Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (2 page)

       
People who left their ships without earning their names went by some other name in the wide world.
 
Sometimes they chose those names.
 
Sometimes others named them in the many ways names are chosen: by profession or distinguishing feature, by omen or favored animal.
 
But anyone sensitive to the sea’s traditions would know what they had failed to accomplish.

       
“I will not give her up for lost,” the captain said, and that was that.
 
If the crew stepped lightly around her for the next several days, why, the captain’s moods were like the sea’s.
 
You crossed them at your peril, but they eventually changed.

       
The pirate’s daughter knew nothing of this conversation, and despaired.
 
She had been her mother’s joy all her life.
 
“I have three treasures weightier than gold,” the captain had said at the girl’s birth.
 
“I have my ship, I have my tongue, and now I have a daughter.”

       
As the pirate’s daughter frowned over the scrawled lines in her journal, she wondered what her worth would be if she became a wanderer, a warrior, a weaver at the sea’s shores.
 
What perils would the inland hold for her?

       
For once she closed the journal early and went on deck, light-footed, keeping to shadows.
 
She didn’t have to venture far before she heard her mother’s voice raised in some navigational dispute.
 
The voice calmed her.
 
She might be an inadequate pirate, but nothing could take away her mother’s love, and the love of a pirate is fierce and true.

       
Months passed.
 
In that time, the captain insisted on giving her daughter increased responsibilities, although the days of peeling tubers were not entirely over.
 
The pirate’s daughter avidly watched the division of spoils after raids.
 
The greatest treasures, tomes of poetry and literary concordances, were shared out between the captain and those whose bravery and cunning she wished to recognize.
 
Poems published in such fashion were often inert, having had their virtue expended by some previous ship on a long-ago voyage.

       
Smaller items—robes sewn stiff with gold thread, scepters studded with electrum and aquamarines, clockwork birds that sang the name of your true love—were distributed generously to the rest of the crew.
 
Even the pirate’s daughter received something for being the first to spy the other ship’s bouquet of sails, a ring of unalloyed gold.
 
It was unadorned, but the band was satisfyingly heavy on her finger, like the best of coins.

       
At night she continued to read the poetry of ages past.
 
She recorded the day’s chants and the prevailing wind; the fish that swarmed by the ship, some of which became dinner, their scales patterned with plural and mass nouns; longitude, latitude, the time at which a falling star winked overhead.
 
But she performed no more experiments.

       
This time the quartermaster knew better than to bring up the topic of contingencies with the captain.

       
“I should have given her something greater than a bauble,” the captain said anyway, over another game of wei qi.

       
The quartermaster had already caught the captain cheating twice.
 
It worried him.
 
Ordinarily she was not so obvious.
 
“There is plunder aplenty,” he said, thinking of other treasures they had accumulated: white wolves’ pelts, black hauberks so finely forged that they shone like fire, and nested boxes that whispered to you of your heart’s desire, every flattery you could conceive of, if you opened them.
 
The
Improbable Dragon
’s hold contained many such things, and they were on their way to a peninsular port to sell what they could.

       
“I can’t give her what she needs,” the captain said.
 
“I can’t give her words.”
 
Her eyes glittered, although no tears fell.

       
The quartermaster was silent for a second.
 
“She might visit you in port,” he said, knowing how laughable the suggestion was.
 
Pirates did not keep to schedules.
 
And they did not associate with those who had failed to uphold their ways.

       
“Oh, yes,” the captain said in her bitterness, “as though any daughter of mine would do otherwise.
 
She would be a ghost on our threshold forever.
 
She was born on the sea.
 
It can’t be gotten out of her blood so easily.”

       
Bowing to necessity, the captain prepared to say farewell to her at the next port of call.
 
Her black moods troubled the crew.
 
No one questioned her devotion to piratical tradition, but neither did they doubt her affection for the girl who was rapidly becoming too old to stay unnamed upon the ship.

       
The quartermaster quietly pondered the matter of sacrificial peacocks, which would be difficult to obtain in the region.
 
Should he substitute a firebird egg or a three-horned ram?
 
Normally he would have consulted the captain, but under the circumstances he thought it wiser to take his best guess.

       
The pirate’s daughter could not help but be aware of these preparations.
 
She did not fear for her life.
 
Indeed, it would have been an offense against the sea to cast her overboard or cut her throat.
 
When they set her ashore it would be with enough food and coin to make her way in the world if she was clever.
 
In her meticulous manner she had begun eavesdropping on the crew’s conversations about the customs peculiar to this region, curfew hours and tariffs and taboos.

       
Two days’ journey from the port, the air stilled and the sea became flat and darkly glassy.
 
Even the sky was the color of dull metal, with no hint of blue in it.
 
