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Brendan Connell: WE SLEEP ON A THOUSAND WAVES BENEATH THE STARS

I.

White, hot sand strewn over with shells and then a great sweep of green; an island rich in vegetation, investigation revealing all sorts of tropical fruits, some of which the crew was familiar with, while others none of them had ever seen before – in the shape of stars, swords and crescents. Large brightly-plumed parrots squawked in the trees and small brown-furred monkeys leapt from branch to branch and chattered while, from the depths of huge ferns, the height of a man, came the pleasant scent of land – welcome indeed to those who had been six continual weeks aboard a ship after being thrown off course by a storm.

It seemed like an ideal place to gather in supplies. There was a fresh-water lagoon in which fish swam and octopuses clung to the rocks. Dozens of giant land tortoises sat on the beach. There were groves of coconut trees.

Some men were sent to gather fresh water, some bread fruit. Six tortoises had been slaughtered for their afternoon meal and men sent into the interior to see what hunting could be done, while La Motte, ship cook, a short, round, balding man with sensual lips and lively eyes, prepared two giant fires, one for his cauldron, the other his weighty cast-iron skillet.

After bleeding the turtles, removing the entrails and assiduously trimming away the fat, he braised their flesh and then set it to simmer with a little claret, bay leaves and various spices.

With sweat pouring down his face he stood, legs somewhat apart, stomach stuck forward, going about his art as if he had been in some famous Paris kitchen cooking for lords and ladies instead of on an island, he knew not where, using his skills to feed thieves and cut-throats.

Late in the afternoon a number of shots could be heard in the distance.

“It sounds like they are having some luck with the game,” Lagoverde, first mate, a quinquagenarian, an Italian, a man with a long, thin jaw said.

La Motte: “It would be nice if they were to bring in an eater of ants or a few monkeys, for such a variety of cutlet would augment the meal nicely.”

“For me, I am happy as the sun with a plate of simple seafood. And indeed, though I like flesh meat well enough, I am always happiest with haddocks, oyster pies or a plate of sweet periwinkles.”

“Then you have chosen the correct career,” the cook said, his words peppered with the vaguest hint of hauteur, “for in truth we have eaten little more than bream, cod and flour for the past fortnight.”

“A sailor’s life.”

“One might as well call it the life of a madman. What I would not give to be able to press my lips against a white young lettuce every now and again!”

A figure could be seen making its way along the beach, towards the cook-site. Long strides. The sun to his back. His own shadow proceeding him.

“Any luck captain?”

“Indeed I have,” the latter said, opening his sack. “I have captured a crabbe-criarde, which cries like a little cat, a hermit crab hosting a Calliactis tricolor and a few interesting echinoderms. The rocky shoals, at the far end of the beach, are rich with a diversity of life.”

This individual, who was addressed as captain, and therefore we must assume was in a position adjudicative and determinative over others, merits a description. Extraordinarily tall and thin, his head was crowned by a thick, full-bottomed white wig, somewhat the worse for wear. His face, remarkably pale for someone who had spent a great deal of time sailing in tropical climates, was like the skull of a horse and his lips seemed to sit in a perpetual frown. He wore a collarless grey coat with deep cuffs and a long overcoat, both lined with grey, and black breeches, white stockings and shoes with large brass buckles. His name was Nikola Bruerovich.

The dish was just then beginning to let off a strong and pleasant aroma which stretched itself out on the air, journeyed to lagoon and jungle and tickled the nostrils of the crew and made those fellows agitate their legs in the direction of the little beach camp.

A mass of accent colours, blonde beards and long wispy black moustaches, bright red sashes and brown jack boots; semi-aniline faces embossed with carefree grimaces, some men with willow legs, some with spruce, others with legs of oak, strong burly-knuckled fellows able to stand their ground against hurricanes or men. There was Bull-Milo, a fellow of little intelligence but great strength, Amraphel, who wore a beard long and sharp as a pike, and Martini, a small Italian remarkably skilled with a blade; – as well as a great diversity more, from the rough-finished to those with polished foreheads and sharp teeth.

Then, from out of the jungle, came the others, the hunting party, their faces eaten by grins, sabres waving in hands, muskets prodding five small beings. Hollering and laughing, these men walked forward with a group of natives between them – in palmetto skirts, long, oily hair brushed forward, so as to completely obscure their faces.

La Motte opened his eyes wide.

The captain frowned.

The men gathered round in interest, laughter and jests.

