Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  Pietru nodded with compliant happiness, and knelt to the gunport, his hand immediately beginning to stroke and pull at the wall of white tendrils. Roland watched in fascination. It still seemed a loathsome activity, the way the scapegoat let himself be swallowed by the Fish’s grasping ropes. But Roland also observed it with a new respect, for in some mysterious manner the connection allowed Pietru to communicate with the monster.

  It was a scapegoat thing, no doubt. Possibly Pietru’s childlike, brutish state of mind, his animal simpleness, allowed him to understand, and be understood in turn, by another animal. It was not an activity fit for a normal, intelligent man, of that Roland was sure. He would never surrender himself to the Fish in such a way. But there was no denying that for now it was an ability that made Pietru, ignorant innocent though he was, more useful than even the greatest man of intelligence and learning.

  And sure enough, once again, as Pietru smiled and laughed, the tendrils in the gunport writhed and parted, and three living fish were deposited through the gap, to land leaping on the floor.

  ‘Good?’ asked Pietru.

  ‘Good,’ Roland replied, and fell to it.

  He did not, however, merely grasp the fish and start to rip at them with his teeth, as he had yesterday. This time his hunger allowed him the patience to prepare a meal more carefully. He had ransacked the galley before coming here, and though it was long since empty of food, and stripped of most of its equipment, he had managed to find a small knife. Now, with inexpert but swift hands, he used that knife to scale and gut the three fish, so that he soon had six ragged fillets of clean white flesh ready to be eaten.

  Oh, what he would give to be able to fry those fillets now, over a fire, in a hot pan, with pepper, and butter, and lemon!

  But that could not be allowed. Yes, he could start a fire easily enough. There was timber aplenty about the ship, and whale oil too in the hold. But a fire would create smoke, and worse, the smell of frying fish would waft all through the ship. Even the faintest hint of it would be a golden lure to the starving men topside: they would tear the Revenge apart in search of the source. So no, Roland could not cook his fish. Not yet anyway.

  He tucked in. And in truth, so malnourished was he even raw fish was a delight to be savoured. One fillet, two fillets, three. It was only as he was finishing the fourth that he glanced up at Pietru, and, as a guilty afterthought, offered the scapegoat one of the last two fillets.

  Pietru lifted the fish gingerly and studied it a moment, then took an experimental bite. He chewed thoughtfully, not in any great pleasure it seemed, but nor in revulsion, swallowed, and took several bites more. But then his interest faded, and he lay the bulk of the fish down uneaten.

  Roland shook his head. How could the scapegoat not be hungry? For that matter, how had Pietru kept his great bulk of fat intact through all these last months of low rations and then starvation? Obviously, he had some other source of nourishment. And as Roland chewed on the last of the fish, he found himself studying the white ropes in the gunport.

  Was that how it was? When Pietru’s arm was enfolded within the Fish’s grasp, was something other than mere communication taking place? Was something – some form of nutrient – being fed to the scapegoat, passing through the pores of his skin, into his very blood?

  Roland swallowed his last bite with difficulty. Well, if that was truly what was happening, then it was even more certain that he himself would never commune with the Rope Fish. To suckle from the monster as a baby did its mother – why, it was beyond disgusting, it was wrong. Even fish raw and cold and flavourless was better than that indignity.

  His meal complete, Roland disposed of the remains down in the bilge, where the smell of the rotting carcasses would merge with the already foul water there, and rouse no suspicion. Then he retired to sleep.

  So passed several weeks.

  Every day Pietru would summon up fish, and every day Roland would eat them. Otherwise they kept to the lower decks. Roland would not allow Pietru to wander higher then the Second Gun, and certainly not all the way up to the open air. He did not want anyone in the two fortified camps to see that they were still alive. Far better if everyone else thought they had both died of starvation, as they would have by now, if not for the miracle of the fish.

  As for what was happening in the fortified camps themselves, with the last of the food surely running low, Roland tried not to imagine. Occasionally he heard cries from above, and once the rushing of feet and the firing of muskets, and screams: a final battle, no doubt, over the last remnants of supplies. But after four further weeks, all such sounds had ceased.

