The Fisherman

by John Langan

  “The ropes,” Rainer says. “Go.”

  Italo advances to the closest of the stumps, circles the spot where the rope reaches to the ocean, and swings his axe at it. The rope isn’t especially thick, but the axe rebounds from it with a crack and a shower of sparks. Italo steps back as if pulled by his axe’s rebound. The rope has been cut only a little. Italo frowns, and strikes again.

  “Hurry!” Rainer shouts at the others, who are still standing, watching Italo’s efforts. Angelo runs to the next closest tree stump and commences chopping at its rope. His cheeks burning, Jacob follows suit. Rainer shoves Andrea forward, and he stumbles to the nearest stump.

  The rope Jacob is faced with is stout, its rough surface shining with the fishhooks whose eyes have been braided into it. The majority of them are the size you would employ to lever a trout or bass out of a stream, but there are a few clearly fashioned for larger sport, including a hook as large as Jacob’s hand that swings wildly from side to side when he strikes the rope. From its width, Jacob expects the rope will not be easily cut. What he does not expect is the sensation that runs up the axe when its blade bites the fibers. The shaft twists in his hands, as if the axe has connected to a source of tremendous power. Jacob has a vision of himself trying to sever a lightning bolt. There’s a flat crack and the axe is flung back with such force it’s almost torn form his grip. The scorch of burnt hair stings his nostrils. He’s cut the rope, but just barely.

  Around him, the air snaps with the crack of his companions’ axes connecting with these strange ropes. A rapid-fire burst of Italian that’s probably a prayer bursts from Angelo’s lips as his axe flies up from the rope it’s struck. The recoil flings Andrea’s axe out of his hands, over his head, and onto the ground behind him. Only Italo succeeds in maintaining something like a regular rhythm, though the sweat already soaking the back of his shirt testifies to the effort it’s costing him. Jacob adjusts his grip and raises his axe.

  Throughout all this, which hasn’t taken more than a minute or two, the Fisherman has remained in place, watching the five of them. When Jacob is three difficult strokes into his task, the Fisherman leaves his spot beside the great bull’s carcass and walks toward the stream. He still has hold of that knife, though he carries it almost casually. Jacob doesn’t care for the sight of him approaching the frothing water, doesn’t like the deliberation with which the man kneels beside it and plunges the bloody knife down into it, but Rainer hasn’t told him to stop chopping, so he delivers a fourth and a fifth blow to the rope. He is making progress. The dense strands that compose the rope are separating, however reluctantly. As each does, he’s aware of something escaping from it, a force that eddies in the air around him, stirring the hairs on his arms, the back of his neck.

  The Fisherman remains bent at the stream, the knife and the hand holding it underwater, for a long time, enough for Jacob to have cut almost halfway through his rope, Italo three-quarters of the way through his. Jacob has been expecting Rainer to approach the man, confront him, but it’s only as he’s rising from the stream and turning to them that Rainer strides past Jacob. From his efforts, Jacob is drenched in sweat. Sweat matts his hair to his head, streams down his forehead, runs into his eyes, blurring his vision. For this reason, he isn’t sure whether, when he sees the water clinging to the Fisherman’s arm, from his elbow to the tip of his knife, as if he’s wearing it, his eyes are playing tricks on him. The Fisherman snaps his arm, as if he were cracking a whip, and the water rushes to the knife, gathering around it in a globe. Rainer breaks into a run, and it’s this that convinces Jacob his eyesight is fine. A flick of the wrist, and the ball of water surrounding the Fisherman’s knife elongates, lancing at Italo, who’s holding his axe above his head, ready for the next cut. Before the water-spear can reach him, Rainer’s at his side, his right hand holding his axe marked side forward, his left making a sweeping motion outward. Like a snake sliding around a rock, the water curves away from Italo and Rainer. Instead, it targets Angelo.

  Jacob is close enough to him to mark the exact location the water strikes, the hollow at the base of the throat, and to hear the sound it makes as it punctures the skin and streams into the wound, the whoosh of water descending a drain. Angelo goes rigid, his mouth gaping, his eyes bulging, while the water invades him. Andrea shouts, “Angelo!” Jacob knows he should do something, but it’s as if his arms and legs have locked. Before movement has returned to them, the tail end of the water-spear has left the Fisherman’s blade and vanished into the wound in Angelo’s throat.

