Chapter Five

Not once in her days-long swim did Ghean consider the massive weight her hair would have, once the water no longer supported it. She noticed the weight, of course, when treading water; it pulled at her neck, and she spent countless hours playing with the new weight, reveling in the return of sensation. Still clinging determinedly to her rock, she hunted just below the water's surface as often as she hungered, despite the hours' delay it cost her in reaching shore. The patient one, almost indistinguishable from her own thoughts, reminded her that a few more hours was nothing to worry about. The more normal her body looked when she finally went ashore, the better off she would be.

The frightened one preferred the ocean anyway, and encouraged the fishing, sometimes pressuring her to stay in a single area far longer than she needed to. Ignoring its constantly voiced fears, Ghean always returned to the surface, finding the sun and the direction she wanted, and beginning her journey towards land again.

When the waters became shallow enough, she stood, awkwardly, no longer certain how to balance her own weight on two feet. Even with the sea lifting her a little as she stood in the shoulder-deep water, the posture felt heavy and clumsy after centuries of the ocean's all-encompassing support. The beach was visible, only yards away, and still Ghean stayed stubbornly in the water, reaquainting herself with the idea of walking. The sun rose and set twice while she practiced, edging a little closer to shore as she began to feel some confidence in her ability to not collapse with the unfamiliar motions.

By the time she stood in knee-deep water, her hair was a significant weight. The days of swallowing down raw fish had added weight back to her frame, and the swimming had turned some of it to muscle, but there was still little strength in a body atrophied by millennia of small actions. Clumsily, she gathered up her hair to fold it over her arms, trying not to drop her stone. Bending to snatch at the lengths of it, she lost her balance, undone by the unfamiliar pull of gravity and the impossible weight of the long strands. It pooled around her again, a black spider's web that was pulled away and pushed back again with the waves that rocked the water. For a while she watched it, mindlessly, admiring the pattern of sunlight through water and shining threads of hair alike. In time, she shook herself, and began searching for a sharp stone or shell with which she could hack the impossible weight away from her head.

She found one by stepping on it, slicing her foot open. Reaching down through the water, she watched the blood drift away in seconds, leaving behind unscarred flesh. The thought came, dimly: I would have had to have wrapped it, and favored it for days, before. She exchanged the shell that had cut her foot for her wedge, placing it firmly between her feet so it would not be lost, and lifted the cutting shell to her hair.

Had to have wrapped it. Ghean hesitated, the shell hovering near her cheek. If I want to sell it I can't let the sea take it away. For a moment she was tempted to leave the legacy of her imprisonment to the ocean, but the patient one shook her head. No, it advised, keep the hair. The world must still use money or barter of some kind. We'll need it to make a new beginning for ourselves.

What if it has changed so much? the frightened one demanded. What if they no longer use money?

Then I'll dump all my hair in a river, Ghean answered it acerbically, and squatted to lift her wedge again, kicking back towards deeper water once both stone and shell were secured in her hands. Seaweed drifted in the water, and Ghean sliced long strips of it, wrapping them around her arms to keep them from floating away. When she thought she had enough, she swam back to shore, trailing seaweed and yards of hair.

She sat on the ocean floor where the water was still deep enough to support the weight of her hair, and she tied a length of the seaweed around her hair, just beyond her shoulderblades. An arm's length further down, she tied another length, and down again, until she ran out of seaweed, well before she ran out of hair. Still, the tied-off lengths gave her more control over the mass of hair than she'd ever had, and she was able to gather it into a slightly more wieldy bundle, piling it in front of her and between her legs.

She lifted her stone, pressed her lips together, and threw it at the shore as hard as she could, knowing she wouldn't be able to carry both it and her hair at the same time. It splashed just before the tide mark, not many feet away, but far enough that she could see it. Without taking her eyes from it, as if it would be lost if she looked away, Ghean took the shell and razed it through her hair, as close to chin-length as she could. It spliced away messily, repeated passes cutting through the heavy mass before it was all free, but even so it took only a few minutes to release herself from the weight. The severed end fell into the water with a soft splash, ragged ends spilling randomly out from the seaweed tie. Her head felt peculiarly light. She shook it back and forth, feeling the chopped ends tickling her jaw, and she giggled. One hand lifted almost of its own accord to brush at the short hairs, passing over the ends with a repetative, obsessive motion.

Only when she looked up to see that her wedge was almost covered by the tide did she think to move. The shell still clenched in her hand, she pulled the hair close to her, trying to capture as much as possible in her arms, and then she stood, staggering to shore with her burden. At the water's edge, she dumped the armful and rescued her stone, putting it higher on the beach with shaky, off-balance steps. Then she returned to her hair, pulling it length over length higher up onto land, until, for the first time in thousands of years, both it and she were free of the ocean.

