by James Dorr
What is love, but a kind of fulfillment? It is in this way that love most resembles death.
• • •
HER NAME WAS MARAN and she was a whore in a port-town brothel, one bred for the purpose, who, despite the estuary’s mists, kept to herself indoors at all hours and not just in daytime. His name was Abassad.
He was a pirate, a king among pirates, who raided such ports when shipping was sparse. He came from a land across the ocean, scrabbling from coast to coast in crab-wise fashion, and preyed on cargo boats when he could trap them. His own ship was bristling with cannon and armed men. At its prow he had had fitted a brass ram.
It was the late spring, though, and shipping had slowed for the coming summer which, so claimed the weather-wise, promised more heat than ever before. This would be a summer where, as it approached the Equator, the very sea itself might boil—turning all topsy-turvey—the wind swirling in to replace its substance. A summer of great storms, or so feared sailors.
Thus it was that, as the Moon of Tempests waxed full and then gave way to those of the summer’s actinic heat, shipping had nearly stopped. Captain Abassad to keep his crew fed, to keep them supplied with the gold and trinkets that pleasured their wives and sweet-ladies back home, was reduced to attacking this fisherfolk stronghold, threading his way through silt-lined channels to enter the great river and, hence, the city’s docks.
It was a short battle. Those of the town were fishers, not warriors. Their three-hulled smacks were not built for combat, but rather as platforms their divers leapt from to pursue their own kind of ocean prey, re-emerging in flurries of tentacles and fins. These were broad-decked boats, designed for fish-slaughter, then a quick salting down and an even faster return to the town’s wharfs to dole out their catch before heat and air spoiled it.
Maran watched all this beneath the first cusps of a slivered Lovers’ Moon—in the old calendar, such as ghouls still kept, that of the coming June. Maran watched this through a silver-ringed spyglass.
She, bred not just from human stock, but also mutations with ocean and river parts to keep her willowy, slim and sleek, well-fitted for bedroom arts, saw through her spyglass even before the red day-sun had fully set, Captain Abassad’s approach to the city. She saw as he ordered the deck-awnings furled for night, his ship’s huge lateen-rigged sails reefed for slow sailing, but surer maneuvering once it became snared in the river’s eddies. She saw as, at twilight, he doffed his day chador, wide-sleeved in the manner that seamen wore them for ease of motion in climbing the high masts, in tending the myriad fittings a ship possessed both aloft and below, and licked her lips when she saw him now in his silks, all but transparent to offer free passage to even the slightest of evening breezes.
She called her serving maids to bring her own silk clothes, cut deep at the throat and slit high at her thighs’ sides. She combed her hair forward to tumble about her smooth, round shoulders, the black of its twisted curls falling to frame the moons of her pale breasts, scarcely concealed by the sheer, clinging fabric—the starkness of contrast, of white and shadow, enhancing the mystery of what lay more dark below.
She licked her lips once more.
Padding again to her spyglass and window—the ship’s cannon were firing in volleys now, not to destroy but to cow the city, to make its men docile—she ordered her servants to put on their chadors, albeit by then the sun was down and such protection was no longer needed.
• • •
It was done as Maran wished. Captain Abassad, having released his men to their pleasures, nearly as soon as he stepped on shore found himself surrounded by slim, black-cloaked figures. A beckoning here, a flash of white wrist there, a glimpse of an ankle—perhaps a brief lowering, even, of one’s day-mask—and he, well enough versed in the ways of such cities, understood what was to be wanted of him. At least in part measure.
He smiled, his teeth gleaming as white as Maran’s skin, and, bowing, he followed.
“It is your mistress you lead me to?” he asked, as the night mist swirled back over the river. One of those leading him nodded silently. Another giggled.
“But why should I seek her?” he persisted, more for the sake of breaking the quiet than expecting answers. At least for the present. “I should imagine a city like this would be filled to bursting with pliant women. I should have no trouble finding one myself, I who am, after all, a captain—and who do not smell of fish.”
