Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  And if they came close enough, then maybe …

  Maybe what?

  He and Pietru might escape?

  Roland’s eyes fell to the ropes that massed as ever in the water all about the ship. Escape how, exactly? There was still no way to leap beyond the Fish’s tendrils, even if the other ship came within fifty yards. And it would not come so close anyway. As soon as it was near enough to recognise the net of white strands draped about the Revenge, it would flee.

  His hopes falling away, Roland watched the approaching sail with bitter expectancy. At any moment, no doubt, the ship would suddenly change course and veer away. Its captain would be studying the Revenge through his telescope even now, and very soon would grasp the danger.

  But the vessel only came on.

  Pietru appeared on deck, drawn by Roland’s shouts. The scapegoat’s broad face lit up in a smile. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing, ‘a ship.’

  ‘I see it,’ Roland replied. ‘Now shut up.’

  They waited. Hope and dread battled in Roland – was the captain of the other ship a braver man than he had credited? Had the fellow seen the white ropes, but was determined to come near anyway?

  In either case, the ship was not hurrying. Indeed, it bore only a single raised sail – on its foremast – which even to Roland’s un-seamanlike eye was an odd configuration, especially in the light winds of the day.

  Indeed, it looked an odd vessel entirely, its rigging ragged, two of its masts bare and its hull streaked with black stains. Nor, as the ship came closer still, could Roland spy any seamen aloft, or on the decks.

  An awful suspicion took root. He stared, begging silently that it would not be so, but as the vessel came on yet, no more than a mile off now, holding the same course as ever, the truth could no longer be denied.

  It was a derelict.

  Fire had swept through it, leaving the stern castle a charred wreck, and the forward hull was riddled with splintered holes, the evidence of cannon shot. Tangled lines and broken spars littered the deserted decks. Roland gazed hollowly, understanding. The vessel must be a casualty of some far-off and long-ago battle. Badly damaged, on fire, most likely it had been abandoned by its crew and left to burn and sink – but instead by some miracle (a rainstorm maybe had doused the flames) it had been preserved. And now, driven by its single rotting sail, it was wandering the oceans as an empty hulk.

  Roland stared on. Here was no brave captain come to investigate, no crew standing ready to help. Here was only another lost vessel, crossing paths in all the emptiness of the sea with a fellow aimless wanderer. Holding its course, the derelict sailed silently by, passing a quarter mile off the Revenge’s bow. Roland could discern no banners or flags, nor any name, so could learn nothing of its identity or origins. He could not even tell which side it had fought on, only that it had lost its battle, only that it was useless to him …

  ‘Goodbye, ship,’ Pietru said, waving.

  Desolation came, crushing. Roland bowed his head. There would be no rescue. There would never be a rescue.

  It was only now, indeed, surprised by the fierceness of his own disappointment, that Roland realised he had still been hoping for one. Through all these years, even though he had told himself there was no hope, even though he knew that no one had ever escaped a Rope Fish, still, it seemed, he had held on to the dream in his heart. Maybe that was the only reason he had stayed alive this long. Because he thought he might be free some day …

  If so, the derelict ship had laid bare his foolishness. Rescue was delusion. Escape was delusion. He must accept that or go mad. He would never get to go home, never see land again or regain his old freedoms. This was all his life would ever be now. The Revenge. Pietru. And the Fish.

  ‘Why Rowand so sad?’ the scapegoat enquired.

  At another time Roland might have raged at this, or struck out in fury, but not now. Now he only lifted his head forlornly.

  ‘What did we do, Pietru?’ he asked, his gaze taking in the sea and the Revenge and the departing ship all at once. ‘What did we do to deserve this?’

  The scapegoat creased his brow, not understanding.

  ‘No, really,’ Roland pressed, ‘why was it us, in all the world, that the Fish chose? What crime did we ever commit that was so terrible it called for this punishment? I … I killed that bird, I know. But it can’t be that. Not just that. And anyway, you never did anything wrong.’

