I had expected nothing less, nothing more. Yet I spoke on, anyhow, and he . . .
. . . hard words aside, I could tell, even then: Mister Dolomance listened.
There was a long silence, after. So long I feared he might be swimming closer, too intent on an easy kill to truly mull my plan over.
But: I accept, he said, at last. Just that.
Good, I replied. And shimmied back up, before the crew might find me gone.
We did not consult long, Mister Dolomance and I, in forming our plans; I knew from the start just how ill-suited by nature he was to be anything like the planning sort. Yet it is always in their desires that men make themselves most vulnerable, and though Mister Dolomance had surely never looked to, we both understood he had already gained far more insight into our captor’s yearnings than I ever would.
So—having extracted such intelligences about the hungers which drove Captain Parry as my co-conspirator was capable of giving—it fell to me, instead, to find a way to turn their direction to our mutual benefit.
It was not so much that the Captain trusted Mister Dolomance (for in truth, he trusted no one, thinking no one equal enough to him to merit such a gift). Yet, as had already become rapidly clear, he placed a quite foolish amount of trust in his dominance over this awful creature, whose taming-by-force formed much of his own reputation.
“I think you are not entirely honest with me, sir,” I heard him say, one evening, over those charts of theirs. “Yet so long as you do what I require, I find I care little what details you may think to withhold.”
A mistake, on his part. And to not consider me, at all, in his equations . . . this was a mistake too, though he did not know it.
Not yet.
The Bitch made on, leading ever-westerly, with Mister Dolomance’s grumbles our pilot’s only guide for navigation. Islands grew scarce, and stores likewise; the crew grew unhappy, yet loath to express it. While Captain Parry kept his face carefully schooled, with only the dullish glint in those sea-burnt eyes to indicate a growing undercurrent of excitement—until the night when I saw him stride into the mess unexpectedly and swig lit rum from the communal store along with the rest, all of them too disconcerted by far to refuse him a part in their drunkenness.
Later, his back set against the fore-deck’s supplemental mast while the crew revelled down below, I watched him stare out over the topmost figurehead’s shoulders at the dark billows Mister Dolomance hid in, and mutter to himself: “Hell gape to take you, Solomon Rusk, if it didn’t that day, the way it should have—you had no stink of the true practitioner about you, trained or un-, that I could discern. How was I to know it hid in your blood, any more than you did, waiting for that very last breath to bring your death’s vow of ruin on me to fruition?”
Here he actually paused a half-moment; I swear I saw him listen, as to an invisible companion. Then grimace at nothing and reply, pale face suddenly touched with heat—
“‘Nice as a divine’ . . . yes, you would say that. But here is truth: You took liberties with me, though I warned you not to, and this is the result. Do not think to deny it! I swore you ship-loyalty, nothing more, but you were not the sort to stint yourself and you have reaped bitter fruit from that decision since, dead man. So you may complain all you wish when drink opens my ears, but I have suffered long enough for your sins, as well as my own. I will have my place, got for me with the sea’s help, and you—you will have nothing. Now stop your mouth, before I prison your ghost in a bottle and sink you further still; from this instant forward you may watch but not touch, not ever again, and choke on the sight.”
All at once, the humid breeze seemed to turn sharp-cold, blowing in one bitter gust from where the Captain sat to where I squatted, listening; I shivered to feel it pass by, as if touched by some strange hand. Behind us, meanwhile, the quartermaster took up with a chantey tune, fellow after fellow soon joining in as a bawling round. Quickly, I recognized in it a song usually attributed to Captain Kidd, here modified to fit a different, entirely predictable personage:
. . . oh, ’Salem Parry is my name, as I sail, as I sail,
The root of my infame, as I sail, as I sail,
My faults I will display,
Committed day by day—
Damnation be my lot, as I sail . . .
For every legend, good or bad, warrants a song made from his exploits. But sailors are fatalists all, drowned men kept upright sheerly by luck’s vagaries—and thus unlikely to stay long impressed by anything, or anyone, who claims to be able to cheat destiny forever.
