by Lucy Foley
‘He will, Morris.’
‘I hope so, Harry.’ He was the only one that called Hal this. And then he’d said: ‘There’s something else I’d like to do, too.’
‘What?’
Morris had outlined it for him. A little magazine – collecting really good work together. Stories, thought pieces. Wouldn’t make any money, probably, but that wouldn’t be the point of it. Perhaps Hal would help him out? He’d know people, Morris imagined, from university – maybe people who could help them with advice about how to start. Morris didn’t know anyone like that.
Yes, Hal had said, he’d love to do it. And it became the thing that their friendship grew around, this future plan. They’d discuss what they’d call it – something to do with the sea, maybe – how they’d use a different theme for each edition. Sometimes it felt little more than a pipe dream. But it was a cure for the tedium. A way of invoking the future, too, a time beyond war – making it feel real. It had been one of the refreshing things about Morris. Some of the men spoke as though they were all doomed to a watery death: it was only a question of when and how, not if. Morris, by contrast, had an absolute conviction in the fact that he was going home.
He wakes drenched in sweat, his heartbeat in his ears. Something to do with his dream, though as he tries to grasp for it, it slips from reach. Beyond the porthole is the liquid slap of the water. The glass runs with rain. He checks his watch: almost two a.m. At least tonight he has managed a few hours’ sleep.
He gropes for his jotting pad, deciding that he might as well do some more work. If he leaves it, he knows that details will begin to desert him, until he is left with only the shell of events. That would be no use to him at all. All the interest of a piece like this, as the Tempo editor had said, will be in the details. Exactly what they are served at supper, the watermelon hue of Giulietta’s nail polish, the cocktail Earl Morgan drinks at sundown.
As he extracts the pad, though, he dislodges something on top of it. It falls to the floor with a soft thud. He looks at the thing, confused. It is a small, dirty book, and he has no idea where it can have come from. He picks it up. Now he can see that it is not so much dirty as extremely old, the pages between the leather covers warped and friable. Then he understands. It is the journal. Gaspari must have left it here for him. This fits with his impression of the man – everything done quietly, without undue ceremony.
All thought of the article forgotten, Hal opens it up, but finds the hand so small that his tired eyes strain to make it out in the weak lamplight. He has another idea: he will go up on deck, and read by the light of the moon, which will no doubt be brighter than this.
As he walks the passageway toward the ladder onto the deck he imagines that he can feel the sleeping presence of the others about him. Someone is snoring. And a low groan – so loud that he freezes for a second, like a burglar – before he realizes that it is a subconscious, atavistic sound, made by someone in the deepest realm of sleep.
He takes the steps up to the deck and finds it empty. A happy surprise, because he had somehow imagined that there might be at least one member of the crew awake to keep watch.
Portovenere, in the distance, is almost entirely shrouded in darkness. A solitary light, somewhere up near the castle, burns a fiery point in the black. The deck is washed with water, but the rain has finally stopped. He goes to one of the beds at the bow, sluices the water off it.
Then he opens the journal, and begins to read. It is slow going at first. The first few paragraphs are all bombast, as though the captain had, initially, intended it to be read.
We are returning from Lepanto bruised, but victorious: our number diminished, but not our spirit. The spread of the Ottoman hordes westward is stemmed. Finally, we are following our great leader Doria homeward.
It is like something written by a sixteenth-century propagandist, and the Italian is archaic, straining his powers of comprehension. Hal feels his interest begin to wane, his eye skimming the close press of text. Until a line catches his attention.
An arrow, taken straight through the eye. In one moment, a man’s life extinguished.
He reads on.
