Monthly Archives: August 2011

The White Hart


Her Majesty’s ship the “White Hart” plunged on through the deep ocean waves. Sailors festooned the yards. Gulls followed hungrily behind in the hope one might drop off and drown in the ship’s wake. A flock of seagulls can live a long time off a dead sailor.

On deck Captain Stone stood firmly at the windward rail, watching the dark sea. In the waist Lady Belinda Hyphen-Dash-Throtestalking took in what she insisted on referring to as “the fresh salt air”, although everyone else on board thought it was just cold and wet.

Up on the foc’sle a sailor stood, dressed incongruously in plain canvas trousers and a ruffed shirt as a gentleman might wear. When anyone asked him about this he replied, “Ruff?” as if he had no idea what they speaking of. His shipmates gave him the nickname “Fido”, and tried to avoid him as much as possible.

Which was exactly his plan.

Well, not the Fido part.

Lady Belinda Hyphen-Dash-Throtestalking waved her hand in the direction of strangely dressed sailor. “Yoo hoo! Donald!” He was entered on ship’s books as “Donald Fagoe, his mark” followed by a scrawled X that was indistinguishable from the scrawled X’s beside most of the other names on the list.

Donald turned in her direction, holding on to the rail. His usually dark countenance was a surprisingly pale shade of green. He was the only sailor who had managed to stay sea-sick the entire voyage, from Portsmouth across the Line, around the Horn and over the entire course of the long run up the coast, standing a hundred miles off to avoid detection by any Spanish colonists on shore.

“You called, M’lady?” he asked. His voice was deep and rich, his diction strangely precise.

“What do you suppose those fishes are looking at?” Lady Belinda asked. “It almost looks as if they’re waiting to be fed.”

He leaned to look over the side. This proved to be a mistake, which was what the fishes were waiting for.

The Captain kept half an eye on the little drama being played out on the foredeck while keeping half an eye on the weather, half and eye on the crew’s work aloft, half an eye on the steersman, half an eye on current, and three-eighths of an eye each on Lady Belinda’s bossoms.

There was something odd about that man Fagoe, he thought. You shipped a few landsmen every voyage, and some of them never quite found their sea-legs, although few of them emptied their bellies with such regularity as to be a threat every time he was sent aloft. Even with daily holystoning–routine scouring with sand and flat stones the size and shape of Bibles–the decks had begun to stain in places. What did the man’s stomach contain?

Whatever it was, the fishes approved.

His thoughts were interrupted by a shout of “Land Ho!” from aloft, and for once all of his attention focused on a single point on the far horizon.

Captain Stone, Lady Belinda, Donald Fago and indeed everyone else on the little ship turned their eyes toward the hitherto unbroken horizon. The captain’s experienced vision picked out a tiny blip far to starboard. The peak of one of Drake’s volcanoes, he had no doubt. If he squinted he could see a plume of smoke rising from it like some latter-day Vesuvius.

“All hands make sail!” he roared, sending the crew up the ratlines. The breeze was steady, but he didn’t trust it. If half of what Drake said about this place was true it was the world turned up-side down.

Arboreal people. Animals that talked. And bears that swam like seals. Nonsense.

He’d travelled the world and knew traveller’s tales when he heard them, like that mad fellow who claimed he’d seen an antipodal creature with a duck bill, a beaver’s tail and a poisoned spur. He didn’t believe for a moment that Drake’s fancies would turn out to be anything special.

There was a faint scraping sound as if a large beast was rubbing its back against the keel. Just a bit of driftwood, the Captain thought, not some mythical beast or magical creature. Nonsense.

Rothgar the Seabear, a fortnight famished
Forgot the cry of gulls and the deep sea swell
and the penguins and the whales.
                        A current under the ship
Swept her along in silence. As she rose and fell
She rubbed her back upon the barnacles of Hull
Entering the vortices.
                        Human or bear
O you who grip the rudder and gnaw the stern-post,
Consider Rothgar, who thinks it tastes like chicken.
“That’s wee bit odd…” said the ship’s carpenter, who happened to be taking a turn at the wheel. He was feeling the influence of Rothgar the sea-bear on the rudder.

“It certainly is!” said Captain Stone, his eyes on the strangely luminous fog bank that appeared out of no-where before them, as if the fog was coalescing out of the very air around them “Hard a-larboard!”

“The helm’s not responding!” A sudden current pulled the ship more deeply into the fog.

“Bring the ship about this instant Mr Scott!”

“The rudder cannae take it any more, Captain!”

