by Seven Jane
Winters, who I had never heard referred to by his first name, nodded and then was gone. He strode calmly through the throngs of men rushing busily about the deck, and when he arrived at the waist of the ship he rooted his feet and tilted his head upward, hands at his sides as another bang of thunder shook the sky. A bolt of lightning cracked overhead, so bright and white hot that it left behind a pale streamer of green trembling against the black. Winters cast a backward glance at Dunn, and then me, and there was madness in his eyes.
“Not long now,” his voice was disembodied by the wind as he called back, heading quickly toward the forecastle of the ship and drawing a cutlass from his belt while he did. He wrapped his fist around a length of rigging from the foremast and stood with his back to us, staring dead ahead, his mane of red hair flying behind him so that he looked for all the world like a lost Viking god readying for battle.
If it was to our deaths that we sailed, then I wanted to meet it in full view. Another wall of water hit the ship and my boots slipped beneath me again, and I cursed my feet as I clung to the rope and gritted my teeth, trying vainly to pull myself through the cabin door and out into the fury. All around me, men yelled and scrambled about the decks, working with ropes and sails as if they could outrun the storm into which we were headed—or perhaps they were racing toward it. I wasn’t familiar enough with outrunning storms to be entirely sure and, frankly, either would have been just as likely. The sounds of the sea and the thunder crashing into each other were deafening and impossible to separate, and the wind buffeted violently around me. A white bolt of lightning scarred a starless sky and the water rumbled like the growling, hungry belly of a great beast. The ship jerked again and a man whose name I had never learned let out a sudden wail as he was pitched overboard. I saw Domingo reach an arm out after him, but it was of no use, and so he quickly pulled it back and resumed his work, his lips moving in what I assumed was a parting farewell to the mate just lost at sea.
It was the second death I’d seen in my time aboard, and somehow watching a man plummet to his end over the side of the ship was more disturbing than when I had watched Winters slice Rabbie through the heart. My sense of adventure failed instantly as I took in the enormity of the scene before me, leaving me too scared to give a damn about where we had finally arrived or what these two pirates saw when they watched the sky break apart over the churning ocean. In that moment, staring into what I was convinced to be the very watery end that my dear Claudette had warned of, I surrendered myself to the ignominy of disappointment and fear.
“We’re sailing straight into a storm,” I screamed frantically at Winters’ back, at Dunn’s eager scowl, at any of the men who might hear me as they clambered about the deck securing the ship. “We have to turn back. We have to turn back now.” I nearly choked on tears of shame and of sorrow that welled up in my throat. I would die without ever reaching Bracile and I would die still an orphan, and I was not sure which was worse.
“No, lass,” Dunn yelled in correction when he leaned farther out of the cabin door, his scowling face refiguring into a sly smirk as he braced himself to its frame, seemingly unbothered that the ship was rolling beneath us like a leaf in a drain, or maybe excited by it. “Ain’t no turnin’ around now, and it ain’t no storm we be sailin’ for neither. We be nearin’ the heart of the ocean, we are. Few more minutes and we be right in it.”
“The heart of the ocean?” I called back as I pulled myself upright and found my footing. Using the rigging as a pulley, I dragged myself to where Mister Dunn stood solidly, smiling at the storm. “I thought was just some poetry, not an actual place. What is it, exactly?”
Dunn laughed, and the sound matched the madness I’d seen in Winters’ eyes. “No, lass, it be real. It be where the very gods of the sea live. Where we be tryin’ to find for many years. Some be callin’ it the heart of the ocean, others call it ole Davy Jones’ locker itself. Others have names even older and more teriffyin’ than that.”
When I didn’t respond, he nudged his elbow in my ribs and said in a lower growl, “Helpin’ him reach this place be the reason you’re onboard this ship, Miss Jones. It be where we findin’ Evangeline, it is. Might be that Jones himself be waitin’ there, too.”
Bracile.
I had wanted more than anything to find that mystical island, to find Mistress Dahl and myself in the process, but that was before I’d learned of Dunn’s legends and had seen the secrets of the oceans made real with my own eyes. Perhaps the mysteries of my beginnings were too dangerous to ever be known, or perhaps I was not as brave as I had wanted to believe.
