Darkly Human

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Waiting?” Herself tensed. “Waiting for what?”

  The bartender shrugged. “Doan know. Doan wanna know. I keep here, to my bar, stay away from the water, ’specially at high tides. That way, I stay safe and not-crazy, and maybe someday I get out and off, too. Drink your drink, sailorgirl, and go back your ship before tide gets too high.”

  Herself nodded, and slipped two coins onto the plank, then kicked back her drink in two swallows. The bartender had already turned away, the coins disappearing under his hand.

  “Well,” Oliver said thoughtfully, leaping up to sit on one of the few sturdy-looking stools and wrapping his tail around his hindquarters for balance. “That was…enlightening.”

  “You think so, cat?” Herself didn’t sound like she was actually asking a question, or disagreeing with him. She just sounded…thoughtful.

  The bird uttered a faint cheep, and looked at Oliver with small black eyes.

  “What?”

  “I think we should listen and get back to the ship. Now. As in, already gone.”

  “Yes, bird,” Herself said. “I think you’re right.”

  “You do?”

  Oliver wasn’t sure it was possible for a bird to look smug, but damned if the featherpot wasn’t trying. He really should have eaten the thing months ago.

  Walking back through town, Oliver was even more aware than usual of every scent and sound around him. His tail held high and his whiskers curling backward, he could slide into the shadows at a moment’s risk…but what if the threat were to come from the shadows? Best to be prepared to jump either way.

  “Liberty’s been cancelled,” Herself told the guard on dock. “Everyone back on board before sunrise, and they’d damn well better be sober.” The guard didn’t question, although he could have, and Herself took the jolly-boat back to the ship without another word to the crewmen rowing. She wrapped herself in her own thoughts, and even Oliver, sitting beside her on the bench, couldn’t say what she was thinking.

  “When tides rise, hey?”

  “Who told you that? Never mind. Idiot’s query.” You didn’t have to tell a sailor anything; if it was bad news, they already knew.

  The bo’sun leaned on the railing next to Oliver and looked out, away from the darkened town and out to the open sea. The bay was an open one, the arms of the island reaching rather than gathering, and the waves seemed limitless and unending.

  “Used to be, this was the good view. Open sail, no walls, no rules save them as we make…. More walls going up every day, though. More rules. Less payday.”

  “You’re getting sentimental and soft in your old age,” Oliver told him rudely.

  “Maybeso, maybeso.” The ship’s master had been at sea longer than any of them, an old navvie who memorized every map he’d ever seen, and then fled the King’s shilling for a pirate’s share. “But maybe it’s the ocean’s getting harder. Tide rising used to be a good thing. Meant we were never trapped. Now…”

  “Now we have no idea what it means. I’m on a ship of old women. Be quiet and look.”

  The old sailor skewed his glance sideways, the way cats and old women do. “What are we looking for, Oliver?”

  “What’s under the tide,” the cat told him. “Captain sensed it, earlier, came here to avoid it. Now Herself’s wondering if it herded us here.”

  “She told you that?”

  “She didn’t have to. It’s what I was wondering, too.”

  “Not revenuers nor navvies,” the sailing master said. “Not anything in the wind or on the sail. Something under the waves, rising from the deep.”

  Oliver wanted to tell him again not to be an old woman, but the tremor in his whiskers kept him still.

  Rising from the deep, and rising fast.

  “Haul and hard, boys, haul and hard!”

  That night, Herself and the Captain and the Ship’s Master met late at night, lanterns burning into the small hours. The tide had risen with dawn, and nothing had come to snatch them off the surface, but Oliver, sitting in a pool of early morning sun, still felt unease. His whiskers knew something wasn’t right.

  The Captain strode the upper deck, his shirt open at the neck and his hair loose from its usual queue, rough-chinned and heavy-lidded but full of an almost manic energy, like the man he’d been months before. Around him, the crew fell to their duties with equal fervor, the long, sleepless night now over; the fact of something to do easing their fears. Even Oliver found himself caught up in the Captain’s optimism, eventually, although his whiskers knew better.

