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// Chapter XXVIII: Complement 
// Story: Subjunctive 
// by Integral Archer 
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	A ship cannot leave without a certain uproar.

The exact mechanism of a ship’s departure is unknown, i.e., it is unknown whether the motions for departure taken by the crew (e.g., pulling up the anchor, unfurling sails, etc.) are what cause the ship to leave; or whether it is the tumult: the waving, the kisses blown, the swears and lewd jokes, the boats that dribble after the vessel for a while longer yet, and the bodies flinging themselves furiously into their wakes.

I say “unknown,” because, in this situation, I can find no cause that leads to the effect, neither in the forces of nature nor in the wills of the sailors, that can be demonstrated past a mere correlation to the ship’s leaving; for even at a time such as this, the Star Buck’s disembarkation—that is, a ship with a captain determined to circumscribe the coast and circumvent the country’s laws, who resolved to run headlong into an invisible but vigilant coast guard; with a mate, whose usually definitive and deliberate motions were now marked with a hesitation caused by the former’s vacillation, caprice, and nebulous motives, compelled as she was into an overwhelming fear of uncertainty due to the expected passengers who had not shown up yet; and the crew, making jokes with themselves, dodging the former (yet worrying about her too), and speculating about the captain, but, unlike before, when their speculations had been directed to the musing of comical supernaturalities, now their usually harsh voices assumed disquieted whispers drawing out slow, painful, mysterious words, about the captain and his aim—at this time, about this ship was every reason to stay quiet, and the Fillydelphians knew this; yet still they waved, blew their kisses, insinuated their debauched notions, jumped into the water with their usual interjections, and maneuvered their boats to chase after the ship, though there were frequent collisions between them owing to the crowded nature of the dock that day. The earth, impressed by forces which science has given us only a hint as to the nature thereof, necessarily had to make its power known in the form of storms; and if those storms didn’t manifest themselves in the clouds, then they had to arise in the hearts of the land’s creatures, making them caper and shout, when, by reason, they ought to be quiet.

Flask, for her part, sprinted across the deck of the ship, shouting orders when confusion set in, lending her own magic when it was needed, and went about brandishing a top-maul, the end of which whetted into a spear-like point, to cut the ropes of the fishing spears fashioned into grappling hooks, shot forth onto the Star Buck’s deck by particularly jocular young sailors. And, waving over it all, rising above the caw of seagulls, mingling among the cries and superseding them, directing all, as though the conductor in this symphony of motion and noise, was her voice:

“How hast thou managed to run afoul the spanker’s rope? Did I not give thee the easiest unfurl because of this very incompetence? . . . Down, down, back to the sea with you! But I’ll keep the harpoons. . . . Faster, faster lest we be swarmed; row if ye have to! . . . Little Pip! Gelding! What hast thou to be afraid of? If thou don’t ascend to thy post, thou wilt shine the bowsprit forever! . . . When a lady departeth, if she be on a stage, ye throw her flowers; but if she be on a ship, ye throw ropes and spears. Thank you, thank you, fillies and gentlecolts; I’ll keep these, but tuck before ye hit the water when down ye plunge! . . . Aye, this heading, thirty degrees by—what didst thou say? Speak up, colt; there are enough murmurs below deck for me; I don’t need them beneath the sun. Where are we bound, didst thou ask? Ah, to the captain’s origins, the best I can see. He’s the only one who would dare to run through a militarized blockade yet not worry about the other side of it. . . . Thou, up there, on thy perch—dost see a destroyer, battleship, man-’o-war, the tail of the blockade? I can’t stop them, but I’ll push her on and through if it be thus demanded. . . . Avast, ye in your boats! The Star Buck has no place for you, for anything! What is on her will give you shivers and nightmares. Down, say I, back to your soft dinghies, and let us founder on our own!”

Every time she switched targets, she would go silent for a few seconds, giving her time to look: first, at the coast; then, second, at the stairs down to the lower decks, to where the captain’s cabin was.

“A little bit faster,” she whispered to herself. “Recede, recede, O coast; recede, hide, and swallow those two before they can cry! But we are not yet out of sight. They are nowhere; Nihil is none the wiser.”