One of those leading him laughed out loud as they continued their winding progress through alleys and narrow streets. Upward they climbed, groping their way to the city’s heights, yet still never too far from the river and ocean. The mist thinned further as relative coolness came over the city, as stars above shone down.
They came to a sprawling, ramshackle building, its old-fashioned, brooding eaves covered with carvings.
“This was once the governor’s mansion,” one of his guides whispered, turning to him—the first words he had heard from their lips thus far! “As wealth came to our city, however, he built a finer one. As for this house, it is now a brothel.”
Another whispered: “Our leaders considered this use more important.”
Abassad nodded.
They led him inside and up the twistings of its grand staircase, the first of the servants turning to face him at an upper landing and frankly inspecting him from foot to shoulder, then once again whispering: “Our mistress will be pleased.”
He entered a bare-ceilinged room alone—what had once been part of the mansion’s attic, but now was furnished in cushions and couches, a soft, curtained bed and arches that led to other chambers—and in one arch hung a stretched, gauze screen, lighted from behind. In this screen he saw a woman’s shadow.
“My name is Maran,” the shadow told him. “And you are the pirate?”
“I am Captain Abassad, yes.” In silhouette alone she was beautiful! How much more so, he wondered, might she be when he saw her in the flesh?
“You have conquered our city, I understand.”
He wondered if she could see him as well. His next words burst from him: “And you are a pleasure girl?”
Her head inclined, her coiled hair bobbing softly, quivering its length from her throat to her mid-thigh, her shadowed hips thrusting as she appeared to shift her weight slightly. “I am in part, yes,” she said. “I am, you must realize, only part human—it’s how such as I are bred. Our city fathers—I may call them fathers—take genes not from humans alone, but modify these with those from animals and from mutations, those whose mothers perhaps were caught out-of-doors in the day’s full sun unprotected, yet preserved their pregnancies. These they select with our prowess in mind, as sexual partners—eel-suppleness thus is part of my makeup, and clingings, and clutchings, things from the sea they chose with other things as well. Thus I am not human in my entirety, lacking such attributes as human morals … ”
Abassad understood, part of it anyway, he who had raided such cities before. “That is enough,” he said. “I—I am human, yet lack morals also. That is what people say. Yet it’s this lacking that makes me a pirate, is it not, Maran?”
He heard her laugh, and saw her form quiver, deliciously trembling, her thighs undulating, her soft, round breasts shuddering, then stretching as she reached up—he reaching also—to find the screen’s fastenings. He gaped as it fell, then he picked her up in his arms, feeling the firm-muscled flesh of her buttocks, the curved slimness of her waist, carrying her, quickly, to where the bed waited.
He parted her thighs with his tongue as he kissed her, covering her torso with swift, hot kisses. Her breasts and her crimson lips. They were both beyond words now.
Then she was on top of him, moaning and tonguing back. He with his hands caressing her hips and thighs, she with her torso grinding against his.
Together they rolled, her thighs twisting around his hips, supplely, sinuously, her fingernails raking him. Shivering, he felt his blood, staining the sheets as they twisted around him, knotting the two of them
further together. Exploding together—he seeing only a redness, a red dark. Feeling a softness, a firmness, a melding of dryness and moisture.
Then sleeping. Exhausted.
He woke in Maran’s arms, feeling the bedsheets stiff beneath them. He woke to a soft light, that of daylight filtered through curtains, pink and scarlet. He, gazing on Maran’s skin, white in the soft light.
She moaned and reached for him, her lips silencing him before he could speak.
Then, again, darkness.
• • •
For three days the two of them enjoyed each other. Maran’s chadored serving girls brought food and drink when such were needed. They changed the bed linen those times that Maran and Abassad paced, naked, to the room’s windows, gazing through curtains, shadowed beneath broad eaves, down toward the ocean that stretched south below them.
“You live on this top floor alone?” he asked one night, they hearing the crashings and bedroom-groanings that filtered up from the levels below them. Some from his own men, he knew.
