Return To The Place of Your Beginnings


The White Hart lay on the white sand, draped in the detritus of the sea, which in this case meant Marie the Mermaid, Drunais of the Fae and Tuc the Seal King, his seaweed crown drooping in the autumn air.

Christopher Marlowe looked at the ship and the ship, in the form of Marie, looked back. He tried to keep his eyes on her… eyes, he reminded himself. I’m trying to keep my mind on her brea… eyes.

After Rothgar’s intervention had put an end to their abortive war he’d left Captain Stone to take charge of the funeral pyre for Sir Hypen-Dash and hurried to see the ship, their only tie to home. Grace had followed with him, her face now stoic. Hope walked beside her. Felicity had stayed to boss the village women around under Captain Stone’s nominal authority.

The ship stood upright by dint of her keel being wedged tightly into a gap of rock that thrust inconveniently out of the sand like a toothsome mouth of the Earth gnawing on the wood. “We are going to have to break that stone to set her free,” he said, and wondered why Grace started at his side.

Drunais scrambled down the side of the ship and ran gracefully in Marlowe’s direction, clothed only in a scrap of sail-cloth. He found his eyes darting helplessly of their own volition between her and Marie the Mermaid, who lay on the rocks, her tailed curled beneath her.

“I was not thinking! ~ Your people’s ways enclouded ~ my sensible mind!”

He smiled. “You may be Fae to your lovely toes, but still a woman for all that, to blame her man for every misstep and error.”

Her eyes fell. “I am to blame, me. ~ I cannot be with you, love, ~ my wanton poet.”

He nodded. “I know. My people… we are going home.”

“But your ship lies fast ~ where Marie pushed her to shore ~ to save her for you.”

“I can set the ship free,” came a voice from behind him.

“Dinnae be ridiculous,” said another voice, and Marlowe turned to see Captain Stone and the ship’s carpenter approaching Grace, who was bending down to look long under the stranded ship’s hull. There was a narrow passage beneath the keel, which was clearly trapped fast between the rocks. It must have already rested there for a full cycle of the tide. Marie the Mermaid flapped her tail listlessly. “I have rescued me too well.”

“I thought you were staying in the village,” Marlowe said to the new arrivals.

“Only to get things organized, which I did. But this is my ship,” Captain Stone told him.

“I can free her,” Grace said again, while Mr Scott the carpenter walked around the hull and frowned and muttered, “The keelson canna take it, Captain.”

“I think we can deal with this,” the captain told her, taking off his hat. “Clearly prayer is called for, and God will send a higher tide to lift her free. With a name like yours I’d expect you know nothing is accomplished without Grace.”

Grace watched the captain kneeling on the sand, his head bowed in prayer. Her religious education had been rudimentary at best, following the simple dictate of her father’s…

Her father.

She wasn’t quite numb enough not to realize how numb she felt. After that first awful endless silent moment when her whole body seemed melted by her tears she had felt the tenuous fabric that passed for reality in these lands recede from her. Nothing was real. Nothing could touch her.

A wet whiskery nose bumped her knee and she screamed and jumped. Tuc the Seal King sat back on his flippers and looked quizzically up at her.

“You have a job to do, Saxifrage,” he said.

“I… I don’t know what to do?” she replied. It was the strangest feeling. She knew she could do it. She knew she would do it. But she had no idea how.

Captain Stone stood up and brushed sand off his knees. “The Lord will provide,” he told Marlowe, who returned a skeptical look. He watched the water, which did not move. A gull swooped low.

“Tide and time have never answered my prayers,” he said.

“Perhaps you should try praying to God instead.”

The poet simply shook his head, his attention drawn up the beach where the Fae Five were approaching, lead by Athis.

Drunais’ face went pale and her eyes went wide when she saw her father. “Christopher! He will be so angry with me!”

“What’s the worst he can do?” Marlowe replied. “Beat you?”

“Much worse! He could send me off to my mother!”

“You sent for me, yes?” Athis asked as the Fae approached.

Marlowe shook his head. “No, you are not needed here.”

Athis looked at the beached ship, then at Grace, then back to Marlowe. “I can see that now.”

Then he turned his attention to his daughter, who hid discreetly behind the poet.

“Come with me daughter ~ you are in need of resting ~ after adventures.” He held out his hand to her, his face firm but not unsympathetic.

“You are not angry?”

“Frustrated, yes. Angry, no. ~ Now please come with me.”

Drunais stepped forward and kissed Marlowe quickly on the cheek before following the Fae, who turned as one and headed back down the beach without a word or a backward look.