  Even then, Roland waited another fortnight, skulking with heroic patience in the lower levels, and with difficulty forcing Pietru to do the same, before the silence convinced him it might be safe to emerge.

  Up they crept, through the Second Gun and the First, and so onto the main deck and into daylight for the first time in months. Everything was silent and still, the sky a pale grey, the air windless, the sea flat. It was an effect anyway of the Fish that the Revenge rolled less upon the water than of old, steadied by the immense counterweight hanging below, but today, in such calm conditions, the deck was as motionless as a desert plain, and as quiet.

  ‘Hullo!’ Roland called, his pistol cocked and ready.

  No answer came. He turned to study the forecastle, then the stern castle, but no face appeared at the barricades, no challenge came in reply. The air rang hollow in Roland’s ear: an absence of everything.

  He noted, however, that the foredeck barricades were all torn down, a result of the last battle, perhaps. He would look there first. With Pietru trailing behind, he mounted the stairs and climbed over the fallen embrasures. On the far side lay the first bodies. They were many days dead by the look, some shot, some stabbed, but there was little smell: so emaciated had the victims already been before death, the corpses were all but mummified.

  Roland pressed on, descending to the chambers below, but all he found were the dead. In all, he counted nearly forty corpses, some evidently killed violently, others who had merely starved, to judge by their wretched poses. Away from the open air the smell was much worse, though it was not so much the stench of decay as it was the smell of too many men confined into too small a space, a stale miasma of sweat, excrement, and unwashed clothes. It must have been awful in there, in the last dying days of starvation.

  Pietru hooted sadly as he stared about at the wreckage. ‘All dead. All hungry and dead. Did they want fish too, Rowand?’

  For the first time, unease ran though Roland. He could have fed these men, maybe, if he had been prepared to try …

  He shrugged it off, reminding himself that they had been happy to let him die of hunger, so why should he have done any differently? He ascended to the open sky again and led Pietru towards the stern castle.

  It loomed up tall in the silence, a far more forbidding presence than the single-storey forecastle. Its barricades still stood intact, but as Roland and Pietru climbed the stairs to the Captain’s Walk, no guard appeared at any of the gun slits to observe or deter them. Roland was free to climb over, and then to shove aside one of the barriers to make way for Pietru.

  They passed inwards, down the wide passage that led to the Great Cabin. Roland remembered the hallway as a bright space of polished timbers, but now all was darkness, the windows shuttered, no lamps lit. Rubbish was strewn everywhere, and from all about came the same smell as in the forecastle, the charnel air of a closed tomb. Sure enough, as Roland peered into the doorways they passed by – the captain’s cabin, the first officer’s cabin – the corpses were waiting, sprawled in beds and chairs: raggedly thin shapes, black cavities of mouths yawning open for meals that would never come.

  Fish … he could have brought them fish …

  But no, damn it, the men here had refused Roland sustenance just as callously as had the men in the forecastle. He had reasoned this out already, weeks ago. If he had brought them food they would onl
y have demanded to know how and where he had got it, and then most likely attacked and killed him to gain control over Pietru. He had done what was necessary to protect himself, that was all, no worse. It was not his responsibility that all these men were dead. It was not his fault. He hadn’t caused this. He hadn’t—

  Hadn’t what?

  Killed them?

  No. That was ridiculous …

  They came to the Great Cabin and passed over the threshold. More wreckage, more filth, more pathetic corpses. The room had been used in part as a storeroom, to judge by the broken barrels and empty crates tossed about everywhere, and in part as barracks, for hammocks and bunks were scattered throughout, many bearing dead sleepers.

  Nothing and no one moved there. That was it, then. Roland and Pietru were the last two left alive on the ship.

  But no – Roland realised, starting – there, in a far corner, something stirred and lifted from a filthy mattress.

  It was a hand, beckoning weakly. And a hoarse cry came, faint and helpless, ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’

  Reluctant, and yet unable to resist, Roland drew closer to the man. He was naked and skeletal, teeth gone, tongue blackened, his bony head moving blindly, vision faded in the final throes of emaciation.