“Yes,” she said, “alone with my servants. And, of course, my ‘clients.’”
“Like me?” he asked. “Am I just a client too? One more you service? One who will, in time, be given a bill, high enough to make up for any damage my men may have caused to the ‘fathers’ you serve. The ones who made you?”
“Shhhh,” she said. “It is not like that at all. There is something more … ”
“Yes,” Abassad said, “there is always ‘something more.’ Some gift, perhaps, or some special remembrance? Not that I would begrudge you, you understand—I think, in a manner, I might even love you and would give such willingly. Nevertheless, there is something I must say.”
She nodded. “Yes?”
“I know these port cities. They are all the same. Your ‘city fathers’ do not mind rapine, up to a point. After all, such wealth as my men take is spent in the whorehouses, much of it anyhow. Those and the brandy shops, these things all owned by the city fathers. Thus it is more a matter of an upward re-distribution than robbery per se—a shaking down, to be sure, of the little folk, but most then plowed back to where it can be used most wisely for the city’s well being, the pockets of those who are wealthy to start with.”
Maran simply nodded this time, without speaking.
“However,” Abassad said, “the time comes when enough is enough. If one shakes the poor sufficiently hard they will, eventually, begin to get restless—a thing that is no longer good for the city nor for those that lead it. Then they must at last act. They must organize fishermen, fitting their boats out, if not with cannon, with torches and harpoons to attack our ship with. With hooks and scaling knives to attack my men–”
“Then it is that time now?” Maran asked him. “I understand, yes. Yet you say you love me—at least in ‘a manner.’ I am a prisoner here, you know … ”
Abassad shrugged, his body glistening with sweat in the lamplight. He, stripped to his loincloth. She standing there naked, or nearly naked, the swell of her hips barely circled in wisps of silk.
“It is that time,” he said.
Maran began to weep, her body trembling. Her pale flesh quivering as she pulled him to her, kissing him one more time, then pushed back gently. Her lips nearly touched his ear:
“Then take me with you.”
• • •
It took most of the night for Abassad to gather his crew together, to ready his ship with his most skilled sailors while sending the others back to the shore for one last sacking. The tide was rising and sails were ready, the deck-awnings furled but prepared for raising at first light of dawn when the ship would be, if all went smoothly, just out of the river. Maran for her turn, still up in her attic, had her serving maids gather all her clothes to her, her treasures and jewels, cosmetics and combs, herself putting on no more than a man’s breech clout beneath her chador. She had these things packed into two great trunks, while others of her servants made noises, of moans and sighs and thrashings on cushions as if all were normal. Of creakings of bed-frames, while those strongest gingerly carried her trunks down the staircase and out to the street below, Maran disguised in her chador among them, wearing a hat and a maidservant’s day-mask instead of her own mask of beaten silver.
She took her spyglass with her as well, tucked beneath her robe.
She saw, as they wound their way down to the harbor, the lights of torches. Of fishing-boats being signaled back from the sea while others, on the shore, gathered billhooks and extra sea-lances, some dressing themselves in stiff, shark-hide armor.
She commandeered a boat that her master owned, having her chief servant say it was for him. She had her trunks placed aboard and, with her own hands on the tiller, had herself rowed to Abassad’s ship.
Once aboard, she watched as other boats gathered—the last of the buccaneers from the shore, bearing their own treasures. Gold this time not spent in taverns and brothels, and silks, and pearl jewelry—one party had actually raided a banquet and robbed some of the wives of the fathers themselves! Abassad laughed at this.
“The tide is at its highest,” he said. “And now there is even more reason to hurry—the city’s great men will not take this lightly. Their boats will pursue us, and they are shallow draft, able to leave the river at any time.”
He gave the order to loose the great sails as they pulled from the harbor to the river channel, letting, for now, the current take them. Maran doffed her chador and stood with the men, helping work the ship outward, gasping with them as their keel, momentarily, scraped the estuary’s bottom, then cheered, as the others did, when the wind took hold. She felt the breeze on her skin, standing now in the stern, Abassad next to her.