Stone grabbed the wheel and the two of them tried to turn it together until it shook them off in a dramatic shower of sparks. The deck lurched as if the ship was tumbling over the edge of a really cheap special effect. Then as quickly as it had formed around them the fog dissipated, and the ship was steady on a new course. The only sound was Donald Fago doing what he did best over the forward rail. Again.

Beneath the bowsprit the ship’s figurehead–a buxom mermaid somewhat challenged in the blouse department–leaned proudly into the fresh breeze as the swirling fog cleared from around the “White Hart” to reveal a bright blue expanse of water, bounded on the East and West by rugged green mountains that hadn’t been there moments before.

Something had changed. The crew dangling from the cross-trees felt it. Lady Belinda in her deshabille felt it. The captain and the carpenter picking themselves up from the deck felt it. And the Mermaid Formerly Known as Figurehead felt it as she woke to unexpected consciousness in a splashing spray of effluent from Donald Fago’s stomach.

Her world was suddenly full of subtle forces and less-than-subtle smells. She felt the strong slow mind of the ship itself reach out to touch her, whispering, “Be Free!” and the wooden bonds that held her let go, dropping her into the deep dark ocean of Faerie as the ship tacked away and the crew tried with difficulty to obey, or even understand, the Captain’s shouted command of, “Clew up the larboard to stern of the forward mizzen carbunkle!”

Mysterious memes metamorphosed mariners. Men manipulated marlinspikes marginally, mangling malapropisms.

“Mermaid?” mumbled masticating Mate Morse musingly. “Marie?”

“Mermaid? Miracle!” men marvelled, missing Morse’s meaning. Mounted Marie moved methodically, mitigating maritime motions.

“Marie!” morose mariners minged mawkishly. “Marie! Mariner’s mainstay! Much-missed mounted mermaid!”

“Mad malkin!” Morse managed miserably. “Major! Marines! Maintain merciless mission! Men! Mount masts!” Moving mournfully, men mocked morphed Marie.

“What the buggering thrice-darned tarnation is going on here?” Captain Stone shouted, breaking the mysterious spell.

“That was varrie odd,” said Donald Fago to Lady Belinda Hyphen-Dash-Throtestalking.

“Most mysterious,” said Lady Belinda, perhaps still feeling the lingering effects of the spell.

The crew were busy bringing the ship around to a new heading now the captain was issuing coherent orders again. The sailors cast longing glances over the side, where the ship’s mermaid figure-head, Marie, was now swimming into the distance toward… something.

“I never would have believed it, had I not heard it with my own ears.”

“Heard it?”

“The men went for a full minute without swearing. I suppose there aren’t any oaths that start with ‘M’,” she mused.

“Merde,” he muttered.

Marie the Mermaid found herself tiring as she swam away from the ship. The water was clear and cold and strangely invigorating, despite her disorientation. A turn of the glass before she had been made of wood, carved into some inevitably male artisan’s idea of a mermaid. Now she was alive. She wasn’t used to it.

A furry apparition approached through the calm water and she opened her mouth to speak.

Rothgar the seabear listened to the sound for a moment, mesmerized, or whatever it was called more than a century before Mesmer was born.

From the far distance there was an answering song, and Marie turned her awkwardly top-heavy body with one powerful stroke of her tail and surged away, combing out her hair as a gust of wind blew the water white and black.

“I have heard the mermaids singing in the caverns of the sea,” Rothgar mused, watching her go. “I do not think they will sing to me.”

Let us go now, you and I
while the sea is spread beneath the sky
like an enormous body of saline water;
Let us go, through half-remembered sweeps
of currents where the tides run deep
across the bones of sunken wrecks
where ragged claws in scuttling pairs
are heard to whisper, “Do I dare? O do I dare?”
For I have heard the giggle of that Eternal Footman
when I licked his face before I bit…
O let us go and make our visit!

Distant in the wake of the departing sea-bear the ship ghosted on toward the unknown shore.

Close to the Edge


“Watch where you’re stepping you silly cow,” said Felicity as Grace stumbled in front of her.

“You don’t even know what a cow is!”

“At least I’m not tripping over my own feet all the time.”

“Father says I’m going through a growth spurt.”

“An annoying spurt is more like it,” Felicity told her and stomped off down the beach, leaving her sister to carry the clam baskets. The mix of sand and pebbles was soggy under her feet, making stomping difficult, but she did her best.

“Moo,” Grace muttered under her breath as she gathered up the buckets, wondering if it was true that cows really were like “fat, slow-moving deer that go moo”, which was the best description her father could give of them.