by James Dorr
Slowly she rose and put on her breech clout. The dying sun shone through the starboard window, and outside she saw …
She turned to her spyglass, set up in the stern window, and looked through it first. Two dots remained, two ship-formed blotches, the largest of the fishing smacks that had still pursued them two days and a night more. Then she gazed again through the starboard window.
“Abassad,” she whispered. “The ocean—it’s turned green.”
He yawned. He rubbed his eyes. He reached for Maran, but she skipped away from him.
“No,” she said. “Quickly, put on your day chador. Come up on deck with me—there is something strange here.”
It was nearly evening and she went up half-naked, content to stay under the deck-awnings’ shade—her mutated skin somehow less prone to burning, despite its pale whiteness. She valued the feel of the breeze on her naked breasts, swirling about her hips, squeezing between her thighs—yet the breeze now, somehow, seemed to be slacking.
She did not say this, though. Instead she asked Abassad: “What is this greenness that lies ahead of us? This almost glowing, strange color the water has? We have not seen this before.”
Abassad frowned. “You remember, before, when I spoke of seas within seas? Of ocean legends? This is such a legend.”
And Maran knew, suddenly, possibly from a dream—or, perhaps, through her blood—just what this legend was.
Abassad spoke on. “Some call what we’ve entered the ‘Sargasso Sea,’ after a myth of ancient times when the world was still young, and neither the sun’s daytime rays nor the sea’s waters reeked with deadliness. This was a place where all the world’s currents stopped, melding together in eddies and swirls—of meadows of sea plants that drew ships within their mesh. Yet these are latter times, and, so some say, it is now where all the land’s contaminations, sluiced into the waters of all the world’s rivers and all the world’s oceans, mix and fester, engendering new life forms all of its own. Fetid weeds, yes, but not just weeds that catch ships’ keels. Things that foul rudders—things that aren’t found elsewhere. Sometimes trapping them … ”
“And you say, Abassad?”
Abassad smiled. “Some say, too, that the Sargasso is love. Love like ours, Maran—but in this case a love to be resisted. A love of the water, and all things that dwell within it, for all the things of the land. A striving, as it were, to draw these back to it, everything living back into its own depths. A riddle, then, if you like.”
Abassad paused. “But what do you think, Maran?”
She looked toward the stern. The blotches that persisted behind them could be seen now in greater detail, even without the help of Maran’s spyglass. The wind was slackening.
“I fear not the ocean, as I have said before, nor those things that may be within it. But what I do fear is these men who pursue us, people whose cruelties I have seen before. Men I know too well.”
Abassad nodded and ordered his crew to let out more sail, to rig jibs and studding sails. Taking the ship’s wheel himself, he steered onward, their vessel propelled now as much by the currents that swirled in the weed-sea as by the wind’s motion.
But aft they could see their pursuers turning back.
Abassad’s men cheered, then leapt to the rigging to add on yet more sail, while Maran kissed Abassad, hard, on the lips. She reached her hand within his chador and found, to her delight, that in his haste to be on deck he had not put on any clothing beneath it.
She snuggled against him, opening his chador and slipping inside to him, making of its voluminous folds a sort of tent for two—rubbing against him and feeling his arousal. Quickly she ducked and she took him within her mouth, moaning as he moaned. She chuckled to think what his crewmen must wonder, should any look down from the masts above them. Yet they were all busy—just as she was busy too.
Heaving, the ship forged on.
• • •
Still there was some wind, though progress was slow through the green that surrounded them, until the fourth night when it quit completely. There had been a rain then—they’d reversed their awnings to act as collectors, guiding the water through filters and porous stone to make it fit to drink, filling their barrels. They took down and furled their sails, lest the rain’s acid should weaken its fabric. They wore hats and rain-slickers, those that must be on deck.
Maran took her turn with the others, seeing to the ship’s needs. She and Abassad, however, now shared a secret, a thing they’d discovered and kept between them, that neither wore any clothes beneath their storm-gear. She doted, herself, on the feel of the rubberized fabric’s slickness against her own sweat-slick skin, liking to think it was Abassad’s hands that rubbed, sleekly, against her breasts—her buttocks. Her shoulders. Her thighs. The mound that lay between them.
She’d let herself come then, and then clutch at Abassad—had she not told him, a half-month ago by now, that she was a creature of clingings and clutchings?—and nearly come once more. Moaning, she would lead him down to their cabin, leaving the crew to continue their labors. Desperately she would tear off his outer-wear, opening her own as well, then be on top of him. Guiding his hands to where the rubber chafed, having him knead her flesh. Slipping him into her.
Screaming, they made love—the legends, perhaps, were true. That in its own way the Sargasso itself was love. Yet she still dreamed as well, when they lay, spent, in each other’s arms.
And, in her dreams, she knew there was more to it.
• • •
It was an urge she had, her love for Abassad—as his was for her. And yet hers was deeper, she being a sea creature, in at least part of her genetic makeup. Nevertheless, as the rains finally left them and, windless, currentless, the weed-sea held them as if in its own embrace, she and her love felt no need for anxiety.
