The Redundant Dragons

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  The night disappeared into dawn, and then the dawn disappeared, stalked and overtaken by billows of fog too thick to allow so much as a glimpse of the wheel.

  The captain had an unusual reaction to that. All of a sudden, she sang a long, sustained, low note, then listened as it bounced back to her.

  “Ah, good,” Captain Lewis said and adjusted the wheel slightly.

  “Were you going to sing the rest of that song?” Verity asked.

  “Oh no, ’twas no song, that. I took a sounding to see how far we are from shore. Used to have the dragon moan to do the same deed, back when we had a working dragon in the engine room. I can also use the bell, but find my own pipes are more accurate and work as well. We’re sailing into the narrowest bit of our passage now, where the North Sea meets the Sea of Glass with the Gremlin’s Horn portside and the Suleskeria Peninsula just coming up starboard.”

  The captain, as watch officer, wore the boatswain’s whistle on a cord and put lips to it to blow the shrill blasts to call all hands on deck.

  The boatswain scrambled to the deck first and reclaimed the whistle, whereupon the captain ordered the sails to be reefed. Verity had learned a great deal, but still didn’t know what half the things on the ship were called or were supposed to do. She wasn’t alone. Many of the crew had signed on when the vessel was a steamer and had not yet fully adapted their skills for sail. Madame Marsha would have called reefing ‘taking in a bit,’ had it referred to a gown instead of a sail. It involved hooks and eyes and ties and things Verity was too inexperienced to operate.

  At this point, she could hear everyone speaking plainly. Both sea and wind were calm, so calm the only sound from the sea was the light slap of water against the hull. When she looked up, a heavy curtain of fog swept over the ship, rapidly growing so thick she could no longer see the water.

  Tiny pinpricks of brilliance pierced the gray pall. At first, she thought the brightness was the eyes of the ghost cats prowling around outside the ship, but it was soon clear that the stabs of light were not paired like eyes. Each grew to the size of a coin and swam into others to form shapes the size of clenched fists. The crew was so fascinated by them that nobody was looking where the ship was heading.

  “What are they?” Verity asked, breaking the awed silence that had descended on the crew like the fog itself. Her voice sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness. Although the sails flapped, the water hissed against the hull, and the timbers creaked, no one seemed to hear her, and no one answered her question.

  “Ought we not to pay more attention to steering the ship?” she asked, much louder than she needed to.

  Everyone had stopped moving, even Captain Lewis. The only movement came from the dancing balls of light.

  The seashells Verity wore around her neck rattled and the beads infused with magic from the walls of the Dragon Vitia’s cave grew warm. Suddenly the ghost cats blinked back into view again and this time they were outside the ship, seemingly suspended over the water. They began chasing the lights, pouncing toward them—and through them, disrupting their choreography.

  As if discouraged by the cats’ interruption, the lights blinked out, cats in hot pursuit only to vanish without a glimmer of a whisker.

  Well, cats were like that, ghost or otherwise.

  But now the fog rolled back to reveal a face, hard and cracked, with sightless eyes, that pushed nose first through the thick gray damp to reveal a chest, arms crossed over it, and batwings. That was a little unusual, surely? The wings? Above the head, the end of a bowsprit drove toward them like a spear.

  The bowsprit parted the fog to reveal a great sailing ship headed for them on a collision course.

  The captain roused long enough to reach up and clang the ship’s bell in warning.

  “Bong! Bong! Bong!” another bell tolled from what seemed like the bottom of the sea.

  Verity cringed, expecting to hear the splinter of deck and mast, perhaps cries of alarm from the other vessel. Relentlessly and without another sound, it bore down on them until its bow had somehow absorbed the bow of their own ship.

  How could that be?

  Someone yelled finally and ran for the rail to jump overboard, but the other ship kept absorbing theirs, first the bowsprit then figurehead, fo’c’sle, foremast and forward funnel. The mainmast and all its rigging were next, and the men who had climbed the rigging to adjust the sails. The other sailors on deck did not back away from the soundless collision but continued to stare, mesmerized.

