Drawn Up From Deep Places

(For we stay as far from human men as possible on Sule Skerry, if we can, unless our instincts drive us otherwise. We know their works.)

I was gasping, painful all over, in strange places—burnt and scraped, as though I’d been dragged over rocks. Indeed, my arm had a chunk torn from it, neat and triangular—nipped straight out at the point where it blended into shoulder, that same place I saw most mariners adorn with tattoo-work. I gaped at this a while, then tried to touch, and flinched from the sting of my own fingers’ salt.

“I wouldn’t do that,” the man advised, without sympathy. “Call it the price of your salvation—a lesson either to keep to shallower waters or learn to hold your breath longer, when you choose not to.”

Though it had been some time since I tried for human speech, I found it returned quick enough. “Where . . . am I, sir?”

And this he smiled at, grimly enough—no surprise there. Since in their hearts, most men like the pap they call courtesy, that sorry salve to their impossible pride.

“This scow of a brig’s mine, by right of seizure,” he replied, sweeping a contemptuous little bow. “Bitch of Hell, some call her, or Salina Resurrecta, since she’s cobbled from shipwrecks. While I myself am Jerusalem Parry, captain: a pirate, as you suspect. You were drowning, meantime—a sorry sight, in one sea-bred. Yet Mister Dolomance here brang you up, before mortality could quite take hold entirely . . . and while I misdoubt he did you as little hurt in the performance of it as he might have, we must always recall how those he comes from are not known for their restraint, in general.”

“Mister Dolomance?”

“Aye, that’s he, hid over yonder, where he likes it best—you’d be dead if he hadn’t found you, or if he was still able to do as he wished, instead of how I tell him to. For which you should, in either case, be suitably grateful.” Fixing me with cold, pale eyes, then, like two silver pennies salt-blanched to the color of water-cured bone turned coral: “And what are we to call you?”

You could not say it if you tried, I thought. But since I seemed compelled to answer, I rummaged for the last human name I’d heard—the one that boy I’d pulled from his boat’s kin had called after him, its syllables dissolving down through water into meaningless sound by the time they reached the cave where my sisters kept him tethered, forcing him to sire a fresh crop of younglings. What they did with him after I never witnessed, for I was already at the sparring by then, about to choose discretion over valor, exile over family. Indeed, it only now occurred to me, I might not see them again, in his company or otherwise.

In that moment I knew myself alone, entirely, lost amongst those who normally hate and prey on us—who either club us dead to steal our skins in error, thinking us only animals, or make away with them when we’re foolish enough to leave them unguarded and detain us for their pleasure, breeding children who will never feel at home on either sea or shore. And so, seeing no other way out, for the time being—

“You may call me Ciaran, sir,” I said, at last.

To my left, I heard the thing Captain Parry called Mister Dolomance give out with a disgusted little noise from his hidey-hole—half snort, half spit—and turned, abruptly far more angry than bereft, to confront whatever creature had dragged me up onto this rotting, lurching mass of timber held together mostly by barnacles and forward motion, at the still-sore price of its snatched mouthful of flesh.

I found him squatting on the weather deck in a strange nest made from two massy coils of rope with a tarpaulin slung over top, keeping himself moist by angling into the splash from a nearby cannon-port’s mouth. Standing, he would be half as tall as Captain Parry but a good two hands broader, squat yet sleek. With doll-eyes and an almost lipless mouth hiding a serrated bear-trap bite, he sported what some sailors called “a drowned man’s pallor,” close-wrapped to save himself from burning in direct sunlight. It was that sea-bed dweller’s skin of his, I later found out, which had left me so raw, drawing blood from frictive angles on the very briefest of contacts.

I know you now, I thought, meeting that lidless black gaze, if only for a moment; he well might mock, since his own kind were known to scorn names entirely. So the fact that he answered at all to that mockingly polite and inexact one the captain’d applied to him showed just how puissant this man’s magic must be, when reflected in “Mister Dolomance’s” grudging obeyance, his infinitely resentful loyalty. Or, for that matter, the mere fact of Parry being yet alive, having not only bent this tadpole version of a Great White shark to his will, but forced it to assume a (mostly) human form, while doing so.

I have no doubt but that Mister Dolomance perceived both my terror and my pity, though his waverless glare rejected them both. And so we stood a while, locked in mutual regard: one cold-blooded, the other warm, doomed to meet for the first time in assumed shapes, confined to this creaking hulk. Me with my man-shape like a secret weakness revealed, as though I’d been forcibly shook inside-out; him with his man-shape imposed from the outside-in, never more than cruel illusion. For beneath it, he remained all rough muscle and horrid teeth, a terrible hunger, not even held together with bones.

Though we suffered the same privations, we could never be allies. I was prey to him, as much as any other thing without Captain Parry’s power to protect it.

“Well, then, gentlemen,” my captor told me, meanwhile, and Mister Dolomance as well—I could tell from the begrudging liquid grumble Mister Dolomance gave Parry back, by way of a reply. “Shall we retire to my cabin, and speak a bit further?”

And since there seemed no option but to go, I bowed my clumsy, fresh-made man-head, and went.

***

“I will trouble you for my skin, sir, if I may,” I ventured, when the door was safely closed behind us.

By the look of his possessions and on closer examination, I gathered that Parry had once been of some quality, as humans reckon such things—regally slim, his fine hands sword-callused and ink-stained, not roughened with rope. If he went un-wigged, that seemed to be by choice; the hair thus revealed was still mostly brown, though shot through with hints of grey. There were also more books in his quarters than I had seen in my whole life, though, grantedly, the sea does not treat such objects well.

But the captain only shook his head. “No, I’ll take care of that awhile yet, as I hold most of my crew’s effects in trust for them. For we are none of us here entirely by choice, you see—not even me.”

“Surely, though, it can matter little to you if I remain. I am no great hunter, like your . . . Mister Dolomance, there; my place is near the shore, not the open sea. And while some of my people have magic, of a sort, I am not one of them.”

Parry sniffed again, prim as any cat. “I have all the magic I need already at my disposal, ‘Ciaran,’ and little liking for competition. You would provide me a very different service; less a tool to my hand than an object-lesson for others.”

“But what use can I possibly be of to you, bound or free, when you have one of the ocean’s greatest nightmares sworn to your service already?”

“You undervalue your own impressiveness. My men fear me, and rightly, because I have a way with supernatural creatures, so adding a selkie to that roster cannot do me ill, even if it does me little comparative good.”

Having no arguments left, I resorted to simply pointing out: “I . . . am no sailor, sir.” To which Captain Parry gave merely a chilly smile, as though to say that was both of no matter, and hardly a skill requiring great genius to master.

“Oh, you’ll soon learn,” was all he replied, and waved me away.

Thus I found myself press-ganged, after a fashion; I betook myself to the quartermaster and begged my share of the ship’s labour, setting myself to it with energy, if not much effect. Yet the crew, on the whole, were kind—perhaps because they were sorry for me, a thing so far out of its place, if not its element.

And always I could just glimpse Mister Dolomance stalking attendance, following at the captain’s heels even while his gaze roamed after me. The farther we went from land, the happier he seemed, his sharp grin less a threat than a promise. While I wished myself increasingly back with my kin, fighting for supremacy I neither craved nor thought myself fit to hold, on that bloody rock; anywhere with land and sea alike, in close enough proximity to swim between.