O Captain, My Captor Page 5

  She is her old self again as she leaves me to attend to the ship's needs as it slips against the docks. Whatever melancholy I was privy to our first day together, and whatever nervousness absorbed her but a few hours ago, both have passed without her ever acknowledging either. I keep wondering about this, about her insistence on hiding parts of herself from her only companion after acknowledging her loneliness and sharing so much blatant intimacy already. And then I needs must wonder further how long she has been on this small ship all alone before she pulled me from the sea. How lonely does a person have to get before they do what she has done just for the company, and what did she do until then with only the waves and the wind to talk to?

  Captain Vineberry guides the ship swiftly and easily betwixt two towering galleons, slipping into their shadows alongside one of the empty piers. The shade is cool, comforting to my sun-drenched skin, and I breathe deeply as if to take it into myself, basking in the relative dimness before I must leave it and the safety of the ship behind for the bright, bustling world of humans. She glides us to a smooth but sudden halt in the water, and to my self-satisfaction, I need steady myself against the mast with the one hand only, and barely lurch forward at all. Even this slight misstep is fault of my own imbalance, not my Captain’s skill with her vessel; indeed, I had scarcely realized how quickly we skimmed the waters before she stopped us, and now I look back at our progress with a minor sense of wonder. The few ships I have seen pass overhead in my life, even the smaller ones, only moved at but a fraction of this one’s clip. Either my Captain’s ship has some hidden advantage in design over most, or else my Captain has some advantage in handling it. I cannot say yet; I am at best only a casual spectator of sailing.

  With the ship stopped, I glance around for something to do, some obvious task with which I can assist. My Captain, however, leaves me no such opportunity; no sooner do I release the mast than she is bounding down from her wheel and across the deck, tugging at what scant few ropes stretch down across it from above. She casually pulls a lever in her wake that sends an attached disc spinning madly. There is a splash, then a moment later the disc stops suddenly. The anchor, I realize; this much, at least, I already know. I look up to see her tightening a knot on a thin rope she has wrapped around a post on our small pier, the end of which secures to the ship’s railing. Bound now to the dock as well as embedded in the coastal floor beneath us, our ship is as secure from theft or escape as I myself was made not so long ago by those same hands.

  Funny, how the space of a few days can change our outlooks. I look back now on my initial awakening onboard my Captain’s ship with less indignation than I had at the time. Make no mistake, I still am not thankful that she stole me from my familiar sea. But I am less resentful.

  The Captain glides past me and disappears below deck once more, returning a moment later dressed in the same outfit I first met her in, for which I have since learned the appropriate words: tan cloth pantaloons ending at the knee, knee-high boots of dark brown leather meeting them, red wrap tied snug around her chest, and that ever-present necklace of pale wood tucked securely away in the soft crevasse of her exposed cleavage. She also now wears a cloth of dark blue tied around her forehead, which covers her brow and ears but allows her waves of dark brown hair to spill out down the sides of her head to frame her face. Around her waist she sports some sort of thick, black loop, a long oblong of the same material hanging from one of her hips and sprouting a gleaming silver-colored handle from the top. She sees me eyeing it and smiles, fingering the handle. “Always wear protection,” she says to me. “I don’t usually need it so long as I have it, though.”

  “What is it?” I ask. Her explanation has enlightened me but little.

  One of her eyebrows rises, and she grips it tighter. “You do know what a sword is, yes?” she asks. There is a soft click and a softer whisper as she slides the metal upward, revealing a long, thin blade that had been hidden in the oblong fabric. With a twist of her wrist, the blade hums upward through the air and flips around to point skyward in her hand, plucking a stray ray of sunlight from the air and reflecting it across the deck below her.

  “I do,” I say, “but my people do not use them. What few I have seen are surface flotsam that sank to our level, and they are all of them brittle brown-green and flaking like fin-rot. None so gleaming as yours.”