  Now the wheel disappeared, then Captain Lewis, who broke through the spell just before vanishing.

  “Ahoy there!” the captain’s voice cried from somewhere within the spectral hull. “Our vessels have become far too intimate! The Belle is not that kind of a ship!”

  The phantom ship—for what else could it be? —continued devouring the Belle. As the ghostly bow crept over her, Verity tried to back away, but her feet held fast to the deck as firmly as if they’d been nailed there.

  This kind of magic was too strong to be dispelled by a mere iron bracelet. The ghost ship was twice the size of the Belle, so Verity did not enter it at deck level but belowdecks, into the fo’c’sle’s berthing deck. Instinctively she brushed at the spectral hammocks her head passed through. They hung, dripping seaweed, above cannons, their iron barrels encrusted with barnacles.

  Then it was overtaken by the gun deck, and into the captain’s quarters. Nary a soul was to be seen anywhere.

  But as the phantom swallowed the Belle’s stern, the boatswain belatedly blew a series of blasts on his whistle and the crew leaped to life again, doing their best to follow the captain’s orders and steer the ship out of the ghost’s interior.

  “Now you lot look lively?” Captain Lewis complained. Verity wondered herself. It was as if the ghost ship had waited until they were nightmarishly trapped before loosening them from its thrall. “This thing has no substance,” said Bowen, the second mate/concertina player. “We must break free for I’ve heard of this before, and this ship’s invisible masters aim to take us to the bottom when she returns to her watery grave.”

  “Is there nothing we can do?” Verity asked.

  “You’re the one with the magic jewelry, dearie,” the captain said. “How about you do something?”

  Even as they spoke, the sea slapped higher on the ghostly vessel’s hull.

  “It’s not that kind of magic,” Verity said. “Don’t you have anything?”

  “Well, there are them as say I’ve a magical singing voice,” Captain Lewis replied, and after taking a deep breath, began to sing in a plaintive voice, “Pleeeease release us, let us go…”

  Nothing at all happened with great speed.

  But the captain was not only a charismatic leader, she was also the lead singer in the cabaret ensemble consisting of much of her crew. With none of their other efforts yielding results they joined in. “Don’t take us to the ocean’s floor. To wreck our ship would be a sin. Release us and let us sail again.”

  “Louder?” Verity suggested and joined the captain in a robust refrain that was surely heard all the way back to Queenston.

  “I really, really hate to do this, but needs must,” the captain said, and when she opened her mouth again, it was very hard to remember that she was at heart a lady. A huge booming baritone issued from her lips and she repeated, “Pleeeease release us (dammit) let us go!”

  It was a noble sacrifice, but Verity felt there must surely be something she could do besides sing harmony. She slumped, discouraged, against the mast, realized the obvious course of action, and began climbing it.

  “Up, up, aloft!” she cried, proud that she had remembered one word. “To the rigging and crow’s nests and suchlike high places, me hearties!” Maybe if they climbed the rigging of their ship they could at least see how fast the phantom was taking them down. If the fog had lifted, they might see where they were.

  “Aye!” the captain said, interrupting the baritone plaint long enough to cry, “Aloft! Ste
p lively as you love your lives! Aloft!”

  The boatswain’s whistle shrilled a long blast, another, a low tone and a warble, followed by a final trill left hanging in the fog.

  The entire crew swarmed up the rigging and hung there like floats in a fishnet. The Belle’s crew was fairly small—small rather than the dozens of people required to man (and woman) a larger vessel—such as the unmanned (and unwomaned) apparition surrounding the Belle. Just where was the crew or their remains? Didn’t phantom ships have phantom crews? Not this one, apparently. Nary so much as a skull or a crossed bone.

  Captain Lewis bellowed a song while climbing, the crew answering each verse with a chorus. Verity followed the soles of the boots above her—not the stylish ones with the high heels and gold embroidery but the sturdy ones with the extra pieces of hide sewn hair out to the soles to keep them from slipping.

  Barely clearing the quarterdeck, the singing crew clung to their ropes. As their song died on their lips, their captor creaked and groaned like a spirit in torment.