Grace stared furiously at the ship’s keel, jammed deeply in the wedge of rocks. It was a pity lasers hadn’t been invented yet, as they would have been the perfect metaphor for the intensity of her gaze.

Unformed images swirled around in her mind. She wanted the ship free. She wanted to go home. She wanted her father back, however frustrating he’d been while alive.

Marlowe suggested pry-bars, but whatever location for prying he named the muttering carpenter insisted “the keelson cannae take it” or “the skantlings cannae take it” or “the sternpost cannae take it”. They needed something that would push everywhere, smoothly at the same time.

She thought about the clams they’d been digging on this very beach just the day before, and their long humorous “trunks”. The Fae boy Ea had told her they had water inside, making them swell…

Her gaze became a squint as she looked through the lens of her imagination to a future that didn’t quite exist yet. “I know how to set the ship free,” she said again.

Surprisingly, her sister Felicity turned out to be actually useful in putting Grace’s plan into action. No one understood what Grace wanted or why, but Felicity, backed by Marlowe, had commandeered a group of women from the village to sew the long tube Grace demanded.

After a few hopeless minutes watching them struggle with the tough sail-cloth the first mate had taken a hand. “Sewing’s not women’s work! You’ll need a man for that! Florence! Nightengale!” Two profoundly scarred seamen stepped forward. One had an eye-patch. The other only one leg. Between them, Grace thought, they’d make a fine pirate, lacking only for a parrot.

They shouldered the women roughly out of the way, mumbling obscene apologies, and spread the bundle of cloth out on the sand, drawing long sharp needles from hidden places in their ragged clothing.

Under their expert hands the form of Grace’s imagination rapidly took shape: a long fat hollow tube of sail-cloth, closed at one end. She pretended not to hear what the sailors called it as they worked.

“Hurry or we’ll miss the tide!” Grace cried as the sailors tried to pull the sail-cloth trunk through the narrow passage under the ship’s keel.

“We cannae do it, Captain!” the carpenter complained. Not for the first time Grace wondered why the man was held in such great esteem, as his only contribution seemed to be telling people what “cannae” be “doone”.

Water was lapping at the stern-post. There was a crowd of villagers and sailors now standing on the beach watching.

Finally, by dint of Tuc volunteering to carry a rope through the narrowest place they were able to pull the trunk through. At the same time a group of village people came down the beach carrying a long log. Grace had them place it near the flaccid trunk near the ship’s bow.

As the tide came in she held the trunk open, letting it flood with water. Soon she was standing up to her knees. She gestured to Felicity, who had been organizing. “Now.”

Felicity shepherded the gathered people into a line and rolled the long log the village people had found down the beach until it entered the water where Grace was holding the sail cloth tube open. Grace pushed the heavy fabric under the surface and let the log roll over it, pulling it up the other side and wrapping it around. It quickly stopped as it squeezed the water inside the tube, bloating it up like one of the fat trunks of the clams that had inspired it.

“Now stand on it and walk backward!” Grace shouted, leading by example. People stepped up, holding on to each other, and as the log rolled under their weight they moved their feet in the opposite direction, squeezing the water harder.

The ship lurched as the tide continued to rise, adding its power to the tube’s even thrust against the keel.

Grace heard the ship’s carpenter say, “Captain! The hull CANN take it! Hoooray!” just as the log gave a sudden jump that tumbled everyone into the water. As she was falling Grace could see the ship’s prow lift and bob, finally free.

Captain Stone suppressed an uncharacteristic urge to do a jig as he helped the soaking villagers out of the water. His ship was off the rocks!

Uncrewed, and increasingly far from shore…

He took a few bold steps into the water and then stopped, frozen.

“What’s the matter, Captain?” Grace asked as she squeezed the water out of her dress. “You can swim to her!”

“I’m a sailor! I can’t swim! Just prolongs the agony if you’re lost overboard.” He seemed to remember a time when that argument made sense.

“I will assist you, my Captain!”

He turned to see the mermaid Marie floating gently on the tide, her arms reaching out to him.

Captain Stone took a hesitant step toward the mermaid then pulled back. He stood like a pillar of salt in the sea. “Either you’re a woman and it would be a sin to touch your naked form, or you’re a monster and it would be a sin to touch your vile flesh!”

Marie rolled her eyes and held her arms out. “I am your ship, my Captain. Come back to me.”

The seal king raised his crowned head above the water near by, and Grace called out to him, “Tuc, can you help the captain aboard?”