. . . So we’ll taken be at last, and then die, and then die,
Though we have reigned awhile, we will die—
Though we have reigned awhile,
While fortune seemed to smile,
We must have our due deserts, and still die . . .
If Parry found the implication insulting, however, he gave no sign of it; his fine-cut face stayed closed and stony, indifferent as always. And his thoughts, now he was done discoursing with Captain Rusk’s ghost, remained his own.
The next day, we finally reached that place Mister Dolomance had described to me—a great knot of weed flowering up from the ocean’s bottom, roots sunk two hundred feet or more, down to the darkness where blue-clear water becomes mulch-black sand. For even at its very deepest places, the sea too gives way to land, eventually.
(And might this have been the worst part of old Captain Rusk’s curse, made all the more potent by his extremity—for if there were truly no place without land, how could the ocean ever be anything but a stop-gap, a salve between bleedings against pain that never fully died? Which, in turn, perhaps explained so much about Parry’s manner, his stiff coldness, his constant distraction; things become clearest in hindsight, always, after the fact. Long after, most often.
(But since I am now coming near my own story’s end, as you can no doubt tell, I judge I too may well be falling into a distraction. So I will take care to try and tell the rest of it through without embellishment, from here on.)
We nosed in slowly, seeking not to entangle ourselves, ’til the weed-forest’s thickness made it impossible and we dropped anchor as best we might, hooking it in the crook where three branches grew together at the holdfast like ivy. Parry and a small party took to the boats, following Mister Dolomance, who merely gave that creaky laugh of his when Parry vented his doubts as to where, exactly, he might be leading them. For once, I felt I could tell exactly what he was saying:
If you believe me capable of deception, wizard, even when still so ensorcelled I keep this shape you’ve laid on me, then it is yourself you make look bad, not I.
At this, Captain Parry merely sniffed yet once more, forbearing response—haughty as the Devil himself, if with far less reason—and waved the oarsmen to their task, bidding them into the weed’s heart ’til all of them were eventually lost from sight. The remaining crew stayed on deck, watching after with weapons ready, lest their master send up some sort of signal for aid. But since I knew exactly what they would find if they only went far enough, I slipped down below and performed a few small tasks, while no one else was looking.
One boat came back, the quartermaster at its helm. “Captain wants ye, Ciaran-boy, and quick-smart,” he called up to me. “To ‘bear witness to his triumph,’ or some-such nonsense.”
“Coming,” I said, and was over the side a second after, not waiting on a ladder or rope; I hit the water with a splash and let the man haul me bodily aboard, all uncaring of how wet I got these ill-fitting clothes I soon expected to no longer have to wear.
The Captain’s boat had moored, again by tethering itself to whatever was handy, right by a weed-clump so thoroughly knotted it had grown a sort of skin, fleshy-rough as any mushroom. A veritable floating island, such as crews tell tales of from one end of the sea to the other, never for a moment thinking to set foot upon its like in real life. And it was here that Jerusalem Parry alread
y stood, boot-heels sunk just a bare quarter-inch into the spongey mass below; stood and swayed slightly, braced against pain, ’til he was sure no blood would come. Whereupon his bitter mouth finally stretched wide and he threw back his head to laugh, delighted as any child with the way his magic had brought him at last to that place he’d so long sought for.
“See?” he called to me, triumphant. “I stand victorious. Though Rusk stole the land from me, yet have I conquered; the sea itself delivers whatever I demand, no matter how impossible!”
“Mister Dolomance and myself, rather, to whom you now owe a debt of thanks.”
Parry raised a brow. “Mister Dolomance has proved a treasured investment, undoubtedly,” he admitted with surprising grace, “so much so I may even free him for it, one day. But you’ve given me little enough during your stay with my crew, aside from sullen looks and poor labour. Or am I mistaken?”
He thought to toy with me in his customary style, all aristocrat’s drawl and fine vocabulary—as he’d done with Rusk, perhaps, who’d seemingly found it more attractive than I. But because I knew something the Captain did not, for once, I met his insults with a similar grin.
