The Song of Sally
The captain’s eyes were weary with grief and despair, for himself and for the monster softly bellowing deep in the bowels of the sundered vessel. Shadows keen and black danced upon the walls, voids cast from a central fire pit, and the cabin shuddered as if a great swell were assailing the hull. The man sighed and a specter of pipe smoke billowed before him and his hand rested on the boards below as if understanding the calls from beneath. He sniffed and stood and passed a ragged sleeve over his eyes and said quietly as if to himself, “she be hungry.”
The beast was quiet then and only the breath of the sea and the murmured groaning of the ship could be heard. Warming my hands upon the fire and breathing deeply, I said, “you know it to be female?”
The captain looked at me with sudden confused rage, flame caught in the wetness of his eyes, “do it matter to ye what sex it is?” I quickly looked away. He stood in simmered fury and several moments later pitifully carried himself to the door and out onto the deck and closed the door behind him. I stared toward the firepit and slowly removed the journal from my pack. I shook my inkwell and thought it best to keep my ponderance short.
Affinity for it. Understands it. Stranded decades. Hobbled. Tired. Ill? Animal of unknown biology.
I then rejoined the letter I had begun writing to my betrothed upon arrival. I wrote of the condition of the vessel and the disquieting beauty of the island, a vast and brutal caldera of rock and ice. Upon its shores the flotsam of the Rhea and its mad captain and monster among the berths far below. I wrote of the man’s disposition, his exhaustion and sorrow and fear. I wrote of the quaking of the ship when the creature bellowed and how almost musical it had turned in the hours since landing. I then offered my deepest affection to my love, and expressed how great my honor was in serving His Majesty on such a mission as this. I wrote that I was well and would return before winter. It was then that I heard upon the deck the desolate whisper of sean-nós song.
Gan í ar láimh liom is cloíte atá mé… a chailín álainn, is tú fáth mo bhrón…
The door swung slowly open and the gray silhouette of the captain froze upon the threshold. He and his dire shadow then stumbled along the wall to the fire. His hands clutching and kneading for warmth. His eyes cast downward in thoughtful melancholy. Lighting his pipe anew he looked up and saw my inkwell and paper and returned my gaze, “yer story best be true.”
Looking down upon what I had written, I stammered, “I’m sorry?”
“What ye say to yer lass. Best be true.”
“Of course,” I said, still unable to find his meaning.
“Reckon yer king’d have me in chains for all I done,” the captain leaned back upon a knoll of weathered pillows and blankets and looked at nothing. Smoke rose from his nostrils and he coughed sharply before he spoke again. “Ye might say I’m a villain who’s fulla hate ‘n misery. But all I done were fer a cause.” He looked back at me and then at my quill. “Write that in yer story too. Write that vengeance were truth by the end.”
I swallowed, “I’ve no aims to make you an enemy of the empire.”
The captain laughed, “empire? Yer right daft if you think it an empire you serve.” A chirp and groan followed from below.
As the groan subsided, I spoke, “it was duty that brought me here, and I seek only answers for your crimes. I seek no justice. We… seek no justice.”
The captain sniffed and spat and unclasped the top button of his coat, its gold piping long blackened with soot and mud and time, its tails scissored off in seemingly crude defiance. He jerked suddenly as if recalling a forgotten task. He stood, gasping and wincing, and trundled to a small chest and pulled from it two glasses and a bottle of amber liquid stifled with a broken cork. He filled one glass and then another. Handing one of them to me he said, “pilfered from the stores of Horatio Nelson!” And he laughed.
“You jest,” I said firmly but there was no affirmation. He raised his glass and looked to me. I raised mine and he toasted, “the devil in us all.” Downing his in one deft flourish of movement, he gently lowered his glass and exhaled with great relish. I followed suit, lacking his elegance and joy.
“To your health, sir,” I said. The captain laughed. I lowered my glass and continued. “May we speak of the missing crew?” The captain paused and then, searching, nodded, “aye.”
“The manifest of the Rhea had it departing Sheerness carrying 138 souls.”
“Aye.”
“Resupplying in Bergen, Norway, your crew numbered 113.”
“Aye.”
“The final entry of your personal log showed 54.”
“Aye.”
The captain’s eyes spanned the room and landed in mine.
“And how many… survived?”
He laughed and replied, “yer among ‘em,” and he slapped the wooden planks beneath us.
I lowered my eyes and asked, “you mean to say that all remaining 54 souls were lost in the wreckage?”
“Lost?” the captain shook his head, “yer not followin’ so well, are ye? A few of ’em were lost in the pursuit. Bit of rough seas. Sickness. What ‘ave you,” he ran his fingers gently over the boards, “but it were Sally got most of ’em after all.”
“Sally?”