  “Today will be a good day, Ollie!” Mika said as he swung past like a little monkey, dragging a coiled rope almost as large as he at some sailor’s command. The cabin boy had come on board the year before, battered and silent, bought in an auction on a whim by the Captain. Now he was cheeky enough to be a cat himself.

  “Good day. Huh.” Oliver had some thoughts on that himself, but he kept them to himself, leaping gracefully to the top of a bale, and from there up the spar to a half-post where he could see where they were going as well as where they’d been, the bay slipping into the distance as the sails caught wind.

  His whiskers twitched, and his ears swung backward against his skull, green eyes trying to see something that wasn’t there.

  Below, he could hear Herself yelling something, and the Captain’s deeper voice cutting across the dozen other shouts and swears of working men, the creaks and groans of seasoned wood that were normal noise aboard the Fifth of Moon. All reassuring sounds of a sailing day.

  “I feel seasick.”

  “You’re a bird. You can’t get seasick.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Quite.”

  “So if I throw up on you…?”

  “I’ll duck the half-digested shells,” Oliver promised, sinking his claws more comfortably into the spar of wood.

  “We should have stayed in the bay. Maybe the natives were nervous, but I didn’t note anyone swimming out to join us, did you?” That was often how they acquired new hands; locals who’d had enough of landbound life, or were willing to trade their labor for a chance to go Elsewhere.

  “No.” The flutterby had a point. “No, I didn’t.”

  “I hate not knowing what’s going on.”

  And that was probably why he hadn’t eaten the bird yet. Maybe different reasons, but they both had a hunger to know, to discover, that drove them out of their usual roles, and onto the mast of a pirate ship, heading into the unknown…

  Unknown. How much unknown had there been, recently? Even before the Captain’s slow change, even the excitement had seemed… much the same. Fun, yes. Profitable, certainly. Still spitting in the eye of the land-bound. And yet…

  “Do you see that?”

  “What?”

  “There. On the surface.”

  A gentle swell, nothing that couldn’t be explained by a strange wind, or a pod of whales coming to surface, and yet…. His whiskers told him, again, it was none of those things. His skin tensed, under his fur, and his ears prickled.

  “Fly down, tell Herself.”

  The bird dove down, a yellow shot narrowly missing sailors who ducked and swore with months of practice since its fledging. Oliver kept his gaze on the disturbance in the water, the tip of his tail lashing back and forth as though he was waiting for a rat to emerge from its hole.

  “What are you, rising up from the depths, so slow and steady?” he wondered, feeling the urge to groom his fur for comfort. “What are you, making my whiskers twitch like a fast summer squall?”

  And then the head appeared, and every man, woman, and cat on-board knew what they faced.

  “Madre de Dios,” Oliver muttered, his whiskers quivering and his tail straight up and bristling. As though it could hear him, the great head turned, rising steadily on a thickly muscled neck, and looked directly at him.

  Impossible, of course; the serpent was too far away to be able to see him, much less hear a whisper, especially when there was an entire boa
t of yelling and screaming humans below. But Oliver felt the instinctive need to bristle and arch his back to appear larger in the face of such threatening interest, as though that might somehow save him.

  If this was what the Captain had been feeling between his shoulder blades when they were under sail before, no wonder he was quiet, and uneasy!

  The shouts of the sailors were matched by the heavy echoing booms of the cannon being slid out; the Fifth had a half-dozen of the guns, taken from a galleon they’d boarded the year before and mounted, three to a side. But although the guns were at the ready, the gunners did not stand to load and fire.

  “We’re going to flee.” Cheepree was back, backwinging to land on the spar next to him. Oliver had already determined that, from the way the ship was yawing and the crew was scrambling. The shouting was more ordered now, a familiar pattern overlaying the men’s fears.

  “He’s coming after us,” Oliver said. “Captain thinks we can outrun it?”

