Beneath Ceaseless Skies #51

by Upshaw, Garth

  “Danziger!”

  I jerked my hand back at the sound of a hoarse cry from the tower. Through the stinging rain, I saw a figure, but not clearly; still, it was Lewis Goodwin’s voice—Abigail’s brother cursing me as I fumbled for the oars and made away with his sister.

  Lewis wouldn’t have time to reach his ship and muster the crew, but still I rowed as though the devil were on my back. Rain and sweat mingled to make the oars slick in my hands. I looked down at Abigail’s still face, cursing her even as I wished to kiss her. I fancied that her eyes opened, so blinked and looked away into the storm. Its wrath was more calming than Abigail’s stillness.

  The Swallow was anchored off the point, mostly empty as the rest of the crew was in port, whoring and spending the gold they’d been paid. Poor Hilary would be below decks, reaching for a leg he’d never feel again except in memory. Doc would be there with him, but otherwise, I prayed my path clear.

  I wrapped and tied a sodden length of rope around Abigail’s waist and crawled my way up the rope ladder with the loose end in my hand. My boots slipped against the Swallow, rain and wind combining to force me over the rail and to the deck with a sob. The rope snapped out of my hands, too short, and I snatched its end before it flew over the rail.

  Inch by inch I hauled Abigail upward. From below decks Hilary shrieked every so often. Why couldn’t Doc give him more rum and shut him up? Sadly, I grew accustomed to the shrieks, and by the time I’d hauled Abigail over the rail no longer heard them.

  I sat there for a long moment, hoping that perhaps the storm would keep the crew in port overnight. Where was I to put Abigail? How did I mean to keep her hidden until we reached the strait where Scylla lurked?

  Reaching the strait had once been my worry, but no more. Even if Arthur the trader wouldn’t buy the egg-sized opal Captain Dodd had lifted from Lady Wellington (and we knew Arthur would, for rarely could he resist something shiny), Dodd’s arrogance would take us to the strait. He wanted to say that he’d challenged Scylla—and won.

  “I trust only you.”

  I looked down at Abigail, who looked up at me. Her eyes were wet from her time in the water, from the rain that doused us, perhaps from tears. Could a dead woman cry? My breath caught in my throat as Abigail raised a hand and wiped the blood off her temple. She wiped her hand clean on her bodice, then she touched my cheek.

  At the touch of her fingertips, I recoiled. I dropped her and stumbled across the deck to the nearest mast, as wide as three men bound together. I felt no safer behind its bulk. Abigail frowned at me.

  “Jakob.” She reached for me.

  Could a dead woman speak? I fumbled for the cross around my neck and held it up to ward her off. Rather than come closer, Abigail pressed herself to the rail. Water pooled around her skirts.

  “Only you can get me there,” she said through her wet, blue lips. “Only you, Jakob.”

  Dead or not, she remained my Abigail, and I’d made a promise to get her to Scylla. I nodded but did not move. My Abigail, my promise. I knew these things but could not make myself move until I heard the arrival of another dinghy—a dinghy filled with drunken men.

  “Jakob,” Abigail whispered. “Take me below, to your trunk.”

  I grasped Abigail’s hands in mine—hers seeming so warm when compared to my own, steady and sure whereas I felt loose like a falling sail. I bundled the rope which wound round Abigail’s waist and ran with her—oh, she ran, on her pale and bluing feet, twisted with seaweed, with but one shoe, below decks with me into the stench of those small, close spaces.

  I had a small trunk, but it was large enough to hold Abigail. I fumbled with the latches, with the broken and rusted lock—what a time to regret breaking that in a fit of anger these long months ago—and watched as Abigail climbed of her own accord into the small space. She tossed out my clothing and climbed in, and I tossed my clothes back in atop her. Hidden beneath my blue shirt and faded trousers, my dead Abigail smiled up at me. She reached for the latch to close the trunk just as the first of the crew came back below.

  They smelled like the taverns and whorehouses where they’d spent their money, sodden with liquor and perfume, and these things they trailed to their hammocks, to lie in them a while longer. They brought with them a yapping dog the color of Abigail’s gown, its face seeming splashed with black ink. It immediately set to sniffing every crevice it could find and yapping at shadows.