  She smiles and whips the sword through the space before her quicker than I can follow, making the empty air sing as it goes. “I suppose it wouldn’t be much good underwater,” she says, “where you can’t get a good swing going. Up here, though, a sharp blade is almost as good as a sharp tongue at getting you out of a mess.”

  “Do I need one as well, then?” I ask as she slides her sword back into its holster. She laughs aloud at that for reasons that are unclear to me, then puts her hand on my shoulder and ushers me toward the pier. With a quick and nimble hop that doesn’t even break her stride, she is standing on the dock, then turns and offers me her hand. My transition is less graceful.

  No sooner do we turn around than we meet our first land dweller, a ruddy-faced man with a visage covered in tight wrinkles, wearing a crisp, blue jacket over crisp, gray trousers, and all of him topped with a wide, tri-cornered blue hat. He holds a gray feather in one hand and a thick, worn book in the other (I have seen books on our ocean floor as well, though none as dry as they are meant to be, obviously), and peers at us as though we are an obstacle that he is still debating how to surmount. I am intimidated already, and semiconsciously step behind my Captain, my hands on one of her arms. “Name o’ the ship, name o’ the captain,” he says, bored. “Docking fee’s a silver a day.”

  Captain Vineberry turns her easy smile on the man as she pulls a silver metal disc from a pocket of her knee-length pantaloons. “The Queen’s Runner,” she says, handing the disc to the man with the book, “under Captain Jerica Vine.”

  The man, for a reason that eludes me, bites the coin before dropping it into a pouch at his waist, where it clinks against a multitude of its brethren. “Outward-bound bell is at four tomorrow evening,” he says, scratching the end of his feather against the pages in his book. “Failure to depart without prior arrangement is another silver. Harbormaster’s office is on Cliff East if you need to change your docking plan.” He tucks the feather into his hat then and claps his book shut, then turns on his heel and clomps away down the dock without looking at us.

  “Jerica Vine?” I ask my Captain when he is gone. “Is Vineberry not your full name, then?”

  “Ah. Yes, that,” she says, her mouth drawing into a pensive line. “Lorelei, do me a favor and remember this, please: while we are on land, 'Captain Jerica Vine' is the start and finish of my name.”

  “In addition to Vineberry?” I ask.

  “No,” she says with a shake of her head, “in place of. 'Vineberry' is … not the most convenient name to have in a locale like this.” She smiles at me and pats me on top of my hat. “Just ‘Captain Vine,’ if you please. It will make things easier for the both of us.”

  I do not understand, but I nod my understanding nonetheless, and we walk on down the docks.

  “Thanks,” she says to me sidelong. “I’ll, uh … I’ll explain later, if you need me to. Oh,” she adds, grabbing my arm and pulling me closer as we walk, “and one more thing. You are not a mermaid here.”

  “I am not?” These shifts in identity are starting to confuse me.

  “For the sake of argument, no,” she says. “If anyone asks, you’re as human as the next person. Just unfamiliar with local custom, and you still have your sea legs.”

  My “sea legs” have melted off into these human legs, I want to remind her, but I sense that this is another thing for which she will later explain. “What if the next person is not human either?” I ask.

  She sighs. “They will be. They always are.”

  ***

  Our first destination is a squat, square building of gray stone in the city proper, set along a wide alley lined wi
th many other buildings like it that my Captain calls a “road.” The walk from the wood of the docks to the stone of the city is probably a short one by surface dweller standards, but my legs ache by the time we reach the door, and I have already had my fill of human crowds. I am not fond of large crowds in my own world, but I do not realize until our arrival at this city just what a “large crowd” entails. At least in the sea, people can spread themselves further from one another; here above it, where the empty air is not thick enough to swim through, everyone is confined to congregating in a mass on the floor. And there are already many, many more people flowing through this city than in any city of my kingdom which I have ever visited.

