Fiction

The Sainted Lady
of the Sea
by Kevin Dole 2

Thank the Sainted Lady of the Sea that Slaven had shown him the ropes! Such knowledge was indeed in need for Peter to evade the salty bastard.

"Come back here wit yo fucking boycunt!" Slaven shouted up from the deck. He had at least a full barrel in him. The drink had made him randy, but also, thank the Sainted Lady, too inebriated to climb. Peter didn't trust most of what they drug up from the bottom and hadn't drunk his share—Slaven had been generous enough to do it for him—and so was sober enough to navigate the upper reaches, safely out of grasp.

"Ah fuck ya!" Slaven slurred.

Not tonight you won't, Peter thought.

Slaven waved a dismissive arm and walked off, stumbling over other sailors. He tripped over Stebbins and fell asleep in his own chunky on the deck. Peter monkeyed through the rigging up to the crow's nest. A gentle wind pinked in the dawn and the Lady's sigil flapped him a lull by which to sleep.

* * *

"Ahhh-errrr, sorry about that last night, Petey," Slaven said the next morning as they prepared to drop the nets. "I know that buggery is not part of your fishy duties as cabin boy. Good thing you're so sprite on your feet, or I might've got you!" Slaven gave him a good natured shake around the shoulders. "I probably still will yet or, before long, you'll be chasing after me." He chuckled. "You'll understand yourself one day."

Peter couldn't imagine being so desperate as to chase after young boy butt. But then he was still young—he felt sometimes things stirring, but not in the way that the men seemed to.

"Or maybe, if you're lucky, we'll finally find some fucking women and you won't have to," he muttered, then asked: "You pray to the Sainted Lady to send us some?"

Peter had, but only after thanking her for seeing it fit to spare his bung. How could he not? Especially with her mark printed on the flag above him, fluttering all the night. He knew her name well, having taken many a cuff upside the rear from Slaven for calling her a Maiden. "She's a Lady, yes, but she's sure as hell no Maiden."

"Oh, I remember my first woman," Slaven was saying as he threw the first winch, "It was back 'fore I was a proper pirate, when I was still a cabin boy—or cavity boy as the cappy liked to call me—like yourself, when the world was fresh after the melt. We were one of the first ships to drag salvage up from the cities, and one day we caught her in our net. She was a mermaid, with barnacles on her bubbies and a big old fishy tail."

Peter had his immediate doubts. It had probably been as much of a mermaid as Slaven was a pirate, but he knew that he couldn't completely discount it, given some of the strange shit he himself had pulled up from the bottom: giant, malformed, crab-insect things with functioning lungs, baby seals with full sets of fingers. When the ice of the caps had washed over the world it had dragged all the world's filth into the sea. The toxins had made things change.

"We watched her for a while there, flapping and gasping, and wasn't long before we all had proper salutes and the leer in our eye. But Cappy was might-right pissed because she hadn't a proper soft spot, so he slapped her with an oar a few and heaved her overboard. But the fool! He neglected that she still had a mouth! We could have kept her in a trough of water and made do with that!"

How? Peter knew little of women. His own mother was but an infirm shape in his memory, someone standing behind him before he had been traded to Slaven's ship. Aside from that they were but legend to the salvage men, something they squirmed over when trading with the Sultan's freighters. "The Sultan," Slaven had said, smiling once "keeps them wrapped in silky sails, every part, even the face, but for the soft spot poking out the back." The soft spot was as much a myth to Peter as the mermaid. When asked about it, Slaven always waxed mysterious: "No matter what color it is on the outside, it's always pink on the inside. It's soft as your bung but a thousand times sweeter." Peter often wondered if the Sainted Lady herself had one. She must have several, he figured, to be so fit to worship.

* * *

"Capt'n Peter!" Chessy the cabin boy hollered as he burst in the quarters, "Come look't we brung up from Frisco!"

Peter folded up the map he was poring over and grumblingly followed. "Rong said you'd probably like to see it," Chessy was saying, "I eren't know why, though she be might strange."

Rong hung back a respectful distance as Peter approached the catch. A large fish was writhing inside the salvage cage. It was an iridescent smear of red and black, the color of night leeching into sudden dawn. Some parts were naked of scales, soft to the touch. It had fleshy grey lids that slipped over and off its eyes. The tail was split into two ends, each with separate fin, and between them hid a slit under flaps of flesh.

"Some sort of gill?" Chessy asked.

"Hold it down now!" Peter barked. Chessy grabbed the great fish by the middle and Peter probed in with two fingers. The spot inside was soft and pink.

"Good to eat, Cappy, yes?" Chessy asked with excitement, then confusion as the men laughed rapturously at his remark.

Peter waved them silent. "Leave us be Chessy," he said. He watched the lad walk off, the canvas against his bottom stretching and changing shape with each step. The movement was like that of the gentle swells of water that lapped and broke against the hull on a calm day. He felt a stirring, but thought of Slaven and shook his head.

"Well," he said, looking down at the fish with some affection, "I suppose you'll do for a mermaid."