But the Star Buck was not even a cable away from her dock when the cry came up: “Stranded passengers!”

There was a commotion aboard the pier as a pegasus flew across their heads, above the docked boats, over the sea, heading for the Star Buck, with cries following her. In the midst of a crowd, a unicorn was pushed, prodded, and thrust forward to the docks, to the pier where dinghies stirred, collided, and capsized in the confusion.

When she heard this call, Flask saw not the commotion on the coast which had augmented the uproar—instead, in the opposite direction, she saw Nihil appear on deck, rubbing his eyes with a hoof, his teeth bared in pain. His ears were splayed, twitching as the clamor of the bells and voices burst forth from the coast and from his own vessel.

The implacable Flask, a constant flurry of motion, who, if her legs weren’t moving, was delegating her movement in her shouts, who was the water between the sands of the sailors, keeping them together and firm lest they sprinkle and spread—she stopped dead at this sight.

Nihil never appeared on the deck during disembarkation. He told Flask that the noise the sailors made nowadays when leaving gave him headaches (though this had always struck her as odd, since she, who had been born on and had never left the Fillydelphian coast, had never known them to be quiet) and that she was more than capable of handling the disembarkation herself. And so she did, while he slunk down into the humid, dark air of the Star Buck’s innards, holed up in his cabin, and engaged himself in an activity unknown to her and the crew behind its locked door. He would never appear until the land was out of sight. So it goes without saying that his appearance on deck was taken as more than a shock to her and the crew.

The crew, not knowing whether to speak, to comment, to jest, turned to Flask—but on her face, they saw only a mirrored expression.

The pegasus alighted upon the deck, approached the old stallion who was staring squintingly at the sun, which was now disappearing behind a looming stratus cloud, and addressed him.

“Captain Nihil . . . sir?”

“He is I,” responded Nihil, still looking up as though struck and immobilized by the clouds, as though his attention were not fully on board the ship. “What dost thou want with him who is I?”

“Captain Nihil, we’ve met before,” she went on. “I’m Flut . . . Deponent. You were supposed to take me and my companion—you called him Scholar—whom you named owner of the ship.”

“Owner!” Flask spat.

“Scholar?” said Nihil, turning. And then, it seemed as though the very act of speaking the word animated him, sent color to his gray skin, and lit up his blazing green eyes.

“Scholar!” he ejaculated. “Hath he not boarded?”

“You left without him. There he is on the dock.”

The unicorn mentioned above was indeed I. At that moment, I had approached the edge of the pier.

Nihil turned to Flask. “Why didst thou leave without the owner!”

Flask said nothing.

Nihil hobbled up the stairs—Flask racing after him, as a firefighter following a flame—to the helm and accosted the pilot:

“Take thou us to the shore!”

The pilot did not act immediately. There was a glance from him—an almost imperceptible twitching of the eyes—to the mate, who exchanged the look with a similar one of her own.

What was in this secret language which only the mate and the crew member knew, of which Nihil was clearly not privy, it cannot be said. But the reason for its necessity and creation was evident enough; the motion was so subtle, so quick, calculated as to slip past the captain.

But the pause, too long and manifest, though enough to hide the meaning, was enough to convey the insubordination if nothing else.

“Why dost thou look at me with the gaping mouth of a cod? Bring us ashore!”

With barely a pause, before the pilot had time to respond, Nihil shoved him to the ground with an agility unknown to one of his age, grasped both his hooves on the helm, and, with an ultimate lunge, sent the giant wheel spinning to starboard.

The ship dipped and banked, like a dog changing course after a dodging rabbit. Flask was thrown against the gunwale and would have been tossed overboard had she not clasped the railing with both her hooves and held on despite the water, churned up and angry, that exploded over the leaning side of the ship, soaking her completely. Little Pip, shaken from his perch atop the mainmast, screamed as he plunged ten feet through the tarp and landed upon an even unluckier colleague.

The Star Buck straightened out, heading directly for the Fillydelphian shore, as if determined to beach herself. Her crew, without exception, had been thrown prostrate, drowned, inundated, or toppled in some way. No one was on his feet—no one except Nihil, who still stood at the wheel, bringing the ship closer and closer.

