Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘I came back to myself to find that the Fish’s tendrils, the great white mass of them that had held the ship for six decades, were now writhing and crackling and breaking away from the hull. And so the creature released the Revenge at last, as no Rope Fish had ever released a ship in all history. And down the monster sank, out of my knowledge, to the embracing deep.

  ‘Weeping, standing on the deck, the rigging free of white ropes at last, I looked about me and beheld another wonder yet. A small boat had put out from the island and was rowing towards the ship. In it were two figures, labouring slowly at the oars. Two people, a man and a woman, it seemed.

  ‘I stared. Was this some vision of madness? How could humans come to be here, at the Doldrums’ heart? But the boat was real, and pressed on. Indeed, as the Fish and its deadly tendrils had departed, the little craft was free to row to the very side of the ship. A voice called up, Ahoy there!

  ‘I tried to answer, but no sound came from my throat. I could only stand there paralysed as the call was repeated, and then at last I could hear the sound of climbing, and first the man and then the woman appeared at the gunnels and climbed over to stand on the deck and see me there.

  ‘I gazed back. It was so long since I had seen another person that they looked almost alien to me. But I remembered enough of humans to recognise that they were in fact both very old. And yet distinctive too. The man, short and slight, but with a commanding presence, had a patch upon one eye; and the woman, her eyes stern and otherworldly, was even stranger, for her arms and face were crisscrossed with hundreds of fine white scars.’

  Lucy could not suppress herself. ‘It was Dow and Nell, truly?’

  Rolly Fish nodded at her sadly. ‘Yes, you would have known them immediately, no doubt. To me, however, they were simply two strangers. But now they spoke to me. Who are you? the man asked. What is this ship?

  ‘I tried to answer, but it was awful. At first I could manage no more than a croak and their stares were pitying. At last I managed to rasp my name, at which nothing showed in their eyes, but when I whispered the name of the ship, the Revenge, recognition lit at last in their gazes.

  ‘Recognition … and horror.

  ‘The man said, No, it cannot be. Not after all this time.

  ‘But the woman was watching me with her knowing eyes. He tells the truth. This ship is indeed the Revenge.

  ‘The man groaned. No, by all the deeps …

  ‘I gasped words at him, You know this ship?

  ‘He nodded at me, the horror still in him. Sixty years ago, I saw this ship taken by a Rope Fish, along with all its crew.

  ‘And then I understood.

  ‘This man – this old, old man – was the youth for whose sake I and everyone else on the Revenge had been doomed.

  ‘You, I accused. You’re him. You’re Dow Amber.

  ‘He flinched at that, and I saw a guilt, a burden, haunting in his gaze. Have we met? he asked. But no, we can’t have …

  ‘He meant my age, of course. That is, my apparent age, for remember, although I was some eighty years old by then, the Fish had kept me a young man in outward appearance. Dow meanwhile had been missing from the northern world for some sixty years, so from his point of view it was quite impossible that he could have previously met someone who looked to be no more than thirty, as I did. But then – and I could see the confusion in him as he tried to reason it out – how could a young man even be aboard this ship, that he himself had witnessed being taken by the Fish so long ago? It made no sense.

  ‘He did not know about my immortality, of course. Nor did I tell him. Bitterness possessed me. I know you, I said, cold and cruel, the ability of speech returning to me quickly in my anger. I was promised a reckoning with you, as were all the others who sail with me on this ship.

  ‘What others? he asked, bewildered, looking about.

  ‘But the old woman with him, she knew, she saw. Her uncanny eyes roamed the decks, widening in further horror. Dow, she whispered, they’re everywhere. By all that floats, there are hundreds of them.

  ‘Hundreds of what? he demanded.

  ‘Ghosts … she replied.

  ‘I had, in these last long hot days in the Doldrums, all but forgotten my cursed companions on the ship, so accustomed was I to blocking out their presence. But there was no blocking them out now, they had come to the moment of their ascendance, and all around us their shapes were coalescing out of nothingness, all the same dreadful faces, nameless but familiar after all these years, their stares ever patient and vengeful.

