Untitled Story

The bowl came at the same hour every night, when the last sliver of sky above the grate went from grey to black.

Tomlo had learned to tell time by hunger. Not the dull, constant kind that lived in his stomach, but the sharper one, the one that arrived in his jaw, behind his eyes, sometime in the deep afternoon and didn't leave until the bowl did. He was twenty-three years old and he hadn't ever gone to sleep full.

He sat with his back against the cold wall and listened. Footsteps in the hallway. The familiar rhythm of them - long step, short step - the gait of a man who had learned to compensate for something painful. Then the creak of the hatch in the door, and the yellow light of a lantern beaming through.

The master's face peered in with the light.

Tomlo had stared at it long enough to know every mark on it. The long scar from cheekbone to jaw, silver and old. Two small punctures at his neck, close together, like something had tried to hold on. A ridge of thickened skin along his forearm where his sleeve had ridden up, as if whatever made it had been dragged free. His left hand was missing the tip of his smallest finger. Not the whole finger. Just the last joint, gone.

He slid the bowl through the hatch. "I'll be back before morning" he said. He always said it. He always was.

Tomlo scooped the bowl up and ate fast. The familiarity of hunger pangs did not make them any more bearable. As quickly as it came, the musky slop was gone and Tomlo’s stomach was satisfied; he did not know what it was he ate, just that it sustained him enough to ferry his tired mind to the evil tomorrow. For what good is a new day except to inform him that nothing has changed?

Tomlo let his head fall back to face the starless sky, thudding against the breathing hull of his master’s ship. He heard the gentle waves lap against the other side of the wall. It was curious, he hadn’t felt rough waters in as long as he can remember, as if the ocean itself was partial to his captor. But Tomlo didn’t mind, it made the restless sleep easier to succumb to.

A recurring dream, one of many, found him that evening. The somber sound of her voice, musical and steady, entered his mind.

When what was high descends to sea,

What neither god will name runs free.

Of lineage kept from heaven’s sight,

A sleeping soldier learns his might.

To spend the war, or spend the world,

Son of Time, his charge unfurled.

It came as a memory, rippling like the unsettled sea in his mind. He could not ever discern the singing woman’s face, and while her words were gentle, they carried sorrow. For whom or what she lamented, Tomlo did not know. The lines seemed ancient, so why did his heart heave with dread?

The misty dream cleared with a pale morning sky and rumblings of distant thunder. Tomlo stirred with the shift in the air. A howling wind penetrated the hard wood of his prison and whistled through the hall. Burning metal weighed down his tongue as the thunder grew louder. The groaning in the sky turned to booms, appearing directly overhead. With a lurch, the ship surged along the waters. The booming pursued them and suddenly brilliant white light pierced the now darkening sky. With a cry, the master tumbled down the stairs and through the hatch leading to the hold. The crack in the man’s head exposed a bit of white skull, turning red with blood. He lifted his hand, pointing at Tomlo.

“The ship. Stay with the ship.” A black metal pole shot from the doorway found its mark in the master’s chest and he was still. All Tomlo could see were gray decrepit hands clutching the shaft of the spear.

“Bah, return to your Invisible King, ferryman. The Sea has no further need of your services.” The hunched figure crept into the hold, leathery skin draped over its bony frame. It sneered at Tomlo, frozen in his cage. “Ah, well now. Bit frail for a god-killer, aren’t you laddie?” Two of her sisters crept in behind her, wearing the same smug sneer.

“Fret not, Sonny, for we’re here to save you.” The second harpy hissed out, her black eyes needling into him as if he were a pincushion.

Tomlo found his breath. “Forgive me, but the tongue of a harpy is as sharp as a Wolfsbane arrow and as pleasant as a bed of Hemlock. Do not deceive for I know only ill-tidings come with your presence.”

A cackle followed. “Perhaps. Though tidings may be ill, you may find they’re not brought before you, Hidden One, but your captor. Strong though your words may be, your quivering betrays you. Your master may have taught you to speak, but lying is a lesson he seemed loath to impart.”

Tomlo watched the first harpy stoop to pick up the cell keys from his dead shipmaster when the ship sprang to life. The hull shuddered, tipping to and fro, unbalancing the winged trio. The sails swung, violently turning the prow southwards and flinging the harpies into the creaking wall with a thud. Before they could recover, ropes shot down from the deck and wrapped round the three harpies. Their flailing was no use, the thick ship’s rope bound them fast. They hovered in the air outside Tomlo’s cell, held in place by the tightening rope. Bone broke skin and their eyes bulged before they finally burst, showering the deck with black blood.

Tomlo shielded his eyes, but a soft clink brought his attention back to the mess of bodies. There in the pile of viscera Tomlo spied the silver of the keys. He reached through the gore and exhumed his salvation. As he slid the key into the lock and turned it, the iron bars shimmered as fish scale catching the light. The colors faded and a strength foreign to Tomlo emerged. Swinging the door wide, Tomlo stepped into the dank hall, picking his way through where the blood lay thinnest. He eyed the ropes which lay dormant now, allowing his passage topside. Before he escaped, he looked back to his master one last time. He was never kind nor generous, and in fact torturous on occasion. But his care, his teaching, was the only thing Tomlo knew all these years.

Stay with the ship, he had said. “No threats can you lay upon my ears any longer, master,” Tomlo found himself saying aloud. Though as he climbed the stairs towards freedom, in the back of his mind he understood it was no threat, but an earnest warning.

The deck opened onto more sky than Tomlo had ever owned.

He stopped at the top of the stairs and let it hit him. Wind first, real wind, not the stale breath of the hold but something with salt and distance in it, dragging his hair back from his face. Then the light, grey and enormous, the storm already breaking apart overhead as if it had only ever come for the harpies and was finished now. He pressed both hands flat to the rail and breathed until his ribs ached.

He should have felt sick. The blood was still warm on the boards behind him, the master still cooling below. Instead, something was leaving him, some long ache he'd carried so long he'd stopped calling it pain and started calling it himself. His jaw didn't hurt. The dull, constant hunger in his stomach had gone quiet. He felt, for the first time he could name, full, not of food, but of hours, as though all the time the hold had kept from him was flooding back up through his feet and filling him to the throat.

Twenty-three years old, and he thought he might, finally, be growing.

A long shudder ran up through the rail and into his arms. Not the sea. The ship. The same tremor that had burst the harpies, but slow now, careful, the way a dog leans its whole weight against a leg it has decided to trust.

"You killed them for me," Tomlo said. His voice came out cracked from disuse. He had spoken to no one but the master in all his life, and the master had never once answered. "Why?"

The deck warmed under his bare feet. The mainsail, slack a moment before, drew taut with no wind to fill it, and the prow swung south, the same southward pull as when the harpies fell, certain as a held breath let go. Below him the hull creaked, and the creak arranged itself, almost, into something with edges. Into a shape his ear wanted to call a word.

He laughed. The sound of it frightened him.

"All right," he told the ship, and felt it settle under him as though it had spent a lifetime waiting to be told. "All right. He said stay with you. So I'll stay."

The warning folded into those words he would not understand for a long while yet. For now he only stood at the rail of a living thing that had chosen him, healthier, freer, more himself than the dark had ever once allowed, and let it carry him south, toward whatever had been waiting there all along.