  Thankfully, just within the door of the building that we enter is a long shelf of wood, set at a right angle against the wall by the door. A seat, I think it is called. Captain Vine nods at it with a smile to me, and I take it as her assurance that I can rest upon it without incident. With a small sigh, I back up to the shelf and, as gracefully as I can manage, fall backward onto it, resting the cushioned tops of my legs that Captain Vine calls my “butt” on the surface and leaning my back against the wall. The shape is ideal for this resting posture, taking the weight off of my feet while allowing them to remain planted on the floor, much like sitting on the edge of my bed aboard the ship. I imagine this must be another common object among surface dwellers, but I do not yet ask my Captain about it, for she was insistent during our walk from the docks that I not show my ignorance of land customs among strangers.

  There is a stranger here, a dark-skinned man with thick, golden eyebrows but no hair on his head, wearing a green vest over otherwise bare skin. He leans forward over another, larger wooden shelf in the center of the room, looking up as we enter with a dazzlingly white smile. “Ladies,” he says, his voice as smooth as an oyster's meat, “welcome, do come in. How may I be of service?”

  Captain Vine smiles back and reaches into the cleft of her prominent bosom. The man's eyes follow intently, widening as she pulls something small and evanescent from between her breasts and places it with a click on the wooden shelf between them. I recognize it even from across the room as one of my scales, a remnant of my stolen tail. A pang of nostalgia wafts through me. I am growing more used to my new legs, it is true, and as they are part of me that had only been hidden until recently, I no longer think of them as alien; but my tail is so much more familiar to me, and I feel that having it now would assuage my sense of awkwardness somewhat among this foreign world, impractical though it may be.

  “Is that ...?” he asks and trails off, taking the scale between his fingers and turning it in front of his face. Glimmers of rainbow light flick across the otherwise mundane walls of the room, colored pricks of starlight against a gray stone night. The man whistles appreciatively.

  “Fresh mer-scale,” Captain Vine says. “Guaranteed authentic.”

  “Guaranteed, eh?” says the man, looking over the scale at my Captain. “By you, I take it?”

  “Harvested myself,” says Captain Vine, “just about a week ago.”

  That confirms my own estimate of time, but by the gods … has it really been a whole week already? I cannot say with certainty — I had been asleep for a good portion of the beginning of it, and the movement of time feels different to me up here, somehow, with the sun’s exaggerated light by which to mark it. A full week seems like a long time to me to be out of my element and amongst all this strangeness, yet already I cannot easily believe that I have known Vineberry — sorry, Jerica Vine — for only this space of time. Her fast intimacy casts the illusion of a long relationship.

  “There are more, then?” the man asks my Captain, bushy brows drawing close together. She nods. “With you?” he adds.

  “D'you think I'd drag them all through the streets?” my Captain asks back, and again I can hear the smirk in her voice. “A full tail's worth, yes, and I can have them here within the hour — if you make it worth the trip.”

  The man grins ear to ear at this. These two, their smiles could disarm a shark. I would wonder if all surfacers had this easy-smiling demeanor had I not already encountered the bored dockworker with his book. “A shrewd businesswoman, I see,” the grinning man says in his oyster-smooth voice. “Well, my beauty, I'll not waste your time with petty haggling, then. Ten silver apiece and you've got yourself a deal.”

  “I'm sorry,” my Captain smiles back, “I thought I heard you say you wouldn't waste my time. But since anyone who's seen authentic mer-scale knows they're worth at least a full gold each, I can tell now by your 'ten silver' nonsense I heard wrong.”

  The man's grin doesn't flinch. “Ah, you are correct, my lady,” he says with a nod. “Further inland, some jewelers have been known to pay such an outrageous price. Here on the coast, of course, where these things are more common, the value is not quite so high. But, as you've clearly done your research, I can offer, say ... twenty silver apiece. For you.”

  My Captain's smile actually grows a bit, I think. “I had no idea they were so easily attainable around here,” she croons. “If that's the case, I apologize; you can go find some yourself, then, and I'll take mine somewhere where they'll be more appreciated.”