  Comprehension seemed to dawn on Pietru’s face. ‘You think Fish caught ship because we did something bad?’

  ‘It’s that – or it’s ill-luck beyond reason.’

  ‘But Rowand, no. Not bad luck. Not punishment either. That’s not why Fish came. Fish had nothing to do with us.’

  Roland gave a bitter laugh. ‘No? How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Easy. Fish told me.’

  There was a silence. ‘What do you mean?’ asked Roland, voice gone very cold. ‘What do you mean, the Fish told you?’

  Pietru lifted his hand to the white canopy of tendrils, and gave the ropes a fond caress. ‘I talk to it.’

  ‘What, when you ask it for food?’

  ‘No. All the time now.’

  Roland stared. Had it really come to that? Was the communication between the scapegoat and the Fish so casual now that they could simply talk about things at whim? He said, ‘And the day the Fish caught the ship? It didn’t come because of us, you said. Then why did it?’

  ‘It was told to.’

  Roland reared back. ‘It was told to?’

  Pietru nodded carelessly: the topic seemed to be of no great interest to him. ‘Fish had no choice, had to grab ship. It was told to.’

  ‘Told by who?!’

  The scapegoat rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then ask the Fish, damn it! Right now!’

  Roland’s urgency finally penetrated. Pietru blinked, and with a chastened frown took a firmer grip of the white ropes, his expression going faraway, his lips moving silently as if in prayer. Roland had a momentary and uncanny vision of the monster far below in the deeps stirring massively in response, and at length – somehow – giving an answer.

  Pietru said, ‘Fish don’t know either. Fish was alone and asleep in the sea, then something woke it up, something Fish couldn’t see, and made it move. Fish says it was like … like being poked with a stick. Fish wasn’t allowed to stop moving, not until it found the ship. And it had to be quick, it had to catch us before we caught the little boats that were in the water …’

  Roland stared in renewed amazement. Before we caught the little boats. The attack boats, is that what the scapegoat meant? Roland had not forgotten. On that terrible day, the Revenge had been on the verge of taking several Twin Islands attack boats prisoner when the Fish struck. Later, Roland himself had speculated about the way the Fish had seemed to intervene as if to save those boats – and now Pietru was confirming his old suspicions. The Fish had not appeared by chance at all, it had been deliberately sent!

  But sent by whom? What agency was so powerful that a monster of the sea must bend to its commands, against all likelihood of fortune?

  What else could it be but fortune itself?

  What else could it be but fate itself?

  ‘Why?’ Roland demanded faintly. ‘Why did the boats matter so much? Who was in them that was so important?’

  Who – he was really asking – was responsible for all this?

  Pietru’s face was scrunched in concentration, still in commune with the creature below.

  ‘All men same to Fish. Fish don’t know names. But there was one man in one of the boats. Young man, little man. Fish was told – do not touch him, do not drown him. Leave that one be.’

  Roland breathed out, transported back to the day, and to the memory of a face he had seen, staring up at the high deck of the Revenge – the young commander of the leading attack boat. It was him, Roland knew somehow. He was the one. But how could such a youth, a junior officer, matter so much to fate that it would wa
rp nature itself to protect him?

  Then came anger. It was irrelevant who the youth was! Who cared even if he had been a great captain, or the War Master of the Twin Islanders himself! Nothing made him worth the entire crew of the Revenge. Nothing made him worth Roland’s life. How dare fortune declare that Roland could be abandoned and cast aside, just so that another might go free!

  Then, as quickly as it had risen, Roland’s fury leaked away. What did it matter now? Whatever the true reason the Fish has seized the Revenge, it was of no consequence anymore. The thing was done.

  Except – it did matter, because it made their captivity feel even more meaningless than it had before. At least, before, Roland had been able to marvel at the cruel uniqueness of the event, which almost made it – and him – special. But to learn that they had been doomed not with any intent, but merely as a side effect, as a necessity to protect someone else; that shrank the whole affair to something mean and small and wretched.

