“I don’t see anything, Sheth.”
As I pulled my knife, I thought I might actually be doing the madwoman a favor. But as I yanked my arm back for the blow, the sound of waves crashed on my eardrums. I buckled to my knees. It sounded like—my head pounded like—I had been smashed into a ship’s hull by a hundred tons of ocean.
As quickly as it came, the pain vanished. In its place, just ahead of Issheth, stood a woman in hues of the ocean—skin the sleek brown of a seal, eyes the turquoise of the warmest beaches, and dreadlocked hair the white of ocean foam.
Issheth stumbled toward the woman, one gloved hand outstretched.
I pushed back onto my feet, clumsy in my furs and boots. I picked up my knife. “Issheth?” I called. “Wait!”
“You both would do much for one you love.” The goddess’s voice was gentler than her entrance; the whisper-scuff of boots on ice.
Are you the goddess of love, too? I thought, bitter with cold and her mysterious air. Part of me thought I was imagining her, that I’d spent so much time listening to Issheth that I’d fallen prey to her delusions. The other part of me knew she was real, and that she would reveal my treacherous heart and smite me where I stood before her.
“Is it so hard to believe that I could be master of that, too?” She answered my unspoken question with slitted eyes. “When you all love so fiercely, for knowing—even when you do not admit it—that it all must end?”
Issheth dropped to her knees on the snowy ice, sobbing.
I stepped toward her, then stopped. This was not my pain. It wasn’t my place to step into Issheth’s hope and grief, to get between her and her wife.
I knelt beside her anyway and wrapped a thick, clumsy arm around her.
“Please,” I said. “She wants to speak to her wife one last time.”
Issheth’s tears froze. The goddess stepped closer and pricked one of the droplets off her face.
“Salt water. Ever my domain.”
She leaned over to whisper in Issheth’s ear, and the captain straightened. I rose and stepped back. My knees were stiff, and the air grew colder by the second. The ship’s passage out of this frozen wasteland narrowed each moment we lingered. We had to get back.
But Issheth’s face was full of light and peace. She murmured back to the goddess, tears falling anew, but this time she was smiling. Somehow, I knew it wasn’t the goddess she was speaking to. Tears crusted on my own face. If the goddess could let Issheth speak to her wife again, what could she do for me, if only I asked?
I scrubbed my tears away and looked back towards the ship to give them privacy. With such long days, it was hard to tell how much time had passed, especially in the presence of the goddess—was she manipulating time, too? For time was of death, the present moment dying for the sake of the future, every second bringing us closer to our own endless night in a quiet bed or a briny grave—but we needed to go.
Come, Issheth. I couldn’t bring myself to say it aloud. Instead, I argued with myself.
Let her have her last wish.
And if it costs you your life? Your own love’s life?
It won’t.
Abruptly we were alone. Issheth sagged to the ground, and I rushed to drag her up. A dazed smile played on her lips. A woman in rapture. I thought of you, back home, and how it felt to see you every time I returned after a long haul. I imagined you now, crusting over with prison scabs as you wait for me, like a ship’s keel barnacled.
I dropped Issheth and ran.
The cold air whipped against my face, ferocious. My wrapped legs trudged, heavy, as I fought the headwinds. Snow crunched behind me, but I made it to the rowboat first. She called out behind me, waved a hand. Even from a hundred paces I could see the grin on her face.
Row. No one would ever know.
Unless they were watching from the ship with a telescope. Likely.
I pushed off just as she sprinted up. She leapt, dove into the boat, and sent it wobbling. Icy water sloshed over the side, and I screamed from the shock of the water and fear of falling to a frozen death. She yelled too, boisterous and laughing. She clapped me on the back once, then pulled me into a tight hug.
They dragged us back onto the ship, too awestruck for words. I said nothing, either, but Issheth’s smile, this halo of joy and peace that followed her—that told them enough.
What did I get from the goddess? A screeching headache that pulsed with the waves, nothing more.
We turned north.
Issheth still sought me out, but she was no longer the same kind of lonely—not the same desperate I was. And I couldn’t face her, knowing that her presence meant I had failed at every opportunity to save you, my love. I even avoided Dolimé, who tried to ply me with the last dregs of alcohol on board.
I only told him, “I have a headache.” Which was true.
The headache throbbed for months as we sailed back north its intensity rising with the thrashing of waves against our hull. During the storms we fought through, I was almost blinded by pain. Issheth pitied me and let me pump below.
Tell me how I could see her tender look towards me, her concern, and think only, Is this my last chance?
Because I did think it.
The throbbing in my skull lessened the further north we went, spiking only during the storms. The night I died, my headache struck again, the echo of waves against the ship sounding between my ears. I covered them, my knees buckling. I barely caught myself against the rail. And Issheth, her fur coat open, helping me up. Her eyes asking, because she knew, she understood—what did she do to you?
The ship pitched. Bucked unnaturally. Issheth slammed against the railing and somehow, I heard her cry of pain over the batter of the wind.
If she were Dolimé, I would not have hesitated. When my hand shot out in reflex, I would not have checked the gesture. Would not have watched his face hover between surprise and fear and suspicion, like Issheth’s did. I would not have measured the twinned guilt upon my soul and reached out after all, a hair too late to yank her back and still keep my balance.
I would not have fallen in.
I traded her life for yours, that night, and even now I am ashamed for breaking my word.
I still could not kill her. I hit the water and went stiff with cold immediately, my blood ice.
I don’t want to tell you how it felt to die, but if I would tell you the story entire, you should hear it.