Betrayal spread across the captain’s face and the fire returned. He pounded his fist to the floor and screamed, “a mhuirnín! Me Sally down b’low!” The beast groaned fiercely and a violent thudding could be heard within the walls. The captain then breathed apologetically and whispered, “aye, lassy, I know. ’Tis a temper I have.”
“How did it take them, sir?”
As if in anticipation, he answered, “boiled with a pinch of salt!” He shrieked with laughter and the wind swelled in tandem. A fit of coughing then took him and, as it abated, a fiendish smile slowly formed upon his face and the beast hummed and clicked in the deep. He said, “forgive me, son, for I weren’t meanin’ to be cruel. Were frozen men all ‘bout and it were plenty to keep her satisfied, if you get me. Ye must understand that I couldn’t let her die.”
A chill spread through me, “good lord, man! You… you fed it? Were you not trying to destroy it?”
His brow furrowed in a moment of sad confusion, “I once sought to kill her, aye.” He stood again and threw another dried board into the flames. A hiss followed and embers glinted before the man’s face. Hypnotized with the combustion, he blinked and tersely coughed and looked back to me. He motioned to my inkwell and said, “be true ‘bout it.”
He sat again and sang.
Iocfaidh mé is ní fhanfaidh mé… is éalóidh mé le mo stór…
And I began to document the tale.
A great beast fed along the eastern shores. As far south as Hull and as far north as Aberdeen. In the early years, it fed in the deep, tearing into fishing nets far off the coast. Men spoke of the strange clicking and pulsing beneath the waters, tracking what was assumed to be some ferocious whale. It was thought when the Fhortún and its crew were lost at sea, not 200 nautical miles from Edinburgh, that it was the creature’s first taste of flesh. Curfews spread across the cities of the empire demanding children and animals remain indoors upon the setting of the sun. None could swear to have witnessed the creature but all saw it in their nightmares. It took rodents and felines in the night, but it hungered still.
The captain was a lieutenant then. A stalwart gent. Avid and compassionate but solitary, guarded and firmly bound for ascension in His Majesty’s Naval Service. It was when the bells at Tilbury Fort sounded and a great panic fell upon the men that he first regarded the terrifying weight of oblivion. In a mad scramble to the battlements, he saw the confusion and fury in the eyes of the other men and feared the creature had swam downriver to assay all of London itself. It was only when he had found his musket and adorned his boots that he discovered how many had been taken into the shallow depths of the Thames, including his captain.
The command of the Rhea was now his and the ship set forth among dozens to safeguard the eastern shore from the monster. Months passed with no sight nor sound of the creature, only still, fearful waters bereft of the living. The seasons changed and life returned, as did the creature. A stench riled the men of the Rhea and at long last the young captain witnessed a great wake upon the horizon. The ship gave pursuit and their wind was favorable, as if the fates now entwined them both on a singular course. Spears and bows and muskets were drawn and readied for the attack but the beast dove beneath and its odor dissipated. The wind ceased and the waters turned stolid and the crew silently watched the sun fade into the west.
In the tar black of night the creature returned and bellowed and wrenched the crew from where they slept. It tore through the hull and beset them with horrid appendage. They were drawn into the depths flailing and shrieking and the captain could only ready his musket before the beast withdrew. A mournful clicking faded with it into the darkness and the dreadful pheromone lingered as a fetid myrrh for the fallen.
Morning came and the creature rose and fled northeast. The Rhea gave chase and many days and provisions later the men came upon the stench again off the coast of Norway. Weapons were readied and watchers were set to every corner of the ship, but yet again the beast caught them unawares in a sudden and profound squall. As the ship took on water, the beast lunged atop the deck and howled and swung and seized over a dozen men and pulled them downward into the foaming waters. The captain, sickened in disbelief and fury, ordered the ship to dock at Bergen to resupply and give chase yet again. He proclaimed to his crew that only the fearful need fear the deep, and the proudest and strongest men shall be praised by His Majesty.
Bergen proved mutinous, and the men of his crew cited the captain’s manic pursuit of the beast as cause to stay aground. In a mad torrent of anger, the captain snarled that they would all hang for their treason and that he would finish the work if he must chase the beast into perdition itself. It was but a few dozen loyalists that remained, bolstered by the captain’s promise of riches upon slaughtering the monster.
Thus, the Rhea set off in wretched pursuit. The captain could now detect the creature’s bellows and stench from miles off, and so the ship sped forth over many weeks in fortuitous winds. The season turned bitter cold and sheets of ice began to appear just north on the horizon. The crew feared the onset of winter but the captain saw only the bloodred eye of the western sun escape him again and again and again.