Ghean sat in the sand, staring at the water, trying to encompass the thought. Freedom. The water isn't my home any more.

The water is always home, the frightened one whispered. It's safe, there. We should go back.

We will, the patient one said. When we go back to recover Atlantis. We will rebuild and we will have revenge. But not now. Now we have other things to do.

Like eat, Ghean told the other two, and pushed to her feet without grace. The water's bouyancy was a welcome respite, even after so little time out of it, and she dove, searching for fish and admiring the ease of movement, without the hair to dodge.

Later, she cut her hair into shorter segments, each a little longer than she was tall, and braided each one. The seaweed shrank as it dried, holding the braids tightly enough to be carried without losing the hair. When she was done there were ten lengths, more than fifty feet of hair. She would sell them one at a time, when she found a city.

The next weeks blurred, as much as the time under water had. She stole clothes from the first town she found, under the cover of dark. Certain memories stood out: the first car that whisked by, and the first plane that flew overhead. She fell to her knees, shrieking in fear, when the plane buzzed over. To her untrained ears, it was the sound of the world ending.

She hid her hair away, and begged or stole food, gaining strength and a smattering of language. She wanted to go to Egypt, that she knew, but she no longer had a word for the country that anyone could recognize. After days of watching, she recognized pieces of paper that people referred to, and then left town: maps. She understood maps, and found an abandoned one stuffed into a trash container near a hotel. Hours of intent study of the shoreline gave her an uncertain belief that Egypt was to the east, but she wasn't sure; the maps looked different, and the coast had changed from what she could barely remember. But she took the map, and a length of her hair to a man she'd identified as a wig-maker, and displayed the braid. His surprise was evident; the length was as long as she was, but Ghean's lack of language prevented him from questioning her deeply. He gave her money, and she stared at it, having no idea if it was a fair price. Lifting the handful of coins and paper, she flattened out the map, and jabbed a finger at the corner she thought was Egypt. "Will this take me there?" she asked, knowing the tongue she used would be utterly foreign to him.

Despite that, he seemed to understand, and pointed elsewhere on the map. "You're here," he told her, and gestured with a finger, circling himself and her with the movement, and then touched a point on the map again. "You're here," he repeated, and Ghean touched the same point.

"Here," she echoed. The wig-maker grinned and nodded. Ghean tapped the money, and drew a line with her finger across the map to what she thought was Egypt. "Here?" she asked.

He nodded again. "You can take a bus. They're rickety and they take a while, but you can get to Egypt." He touched her end of the map, and said, "Egypt," again.

"Egypt," she repeated dutifully. "Here, Egypt?" She touched the two points on the map again.

Another nod. "On the bus."

Ghean shook her head. "Bus?"

The wig-maker pointed over her shoulder, at one of the four-wheeled vehicles. "Bus," he said, and then, taking pity on her, he brought her to the bus station, and arranged her ticket across the top of Africa. As she boarded, he gave her another handful of money, and she folded her fingers around it with a grateful smile. "Thank you," she said. Those words she had learned.

The bus terrified her at first. Leave this, run away, back to the ocean, back to Atlantis where it's safe, no fast strange things to carry us across the sand, go back home where it's safe, where we're safe in the darkness, the frightened one chanted, an overwhelming litany that drowned out even the patient voice for hours.

It faded, though, as Ghean began to become fascinated with the speed the vehicle travelled with, the efficiency of crossing the country on the rough roads. Once the fear fell away, she concentrated, with the patient one's encouragement. The language was vastly different, but people on the bus were friendly, and they gave her words for things. She would ask and point, and they would laugh and answer. By the time she reached Cairo, she could make rudimentary sentences, and she knew the year was 1914. It meant nothing to her.

In Cairo, she found caravans that went into the desert, ferrying people to see the Sphinx and the pyramids. She sold another length of hair, for a lesser price than the first had gone for, but she didn't have enough words to barter. Without worrying, she joined a caravan, riding her camel with the ease of muscle memory. She refused to think about that too deeply, afraid thought would tumble her off the animal's back. Instead, she idly stroked her wedge of stone, and waited for the familiar Sphinx to appear ahead of her.

When it finally did, she let out a cry of dismay, turning to the guide and gesturing at her face. "Nose! Nose gone!"

He laughed, white teth bright in a dark face. "Shot off by Napoleon's cannon," he explained.

None of the words made sense to her, and so she simply turned back to the great Sphinx in horror. It had been new, not quite completed, when she'e left Egypt, and now it was so worn and old. Nervously, she turned back to the guide, pointing to the Sphinx again. "How old?" she demanded.