“Let’s bake them like apples!.”

“No, we’ll have La Motte fricassee them!”

“The girl looks tasty enough to eat raw!”

And then:

“They have something on their bellies it seems,” one individual said. “A tattoo or scar.”

He pressed his finger to an old man’s stomach and then let out a cry, for the thing had opened up, like the mouth of a shark, showed two rows of jagged teeth, bit off the tip of the finger – a splash of orange and then the wounded pirate, frenzied, cutlassed the native and blood excited the desire for more blood, crewmen joining in to slaughter, exterminate those with the long, oily hair – sound of pistols, thrust of blades, till, in just minutes all but one lay wasted bleeding on the sand.

“Stop!” the captain cried. “You men who spend your lives searching for treasure – do you not see that what we have before us is a treasure in itself? I want this interesting specimen kept alive, for I believe it is worthy of study.”

A small female sat quivering in the sand, in the midst of the corpses of her people.

II.

One might ask how it was that so many rough men were obedient to this rather decayed looking gentleman. The answer was quite simple: he was both cruel and generous.

He never took a larger share of loot than his men – having the said loot divided equally amongst all. In the same way, he never ate better food than the rest. Yet he was exacting in his demands for discipline. The slightest breach of conduct would have him blow out the brains of the offender.

It must also be said that he did not lack bravery. For, during assaults, he did his part, coolly and methodically killing men as if he had been gathering specimens from a tide pool. He had never been known to laugh, smile, cry or raise his voice in anger. If he raised his voice at all, it was only to be heard. He seemed a man totally devoid of emotions.

He had been born in the Republic of Ragusa, brought up watching the ships in the harbour, the water splash against the rocky shore. As a young man he had studied at the University of Padua where he distinguished himself by writing a 4,970 Latin verse epic in dactilus hexameter on the lunar eclipse, a work of technical excellence, though dry in the extreme. He fought several duels and dabbled in invention, map-making and botany. Later, he had spent fourteen years sailing the known world, composing a work on tides which, when it was finished, was promptly condemned by the most Holy Roman Church for certain theories it set forth that were at odds with the idea of a single supreme creator and ruler of the universe.

Treated with sudden disdain by the higher ranks of society, met with silence by comrades in science, he swore off the world, procured a ship, gathered together a crew of desperate but for the most part intelligent men, and set out to make his fortune.

III.

Swimming amidst creeping ludwigia and undulated crypt, schools of dazzling fish gazed up at the jolly boat as it coasted from shore to ship and ship to shore, supplying; hold soon stocked with about fifty living land tortoises which could be kept alive and killed as needed, thus offering a steady supply of fresh meat. Also brought aboard were about four-hundred coconuts, and numerous other fruits and a good supply of fresh water.

Then a fragrant breeze filled the sails of the Sparrow, a miraculous ship, a sloop, an incredibly fast vessel with pontoons of coconut shell fibre attached to its sides, making it almost impossible for it to sink even during the most raging of storms; and it skimmed over the ocean; behind it, a group of fins following for many a league.

IV.

The captain was working on a tract entitled A Catologue of Sea Waters, Their Moods and Concomitants.

“Come in,” he said brusquely, not even lifting his head from the page he was vigorously covering with lines of fine handwriting.

The door opened and Lagoverde entered the small and crowded cabin; – on one wall was attached a table of trigonometry next to a huge thermometer. Shelves were stuffed with books and manuscript pages and scientific apparatus were stored on every side, versorium nestling against circumferentor, a nonius in one corner, in another stood a dusty, neglected looking glass.

“She has been cabined separately as you requested and god willing she will not lead the men to any kind of monstrous temptation.”

“Anyone who attempts to violate her will be flogged to pudding.”

“I’ll let that be understood.”

“And how is she behaving?”

“Well, she refuses to so much as touch her hammock, preferring instead to crouch in a corner on a pile of straw like a beast, her tongue hanging out over her stomach. She cries a great deal and spat out the cooked food offered her but became ravenous at the sight of raw tortoise entrails and seemed to relish a few fresh guavas that La Motte put before her.”

“Have La Motte shave her head – and tell him to be quick about it, as I want to examine her cranium, which seems surprisingly healthy, this very evening.”

V.

Later Captain Bruerovich, as he had said, went to examine the creature. With her head now shaven, her already large eyes appeared even larger. He was surprised by the delicacy of her skin; touched her face and noticed that it excited the action of her larynx; touched her cranium, took note of all the surface peculiarities, letting his long thin fingers, nimble as wasps, travel from the ethmoid bone to the mandible, and then back to the sphenoid.