  I lowered myself to sit on the trunk as Paddy O’Neill came closer and gestured with a meaty hand at the dog. The scent of rum curled through the air along with the hand, a new tattoo of a duck rippling on his forearm.

  “‘e’s a temple dog, aye? Made to roust the demons and tear ‘em a-ssunder.”

  I didn’t want the dog rousting my demon and nudged its wet black nose away from my trunk. The dog didn’t like the taste of my boot and growled at me. “New ink?”

  “Ah!” Paddy slapped the tattoo, reddening the skin a little more. “The talents of lovely mistress Lorelai—at least one of them, aye?”

  Paddy slapped my shoulder then fell back into his hammock, where he rocked and soon began to snore, as he did nightly. Often the snores were accompanied by remembrances of a sweet girl he’d left back in Ireland and the sour things he loved to do to her. I wanted to stuff Abigail’s ears with linen so she wouldn’t hear.

  Instead, I closed the latch as well as it could be closed and fell back into my own fabric. I lay awake the night through, imagining that I heard Abigail singing. Distant and pleasing, like a shooting star across the night sky, her voice guided me toward a shore I still could not see.

  Dawn found me on deck with a handful of other early risers. Finch and I made neat stitches through sailcloth, a continuing effort to complete another sail so that we might have a replacement for the one the winds currently shredded.

  Finch was young, seven maybe eight, and had been sold into the captain’s service by his parents. He couldn’t remember a life lived on land. Couldn’t remember his real name, for that. His hands were as worn as any man’s here, callused and scraped; his skin no longer burned but had acquired the deep color of a man at sea.

  I could remember my parents—my father himself a sailor, my mother always in the crook of his sun-bronzed arm. They’d raised me to the sea, and I wondered if it was worse to have that memory or have none as Finch did.

  We raced with our needles, quick and neat, but Finch always bested me—until today. His stitches were slow, his eyes focused on something else. I followed his gaze across the deck, to the horizon over the rail, and saw it. A ship. It looked like a jagged black rip in the sunrise.

  “How long’s it been there?” I asked in a whisper.

  Finch watched the ship and stitched. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Don’t know. Looks English.”

  I couldn’t see a flag from this distance, but Finch didn’t need even that much to go on. He never used a spyglass; he liked using his sharp eyes to view the world from the crow’s nest. Being up there made me want to throw up.

  Of course the ship would be English. I stabbed my needle through the sailcloth and stood, squinting to get a better look. It still looked like a black line against the orange horizon.

  “Moving fast,” Finch said. “Could have letters against us.”

  Lewis Goodwin could have letters of marque, I thought. He’d had the night to see them signed and sealed. If Lewis suspected I had Abigail—dead or alive—he would stop at nothing to get her back. Though I loved Abigail, her family loathed me.

  “Did ye see her then?”

  “Just a wisp of a dress, movin’ in the night.”

  I turned from the sight of Lewis’s ship to the group of men who passed behind me.

  “There’s a lass on board,” Gerald whispered to me, as if sharing a dreadful secret. “Dead, but walking.”

  “Dead?” I asked.

  “Lass?” Finch asked, his voice rising.

  “Aye, she has a pale gown, her skin like the drowned sea.”
Gerald winked at me, as if I would know what he meant.

  “All hands!”

  Captain Dodd barked orders from the quarterdeck. As they always did for him, the crew flew into motion and by Dodd’s command turned the Swallow upwind. With all her sails loosed, she caught the rising dawn wind and cut through the swells. This alarmed the few seabirds that had taken their leisure upon one of the masts. The same mast I’d clung to when Abigail had spoken to me.

  Had she? Was she now wandering the ship, allowing the crew glimpses of herself? I couldn’t allow myself the time to truly think on it, alive as the deck was with men eager to escape English capture.

  “Why’s they comin’ now?” Gerald wondered aloud as the Swallow stretched the length of sea between us and Lewis—if it were Lewis. Who else could it be?