The captain had expected such ill fortune.
 
The sea knew what was to become of the girl baptized in its waters, the whispers said; the sea sensed her failure and was punishing the
Improbable Dragon
for it.

       
“Prepare the kestrels,” the captain said, in case those lesser sacrifices were necessary so they could reach port in the first place.
 
If those didn’t work, they would fill nets with books: plays no longer performed yet studied still by scholars in island colleges; pamphlets lamenting the state of affairs in widely disparate polities; quartos containing the contradictory wisdom of men and women from different eras, with footnotes by acerbic and anonymous commentators.

       
Pirates never sacrificed poetry, even poetry leached of its virtue for seafaring purposes.
 
You could not spend so much time navigating by words without coming to appreciate their beauty.
 
Besides, the wisdom went, in some far future, the deeps of the Unwritten Sea would relent, and old poetry would become as new.
 
In the meantime, the pirates sold volumes to scholars of literature and hopeful treasure-hunters who thought secret paths lay within the lines.

       
The pirate’s daughter watched from her perch amid the cobwebby shadows of the rigging.
 
She didn’t flinch when the birds’ necks were wrung, or when their small carcasses, laden with rusted chains, splashed into the Unwritten Sea.

       
As her mother said the words of propitiation to the depths divine, the pirate’s daughter turned her arm over to inspect the birthmark.
 
It had faded over time, as some did, even the dark stain on the inside.
 
Yet she was no longer a child.
 
Her eyes stung, but she would not give the ship her tears as she had in the past.

       
The sacrifice had no effect.
 
The
Improbable Dragon
remained becalmed.
 
Not the slightest ripple passed outward from the hull.
 
Someone spat experimentally into the water, to no avail.
 
The sea’s silence was absolute.

       
The pirate’s daughter scratched at her birthmark.
 
At first she was disturbed by the sea’s stillness, having grown up to the sounds of wind and wave, the ship’s cantankerous creaking.
 
It was as though music on a night for feasting had stopped suddenly, without explanation.

       
She scuffed the toe of her boot against the deck.
 
Even that small sound seemed impertinently loud, now.
 
It made her think about how music was composed both of sound and silence, and how both were necessary to define it.
 
Her breath caught.
 
Sound and silence, words and—

       
“Captain,” the pirate’s daughter said from her haunt.
 
“I have a poem.”

       
It was presumptuous of her to say so, and would have been even if she had skill equal to that of the captain herself.
 
It was a great honor to recite the first poem on those occasions when the ship proved unresponsive.
 
This was a practical tradition: during a raid, there was rarely time to waste letting second-rate poets fumble with their forms.

       
The captain had not attained her position through kindness and sentiment.
 
But she weighed her pragmatist’s instinct against the fact that no stranger-ship approached them.
 
Their sole antagonist was the sea itself.
 
All she would lose was her reputation for ruthlessness.

       
In the end her faith won out; if her crew respected her the less, why, she could win them back afterward.
 
“Speak,” the captain said.

       
Her daughter went to the gunwale and breathed out over the waters.
 
At first the crew thought she was nerving herself to the task and held silent.
 
Then the captain’s daughter breathed again and again, wordless each time.
 
The crew began to mutter among themselves: Had the girl gone mad?
 
What trick was this?

       
The captain’s daughter opened her hand and let fall a single slip of paper.
 
As it fell, it danced this way and that, tugged by the whims of a wind from nowhere.
 
When the paper reached the sea, faint ripples pooled outward, then grew into waves, so that the sea became a broken surface of darker water and filigreed foam.

       
“What poem did you write?” the quartermaster demanded, forgetting in his anxiety that it was the captain’s place to speak.

       
The captain marked this.
 
Nevertheless, she was smiling a fierce smile, a proud smile, and its echo was on her daughter’s face.
 
Both mother and daughter stood tall, and if the daughter was not so tall as her mother, a few years remained during which that might change.

       
“Lacuna,” the pirate captain said, greatly satisfied.
 
“Her poem is the poem that is all things in potential.”

       
The
Improbable Dragon
bobbed up and down in the water, slowly but perceptibly drifting forward.

       
“Have you thought of your name?” the captain asked.

       
The woman—no longer a girl—started to laugh.
 
“I never thought of one,” she said.

       
The captain smiled in turn and had a team of fishers retrieve the paper from the water.
 
It came to them readily enough.

       
Soaked as the paper was, a single word upon it could be read in sharp-edged ink.
 
The sea had written upon the blank paper a name for the pirate’s daughter.
 
We may say of this name that it meant nothing in any tongue the pirates had encountered, although perhaps some far scholar might find a possible root in some protolanguage.
 
It had few syllables and was easily pronounced by them, and by many who would tell of her exploits in years to come.