Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27

THE PIRATE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER

by Yoon Ha Lee

       
The pirate captain’s daughter had no name, although her mother’s land-born lovers, male and female, sometimes amused themselves thinking of names for her.
 
Such strong hands, such a lithe frame, one might say, and suggest a name from an island known for its wrestlers.
 
Another might admire the way her straight, dark hair was pulled back by pins with dragonflies on them, and name her after summer nights.

 
     
Once, a small woman, dark-skinned and improbably delicate, looked at her for an unnerving moment before suggesting that she be named after a certain type of two-handed sword that had not been forged for over three centuries.
 
“You’ll grow tall like your mother,” she had said, “and like a fine sword you’ll wear leather stitched with bright thread.”
 
The pirate’s daughter had liked that best of all.

       
 
But pirates upon the Unwritten Sea had traditions as surely as did their prey.
 
No one traveled the Unwritten Sea save by poetry.
 
For the little fisher-boats that never ventured far from shore, a scrap of chant handed down from parent to child might suffice.
 
For the dhows and junks that ventured into the sea’s storms, cobwebbing the paths of trade between continents, more sophisticated poetry was required: epics in hexameter, verses structured around jagged caesuras; elegantly poised three-line poems with the placement of alliterating syllables strictly dictated.
 
A poem would guide a ship only so far ahead and no farther, and one had to use a fitting poem for the weather, the currents, the tides, the color of light on the foam and the smell of the wind.

       
Lesser pirates might content themselves with smaller commodities: chests packed tight with baroque pearls and circlets of wire, rutilated quartz, and the bones of tiny birds, all cushioned with silk cut from the coats of hanged aristocrats; spices named after extinct animals, but no less potent for all that; oils pressed from the fruit of trees planted during meteor showers and comets’ passing.
 

       
Pirates of the highest tier, the ones whose names and exploits were discussed avidly even in inland cities like those of conquering generals and master calligraphers, raided poetry itself.
 
To understand her trade, a pirate must be a poet herself, and could not take a name until she had scribed a poem in the language of her sea-yearning soul.

       
And so the pirate’s daughter had a problem.
 
She didn’t want to leave the Unwritten Sea.
 
Her mother had birthed her on this very ship, the
Improbable Dragon
, on a night when dragons blotted out the five moons with their battling, and their blood mottled the sea the color of bronze and copper.
 
The sea’s dark waters had baptized her, staining the birthmark on her left forearm dark within dark, like a dragon-whelp curled within its storm-shell.

       
She knew that the
Improbable Dragon
had a vexatious preference for lines with an odd number of syllables, even when the form demanded otherwise, and that the sails and nets tore more easily when the ship’s will was thwarted.
 
When she menstruated for the first time, she cut up her stained clothes and braided the rags together, then sank them into the sea with a lump of hammered iron as a pledge toward years to come.

       
The pirate’s daughter studied chapbooks stitched with tidy linen thread, borrowed from her mother’s hoard, and copied out poems into a journal of her own.
 
She had stolen the journal from a merchant in a port where dancers wearing jewelry of heliotrope and moonstone greeted the ships each morning, and chaste priests in hair shirts blessed them each night.
 
The journal was actually a ledger, but the pirate’s daughter was well familiar with double-entry bookkeeping—piracy was still a business, as her mother liked to say—and didn’t mind.
 
The sturdy book with its sober black cover and binding was just the thing to remind her of how serious the matter was.

       
Though she might be her mother’s daughter, she had duties on board the ship.
 
She scrubbed the deck; adjectives (in the languages that had them as a separate category of word) were the worst, staining the wood as deep as they could go.
 
She helped the cooks prepare taro or dumplings or eel for dinner.
 
She sat attentively at lessons in navigation, learning the coordinate systems and cartographic projections favored by scholars in nine dominant seafaring nations.

       
Let it not be said that the pirate’s daughter was not diligent, even during her chores.
 
As she scrubbed or peeled or calculated, she thought of synonyms and homophones, words with branching etymologies across languages in different families.
 
