Oh, no — that’s a lesson I don’t want.
Two sister fish we are, and one knows the ways of the shore and can sing a sailor to the very brink, and one trails her hair the way they do, until it catches a sailor.
I have heard the singing when I press my ear to the hull. I have heard my own.
A pirate sees the hair in the tide before he swings, a true wild swag of it. He has to sing back quick or his nether part will grow longer and longer with him a’dangle on the rope. We are uncommonly clever about a man’s parts, as you will be too. You must come with me, for the love of our father who abandoned you because he could not stay.
The world is scarce of love, it washes few and drowns most of those.
You will not come?
There it is — the rain at last. I must race to the shells I have collected and nurse my brother.
You are bound to your brother as fast as husband to wife.
Don’t come upon him or he will think he is raving for sure and I will have to attend his supporations all over again. And don’t leave any more of your prints. He will become a cannibal himself if he is reminded.
You send me away after all my trouble? Why can’t you see that you know your rightful place all along, and long now to swim there?
I am no girl, nor fish. I am not your sister, nor your father’s child. I am a pirate on a pirate’s island, with no past at all, and surely no future. Do not slander what little I have left. Begone from me. Leave my sight!
17
In the beginning, everyone lived beside water.
I like that. Beside and not in it.
Everyone lived beside water that was sweet and you could drink all of it. You didn’t wait for a storm, you didn’t wait for a bird to show it to you.
Water, I want water.
You should not have scared the bird.
Let it fan me with its water-love, let it fly to me with a key to water around its green neck. I didn’t mean to throw so many rocks.
Sit down, sit down. The dew can be sucked from the leaves on the morrow. Let us try again for a water story: Tataunga, the great chief—
— whose teeth crushed shells, who cannot see his business his belly is hitched out so far, who keeps pirates behind staves to dance on his fire.
The savage king Tataunga gives a great feast in praise of water, with grog and beers and soups—
Not soup. Never soup again. Too much rope in the soup.
Tataunga possessed two beautiful daughters, begot by a woman flung off a maharajah’s vessel.
Named Ma.
They are all named Ma who have you as a son.
One of the daughters escaped the evil Tataunga and the other stayed below and kept her fins. The son who is not so beautiful is from another father.
So many fathers. What of the fish woman?
She’s a whale. Small, but not perch or something with silver in its skin.
Whale, fish — they are all mostly water.
O, hateful water, oh beautiful water.
This beautiful fish with watery fins and skin the color of ruby beaches at sunset the boy befriends, speaking to her just long enough to get her true secret.
Many palms sway behind Tataunga as he dances — what secret would that be? The secret of life? I know that secret, it’s the thing that Tataunga does at night to his last and final daughter.
No, not at all. The fish gives him the secret of death instead, that’s it, the fish tells him how death fights us.
We are all dying. Great gasping breaths, the hawking, then the phlegm. How can we listen?
Don’t lean on me so — the daughter possesses an eye that sees beyond all others and she uses it. Though Tataunga sends her to every part of the sea, to every shore that the seas wash up to find her sister and her secret, he dies before he hears it.
I have the eye. See — a whale’s eye.
Give it here. That eye is mine.
I was given it, I didn’t take it from you and I need it now, to fight off Tataunga with mine eye.
It stinks. You don’t want it.
I’ve had it too long to stink, unless it be the stink of my skin against all these washed-up clothes.
Keep the eye then, you cur. Tataunga brings his hooks and axes. I see him bury himself inside the whale’s chest.
I’ll bury myself.
You’ll get sand down your gullet, you’ll choke on it.
You are without respect! Tataunga comes to cut out your tongue.
Put down that cutlass. It’s my cutlass.
The palms wave as if to attack, we must fight Tataunga.
All right, we’ll fight the palms so they don’t cut out your tongue. As long as you don’t harm the stick I walk on. Tataunga!
Tataunga! Not so close. I think you are too close.
The battle ends with Tataunga drinking a cup of grog with us—
— and weeping over his lost daughter.
What about the daughter?
His tears fall upon the lost daughter and they turn into treasure, pieces o’ eight in bags of silk.
Finally, treasure. Which Tataunga doesn’t need or want so we hasten to take it.
But you are Tataunga.
I thought you were the daughter.
The fish?
I am not the fish either. I am not even the whale. The secret! The secret! I’ll cut it out of them.
Let me seize that sword of yours. You’ll do yourself harm.
My eye! You have cut mine eye! You have poked out my eye!
Don’t — scream — so.
My eye, my eye!
It’s just the one, you can do all your looking with the other.
Get away. Get away. My eye!
Hold it with your thumb to stop it bleeding.
Monster!
We’ll get you a patch, a lovely patch out of hide, or a black swatch. It’s not like losing another leg.
What am I to do? I’m blind.
You are the one-legged brother who creeps, and now you will have to creep alongside me.
Curse Tataunga and all the Higher Powers!
It’s a blessing is what you must think — your one eye will see what comes next where two cannot, they are too busy conferring.
You dream that. What would I see?
A man with a fork rising from the sea to take out the other.
Mercy!
18. A Year Later
I don’t know how you see anything through your one eye.
It’s a ghost boat yonder, or nothing. It’s a boat that floats for sure, that’s all.
— A square-rigger?
A true boat, and it coming toward us!
Indeed.
Let’s flap our rags, let’s jump from a tree! Fire! The fire! Coax up the fire!
No time. They’ll be ashore before we can find enough kindling. Besides, they’ll never stop if we look like brigands drying our takings over a fire.
Southbound.
Southbound will be fine. Southbound will be just dandy.
Southbound it is. And a big fine ship it is. The newest of sails, all rigged right.
The bones of the burnt hull lure them.
How will they see us?
They see us, they’re tacking.
We are but two castaways from a boat caught in the rocks and burnt, that is our story — ah, what was the name of the vessel you heard was refitted?
The Mayflower or the Maryflower, some-such.
We are two castaways from the Mayflower, all that was left of the hundred of your countrymen accosted by brigands and left for dead after the burning boat catched on the rocks.
The flag is English?
It is. But the tale of being beset by something like the Frobisher ship is better, with its fraud so long ago of saying they were looking for the Passage, poking about and picking up women and not discovering — everyone knew Frobisher was a pirate. We begged to be put off the Frobisher-type ship and die here, rather than go on with the likes of that kind of captain.