He had been only an arm’s length from me. Nothing to choose between us, except luck. Some would say Fate, or Providence, but I find it more and more difficult to believe …
I have killed forty-nine. As commander of the ship, I have been responsible for many more: though the ones that stay with me are the ones committed by my own hand. I have seen them die only an arm’s length from me, watched as the soul departs. As men who once lived and breathed and loved become nothing, merely so much cloth and inanimate flesh. I know this is not the proper way to look upon such things. These men, these Turks, are godless creatures whose influence must be curbed. Lepanto has been a magnificent victory for Christendom. And yet good Christian knights and Ottoman infidels die in much the same way. I cannot help but remark it. In dying, there is nothing to choose between them. The soul, of course, is the thing. But does it truly endure, after death? Sometimes I find it hard to believe. When I return to Genoa I will go and talk to the priest. I must confess these thoughts, because I know they are dangerously near to heresy.
This speaks to Hal. Now, for the first time, he can imagine a real man sitting down to write, trying to make some order out of the jumble of his thoughts. He recognizes the impulse. He had kept a diary himself, on board Lionheart. He had tried to get it all down: the mundane and the extraordinary. How the ship had smelt – a mixture of canned food and disinfectant; the hours of boredom sailing through still waters and then the sudden nighttime violence of an engagement; the cacophony of the guns, which they could hardly load fast enough. Watching that first enemy ship, the German destroyer – which everyone begrudgingly agreed had fought valiantly, even when the game was up – go down with every member of her crew. Drowned before any could be rescued as POWs.
After the thing that had happened, he had tried to put it down on paper: what he had done, how he felt. And found that he couldn’t. To write it out, even if it were for his eyes only, was too shameful. He reads on.
A strange occurrence this evening, nearing dusk. So strange that I find it hard to put into language: but I must try, in order to make sense of it within my own mind. We found a woman in the water, a mile from shore. It was an experience in no small way affecting. I have not seen a woman in a long while. Nor have many of the men. I must keep her from them, protect her from their lechery. I will watch over her until we reach Genoa, and then …
The handwriting trails away. The captain, apparently having lost his train of thought, goes on to describe her instead:
… her hair like the black ink of a squid [nero di seppia], her eyes too. A mark on her white cheek, tiny, like a drop of the same ink. Her skin with a sheen to it like the inside of a shell. She seems a creature of water, as though it runs inside her veins instead of blood.
Now the writing has life to it. A kind of desperation too. Over the next few pages it becomes less rational, more a meandering stream of consciousness. And yet somehow it makes for easier reading: perhaps because Hal finds himself constructing a narrative from it. The strange thing is that it seems almost to come as much from somewhere inside himself as from the page in front of him.
A LARGE SHIP. The men on board are tired and homesick, some of them nursing injuries or sicknesses, some of them mourning fellows slain. The only man not showing the signs of strain – he hides them well – is their commander. A young man, but a powerful one, scion of one of the Republic’s foremost families.
They are on the homeward straight now. The men can almost taste the cooking of their mothers, see the faces of their beloveds. From here, the rest should be plain sailing. The familiar coast is almost in sight: that fertile rich dark green. It is nearing dusk, and the ship is preparing to drop anchor only a few miles from Genoese waters. The captain finishes his supper, and decides, on a whim, to head up on deck, to look upon his homeland. It has always looked its best to hi
m at this time. That beloved dark line, the same mountains he could see from his bedchamber as a child.
But now something else catches his eye: something nearer to hand, on the surface of the water. He peers through the gloaming, squints to bring the object into view. When he does, he does not want to believe it – but he is certain of what he sees. It is a man’s head, bobbing in the water. For a few seconds, full of the horrors that he has witnessed, the young man believes that he is looking at a head that has been severed from a body. Not here, he thinks, not so close to home. But as he watches, an arm breaks the surface. He suddenly understands that he is looking not at the remains of some terrible mutilation, but a living human: swimming. What can they be doing here, so far from the coast, in such deep waters?
He calls to his second- and third-in-command, who come up on deck. He points to the figure. One man’s eyesight is so poor that he cannot make anything out, but the other’s is keener than his own.
‘He’s swimming, sire,’ the man calls, ‘but he’s tiring. Keeps slipping beneath the waves. He won’t be afloat for much longer.’
‘We’ll go for him.’ If he is Genoese, it is their duty to save him. If he is a Pisan, they can make him their captive, and plunder useful information from him about their near neighbours.
