Magadin smiled patiently. “Not a villain. Not a witch, or a maiden. A captain, which is a little like being all three. But believe what you will. When a mermaid mocks a monster for telling a story too fantastic to swallow, who is to say which is the more ridiculous?”
I purpled, swelling up with rage like an overripe plum. “I am not a mermaid! Mermaids are skinny little fops with shells to cover their tiny tits! Mermaids do nothing but sit around on rocks staring into mirrors and teasing ships to their doom. Perfectly good ships! Galleons, even! Wasteful milksops, the lot of them, and you couldn’t build half a brain if you had the whole race on a slab. I am a Magyr. I could crush your skull with my hands and drink this rat town under the table afterwards. And if I wanted to kill myself a passel of sailors, I’d bloody well do it with cannon, saber, and a fist in the teeth, not by batting my damn eyelashes. You’d be wise to remember it, Maggie, my love, and if we see a mermaid on our jaunt across the high seas, the best thing for all of us would be to let Sheapshank here put an arrow through her giggling head.”
With that, I gave her a good splash with my tail and ordered the boys to take me aboard.
Now it were a week on the waves, and Turkshead vomiting over the side every morning like a fisherman throwing chum to the whales. Weren’t nothing unusual that I could see: the ocean’s blue no matter the day or the tide, and if I loved the great salt thing enough to describe it, I’d love it enough to swim in it, do you get me?
Maggie, for her part, sailed that ship like nothing I’ve seen. My boys are no layabouts when it comes to crewing a fine ship—I bought them at a bargain from the Ajanabh fleet when they were so poor they couldn’t buy splinters. But she wouldn’t hear of it, running up and down that deck like a dervish. You wouldn’t have thought anyone could man a ship that size all on their own, but Magadin did it, and no lie.
Which is how it happened that Turkshead was the one to sight the monster
first, while chucking his chum at dawn for the twelfth day. He came spluttering up to my tub like a baby who’s discovered his thumbs, and dragged the old barrel screeching across the deck, spilling my brine everywhere, so that I could stare over the rail and see, horribly, the water breaking over a shell so enormous that at first I thought we’d hit land.
It was difficult to clap an eye on, a shell like a turtle rising up, but the color of the sea itself, so that it seemed like a wave or a reef, but too impossibly huge to be alive. Turkshead was crying, babbling that it was going to eat us—but I couldn’t see a head to the thing at all. It was nothing but shell, rising and rising, water running off its back, slick tiles of shiny blue and black and green, repeating over and over like a puzzle. The ship was caught in a roil of froth and foam, the sea rushing into us as it rushed away from the beast.
“Leviathan,” whispered Sheapshank, and he mumbled a prayer so that I could not hear—the boys know I don’t approve of their bloody damned Stars.
Magadin cried out to us, dashing from sail to sail, fighting to keep us arights. “It’s the Echeneis! Don’t you read books? That’s not even half its girth you see! It can swallow us and not even feel the prick of the mast in its gullet. Man those lines, Sheap, or we feed the monster!”
The boys were so glad of something to do they fell over themselves trying to get to that flapping jib first. I just watched, frozen as a side of seal meat. The thing was still rising, so high now that it cast its shadow over us, and I shivered in the sudden cold. Goose bumps stood out green and blue on my arms, and soon there weren’t no sea at all, only the ugly black thing, growing like a dead sun. I looked hard for the head, searched like a fish prodding through coral for a meal, for the littlest break in the giant shell.
Sheapshank screamed—I’d never heard my poor boy scream, I protect him so he don’t have to—an awful, keening sound like iron sawing through iron, and suddenly the waves broke over the head, a whale’s head, with a mouth that never ended. It stretched, all smiles, around and around until it seemed it would split the monster’s head, with long, yellow-white curtains of baleen gleaming sickly. Its eye was the color of an old corpse. A stink wafted out, like rancid meat and soiled cabbage. As soon as it broke the salt scrim, Turkshead unlatched one of the thick-handled harpoons hanging on the sides of the ship and hurled it with all his not-inconsiderable strength towards the mouth of the Echeneis.
It glanced off like a hanky thrown at an iron door.
