Pirate Talk or Mermalade (12 page)

Let’s try seven paces forward and then seven west and seven north and fourteen east, each time forcing a distance away from them without returning.

I hope you prove better with numbers than with letters.

Seven’s the number, a lucky one. See, we’re moving directly in one direction even though we’re touching all four of them.

Seven, and seven, and seven. The seven seas. I can do sevens.

And fourteen. Oh, for a cove and the depths.

You did make a pirate, didn’t you, after all, brother?

Seven.

Sorry. You have to watch which way. Now I’ve lost count.

What’s this? Did somebody else leave their golden gods out on the ice like a service was wanting? Is this a regular dropping off spot for sacrileges? What could the priests and Beezlebub be thinking? All of them in a nice little row like that, not buried nor mapped neither.

Quiet now, silence. You’ll shake the snow off the cliffs.

I have the need to speak as much as you do. South Seas, South Seas.

Spit it out. South Seas! But silent. By the by, isn’t that your ear there we saw from the last time around?

The navigator’s. Too tough, remember?

Perhaps our boat met the South Seas’. “Two Boats Abraided by the Icy Seas” be the figure.

Aboutface on seven, lips or no lips, I say. We’re walking away from them, we’re leaving them.

Was that a whole turn or a half?

The wind feels by half.

Yes, that’s good. I remember the wind against the gold.

Nothing can scare me after Ma.

Must be death coming on if you’re telling me about our old Ma again. Must be death in a hat or all this quiet.

Shshshsh. Someone’s abreast of us.

It’s gone, whatever followed.

There’s always blood to mark the spot.

Only if it were plenty.

You want to kill me to mark it.

I did not say that.

It were on your very lips.

Nothing but ice on my very lips. Let’s leave the cutlass instead of blood. Finders would know pirates was here with such a one as yours, with the rubies at the hilt.

You just want me unarmed, you’re wanting me to leave it so you can grab it and use it on me and then eat me too, your own brother.

Never. Truly, never. Ach—these lips.

You’re not going to bother with a match or some wood like you did the others, you’re just going to take my cutlass
and stick me to mark the treasure with and then eat me raw and bloody.

Bloody hell.

Give the eye up.

It’s mine.

Give it up.

I don’t have it.

I know which pocket.

Oh, which?

She was my woman and not no one else’s—not Peters’ nor yours, you traitor of the seven seas. Brother!

Give me that back, give it to me—

Traitor.

You threw it, you half-a-brother with half-a-leg and one eye and no brain and a hook, with an idiot’s stagger and the pirate’s want of parts lost out of stupidity and cupidity and titty—goodbye this time for good or ill. Goodbye and nothing. You can find your own way, you can crutch along until your stump goes soft, you jealous slag. I’m away, I’m off, I’m gone.

You cast out the whale’s eye?

My brother threw it.

He is not your whole brother and you are not the son of the father you think. Here, take it back.

I don’t have a father.

Your father floated to the top, and then sank straight to the bottom where your mother has wormed to.

My mother was buried.

There’s good water beneath your place, and strong current. Your mother does not fear it anymore. Now, get your foot out of the drift and listen: Your father is dead at last of the cut your brother gave him in the troughs of the storm.

He was the fish we fought?

A man of the sea. The mustachioed man of your mother’s Manuel.

Begone, you witch of the sea. Such lies!

But I have your child.

No, no—the child gone over?

The one you birthed from all your clothes.

The boat voted to put the babes and Molly off, for lack of food. I had no choice. I stitched an X to its pocket. I
wanted it to have my name at least.

Name, name. Does the minnow bear a name? I was planning a treatise on the names of the healing kelp but no one will read it. They prefer to stare at the sky until the kelp washes over their wounds. Come below now. It’s time. Your babe is here.

Not below.

That’s the fear in you again, the mother-half that fights the father. How far I’ve had to chase you! Come now, the ice shifts, it will close again soon.

The water—

The sweet, sweet salt of it.

Can I not rest on your fishy rump and think it out? For a short time at least.

Oh, thinking, that’s what you’ll do there? Hasn’t the fighting of pirates and all the charnel-making chased thinking clear from your head?

It is thinking that makes me live. My true father, dead?

Seven, and seven. To fourteen.

My brother comes, to spite me.

Live then.

It must be the cold. You must have seen things. That woman from before? I have but one eye but even I can see this is not the place for such rendezvous.

Seven. And twenty-eight. Wipe that eye of yours better. Night is approaching. I saw her.

Night is not approaching, day is.

Seven.

You should not go off without me, brother.

Aye.

You won’t leave me again, will you?

I didn’t leave you for nothing, you forced me to go by throwing away my one thing, you brute!

Aye.

Aye.

Do you have a rope?

Am I the child of my mother?

Tie it between us so we cannot part.

Between us? As stupid as that navigator, letting Death have a chance to laugh twice?

I say tie it. I cannot drag my leg on without knowing
you are here with me, talk or no talk.

You’ll drag me down.

I’ll lead you out. I know the way.

You do?

I have the bravery, I found it after you left me for good, to see things.

Let us keep to the number.

Quit muttering.

That monk—the Frenchman on the boat that slaved us, he muttered to himself too. I caught it from him. He lay athwart the hatch while you were below. Sometimes while he muttered, he worked out a paper from under his robe and folded it.

He had paper?

He would fold it and fold it, this bit of paper, into a gull that flapped.

Seven hundred and fourteen. He made a bird from a paper?

Aye. I saw it, while telling out one of my stories to keep him from lashing you. It flapped, his bird, like life.

You’ll be seeing our Ma next, as easy as paper flapping from that hardly-a-monk’s hand. Stop flapping yourself.

The snow’s in my face. And you’re dragging the rope.

We haven’t eaten it?

Not much farther.

Not so far that you can fly.

Seven.

If only we had paper, we could burn paper.

Or make a map.

Or a bird.

Or put death on it, like my paper.

It’s the bear.

Aye.

We have been circling it.

Circling sevens. And more.

What’s that great bit of cloud over there? Seen, there, in the side of the ice.

Another trick of the eye.

You’re just trying to throw me off again, first gabbling over the whale’s foul eye, then the story of a fish you can sit on to help you think, then of that detested Frenchman who folded gulls—I swear you are a brother to confound another. Just look and tell me what you see.

A whale.

A fish-whale?

One of these white ones you’re supposed to stay away from, a great white whale suspended in the air with string, and snow forcing its gullet like krill in a wave.

It is not. It’s a gull too close. There’s too much fog to see.

It’s a whale.

Then it’s come for its eye. Give it up, give it.

Never.

You must.

Gone.

Or just a cloud.

Or we’re inside the fish—

—and another’s come to swallow us.

Or something’s slipped out and gone down below, into a hole in the ice.

By the ghost of all the blubber that rinses these seas! It’ll come roaring up next at our feet when we least expect it, it’ll come roaring up and rip off our legs and chew us up alive like one of those map serpents.

At least it’s not—my female parts.

Keep walking. First you see things that aren’t there and now this talk of female parts. Seven. I’ve known you since all the seas were fair game, you bastard, we were boys together with our Ma, our gibbetty Ma.