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 colour 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 valour, 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, 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.”
“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 use.
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?
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 already 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. . . .
. . . if he cares to.