I see a vision. A wall of water is going to crash like an avalanche through the city over buildings and people. It will break them. It will drown them. It will leave bodies strewn like flotsam among the rubble.

 

I run screaming to the market: “A great wave is coming! Flee now!”

 

A woman selling fish sneers. “The gods have told you this? Poseidon speaks to you?”

 

We can see the water from here. The sea is calm, the sea is false, the sea is lying. The market is crowded. The port of Phalara is busy. And yet to me it all looks like ruins.

 

Tears stream down my face. “A wave is coming!”

 

A baker looks at me from the doorway of his shop. “Demons,” he mutters.

 

No, it is revenge. I cursed Poseidon, and he cursed me in return. He has made me know things, true things. The woman selling fish abandoned her ill husband in another province of Greece. The baker has a cache of coins buried next to his oven.

 

They scorn me, but I do not hate them. I hate Poseidon. I want to deny him his victims. “We must flee. Run! Now!”

 

No one looks my way. Have they all suddenly gone deaf? Is this another trick of that god?

 

“You should flee, harridan.” People laugh. They were listening. They see me tear out my hair. Some of them know me, know my husband and family were lost last month to a shipwreck. They know I am mad with grief, taunted by the god of the sea.

 

The wave is coming. I flee as fast as my old legs can run out of the city, past the vineyards, and halfway up the highest hill. A dark line rises on the sea at the horizon. I close my eyes, but I have already seen what will happen…

 

When Poseidon has finished his devastation, I return, passing bodies carried up into the vineyards, climbing over rubble, wading through stinking pools filled with ashes and trash, and there, next to the baker’s oven where the soil has washed away, is a leather purse, and inside it, I know, will be silver.

 

I shriek at the sea, the water now calm and stained brown by its plunder. “Take this curse from me!”

 

Suddenly I stand among a crowd of people on a hillock overlooking a long beach. The sea rages in a storm. Wind drives cold raindrops like needles into my face, and Poseidon howls jubilant at imminent death. Again, I know what will happen.

 

I know this place, too, this wild seashore. I have lived here since I was a lass, the word they use here in Ireland for girl. We live conquered by the people of the neighboring isle, Britain, which now wages war against Spain. The defeated Spanish ships sail past us, en route to escape.

 

Or rather, they try to sail through the storm. Their captains do not know these waters, these shores and their cliffs, and they sail lost. We are forbidden to help them as we watch Poseidon drive them aground. Wood rends against rocks, men scream into the smashing waves—hundreds, hundreds of voices crying out with their last breaths.

 

I wail like the banshee that I am, and banshees are respected here. British soldiers hunch through the wind to capture survivors, who will be strung up on gallows. But a few survivors will wash ashore farther down amid the rushes, and I will send our men to help them escape.

 

Madness is a thing of the gods and those who worship mad gods. Madness is no longer mine. My curse is immortality.

 

And so I am tormented, life after life, by Poseidon’s earthquakes, monsters, floods, drownings, and wrecks. Life after life, I fight back, each time with the skills the passing centuries give me to use: navigator, doctor, admiral, meteorologist, seismologist, hydrologist, and oceanographer. I learn his tricks and how to defeat them.

 

I save lives. But everywhere he can, he manifests to mock me.

 

As I plan a barrier across the River Thames to guard London against storm surges from the sea, the ground shakes beneath me. The building rattles, my chair tips, and I fly backwards. My coworkers felt nothing.

 

As I install a seismometer as part of Japan’s earthquake early warning system, I return to my car and find it filled with water. The police vow to discover the vandal but do not notice the god’s bubbling laughter.

 

As I examine maps and meteorological data to predict the path of a hurricane, the wind in my mind shrieks like ten thousand doomed souls that only I can hear. I vow to work through my deafness to save every soul.

 

Humanity’s mastery of the physical world grows to encompass the Earth and beyond.

 

As I work at a space station, I discover I am outside Poseidon’s realm and reach. For the first time in well more than two thousand years, my god-haunted ears enjoy silence. In space, no one can hear ancient Earth gods scream. In that peace I devise a plan to undo the curse and avenge myself.

 

Step by step, life by life, my work continues.

 

Now I serve aboard a spaceship, a small, spry vessel with a pioneer crew of six flitting around an ice asteroid as large as a glacier. We are orbiting the planet Mars. The asteroid is one of many icy behemoths gently prodded year after year from the asteroid belt toward the red planet.

 

The pilot points to a sonar projection. “Here’s a fault line,” she says. “We can crack off a piece here.”

 

I get to work setting the laser array. “Ready.”

 

A burst hits deep within the crevice, and water explodes into vapor. Step by step, nudge by nudge, pieces break off and fall toward the planet. They will evaporate into the atmosphere, which grows steadily thicker and cloudier. In some places, it already rains on Mars. In a few places, water flows again, collecting into ponds.

 

Eventually, Mars will have oceans.

 

I glance up at Earth, that blue marble ruled by a mad water god. My curse on him has come true. He is trapped in the gravity well of that planet, where little by little humans whittle away his power. I have escaped to create a rival secular sea.

 

I mutter, “Your games are getting old.” He cannot hear me, but he can see what I am doing as Mars slowly turns as blue as Earth. I am not like a god who plays with mortal lives as if they were toys. Here, he can no longer force rebirth on me when my lifetime comes to its natural end.

 

My anger has turned to pity. I send him a prayer.

 

“Oh great Poseidon, change your ways. Learn from me. You, too, have the power to refashion a world into a blessing.”

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