“As it ensues, yes,” I replied. “For instead of giving, I have in fact taken something, without your notice.”
“Explain yourself, sir.”
I shrugged. “Wait, and see.”
Out where weed gave way again to ocean, the Bitch floated low, lapped at by some gentle tidal gyre; we caught yet more music off its thronged deck, playing counterpoint to light laughter, scuffle and jesting. But all this changed a moment later, when—with a flash and muffled roar, like some cracked cannon’s back-fire—its magazine, which I’d carefully set fire to before disembarking, went off, blowing her hull so far open her guts were laid bare. The mainmast went one way, the mizzenmast another, tearing wood like splintery paper; screams rose, as did smoke, and flames.
Had he been still on board, Captain Parry’s magic might have turned the trick, but from here, there was no help for it: those careful bonds suturing wreck to wreck dissolved, leaving the ship itself to slide apart in chunks and sink, taking the bulk of his crew down as well.
Parry’s smile became a snarl, his eyes two werewolf moons. “You flotsam scum,” he called me, words ground out between his teeth like bones. “God curse the day I ever let you on my vessel.”
“Yes, and that was entirely at your pleasure, was it not? Well, I wish you full joy of that call, just as you once wished Rusk’s ghost joy of his, when you thought no one was listening . . . and joy of this new home of yours, likewise, for however long your stay on it may last.”
Caught gloating as only fools do, I was so puffed with my own cleverness that I barely registered Parry’s hand slipping inside his coat, though I knew what it was he kept there. But when he withdrew the hex-bag, brandishing it like a pistol, I at least knew to shy away; the boat rocked sharply, salt spray slopping in over the side, prompting the quartermaster—shook from his shocked silence, and grabbing for his oars—to swear in three separate languages.
Still: “Not so much as I wish this joy on you,” Parry told me, coldly. And up-ended the whole mess into the waves between us—bottle-finger, eyeball, hair-rope, fetish, tooth and all else, useless to him in his current cheated state, except as one last weapon. Since, at the very end, yet another thing more came slipping out to feed the churn . . . my skin.
My skin.
I must confess I almost went in after it, just on the off-chance, before I recalled what lurked in wait below. But then I caught sight of Mister Dolomance, still crouched in his captor’s shadow, tearing away at his own parody-of-human disguise in a paroxysm of painful delight: mouth already ripped to either earhole with new teeth sprouting up along the bottom jaw in a bloody spray, muzzle punching out triangular, while his eyes—already far too widely spaced for comfort—migrated to either side of his head, losing their minimal ability to blink entirely. Shoulders hunched and splitting down mid-line, too, as his fin’s long-buried crest at last came arching up between. . . .
All your bad works brought to ruin in the same instant, I thought, staring Captain Parry down, straight in his silver-penny glare. All you’ve sowed bloomed up full, sir, and ripe for reaping; well, I do hope you relish the taste of it, you sad fellow sport of unnaturalness. What little you can swallow, that is, before the end.
Beneath the Captain’s boots, the weed-island rocked and buckled, forcing him down on one knee. I watched it crack, pull apart at its weakest points, and remembered how Mister Dolomance had described the forest that supported it, where his kin (who do not of a custom flock, or even pair, at least for longer than it takes one to get a kit on another) glided so close they risked touching in order to graze the schools that fed on those mile-high weed-fronds. It was always twilight there, a purple half-night forever blood-tinged, the water itself heavy with rotting meat; a bed of infinite appetite upon which every prospective victim knew they would, at least, die full-stomached.
This was what Jerusalem Parry found himself momentarily balanced above—a chasm of open mouths, all waiting to take a bite, before what was left of him drifted to the ocean’s mucky floor. Yet even as he summoned his last few shreds of power to stave that judgement off, if only for a breath, he opened himself to the surprise attack he should have most feared, all along: Mister Dolomance, leaping high in mid-spasm to bite deep into the Captain’s unprotected nape, severing spine and the spell which kept him man-shaped alike. The shared arc of that jump threw them both sidelong, dragging Parry off-balance even as Mister Dolomance’s legs shrank vestigial, once more fusing to form a tail; the weight of it put them down together with a great slap, waves gouting high, and slammed shut a blue-water door upon them both.