“That’s the land wind,” he said. “It should hold steady for us until after dawn, but then the wind will change. Right now it’s from the land, guiding us farther from shore every moment, but once the sun rises the land will grow hot again. Then the wind rushes back–”
“Look!” she said, pointing.
They looked toward the shore and saw the first fishing smacks clearing the river’s mouth, glistening with torches and glints of metal. Abassad nodded.
“They won’t catch us yet. Not while we have steady wind. But when the wind changes, their greater maneuverability will be to their advantage. And even we ourselves cannot go too far out … ”
Turning, he made a sign to his crew and Maran watched as one pulled on the ship’s wheel, while others adjusted ropes. She felt the ship shudder as, trembling, it started to shift its course to the east.
“But we have cannon, and they do not,” Maran said. “Won’t those protect us?”
“To some extent, yes. But some of the fisher’s boats will still catch us—a few of the most agile. Their small size means they dare not go too far out into the ocean—they’re not built for deep-water sailing as we are—but in the coast’s shadow, where we must sail as well for the time being to reach our homeland, approaching astern where our guns cannot fire on them, some few will catch us. And when that time comes, you must go below, Maran.”
“But I don’t understand,” she said. “Why did we turn then? While the wind is steady, blowing out to the sea, why don’t we use our ship’s greater size, it’s ‘deep-water’ capabilities as you say, to sail straight across the ocean’s breadth and so reach your homeland all the more quickly. And if, in so doing, we go so far outward that they won’t dare follow, is that not all the better?”
Abassad chuckled. He hugged her to him, his muscled chest pressing against the soft of her breasts. Kissing him back, she felt his hands stroke her flesh, gently exploring the rounds of her buttocks, the soft yielding of her thighs.
Moaning, she persisted: “Soon we shall both have to go below anyway, if only to avoid the sun’s burning. But while it is still dark—and while the wind does still blow to the deep sea, why not sail out with it at least some more distance and only turn later, always striving to go farther from shore until they’ve completely given
up their pursuit?”
Abassad nodded. “We could, if we wished,” he said. “But there are dangers. There are storms, of course, though our ship is strong and can withstand rough weather. There are whales and serpents and other mutations—some of these, granted, perhaps just legends, but some of these men have seen. And there are regions—seas within seas—that it’s dangerous to sail through … ”
“But your men will follow you, if that is where you would go?”
“Yes,” Abassad said. “My men would risk fighting the ocean’s mutations, if that’s what was needed. But what of you, Maran?”
“Look,” Maran said, again pointing sternward. Some of the faster boats were drawing closer. Abassad signaled his crew once more.
Again the ship shuddered, but this time because its farthest aft cannon blasted out fire and steel. Maran could feel the heat as the shot rushed past, still wide of the boats directly behind them, yet bearing a warning. This ship would fight if it must.
Maran watched the boats slow for a moment, but then resume their chase.
She kissed Abassad, her tongue darting to his ear. “I do not fear the sea’s dangers,” she whispered. “I am, in part, of the ocean myself—as I have told you.” She held up a hand and he saw the slight webbing between her fingers, a thing he had possibly seen before, but scarcely noticed. Port-town pleasure girls were almost always mutations to some degree—as she had told him too.
Abassad laughed. He called his crew to them. “Then you would risk even the unknown, Maran?”
She nodded and he turned, again, to his men. Once more they sprang to the ship’s lines and halyards, swinging her bow back to the open sea. Letting more sail out to catch the wind while they could.
Maran saw the dots that pursued them grow smaller, some even then turning back. Abassad took her hand.
“Now we shall go below.”
• • •
Maran woke in the ship’s small stern cabin and kissed Abassad where he lay next to her, letting her tongue linger over his chest, his belly, his parts below. She stretched and yawned—she had had a strange dream, one of the sea’s calling her, one she would not tell Abassad of, but one that seemed natural. She was of the sea herself.
