There were more turtles inside the city. Some swam like guards around the perimeters, circling around and around the glimmering structures. We wove in and out of the grid of streets, my turtle slowing down in front of the murals so I could see that many of them were maps like the ones on St. Beatrice.
Who lives here?
The voice took a moment to answer in my head. The Men of the Sea. But they are gone. We keep the city safe.
Where did they go?
We do not know.
Except for the turtles, the city was deserted. The turtle was too big to enter the buildings, but he hovered near the windows so I could see into the rooms. Most of them contained furniture, couches and beds and tables made of coral and mother-of-pearl, decorated with seashells, some of them turned over as though whoever had lived there had left in a hurry. There was something timeless about the scenes in front of me. The Men of the Sea, whoever they were, could have left yesterday. Or a hundred years ago.
When we’d been through the whole city, the turtle glided over to a central domed structure, a temple, I decided, and we swam inside through a huge window that seemed to have been made for him. We found ourselves in a cavernous hall, with the seashell murals decorating the walls and tables and chairs in rows. They were made from the same mother-of-pearl as the buildings. At one end of the hall was a huge throne, beautiful and empty, constructed from red coral and decorated with seashells and gold coins and gemstones.
“King Triton’s throne,” I whispered to myself.
Yes, the turtle answered. Now I will take you to the place.
Which place?
The place you were told to go.
You mean my father? Do you know my father?
The turtle didn’t send any response, and I had a moment of doubt. This was crazy. What was I thinking? Of course Dad hadn’t been here. It was ridiculous. If he had discovered the city where King Triton lived, if he had discovered a race of giant turtles who could communicate without talking, if he had found the ships’ graveyard, well, we would have known about it, wouldn’t we?
But we had thought that about Ha’aftep Canyon. Maybe this was a place like that, a place that Dad had wanted me to know about, a place he didn’t want to reveal to the world. Because like Ha’aftep Canyon, it would be destroyed if people knew about it. I imagined tours through the city streets, gift shops selling shells plucked from the buildings, the turtles placed in cages for viewing.
The turtle made his high chirping sound, and a door in the wall behind the throne slowly swung open, revealing a winding tunnel lined with the pearly, light-emitting substance that surrounded the city. We swam through and the doors closed behind us.
We were now inside a long tunnel. Waiting for us at the end was another turtle, standing sentry before a small, rectangular room. This turtle was bigger than my turtle and his face had a wizened, wrinkled look to it that made me think he was very, very old. He warbled in a high reedy whistle and my turtle warbled something back before settling down on the floor of the cavern. I waited, but he didn’t offer any explanation. I walked around the inside of the shell, trying to figure out why he’d brought me here and what I was supposed to do.
The walls of the room were covered with more of the shells, arranged in shapes that reminded me of hieroglyphics. At the far end, an entire wall was covered with tiny white stones and shells. They had been set into its surface, forming lines that radiated out from a central circle in imitation of the rays of the sun. Was that it? A picture of the sun? Was it another code? Clearly this is what the turtle had wanted me to see.
I stared at the pattern until the lines of shells blurred together and I had to stand back to see the design made by the winding lines.
And then, finally, I knew what it was.
This was the next map. Dad had been leading me here all along.
I tried to imprint it upon my brain, to take a mental picture of it so I would remember later, but it took me a while to get oriented. Before I could try to match this map to the maps in my head and figure out what it was, my turtle looked up sharply, as though he’d heard something, and whistled to the other turtle, who started to move around as though he was very agitated, churning up a lot of sand in the chamber. My turtle chirped and wheeled around, swimming back out through the tunnel, his flippers rowing through the water. I couldn’t see anything now, just the white of the churning water as we flew away from the map I’d come all this way to see.
“No! No!” I pounded on the shell, not trusting my inner voice and yelling out loud at the back of the turtle’s head. “We can’t leave! Go back! I didn’t memorize it yet!”
But he didn’t respond. We swam out of the throne room and then out of the city, very quickly now, up through the trench. Frantically, I took out my compass and kept track of our direction so I’d be able to find my way back. We sped through the dark part of the ocean and then into the shallower, lighter waters, filled with all that bright sea life.
What’s wrong?
Danger.
What kind?
No answer. The turtle seemed scared, swiveling its head back and forth to search the ocean around him.
We raced up toward the surface once again.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture the map. But I hadn’t looked at it long enough. It was the most frustrating kind of work, trying to remember something I’d hardly seen.
This time, the beautiful fish and bright-red coral held no fascination for me. I shut my eyes and tried to remember, but all I could come up with was a mosaic of shells with no logic or order.
The water around me became lighter and lighter and then suddenly, the door was opening and I was tipped out into the shallow water. Before I knew what was happening, the turtle had disappeared and I was standing on the beach, warm turquoise water up to my waist, blinking up at the bright sun as though nothing had happened.