  XXII

  His axe gripped near the end with both hands, Rainer advances on the Fisherman, who half-crouches, as if weighing another plunge of his hand into the stream. Italo resumes chopping through his rope. Angelo turns to face Jacob. He moves stiffly, as if the water that’s entered the hole in his throat has swollen his joints. A sheen of what appears to be sweat shines on Angelo’s face, his hands—the Fisherman’s water, Jacob realizes, seeping out Angelo’s pores. As if he’s crying uncontrollably, Angelo’s eyes shimmer. Beneath the water, they’re gold. Jacob groans, and as if in response to his displeasure, Angelo coughs. It’s a rough, wet noise, the sound of a man trying to clear his lungs of the water that’s drowning them. Little spouts of water splash from the wound in his throat as the cough goes on and on and on, bending Angelo over with its force.

  Within each liquid bark, Jacob hears something else, what might almost be a word, words. There’s a language forcing itself out of Angelo, a harsh assemblage of phlegmy coughs, grunts, and clicks of the tongue that Jacob nonetheless understands. It’s not so much that he can translate individual words as it is that he can see their subject. More than see—for an instant, it’s as if he’s inside what’s being described. One moment, he’s hovering airplane-high in the air, so far up the coastline below him might be the kind of oversized map you sometimes encounter on the floors of museums. He doesn’t recognize the contours of the shore, but he already knows the black ocean, as he knows that the humps rising from it, parallel to the coast, aren’t islands, but more of the great beast he’s watched shift its back in front of him, Rainer’s Leviathan. And this might well be the Biblical personage, because it continues along the shore in both directions, to the limit of Jacob’s view. From points up and down the coast, a lattice of fine lines stretches to the water, some of them ending at one of the enormous humps, others plunging beneath the waves. The Fisherman has done this, Jacob understands. Working over a length of time Jacob does not even want to consider, the man with the lank hair and scraggly beard has cast his lines and lodged his hooks into the bulk of this immensity with a patience that’s equal measures mad and heroic. He has brought this monster, this god-beast, to the brink of complete capture, and while doing so must be a trespass of a fundamental order, Jacob cannot help himself from admiring the man.

  With unnerving speed, the scene beneath begins to draw closer. Though he can feel his feet planted on the ground, Jacob has the sensation of dropping from a great height, like a bird who’s lost the use of his wings. Wind pushes against him as the ground gains in definition. Through eyelids squinted almost shut, he sees that the ropes directly below him are also fastened to the remains of giant trees. His ears fill with roaring, the sound of the air he’s plummeting through. It is absurd—his feet rest firmly on the red soil. He hears Angelo expelling the jagged language from a throat that must be raw from it. He is standing listening to Angelo, and he is dropping towards a tree stump the width of a field, and when he strikes that expanse of blond wood, Jacob knows he will fall over, dead. He closes his eyes, but it makes no difference. The tree stump fills his vision, a wooden plane. He sees that the rope tied around it has been painted with symbols, angular markings midway between pictures and letters. They appear to float above the fibers. What a peculiar detail, he thinks, to accompany him out of this life.

  Somewhere in front of him, there’s an explosion of sound, sounds, a train of them slamming one into the other. A drawn-out yell c
ollides with the thud of one body crashing into another, which smashes into Angelo’s weird speech, which breaks into random coughing. The tree stump Jacob’s fifty feet away from meeting bursts as if it had been projected onto a giant soap-bubble. With it goes the impression of falling, the departure so sudden that Jacob staggers forward a couple of steps. This brings him to where Andrea and Angelo are wrestling in the red dirt, carried off their feet by the force of Andrea’s charge. Angelo is on his back, Andrea half on top of him. Andrea’s left forearm presses across Angelo’s throat, his right arm raises his axe. Angelo’s right hand is under Andrea’s chin, forcing his head back, his left hand grips Andrea’s elbow, holding his axe at bay. Andrea’s eyes dart in Jacob’s direction. Through teeth clenched shut, he hisses, “Come on!”

  For a second, Jacob does not understand what Andrea is saying to him. Then the weight of the axe in his hand clarifies it. He hurries to Andrea’s right, where more of Angelo’s body is exposed. Angelo’s gold eyes lock on Jacob standing there, both hands on his axe, and his lips draw back in a snarl. The water coating his face writhes. His legs kick, his hips buck, as he attempts to throw Andrea off. “Do it!” Andrea shouts.

