For all Helena's worries, bath night didn't turn out to be difficult. Giulia already knew, having heard Luca talk about it, that she would have to be careful which way she scrubbed – a sponge or cloth pushed in the wrong direction could fold scales or even tear them, which would hurt. Alberto gave her some advice about how to groom her fins and make sure nothing got stuck in between them, and after that the biggest challenge was figuring out what to do with her tail, which the bathtub was not designed to accommodate.
Once she was clean, she dried off in front of the mirror to watch herself transform. As Luca had observed, her sea monster eyes were pink, with the same vertical pupil the boys had. Giulia remembered reading in a book that this was a characteristic of creatures who needed to be able to see in both the light and the dark, like cats. That made sense for sea monsters, since some of them lived in the well-lit shallows while others were found in the depths, like Luca's uncle.
It was funny to think... not long ago, Giulia hadn't even believed in sea monsters. Now she was one and it was the most fun she'd ever had. And if the genie had a problem with that... well, that was his problem. The other sea monsters were fine with her, and if he didn't think meeting a whale was cool, maybe that was just because he'd never met one.
After that it was Alberto's turn in the bathroom. While he washed up and brushed his teeth, Giulia took a look in her room to see how they could make space for the boys to stay over. She pulled the cover off the bed and shook out the sand the genie had left there, then swept it up into a dustpan and tossed it out the window. The main things they were going to have to move were the planks and the biggest piece of amphora. They couldn't put them in the treehouse in case it rained again, and there was already stuff under the bed. Where could they stash them inside?
The best temporary solution seemed to be putting them in the hallway and hoping nobody tried on them in the middle of the night. When Alberto was done with his bath, they got to work cleaning up.
Partway through this, there was a knock on the door. A moment later, they heard Massimo's voice. "Alberto! Giulietta! Luca is here."
"Finally!" Alberto said. They put down the big piece of amphora and hurried down the steps to meet their friend. After their own brief experiences with Uncle Ugo they were expecting him to look slightly traumatized, but instead he was beaming.
"What took you so long?" Giulia asked.
"I was talking to Uncle Ugo," he replied. "You guys, you won't believe this. He gave me a fossil – it's this coiled-up shell. I can't take it out of the water because the air will damage it, so I'll show you tomorrow. And he knows who Oannes is!"
His friends had been planning to tell him about Professor Hamid and her theory about Alberto's shipwreck, but that stopped them dead. "He does?" asked Giulia.
"Yeah! He said Oannes was a wizard who taught humans how to read and us how to Change! There's a woman who knows more about it. He called her the Librarian of the Deep."
"A library, like the genie said!" Giulia was delighted.
"I know!" Luca could picture it: a sunken building with columns and scrolls like the big university library in Genova, but at the bottom of the sea. It would doubtless be filled with amazing things from both the human world and the underwater one, things the sea monsters had made long ago when they were doing things like building water conduits and engraving things on huge slabs of stone...
And killing humans who they thought had insulted them?
Luca shook his head a little to get rid of that awful thought, wishing he hadn't had to banish it over and over. "If we see the genie again," he went on, "we should tell him about her. Uncle Ugo was also telling me that he's been to even deeper places than the Mediterranean. When you look at maps and gloves, there's just so much ocean. Humans live all over the world, so you'd think we would, too, and Uncle Ugo says that's true! Way up north there are people who live under the ice and hunt walruses."
"Someday we'll have to go see for ourselves," Alberto decided. "We'll go all around the world and see who's there, on land and in the water."
"And Giulia can come, too, now," Luca agreed.
"Of course," Giulia said. "Humans are different everywhere. In China they eat with chopsticks instead of forks, and in India they have cows but they don't eat them, they just let them wander around because they're sacred. Imagine how different sea monsters will live in different places!" The thought was thrilling... exploring the oceans of the world would be like exploring the jungle, back before everywhere had been mapped and all the people had met each other. Who knew what they'd find? Giulia's new life was more and more full of incredible possibilities all the time. To think, her mother was worried about school of all things!
"It's too bad there are no books about it," Luca said.
"We can write the books ourselves," Giulia suggested.
