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The stillness enveloped him like a cold, damp blanket, and he could not help but remember what it was like to sleep aboard ship -- no matter what the locale, no matter what the temperature, there was always a dampness, a chill, which set in as the moon slid across the velvet night sky. He had been but a lad then, taken bodily from the wharf of Rum Quay and conscripted into the service of his king, Fat Henry the Eighth, as a cabin boy aboard the carrack, H.M.S. Aquitaine. The life had been a hard one, and there wasn't an inch of his body that didn't show the scarring of it, but he had been fed and clothed and looked after, instead of having to scrounge for even the meagerest of scraps on the filthy streets of London. Fancy Captain Jack Harlow had been like a father to him, a typical English father -- all discipline and mind your manners. However, the first mate, Lieutenant Samuels, he was all right: stern, but fair -- and that's about all anyone could ask of a mentor back then. Mr. Sams, as all the swabbies called him, taught him how to tie any knot anyone could ever need about a ship, plus a few more; how to shinny up a mast or across a gaffe in the highest seas without either getting sick or falling off; how to woo a lady fair, as fair as any a lowly sailor might attract; how to look beneath a man's outer garments to see what color his heart was; how to choose friends who were worthy of you and you of them; but the one thing Mr. Sams taught Screed that he would never forget was how to swim. And knowing how to swim was what had gotten him this far in life. Most of Screed's shipmates -- hell, most sailors born before the 19th century -- couldn't swim, hadn't even seen water warm enough to swim in before they were spirited away to slave aboard some merchant ship. So it was his fortune -- his fate and his destiny -- to have learned at all. It was the only thing that kept him alive ... alive long enough to be killed and resurrected. Before there were individual names for them, when people had more important things to do with their time, there were still hurricanes. Big ones, small ones. It didn't matter. Their European ships might as well have been made of kindling for all the good their oaken hulls did them. Most of the crew were below decks when it happened -- and as such, Screed figured, that is where they remained, all the non-swimmers -- to prevent any men from being washed overboard in the roughening seas. As agile as he had become, Screed, a sea-weathered man of thirty-three then, was sent up the mizzenmast to secure a rigging which had broken loose, which could easily have torn the mast asunder if left untended. Surprisingly and despite his unique vantage point, the sailor never saw the wave coming, the one which flung him hundreds of yards away from the capsizing cargo ship and into the indifferent whirlpool known on maps even then as the Caribbean Sea. Most any man, even Mr. Sams, might have drowned right there, but Screed managed to keep his head above water and eventually swam to shore. He lay on the beach, exhausted, for hours. Every muscle ached, and every breath resulted in the coughing up of sea water. It was all so unreal whenever he thought about it after, but now, here, as he lay so still, the memories played out clearly in his mind. He slept under the gray, wind-tossed cloud-cover when the mere act of breathing had finally sapped the last of his strength. Then, someone came to him -- a dark-skinned man, wizened by too much sun -- and bundled him into the back of a cart. The journey was long and bumpy, and their progress seemed slow. The returning sun hurt his eyes, burned his skin, until he wished he never had to see it again. Finally, they reached their destination, a small fishing village. Screed was taken inside and laid to rest upon a straw mat. He remained there for he knew not how long as the heat still seemed to beat mercilessly down upon his head, and the dirt of the floor seemed to sway beneath him like the deck of the ship he had not long ago abandoned. And then there was darkness, as there is now. An oddly familiar, yet somehow still foreign, smell finally roused him. Smoke. But not the smoke of a wood fire. And not the smoke of tobacco. This was an oddly pungent smell, a smell he recoiled from, yet yearned for. It seemed to surround him in the darkness, to hold him apart from all his other senses. Then he heard ... something. A pounding. Was it the beating of his own heart? It seemed to move through him like a heart beat, but he was sure it came from outside himself. The noise grew louder until Screed recognized it as a drum beat. Then added to it was a chorus of voices, chanting in some language he did not understand but with an urging he could not ignore. His body, seemingly of its own volition, responded to the music, moved with it, into it. Then suddenly a