As my despair mounted, I prayed outright to the eel-tailed Maid of the Sea (whose teeth are fishbones and whelk-shells, whose wet breath smells only of salt, and cold, and death), though She was far more likely to answer Mister Dolomance than the likes of me. But then again, my elders had taught me his kind do not trust in invocations to free them from mishap, if their own strength proves unequal to the task. For they are a harsh people, the s
leepless ever-moving ones, even to themselves—unwilling to incur debts they do not wish to pay, even to the goddess who watches over all such wrack as we, the fertile ocean’s muck and cast-offs. Its children, lost at sea, or out of it.
As time wore on, meanwhile, the quartermaster grew friendly with me, giving me leave to eat raw fish from the common net, and stroking my hair as I did. “Do not be sad,” he would say, “the captain will tire of ye soon enough, like any other toy he plucks from the deep. ‘Sides which, were you bound for anywhere in particular? No? Then it’ll serve you just as well to stay a while wi’ us; just drift along, as if current-borne. See where that takes you.”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked him, sullen, picking bones from my flat, blunt man-teeth. Only to have him laugh aloud at my bitterness, matching it with his own.
“Do any of us?” he asked me, in return.
***
The answer, of course, being no. We all existed entirely subject to the captain’s whim, just as he himself was inwardly consumed by a seemingly-constant quest for novelty, sharp-panged as any mere bodily famishment. Those silver-penny eyes of his always scanning away at the horizon, seemingly incognizant of Mister Dolomance crouched like some lump of pure hatred made flesh at his side—though not so much ignorant of his closest companion’s feelings, I eventually came to see, as simply content to ignore them.
Rumours followed Parry, as with any other fatal man, so I listened to them whenever they were offered, eager for any possibility of escape. “Captain’s cursed, is what I ‘eard,” the second gunner said at mess, as the rum-cup was passed ‘round one way, the water-cup the other. “‘Twas laid on ‘im ‘ow ‘e can’t set foot on land . . . ”
The first gunner, impatient: “No, fool, for I’ve seen him do so, to his cost—it’s that he can’t stay on land, or he starts to bleed.”
“Aye,” the quartermaster broke in here, nodding sagely. “I was there as well, that same occasion, and saw what come out—enough t’fill a slaughterhouse trough, and him so pale t’start with! Which is why he stays afloat, these days, and sends Mister Dolomance out scoutin’ for prizes instead, settin’ him t’bite through anchor-ropes or gnaw holes in some other ship’s side. For it’s wrecks the captain wants, as we all know, and there’s no earthly reason why he should be content t’wait for ‘em to happen natural . . . not when he has so many other ways to make it so.”
But to what purpose? I almost asked, before thinking better of it. Answering myself, as I did, with the sudden realization: To cobble this ship of his ever-bigger with them, of course. To grow his kingdom—or increase his prison’s capacity, at the very least.
Salina Resurrecta, Bitch of Hell; Parry’s Doom they called it as well, whenever they thought him too deep-engaged in his arcane business to notice. A blot of a thing, literally engorged with flotsam from every prize it took and scuttled, hull gaping open maw-like at Captain Parry’s gesture to suck in whatever items he—or it?—most took a fancy to. Thus it increased in size, steadily, over the months I spent as just one more item of that literally damnable vessel’s cargo—sprouted fresh decks and hulling, masts and port-holes rabbit-breeding ‘til the whole ship sat taller against the waves with a veritable totem-pole of figureheads to guide it, a corpse-fed trail of destruction left behind in its ever-widening wake.
I remember the captain standing high in the foredeck, shaking that hex-bag he used to raise fog and draw storms out into the wind, full to its brim with less-than-sacred objects. These I saw variously, at differing times, when he would reach in and withdraw them for specific tasks: a wealth of red-gold hair, braided and knotted nine times nine (this aided in illusions); some dead babe’s finger, pickled in gin (he used it as a pointer, to navigate). An eyeball carved from ivory, set with the skull and crossed bones in fine black jet, was all that was left of the Bitch’s legendary former Captain Rusk, fashioned to replace one lost in battle and plucked from his barnacle-torn corpse after Parry had him keel-hauled, scraping him dead on his own ship’s bottom-side—a trophy for luck, perhaps, though Parry sometimes raised it to his ear and gave that cat’s-wince smile of his, as if it whispered advice to him.
