Mariam hauled her aching body onto the beach, the burn of salt water prickling in her nose, and thought of only three things. First, this island would have been the ideal place to plunder, were she in possession of a proper ship. Second, she would do anything for a change of clothes and a warm fire. Third, if she had to look at the seagull devouring the cadaver of a rodent near the shallows any longer, she would stalk over and snap the creature’s neck.
She spit out a mouthful of salt water and half stomped, half stumbled until her feet were no longer sinking into the pale sand. The sun had started to creep over the horizon and threw shadows past the spindly fingers of grass sprouting from the dunes. Her drenched boots squelched with every step, and her legs shook like she was a green-behind-the-ears deckhand treading on firm ground after her first trip out to sea.
Funny, how her body could feel close to collapsing when her thoughts roared, untamed as a whirlpool. But while the ocean moved with neither rhyme nor reason, her hatred had a clear target – a crew worth of them.
Mariam climbed over grassy mounds and past crippled trees until the outskirts of a port town became visible. Next to the unmarked town entrance stood an ancient looking shrine.
A few half-melted candles had survived the storm, dripping strands of wax fusing them to the shrine. The candle wicks were submerged in water that had collected from the rain, having gone unchanged after last night’s storm, and the name of whoever it was supposed to honor was no longer legible.
The howling in Mariam’s mind morphed into a piercing shriek. She had the overwhelming urge to pour the water out of the candles and relight them, but before something could come out of the impulse, she pushed it away and kept moving. She had no right to pay her respects to a stranger, nor to the ghost filling her ears with noise.
Just past the first row of crooked houses, Mariam spotted an islander. He introduced himself as a fisherman and was too kind for his own good: The thought of her being anything other than a stranded sailor did not seem to occur to him.
“Poor thing,” he crowed, grasping Mariam’s arm with one withered hand. “Let’s get you warmed up, shall we? Is there somebody else who needs help?”
“Just me.”
“Nobody should be out at sea in that kind of weather. Especially with no crew.”
Mariam clenched her teeth so tightly that her jaw creaked. “I know.” They’d known it, too, when they’d set her on her way in a rotting dinghy.
On their way into town the fisherman prattled on about the storm and his daughter and a hundred other mundane things that must have been important to a man who’d wasted away on the same dirt pile of an island for all his life. “Why, my wife, she would have loved it. She always went for walks after storms when she was still alive. Said there’s nothing more–”
“Is this your boat?” Mariam interrupted. They’d arrived at a row of tiny, colorful huts by the harbor. The bay dented inwards in a half-circle, forming a pool that was almost cut off from the ocean. The nearest boat was small, but seaworthy. Possible to steer with one person.
“Yes. Old lady’s seen better times, but she’s made it through the storm just fine.”
They were the only people at the docks. “And your hut?”
“Right here. Not so many fishermen around that we’d fight for docking space. Once or twice I’ve had to dock further in, but most folks know here’s–”
Mariam knocked him out with a punch to the temple. The noise filling up her ears swelled. She dumped his body in his hut before collecting all the sailing supplies he’d placed neatly beside the door so the storm wouldn’t sweep them away.
The sun crawled higher as she worked. She turned her back to the gallows set up in the harbor before she unwrapped the rags from the edges of the boat, checking the wood for cracks or chafing. She avoided looking into the bay, too, though she quickly found it to be impossible. Pieces of wood and shreds of dead plant life floated in the water. Mariam averted her eyes. The plant life looked too much like tufts of hair for her liking.
A few people threw glances at her as they started to walk about the harbor, but they were more concerned about checking their possessions for storm damages than paying attention to her. Fury filled her ears with renewed howling as she imagined her crew doing the same, having weathered the storm under their new captain. She wondered who they’d voted for. Obviously not for her. Not for the now bloating body drifting somewhere below, either.
As she rowed out, Mariam could no longer avoid looking at the gallows in the harbor. A raised platform held beams of decaying wood and frayed rope. It looked like it would collapse if anything heavier than a kitten was strung up from it.
The old fisherman would hate Mariam for the theft, not knowing how narrowly he’d escaped death. What a joke, that she’d let him live instead of her former first mate. Sparing his life hadn’t served a higher purpose. It would have been cleaner to kill him. Just as killing her first mate would have been clean, had Mariam not been caught in the act.
She wondered what would have happened, had she decided differently. She could have put her first mate on a boat and set her to drift, or rallied the crew, or trusted them to vote for her over her first mate. Nothing was forcing her hand now, and yet she was on her way to finish what she’d started when she’d stabbed a crewmember under her command in the back.
She scanned the water, half expecting to spot sightless, accusing eyes staring out at the surface, or blue-tinted hands reaching out of the waves: eyes she’d last seen widened in shock, or hands that had raised – too late – to block her dagger. Mariam wondered if a part of her had expected her mercy to balance out her murder. If anything it proved that she could take or spare lives on a whim.
Mariam closed her eyes. The sound of waves mixed with the howling filling her head. She’d always shared a temperament with the ocean.
Sophie Piechulek