“A gold piece be to him who can bring the Scholar to me!” he cried.

He couldn’t be heard at that distance over the waves, past the cries of the sailors. But nothing he could have said would have expedited the process. The Fillydelphians needed no motivation nor any incentive, but rather they took this as an opportunity and an excuse to release their usual and desired vociferations.

I was pushed, quite apart from myself, into a wooden dinghy bobbing at the end of the pier, the water thrown into disturbance not so much from the waves the Star Buck was sending as it was by the rocking of the dinghy’s operators, anxious to get me on board and to paddle out. We didn’t set off immediately; a small battle was fought around me, the landlocked, thirsty sand crawlers against the operators of this boat, the former pulling and biting at the oars and falling into the ocean, the crew of the latter trying desperately to stanch the unremitting torrent—the water piling ever-higher into the rocking boat.

At length, the boat set off, though not without a few last desperate and vain attempts from the onlookers to jump over her gunwale. We made a course directly for the Star Buck, which was tacking in our direction, on a course to crush us with her cutwater.

Still closer we approached, and it wasn’t till the last second that my pilots realized the danger and tried, desperately, to change direction. Screams erupted from the deck of the Star Buck, cries of “ahoy, ye down there!” “brace!” and “forsaken fools!” The only one who could’ve cried “hard a-starboard!” and saved us was the mate. But she stood looking down from the bow, watching the small craft grow smaller beneath her, her lips pursed, almost as if she had foreseen the future and was content with it.

But just when the Star Buck seemed to have reached the point of no return, when a collision was unavoidable, Nihil threw himself and the wheel to the right, and the ship banked yet again, throwing up her characteristic wake, splashing both us in the dinghy and the crew on the deck alike. When she righted herself, there we were, nearly touching her port side.

A rope was cast down. “Ahoy, Scholar!” came Nihil’s voice. He appeared above, over the side, having abandoned the wheel without informing the pilot, who, given no warning, desperately jumped on it to save the ship from going askew. “Climb before thy feisty rowers have a chance!”

“Look, sir,” I called back. “I have an injury!”

“Then we shall pull thee!” Then, turning to the crowd of deckhands crowding behind him, he bellowed: “Grasp ahold of this hempen coil! Why do ye stare at me as though ye were blowfish? Come on; come on! Aye, that’s the way!” he said, the rope between his teeth.

I jumped and grabbed the extended rope with my teeth. Had I not at that moment grasped the rope as I did with my near foreleg as well, my neck and spine certainly would’ve been broken when one of the operators of my ferry jumped, bit down on my tail, and held me with the weight of his body, determined as he was to be pulled with me up to the ship.

Till this point, Flask had stood by, watching me arrive, tapping her hooves, a malicious scowl carving her features. But no sooner had she seen the hitchhiker on my tail than she approached with her top-maul the rope the whole crew was pulling, despite the one cry of “avast!” which came from the only crew member who saw what she planned to do, whom Flask pretended not to hear; and, waving it in a fervor, as though she were a sovereign and the top-maul her scepter, she shouted:

“And if there be any power left in me, be it unleashed upon thee!”

Though I’d managed to land a kick on my tailgater’s face, which sent him spiraling down into the sea, laughing until he was muffled by the splash, still Flask came, feigning not to notice that now there was no danger.

But the gyrations of the sailors pulling the rope in and the captain’s incessant exhortations to himself and them got me on deck before Flask could approach. When I was pulled onto the deck and felt the Star Buck’s wood for the first time, I was treated to a few friendly jeers and Nihil’s praises and expressions of gratitude. Dripping wet and exhausted, I sincerely felt like an anchor.

As the crowd dispersed and Nihil helped me to my feet, the only sound was the sonorous crash of metal on wood. It was Flask’s hammer, falling lifeless to the floor.


*


When the Fillydelphian harbor faded from view, a certain calm betook the atmosphere of the ship. Though the sailors were untiring in their tasks, now they didn’t speak to each other; and, if they did, it was in quiet, hushed whispers, and never more than a sentence or two. Even the appearance of the two travellers, the deformed pony and her companion, did nothing to stir the environment, unlike how they had on the shore.