The captain orders a tender made up with all possible speed, and boards it with two of his men.
‘Pray that we get to him in time.’
Luckily, with the relative calm of the sea, it is easy to keep the figure in sight, and with the wind behind them the little craft moves swiftly.
It is only when they are a few arm’s lengths away, beginning to reach hands out towards the water, that the men see what had not been apparent to them before. The figure is nude. And then they see the other thing. Not a man, but a woman. The men’s hands drop – they are unsure of what they should do. None of them have seen a woman in weeks – and a woman like this? Perhaps never. The captain is not so easily defeated as his men, however. He reaches over and grabs the girl beneath her armpits, hauls her – even as she flails against him, almost threatening to pull him over with her – into the craft. She lies there, breathing in great gasps, sounds that might be made by some dying animal. The captain struggles not to look at the slender, nude white body, at the dark hair that seems to bleed onto the wood like black squid’s ink.
‘That’s not a woman,’ one of the men whispers, almost to himself. ‘It’s a mer-creature.’
The captain scolds him for his whimsy, but he can understand the fellow’s meaning. The woman’s beauty is unearthly, and the extreme whiteness of her skin seems suited to some submarine lair.
He shrugs off his cloak and wraps it about her, taking care not to touch the soft white flesh. The woman is barely sensible now: her eyes are closed, and the breath rasps out of her. But at least, the captain thinks, it shows that she is breathing. He leans in close. ‘Can you hear me?’ he asks her. His voice surprises him by betraying a quaver, almost as though he were afraid. Strange, because he prides himself on never showing fear.
Her eyes open, and she looks at him but there is no answer, and he does not try again. Her black gaze has silenced him.
‘I don’t like it,’ one of the men says. ‘I don’t think we should bring her onto the boat. There’s something odd about it.’
‘What do you suggest I do?’ the captain asks. ‘Pitch her back in?’ The fellow shrugs, but his expression suggests he thinks it might be preferable.
‘The men, sir,’ the other man says, ‘there will be a riot. They haven’t seen a woman in months.’
And neither have I, thinks the captain to himself. And perhaps I have never seen a woman quite like this: so beautiful and strange. But aloud he says, ‘We’re close to home now. I will keep her in my quarters. She will be protected from them there.’
When they return the captain sees that men have lined the deck, curious to discover what has caused their commander to leave his ship. He has wrapped the woman in his cloak so that as much of her as possible is hidden from view. Only the blue-pale legs are visible, and when she is hoisted up on deck they hang limply down, not unlike the limbs of a corpse. As she is carried to the captain’s cabin the men stare, wordlessly, at the strange spectacle. For all they know their captain is carrying a body – not a living person. He will have to find some way of explaining it to them. The men mutter and whisper among themselves, but he hears several perplexing references to ‘the ankles’. It is only when the woman is placed in the chamber outside his cabin that he realizes why. Around her ankles is a thick rope of bruises, as though something had been tied viciously tight about them.
A bed is made up for the woman in the captain’s quarters, and when he goes to his own bed he finds that sleep eludes him. He cannot stop thinking about the woman in the next room. Despite the heavy drapes that divide the two cabins, he is certain that he can hear the gentle exhalations of her breath. Eventually, unable to bear it any longer, he goes through to her, simply – he tells himself – to have a quick look, to check that her condition has not deteriorated.
It is a full moon and he can see her almost as clearly as in the day: though the cold light makes her appear all the more otherworldly, like a creature underwater. Her black hair fans out about her head as though the strands are afloat. She is so still that he places a palm above her nose and mouth, to check that she is really alive. The breath comes as a shock, a surprising warmth against his skin.