“We’ll be dead before we reach Bracile if we try to make it through this storm,” I argued as another wave racked the bow of ship so forcefully that it twisted her around clockwise. Dunn didn’t respond, and I was not sure if the old man could not hear my warnings, or if he simply did not care. “We need to find another way.”
“There not be another way, lass,” he said, and in the flashing light I thought I saw him wink at me. “Either way it’s no matter now. Look.”
He pointed the stub of his thumb toward the fore of the ship, where far off in the distance Winters was shouting orders to his men, cutlass held high in the air as he aimed it in the direction of the lightning that continued to rake claw marks in the heavens. The few remaining stars had been snuffed out and the storm clouds had narrowed, sharpening into thin, skeletal fingers that reached down, their tendrils grazing upon the surface of the swirling ocean. It was a storm well and proper, and unlike any I had ever seen or heard of before; the sky and sea melded together to form a never-ending tempest and we were sailing straight for it. For the first time since we had left Isla Perla, I worried that I had given my allegiance—my life—to a madman and his crew. Perhaps there was no such place as Bracile. Perhaps Mistress Dahl was well and truly lost and no amount of mythical legends of seafaring folklore would bring her back.
Perhaps Merrin Smith was all that I was, and whatever answers I hoped to find to my identity and my past were lost along with Evangeline, for surely nothing could be so absurd as that she and I would both be connected by legends of the deep.
I shook my head in disbelief. “No man who’s ever sailed for the island of Bracile has come back to tell the tale. No matter which story it is, it ends the same.”
“Aye,” the old man agreed, still infuriatingly unruffled. “Dead men tell no tales, that they say.” His meaty hand clasped the knob of my shoulder, and he pulled me into the swirling mass of men and wind and water competing on deck. “But this time we not be sailin’ just as idle men, are we, searchin’ for an island that can’t be found? We be sailin’ with the daughter of Davy Jones.” Then, as if to drive his point home, he tapped a finger against the imperceptible lump in my breast pocket that held the ring, which was growing hot again against my chest with every flash of lightning overhead. “And what’s more ’an that,” Dunn continued, motioning toward the captain, who, satisfied with the preparations done by his crew, had resumed his perch on the forecastle where he was speaking to a dazed looking Tom Birch, “yer count be off, Miss Jones. There be one man who’s been to Bracile and back … and he be onboard this ship.”
I watched as Winters spoke and wondered how much history the ever-brooding, enigmatic man held locked away within, but I had no time to dwell on what adventures the Riptide’s Captain may have endured. With both hands Dunn brought my hat back down atop my head, forcing my dark curls beneath its folds. “Put your hat on, Mister Rivers,” Dunn said, adding emphasis on the last as he held the brim of the hat so that I was forced to meet his small, shiny eyes. “Now migh’ not be the best time to go introducin’ yeh just yet. Be best to let the storm pass first.” He directed a look of meaningful punctuation in the direction of Tom Birch, who had moved away from the captain and was now standing at the edge of the ship with his fist wrapped in a knot of rope. He alone had a mist still lingering in his eyes, and he was blinking in rapid succession as wind and rain pelted mightily
against him. Unlike the rest of the men, the strange trance still had its tendrils in the ship’s boatswain.
The warning in Dunn’s words had been obvious—a command to keep my distance from Tom Birch—but I couldn't help myself; with Tom in my sights, my unsteady feet finally found purchase on the slick wooden planks beneath me. I heard the old quartermaster’s voice calling from behind, telling me to stop, but this only made me charge harder into the storm as I made my way to Tom. It was like trudging through sand, and I had to run hunched over to avoid being barreled over by the gusting wind, one hand firmly holding my hat atop my head while the curls that broke free whipped around in the air around my face and stuck unpleasantly to my skin like soggy seaweed. Whether it was out of desperation to know if the longing I’d seen in his eyes on the sea water had been for me or the water, or if it was only to speak to a man not entrenched in lore and mystery, the only thing I knew for sure was that if we were to drown I wanted my last words to be shared with this man and not that damned, riddle-ridden quartermaster. The storm seemed to sense my passion and responded accordingly, the sea swelling up another notch in its intensity, and I slid across the deck, taking hold of anything solid enough to hold on to.