  “Ain’t no cause!” Finch cried and threw his small fist into the air. “Ain’t no—” He broke off as he caught sight of the strand of pearls Jasper Kay had hung around his neck. “Ye crimp those seeds from an English lady, man?”

  “I think she were Dutch,” Jasper said, which drew a roar from the men gathered round us.

  I didn’t care what she was; if that ship was English, the odds were firm that it was Lewis Goodwin who captained her. The Rosemary was a fine vessel; if the Swallow faltered once, she would soon be overcome.

  But the Swallow was ever swift and fled eastward, closer to the whirlpool that I would throw Abigail into. How I would manage that was beyond me; it was one step at a time, and all the deck stretched before me was slick with Abigail’s blood.

  No one missed me when I stepped away, below decks to check on Abigail. Paddy’s rat of a dog sat near the trunk and I shooed it away. With a yap, the beast settled a few steps away, his beady eyes following my every motion.

  I eased the lid of the trunk open. The stench of the deepest ocean rolled out, dank, muddy, black. I peered in at Abigail who lay just as I’d placed her the night before, under my rumpled clothes. Her blood had darkened in her veins, leaving charcoal tracings beneath her white skin. Over this, the blood from her temple wound had dried in blackened streams across her face, down her throat. These lines crisscrossed like guides on a map, but I couldn’t make sense of the directions.

  I held my breath as I reached a hand in and touched Abigail’s cheek. She was chilled and did not stir. I exhaled and slid my fingers down her arm, discovering something slim and pale in her hand. I thought it was an eel, but as I took hold of it found it hard. I pulled it free. ‘Twas the bit of scrimshaw whale rib I’d gifted her with before my leaving. She kept it in her busk, liking to say that it was my touch kept her spine straight.

  The little dog ran to my side and snatched the bone from my hand. The foul beast skittered away with it, and I chased him, under and over hammocks, around other trunks and casks of rum and water. When I had him backed into a corner, he growled and spit around the bone and refused to give way when I’d grasped the other end. He shook the bone hard but I held firm.

  “Little demon dog,” Abigail said.

  The dog shrieked and released the bone. He fled between my legs and vanished into still-swaying hammocks. I turned, but didn’t see Abigail anywhere.

  The story on the whale rib was given to me by my mother. It was the story of a woman who never felt herself part of this world, called by monsters she could not see but could feel in the bloody marrow of her bones. When the wind blew, they tugged upon her sleeves; when she swallowed, she could taste them—brackish. When she slept, they would curl beside her, and sometimes snore.

  My mother said it was her own story, then softly laughed and said the monster in her bed was Father, and that I should never mind. But I watched her move through her days and felt something distinctly not human about her.

  When pirates slaughtered her and my father, her blood was red, her bones white; human enough, until the pirates threw them from the deck. The water came alive at the taste of blood; it boiled and threw the ship on its side. I would have drowned in those waters but for the tentacle that slithered around me and tossed me up on land. A thin strip of sand served as my home for three days, a hairbrush and a doll without a face my only companions until other pirates found me and took me in.

  “You think I’ve claimed her story for my own, don’t you? You doubt me,” Abigail said.

  Her hand covered mine, covered the whale rib until I could only see the tangle of our fingers. I wanted to look at her, but didn’t dare.

  “I’ve never felt right, Jakob, never, until you came along.” Abigail’s fingers slid between mine. “Don’t you feel it inside you? The reach of your mother even now? The sea, Jakob.”

  I tried to pull my hand free, but Abigail wouldn’t let me go. She wound herself round me and it seemed she had tentacles then rather than arms and legs. Any man on board this ship would welcome her consumption, but I was filled with the need to run, to jump overboard and give myself to the sea. At the touch of Abigail’s saltwater mouth, I felt relief.

  “You were born with the sea inside you,” she whispered against my mouth, her fingers like anemone tentacles as they pulled the sea from me. It was warmth and water between she and me; I swallowed her and she swallowed me, and in this way we passed from Atlantic waters into Mediterranean.

  The Rosemary chased us across the day and on through the night. She made up some distance between us, but still the Swallow kept her lead. Scylla lay somewhere between Sicily and Calabria, so said our maps; we followed them as though they were gospel.