Luca's face lit up, not unlike the Christmas tree in the corner of the kitchen. "We can!" He'd never thought of writing a book himself, but of course he could. He just needed to learn enough things to fill one!
The kids continued to make plans while they finished cleaning up the room, neatening books and stacks of records, trying to make it as tidy as possible in order to justify their excuses to Professor Hamid. It was Luca who noticed something that hadn't occurred to either of the others.
"Where did the genie's bottle go?" he asked. They'd found the other five and put them back on the shelf above the bed, in a neat row organized by height – but the lopsided one made of plain cloudy glass was missing.
"I don't know," said Giulia. She'd forgotten about it. When she'd made her wish the other day, she'd just dropped the bottle and run to find her swimsuit so she could jump in the ocean and test the result. "Did it roll under something?"
She crawled around on the floor, checking under her bed and desk, while the boys peered behind furniture and moved the stacks they'd made, just in case they'd accidentally hidden the bottle while cleaning up. There was no sign of it.
"Maybe the genie took it away with him," Luca suggested. "It could be kind of like his house, right?"
"Maybe," said Giulia. She'd read stories about genies, but none of them had ever suggested what such beings did outside of appearing and granting wishes. They had to do something, though. It wasn't like they could just sit around in their lamps or bottles all day, right?
"It's not like we need it," Alberto said. "It's not even one of the pretty ones, and we already know what was in it."
"I bet the Professor would have been interested in the genie, though," Luca said.
Alberto dismissed that with a wave of his hand. "She probably wouldn't believe it even if she saw him. She didn't even believe in sea monsters. We asked her. And she thinks she knows about the history of the ocean!"
Luca thought about that for a moment... Alberto clearly thought it was funny, but Luca wasn't so sure. "A historian's job is to figure out what happened long ago, isn't it? If she doesn't know about us, she'll never get it right."
"You're not gonna tell her, are you?" asked Giulia.
"Of course not!" Luca replied quickly. "I'm just saying, it doesn't seem fair. Especially if us and the humans used to be friends. Uncle Ugo said that's what Oannes wanted, but the humans killed him because they wanted to steal his magic." He didn't want to mention that his uncle had said they'd eaten Oannes. That was just too horrible.
"Doesn't sound like we were friends," Alberto observed.
"A lot of history is humans not even being friends with each other," Giulia said. "I guess it makes sense if we weren't friends with sea monsters either." Those mosaics just showed that the Romans had known about sea monsters, not that they liked them.
"The genie made it sound like we weren't very friendly, either," Luca reminded her.
"Hey, I think we're done cleaning!" Alberto interrupted, trying to push his friends away from this dismal topic. "What should we do now? We've got cards!" He pulled a biscuit tin out of a drawer and opened it, revealing an assortment of cards from four different decks. "I know there's at least one of each in here. We could play Go Fish!" Alberto grinned, proud of his own joke.
Card games and bad puns turned out to be acceptable as a distraction, but only partially. As they sorted out the cards into a usable deck and then began to play, Alberto and Giulia told Luca what they'd learned from Professor Hamid. He agreed that it was cool they might know the history of this ship so exactly, but a shadow crossed his face when they mentioned that she'd said she would see if she could find any ancient Egyptian stories about sea monsters. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear them, if those were the sorts of sea monsters the genie had known.
When Massimo told them it was time for bed, the kids got into their pajamas and the boys unrolled their sleeping bags on the floor. Giulia pulled the covers up to her chin and thought it was nice to be back in a bed tonight. The weight of the blanket was comforting, and she definitely liked having something underneath her rather than just floating in the water. Maybe if she slept over at Luca's more often, she would get used to it... or maybe she would just always prefer sleeping on land.
"Luca," she said, as they settled down, "the first time you slept out of the water, was that weird for you?"
"Not the first time," he replied. "I just nodded off while Alberto and I were talking and I didn't realize it until I woke up. The second time was the first night in your treehouse, and I was so tired it didn't really bother me. Although one morning I woke up..."
"... and you'd been lying on your arm and it fell asleep," Alberto interrupted with a grin, "and you woke me up in a panic."