I would have frozen before I drowned, I think, so imagine a bucket of snow. Put your hand in it. Shock, at first, and shortly after, repulsion at the chill. Leave your hand in. The cold seeps. Layer by layer of skin, it creeps to the core of your bones. It leaves numb flesh behind, and finally even the bones begin to stiffen.
The cold took mere seconds to get to my heart, and in between the slowed beats, she appeared. White dreadlocks floated about her head. One touched me, like a curious sea serpent.
In the water, she had a powerful naked torso, but her lower body wasn’t static at all. I don’t know if it was my proximity to unconsciousness, but I’d swear it, yet—
Her lower body shifted from vertically finned tail, like a fish—a shark—to horizontal, like a scaled whale, to smooth furred seal, to webbed bird feet, to tentacles, over and over, all scaled to her size as she appeared before me.
I have the feeling she restrained herself for my sake.
Frost crept through my brain. Slowed my limbs. I let my eyes droop shut.
A fish or clump of seaweed brushed against my cheek. Or perhaps, the caress of a webbed hand.
Remember this when we meet next. You cannot have one part of me without the other.
Love without death? The ocean without grief?
Then clammy lips brushed mine.
With the kiss, the cold reversed; not quickly, no, but the death chill receded. She gripped me in strong, shadowy arms, and we sped to the surface as my thawing lungs spasmed for air. I crashed onto the deck of Issheth’s ship, vomiting sea water.
The cruelest
of the waves ceased, though rain still lashed the deck. I struggled to my hands and knees and wiped back my sopping ropes of hair. Half the crew gaped at me in horror. Only Dolimé reached for me, and even that after hesitation. Then Issheth’s boots pounded over to me. She didn’t push him aside, not exactly, but she wedged herself between us, held my head between her hands, checked my eyes. Such heartbroken relief when she discovered I was all right. The fear that she would suffer twice what no one should have to. I hoped, for her sake, that I had not been gone long.
She kissed me there, in front of the whole crew. When our lips parted, she shivered and her breath misted with cold. Her eyes narrowed and she stepped back, though she held fast to my arms.
I was not all right, not quite.
My headache had gone, but within my chest, a shard of ice lay wedged between my lungs and heart.
“Issheth,” I said. “We need to talk.”
As I spoke, I felt the water at the corners of my lips crystalize.
It was—is—strange to be on land again. I cannot call it dry, because it seemed we brought a tempest with us, but the earth didn’t pitch beneath my feet, nor beneath Issheth’s beside me. Her chains rattled as I led her up the stone steps to the High Court. Somewhere beneath us, you waited. I hoped.
Above us, pigeons flew and shat and fought over scraps before ducking back under rafters. The people stared as they passed us, some of them even spat; you know the stories. There is a reason the Court struck so hard a bargain for her head.
“Are you ready?” I murmured, before we went inside. I kept my hand at her back to steady her. Her heart beat so quick under my fingers without the layers of fur between them. I never felt so cruel except when I left you behind to find her.
“I owe you a debt.”
I nodded. A chill coursed through my bones. She shivered, too.
A ship is small and usually crowded, and a sailor is stuck with their crew for weeks to months at a time—and yet I never felt so pinched, so panicked as I did when the Court doors slammed shut behind us.
And yet, there you were. Chained, like Issheth, sores weeping; your braids wild and undone, grown into knots. My knees shook, as if I wasn’t used to walking unmoving tiles. The hope in your eyes, though—and Issheth’s whisper, “Steady, Lae”—stiffened my back.
I led her forward by her chains until we stood before the judge who had offered me our bargain half a year before.
“I’ve brought the Pirate Queen Issheth. As agreed. In return for two full pardons.”
I had forgotten what he looked like, and even now, barely an hour later, I forget again. I remember his voice, though. The smugness, and how his condescension echoed through the wooden room. How other lords of the Court, men and women, laughed when I pushed Issheth forward and she stumbled, tripped, fell. I forced myself not to rush forward, not to apologize and help her up. I have not forgotten the heavy ache of iron against my own joints.
The chill in my breast spread, a strange numbness that also ached.
“Issheth, of the Sea Wife.” He spat the name of her ship. “You stand accused of piracy, murder, theft of government property. Years worth of each offense. How do you plead?”
She stood.
You have had to stand up in chains. You know how they try to drag you down, and standing straight isn’t worth the effort. Surely, you can imagine why it was that moment, as she stretched to her full height and shook her hair out of her face, that I knew I loved her, as surely as I love you.
The cold in my chest frosted my throat.
Issheth smiled at him. “Guilty.”
And then I let the ice building within me escape. The goddess’s breath curled in the air like a dense sea mist—then froze the heart of everyone in that room but you, Issheth, and me. The walls rimed with the frost like a winter morning. The lords’ eyeballs went glassy like icicles under a spring thaw, their limbs outstretched and immobile. I still cannot believe it, though the ice sits quietly in my chest once more. Waiting.
I unlocked your chains and held you for one bittersweet moment—you were so thin, and you winced at my touch.
I had hoped you would follow me and Issheth to the ship to collect our things, but I understand. You need time. I expected you might need convincing, so I leave you this letter. Don’t worry; the innkeeper is a friend of Issheth’s, and she will keep our secrets.
There is money enough here to buy you passage almost anywhere in the world
But... if you decide otherwise, find Dolimé at the inn. Look for the big man who smiles too much. He’ll have a horse for you. We’ll be in the woods east of the city; he’ll know how to find us. Word will spread, and they will make no more bargains for my life. But they will not expect the Pirate Queen to flee by land.
I hope that when you read this, you’ll understand why and how—for everything. I hope you will forgive me for making you wait.
Now, I wait for you—on solid ground.
© Copyright 2020 C.L. Clark
C L Clark - [BCS296 S01] Page 2