Alone and unobserved he looks at her greedily, noticing all that he had not had the leisure to see before. The black eyebrows, two perfect curves, as though etched with the compasses he uses on his charts. The nose: too strong to be conventionally feminine, but somehow well suited to her face. The pale pillow of her lips. His gaze lingers there longest of all. He tears his attention away and looks, instead, at those bruises on her ankles. They are dark, purplish: evidently of recent creation. And he realizes, suddenly, that they are matched by similar patterns about her wrists. He cannot believe that he did not notice them before: was he so obtuse as to have been distracted from them by her naked body? What was she? A prisoner of some sort? But what monster would imprison such a woman? Though, of course, no crime is too heinous for the Pisans.
Eventually, having satisfied his need to look, he turns to make his way back to his cabin. But as he does he has an awareness of being watched, a sensation so powerful that he can feel it prickle down his back. He turns, and just stops himself from starting with alarm. Silently, she has raised herself from the bench so that she is sitting up, and her eyes are open. She is watching him. Quickly, he recovers himself, though he is certain that his first expression must have betrayed his shock.
‘Hello,’ he says, slowly, not sure she will understand him. ‘I hope you are feeling recovered.’
There is a long pause. He is uncomfortable beneath her gaze, but he steels himself not to look away – that much would be a sign of weakness. Just as he has decided that she clearly does not understand him, she speaks.
‘Yes, thank you.’ She speaks in Italian, though her accent is strange.
‘You were such a long way out,’ he says. ‘How did you come to be in the water, so far from shore?’
She frowns, and takes a long time to answer. Eventually, she says, ‘I don’t remember.’
He isn’t sure that he believes her. How could someone forget something like that? Her gaze on him is unwavering. It gives him a certain thrill, to have so much of her attention focused upon him. It unnerves him too.
‘Where are you from?’ he asks her.
‘Oh, nowhere you will know, sire. My background is a humble one.’
He waits for her to say more, but she does not. He senses a reluctance in her to reveal her origins to him. It only intrigues him further. He wants to find out more about her, and is about to ask another question, when she says, gently. ‘If you do not mind, sire, I am very tired.’
‘Oh.’ He steps back. ‘But of course. Forgive me for disturbing
you.’
Just as he is about to draw back the drapes, she calls to him. ‘Thank you, sire. Without your assistance I would perhaps have perished.’
There is no perhaps about it, he thinks, but does not say it. He did save her life. ‘You are welcome, signora.’
The storm appears out of nowhere the next morning, bruise-dark, the hue of the marks on the girl’s legs. The clouds gather themselves astonishingly fast, and there is barely time to reef the sails before the first gusts come upon them, whoomping against the fabric, shivering over the deck. The thunder feels extremely close and loud, almost personal. And then there is lightning, following only a moment behind. It forks into strands of fire, a phenomenon the captain has never seen at this time of year. The wind, too, is strange. He can’t work it out. Any Genoan knows the eight winds as well as he knows the names of his own wife and children. They are like a litany: Scirocco, Tramontana, il Grecale, il Ponente, Mezzogiorno, il Mare, Borrasca, Maestrale. But this one is schizophrenic, shifting, impossible to read.
He hears the confusion and dismay of the men all about him – can almost taste their fear. Luckily they are able to make their way to relative shelter from the wind and the swell in the deep waters close to the land. But, as the captain hears one of the men say, if the lightning struck them it could split a mast in two. There is not much to do other than brace themselves and hope that they can hold out. But then, after raging with peculiar ferocity for a short time, the storm retreats, to disappear as quickly as it arrived.
And the rumours start. They are a superstitious lot, sailors. Perhaps inevitably so, considering the vast and unknowable nature of the sea. Watching for omens is another way of navigating for some: no different, really, to reading the stars. The captain has brought a woman on board ship. Every sailor, even those who don’t believe in the other superstitions, knows that this is bad luck. Moreover, she is a strange, beautiful woman who was found in the middle of the deep waters, nowhere near to dry land. It looked as though she were drowning, but might that simply have been a ruse? Is she a mer-creature, then, as the captain’s third-in-command had at first suggested? Well, some of the men reason, they are certainly known to be found in these parts. What is commonly agreed is that the storm was a strange one, and it followed too soon after her having been brought on board.