  Jacob wants to shout back that he’s trying, but Angelo is twisting around so much, he keeps putting Andrea in the way. The axe over his head, Jacob shifts right, left, right again. “For Christ’s sake!” Jacob bellows and, raising his foot, shoves Andrea out of the way. The move catches Angelo by surprise. He’s been straining so hard to force Andrea up, that his efforts carry him almost to a sit. Now, Jacob thinks.

  As he does—it’s not so much that time slows down as it is that he’s aware of everything happening around him. Rainer and the Fisherman are in the midst of a fight, of a kind of duel. Each grasps his weapon in his right hand, and knife and axe clash in a rain of sparks. The weapons are followed by their left hands, each of which centers a sphere of Jacob can’t say exactly what, except that the Fisherman’s shines like mercury, while Rainer’s is dark as obsidian. When the spheres collide, the air around the men dims, and Jacob’s teeth ache.

  Italo, in the meantime, has reached his final stroke. The edge of his axe is dull, notched, as if he’s done a year’s worth of work in the last five minutes. Like Jacob’s rope, Italo’s is hung with all manner of fishhooks, which jangle as the rope spins, clockwise and counter-, against the forces that strain it. Italo’s exhaustion is evident. His shirt is transparent with sweat. He sways from side to side as if drunk. Nonetheless, he musters the strength for one more heave of his axe. It cleaves the remaining strands of rope cleanly. A thunderclap knocks Italo off his feet, radiates outwards. The rope rears back like a wounded serpent, its rigid straightness released into loops and snarls. Hooks flaring, a length of the rope coils at Rainer. He’s already started to turn his head, probably in response to Italo’s axe slicing through the rope, so he sees the flashing hooks, the curving rope, and, with a speed Jacob would not have guessed he possessed, throws himself to the ground. One of the hooks catches the back of his shirt and as quickly rips free, following the rest of its fellows as the rope rolls above Rainer and into the Fisherman. Maybe he’s been too focused on his contest with Rainer—maybe that black globe surrounding Rainer’s left hand has affected his eyesight—either way, he doesn’t react in time. The rope slaps up and down him, burying a host of the smaller and several of the larger fishhooks in him.

  This is Jacob’s moment. Pivoting his hips to give the blow its maximum force, he swings the axe down. In the quarter-second it takes for the blade to traverse the arc up, down, and into the base of Angelo’s neck, where it joins the shoulder, Jacob watches Angelo’s eyes darken from gold to brown, the water slide off his face. STOP! his brain screams, but it’s too late. Already, the blade has reached Angelo’s skin. It cuts deep, through the muscle and collar bone, down to the edge of his breastbone. Blood vents from severed arteries. With a cry, Jacob releases the axe and stumbles back. The handle of the axe protruding up like some awkward new limb, blood bubbling red onto his shirt, Angelo attempts to raise himself to his feet. All he manages is to bring his right arm around in front of him, to shift his legs underneath him. As soon as he has, he slumps over, supporting himself on his right arm. Blood pattering the soil, Angelo lurches into a half-crawl. Jacob can’t imagine where he could be headed. Nor is it likely Angelo has much idea. He manages to place one madly trembling hand forward before his arm gives out, dropping his face into the dirt that’s already damp with his blood. His mouth opens and closes, opens and closes, opens and remains open. Though he damns his cowardice, Jacob can’t bear to approach him. It’s left to Andrea to kneel beside their comrade and search his neck for the pulse both men know won’t be there. Italo staggers to their sides, but there isn’t anything he can do.

  A scream jerks the men’s attention from the crimson pool spreading under Angelo. It’s the Fisherman. He’s struggling against the rope that has stitched itself to him, crossing from his right hip to his left shoulder like a sash. Behind him, the rope has drawn taut, and is pulling him toward the rocky shore, and the dark waves beyond. Although blood streams down his apron from dozens of spots where the fishhooks have pushed through it into him, the Fisherman fights mightily to stay where he is. Grabbing the rope at a spot high on his chest, sucking in his breath as the hooks stab his palm, the Fisherman raises his knife to ease the tip between his skin and the rope. The rope yanks him back a step. He licks his lips, his brow furrowed, as he concentrates on sliding the knife under the rope.