  Pietru had taken his hand away from the white ropes. He wiped his brow. ‘Head hurts. Talking with Fish is hard.’

  Roland looked again to the derelict ship, receding away to the north. No, he could not even rail against fate, for fate wasn’t listening. It had dismissed all thought of them. Their purpose was served, their tiny role in the grand dramas of the age played and done. There was no epic story here, no fight for survival that would end in triumph. The Revenge was not the hero of any tale. It was a footnote of someone else’s history, already forgotten.

  ‘All right,’ he told the scapegoat, ‘that’s enough for now.’

  Pietru shuffled off. And from that moment on Roland gave up any semblance of hope or effort in his exile. He ceased to care about his appearance and his clothes, or about the state of the ship and the water in the bilge. He ceased to watch for sails, or to try to chart their position on the map. He took to sleeping all day and night, and stared sightlessly when he was awake. He hoped for nothing any longer, expected nothing, attempted nothing.

  He did only one thing. He kept himself alive. He ate his daily fish, and drank water from the rain barrels, and refused to die. That final step was still one he could not – or would not – take. Hopeless or not, irrelevant or not, it was his life still. And still he did not want that life to end.

  Seven months later, the first ghost appeared.

  After the third of the apparitions, Pietru – as Roland had demanded – stopped reporting the arrival of further spectres. But Roland knew all the same that more and more unseen shades were peopling the ship.

  The scapegoat did not speak of them, but his manner gave patent clues to their presence: the way he ducked his head as he passed certain doorways; the way he would start suddenly, as if at some sound beyond Roland’s hearing, staring off with eyes wide; the way he avoided more and more areas of the ship, until he rarely left the stern castle anymore. Pietru held his tongue throughout, but he behaved as a man would who was hemmed all around by sights and sounds he could not bear to contemplate.

  But that was the scapegoat’s problem, Roland told himself. There was nothing Roland could do about it. Indeed, as long as Pietru continued to muster his courage and descend to the Third Gun deck every day to collect the rations – and faithfully, the scapegoat did exactly that – then it was Roland’s policy to ignore Pietru and the question of ghosts entirely.

  So passed more years yet.

  Despite his fugue state, Roland kept count of those years, adding the days one by one in his head. He had no interest in the total anymore, but it was an action too deeply ingrained in him to stop. So he knew, without wanting to, when the two thousand days mark came and went.

  And when the three thousand days mark passed.

  And when the four thousand days mark drew near.

  Ten years and more, since their capture.

  Over a decade.

  But these were just numbers, figures plucked from the air. They meant very little. The truer measurement of time lay in the age and decay that was visible about the ship, for although the hull of the Revenge, sheathed doubly in nicre and in the caul of the Fish, was proof against rot, everywhere else decline was advancing apace. Topside, the useless sails were now in tatters, and the rigging drooped slackly, ropes unwinding into frayed strands. The deck timbers, polish long since worn away, were beginning to warp and split. And below decks, a slimy scum of mould and dust covered everything, thickening year by year as woodworm chewed unchecked at the framework.

  Then there was Roland himself. One mirror remained unbroken upon the ship, hanging in the Great Cabin, and when upon occasion Roland chose to study himself in the glass, he beheld there a figure withered far beyond his actual years. He had ceased all shaving and grooming, so his hair and beard had grown into wild matted nests. His clothes were rags, his teeth yellow, his skin pale and pasty for lack of sun or exercise. But his eyes were the worst. They were the eyes of the very old, of those whose minds were already departed and who only awaited death now; grey, watery and listless.

  Why – Roland would observe grimly – he was all but a ghost himself now, one more spectre to join Pietru’s throng.

  Then he would turn away from the mirror, and not look again for another week perhaps, or another month.

  Or another year.

  All the while, the Revenge drifted.