  Although the seas had been calm when the phantom overtook the Belle, waves they could not see now pounded a spectral hull while spray they could not feel hissed like a sea serpent beyond the unearthly barrier between them and the living sea.

  Ghost cats swarmed up the masts, over the sailors and onto the spars. One phantom feline clung to the braid coiled atop Verity’s head to keep her hair out of the way. Instead of her hair, she had to look past the swipe of a translucent tail.

  The air shifted. Something was stirring among those wild waves.

  It sounded as if the water had risen closer to her perch in the crow’s nest. Was the ship sinking? With everything shrouded in fog and ectoplasmic hull, it was impossible to tell.

  A blinding light broke through, flooding the ship. The fog cleared just enough to see that not only was the ghost ship slowly sinking, it had carried the Belle closer to the rocks of the Suleskerian coast.

  The cook clung to the mast below her and called up. “What now, Cap’n? We seem to be caught between the rocks and a wet place.”

  The captain yelled into Verity’s ear. “M’dear, we be bound for a watery grave. It’s up to we two to save who we can, though our ship be lost. Captains usually go down with the ship, but if we’re to spare the crew, we must go down before her. Are you with me?”

  “M-me?”

  The captain gave her a withering look. “Oh, please. Your father’s a merman and you swim like a fish. Try to leap so that your dive will take you over the sides of both vessels.”

  What with one thing and another, Verity could hardly be any wetter and so she said, “Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

  The crow’s nest, half a rum barrel, stopped at her knees, too high to permit her to dive from within it. She’d need to climb out onto the rigging, slick and icy cold as it was, if she could tell the real ropes from the ghostly ones. Hoisting a foot onto the edge of the barrel, she lunged for the yard.

  The ship suddenly lurched and she fell back into the barrel and against the mast.

  Ecstatic barking fractured the ragged fog.

  A froth of seals, their heads so numerous and active they looked like furry gray bubbles, grinned triumphantly up at her from the fading phantom hull. The fog wisped it away to nothingness and the massed bodies of the seals glistened through the vanishing vessel’s deck. The seals pushed against the hull of the Belle, their sleek backs and flippers undulating rhythmically as they shoved the living ship from the grasp of the dead.

  One of the seals barked louder than the others. Above the sea and the rumble of distant thunder, as the sky flickered with lightning and the green flash of St. Elmo’s fire, the seal said quite clearly and in a human tongue, “Heave, me beauties, heave!”

  The voice was familiar.

  It barked staccato commands, One bark, two, three, four and after the fifth bark, without so much as a pop of separation, the Belle rocked free, but free of what? The ghost ship was no more. The Belle wobbled drunkenly in the waves before righting herself.

  The crew hit the Belle’s deck. The seals continued to push until she was well clear of the rocks.

  Then it was back to work. Verity’s shipmates setting to work hoisting, reefing, furling, unfurling, and other tasks with sails and ropes that she tried to keep straight. She was sure they’d be sailing away as fast and as far as they could get from the place where they had almost met a watery grave.

  But Captain Lewis paused beside the boatswain. “It’s her, Angus. Admiral Blood’s famous vessel, the SS Nice Try. I feel it in me bones. I’m going overside to have a look below. Why would she haunt these waters, lest her corpse lies beneath?”

  “You’re thinking we may yet see a payday from this run, Captain?”

  “I am. Lower me gig. I’m going to dive and search the bottom.” With a wink at Verity, he said, “So, are you coming? You’ll likely get no wetter than you are now.”

  The truth was, Verity felt a tiny bit hesitant about tackling the vessel that had almost killed them, although, of course, it hadn’t. A chance to dive for sunken treasure and make the ghost ship give up her secrets was too good to pass up.

  And the truth also seemed to be that her father’s connection to the mer-creatures seemed to be hereditary in nature, at least according to Captain Lewis. Besides, when she swam to the Belle from the ship that had kidnapped her, she’d been none the worse for wear. Not even winded, to the best of her memory.

  So she jumped in.

  She beat the captain into the water, and heard the impact in the water when he went in. But when she shot to the surface again after her initial dive, a mermaid with the captain’s face gave her a thumbs-up sign. Signaling for her to follow, the mermaid rolled into a dive.