"I was afraid it was gonna fall off or something," Luca admitted.
"So it didn't really bug you, huh?" Giulia asked.
"Sometimes it kinda does. Sometimes I'll have dreams about falling, which I never do underwater, or I'll dream that something is sitting on my chest and squishing me, because of the gravity. And I still don't like blankets very much. It feels too much like being caught in a net."
Giulia knew that – in Genova he'd always kicked the covers off, except on very cold and rainy nights. "How about you, Alberto?" she asked.
"I don't remember my first time doing either," he said. "I've done both for my whole life. Why, did being underwater bother you?"
"Kinda," said Giulia, and described how it kept making her feel like she was falling out of bed. "Which do you like better?"
"The surface,"s aid Alberto. "Because you can look up, or out the window, and see the moon and stars."
"I think underwater," Luca decided. "It's just more comfortable. On land isn't bad, but..."
"Don't worry, I get it," Giulia assured him.
With the end of the year approaching, the sun rose late the next morning. Luca, Giulia, and Alberto were up considerably earlier, knowing Professor Hamid would be back to see Alberto's finds. It was colder and windier than it had been the previous day, though the sky was clear and the man on the radio said it wasn't likely to rain. All three dressed in long sleeves and sweaters, doing their best to look normal and not give Helena any more reason to be nervous.
They had breakfast, and Giulia flipped through a very old book she hadn't looked at in some years, about fossils and extinct animals. She found the page with illustrations of ammonites, squid-like creatures that had once inhabited the oceans in their coiled shells, and showed it to Luca.
"Is this what your uncle brought you?" she asked.
"Yes!" Luca said. "That's exactly what it looked like... that one!" He pointed with the end of his fork to a type with a ridged shell. "What's it say?"
Giulia frowned at the label next to the illustration, doing her best to wrap her tongue around the unfamiliar, Greek-derived name. "Pleuroceras solare," she said. "From the late Jurassic of Europe. It says it lived a hundred and eighty-five million years ago."
"Whoa." The size of the world had surprised Luca, but the age of it was something else. Grandma talked about things that had happened fifty years ago, and Old Nonna Castagnola had a story about how she'd lost her tail to a leopard seal, which might have been seventy or eighty years ago. His history classes at school, however, talked about stuff that happened hundreds of years ago, the Romans and Egyptians had been thousands of years ago, and now here was something millions of years old, from before there were humans or sea monsters or anything else familiar... and the most amazing part was that he had held it in his hand.
"The museum we went to said that people find fossils all over the world," Luca said thoughtfully, crunching on a piece of biscottate. "But imagine how many must be at the bottom of the sea where humans never see them."
"Another thing we'll have to look for when we go around the world," Alberto decided.
Helena laughed. "Are you kids sure you're going to have time to do all these things?"
"Somebody's gotta at least try," said Luca. "There's just so many things nobody knows."
"Well, you do seem to have started a trend of sea monsters wanting to be better-educated," Helena told him. "Arturo was asking me the other day what you do at school and whether he would be allowed to go, too. I told him that was up to his mother, and he looked very disappointed... I think he figured she wouldn't approve."
"Maybe I could have my Mom talk to her," Luca suggested.
"I wonder if Arturo's gonna be back for chocolate again today," said Giulia.
"I have no idea, but I'm keeping the pot on the counter just in case," Helena said.
By the time they finished breakfast, Arturo had not yet appeared, and curiously, neither had Professor Hamid. Luca was impatient to show his friends the gifts Uncle Ugo had brought him, but Alberto wanted to be there to see the Professor's reaction to the things he'd brought up from the shipwreck. So, after some frustrated waiting, the kids decided they would head up to the hostel and find her.
Portorosso's hostel was a three-storey building painted pale blue, with a little shop on the first floor that sold magazines, newspapers, and comic books. The upper levels had four rooms which the owner, Signor Gamacchio, would rent out to strangers passing through the town. So far as anyone could remember, all four had never been occupied at the same time.