  ‘Who is it?’ the man pleaded.

  Roland stared for a time, not wanting to answer. But somehow he could not refuse. ‘Roland of the Counting. And Pietru.’

  The blind eyes searched still in confusion. ‘Roland? Pietru? No, no … they’re dead, they’re long dead.’

  Roland only watched silently. He should have been able to recognise the man, he thought: but he couldn’t.

  The figure tried to rise to its elbows, a ghastly, failed effort, but for a moment the dead-white eyes seemed to see. ‘Roland,’ the man gasped in disbelief. ‘But … how? What have you been eating? Where did you find it?’ And then, with sudden, terrible hope. ‘Give it to me! Quickly. For the love of all things afloat, please, if you have food, help me!’

  And truly, Roland would have – so he told himself in the months and years afterwards – he really would have sent Pietru below in search of fish, forgiving the fact that this man, whoever he was, had been one of those to refuse Roland himself food in virtually the same situation.

  But he was not given the chance to be merciful. The man crumpled with his final words, a hand going to his chest in agony, as if the feeble organ beating there had burst with the effort of speech – then he slumped back with a groan, writhed a moment more, and fell still.

  ‘Fish, Rowand?’ Pietru enquired, mystified.

  ‘No,’ Roland replied. ‘No fish.’

  On the high deck, in the cold darkness, Pietru stared still at the ghost on the foredeck. Finally, Roland voiced the fear in his heart.

  ‘The old man,’ he asked, ‘do you recognise him? Is he … was he one of the crew?’ And he waited in dread, the other questions asked only in his thoughts. Is he thin and wretched? Is his mouth black, his eyes blind, his arms and legs covered in sores? Is it one of the men I let die?

  Has he come for me?

  Pietru tilted his head. ‘No. Don’t know him.’

  Roland sagged.

  And yet, instead of relief, he felt only a chill confusion. If the spectre was not one of the Revenge’s dead crew, then who was it? If it had been one of Roland’s victims, returned to avenge itself – as dreadful as that would be – at least there would be an explanation.

  But what was a stranger doing here?

  Roland straightened abruptly. What was he talking about, strangers and spirits? There was nothing there. No apparition, no ghost. There were no such things. The scapegoat must be experiencing some form of hallucination, surely. A delirium vision born of their long isolation.

  The conviction faded as fast as it had been born. The angle of Pietru’s head as he stared unfailingly at that same spot, the quiet, awed tone of his voice: there was no delirium or madness there. Only fact.

  ‘Who is he?’ Roland whispered, straining with his own eyes to see, even though there was nothing, nothing. ‘What does he want?’

  Pietru gave no answer for a long time.

  Then, ‘I think he drowned.’

  Following the death of the last survivor in the Great Cabin, Roland, as the only remaining officer on board, could rightfully and lawfully declare himself the new captain of the Revenge. And so he did.

  Oh, the pleasure and irony of it – he, Roland of the Counting, so incompetent, so maligned by all the others, now captain. And his first act of command was to light a fire in the galley and cook his daily fish. Though he had no butter, nor pepper, nor lemon, it was an ecstasy sublime. Even Pietru ate an entire fillet, little appetite though he had shown previously.

  Next, Roland moved into the captain’s cabin.

  It was not so simple as that, of course. The stern castle was a filth-ridden tomb, and to make it habitable again, first the barricades needed to be torn down and the doors and windows thrown open again, then some fifty corpses needed to be removed, along with mounds of rubbish.

  But Roland had nothing if not the time to spare, and he had the strength now too, with hot food warming his stomach.

  So he began the labour that same day, and worked away steadily over the following weeks. The corpses were the worst of it, but by wrapping them in canvas, he was able to drag them – with Pietru’s help – out to the Captain’s Walk or to the main deck, and from there to the rail, where they could be manhandled over the side. The Fish took care of them after that, for as each bundle splashed heavily into the sea, the thousands of white ropes that floated there as ever would quickly seize them and drag them under.