  I sit and listen to these two smiling and not-quite-arguing for about ten more minutes, after which time Captain Vine helps me to stand and we leave. My scale stays with the bald man, and my Captain now jingles a small pouch of fifty silver coins in her hand, her smile never leaving her throughout the whole process. “They’re still worth more than fifty silver,” she says to me casually, “but this is a pretty good deal for a place like this. Better than trying to port hop for something higher, anyway.”

  “If what I am is so valuable to these people,” I ask her quietly when the crowd grows thinner, “why must I keep it secret?”

  Her smile wilts. I find I dislike it when my questions somber her, but I needs must know these things. “Valuable and desirable are different things,” she says back as quietly. “You are worth money to them, but that’s not necessarily a good thing for you. Money they like.” She stuffs the pouch of coins into a pocket of her breeches, making the fabric bulge. “That doesn’t mean they’re wise enough to like those that supply it.”

  “I do not understand,” I confess. “My kind is not welcome here, even though it is known we can walk the land like any other? Even if our presence brings prosperity?”

  “Pretty much,” she says, then sighs. “Most people would prefer the prosperity not require your presence. That’s why your scales are so valuable — they don’t want merfolk here, so merfolk don’t come here. They don’t want to deal with you, so the things one gets from dealing with you become rarities. I doubt most humans even know anymore that merfolk can leave the water if they wish.” She turns a quizzical look on me then. It is not the first look like this that she has given me, but it is still strange to see confusion on a face that usually looks so sure of itself. “Your people know this already,” she says. “That’s one reason they hardly come to the surface. How have you escaped it this long?”

  I look down at my feet as we walk under the pretext of guiding my steps, but the truth of it is that my naiveté is somehow embarrassing to me. I have never enjoyed the feeling of not knowing everything that I should, of not being in control — if not of the situation, then at least about how I can perceive it.

  At least, I did not used to. My Captain seems intent on changing that, and her possibility of success is not to be lightly dismissed.

  “I am a princess,” I remind her, “the youngest of five, in a small sea surrounded by larger seas. Surface life does not affect us as much as the coastal kingdoms. And … I suppose I am somewhat sheltered even from what little does reach our knowing,” I admit. “At home, I am not expected to be worldly.”

  We walk in silence for a few moments. Then my Captain’s hand is on my shoulder, her soft voice in my ear. “Are you all right?” she asks, and the sincerity in her tone catches me off guard. “Not to look a gift deer in th
e mouth, but … well, I did kidnap you, if I’m being honest with myself, yet you don’t seem so upset by that anymore.”

  I shrug, placing my hand on hers again. “I was at first,” I confess, “as you know. But being with you is not so very terrible as I feared then that it might be.” It is an honest answer, and one that I had been wrestling with in the back of my mind this whole time. Funny how being asked for it aloud can add a certainty that I privately did not want to attribute to it.

  “Would you still dive straight into the sea and be off if given the chance?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say without hesitation. “You are not so very terrible, but your world is not mine, and now you are telling me that I do I not belong here, and neither am I wanted. Would you not also trade this alienation for comfort and familiarity if you could, were you in my stead?”

  She stops so abruptly then that I walk a good few feet without her, and when I realize this and turn around, I see her staring into the crowd ahead with a pained expression on her face. Unnerved, I turn again to follow her gaze, but see only more humans, none the same height or width as another. None look particularly upsetting, but when I walk back to her, she has not moved nor looked away.

  “Captain?” I say hesitantly, placing a hand on her arm. “Is something amiss? Are you well?”

  She looks at me with those pained eyes, a wistfulness about her gaze that I cannot understand, then takes a deep breath and expels it slowly as a sigh. “I’m fine,” she says quietly in an unconvincing tone. It is all she says for a moment, standing still and watching the feet of those who pass in front of us. I am about to repeat my concern when she sighs again and buries her face in her hands. “Lorelei,” she groans into her palms. “I … I am a fool.” She drops her hands then, instead looking up to stare dejectedly into the sun. “You’re right. You don’t belong here, not you. There’s no reason you should need to bear this disconnect as well. I never should have done this.”