Yet she dreamed on, and she knew from his groans as Abassad slept next to her, that he dreamed also—dreams of disturbing things, cuttlefish creatures, but here known as “siren-fish.” Octopus-like, and yet only scant inches long. And other creatures, the seafood that people ate—wormlike, some of them parasitic. These were the creatures that those who were fishermen in her old city caught, shipping them up the great river to sell them. But in her dream spewing from sea-rotted corpses.
So it was that they did not notice that some of the crew were growing restless. So wrapped in themselves they were. But then one evening—they had slept the whole day through, as did most of the crew as well by then, save for a lookout or two at the bow and stern—they heard a rustling. They heard the sounds of bare feet on the deck above. Yet when they ascended the ladder, both still completely naked, they found no one up there.
They looked above them, up toward the rigging, but no one was there either. Nor could they find anyone when they searched the hold.
Then Maran shouted. “Look here!” she said. “No, wait. I’ll go below to get my spyglass.”
Abassad waited beneath a black night sky—it was the dark of the Lovers’ Moon’s waning, a full month since Maran and he had first met, that was now giving way to what those on land called the Moon of Ratcatchers or, as the ghouls named it, the month of July. The steaming sea gave off a faint phosphorescence.
And then he saw, even as Maran came back on deck, a half league from their stern the ship’s longboat sinking. “Quickly,” he shouted. He took the glass from her, and focused it on his crew’s desperate faces. Now, in the distance, they both could hear faint screams.
He handed the spyglass back to Maran, to let her look too as the boat went under.
“What is it?” she whispered.
He shrugged. “I do not know. The crew deserted us, that much is evident. That was my own fault—I should have done more to encourage their work, to find some way of freeing us instead of just waiting. And yet what can we do other than just wait? Eventually, certainly, something must happen. Yet … ”
Maran kissed him. “And yet we must wait, though we do have each other to help pull us both th
rough.” Even as she said this, though, she knew that she lied. What was it she had told him when they first met, of human morals? Of how she was lacking in all remnants of such things.
Instead she asked him: “What made their boat sink that way?”
“I don’t know,” Abassad said. He kissed her back. “Probably it was overloaded—we’ll have to check to see what supplies they’ve left us. But as for now, as you say we do have each other.”
She let him hug her and take her down with him, for the first time making love on the open deck. She felt the bare wood hard on her naked back, crushing against the rounds of her bottom, scraping her shoulders, yet she reveled in its feel. Groaning, she arched her back, letting him clasp his arms around her, then opened her thighs to him. Sighing, she kissed him, raising her pelvis to help in his entry, then crossed her legs over him, clasping his buttocks.
Joined together, they rolled in ecstasy until, both exhausted, they could make love no more.
Then Maran felt a sudden coolness—a breeze on her heated flesh.
“Abassad! Wind!”
They found a second strength as, still unclothed, they leapt to the main boom and untied its furling strips. Then, working together, Maran as anchor to take the slack from him, Abassad hauling the thick main halyard, they raised the boom upward, letting the vast sail fall.
Panting, they sat again, catching their breath. Laughing, they hugged again, each crossing their legs around the other’s waist so that, still sitting, they still were able to bring their torsos grinding together.
They nuzzled each other’s ears, mouths, noses—he her breasts. Sucking and licking, his tongue struck a roughness just behind her ear, hidden beneath her hair.
She hugged him harder, her breasts pressed now to his chest.
Finally they stood again. Laughing they ran to the stern, to the ship’s wheel, still sheltered under its daytime deck-awning. They saw to the east a glow, a new sun’s rising.
They turned the ship to bring the wind behind it, watching the sail belly as the air filled it—and saw its rain-rotted cloth split into tatters!
That whole day Maran wept. She dreamed, once, of cuttlefish—siren-fish, rather—each with its tentacles linked to another’s tail, each perhaps only an inch long itself, contracting perhaps no more than half that small length, but so linked together as chains to the ocean’s floor that, together, they might pull down cities.
She felt their ship shudder.
She was not surprised when Abassad entered the cabin they’d shared with the news they were sinking. “It’s my fault again,” he said. “Just as I neglected the crew, I’ve neglected the ship as well. I don’t mean just the sails—we’ve seen what happened there. Failing to wring out the rainwater’s acid, then dry them the next day. But also the caulking has sprung from the ship’s hull. Down in the cargo hold, half empty now from what the crew tried to steal, we’re leaking water.”
“How bad is it then?” she asked. “Do you mean we will die?”—knowing she lied again.
Abassad shook his head. “As for the leak, it’s coming in too fast for me to repair it. But there is still a chance. While you were sleeping I built us a raft of wood from the main deck. I built oarlocks on it and found a pair of oars that the crew left when they stole the longboat. I’ve lashed on supplies, water and biscuits, as well as the things you brought—your clothes and jewelry. You shall not lose them. And also the jewels that we stole from the city–”
Maran’s kiss silenced him. Just a kiss only, though. Now she must work with him to launch the raft over their pirate ship’s sinking side. Then, once floating free, they erected a tent-cabin out of awning scraps they had scavenged so they’d be protected from the next day’s sun.
Then, pushing off, she watched as Abassad rowed them, helped by more awning scraps they’d set up as a sail. Simple, yet useful.