Giulia was the first one to go inside. Normally pushing the shop's door open would have made a bell jingle. Today, the door was propped open an inch or so with a wedge of wood – and when Giulia opened it further, a bucket of cold, soapy water came down on her head. She felt the strange prickling sensation of transforming, and even before she heard familiar laughter, she was pretty sure she could guess who was responsible.
Luca hurried to pull the bucket off her head, while Ercole, standing next to a magazine rack with a mop in his hand, laughed heartily. Alberto ran up to give the older boy a shove, but Ercole put a hand in the middle of his chest and held him at arm's length, where Alberto could do nothing but swing impotently at him.
"Are you okay?" Luca asked, trying to stay between Giulia and Ercole. Nothing was said, they all just knew this was one person they didn't want finding out about Giulia's wish.
"Yeah, I'm fine," she grumbled. The water was not only cold and soapy, it had already been used to mop the floor and so was filthy and full of grit. She pulled her hat off and shook her head hard, trying to dry out her fins and turn them back into hair while Ercole was preoccupied with Alberto.
But it was too late – Ercole had already realized both who he'd just soaked, and the unexpected result. For a moment he was too surprised to say anything, which gave Alberto the opportunity to finally push him over, taking a shelf of comics with them. Unfortuantely, it didn't take Ercole long to pick himself up and resume doing what he did best, which was being obnoxious.
"Spewlia?" he sneered, as she wiped water off her face. "I don't believe it! You've spent so much time with these sea monsters, you've turned into one!"
"What, are you jealous?" asked Alberto.
"Jealous?" Ercole frowned at him. "Why would I be jealous?"
"Maybe because you know we're smarter than you are," Alberto replied. "And better-looking. And faster at all three race events."
Ercole rolled his eyes. "You cheated, number one," he snarled, "and number two, even if that were true it still wouldn't make it worthwhile to turn into a slimy fish every time I got wet. Now all three of you get away from me." He waved them away as if shooing a mosquito. "If sea monster is contagious I don't want to catch it."
Giulia scowled. She knew that Ercole never let anything go, so he would doubtless be giving her misery about this forever. "You won't catch it just by standing there. We'd have to bite you. Like vampires." She bared her teeth, but the effect was ruined a moment later when she dried out enough to change back.
Luca and Alberto took up positions on either side of her, also doing their best to look fierce. Ercole glanced at each of their faces in turn.
"I don't believe you," he said, with just a hint of trepidation.
"Wanna test it?" Alberto asked. "Luca, we'll hold him down, and you do the thing."
"No, thanks," said Luca, making a face. "He probably tastes like whatever he puts in his hair."
"What is going on down here?" demanded the voice of Signor Gamacchio. He came down the stairs into the shop and looked around, blinking through his spectacles. These were found and very thick, and with his sharp nose they made him look like a tall, thin owl.
"Nothing," said Ercole quickly. "Just joking around with my friends, the sea monsters."
"He put a bucket of water over the door!" said Luca, pointing.
"Look at my shirt!" Giulia showed the hostel owner how it had been stained by the dirty water.
Signor Gamacchio took in the puddle on the floor and the rack of comics that had been knocked into it. "Ercole!" he barked. "I told you to clean that floor, but you've just made a bigger mess!"
"It was only a prank!" Ercole protested. "Besides, he pushed me."
"A prank that ruined a dozen copies of the San Giuseppe Gazetta!" Signor Gammachio stomped over to pull the wet newspapers out of the rack by the door. "You're fired!"
"I only started work here yesterday," complained Ercole.
"And you're finished today! A boy your age ought to know better." Signor Gamacchio pointed to the door. "Partisci!"
Ercole dropped his mop on the floor and stormed out, pausing to glare at the kids and draw a finger across his neck before slamming the door behind him. Giulia stuck out her tongue and thumbed her nose at him.
"I only hired him as a favour for his father," said Signor Gamacchio, starting to clean up the mess. "Clearly that was a mistake. It's his parents who are to blame, really. This is what happens when children are raised with privilege. Alberto, I imagine you're here for La Giornale for Massimo? Let me see if I have any that are dry."
"No," said Alberto. "I mean, yes, he'll want one."
"But we're also looking for Professor Hamid," Giulia said.
