Clockwork Phoenix 4

by Mike Allen

  The beach bum didn’t say anything for a while. “It’s a lovely thought. I guess one day we’ll find out.”

  “One day,” she said, but he knew her thoughts were far away from him, drifting on a nighted ocean, floating among the stars.

  “My name’s Damon,” he said.

  She shook herself. “What? Oh. You told me that already.”

  “I know, and thank you. But it may be a long time before we see each other again. I want you to remember my name until that happens. I want you to remember me. Can you do that?”

  She took in a breath. She didn’t mean to. She didn’t even realize for a little while that this is what she had done. The drowned girl had forgotten to remember not to breathe. She let it go, feeling the warmth of it as the breath escaped her body. She wondered, just for a moment, what it would feel like for the beach bum to touch her then. She finally shook her head. “You said yourself that we didn’t matter. Not to each other, anyway.”

  The beach bum hesitated. “And you said that we might be wrong. And if we can be wrong,” he said after a while, “Why couldn’t it be about something that matters?”

  The drowned girl took another breath. On purpose, this time.

  “I’m Lucia.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “No you won’t,” she said.

  He shook his head firmly. “I promise.”

  “You always say that.”

  “To them,” said the beach bum, waving a hand to the rest of the world. “Not to you.”

  “I’m Lucia,” she repeated, so softly that he wasn’t even sure who she was talking to. Perhaps to him. Perhaps to herself.

  The drowned girl closed her eyes, slipped into the water and drifted away. Later she dreamed of stars, and comets, and then of something else. She dreamed that some where, some when, some desolate stretch of sand, the beach bum waits. Damon waits for her. And he does remember.

  TRAP-WEED

  Gemma Files

  For their land-longing shall be sea-longing and their sea-longing shall be land-longing, forever.

  —An old legend of the Orkneys, concerning those seals who shed their skins to become women and men.

  Any selkie can be Great, if he fights for it when challenged. We are by no means a democracy.

  But for myself, I did not care to, and was driven forth, into deeper waters. So I swam until my fat and fur could no longer warm me, ’til the chill had almost breached my heart. I swam ’til my lungs gave out, then sank, deep into darkness.

  When I woke, I found myself aboard-ship, peltless and doubly nude. A lean man stood looking down on me, his elegant face all angles, while others watched from behind, above … so many, for this creaking wooden shell to carry ocean-bound in safety. I had never seen such a number before, all in one place.

  (For we stay as far from human men as possible on Sule Skerry, if we can, unless our instincts drive us otherwise. We know their works.)

  I was gasping, painful all over, in strange places—burnt and scraped, as though I’d been dragged over rocks. Indeed, my arm had a chunk torn from it, neat and triangular—nipped straight out at the point where it blended into shoulder, that same place I saw most mariners adorn with tattoo-work. I gaped at this a while, then tried to touch, and flinched from the sting of my own fingers’ salt.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” the man advised, without sympathy. “Call it the price of your salvation—a lesson either to keep to shallower waters or learn to hold your breath longer, when you choose not to.”

  Though it had been some time since I tried for human speech, I found it returned quick enough. “Where … am I, sir?”

  And this he smiled at, grimly enough—no surprise there. Since in their hearts, most men like the pap they call courtesy, that sorry salve to their impossible pride.

  “This scow of a brig’s mine, by right of seizure,” he replied, sweeping a contemptuous little bow. “Bitch of Hell, some call her, or Salina Resurrecta, since she’s cobbled from shipwrecks. While I myself am Jerusalem Parry, captain: A pirate, as you suspect. You were drowning, meantime—a sorry sight, in one sea-bred. Yet Mister Dolomance here brang you up, before mortality could quite take hold entirely … and while I misdoubt he did you as little hurt in the performance of it as he might have, we must always recall how those he comes from are not known for their restraint, in general.”

  “Mister Dolomance?”

  “Aye, that’s he, hid over yonder, where he likes it best—you’d be dead if he hadn’t found you, or if he was still able to do as he wished, instead of how I tell him to. For which you should, in either case, be suitably grateful.” Fixing me with cold, pale eyes, then, like two silver pennies salt-blanched to the color of water-cured bone turned coral: “And what are we to call you?”

  You could not say it if you tried, I thought. But since I seemed compelled to answer, I rummaged for the last human name I’d heard—the one that boy I’d pulled from his boat’s kin had called after him, its syllables dissolving down through water into meaningless sound by the time they reached the cave where my sisters kept him tethered, forcing him to sire a fresh crop of younglings. What they did with him after I never witnessed, for I was already at the sparring by then, about to choose discretion over valor, exile over family. Indeed, it only now occurred to me, I might not see them again, in his company or otherwise.

  In that moment I knew myself alone, entirely, lost amongst those who normally hate and prey on us—who either club us dead to steal our skins in error, thinking us only animals, or make away with them when we’re foolish enough to leave them unguarded and detain us for their pleasure, breeding children who will never feel at home on either sea or shore. And so, seeing no other way out, for the time being—

  “You may call me Ciaran, sir,” I said, at last.

