Chapter 44: What the Captain Tells Me

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The leviathans fly free in skies far from skerries and fear only dragons and, sometimes, man. The greatest grow to more than four hundred ulls, but those that man harvests are about three hundred. It’s tight quarters, not as tight as our sharks, but we’re on them for a bit at a time.

When man takes a leviathan, the fat is rendered down for oil. Only the wealthiest men and the men who do the hunt taste the meat, and then only the muscles, especially the heart. Leviathan oil is too precious to eat as blubber. The oil can be burned in the great lamps and used for other purposes.

The skeleton is bound with ropes and the corpse hosts decks and holds. The men who sail the leviathan carry cargo from one world to another and they fish. They are away from skerries for dark after dark after dark.

In the right season, the sailors guide the leviathan into strange regions where the native leviathans tolerate them, but keep a distance, save those who knew the leviathan in life.

The great beasts are dead, but the bones remember their lives and speak to men in their dreams. Even waking dreams for those who sail them. Any who pass time on such a vessel feel the connection in their very own bones.

(I ask him if the bones remember the name of the Leviathan. He looks at me strangely, but then continues.)

If you join a crew, you will like as not never set foot on this world again, for the captain takes his vessel this way and that, wherever there is cargo or fish or sometimes plunder. Do you have family, here, boy? Your mother, but anyone else? No?

Once in the afterlife of a Leviathan, or sometimes twice, the crew takes down another of the great beasts, driving a spike into its brain and towing it to a world to be torn apart and fitted up as a ship. All the crew who do this lose their names. They cannot speak them, do not remember them.

(Bessil is the name I am given after the hunt. It is carved for me in a bone pendant. I look at it every single day to remember that it is now my name. On the other side of the pendant is carved the name I had before. I cannot read it and when others read it to me, it is just gibberish.)

(Come along, Bessil, says Sabill, but she actually says, Come along and strange sounds.)

The life of a sailor on a Leviathan is hard. The remnant of the beast needs attending or it rots and cracks and falls from the sky. Not like the sharks we fish in, which last a while then we take anew.

The womenfolk on these ships are not for the common sailor and womanly responsibilities fall to the boys. It’ll be a long time before you have a boy of your own. Be ready for that.

Living in the heart of the Leviathan is living in a Sailor’s Dream. Time means nothing. There are no goblins, but you will fly though swarms of sprites. Many sailors don’t survive - they go sailor-mad and settle on strange skerries. If you survive you will see dragons.

“I will see dragons,” I say.

“What is the name of the Leviathan in the skies?”

“Senthra-sha-lews-tlanvee.”

“It’s not destined, Bessil.” The Captain looks at me. He’s a hard man, with weathered skin and impressions around his eyes where his lenses sit - and have rested every time he sails for all the time since he is my age and chosen to take to the sky. “But we will help you, if you want.”

He tells me to sit while he checks the shark.

“Well, Bessil, I’ll take a chance on the light for another harvest. Is there anyone here you want to say goodbye to? Anyone who can talk you out of this?”

“No, sir,” I say. “When does the Leviathan come?”

“They’ll be here for a while, but they do not come to Bocut. Only Fearsmere can dock them.”

“I would visit the tomb of Fearsemere,” I say. “I offered to light a candle for a - Well, it’s a long story. It’ll take me time to walk there,” I say. “I have no sandals, but I can walk the grass like a beggar. And I know people on the way.”

“There’ll be no more walking around the world for you,” he tells me. “If you want to sail the skies, you should taste the air once.”

“We’ll be over the land this whole time?” I ask Cowen. He is on this fishing voyage.

“There’s no promises in the sky,” he tells me.

I sit in the netting and hold the rope, as instructed, while the longboat’s crew make her ready. This shark is vibrant, not like the husk I slept in at the Three Goats. There is no mind in the bones. What mind I thought I felt in the Three Goats was my Sailor’s Dreams of Senthra-sha-lews-tlanvee.

When they loosen the ropes, the ribs spread apart and the shark-boat lifts into the sky. I watch the ground go away - not to throw up but that my stomach and innards are in a different place than they should be.

The body twists and I shift in the net. The captain pulls the ropes to turn the body to catch the wind and all Bocut shrinks behind me.

“Don’t look,” Cowen tells me over the wind. “We’ll pass over the Plateau of Silence and it is not proper to look on it.”

I steal a peek at the ring of stones at the plateau. The place where my father lay when he passed.

But is he my father? I was brought up for my mother’s tit, so I must have been brought up from down below. Had I seen my mother and father as I walked all the way around the skerry?

“What’s that?” I ask. “Are we falling from the sky?”

“We’ll fish by and by,” he says. “There’s for Fearsmere. You’ll have to convince them to take you as a sailor.”

“That’s right,” the Captain calls from above. “They’ll not take my word as fishing captain and I only know you a little. You’ll persuade them or you’ll have a different life.”

They didn’t land the longboat, instead had me scurry down a loop rope and Cowen called out to me, “Sky have mercy!”

“Sky have mercy! Happy in the Light!”

Submitted: November 20, 2023

Fantasy sprite goblins bones