  Which is when Rainer steps in close to him, his axe swinging up. It clangs on the blade of the knife, spinning it out of the Fisherman’s grasp. Rainer reverses his stroke, and sweeps the Fisherman’s legs out from under him. The man sits down hard. To his rear, the rope sags, then straightens, slamming the Fisherman onto his back and dragging him in the direction of the beach. His one hand still hooked to the rope, the Fisherman slaps the ground with the other, searching for purchase. His fingers dig into the soil, carve trenches in the dirt as he’s pulled across it. Blood spills and splashes from his apron. His breathing is loud, hoarse, a much larger sound than you would expect from so slight a man. Keeping a few steps behind, Rainer follows him as he’s towed from the dirt onto the stony beach. Rocks clatter and click as he drags over them. Frantic, he tries to dig his heels in among the rocks, but they’re scattered by the force drawing him on.

  Maybe halfway down the beach, the Fisherman succeeds in wedging his left foot into a narrow fissure in a long table of a rock. He howls when the rope continues to pull at him, and the howl increases its volume as he pushes his way to his feet, crescendoing in a victory cry that’s interrupted by Rainer hammering the blunt end of his axe head on the Fisherman’s left knee. Bone cracks. Face blank with this new pain, the Fisherman pulls away from it, and in so doing, inclines in the very direction he’s only just succeeded in resisting. When the rope yanks him down, his foot remains caught in the stone that has switched from brace to vise. With the snap of a dried branch, his ankle breaks. For much too long, his foot is caught in the rock as the rest of him is dragged towards the water. Further bones, ligaments, crack, pop. A high, keening sound leaks from the Fisherman’s mouth, which is clamped shut. With his free hand, he pushes at his trapped leg; with his free leg, he kicks at it. At last, his heel slides loose and he’s pulled off the long rock.

  This is it. There’s nothing of any size to prevent the Fisherman being drawn the rest of the way to the black ocean. He appears to know this, which is not to say that he accepts it. In his antique German, he lets fly a volley of curses at Rainer. “Go fuck your mother,” Rainer says. The next volley of curses expands its targets to include Jacob, his companions, and their families. “Go fuck your father,” Rainer says. What Jacob assumes is a further round of invective is delivered in a language he thinks is Hungarian. “Go fuck yourself,” Rainer says.

  Whatever the Fisherman is about to say next is interrupted by the furthest edge of a wave surging over his face an
d chest. Coughing, he shouts in German, “I turn my body from the sun! I turn my mind from the sun! I turn my spirit from the sun!” Another wave rolls over him. Rainer has halted his march just beyond the water’s reach. When the wave has subsided from the Fisherman, he raises his head to look at Rainer. “From hell’s heart,” he shouts, “I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!” Rainer doesn’t answer. The next wave that falls on the Fisherman is larger; it buoys him up, momentarily, delivering him to the following wave, and the wave after that. Jacob thinks that maybe the dark ocean has hold of him, now, but the water retreats, depositing the Fisherman on sand studded with rocks. He’s pale to the point of white, as if the water has washed all the blood that was left out of him. Tilting his head to the sea, to the vast coil waiting for him, he shouts, “To thee I come, all-destroyer! To the last I grapple with thee! Let me then tow to pieces, tied to thee!”

  A wall of water crashes down on him. Jacob loses sight of him in the resulting foam, and doesn’t regain it until the Fisherman has been carried a dozen yards from shore. Amidst the rioting waves, it’s difficult to distinguish much with any certainty, but Jacob could swear he sees the Fisherman grasped by a multitude of silvery arms; it’s impossible for him to say if they’re holding the man up, or dragging him under. Then he’s gone, taken by the water.

  XXIII

  Rainer doesn’t waste any time marking his passing. While Jacob and the others are still squinting at the ocean, Rainer turns and starts up the beach. On the way, he stoops to retrieve the Fisherman’s knife. As he comes closer, Jacob’s eyes are drawn to his face. The white light that’s been focused on his features has brightened to the point they’re almost impossible to discern. He stops next to Angelo’s corpse, and crouches beside it. Jacob—it isn’t so much that he’s forgotten about Angelo, slumped over in a pool of his own blood, as it is that his attention has been commanded by the spectacle of the Fisherman’s undoing. Now that he’s met whatever fate was awaiting him in the ocean, his hold on Jacob has ceased, leaving him to face the man he’s killed.