we were supposed to look into the face of darkness? Face our fears?
A Thousand Flowers
By Margo Lanagan
I walked away from the fire, in among the trees. I was looking for somewhere to relieve myself of all the ale I’d drunk, and I had told myself—goodness knows why— in my drunkenness that I must piss where there were no flowers.
And this, in the late-spring forest, was proving impossible, for whatever did not froth or bow with its weight of blossoms was patterned or punctuated so by their fresh little faces, clustered or sweetly solitary, that a man could not find any place where one of them—some daisy closed against the darkness, some spray of maiden-breath testing the evening air—did not insist, or respectfully request, or only lean in the gloaming and hope, that he not stain and spoil it with his leavings.
“Damn you all,” I muttered, and stumbled on, and lurched on. The fire and the carousing were now quite a distance behind me among the treetrunks, no more than a bar or two of golden light, crossed with cavorting dancers, lengthened and shortened by the swaying of storytellers. The laughter itself and the music were becoming part of the night forest noise, a kind of wind, several kinds of bird cry. My bladder was paining me, it was so full. Look, I could trample flower after flower underfoot in my lurching—I could kill plant after plant that way! Why could I not stop and piss on one, from which my liquids would surely drip and even be washed clean again, almost directly, by a rain shower, or even a drop of dew plashing from the bush, the tree, above?
It became a nightmare of flowers, and I was alone in it, my filth dammed up inside me and a pure world outside offering only innocents’ faces—pale, fresh, unknowing of drunkenness and body dirt—for a man to piss on. Which, had he any manners in him at all, he could not do.
But don’t these flowers grow from dirt themselves? I thought desperately. Aren’t they rooted in all kinds of rot and excrements, of worm and bird and deer, hedgehog and who knows what else? I scrabbled to unbutton my trousers, my mind holding to this scrap of sense, but fear also clutched in me, and flowers crowded my eyes, and breathed sweetness up my nose. I could have wept.
It is all the drink, I told myself, that makes me bother this way, makes me mind.
“Have another swig, Manny!” Roste shouted in my memory, thumping me in the back, thrusting the pot at me with such vigor, two drops of ale flew out, catching my cheek and my lip two cool tiny blows. I gasped and flailed among the thickening trees. They wanted to fight me, to wrestle me down, I was sure.
I made myself stop; I made myself laugh at myself. “Who do you think you are, Manny Foyer,” I said, “to take on the whole forest? There, that oak. That’s clear enough, the base of it. Stop this foolishness, now. Do you want to piss yourself?
Do you want to go back to the fire piss-panted? And spend tomorrow’s hunt in the smell of yourself?”
I propped myself against the oak trunk with one hand. I relieved myself most carefully against the wood. And a good long wash and lacquering I gave it—aah, is there any better feeling? I stood and stood, and the piss poured and poured.