"Ah. Let me call her."
Signor Gamacchio went back upstairs to knock on his guest's door, while the kids righted the rack Alberto had knocked over. Just handling wet paper was not enough to make them begin transforming, but all three still quickly wiped their hands on their shirts or trousers when the Professor came downstairs.
"Morning, children," she said, noting the new face in their midst. "You must be Luca. Signor Gamacchio here was telling me how surprised he was I didn't see all three of you at supper last night. He says you're inseparable."
"That's me," said Luca. "I had to stay home and have dinner with my uncle, but he actually turned out to be kind of cool."
Signor Gamacchio himself went to continue cleaning up, while Professor Hamid made sure she had everything in her bag and then followed the kids back down to the Piazza. She held her jacket closed tightly at her throat to keep the wind out.
"I called a colleague in Napoli last night," she said as they walked. "He's working on a mythological encyclopedia of ancient Egypt, and I asked him if he knew anything about sea monsters in their stories. He looked it up and called back this morning, and do you know what he said? He couldn't find anything about sea monsters at all."
"Nothing?" Giulia was surprised.
"Really?" Luca was also startled. If there were humans with no stories about sea monsters, did that mean there were also sea monsters who didn't know about humans?
"No," she said. "In fact, in Egyptian stories, supernatural water creatures always seem to be friendly. There were beings they called Abtu, which means from the west, because they came from far out in the Great Green. They were supposed to guide ships during sea voyages, and they helped the goddess Isis gather up the hidden pieces of Orisis' body after he was slain by Set. There were even heavenly Abtu who swam with the boat of Ra across the sky. Their queen was the goddess Hatmehit, who is drawn as a woman wearing a fish-shaped headdress."
"Wait, so they did know about sea monsters," Alberto said. "You just said they didn't."
"Well, sea monster is hardly the right way to describe them," Professor Hamid said. "The ancients thought of a hippopotamus as much more monstrous than an Abtu."
Luca took this in with wide eyes. If the ancient Egyptians thought sea monsters were friendly, then maybe things hadn't really been so bad back then. "Do you... have you ever heard of somebody called Oannes?" he asked.
Professor Hamid didn't seem to like the question. She gave him a suspicious look. "What books have you been reading?"
"I read a lot of books," said Luca, "but I heard about Oannes from my uncle."
"Well, did your uncle tell you that he came from outer space?" asked the Professor.
"No... he said Oannes, uh, came out of the ocean, and taught humans how to read."
Professor Hamid relaxed a little. "Oannes is some kind of Mesopotamian deity. He's usually drawn as a man with the skin of a fish draped over his head and shoulders... not unlike Hatmehit, actually," she said, sounding surprised by her own observation. "Supposedly, yes, he was the king of a land beneath the sea, and he taught writing and mathematics to the Sumerians. I don't know very much about it, since that's not really my area, but you'll find books being written by crackpots who think he was a space alien. You three have quite the interest in stories about fish people, don't you?"
"Like Massimo said, it's kind of a thing around here," Alberto replied.
She nodded. "Signor Gamacchio had this young man working for him, cleaning and such... he wasn't very polite but I asked him about your local sea monster legends, and funnily enough, he told me to ask you. He said you were the experts, and if you wouldn't tell me I could throw a bucket of water over you and then you'd talk. Is that some kind of local joke?"
"Kinda," Alberto said, "but if you explain it, it's not funny."
They arrived at the Pescheria and Giulia let them in the gate, and they headed upstairs to the kitchen.
"Did you two get your room cleaned?" Professor Hamid asked on the steps.
"Spic and span," Giulia promised.
"Great! I can't wait to see your artifacts."
Giulia opened the kitchen doors. "Mamma! We're back!"
Helena looked up from stirring a pot of chocolate on the stove – Arturo was sitting at the kitchen table, eagerly awaiting his cup.
"Bongiorno, Hafsah," Helena said.
"Good morning, Helena," Professor Hamid replied, with a puzzled look at this small boy dressed in nothing but a set of trousers made out of seagrass.