Tuc’s reply was a silent flip of his tail that pushed him back beneath the surface. “That was helpful,” Marlowe remarked as he watched the frozen tableau. The ship continued to drift further from shore.

A moment later the captain screamed as Tuc nosed him behind the knees, sending him stumbling and splashing forward into Marie’s waiting arms.

Marlowe and Grace watched as the captain was helped aboard his ship by Marie the mermaid. “I never should have left you my Captain! It is my destiny to ride your prow!”

“Err… ah… Very well, just let me get us underway and we’ll discuss your future opportunities in mermaiding and general figure-heading…”

Marlowe laughed. It was the first time he’d felt happy in… how long? Since yesterday? It seemed longer.

The small gathering had dispersed as people headed back to the village to prepare for the coming voyage, led by Felicity. The Captain managed to fend off the attentions of his salacious figurehead for long enough to raise a single sail and turn the ship’s head toward the entrance of the bay.

Marlowe waded into the water and inspected the remains of the rocks that had trapped the hull. The little outcropping was split and shattered. He looked at Grace, who was lost in thought. “Come on, Stonebreaker. It’s time to honour your father.” Grace nodded. It was time indeed.

The villagers and sailors were running to and fro when Marlowe and Grace returned. The ship was rounding the point under Captain Stone’s gentle touch and Marie’s enthusiastic and expert assistance.

No one was paying attention to Sir Hyphen-Dash as he lay on his pyre on the beach, quiet as he had never been in life. Gulls stood all around, waiting patiently for him to become edible. They found that things generally did, if they waited long enough.

The sight burst Grace from the numb calm that had possessed her since that moment when she had realized that Rothgar was right, whatever she meant.

She raced forward, hands waving, sending the gulls into raucous flight. They circled, but landed nearby, still waiting. She collapsed to the sand, suddenly exhausted.

“It’s going to be all right,” said a voice beside her, and she looked up to see her sister Felicity, with their cousin Hope beside her. “It’s how he would have wanted things,” Felicity said, helping her up. “Come help us pack things, please. Then we can go home.”

They came. From down the village paths and through the forest ways. From past Argumdur and out of the hills. They came through the black water and past the bright stars beneath an ancient Moon. They came.

As evening gathered the Fae arrived in ones and fives, helping quietly, silently, unasked and unorganized, to move the whole of the village’s worldly possessions into the ship which Captain Stone had grounded on the sand as the tide went out of the bay.

The carpenter was busy caulking and patching while the Fae moved up and down the gangplank, stowing and stashing, stashing and stowing, and then doing it all over again.

The villagers rushed about, frantic and flumoxed, while the Fae calmly loaded their lives away in the ship’s hold. When the work was done there wasn’t a stick standing where the village had been. Only Sir Hyphen-Dash’s funeral pyre remained as evidence that the English had ever settled here.

“MOOOO!” came the sound from somewhere in the forest nearby. Athis rolled his eyes.

“I think the silly cow will have to stay,” Felicity remarked as the Fae fumbled about helplessly trying to track down the errant animal. “The ship is packed so tightly we’ll be sleeping on the deck for half the voyage.”

“We’ll all be doom…” Hope began, then caught herself. “Well, it won’t be very pleasant, but I suppose most of us will survive.”

The mooing from the forest stopped, and a few moments later Don Deigo appeared, leading the cow by a vine he’d thrown around her neck.

“I think this belongs to you,” he said, leading it over to where Lady Belinda stood. He handed her the end of the vine and stepped back. The cow stretched out its neck and licked his ear. He tried not to flinch.

“No one has ever given me a cow before!” Lady Belinda twittered.

“I deeply regret the death of your father, my lady,” Don Diego said with a bow. He was still unsteady on his feet but looked less green than usual. “He was an honourable enemy. Not like these elves, who understand nothing of the glory that is war.”

“Do you think perhaps there might be glory without war?” she asked him. He looked perplexed, then shrugged. “They say with love anything is possible.”

“You mean..?”

“I mean I love you, my lady. You have been the one good thing I have met on this journey.”

“Then you must return to England with us and make peace between our peoples! After all, it isn’t as if you could us any harm. What would you do, send an armada of a thousand ships against our island? What a disaster that would be!”

“As you say, m’lady.”

The tide slowly inched its way up the beach, lifting the ship off the smooth sand. Most of the sailors were already aboard, preparing for departure under Captain Stone’s watchful eye. Marie the Mermaid graced the bowsprit, fending off unwanted attention with swift slaps of her tail.