searing, like a firebrand, shot across his body and, just as suddenly, the music, along with all other sensations, ceased. Finally, he could see again, but when Screed looked around, he found himself alone. He was aboard the H.M.S. Aquitaine. He wandered the deck, somehow knowing that calling out to anyone would be fruitless -- even the sails hung lifeless from the yardarms above him. She was a ghost ship, becalmed in a sea of blue glass. Screed could not help but remember the model of the Aquitaine Captain Harlow kept on his desk, and it felt to him now that he had somehow gotten aboard that ship, aboard that frigate built mysteriously inside a bottle. At the thought, he turned toward the door which led to the captain's quarters. The knob turned, then the door swung slowly open to reveal a blinding light within. Screed shielded his eyes until a figure stepped in front of the doorway, blocking the light within -- it was the very silhouette of Captain Harlow, and Screed knew his commander was there for only one reason, to punish him for the sinking of the Aquitaine. Fear gripped at Screed's heart. He saw that he had no choice -- he would not allow the captain to keel haul him for his laps in duty -- he would take his chances again in the open seas. Without another thought, he threw himself over the railing. The darkness which now enveloped him felt much as that still sea had long ago -- cold, lonely. There was no light for him then beneath the surface and there was no light for him now. His fate was that of the soulless animals from which he fed. But, unlike then, he did possess a soul, a soul which now lingered within this abyss. For how long he knew not. Eventually, would his immortal body reclaim his soul, as it had that first time, or would he stand before God? Or had he already been judged and this was his eternal sentence? Softly, gently, the sound seeped through his reverie, like the lapping of waves against the hull of a ship. Screed smiled to himself. His oldest friend had granted his last wish and buried him down by the water. I never felt right on land, he told Vachon, though that wasn't quite true. He should have died at sea as his shipmates had and that's what silently gnawed at his gut all these centuries. Though, truth be told, he collectively lived each of their lifetimes and lived them pretty much as he thought they would have lived them themselves, had they had any free will in the matter. There was some justice in that. The sound then, was a comfort to him in the darkness, but the longer he listened, the less familiar the sound became. The rhythm grew irregular, not like the sea at all. And there were other sounds now, faint and muffled, like someone whispering on the other side of a door. Could it be? Crying? Was someone here for him? Mourning him? He listened even more intently. Who was it? Then he heard the words: "Screed, I wish you were here. You always knew what to tell Vachon; I need you to tell me now. What should I do? I need someone to tell me what to do. You're gone and Vachon ... he's left again. He didn't even say good-bye this time. I don't think he's coming back.... I don't want this life, Screed, but at least I wasn't alone before." The words dissolved into more tears, then faded again into the lap, lap, lapping of water against the shore. Urs. Alone and lonely, once again. She loved Vachon; it wasn't in her to do anything else. And he loved her, but neither could complete the other, both lacking the same key elements: self-confidence and self-esteem. More like brother and sister -- raised by the same neglectful father and absentee mother, forced to make life-altering decisions their upbringing could never have prepared them for. All they could do was comfort each other, and even then they often failed to comprehend what the other needed. But he knew. Vachon needed someone to put him in his place -- not let him get away with shit -- and who could still love him, not despite his failings, but because of them. Urs needed someone who wouldn't just give her things, but who would teach her how to achieve them on her own, only then would she be able to love herself enough to let someone else truly love her. But knowing these things did not make Screed up to the task of completing them. No, that he had failed at. And now it didn't look like he'd get another go at it.... Soon the lapping of the water near his grave faded like the receding tide. And the close darkness became everything to him. |
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Inspired by "What Child Is This" by William Chatterton Dix, based on the melody of the traditional English folk song "Greensleeves."
Thanks go to Nancy Warlocke for her most valuable comments. And thanks to James Parriott not only for creating these characters but for letting us use them in this profitless forum. |
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(December 2000)