  To my left, I heard the thing Captain Parry called Mister Dolomance give out with a disgusted little noise from his hidey-hole—half snort, half spit—and turned, abruptly far more angry than bereft, to confront whatever creature had dragged me up onto this rotting, lurching mass of timber held together mostly by barnacles and forward motion, at the still-sore price of its snatched mouthful of flesh.

  I found him squatting on the weather deck in a strange nest made from two massy coils of rope with a tarpaulin slung overtop, keeping himself moist by angling into the splash from a nearby cannon-port’s mouth. Standing, he would be half as tall as Captain Parry but a good two hands broader, squat yet sleek. With doll-eyes and an almost lipless mouth hiding a serrated bear-trap bite, he sported what some sailors called “a drowned man’s pallor,” close-wrapped to save himself from burning in direct sunlight. It was that sea-bed dweller’s skin of his, I later found out, which had left me so raw, drawing blood from frictive angles on the very briefest of contacts.

  I know you now, I thought, meeting that lidless black gaze, if only for a moment; he well might mock, since his own kind were known to scorn names entirely. So the fact that he answered at all to that mockingly polite and inexact one the Captain’d applied to him showed just how puissant this man’s magic must be, when reflected in “Mister Dolomance”’s grudging obeyance, his infinitely resentful loyalty. Or, for that matter, the mere fact of Parry being yet alive, having not only bent this tadpole version of a Great White shark to his will, but forced it to assume a (mostly) human form, while doing so.

  I have no doubt but that Mister Dolomance perceived both my terror and my pity, though his waverless glare rejected them both. And so we stood a while, locked in mutual regard: one cold-blooded, the other warm, doomed to meet for the first time in assumed shapes, confined to this creaking hulk. Me with my man-shape like a secret weakness revealed, as though I’d been forcibly shook inside-out; him with his man-shape imposed from the outside-in, never more than cruel illusion. For beneath it, he remained all rough muscle and horrid teeth, a terrible hunger, not even held together with bones.

  Though we suffered the same privations, we could never be allies. I w
as prey to him, as much as any other thing without Captain Parry’s power to protect it.

  “Well, then, gentlemen,” my captor told me, meanwhile, and Mister Dolomance as well—I could tell from the begrudging liquid grumble Mister Dolomance gave Parry back, by way of a reply. “Shall we retire to my cabin, and speak a bit further?”

  And since there seemed no option but to go, I bowed my clumsy, fresh-made man-head, and went.

  * * *

  “I will trouble you for my skin, sir, if I may,” I ventured, when the door was safely closed behind us.

  By the look of his possessions and on closer examination, I gathered that Parry had once been of some quality, as humans reckon such things—regally slim, his fine hands sword-callused and ink-stained, not roughened with rope. If he went un-wigged, that seemed to be by choice; the hair thus revealed was still mostly brown, though shot through with hints of grey. There were also more books in his quarters than I had seen in my whole life, though grantedly, the sea does not treat such objects well.

  But the Captain only shook his head. “No, I’ll take care of that awhile yet, as I hold most of my crew’s effects in trust for them. For we are none of us here entirely by choice, you see—not even me.”

  “Surely, though, it can matter little to you if I remain. I am no great hunter, like your … Mister Dolomance, there; my place is near the shore, not the open sea. And while some of my people have magic, of a sort, I am not one of them.”

  Parry sniffed again, prim as any cat. “I have all the magic I need already at my disposal, ‘Ciaran,’ and little liking for competition. You would provide me a very different service; less a tool to my hand than an object-lesson, for others.”

  “But what use can I possibly be of to you, bound or free, when you have one of the ocean’s greatest nightmares sworn to your service already?”

  “You undervalue your own impressiveness. My men fear me, and rightly, because I have a way with supernatural creatures, so adding a selkie to that roster cannot do me ill, even if it does me little comparative good.”

  Having no arguments left, I resorted to simply pointing out: “I … am no sailor, sir.” To which Captain Parry gave merely a chilly smile, as though to say that was both of no matter and hardly a skill requiring great genius to master.

  “Oh, you’ll soon learn,” was all he replied, and waved me away.

  Thus I found myself press-ganged, after a fashion; I betook myself to the quartermaster and begged my share of the ship’s labour, setting myself to it with energy, if not much effect. Yet the crew, on the whole, were kind—perhaps because they were sorry for me, a thing so far out of its place, if not its element.

  And always I could just glimpse Mister Dolomance stalking attendance, following at the Captain’s heels even while his gaze roamed after me. The farther we went from land, the happier he seemed, his sharp grin less a threat than a promise. While I wished myself increasingly back with my kin, fighting for supremacy I neither craved nor thought myself fit to hold, on that bloody rock; anywhere with land and sea alike, in close enough proximity to swim between.

  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 sleepless 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 fore-deck, 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 the great Mother Mister Dolomance and I shared to his all-too-human will.

  “Who was it cursed him, though?” I demanded, eventually, scrabbling 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?”