The four-leaf clover should not have been there, caught in Esteban's hair. It was a surprise there was any clover at all. The cows had already been through twice that week, pulling at the remnants of ... [+]
I remember the exact moment I woke up. The sway of the ship, familiar and calm, rocked my hammock without anything heeding it. Whatever storm we saw in the distance must have blown over without a fuss, or perhaps it disappeared, no longer interested in upheaving his precious voyage I unknowingly stumbled into. I stared at the beam above my head, hearing the waves crash into the sides of the Hangman's Mistress.
There was no use lying around. Once awake, I knew it would be long before I fell asleep again. Responsibility loomed over my head in my every waking moment, and there was no guarantee of what could be encountered in uncharted waters. Not in these lands. Back within the waters of Essentina, there was at least one ship that would pass over your remains if you had failed, and if there was none, there was someone who could pronounce you dead and read off your eulogies with false sincerity. Out here there was none of that. If you disappeared, you became another tale.
Tales were told, anyway, from this journey. Not of my own, but from the sailors I had surrounded myself with. No one understood what happened in these waters more than I did, but even then, I am not able to explain it myself.
He looked like any ordinary man—a scholar, maybe, and not a sailor. He had a son, slumbering somewhere down below in my remembrance. But he laughed and bled the same as us. Yes, he bled into the sea that loved him, and his son turned to water with him.
I opened the door leading out to the deck. The wind rushed past me, salty and damp with the callings of rain. There were no clouds in the sky, however, not above us. I could see the stars glinting with a foreign light. They held the same constellations, but it was as if I was looking at them from a different angle. I never could explain how or why, but the wind's song always carried a mournful harmony, something I had heard years back when I first came to the sea.
My feet led me where I needed to be. The great expanse of the ocean laid bare before me, nothing hindering and unforgiving. Leaning against the bow, the ordinary man stood facing away from me, humming the melody to the wind's harmony.
"Where did you learn this?" I asked, and the melody ceased. Eyes too blue for the sea turned to me. They were temporarily covered when a few blonde strands of hair blew over them.
"Captain Donovan," he greeted with a nod, taking a step back to not have his back towards me. "Suppose this wasn't a song I learned, but felt. What would you say to that?"
"Are you saying you thought it yourself?"
"I wouldn't dare claim such a thing. Words can be revered; songs can be mistaken."
I clicked my tongue. "You switched back to riddles, Alma."
"My apologies, Captain." Alma nodded his head once again before turning back to the sea. "I do not mean to be cryptic. Perhaps it's how the moon shines across the waters tonight. I've seen a man drown in waters like these. Dark, deceptively deep with only the moon above that fades the farther you sink. Nothing violent, but tragic nonetheless."
"Why did he drown, then?" I stood next to him by this time. Entertaining his thoughts wasn't something I did often, but something was calling me to that moment. Dangerous words were being said by a man who couldn't be listened to—shouldn't be listened to lest you go mad yourself. "Was there no one there to fish him out?"
"No one wished to."
"A murder?"
"An unfortunate fate."
Alma then began to laugh. It sparked through the air with merry, as if he knew what he was saying was absurd, but I had always thought it carried the shrill notes of madness.
The same laugh haunted me as I watched him bleed into the water of a cave, decaying before my eyes until not even his bones remained. His son had long since been reunited with the sea by then. Alma didn't want his son to witness what had become of him. The cave echoed the same harmony that carried in the wind, which I now understood were the cries of the chained goddess who was punished for saving the man who sang to her so sweetly; a man doomed to drown over and over again.
Yes, the man who sang to the sea drowned one last time before he joined them. All parts of the song combined at last. To this day, I still find myself humming it, only to stop short of the end. I still cannot comprehend that I once had something unknown on my ship; a god and his once-mortal guardian.
"Have you ever thought about what your own fate is, Captain?" Alma asked me once he was done laughing. Bandaged fingers drummed against the railings, his skin too thin after weeks of abuse.
"Why would I think of something that is merely a wishful tale?" I replied, scoffing in the face of something I didn't know. "I am not foolish enough to tie myself to something that is just a possibility. Every action has a consequence, and some are not brave enough to face them, thus turning to these beliefs that we are not in control of ourselves."
"Ah, wise words. Wise words, indeed." Alma pushed himself off the railing and took a few steps away from the edge, putting distance between him and I. "Pardon this one, Captain, if I had woken you from your sleep. No need to entertain a madman's words this late."
"If you know yourself as a madman, why do you not right yourself?" I found myself asking. These words had burned into my mind since the beginning, ever since I held a cutlass to his neck as he begged for his son's life and not his own.
Another manic line of laughter broke out of him, and with myself now facing him, I could see the madness in his eyes, yet they were coherent and undeniably intelligent. He knew something I didn't, and he was going mad by never being able to say it lest he be struck down and forced to start again.
"I know I'm insane, and I always have been. That is what happens when you live like me." His eyes crinkled in mirth while mine narrowed in turmoil. "I am a slave unto my own son, but he doesn't know it, yet. How could you not go mad from that?"
I left him there after that, carelessly brushing past him back to my own quarters. There was no use, at the time, talking to a man like him. The breeze cut short behind me as the door swung shut, muting the sounds of everything outside. My ears felt muffled and hollowed from it, the wind's harmony to a song that had yet to exist still blowing.
It didn't take long for me to settle back in my hammock, and sleep overcame me shortly after, along with the memory of a god cursed to live again.