  “Captain wanted to go after it,” the bird said. “Herself said otherwise. Crew voted to run.”

  Not good when the crew voted down the Captain, but it happened, and captains survived. Oliver was surprised to feel relief. He might wonder about a change, but changing Captains mid-serpent wasn’t a wise idea.

  “Wow,” the bird said. “It’s coming fast.”

  Faster than they were going, Oliver saw that immediately. The head rose out of the water on a neck that was twice as thick as the main mast, and almost as high. The head itself was probably the size of the jolly-boat, and what that meant about the still-unseen body…

  Could swallow one medium-sized cat and not even notice.

  Despite running away to sea in a sailor’s kit-bag, Oliver was a practical beast. A creature that size, swimming that fast, would have to eat huge meals to keep its strength up. A ship the size of the Fifth might look like a decent meal, but the actual bulk of it was wood and iron, not flesh. Humans might be foolish enough to think that didn’t matter, but they had weak noses. A true predator would know the difference…

  That meant that either this serpent was a lousy hunter, or it wasn’t looking for them to be a meal. So what did it want? What could it want?

  What could they give it, to make it go away?

  That question in mind, the cat made his way, carefully, down to the deck. Keeping his tail high and his steps precise, he managed to avoid being stepped on by any of the sailors rushing from task to task, or tripping any of them up himself.

  “Hullo, cat.”

  “I don’t think it wants to eat us.”

  The Captain swung around to grin down at Oliver. His face was sun-browned, and his nose was lopsided from far too many breaks, and his eyes squinted half-shut perpetually, but his smile was as bright at open as Mika’s. Some on the crew long-suspected the Captain was mad, but if so, it was a madness that had served them well, and profitably. It was good to see it back, no matter the why.

  “Neither do I,” the Captain said now in agreement. “But these cowards, they chose to fly.”

  Herself, her feet hooked into the railing and balancing against a post, a spyglass raised to her eye to look back at their pursuit, lowered the ’glass and looked at them. “If it doesn’t see us as a meal, why is it chasing us?”

  “Because we flew,” Oliver said, as though it were completely obvious. In truth, the thought had only come to him then, when he was wondering the same thing. It watched, it menaced, it made everyone uneasy wondering what it would do – but it did nothing. Nothing, until they made their first move.

  “Are you telling me,” Herself said, stepping down lightly and advancing on their pair of them, “that we’re that thing’s…. chase-toy?”

  Oliver felt his ears go flat and he resisted the urge to twine around her legs ingratiatingly. “Um. Yes?”

  The Captain started to laugh, swinging his arms as though to embrace the possibility, and Oliver felt his whiskers twitch, the way they did when a storm was brewing nearby.

  “Well if that’s so, let’s make it a splendid game!”

  The Captain’s mood was not as contagious as he might have wished; the crew was understandably unnerved by the size and speed of the creature chasing them, and Herself glowering at the stern, spyglass still in hand, did not encourage lightheartedness. Yet, given the challenge, they rose to it as only sailors could.

  “I’m truly seasick, now,” the bird announced. Oliver spared it a glance. Truth, the feathers around its beak were paler than usual, and the glossy black beak was slightly green-tinged. With four feet securely to the deck, the sudden tack-changes the Captain was putting the Fifth through didn’t bother him quite so much, but he imagined flying to keep up with it might be somewhat disconcerting.

  “You want me to eat you?” he offered.

  “You’re disgusting.”

  Oliver went back to watching the Captain. One hand holding onto the rigging, the other gesturing madly as he shouted instructions to the crew, he swung dangerously out over the water as the ship veered first one way and then the other, but never seemed to notice the danger.

  “Mind yourselves!” the coxswain shouted as the ship tacked sharply. “First tar to go over stays over!”

  “Captain needed this,” Oliver said, everything suddenly clear.

  “What, being chased by a great beastie and making like a moon-touched fool?”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “Humans.” The disgust in his voice made Oliver laugh. The bird ate from Herself’s hand; it had never hunted for anything in its life. Prey never got bored. It didn’t understand. Captain needed this. The serpent needed this. Maybe, even the ship herself needed this.