On shore the villagers gathered around the funeral pyre, looking expectantly at Marlowe. He glanced around the crowd. Drunais was in the back with her father, avoiding his gaze. Grace and Ea were standing side-by-side, not speaking. Daphne, Cat and the raccoon Skeezicks were nose-to-nose-to-nose. Cat looked unhappy.

He rummaged through the attics of his mind, looking for suitable words. Achilles’ lament over Patroklos’ pyre? Too bitter. Thucydides’ version of Perikles funeral oration, telling the men and women of Athens they were the best, but their dead sons were better? Too arrogant. “Friends, Britons, countrymen…”? Too derivative.

It was time to say something new.

The rising of the Moon signs the end of day;
the lowing cow wends noisy through the trees.
Upon life’s journey we all make our way
down forest paths or far across the seas.

But here upon this beach there will remain
a man untouched by the Muse of Fire
who treated Art with humor and disdain
more expert with a sword than with a lyre.

Yet who could not his simple strength respect,
his steady purpose, honest hate of all
complexity and intrigues that collect
the souls of subtle men before their Fall?

The machinations of our Queen passed by
his noble ignorance of politics,
untutored in the use of clever lies,
diplomacy or other artful tricks.

His great accomplishment was not the war
that ended with his own unplanned demise
but bringing us all safe unto this shore
and lighting love within his daughters’ eyes.

We leave his bones to rest in well-earned peace
ten leagues beyond the wide world’s further end
knowing that his soul has found release:
he’ll be remembered by both foe and friend.

In the silence after the elegy Cat returned to Marlowe’s feet, twisting between his legs in the way cats do. Marlowe stooped to pick him up, something Cat rarely permitted. Now he seemed subdued. Marlowe scratched Cat’s ears absently. Odd how he never noticed the purple any more.

One of the men brought a burning brand from the last of the village fires and handed it to Grace, who pushed it in amongst the dry moss and small branches at the base of the pyre. Flames began to flicker and smoke curled up into the quiet air.

There was a dry scraping and rustling as a mouse that had found its way into the pyre was sent scurrying by the smoke and heat. A pair of tiny eyes could be seen in the gathering dusk as the little creature paused in fear at the open space it would have to cross to safety.

Cat said, “I must save him!” and squirmed free of Marlowe’s arms, landing heavily on his paws and leaping into the pile of burning logs.

Marlowe watched aghast as Cat leaped into the flames and captured the terrified mouse in the swift clamp of his jaw. A gentle but definite flick of his neck sent the tiny creature tumbling to safety where it was promptly pounced upon by Daphne, who pinned its tail with her paw and then let go, waiting for the mouse to move before she pinned it again.

Cat jumped down from the fire just as the log on which he was standing burst into flame. He landed with unsurprisingly feline grace in front of Daphne. Skeezicks was in the background watching carefully, muttering to himself, “Is this what cats do? O! I could do that… hmmm… maybe not…”

“Let it go,” Cat said firmly. “You’re well fed. You don’t need to kill to live.”

“It is my nature,” Daphne replied.

“And this is mine,” said Cat, catching her a cuff with his paw and hissing. She shrank back and the mouse ran for the safety of the outer darkness. Cat watched it go with a smile.

Grace watched the little drama play out in the shadows of the flame. The fae boy Ea watched by her side. “Can the leopard change ~ from hunter to a helper ~ of its former prey?”

“Until he gets hungry enough, I suppose,” Grace replied absently.

“You soon are leaving,” he went on. “I have been given the job ~ of going with you.”

Grace’s eyes didn’t leave the fire, where her father’s body burned. “Why?”

“To see if such change ~ is found in felines only ~ or also your kind.”

“I fear you will be disappointed.”

“What can’t happen with ~ that crazy little thing called ~ love?”

Grace watched his eyes grow wide with the struggled not to speak four more syllables, and then she took his hand and said, “It might be… love.”

As the fire died down the call came to board the ship. It was full night now, and the tide had lifted the hull off the sand. “Hurry, or we’ll miss the tide!” the Captain called. “There’s not a moment to lose!”

Not for the first time Marlowe wondered why sailors were always in such a rush. If he had a penny for every time he’d heard that call and been told there wasn’t a moment to lose he’d have… three pounds sixpence, the part of his brain that had not forgotten his legacy as a merchant tanner’s son computed.

He’d led a well-traveled life. And now the end of all his travels was come. One last voyage home. He wondered if any of his family or friends were still alive. Time ran differently, here among the fae, certainly if the past two days were any indication. Perhaps he was returning to a changed world, a world where men flew through the skies, where lack of want brought peace between nations, where poets and artists were duly honoured by their peers.