When I finally reached Tom I clenched my fists at my side before they could reach up and wrap around him of their own accord. “Tom,” I yelled, my voice barely breaking above the roar of the sea. “Tom Birch! Are you all right, mate?”
“Oi, Rivers,” he called back as he bent his head downward, his eyes blinking rapidly. He looked down in my direction but the water that washed in small rivers down his face and dripped off his eyelashes obscured his vision. He tried to lift a hand to wipe at the salt water pouring down his face but it was caught beneath the heavy weight of the wet canvas he’d tied around his neck. This he wrenched away from his body, looking bewilderedly at it as if he had no idea why he wore it, and then dropped at his feet. “I had the queerest dream,” he shouted over the storm as he swatted away the water from his face. He looked at me blearily at first, and then a glimmer of recognition sharpened his gaze, and behind it a look that might have been shame. “You were in it, but only you weren’t, well, you.” I wished I knew what it was he wasn’t saying when he shook his head and rubbed his face roughly. “I must have been dreaming, but I thought I …” He stopped and stared at me again, letting the end of his sentence trail off.
“You thought what, Tom?”
Before he could answer, lightning split the sky high above our heads, and the ship surged forward under our feet, like it were beginning to slide down a drain. Tom yanked a spyglass from the inside of his coat pocket and held it up to his eye. Even in the darkness I could see the color drain from his skin. What he saw in the distance absorbed his attention immediately, and he hoisted himself up the rigging, hooked a foot in the rope, and swung backward, waving the branch of his arm frantically as hailed the captain. “Maelstrom,” he yelled, “Straight ahead, Captain.”
The word stopped my heart as the ship fell out from beneath me.
Then, “Bear down,” Tom yelled to the men scurrying on the deck without waiting for the captain’s reply. “Brace abox!” It was a command to stop immediately, and to turn the ship. The boatswain, believing he had been first to see what was waiting dead ahead, signaled again at the captain, who was staring eagerly in the same direction that Tom had pointed his spyglass.
“Belay that.” Winters’ voice was even more powerful than the wind’s mighty roar as he turned and faced the crew. “It’s not a maelstrom that waits for us.”
He took a step down the stairs, and then with one hand still gripping the rigging of the foremast he leaned into the wind above his men. All eyes met his expectantly, and his vibrant blue eyes were shining more fiercely than ever I’d seen them. He looked ferocious, all pretenses of cautious command gone. “It’s Charybdis,” he announced triumphantly, as if that was enough.
And it was.
It started soft. One man began banging the flat of his cutlass against the rail in a slow, purposeful rhythm, and then another, and then a third began to beat two lengths of iron chains together. Their call was picked up by others, and soon all around, from Jomo—who had emerged on deck and was standing with his array of jagged knives tucked in his belt—to Domingo, the ship’s carpenter, who wielded an axe, and even Dunn, who stood with half a dozen pistols in his baldric and the grips of two more held in each hand, the men’s voices rose together in a chanting, thunderclap of sound, rising in a horrifying chorus as they pointed their weapons toward the sea. Even Tom had loosed a gleaming sword from his belt and twisted away from me to stare into the storm, his face contorted into a look of intense determination.
The captain yelled loudest and most terribly of all as every man of the Riptide’s crew flocked to the rails of the ship from bow to stern, quarterdeck to forecastle, and clung, screaming, chanting, and beating the sides of the ship with their swords, cutlasses, and even cannonballs clenched firmly in white-knuckled fists. They pummeled their feet on the decks of the ship around them, the noise steadily increasing in volume and rhythm until it grew so loud and fast that it became even more furious and frightening than the storm itself.