  ‘Dow remained blind to them, but not Nell, she beheld them just as clearly as I did. Yet for her they were not nameless.

  ‘Dow, she moaned brokenly, they’re people we know. I can see Johannes, and Fidel, and Vincente – and a woman with him, and a child, wet and terrible and drowned. Axay is here, and Uyal. And that Laundress girl, Cassandra. And Agatha Harp. And Dow, do you remember, in the Ice, that wretched little woman we found, frozen on the island, my sister scapegoat? She is there. And many others, faces I don’t know. But they know you; I can tell by the way they look atyou. Oh Dow, they’re so … broken, so hurt, so angry, some of them. They … don’t you see? They’re the people who died to help us. People who died because of us.’

  Rolly Fish stopped suddenly, and gave a shrill laugh, and Lucy could glimpse a much younger, and much more unpleasant man.

  Then he sobered. ‘I won’t lie to you, young woman. The look on Dow Amber’s face was a joy to me. He was staggered, horrified, as if some hideous weight had just fallen upon his shoulders. As perhaps it had.

  ‘My family, he whispered to his witch woman. My parents, my brother, my sisters. Are they here too?’

  ‘Nell stared. I see a family like that, yes … I’m sorry, Dow, yes.

  ‘Are they burned?

  ‘I can’t … yes … yes, they are burned.

  ‘Dow was white. And all these ghosts, he asked, can you tell why it is that they are here? He spoke as if he knew and dreaded the answer. For good or bad, they all died long ago. What is it they want now?

  ‘Us, Nell replied, with a hopeless stare. They want us.

  ‘At that, Dow gazed all about at the empty decks, and for a moment it seemed that maybe he could see the ghosts after all. Then at last he bowed his head, and gave a sad smile to Nell. Of course they do. And so they should. They were always the ones who paid the price, not us.

  ‘There is only one fee they will accept now, she said, as if in warning.

  ‘I know, he answered, and well, aren’t we ready anyway? It’s no mistake, I think, that this ship has come here just at this time.

  ‘No, she answered, no mistake.

  ‘Dow now addressed the invisible watchers. Wait, he told them. One last time. We will return, and soon. And I saw all around the stony faces of the ghosts, and their implacable patience. Yes, they would wait, a little yet.

  ‘Then Dow turned to me. You, however, Roland. You are no ghost. What are we meant to do with you?

  ‘To that I had no answer, but Nell said, He must come with us back to the house. I think I know where his future lies now.

  ‘So I went with them. We climbed down to their little boat, and we rowed away from the Revenge. For the first time in sixty years, I looked back upon the ship from without. There was little to recognise of the original vessel: the hull was all alabaster white now, its masts bare of sail, its gunports hollow and empty, a ghost ship indeed. And gazing at it I grew dizzy and distressed. It was all too much suddenly, for the Fish to be dead and for me to liberated. Or perhaps I was suffering from the shock of my return to mortality, now that my communes with the monster were over forever. I can’t say.

  ‘In any case, I was sorely ill by the time we landed on the beach, and soon passed into a long delirium, so I remember very little of my time on the island. Dow and Nell’s island, I suppose I must call it, for I never learned any other name; their little refuge of coolness and greenery there amid the Doldrums dreariness. There was a
house, I remember, and a bed into which I was put while I was nursed through my sickness. It seemed to be a home that they had lived in for many years, just the two of them, alone, as far as I could see …’

  Rolly Fish paused, thinking, and once more Lucy could not suppress herself. ‘Just the two of them? But what happened to everyone else? Dow and Nell took two ships and hundreds of people with them into the Doldrums. Weren’t all those people there too?’

  The old man smiled painfully. ‘No, there was no one else. And no, I don’t know what happened to all the others. If Dow and Nell told me, I don’t remember. More’s the pity, for it’s what people have always wanted to know, since my return, those that give any credit to my story. When they used to come to see me, the question was always the same. What happened to all the others? Dow and his followers went in search of a New World, to find land in the southern oceans. Did they make it? Did they find land? Are they alive? Or did they die, all those people on those ships?