  Verity followed suit, diving deep as if she’d done so every day of her life. The water was cold but not unbearably so.

  The seals had remained nearby and dived when she did.

  Except for the disturbance caused by the Belle and her rescuers, the sea was calm and clear enough to see the captain’s mermaid tail undulating beyond her and the seals chasing each other all the way down.

  The rib cage of bent timbers enclosed the rest of what mortal material remained of the ghost ship. Barnacle-covered cannon still protruded from beneath the deck. The seals swam into a hole in the stern and out again. The mer-captain swam after them. Verity was about to follow when a pair of feline eyes glittered from between the planks in the bow. As she swam across the deck, a feline form rose from an open hatch, circled her, then returned to the hatch and sat there twitching its tail as if it expected to be fed. When Verity swam toward it, the cat ducked back into the hatch.

  Being neither a ghost nor a sea-creature, Verity followed very carefully. What could be in the fo’c’sle that the cat found so fascinating? Nothing but rags of hammocks and broken sea chests of the type sailors used to hold their belongings while at sea.

  The cat didn’t leave her in doubt for long, but sat on one of these. When Verity opened the lid to inspect it, the cat put paws on the side of it and peered in, but the clothing and whatever else it may have held had long ago succumbed to the sea. All that remained was another little cask, sealed with tar but also covered with barnacles. The cat did not want her to leave it; that much was clear.

  The cats were the spiritual remains of the familiars of wizards murdered by the craft of enemies. Verity was trying to find the descendants of those wizards, so possibly the cask interested the cat because it held some clues relating to the wizards. Tucking the cask under her arm, Verity propelled herself out of the hatch in time to see the captain swimming out of the hole with a larger chest, also heavily barnacled.

  The mermaid/captain beckoned to her, and the two of them guided the chest to the surface.

  With the help of a net and the crew, they hoisted the chest onto the captain’s gig and back aboard the Belle’s Shell.

  By the time Verity had dried her hair and changed into borrowed dry clothing, Captain Lewis was no
longer a mermaid, but any sorrow she might have felt because of that fact was overshadowed by excitement about the treasure chest. The little cask Verity had found was there too, a ghost cat’s rear planted atop its lid as firmly as a phantom feline back end could be.

  The seals grew bored and swam away, except for one that pulled himself up on the deck, water sluicing in sheets from his sides. He shook himself like a wet dog. When the shaking stopped, she saw that the newcomer was not a seal after all, but Mr. Gray, who looked to be quite bare except for the sealskin coat he clutched to his chest as he sprinted for the hatch.

  He vanished down the hatch but was back up again wearing breeches and pulling on a shirt, before she had time to blink. The rest of the crew took no notice of the manner of his return, but the ghost cats slithered around his feet as if he were made of cat grass.

  The captain called to her. “Come along, dearie, and let us see what we’ve found. This will teach the Nice Try to try and sink the Belle. We’ve robbed her of these and I’ll wager there’s more treasure yet in her hold. She was said to have sunk a transport ship carrying a roster of mighty wizards from the Southern Arm to Queenston, though no one knows who sank her exactly or what became of her passengers and crew.”

  “Whatever it was, Skipper,” said Angus the boatswain. “Best to throw it back over the side before the Try comes looking for it and tries to sink us again. Mr. Gray’s family has all gone home now.”

  “Aye. Although I be unaware of an old sailor’s superstition against robbing a wreck that generates an eerie apparition, if there isn’t one, there ought to be.” This was from the sailor called Prof by the others because of his more or less erudite manner of speaking. He tried to fit in with the sailor’s vernacular, substituting ‘be’ for ‘am’ and salting his speech with a few idioms, and although it didn’t fool anyone, he was a good banjo player, so the rest of the crew forgave him his idiosyncrasies.

  “Open it, Cap’n!” urged Mr. Funnel, the carpenter/surgeon who had been the engineer and dragon wrangler before the dragon went on strike with the others, rendering the engine room essentially useless, and reverting the Belle to her origins as a sailing ship.