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, showed him 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 was 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.�
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“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 my and the shark’s great Mother 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?”
“Aye, for them rigs don’t have locks, just seams—the witchfinders put ’em on hot and force ’em sealed, so’s they’ll waste all their effort on one last spell to keep from dyin’; Captain Parry keeps his cravat high for a reason, t’ hide the scars all ’round his neck. But Rusk broke it open, with his hands; he was a strong man, and always knew the trick of twistin’ where a thing was weakest.”
“I ’eard this tale, too,” the second gunner chimed in. “‘Jerusha, I’ll call ye,’ he said, ‘seein’ you owe me all.’ And Parry just snapped at ’im, like they was two gents in a drawing-room: ‘Sir! I have not given you permission to use me thus, familiarly!’”
“No, and he never did, did he? Though Solomon Rusk, bold bastard that he was, wasn’t a one t’ ever pay such niceties much mind. . . .”
So Parry had begun in servitude himself, of the same sort he practiced on Mister Dolomance and me—a slave turned slave-master who, just like the shark-were, had no sympathy for his own past weakness, let alone the weaknesses of others. I fought free, he might say, if questioned; do the same, if you can . . . and if not, stop your whining.
(Yet for such a creature to base his power in the sea, where nothing is permanent, ever . . . not the shape of land, the ebb and flow of tide, or even any clear distinction between what makes one more itself than the other. . . .)
I think you court destruction, sir, I thought, allowing myself the very faintest beginnings of hope. And would almost have risked a smile to myself, had I not been so afraid he might be watching.
On those few brief occasions when we put ashore to trade, restocking with food and weaponry, the Captain always hung back, with only Mister Dolomance (who had an instinctual distrust of anything under his feet which did not move according to the ocean’s in- and out-breath) for company in his watery exile. And though other times women might come aboard, for the crew’s recreation, the Captain never indulged himself, though he might have had his pick—being not only undeniably handsomer than any other man on his ship, but having far better manners.
Instead, the two of them would retire early, and I would peep in through the window’s crack to discover them bent together over parchment, Mister Dolomance squeak-gurgling away in Parry’s ear while his master scratched away furiously with pencil and charcoal, checking and re-checking measurements with various instrumentation. And slowly, I came to figure they must be making a map together, hopelessly impenetrable to any land-dweller’s eyes: A grand survey of the ocean’s most uncharted areas, from the bottom up.
“He seeks for a place more land than sea, yet neither,” was the quartermaster’s theory. “Only there might this bane of his be lifted, and he find peace, if that’s indeed what he’s after.”
“Do you doubt it?”
“With the Captain? Where he’s concerned I doubt all things, ’til I’m told otherwise. ’Tis the best policy I’ve found, thus far.”
I glanced away, just in time to catch my fellow captive—listening too, as always—shoot me what passed for a smirk on that mask-like parody of a human face of his, as if to say: What fools!
Indeed, it did often seem to me the crew barely knew whereof they spoke, notwithstanding the fact they’d spent far more time under Parry’s rule than I had. And one way or another, for all my researches, exactly nothing they—or I—had discovered about him could in any way free me from my situation. I remained trapped, his possession, his slave; yet still worse, for I was not even of any great interest to him, of any particular u
se.
It galled me to realize this, almost as much as it galled me to realize I cared, either way. But perhaps Captain Parry was not altogether human either—partly dragon, maybe, for his twinned love of gold and fire, his magic, his damnable arrogance; partly wolf, for his love of blood.
Or he was just a man like any other, plundering this great sea-womb and stealing its children, using power he had no right to bend our Mother herself to his selfish desires. Would that make things better, or worse?
I could not fight him, either way—not I, who had declined to fight even my own kind, against whom I might have stood some chance of success. So I must find some other, more subtle, way . . . think myself out of this trap, like the man he’d condemned me to pretend to be, instead of the seal I so heartily wished I still was.
So I thought, and thought again, and thought yet further. Until, at last—I found a way.
One night, while Mister Dolomance swam his own discomforts away in the sea below’s black bosom, I threw a rope over the ship’s side and shimmied far enough down to face my fears—plunged my face into the water and took a deep, drowning breath, opening my mouth wide enough to let words leak out, trusting the water to carry them to Mister Dolomance’s ear-holes, translated thus into speech we might both understand.
We must work together, I told him, to gain our freedoms.
A gulp, and the reply came back, harsh even through silky fathoms: Clumsy sea-cow in man-skin, born neither of one sort nor the other, you fat-greased, fleshy thing! What could you offer that I had any need of, save for enough of your meat to fill my craw, and your too-hot blood to wash it down with?
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