At night, during snatched minutes beneath the radiance of three moons near-full, she curled up in her tiny cabin, wondering why one poet scorned rhymed couplets when another wielded them like sword and dagger.

       
Alas, for all this, the pirate’s daughter knew herself to be no poet.

       
She tried, how she tried, essaying experiments with a child’s toy boat in a large pot borrowed from the sympathetic head cook.
 
She filled it from the Unwritten Sea and watched her reflection in the inscrutable inky water.

       
The water wrote her face into adult possibilities, showing her as a duelist in a city where the lanterns were decorated with the wings of rare butterflies, or as a florist who garlanded the blindfolded runners of a foot-race as they bent their heads so she could select blossoms of good omen or ill according to what she read in their upturned faces; a courier changing steeds every waystation, from quagga stripes to dapple grays to skewbalds, all of them with wing-buds grafted to their sides to urge them to the wind’s own speed.
 
She tried not to dwell on the fact that none of the images was of a pirate-woman, tall like her mother, wearing supple leather stitched with bright thread.

       
Instead, she attached a strip of her own poetry to the toy boat with her saliva, hoping water would call to water even if her words were weak.
 
The poem itself was a shy thing, a tercet about the shape of salt crystals and the splash of tears on browning paper.
 
Just from one end of the pan to the other,
she wished the boat.
 
No prayers.

       
Of course the pirate’s daughter knew of the many gods whose whimsy the sea was subject to, gods of seaweed and coral, shore and reef, dolphin and shark.
 
There were gods who took the shape of long-limbed men and women leaping from the foam, and gods as insubstantial and mighty as the summer air.
 
But the power she needed to rouse was that of the sea itself, and no gods would interfere with something so sacred.

       
The sea did not smile upon her tercet.
 
The boat bobbed up and down in the pot, water sloshing its sides, but it did not move forward or backward or even sideways, even in response to the
Improbable Dragon
’s own motions.
 
The pirate’s daughter, being young, was helpless to prevent the spill of tears into the pot.
 
Still the boat did not move.

       
She repeated this experiment many times with the same rig, the same pot, the same inky water.
 
It would not have occurred to her to doubt these small fundaments.
 
No; any failure was inherent to her poetry.
 
She was old enough to take responsibility for her own failures, as a proper pirate ought to.

       
Her mother was not unaware of these struggles.
 
Everyone on the ship, from the quartermaster to the rats with their kind faces and clever hands, reported to her mother.
 
But her mother lived by the code that all worthy pirates do, and so she, like the gods, would neither help nor hinder.

       
“Perhaps you should consider the possibility that this is not the profession for her,” the quartermaster said one night as he and the captain played wei qi with jade and onyx stones.
 
The captain was letting the quartermaster win at the moment, a sure sign of her foul temper.
 
When she was in a generous mood, she dispatched her opponents leanly and efficiently.

       
The captain scowled and made another suboptimal move.
 
At this rate she was going to have to pull some extremely underhanded tricks to win.
 
Not that she disapproved of underhanded tricks in and of themselves, but in wei qi, as opposed to the world, she sometimes liked to know that she was cunning enough to prevail without them.
 
Conceding to the inevitable, she rearranged two crucial stones when the quartermaster wasn’t looking.

       
He looked back down at the go table.
 
“That one,” the quartermaster said, pointing, then frowned.
 
“What else?”

       
The captain chuckled throatily.
 
She replaced the stone that he had correctly pointed out, but not the other.
 
It was their rule.

       
They played several more turns.
 
The captain purloined a piece or two.

       
“She’s young yet,” the captain said.
 
“Somewhere in her is a sonnet, a pantoum, a haiku.”
 
Her own name-poem had been a small saga in slant-rhymed couplets.
 
After particularly splendid victories, the pirates recited parts of it in her honor.

       
“We must plan for contingencies,” the quartermaster insisted.
 
He was a great believer in plans.
 
The departure of a ship’s son or daughter was never a time for rejoicing.
 
When it happened because the child had failed to write a name-poem, it was a dark omen.
 
Certainly the captain had sacrificed black lambs and peacocks in the past to ward off bad luck.