"This is Arturo," said Helena, remaining calm although her hand was shaking a bit as she stirred. "He's a neighbour's son. His mother doesn't make cioccolata so some mornings he comes here for a treat."
"I see," said Professor Hamid. She clearly had several more questions, but was too polite to ask them.
Giulia decided to offer some answers anyway. "He made those," she said. "So we bet him he couldn't actually wear them all week. He's doing pretty good. I thought they'd have fallen apart by now." She grinned nervously.
"He'd be doing better if he hadn't spilled chocolate down the front of his shirt," Helena joined in. "I've got it in the wash."
"It's been an eventful morning," Professor Hamid observed.
"Anyway, the stuff's in my room," said Alberto. "This way!" He hurried up the steps.
Professor Hamid and the other kids followed. They were going to have to keep the Professor upstairs for as long as they could, to be sure Helena had time to either send Arturo home or at least find him a shirt to wear. It didn't look like that would be a problem, though. As soon as she saw the chunk of amphora sitting in the hallway, the Professor knelt down to examine it more closely, absolutely entranced.
"It's got the handle with the stamp!" she said, delighted. "Did Stefano tell you to look for that?"
"No, this is just the piece I brought up," Alberto said, pretending humility. "It looked like the most important bit."
"It certainly is! This will tell us where the amphora was made, which will help us figure out what they were shipping in it," the Professor said happily. "Good work!"
"Aw, it was nothing," said Alberto. "Come and see the rest."
Professor Hamid was also interested in the glass bottles and the small items of jewelry and coins that Alberto had found, but these pretty items didn't get the same reaction that the big chunk of pottery had. Eager for more praise, Alberto assured her that there was plenty more still lying buried in the mud of the seafloor.
"A lot of it's under the column pieces," he said, "but I'm sure there's lots more I could dig up for you. There's plenty more smaller stuff, too."
"When we went down there yesterday we found a pin shaped like a dolphin," Luca said, "and more coins."
"And I found an oil lamp with a crab living in it," Giulia added.
Professor Hamid looked up, startled. "That's where you were yesterday? I thought you were just swimming. Do your parents really let you go diving at this time of year?"
"The water's not that cold," said Giulia.
"Yes, but the waves can get high," Professor Hamid said. "Aren't you worried about being hurt getting back in your boat?"
"We don't use a boat," said Alberto. "We swim there."
"How far is this wreck from shore?" the Professor asked.
"We don't start from shore, we start from the island out in the bay," said Giulia, starting to realize that they were getting into dangerous territory. They could joke around, but they couldn't give their guest any reason to think something actually weird was going on. "The boat is just to get out to the island."
"We've got kind of a hideout out there," Luca put in.
"But we can't take you there, because it's an even bigger mess than this room was," Alberto added.
"I see," said Professor Hamid. She clearly still thought this was all a bit odd, but understood that it was none of her business. "I would love to make some drawings of these items. Do you think your mother would let me use the kitchen? The light's better in there and there's more table space."
"I'll ask!" said Giulia, hurrying to the door. Maybe Arturo would be gone already. Or maybe they could get rid of him really quickly.
"Hey, Professor!" said Alberto. "Wanna see something else cool we found!" He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the snail shells they'd broken while decorating their sponge tree. "Look at this shell!"
"Oh, that's lovely," the Professor said, taking the pieces. "And look – the two halves go together perfectly."
"That's because he's the one who broke it," Luca couldn't resist pointing out.
Giulia darted down the stairs. Arturo was still at the kitchen table, now wearing one of Massimo's shirts, which absolutely engulfed him even with the sleeves rolled up. The neckline was slipping down over one of his shoulders, and he kept having to pull it back up again.
"Professor Hamid wants to use the kitchen table to do some drawing," she said.
Helena looked at her small guest. "Arturo, if this is going to be a habit I think we need to get you some clothes. If you keep doing this into January you're going to get frostbite."
"What's that?" asked Arturo.
"It's when your ears and the tips of your fingers freeze and they never thaw out again," said Giulia.
Arturo looked down at his hands, worried. "Can I bring my chocolate?" he asked Helena.
"If you're careful with it," she replied.