Around the lofty heights of his mind thoughts gathered, dispersed, gathered again, like drifting clouds. Infamy slaughtered by fame. The discovery caged, displayed throughout the capitals of Europe, astonishing princes and princes-elect, loosening their purse strings while making the women of court squeal like mice.

The captain spent the following days in assiduous study of the creature. The desk in his cabin was strewn with notes, measurements, diagrams.

“Nature, hereditary, has fitted her with a most unusual structure – and I must ask myself why.”

Gauge her jaw, assess her limbs; try and determine, along Anaximanderrian lines, by what transmutation she had come into being; if there was any possibility of a common progenitor.

VI.

“A ship to larboard captain.”

“What variety of ship?”

“A galleon.”

“Nationality?”

“She’s flying a Portuguese flag.”

The captain finished the sentence he was writing, placed his grey goose quill pen back in its holder, rose from his seat and made his way on deck.

“What do you think?” he asked Lagoverde.

“It is a large vessel.”

“Indeed. And undoubtedly holds booty to match its size.”

“But it is clearly a risky enterprise. There must be three men to every one of ours aboard her.”

“True enough, but our men are restless. If we pursue the prize, they will fight hard, if we forgo it, they might turn morose.”

“Yes, they are thirsty for blood.”

“First we must cripple this oversized bastard,” the captain said. And then to his chief gunner: “Jacques, cut away its masts.”

The Sparrow was armed with nine bronze cannons, a few of these ornately decorated with scrolls and escutcheons. The gunners worked off a guidance table that the captain had written up, using chain-shot to take down the rigging of the ship, after which they fired carcasses, incendiary ammunition, in excess of 40 rounds per gun until they were no longer safe to load.

It was then that they boarded; faced the odds of over two-hundred to their seventy; the deck a veritable hell.

The captain calmly ran his cutlass through one man, exploded his pistol at another.

Fire danced on all sides to a chorus of screams and curses. Heads tumbled from shoulders and limbs, in bursts of blood, went flying from trunks. Faces distended in horror, some men were thrown overboard to be swallowed by the waves, others butchered on the spot.

A Portuguese grimaced so that his gums could be seen. Bull-Milo, wielding a large axe, lopped off his left arm while, nearby, one of the crew of the Sparrow felt a projectile take off one of his ears – a far better fate than that of the first mate of the galleon who, moments later, had a bullet shatter his skull.

Captain Nikola Bruerovich nodded his head in approval, looked to his left, saw: Mademoiselle Savage standing before him, a huge knife in her hand, her arms flecked with blood.

Their eyes met for a moment. Then our hero turned and continued his methodical work of exterminating all resistance aboard the ship; after which, the deck having been made slippery with gore, the hold was inspected: good quantities of minted silver and cochineal, as well as other items of value.

That night, while the men were celebrating their victory and mourning the death of their shipmates – both functions requiring the playing at reverse Diogenese (barrel in stomach rather than stomach in barrel) – the captain stayed sequestered in his cabin. The next day, the crew were cheerful, singing and joking while they went about their tasks, for the voyage was now turning profitable, but the captain seemed downcast, his frown longer than usual, his manners more clipped. His soup that day he barely touched; of claret he took two cups.

VII.

Lagoverde was presented with a sight that surprised him. The looking glass, long neglected, was now hung, its surface polished, prominently on one wall where the table of trigonometry had once been. The captain himself had no time for talk, for he was busy – washing his wig!

The first mate scratched his long chin, made his way to the kitchen.

La Motte sat with a length of light-blue silk on his lap, a needle in hand.

“What are you doing?” the Italian asked.

“Making a set of female garments.”

“Eh! And who, pray tell, are they for?”

“Well, the only femme on board obviously. Captain’s orders. It seems her grass skirt has gone out of fashion.”

Lagoverde went on deck.

“Who would have believed it,” he murmured to himself, gazing out at the bloody sun as it descended beneath the waves.

VIII.

As bizarre as their romance might have seemed, it was fitting – for no mortal woman could have ever thawed the rigid ice of Bruerovich’s heart – the task being reserved for something else – a specimen; a dark cave full of slime and spiders for the first time flooded with light. And a strange but true fact: the most violent passions are often between beings who share no common language.

