The surface of the sea is protean in its variability. To an etymologist this is a tautologous statement, and any experienced sailor knows that it’s a truism, not worth saying. But to sailors who have found a new love? Though they will not quite admit it, everything seems fresh, even useless and overfamiliar things.
To Captain Penthenny, the sea that day seemed protean in its variability, new and exciting.
So was the wind. So was the flotsam of Mordew that so recently had been nothing more than a tedious obstacle to steer around.
When Penthenny reached down, she found, where the extent of her arms reached, a warm hand – Niamh’s – which she held, and then, in the middle distance, she saw a blot of blackness amongst the bobbing and charred beams of collapsed houses.
The blot was steady in the uncertain and changeable blue.
If it had been Oisin at her side – she would not have touched his hand, let alone held it, but if, by some coincidence, it had been him – the captain of the Muirchú would have taken the blot for a floating plank, or a dead shark, or some other marine commonplace. She would have turned aside, gone to her cabin, uncorked a bottle of whatever remained to be uncorked and would have drunk herself to sleep.
But it was not Oisin at her side.
People newly in love – perhaps it is better to say people whose love is newly reciprocated – are always alert, though they might not know it, for situations that, while they do not test their love object – that would be too negative – do at least have the opportunity to demonstrate the truth of the feelings that surge in their blood.
It is not that the loving heart does not believe itself, but more that it desires events though which new love might be expressed, so it can enjoy them. This was the case with Penthenny, though she didn’t know it consciously, and so, when she saw the blot, she sought out that loving agreement that a kindred spirit will demonstrate on the shared experience of something unusual.
Penthenny said: ‘What’s that?’ and though she didn’t expect an answer that gelled with her own feeling, her heart longed in its desire for it, since it would be as good as proof to it that its burning was not unjustified.
Fortunately for the captain, heart, mind and all, Niamh said, ‘Looks like a dog, I think.’
The smallest things: these are what love is made of, in the beginning. As time passes, the life of lovers gains gravity and import – it gathers life and death, joy and sadness – but right at the beginning, the shared sight of a dog, at a distance, when someone else might have said ‘What are you going on about?’, these almost nothings are enough to solidify the world around something that otherwise might not come properly into being.
They will be forgotten, certainly, in the passing decades, but that makes them no less true, no less vital when they happen.
Penthenny had her idea confirmed, and this was what saved the seventh daughter of Sirius – whose name was Treachery – because who could not, at the risk of undermining their new love, let a shared vision of a dog at sea falter through lack of interest, or lack of action?
No one loving, is the answer.
And the fish, who was recently made aware of a future mate? It too invested in the rescue, looping through the waves back the way it had come, back towards Mordew, a place it now held fondly in its heart where once it had been only the source of a strong, but troubling, magnetism.
The Muirchú, without any orders being given, made the adjustment to its course that brought Treachery into its orbit.
Niamh, waving away her captain’s insistence that she need not do it herself and that one of the sailors should be called, took a boathook from the rack, and placed it in the water, thinking that, since a dog will grab a thing with its jaws, this dog, all grey and wet and sleek as a seal, would do that, and so allow her to draw it in.
She did not know, Niamh, that the dog had its mouth filled with the pellet Nathan Treeves had become – how could she? – but she was disappointed when the dog did not seize the wood that would have saved its life.
She, like Penthenny, had her happiness invested in its saving.
She had long harboured an irritable type of desire for her captain, one day attraction, the next day fury, and this was solidifying in favour of attraction now, so she could not brook this lack of will on the part of the dog to be saved, because what woman will prefer a continuation of irritation to the satisfaction of her longing? Who would prefer to see a dog drown to saving its life? Very few who are not disposed to those odd types of pleasure, which Niamh was not.
Consequently, by a rational resolution of an internally written equation, such as Niamh was wont to draw up for herself, she stripped down to her underclothes – something she was now glad to do in front of her superior, rather than appalled by the prospect of – and dived over the side, entering the water like a cormorant does, perpendicularly, surfacing as the same bird will surface, fish in mouth, before forcing itself into the sky and away.
Niamh did not fly up, but crawled through the waves towards the dog instead, who was very near now, and grabbed her under the forelegs.
Treachery rested her head on the sailor’s shoulder, to breathe more easily through her nose and the corners of her mouth, and both of them were hoisted up onto the deck of the ship by Penthenny, who had sent Oisin away back to his cabin when he had tried to help. There he attended to whatever it was he occupied himself with – the imagined details of which were the source of much amused and belittling gossip at the mess tables at mealtime.
Was it his fault that he was to be the focus of a new couple’s separation of themselves from the loveless of the world? No, it was not, but then he was to perform a similar unkindness on the people of his acquaintance years later when, his brass nose shining, he attracted the delighted attention of a partner suited to him, the particulars of whom this tale does not provide, and which you can therefore choose for yourself.
Treachery – once she had been dried with towels, fed, watered and combed – by standing at the prow and indicating with her nose where it was that she wished to be taken, made use of the captain’s almost infinite intention to see this dog’s story end positively to have the ship take her to the waters above the sunken city, Waterblack. These Irish-derived sailors knew it better by the name ‘Duḃlinn’, which was like ‘Black Pool’ in their ancestral language, and there Treachery dropped over the side the Nathan pellet, as her mother, the Great White Bitch, avatar of the old Mistress of Malarkoi, had bid her to do.
It sank down and landed on the Ha’penny Bridge, now rusted and barnacled.
Her job done, Treachery allowed herself to become the pet of Penthenny and Niamh, who named her Perdida, the lost one, which from that time overwrote her given name and thereby provided her an entirely different fate – a story for another time.