  And still the men talked of seeing a woman walking the decks. They said she invaded their dreams, wriggling down into their hammocks the way water could trickle into a collar. I could taste that water; the slip of Abigail’s mouth against mine. Did these men know that taste? How dare they.

  I sat up nights, waiting for Abigail to emerge on her small blue feet, but always found myself asleep come dawn, having missed her wandering. When I was able, I opened my trunk to look down on her and found her as I had left her. She remained wet; seemed sleeping.

  Paddy’s small dog continued to nose around the trunk, scratching and whining and worrying at one corner with his teeth. He’d done a good job on the wood, leaving deep bite marks as he sought what it contained. Seawater pooled around the trunk now, the dog leaving wet footprints as he scampered out of my hands.

  I grasped him by the scruff of his neck and hauled him against my chest, surprised by the fight in his compact body, surprised by the weight. He growled and strained against my hold, teeth snapping at my hands. He caught one of my fingers, blood bright against his chops.

  I ran with the dog to the upper deck and swung him out over the rail, meaning to drop him into the sea. ‘Twas Finch who caught me and pulled me back.

  “What’re ye thinking?” he cried. He ripped the dog out of my hands and dropped him to the deck, where he struggled to find his feet before scampering into the shadow of a rum cask.

  I sank to the deck and buried my face in my trembling, bleeding hands. What was I thinking? I had always liked dogs, had lived with one for a time, but this one threatened the secret of Abigail. No one could know. I glanced at the few crew about the deck; they didn’t mind me or my misery—they were too wrapped within their own.

  “This about the lass in yer trunk?” Finch asked.

  I stared at him and said nothing. His dirt-brown eyes met mine easily. We’d known each other for years, this boy and I, and I saw no malice. But I did see wheels turning; this boy was no boy; he’d been raised by pirates. If he knew about Abigail, he meant to use that to his advantage.

  Finch sat beside me and exhaled. “She walks ‘round at night, leaving her wet footsteps all over. Slipped in my hammock to make herself warm-like and let me have a taste of her. Thought it was all a dream, except I never dream, and the others started talking about her too, aye?”

  “Finch—”

  “Gets even stranger, then.” Finch thought for a moment, his small teeth chewing at his thumbnail. “A man comes to me, a ma
n not of this crew, tells me he’s after the lass and he’ll pay me whatever I ask if I help him. And then just like the lass, he’s gone. They come and go like the wind, Jakob.” He spat his thumbnail onto the deck. He laughed, a dark coarse sound that no one so young should make, but whatever boy had been inside Finch’s body was long gone. “Pay me whatever I ask.”

  My heart raced in my chest. “What did you ask him then?” From below decks, I heard Hilary cry out again; I pictured him reaching for his leg, his leg that had rotted and was thrown to the sharks. Wouldn’t he ever stop screaming, reaching?

  Finch shook his head. “As I figure, it’s none of my business, save for lasses cursing the ships, ye know. It ain’t right, her being on board like that. Even if she is dead. Makes it worse, her being dead, don’t it?”

  Abigail being dead made everything worse. The skies were darker, no matter the sun standing in them; the nights endless and plagued with demons.

  “I just want her off this ship, and if ye take her or he does, doesn’t much matter. Could be Davy Jones for all I care.”

  “I made a promise,” I said.

  Would Finch understand that? We men of the sea often went back on our words, no matter how well we meant them when first spoken. We tried to stay true to those we crewed with, but we often failed—as I’d failed, by bringing the Swallow toward her doom, even as I brought Abigail closer to— To what?

  “Aye.” Finch looked across the deck, then back to me. “Ye mean to throw her into Scylla?”

  I looked at the boy sharply. “What do you—”

  “It’s a legend, aye? A dead lass thrown into Scylla’s mouth, given new life.” Finch spat another fingernail onto the deck, then scrubbed his hand across his trouser leg. “But it’s the wrong kind of life. She won’t be yers after that.”

  I shook my head and raked my hair out of my eyes. “It’s not that. I don’t want her back.”