It was as they tracked the beast off Newfoundland that it slowed and the odor dissipated again. Many nights passed in silence and fear and every lap of water quickened the men’s hearts and filled their waking eyes with phantoms of a shapeless demon. The cold came fast and sharp and ice began to form beneath them, shuddering and groaning and scraping the ship from beneath. The water hardened until it ceased to move entirely. The men hid and warmed below decks and assured themselves no animal of this kingdom could penetrate such flows.
The monster returned under perfect starlight and thrust itself beneath the ship, throwing the men atop one another and many overboard into the blackened doom of the freezing waters. The creature heaved itself again in a violent surge of animal fury and pressed the ship nearer the coast. The men shot arrows and fired muskets blindly at the frenzied avalanche exploding beneath them. Again and again the ship tore through the ice and drew closer to the rocks of the island, each surge rending the spine of the Rhea in a sickening wet lamentation of dying prey. The captain reeled from a head wound and fell out of consciousness just as the beast gave one final horrendous cry and turned the ship sideways and onto the shore where it would ever remain.
All was quiet as the captain finished. He blindly massaged his forehead and said, “fierce animal down there. No fiercer than a mare in heat, though, I reckon. Beasts of all kinds have ways a gettin’ what they need. Man bein’ no exception.”
I didn’t speak but nodded slowly.
“Weren’t ever good with the women folk and they never had much love for me neither. A measure of want ‘n need, I always said. To have purpose ‘n need, now there’s love,” he laughed then as if hearing himself speaking a new language, “though I reckon that fifty years is ‘nough time to love anything. Enough for it to love ya back.”
The wind swelled and abated before he spoke again, “fear’s a toxin, but so’s loneliness, if ya follow. Never reckoned we was chasin’ one another for the wrong reasons.”
I understood and spoke, “forgive me, but… how can you… love something such as it. Such as her?”
The captain looked sidelong at me as if riled with suspicion, “such as her, he says.” And the captain coughed and said, “love yours and permit me to love mine, and there’s nothin’ else to be said about love.”
Confusion swept through me as I looked at what I had written. He continued, “you must know… that we’re one another’s now. For better or worse, what have ye. Tis a love story, my boy, same as the one ya been writin’ to you lassy back home!”
He cackled, long and raspy, and after a sputtering of coughs said, “a bit fewer to die in yours, I’d say.”
The captain saw the emptiness in my eyes and his smile faded, “what, boy, would ya have me do fer a lovesick monster?”
I stammered, “I… I cannot say what it is I will do with this story.”
“Do as ya please, I say,” the captain slowly turned his head to the window and his eyes glistened with tears, “fer I don’t have much time left with her, I fear. Thought she’d stuck herself ‘ere by accident. Caged herself in a place that she couldn’t escape. Only now as I’m feebler and older and sicker she tells me she meant to stay jus’ fer me all along.” He sniffed and his voice shuddered, “wanted my company.” Then his hands rose to his face and he convulsed in heaving sobs, “wanted to share time with another beast.”
I stared at the wreck of the captain, crippled and doddering, a shell of the man he once thought himself to be, and perhaps truly what he was beneath. Lonely himself. I then looked to the fire again, another infernal creature hissing and spitting and in the throes of death. And then I could hear from the berthing deck the creature wailing a most mournful song that brought tears to my eyes as well. Her cry told the story of a being eternal, cursed in life and wandering unfathomable depths for any measure of kinship or kindness. An incalculable sadness of eons rife with violence and fear and disgust. A solitary creature beneath the heavens righteous in its pursuit of love.
As I watched the captain sob, I regarded these monsters both with fierce compassion, as they indeed found one another in shared requiem. The cabin shuddered once again from the deep symphonic whispers of the beast and I stood with shaken balance and blind allegiance. I shed the dust from my coat and looked again at the journal with consideration.
I strode to the captain and placed my arm upon his shoulder. His quivering ceased and he looked into my eyes. His were bloodshot and dull, unforgiven and pleading and not long for his world. We saw each other truly then, and I asked him, “what must I do?”
September 18, 1838
My Dearest Love,
The very thought of your grace in my sojourn to the American continent has filled my heart with joy these past many months, and to feel your embrace upon my return has been of my utmost desires. So it is with a most painful sorrow that I must rescind my promised return and my hand in marriage. While the thought of you in tears is far too painful for me to bear, this is how it must be. May you someday forgive me.
No solace will be found in the accompanying pages, but they speak true. Within them you will find a conflicted man and a fearsome beast inextricably paired in their melancholic yearning. You must forgive the captain, may he rest, for his villainy and obsession. You must forgive the beast as well, for it yearns for what it can never have. And, you must forgive me, that I have taken so much of your love and now must pledge it to another.
Do not seek me. Do not mourn me. And do not deny love, for it lives in all things.
With all my best,
Your Lieutenant
This story was submitted to Reedsy.com’s weekly short story contest under the prompt: “Write a story about two characters who start as mortal enemies but learn to embrace their differences.”