It was done, then—our revenge, complete—and Mister Dolomance surely got the lion’s share of spoils, though I was the one self-condemned to live out a false man-life ’til laid in some land-bound grave. And since cowardice, at least, could never be counted amongst his sins, I somehow knew the Captain would go down fighting, to the very last . . . that image bringing me a variety of pleasure, at least, even as grief for my own losses cored my buried seal’s heart.
The quartermaster pulled to with a will, meanwhile, and I took up oars as well, helping him put enough distance between us and the Bitch’s overthrow to make sure we were well out of range before the true frenzy began. After which we drifted, delirious with heat and fever, with hunger our only company; it occurred to me more than once, during this phase, that if I had managed to regain my true shape then the man I shared this boat with would have slit my throat long since, and be already picking his teeth with my bones. But thankfully, another ship picked us up before he could fully recall what lurked inside me, instead of thinking of me only as a boy—a tender thing, more his kin than not, to be protected rather than eaten.
“Ye’re one of us now, son,” was the last thing he spoke to me, which I know he meant kindly. Yet I just shook my head, waiting until he slept to steal what few coins he still possessed to pay my passage and roll him out through the sluices with a splash so quiet I reckon it was barely heard, either above-decks or under.
It was an impulse and no doubt an unworthy one, for I did feel bad after, if only a little while. But the feeling did not last long, confirming what I hoped was still true, even in my current skinless state: That we were not alike, he and I, no more than I and Mister Dolomance. That we never could be.
By ship after ship and voyage after voyage, sometimes spaced years apart, I made my long way back to the Skerry where I took up residence on the shore, gazing each day from cliffside across to the home I would never regain. I built myself a boat, and fished from it; I made myself a life, and lived it. At a midsummer dance, I told a girl my name was Ciaran, and married her. Our son became Young Ciaran, in his turn.
And then, one day, I pulled up my net to find a skin—my skin—inside it.
Now it is late
, and the fire is almost out. In the other room, Young Ciaran and his mother lie sleeping; my tale is told, in almost every particular. So I sit here and stroke the long-lost pelt spread out upon my knees, so soft, so durable . . . barely a mark on it, though my own hide has grown rough from ill-use, and not even a tear to show where the scar I once took from Mister Dolomance’s teeth should be. Indeed, it reminds me of nothing so much as its polar opposite, my former co-conspirator’s skin, which—like Captain Parry himself, as one man learned, to ill-profit—could hardly stand to be touched at all, at least from some angles, without danger of wounding. Never without cost, of one sort or another.
Tonight, I think, I will go swimming. And I smile, even knowing what probably awaits me, out there in the dark stretch of water between beach and Sule—something cold-blooded, grown huge as a bull in its far-roaming freedom, with little about it to indicate it was ever forced to walk upright, bowing and scraping at the whim of a man whose magic kept it prisoned in a shape it never would have chosen otherwise. For unlike my own kind, Mister Dolomance was only made to be what he is, not what he could be; his sort have no use for contradiction, let alone for metaphor.
Yet we are both equally treacherous, he and I—just as our Mother the sea is, in Her changeable yet unchanging heart. We cannot be overborne even by the subtlest magics, as Jerusalem Parry learned too late; we cannot be trusted, ever, even by those who love us. And as the sea is my home, so I will be proud to die there, if I must . . . more proud than I ever would have been to die on land, had I been forced to, as for so many years I was certain I would be.
Perhaps, though . . . perhaps I will fight, this time, the way I declined to, so long ago. Why not? What more do I have to lose?
Little enough, in the end.
The tide turns. The fire becomes ash. I rise. And here—in silence—is where I take my leave of all you who listen, closing the circle with these words: Just as any man may seize power if he consents to pay for it, by whatever method, any selkie may be Great, eventually. . . .
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