  Then it was mostly a matter of patient cleaning and airing and sifting through the wreckage. By the end of several weeks, Roland had the upper floor of the stern castle restored to near its original state: the captain’s quarters, Pietru’s quarters and the Great Cabin all ordered and neat once more. True, much of the finer furniture had been destroyed, and there was no replacing the broken glass in the windows, but Roland had scavenged chairs and tables and beds and sheets and cutlery enough to recreate at least a semblance, on this one upmost level, of the Revenge’s former dignity and beauty.

  And strangely, the Revenge did seem beautiful to him now. In the days before the Fish came he had loathed the ship, when it had been a place of exile, and he a scorned outsider. But now that the vessel was his, it was all different. The gleam of brass, the touch of polished timber, the solid decking beneath his feet, all of it filled him with pride as he patrolled his small territory. Why, given time, he might restore the whole ship.

  Still, it would be a vast labour, and while Roland’s health had improved greatly since the worst days of his starvation, he was yet suffering intermittent symptoms of scurvy, and was easily exhausted. The problem was, man could not live on fish alone: to be fully fit he also needed some form of fruit or vegetable. Which set Roland wondering. Could Pietru request only fish from their captor? Or could other foods be summoned as well?

  It was an intriguing notion. Pietru was still descending every noon to the Third Gun deck to collect the daily supplies, and though Roland had not bothered to accompany him for some weeks, today he followed the scapegoat down to the gunport and posed a new request.

  ‘Not fish this time,’ he explained carefully. ‘I’m not hungry for fish, I’m hungry for other things. You know, vegetables. There won’t be vegetables down there, of course, but there will be things like kelp and seaweed. That’s what I want.’ And when Pietru only stared in puzzlement, Roland sighed, ‘Just ask for green things. Leafy things. Can you do that?’

  ‘Green things,’ the scapegoat repeated uncertainly, but nodding. ‘Leafy things.’ And he bent to the gunport.

  Roland waited. Pietru frowned and muttered in doubt as the white tendrils enfolded his hand, but to Roland’s delight, when the caul writhed and parted, it was not fish that appeared, rather it was a mass of green matter, dripping wet. Deposited on
the deck, it proved to be seaweeds of several types, some leafy and soft, others dense and spiky, tangled together. As a soggy heap, the kelps hardly looked appetising, but within an hour Roland had them chopped and simmering in a hot soup. Drinking it down – the flavour was mildly bitter, but otherwise quite palatable – he fancied he could feel the new nourishment flooding directly into his veins.

  From then on, every third day, he ordered green food instead of fish, and within another fortnight his scurvy was gone.

  In appearance too Roland was becoming his old fastidious self again. In his time of banishment below decks his clothes had grown filthy and ragged, but during the restoration of the stern castle he had scrounged together several uniforms in neat condition. Also, he was now bathing regularly, in the captain’s tub no less, for water was one thing the Revenge had never lacked, even in the days of hunger. This was thanks in part to the Fish, for the monster had carried the ship away from the dry tropical south and into the rainy realms of the mid-latitudes; but thanks also to the crew, who before their deaths had set up waxed sails to catch the rain and funnel it into waiting barrels.

  Life, in fact, in those first few months of his ascension, was very nearly pleasant for Roland. He was occupied every day with labour and purpose, his belly was full of hot food, he felt healthy and clean, and there was no one anymore to gainsay him, or to torment him over his lack of abilities. Many was the evening indeed that he would mount to the high deck, having dined his fill, to stand at the wheel in a masterful, satisfied pose, as if all was right with the world, and as if he was truly captain of a ship under sail.

  But sometimes …

  Sometimes, all of an instant, even as he stood proudly, hand upon the wheel, the illusion would shatter. Suddenly, he would become aware of the dreary, festooned lines of the Fish; suddenly he could see the tangled, useless rigging and the torn sails hanging limp; suddenly he could hear the silence of the great empty vessel, and smell the musk of decay and disuse from the decks below. And a sick horror would fill him. What did he think he was doing, playing at being captain? Was he going mad? Was he that blind to reality? For the reality was that he was a prisoner still, doomed to an eternity of this, and he was alone, utterly alone, apart from a simpleton who could barely speak. This was not a life; this was the very essence of damnation.