  ‘Alas, I cannot say. Where Dow and Nell had been, what they had done with their lives, what had happened to their fleet and all their companions, of that I have no knowledge. All I remember is that the two of them, as I said, were very old. Also, they were neither of them well. Dow was bony and drawn and had a deep and persistent cough. Nell was tired and weak, as frail as a dried leaf, for all her sternness. Still, they had the air of a couple who were content and satisfied with the life they had lived, even as it was coming to an end. In fact, I became aware that, around me, they were packing up their little house, as those do who are about to depart on a long journey.

  ‘In time there arrived a morning when my head felt clearer, and Dow and Nell came to me and saw that I was almost myself again. And Dow said, Come with us now, Roland, for it is time to end this.

  ‘I was better, yes, but still in many ways it all felt like a dream. I went with them without argument, down to the beach where their little boat was waiting. It was packed, I saw, with supplies, food and water for many months sailing. We climbed in and rowed slowly out once more to the Revenge.

  ‘The ship had not moved, there in the calm waters. We pulled alongside and Dow and Nell, cautious in their frailty, prepared to climb aboard. Unthinking, I went to follow, but Dow raised his hand.

  ‘No, Roland. You are not to come with us. You must stay here in the Maelstrom. This boat is yours now.

  ‘I stared at him, not understanding.

  ‘Nell said, This craft has served Dow and I well all these years, but we don’t need it anymore. The Maelstrom we pass to you. You must take it and row north. There is food and water enough to last. I have sent word to the Sunken, and they will not trouble you. In time you will come to seas of wind and wave again, and after that you must sail for your home in the Kingdoms.

  ‘Home? I enquired, for the word had no meaning.

  ‘You have suffered a long time, Roland of the Counting, Nell replied. But there is this at least: in all those years you have not aged. You are still a young man in body. So take this boat and return to your homeland, and live out the life that was stolen from you by Fate, all for the sake of Dow and me.

  ‘I shook my head. The notion was madness. Me, sail all the way through the Doldrums and then across the Northern Sea on my own? It was laughable, impossible. I said, I will be lost. I am no sailor.

  ‘She smiled. You may be surprised.

  ‘With that, Dow and Nell climbed away up the side of the ship. I noticed then that each of them carried nothing other than a single leather flask that hung from their shoulders and gurgled with some sluggish liquid within. Once on board, the two looked down from the rail at me a last time.

  ‘Go, Dow ordered, you cannot stay near this ship. But keep the Maelstrom well. It has never failed us, in all our voyages together.

  ‘Yet the boat is not yours to keep forever, added Nell. I have a prophecy to impart to you, the last of my life. Listen now. And she spoke then words that I have never forgotten, even though I did not understand them at the time. But now at last, after all these years, I think that perhaps I do.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Lucy. ‘What was the prophecy?’

  The old man shook his head, amused. ‘Later, young woman. All that matters for now is that Dow and Nell told me once more to be on my way, and I obeyed. I took up the oars and rowed away from the ship.

  ‘But before long I looked back, and then stopped rowing in my puzzlement. For on the Revenge, Dow and Nell were going slowly to and fro, pouring out the liquid from their flasks. At length, they seemed to be done, and retreated to the High Deck. From there, they looked forward over the ship. And I saw then, for the last time, as if a veil was taken from my eyes, the ghosts. They were massed on the Main Deck, as would a crew awaiting a speech from the captain. And indeed, Dow and Nell were now addressing the assembly, though I was by then too far away to hear their words.

  ‘But at last they were finished. Dow bowed a final time to the collected ghosts, and then turned aside a moment, and lo, when he turned back he held a flaming brand in his grip. He held it high for a time, and the ghosts seemed to stare at it enraptured. Then he cast it out and down to the Main Deck. And immediately a great flame arose, building to a fierce blaze.

  ‘It was oil that Dow and Nell had spread across the ship, of course. And although, when the Fish had been alive, the Revenge had been all but invulnerable to flame, now that the monster was gone, the timbers that had been so infused with the essence of the Fish seemed especially eager to burn, for the blaze spread with incredible swiftness.

  ‘Soon the entire ship was burning. My last glimpse of Dow and Nell was of two figures, already wrapped in smoke, embracing by the ship’s wheel, and then sinking away, overcome by the fumes.