Then, with Abassad’s encouragement, she amused them by putting on jewelry as she sat, still naked. She hung rubies from her ears, contrasting crimson against the jet of her hair, then dangled emeralds and gold from her throat’s paleness, setting their green—the tint of the Sargasso—against the pink-and-white of breasts and nipples. She put silver to her waist, letting it dangle down, framing her tuft’s blackness, while she draped gold chains across her hips’ lush curves, the swell of her rounded thighs, once more to contrast against the white of her flesh. She stood up then, modeling what she had done for Abassad’s pleasure, feeling herself the pleasure of being watched. Yet knowing it would end–
“Maran!” Abassad said, suddenly. Frightened.
She turned and watched with him—the ship they had left, still on the horizon, was rapidly sinking.
“It should not be that fast,” Abassad told her. “Not from the leak alone.”
Both of them thought—she knew he thought with her—of how the ship’s longboat had sunk quickly also, once it had scarcely left the ship behind it.
She thought of the chains of squid-like siren-fish, each just an inch long, but each link contracting to perhaps a half inch. These, added together—perhaps a mile, more or less, to the sea’s bottom.
She looked in the water at the raft’s sides, illuminated by its phosphorescence more brightly than before, and saw, only inches beneath its surface, the tiny tentacles. Reaching.
Aspiring.
Some, as Abassad had said, compared it to loving.
Then Abassad saw them too, clutching the raft’s deck. “These, I am told, are what are called ‘siren-fish’—one of the Sargasso’s deadlier features, or so say the legends. Yet they’re such small things.”
Maran nodded. “Yes.”
“But what I don’t know is how they attract men. That is, the legends—the most ancient of them—speak of a race of deadly women, half fish and half human, that attracted sailors. But these—these are ugly!”
“They sing. They send dreams,” Maran whispered, “to those who can receive them.” She kissed him one final time, letting him stroke her hair back with his hands, to feel for the first time the gill slits behind her ears. She let him feel her flesh, scale-like as his hands rubbed over the jewels she wore, catching the glow of the sea’s phosphorescence as if they were real scales. Then she pushed off from him, plunging into the sea.
“Goodbye, Abassad,” she called as she rose, once, now draped with green weed as well. Twining it over her hair and her jeweled skin, glowing herself now. “Remember the legends, the new one you told me. About the Sargasso—about how the sea is love.
“Know this, that human or not, I still love you.”
• • •
This time she did not lie.
III.
INTIMATIONS OF FUTURE DISASTER
That there was a larger world outside both the Old and the New Cities, this was a thing the Poet had, of course, heard of. But in his heart he had perhaps not believed. Had not truly believed. For while others might tell him things, he had not seen them. Not with his own eyes. The ghouls had legends, too, oral traditions now mostly forgotten, as well as their books of Law. These also were passed down from parent to offspring.
But these had no meaning—no intimate meaning. These were things one simply learned by rote. Ghouls, by the main, were materialistic, they were simple creatures, they lived in the here and now. No time for thoughts of the past or future.
But books of the New City, those of the humans, were filled with future thought. Worries. Projections. Fears and apprehensions.
And yet a seizing, too, of the present, as if in a frenzy, of what there was now. Of what could be held close. Of pleasure, but love as well. Friendship. Loyalty.
This was, at least, one thing their legends had taught.
CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS
Two by two they passed through the New City, these the beasts of the Southern and Eastern wastes—and not just beasts only. And as they went their way, there seemed so many that some questioned what was left.
• • •
THEY HAD JUST MADE l
ove. They stood now, he naked on the balcony of her New City tower apartment that overlooked the river and, beyond it, the Tombs. She still inside gathering up her clothing. She searched for a towel to wipe the sheen of sweat from her breasts and thighs while he, outside, stretched and gazed to the streets below. She watched him do this, she wondering herself how this night would play out as she brought him a towel too, glimpsing as she did the river causeway, the soft, green glow west of it of mausoleums, the Tombs’ central pyramid, and, beyond even that, flickering blue ghoul-lights.
He had been with her the whole day before, from the rising of the bloated, red sun whose heat grew more violent with each passing year. They had made love more than once—but now she wondered.
He would not press her: He was a scholar and scholars did not press. They worked through persuasion. But he had hinted that the time was coming that they should commit themselves one to the other, to husband-and-wife themselves in the New City’s way. And so she questioned.
He was a scholar, a man of respect, yes. A man of some wealth—enough to woo her. But he, a young scholar, in the way of scholars at all times was so … so pedantic. Pedantic and dull to her. He, as a scholar, spoke only of learning—of her too, of course, when they lay together, but even then speaking more in the manner of a schoolteacher than, as she imagined, a romantic lover.
She had dreamed once of being carried off by pirates. She had heard that there were pirates still, far away to the south, who plundered the ocean.
She glanced again toward him, the down of his heaving chest, and then past him to the wide, toxin-stained river, reflecting the Tombs’ lights, and wondered: Were there pirates on the river too? Or only boat-gypsies? She had thought once how fine it might be if she had been born a river princess ….
But then he called her name.