  The sun rose overhead in the cloudless sky, and the wind remained brisk and steady, filling their sails with much-needed wind, as though God Himself were betting on them.

  The serpent was close enough now that they could see the details of its great head, a triangular wedge that was in fact larger than the jolly-boat, set with scales that glistened in the morning sunlight, dull green and muddy blue, set around a great black eye that didn’t seem to blink. The neck stretched out, even as the boat changed direction and avoided it by half a dozen ship-lengths.

  The distance was closing, and only the skill of the crew and the kindness of the wind was keeping them this far apart, this long.

  Oliver had seen the carcass of a great squid, once, hauled up by a whaleboat crew and left to rot on the beach. The serpent’s eye was like that, large and glassy. Only this one was attached to a living creature, and looking at them.

  Looking at him.

  Oliver suddenly felt queasy.

  There were some islands the Captain told him to stay on the ship. Those places, cat was considered a delicacy.

  “Now you know how I feel,” the bird said, too observant, fluffing its feathers and preening them back down again.

  “Oh, shut up,” Oliver said, and jumped down to go join Herself.

  “Hard starboard,” the Captain called, and his body swung to the left as the Fifth obeyed his command. Seawater splashed on his boots, and his laughter rung out over the sails like church bells on Sunday.

  “He’s going to get us all killed,” Herself muttered, but even she had the hint of a smile on her face. Captain, at his best, had that effect on some. “Englishmen, pfah!”

  The wind picked up, and the sails overhead belled exactly the way they were designed to. Oliver dug his claws into the wood to keep from sliding as the Fifth zagged and then zigged in a way she hadn’t been designed to.

  “Steady on now,” the Captain roared to the crew, his shirt stained with sweat and his voice hoarse from overuse. “Steady and hard, boys, that’s the way to show this beastie who’s lord of the sea!”

  The serpent, suddenly zagging itself, cut through the wake of the ship.

  “Ware the tail!” someone shouted, even as something moved under the surface, creating a wave that slapped the side of the Fifth like an irate whore.

 
“Hah!” Captain abandoned his perch and raced along the gunnel to the stern, whooping like a boy even as sailors scattered before him.

  “Be careful, you idiot,” Herself whispered. Cheepree fluttered up to her shoulder, and plucked a strand of hair with its beak. Oliver stirred, his claws kneading the hard wood underpaw, torn between the need to feel her hand on his fur, and the desire to go chasing along with the Captain.

  “You!” Captain’s voice carried the length of the ship, over the creaking of wood, the shouting of men, and the slush and slap of water. “You, beast!” A wave rose up and splashed him, head to toe, and he seemed barely to notice. A sailor tossed him a rope, yelling something, and he shrugged and wrapped it over one shoulder, a half-hearted concession to the risk he was taking.

  Oliver braced himself with all four legs, feeling disaster place its cold finger on the spine of the ship. There was challenge, and destiny, but this… this was madness. What was the Captain doing?

  What he had to do, his whiskers told him. What you told him to do.

  The great head reached forward, snaking almost at water’s level. The scales were each the size of a child’s open hand, the eyes all pupil, inky black and soulless. The wedge-shaped head had a single opening at the top, like a whale’s blowhole, while the long snout tapered into a sharp beak that curved downward in a cruel edge.

  “The devil itself rides that thing,” one of the sailors muttered, unable to look away.

  “The devil is that thing,” another said.

  Captain either did not hear them, or was listening to another voice, because he leaned out, the rope over his shoulder strained tight, and extended one arm toward that vicious beak.

  The head turned sideways on its neck and snapped at him. The Captain swung back, laughing like a fool.

  “Pass me a stave,” he shouted over his shoulder. No-one moved, save what was needed to keep the ship steady and moving. “A stave, damn you!”

  Mika shoved through the bodies, a wooden stave near as tall as he gripped in one hand.