The crew did not laugh or joke over the matter. For they knew well enough how lonely the life of a sailor was and there was a certain pathetic element in this high-seas romance which made them silent on the subject; their lips sealed by a mixture of awe and pity – maybe even fear.

And it is often difficult to say why one being is attracted to another and why it is that every man, at some point in his life, will fall in love. There was not a great outward change in the captain’s behaviour. He was still as rigid as ever, his lips still as unsmiling, but behind the closed door of his cabin, those slender strips of flesh became tender.

It was during this period that, casting their fishing nets, the pirates pulled up from the sea a strange creature – a serpent with a head that closely resembled that of a human child. La Motte diced it into sections and served it, batter-fried, for lunch.

IX.

The weeks that followed were prosperous, full of butchery, fire and shrieks. The ship flew past cone-shaped islands, glided along the rippling scales of the sea, skimming over white horses and dying them red with foaming blood, the crew happily indulging in despicable behaviour. They attacked no less than seven ships – two Dutch, a Spanish, a French, two English and another Portuguese – divesting them of gold and silver, cochineal and indigo.

It seemed that the native girl had brought them good luck.

The captain had taught her to use pistols, had given her a brace of them, and these were stuffed into a sash of bright blue silk, which was wrapped below her mouth, around her thighs. She wore a pair of loose-fitting, brightly coloured trousers; a brocade vest, parrot-green in colour; and a tassled hat, shaped like the roof of a pavilion.

And she, in these adventures, would always become excited, homicidal – a terror to those poor souls attacked – for to them it seemed truly as if they were being confronted by maniacs and monsters, a band come from hell.

She found a certain ecstasy in extreme violence. During one assault, she jumped on a man, straddled his neck and choked him to death with her thighs. On another occasion she was caught gnawing on a human foot, but this in now way disgusted the captain—possibly he even found it charming, as lovers often do the foibles of their beloved.

And on those days when the fighting was the most ferocious, the native girl’s appetite for love was most keen and Bruerovich, trembling, pressed his lips to those hands, beneath the nails of which might have been found deposits of human flesh.

X.

Dark grey. Steady, light precipitation. She leaned against the gunwale, her eyes gazed off, dreamy, letting her body absorb the drizzle, which ran over her face, made her clothes cling tightly to her lithe form.

When it rained she was always like that, lost to the world, absorbed in nature; and the captain kept his distance, being to some degree awed; and later, glancing in her eyes, he thought he could make out far away vistas, palm fronds, mysterious sun drenched beaches on which beings swirled together in worship of the waves – an enigma his analytical mind refused to confront; for Mademoiselle Savage was an odd mixture of boldness and shyness, brutal enthusiasm and sadness. She could scratch and bite but also hug tenderly. She carried with her some primordial inscrutability, was a path which led back to those days of formless void; waters under heaven and boiling rock when the world was born.

“What do you make of her?” La Motte one day discreetly asked the first mate.

“She is an animal picked up from the islands.”

“Which means?”

“Just that.”

XI.

A dead calm. Evening. The captain stood on deck, gazing out at a purplish sunset, Lagoverde by his side.

“I think this will be my last voyage.”

“Indeed!”

“Indeed.”

“You are retiring then?”

“I have always thought Greece would be a nice place to go … to live peacefully, to study the marine life there while walking over the land once inhabited by Pythagoras and Sophocles.”

It was at this point that their discourse was cut short by the approach of Martini.

“Pierre, the powder monkey, is ill,” the latter said.

“It is probably simply a bilious complaint caused by some bad piece of fish La Motte served,” was Bruerovich’s comment.

“That is not the kind of sickness the boy has. He has a fever.”

The captain and his first mate went to investigate, saw the boy lying in his hammock, face glistening with sweat. He was wracked with pain and coughed violently.

“How long have you been feeling ill?” the captain asked.

“I haven’t been quite myself for the past few days,” the patient murmured. “If you have something that would make me feel better …”

Nikola Bruerovich examined his body, saw the rash on his chest.

“It is typhus.”

“This is bad,” Lagoverde said.

“Yes, it is. I want the entire ship to be cleaned, from top to bottom – throw the bedding overboard, swab the cabins with vinegar. And, by no means, let any man near my cabin.”

The next day the boy died and they wrapped his body in sheets and threw it overboard.

“It’s never nice to throw a colleague to the fish,” sharp-bearded Amraphel said, “but it does mean more grain for the rest of us.”