He shook his head sadly. No fairy tale of knowledge nor the long result of time for him.

As he turned away from the fire a figure in the shadows caught his eye.

“–to wound the autumnal poet?” he asked. Dry leaves were scattered under his feet. The in-dark cried out for a name. A whole, closed universe seemed to swirl in the silent space between them, full of passion and confusion and love. He felt all language sunder on silence.

She asked him, “What… who… will you remember when you remember me?”

“I am limited, finite, fixed,” he replied. “And I am afraid that the universe is infinite and incomprehensible. That time loops back on itself like a helix of semi-precious stones, twisting and stretching like a snake swallowing its own tail. I will remember that you opened the doors of perception, and allowed me to see everything as it may really be. Infinite. But I remain. Limited. Finite. Fixed.”

She shook her head, not understanding. He thought he could still hear them, walking in the trees, not speaking. Out of the halls of vapour and light. She said, “Goodbye my love. I have come to–”

Marlowe felt like a bit of driftwood, caught in a whirlpool and spun about again and again until some vagrant fluence pushed it free. He looked at Drunais, wondering how long they had stood there, frozen in this closed eternal moment while time turned in on itself and held them in its hands.

“A thousand years, love ~ so I will remember you ~ as the summer ends.”

“The summer will not end within my soul
while still the memory of you remains
to remind me how the wave’s long roll
of time and chance reality constrains.
We are not fated to combine as one
No matter how our courses closely run.”

He drew her close and kissed her. While it lasted, it lasted forever.

“It little profits that an idle man,
matched by a purple cat, I rant and rave
uneven verse before an audience
who fight and kill and die and know not peace.
Yet I cannot rest from speaking: I will raise
my voice against the storms of nascent war
whose bloody rains fall fat and thick upon
the wine-dark sea. I shall become a name
to reckon with along the corridors
where diplomats and princes make their plans
to solve the blight of scarcity and fear
by raining random death upon the world.

There lies the bay. The ship awaits, her crew
embarking for our homeward voyage. I go
from all of this, from you, as one reborn.
The slow tide rises. I live anew
perhaps to find some work of noble note
not unbecoming one who wrote of gods
and mortals striding ‘cross the war-torn world
for my purpose holds: to sail into
the sunrise and return from whence I came
carrying a message for my lords
whose will I served; and yet I will now strive
to seek and find a way to make them yield.”
Captain Stone gave the order to weight the anchor on the turn of the tide.

“98 pounds, six ounces and a scruple!” the mate replied.

“Funny what a difference a definite article makes,” Marlowe said absently to Cat, watching the moonlit shoreline turn and drift. Or perhaps it was the ship. Nothing seemed quite real.

He looked around the deck. Bundles and bags were still scattered everywhere, although the crew were already busy stowing and stacking. Marlowe felt worn out, as if he’d lived a vigorous year or more in the past two days.

Lady Belinda stood at the rail, Don Diego by her side. She was waving goodbye to the Fae. They did not wave back. Toward the stern Captain Stone was fending off the blandishments of Marie the Mermaid, although Marlowe thought he detected a certain yielding of the Puritan’s frosty demeanor as he pushed her away. “Call me Fish-Tail,” she said. “All my friends do.”

“What do you think the world will be like, when we return?” asked Cat. He was trying not to watch Daphne and Skeezicks snuggling up together by Grace and Ea. Marlowe was trying not to watch the fading figure he thought was probably Drunais on the increasingly distant shore.

“The same,” Marlowe said, with a hopeful weariness. As the ship moved away from shore time seemed to stretch out, like fabric stitched at an awkward join. They were moving smoothly over the calm sea, sails full even though there was no wind. Tuc the seal king surfaced to watch them ghost by.

“Do you think…?”

“Yes?”

“I will turn back into an ordinary cat?”

Marlowe shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m certainly not going to turn back into an ordinary man.”

“If this was one of my plays we’d all be dead by now, each by our own hand,” Marlowe mused.

Cat commented, “Then I suppose we should be grateful for a more humane Author, and Artist.”

“We are the authors of unfolding fate:
the captains of our time, our human lives.
A change in course can never come too late
while still the heart has love and sinews strive
to build a better world where peace may grow
where one day children never war will know.”

On the beach the Fae were watching. “Do you think we should have told them?” Siduri asked Athis.

“They’ll find out soon enough,” Athis replied, as the ship vanished into the not-quite-distance.

Somewhere nearby Rothgar the sea-bear swam on through the deep.