Magadin sighed heavily, as if she expected it. Her sad little ship was losing her battle with the wind, and sliding towards the black blot of the monster. Her face, such a pretty face, really, in spite of everything, settled into a grimace, and though her scaly arms did not loosen on the wheel, I saw her despair.
The Echeneis saw nothing. It only began the long opening of its mouth. Gray water rushed in, a wave crashing with a terrible noise like palaces falling, and the dark of its throat yawned, pulling us in. No matter how Maggie pulled at the wheel to swing us ’round, no matter how trim the lads kept the sails, we spiraled closer to the sloshing stomach of the sea-beast.
“Sheapshank, love!” I cried. “Your mistress is dumb as a team of cows. Bring me the harpoons!”
Always obedient, my Sheap gathered up an armful of spears and tipped them into my tub. “I swear, if my tits weren’t screwed on, I’d have left ’em in a bar ten years ago.” I grinned coyly up at his tattooed face. “Did I ever show you my gland, sweetheart? I don’t show it to just anyone, but times being what they are…”
I lifted one of my heavy breasts and passed the sharp tip of a harpoon across the skin beneath. It parted, and a green ooze dribbled out onto my belly—Magyr, unlike those cretins called mermaids, are not defenseless dolls. We have sacs of poison in our chests, just like squid’s ink. I stuck my hands into the mess of bubbling slime and told the boys and the beast-girl to do the same. Quickly, the four of us dipped the harpoons in my fluids and loaded Turkshead with the sopping sticks. He ran up to the prow, positively white with nausea, and hurled the first directly into the Echeneis’s maw.
It disappeared, useless as a limp sailor.
He tried, again, and again it vanished into the black. Again, the monster didn’t seem to grasp that it had swallowed enough Magyr oil to kill a herd of horses. Sheapshank sunk to the deck of the ship and began to cry.
But Mags, oh, Magadin—captain among captains, that one! She grabbed up the bundle of harpoons and kissed me smash on the forehead.
“See my ship gets home,” she said, and winked at me. “The ship deserves a harbor, whatever happens to her sailors.”
“Wait! If anyone’s to go overboard, it ought to be the lady with the tail, don’t you think?” It’s not that I wanted to leap off into the blue, you understand. But I thought it was proper to offer.
Magadin laughed and thumped her wolf’s tail against the rail.
“Absolutely!” she yelled. And with that, she leapt overboard, her frog’s feet kicking up, bright green in the dull water. She was swept into the monster’s mouth quicker than oil running downhill in summer—and as she passed the wall of baleen, she twisted, rode the swell of sea, and thrust her spears into the roof of its mouth.
The Echeneis roared in rage, and the sound bit at my ears, like rusty knives scraping the drum. It shook and pitched, the shell bulging bladder-full, and all in a rush, the hideous thing vomited, spewing a flood of gold coins onto the ship’s deck, tearing through its wood like cannon-fire. The beast kept up its retching, showering the ocean with gold, and I saw Magadin’s tail lift up soggily once, twice, before she disappeared into the black.
“THE BLOODY SHIP WAS FULL OF HOLES BY THEN, OF course. But full of gold, too! We steered out while the monster went under again—and a good thing we did! When the top of its shell sunk at the last, the sea washed in over it like a flood; we were almost caught. But my tub was at the wheel and the boys were patching holes for all they were worth, and we limped back into Muireann port with full purses! And not just gold, but antiques! Those are worth five times what a plain gold dime is! I’m only sorry I never got to see Tack’s young-sters—and her pies.” Grog looked sad for a moment, but drained her tankard and was all smiles again, her yellow teeth garish and bright. “That’s a tale worth a meal, Evvy, wouldn’t you say?”
But Sigrid’s face had gone black and white at the same time, desire and hope and despair flitting like clouds across it. “You saw the Echeneis? You lost your captain to it?”
“Is this one deaf or feeble, Ev? Hasn’t she heard what I said? Don’t she got her hands full of dead men’s gold?”
“Do you remember where, you soused dog?” Sigrid’s eyes blazed like a fire in midwinter. “Could you find the place again?”