XII
It was called vaporing, this sort of high-pitched, clanging cry formed by the combination of the men’s voices, and fists, and feet. It was a throaty, pounding, terrifying sort of racket, intended to simultaneously hearten the crew for a bloody battle and to strike horror into its adversary. Since we had avoided confrontations with other crews who might interrupt our voyage or follow in our lead, we had not yet faced another ship in combat, and so I had yet to experience the effect of vaporing for myself. Still, I had heard of it often in the relaying of old terrors from pirates and sailors alike who had become too old or too injured to take back to the sea. Whether from the side of victim or tormentor their tales of the phenomenon had been the same, all told with the pale ghosts of fear still haunting their faces. The harsh tremor of this jarring sound was said to be a noise that commanded nightmares in those who had witnessed it and lived to tell the tale. It was a noise that had the ability to worm its way into your core, and upon having heard it, left one forever scarred.
It was the sound of impending death.
As it swelled around me, the sound of the pirate’s vaporing—of my own voice as it raged forth from the very depths of my soul—rose fierce and raw and horrible, but it did not fill me with dread. Rather it was a deliciously potent cacophony of bolstering, brutal energy that burned black the tender spots that endured inside of me, hardening my resolve as if what remained of my courage had been brought up like silt swirled from the pit of a deep pool. Without any conscious decision to do so I, too, loosed my cutlass from its place on my belt and held it aloft, gripped tightly in my sweaty palm, while my empty fist pounded against a length of railing seemingly of its own accord. I had made no conscious decision to join them, but the sound had quickened me and I yelled and stomped my feet alongside my brethren, my voice joining theirs and my eyes transfixed on the storm brewing ahead so that we faced it as one united, writhing mass.
Had the storm before us been born of mortal flesh and bone, it would have crouched in fear, halted in awe or in terror of the sound and sight that greeted it as the Riptide brazenly bared its mighty broadside and its crew before it. But as it was not mortal it was unaffected. Instead, it continued to churn angrily before us as it pulled the ship into the glistening teeth of water that rung the edges of the deep funnel, tightening in a coil that burrowed into the heart of the ocean.
As I stared forward into certain doom, my thoughts raced backward, flashing in brief, half-formed glimpses at the memories I’d earned in my short lifetime. I saw Claudette’s face first, my oldest and dearest friend, her caramel skin and smoky chocolate eyes smiling at me above a coy, smirking mouth. She was a delicacy of a woman, too beautiful and too smart to spend her life as nothing more than a whore in a dirty quayside brothel. I saw Mistress Dahl, Evangeline, the
same in my last memory as she had been in my earliest, with tumbling golden curls and bright, gemstone eyes that taunted me with the promise of secrets and knowledge still unshared from the porch of her tavern where she presided over the island. These women, whose countenances were carved into my heart, were joined by the faces of the men I had grown to love, despite their hardness and their flaws. Brandon Dunn with his scowl and wraithlike white hair, alternatively my guardian and antagonist. The unlovable, unmovable captain, Erik Winters, a man formed as much by his iconic auburn tangles and steel grey eyes as he was of growls and granite and other things just as hard and merciless. I saw Jomo and Rabbie, the glaring, one good eye of Domingo “Left Eye” Diaz, and even Gregory Nip, strangers who had become my peers, and my brothers.
The last face to pass through my thoughts was that of Tom Birch. I saw him now as I had when I’d first laid eyes on him, scaling the full six and a half feet of his tall height from beneath the brim of the hat I’d claimed from the forgotten artifacts of one of Claudette’s clients. I had never been able to define what it was about this man that had the habit of speeding my heart and slowing it down at the same time, but I had long ago accepted it. What’s more was that I had come to depend on his companionship onboard as much as I had Claudette’s on land, although it caused my heart to flutter every time I dared to look into his saltwater green eyes or watch the disheveled crown of his sandy head high above the rest as he moved about the deck with a gentle quality not typically associated with a man who’d spent his entire life in the company of pirates. He was kind and unassuming, but loyal and dependable, and I was startled to find that even though I’d barely known him two months, I felt as though somehow I’d always known him. Now, I was unwilling to live even one day of a life without Tom Birch in it.