But then there was an idol of dark wood, too, so gnarled one could barely ascertain its shape and studded all over with rusted nails, staining its weathered skin like blood—who had Parry stolen that from, and why? Bone fragments, sea-glass, scrimshaw, plus what I took to be a serrated tooth from Mister Dolomance’s smile, knocked violently free at its root. And deep down, far beyond my reach, though I caught the occasional teasing glimpse of it, now and then . . .
. . . my skin, contradictory heart of all I was, reduced to one more fetish, one more weapon in Parry’s arsenal. One more tool to bend my and the shark’s great Mother to his all-too-human will.
“Who was it cursed him, though?” I demanded, eventually, scrabbing for some sort of detail to use against Parry, some way out of this closing trap. To which the quartermaster replied, musingly—
“Now, that I can’t say, young Ciaran. Only that it happened quick enough, without warning, some time after he first took the Bitch in mutiny, I think, and laid our old captain down. So perhaps it was Solomon Rusk’s work, not that I ever saw him do for any who rose against him with weapons other than sword and fist, previous. Still, keel-haulin’ is an ill death, a singularly painful end . . . and it does give you time t’think on things, I can only s’pose, when you’re down there under-hull . . . ”
“How foolish he’d been to bring Parry on, in the first place,” I suggested.
A nod. “Maybe so. Rusk took him off a Navy prize, y’see—found him down in the brig like cargo, iron-collared, and knew him a magician bound for the next port of call, to face the king’s justice: be burned alive or hanged in chains, depending on the Admiralty’s fancy. Those other blue-coats who swore the ship’s Articles t’keep their lives were mightily afeared of him already, sayin’ how he was accused of all manner of wizardous ill-doings—necromancy and doll-makin’ and catchin’ gales in a sieve, the way most sailors think only women do. But Captain Rusk, he wouldn’t be warned away, not once his temper was up, or his interest piqued. He’d have a man-witch at his beck and call, or know the reason why.”
“Most magicians die in the uncollaring, don’t they?”
“Aye, for them rigs don’t have locks, just seams—the witchfinders put ‘em on hot and force ‘em sealed, so’s they’ll waste all their effort on one last spell to keep from dyin’; Captain Parry keeps his cravat high for a reason, t’hide the scars all ‘round his neck. But Rusk broke it open, with his hands; he was a strong man, and always knew the trick of twistin’ where a thing was weakest.”
“I ‘eard this tale, too,” the second gunner chimed in. “‘Jerusha, I’ll call ye,’ he said, ‘seein’ you owe me all.’ And Parry just snapped at ‘im, like they was two gents in a drawing-room: ‘Sir! I have not given you permission to use me thus, familiarly!’”
“No, and he never did, did he? Though Solomon Rusk, bold bastard that he was, wasn’t a one t’ever pay such niceties much mind . . . ”
So Parry had begun in servitude himself, of the same sort he practiced on Mister Dolomance and me—a slave turned slavemaster who, just like the shark-were, had no sympathy for his own past weakness, let alone the weaknesses of others. I fought free, he might say, if questioned; do the same, if you can . . . and if not, stop your whining.
(Yet for such a creature to base his power in the sea, where nothing is permanent, ever . . . not the shape of land, the ebb and flow of tide, or even any clear distinction between what makes one more itself than the other . . . )
I think you court destruction, sir, I thought, allowing myself the very faintest beginnings of hope. And would almost have risked a smile to myself, had I not been so afraid he might be watching.
***
On those few brief occasions when we put ashore to trade, restocking with food and weaponry, the captain always hung back, with only Mister Dolomance (who ha
d an instinctual distrust of anything under his feet which did not move according to the ocean’s in- and out-breath) for company in his watery exile. And though other times women might come aboard, for the crew’s recreation, the captain never indulged himself, though he might have had his pick—being not only undeniably handsomer than any other man on his ship, but having far better manners.
Instead, the two of them would retire early, and I would peep in through the window’s crack to discover them bent together over parchment, Mister Dolomance squeak-gurgling away in Parry’s ear while his master scratched away furiously with pencil and charcoal, checking and re-checking measurements with various instrumentation. And slowly, I came to figure they must be making a map together, hopelessly impenetrable to any land-dweller’s eyes: a grand survey of the ocean’s most uncharted areas, from the bottom up.