XII.

The captain’s orders were followed to the letter and the problem seemed to be under control, as, for three days there was no sign of the pest. But then, on the fourth, Bull-Milo was found unable to rise from his hammock and, eight hours later, died.

That same evening two more members of the crew came down with the sickness. The next day another two. The day after a full seven.

These men, who regularly faced death in the form of battle with smiles on their faces,  trembled before this invisible, virulent enemy. Some stained their throats with rum. Others remembered prayers of their childhood. But strong and weak, drunk and sober alike were ravaged.

Men writhed in their hammocks; a few lay on deck, hallow eyes staring up at the blue sky. One, hallucinating, saw the ship enveloped in the flesh of a giant sea snail. Another, singing, said he was having a musical competition with demons.

While some recovered, others did not. Within a week a half dozen crew members had been cast to the waves.

XIII.

On a certain morning Lagoverde knocked on the door of the captain’s cabin.

“Do not come in,” was heard from within.

A moment later the captain showed himself.

“She has got the pest,” he said.

Lagoverde did not reply. There was nothing he could say and truly this world is as fleeting as a flash of lightning.

She became delirious and Bruerovich found it difficult to keep her in bed.

He tried, in that brief period of time, to squeeze some answers from nature, to unweave its very fibre. He frantically studied his books, consulted his mind, ground together powders; made the girl drink water infused with sulphur, smeared her body with tar diluted with spirits, filled the cabin with vapours and smoke.

Dozing off briefly, he imagined that thousands of hands were crawling towards him, pushing themselves against his lips, demanding their pressure; a frightful obscenity that transferred itself to inanimate objects when he awoke – glasses, table, grey goose quill pen all begging him for his affection.

XIV.

Her breathing was very weak; her face appeared to be melting like a candle. Stomach exposed, the mouth thereon wore an awful grin. Her large eyes stared at the captain, the pupils endowed with a bronze immobility. Then she turned her head away.

He got up and left the cabin. His heels clicked against the boards; his steps steady. The few on deck went about their business in silence. The gentle splash of water against the hull.

A bubble.

A drop of dew.

He stood on the bridge of the ship and gazed out over the water – an endless meadow, a vast blue-green carpet. The ship floated on the lonely sea, in the distance a mass of dark clouds rested on the horizon and his lips were set firm.

XV.

When he re-entered his cabin, he was surprised to find that she was not beneath her bedding, but rather sat on the floor, completely naked, in an odd position; ankles locked behind neck; body covered by a thin, slimy film.

“You need to get back to bed,” Bruerovich said, approaching.

The jaws on her stomach opened; she snapped at him, would not let him near her; and so he stood back, watched as she began to shiver violently, writhe; jaws now protruding from belly, stretching themselves forth; and eyes migrating.

Around her he noticed gobbets of flesh, toes, terminal members of the hand.

“What transformation is this!”

Gasping, she began to flop around the cabin; gills quivering, a deposit of sticky yellowish gelatine left on the floorboards in her wake.

The captain’s right hand agitated, as if it had a volition of its own, wished to seek out a quill and take notes, but the convulsive situation before him made him see necessity and so he called in the aid of a few men and, together, they cast a net around her, dragged her on deck, a swirl of tempestuous movement.

“It wants water,” Lagoverde said.

Captain Nikola Bruerovich was silent for a moment, and then gave the order, watched as the load was hoisted to the gunwale and, a moment later, with a splash, the object fell into the blue; a glistening flash and she was gone, lost in that expanse which might be called the largest of teardrops.

But there was no time to recite poems, no time to sing deep ballads of passion for freedom or dolorous life.

“Ship to port, Captain. A frigate.”

“Flag?”

“English.”

“How many are we?”

“Forty-seven.”

The captain turned to Lagoverde. “Do you think we can take her?” he asked.

“I do not know, but I would not mind killing a few Englishmen.”

“And you shall.”

Brendan Connell was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous places, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003) and Fast Ships, Black Sails (Nightshade Books 2008). His published books are: The Translation of Father Torturo (Prime Books, 2005), Dr. Black and the Guerrillia (Grafitisk Press, 2005), The Architect (Creating Chaos, 2009), and Metrophilias (Better Non Sequitur, 2009).

The story We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath the Stars has been previously published in an anthology titled Fast Ships, Black Sails, which was edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer and published by Night Shade Books in 2008.

His blog is at: brendanconnell.wordpress.com.

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