  ‘After that, there was only the inferno. But in the cloud that went up I fancied that I saw the ghosts. They were rising amid the fire and the smoke, and dissipating as they went, their forms fading into the sky, as if set free from the ship that had been their unhappy prison for so long.

  ‘At the time I did not understand, but later I came to grasp what had happened. Dow and Nell, to appease the spirits of their past, to honour the debt they owed to all those who had died for their sake all those years ago, had paid in the only coin they had left to them: their own lives. And in doing so, they had unfettered the ghosts at last and sent them to their rest.

  ‘But there and then, all I felt was horror. I turned my back on the burning ship, and rowed away from that place, never to return.

  ‘As instructed, I pointed my bow to the north – the Maelstrom bore no compass, yet somehow I knew which way to go – and so commenced the long voyage out of the Barrier. It was not easy. I was weak still, and when I passed beyond the limits of the oasis in which Dow and Nell had made their home, I had to endure once more the suffocating heat of the Doldrums. Yet I did not falter. And though from time to time I glimpsed, upon the floating islands, the sinister figures that I had observed previously, the Sunken of which Nell had spoken, I was not assaulted by them or by any other creature. In time I came to the Sterile Sea, and in time again, after countless tedious days, I came to the weeds and stench of the Outer Doldrums, and passed through, and so at last felt a wind on my face and knew I had returned to the open ocean.

  ‘But what now? How could I ever hope to find my way home in all the wide seas: me, who had been such a laughingstock of my fellow officers, so little did I know of navigation and seafaring. Ah … but Nell was quite right. I was no longer the hapless youth I had once been. Sixty years upon the sea, observing the ocean through the eyes of the Fish, had made me, even without my knowing, a mariner like no other. I had lost the Fish, true, but I found that even so I could still read the ocean currents as if they were familiar paths; I still recognised each wind and knew where it came from and to where it would blow; I still sensed the ocean floor beneath me in all its rises and falls; and I could still smell land even when it was miles beyond any horizon. And so it was that, unerringly, I steered my little boat towards
the Kingdoms, and not two months after escaping the Doldrums, I sighted land and sailed into the Golden Millpond, and docked at last in the port of Denez in the kingdom of Creve.

  ‘I was home. How long had I dreamed of this moment, back in the early days after being captured by the Fish!

  ‘But, of course, it was nothing like I had hoped. Too many years had passed … far too many years. My father had died during the war, and my mother, I learned, had followed thirty years later. I had no other family left other than several distant cousins who had inherited my father’s estate. I had hardly known them sixty years earlier, and they certainly did not recognise me now – nor would they believe that I was really Roland of the Counting.

  ‘No one would believe it. Wherever I told my tale, I was denounced as a liar, or a trickster, or a fraud. People began to call me Roland of the Rope Fish in mockery, refusing me my real name. And soon enough I was known far and wide as just Rolly Fish, a pitiful and impoverished madman.

  ‘But after all, how could I blame people? Back in the normal world, I could scarcely believe my own tale myself: the last six decades, the Fish, Pietru, immortality, the final journey into the Doldrums … it all began to seem like some impossible fantasy. Could it be that I really was, in fact, just some thirty-year-old madman who had, in his deluded state, imagined a whole other life for himself? How could I prove that this wasn’t the case?

  ‘Except, what about the Maelstrom? It was my one possession now, that little boat. It was my home too, for I had no other place to lay at rest in Creve, not in all the months that I stayed there. The Maelstrom was unquestionably real, a solid fact of timber and canvas – so didn’t that meant that everything else about my story must be real too? Or at least some of it?

  ‘It was a hope to cling to. For myself, at least. It convinced no one else, however. For after all, it was just a boat.

  ‘Either way, in time I tired of Creve and of the constant derision. My cousins, to be rid of me, and because I did seem to know more about my father’s estate than any stranger possibly could, including embarrassing details of some dubious financial arrangements of old, agreed at last to pay me a small settlement. With that money in hand I fled Creve and sailed away in the Maelstrom, and to this day I have never been back.