He shrugged easily. "Forty-five hundred, five thousand years old. About that."

Ghean stared at him blankly, trying to understand the numbers. She shook her head unhappily, and held up her hands, fingers spread. "How many?"

"What, fingers? Ten. Ten fingers."

"Ten," she repeated, and looked worriedly at the Sphinx. "How many tens?"

The guide hesitated, then slid off his camel, encouraging her to do the same. She did, crouching in the sand next to him. He drew out ten marks in the sand. "Ten," he said patiently. Ghean nodded, short hair brushing along her chin.

Rapidly, but neatly, he made nine more rows of ten marks. "Ten tens," he explained. "One hundred." She nodded again, and he made a box around the one hundred. "Ten of these make one thousand. Do you understand?"

Ghean did, but lapsed into her own language to express her understanding. "Yes. Ten times one hundred is a thousand. I understand." She nodded, dark eyes on his face. "Ten one hundred," she said carefully, in his words. "One thousand."

He grinned. "Good. Yes." Then he pointed at the Sphinx. "Five," he said, and held up five fingers. "Five thousand years old."

Ghean's chin jerked up and she stared at the Sphinx. "Five thousand years?" The brilliant blue sky around the Sphinx dimmed and fogged, and blackness swept in to comfort her.

She woke slowly, to a familiar scene: the desert left in darkness by the sun, and the crackle of a fire just beyond the edge of the tent. For a moment she relaxed, smiling, wondering when her mother would come get her for the evening meal.

Firelight glinted on the metal post of the tent, and memory rushed home with a painful blow. Her mother had been dead five thousand years. Five thousand years.

Not even the patient one was prepared for that much time to have gone by. A wordless sound of loss ripped out of Ghean, shattering the quiet night. Camels, close by, bellowed in irritation at the unexpected scream. Ghean curled on her side as she had done for so long, no longer floating free, but weighed down by gravity and unfathomable years having passed. Panicked fingers reached out far enough to find her stone, and she drew it close to her chest.

The guide came running, kneeling at her side to check on her. Ghean rocked violently, the patient voice trying to sooth her terrified thoughts while she tried to force her mind to encompass the number of years that had passed.

She could not do it. Five thousand years! the frightened voice screamed at her. Five thousand years! Too much has changed! Go home! Go where it is safe, where nothing ever changes! Go home to Atlantis!

Five thousand years is a long time to wait for vengeance, the patient one whispered in counterpoint. If we go back now, we'll never get what we want. We'll never have revenge. We'll never rebuild Atlantis. The years aren't so important. That we're free now, that's what's important. We're free now. Stay free. The world has changed. If we don't change with it, we'll never survive.

Ghean whimpered softly, as the guide sat beside her, helpless. Get up, the patient one urged. Look at the world as it is now. Find a way to accept it. We've survived this long. We're learning new words, and we know we can sell the hair for money. Get up, and face the world. Let us survive.

Ghean hiccuped, an unhappy sound, and climbed blindly to her feet, her stone held against her chest by crossed arms. The guide came to his feet as well, following her beyond the perimeter of firelight. There, Ghean looked up into the sky, seeing it for the first time.

She had looked up every night while she was in the water, but she had denied what was there, never truly seeing it. The stars had wheeled in their cycle, no longer where they'd been, distorted almost beyond recognition. Shaking, she searched the skies, and slowly picked out the sign of her House, the great ram.

She was the last member of her House. "Mother," she whispered, and then turned towards the Sphinx, a great shadow in the darkness. Never looking at the ground, she worked her way through the cold desert night, over spilling slopes of sand, until she reached the ancient structure. Slowly, methodically, she circled it, fingers trailing along the stone, until finally she came around to the front of it again, and knelt in the sand.

Five thousand years. Ghean sat before the Sphinx, letting the factions of her mind war between retreat and acceptance, detatched from the battle as thoroughly as if it took place in another mind entirely. She watched the quick desert sunrise color the stone structure before her, as it had done thousands of years ago, and still she did not move. In very little time, she could feel the sun burning her pale flesh, as it had once burned Methos', the same sun in this same desert, hundreds of lifetimes ago. She smelled the sand heating around her, and tasted sweat forced from her body, and she listened distantly to the argument in her mind.

As the sun reached its apex, she decided. Slowly, she leaned forward from the waist, bowing deeply to the great Sphinx, until the sand touched her nose. Eyes closed to the heat rising from the sand, she chose the patient voice, and folded the frightened one away, deep into her mind. With a grace remembered from a childhood long gone, Ghean unfolded from the sand, lifting her piece of Atlantean stone with her, and walked out of the desert to claim a destiny five thousand years delayed.