  They had probably circled the world by now, the Fish and the ship together, driven only by the wind against the hull, and the currents in the sea: though whether they had done so east to west, or west to east, Roland could not say. He knew only that they had never wandered so far north as to reach the Unquiet Ice, nor so far south as to become enmeshed in the Barrier Doldrums. In the middle latitudes they had remained, crossing the Middle Sea and the Outer Ocean alike without sight of land or of another sail.

  Or even of any living thing. No bird ever alighted upon the ship, no shark or whale ever swam near. No doubt, all such creatures were too wary of the Rope Fish and its tendrils. Nor did any other monster of the sea ever approach. At some point the Revenge must surely have drifted across the infamous abyss of the Blue Wilderness, where great serpents – so Roland had heard – were purported to rise roaring from the deep. But no such fantastic beasts ever troubled the Revenge. Perhaps there was an etiquette between monsters, so that one leviathan would not attempt to steal another’s prize.

  In all, it meant that for year following year, there were no distractions or novelties to behold from the Revenge’s decks, nothing whatever to look at other than the sea and the sky. And Roland had learned that though both the sea and the sky were ever-changing, as wind and weather and seasons proceeded by, they were essentially always exactly the same. Each span of sea could have been any other span of sea, each slice of sky was no different from any slice of sky anywhere else. Without land to give reference, or instruments to measure by, the entire world was reduced to a single horizon of water that was never crossed and never left behind; an infinity of sameness.

  Oh, there were storms, and great waves, and week-long gales … but the Rope Fish held the ship steady and secure through them all, better than the most skilled captain might, and Roland held no fear for their safety. Indeed, in time he ceased to notice the weather at all in any true sense. It was too fleeting. The seasons themselves became as swift-moving to him as the endless days, and the wheel of the stars as monotonous as a whirling clock.

  Who knows how long he might have gone on in such detachment and apathy – his whole life perhaps, seventy or eighty years sliding by in a grey haze, until at some point in his sleep he simply expired.

  But as the eleventh anniversary of their capture came and went, one circumstance at last began to penetrate Roland’s torpor.

  It was Pietru.

  Something was wrong with him.

  In truth, little though Roland had cared, the scapegoat had not been his old self for years now. Not since the ghosts had started appearing. His native happiness had faded as the apparitions crowded about him ever more densely, l
eaving him silent and sombre. But now it wasn’t just that he was unhappy, now he looked physically unwell. He was losing weight, even though he had always retained, until now, his great girth, succoured by his communion with the Fish. Also, his round face was becoming lined with age. And Roland was reminded, with an unpleasant shock, that although the scapegoat always seemed childlike, he was not young. Indeed, he was over sixty now.

  He began to watch Pietru more closely. There was no mistake, the scapegoat was slowly wasting away. As ever, he ate no fish or kelp – but what about his other nourishment? Finally, Roland followed the scapegoat down to the Third Gun, the first time he had done so in some years, to observe the communion with the Fish, and the summoning of food.

  The process had changed. Instead of coaxing the white ropes until they enfolded his hand, now Pietru merely placed his palm against the caul – a gentle pat of reminder – and promptly the ropes opened and the fish were passed through. The unearthly comingling of flesh, and the sharing of nutrients between scapegoat and monster, was no longer taking place.

  ‘Pietru,’ Roland said, ‘why don’t you do this the way you used to?’

  The scapegoat shrugged. ‘Don’t want to.’

  ‘But aren’t you hungry? What are you doing for food? Don’t you keep yourself strong by talking with the Fish?’

  ‘I did. But don’t want that anymore.’

  ‘But if you don’t eat anything, and you don’t talk with the Fish, then you’ll get weak and thin. You’ll get sick.’

  Pietru nodded his great head, complacent. How old he looked suddenly. ‘I know. I don’t mind. I’m tired. Want to go to sleep soon.’

  And Roland knew what the scapegoat meant by sleep. Not simple rest, Pietru was talking about dying, about choosing to die.

  Roland’s long apathy dissolved in an instant, and for the first time in half a decade he felt a genuine emotion – terror.