Flask, making her rounds on the deck, ran into these two.

“Good evening, ma’am,” said the traveller.

Her companion, greeting Flask in his own manner, nodded amiably and smiled.

“Aye,” she snorted in response.

“Can I say,” the traveller went on, “that I’ve never encountered a more polite or professional bunch of ponies as your crew? On the shore, on other ships, wherever I go, nothing but hostility and vulgarity.”

“Money will do that,” said Flask. “Give me a little money and I’ll give to thee a kingdom. Oh, sure,” she scoffed, “they’ll say that money doth not carry happiness, that true seekers of the soul, whatever that bromide signifieth, care not for money; but one cannot dispute that money procureth for oneself security and comfort, such indispensables. But I will not pretend that I be anything but a creature of money: that which giveth money is good, that which taketh away bad. Indeed, for thy part, don’t pretend that thou be different or try to ascribe the same false attitude unto me.” She scoffed. “Though I still wonder how one with thy looks could acquire such a sum.”

The traveller said nothing in response. The stallion, in tune with her emotions, sensed that she had been offended, and growled at Flask. He would’ve certainly leaped and attacked the mate had the traveller not held him back.

Then, after a pause, Flask continued: “Understand, thou, that I make no pejoratives; I simply say that gold shineth, so it followeth that he who carrieth gold shineth as well.” And she added, under her breath: “And what is black under the surface hath only the gold of fools. Steady, Flask! Be wary.”

“I understand. You know . . .”

While this conversation was taking place, I stood apart from everyone. I did not watch Flask or the crew, nor did I notice that Fluttershy had disappeared below deck. Instead, I watched Nihil. He leaned over the gunwale on the starboard side. Whether he was staring at the ocean, the horizon, or the sky, it was impossible to tell. He listed to the motions of the Star Buck, and it was only the wind that caused his ears to twitch. There was something singular about his air which, as a pony, I could not feel and was even compelled to ignore, but as a changeling, enraptured me. By these two attractions I was pulled away but pushed toward him even harder. . . . The Star Buck dissolved, as did the ocean. . . . Nihil grew larger as the world swept away. . . . I couldn’t hear the waves, but somewhere vaguely in the distance I thought I heard an “avast.” . . . It was Nihil who pulled me near, and I him in my turn . . . luring me with a familiar longing—

Teeth clenched my tail and a powerful pull jerked me off my feet. When I recovered myself, I found myself staring into the livid face of the mate.

“Art thou an idiot?” she hissed through her teeth. “Dost thou not know what avast signifieth?” Her scowl could have boiled the ocean.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“I know thine aim,” she growled. “Were it up to me, thou wouldest drown thyself, right over the side of the ship at this instant. For reasons known only to the creatures of Mare’s abyss, Nihil hath fallen for thee in his mania, and he can’t see why it necessarily will go awry, not only for himself but for thee as well. Aye, for thee as well. Mark me.” She pointed to Nihil with a hoof. “Go not near him. In the soil of that soul stir night crawlers thou dost not want to unearth! They will beget none of the fish thou seekest.”

“I wanted only to talk to him.”

“Is that what thou callest it? Talk?” She spat out the word, as though her tongue necessarily had to writhe like a worm to say it. “Don’t think I can’t see thine evasions and euphemisms. But, nay, for his sake and thine own: do not disturb him now. ’Tis his attitude during every disembarkation. Great, terrible things are beneath that facade, his veneer, and woe to him who disturbeth Nihil if he be in that attitude! And be I damned if I allow thee to play with thy manipulative magic!”

“Do you hate me?”

“I do not have to assent for thee to know that is true.”

“What do you think your captain would think of the fact that you think thus about me and talk thus?”

She knew that she’d been caught. To retort would’ve been only to confirm what I’d said. From her teeth grinding in place, it was evident she knew this. She bowed, a disgustingly ironic curtsey, and walked off. “I’ll get thee,” she mumbled. “Ere this voyage be over, I’ll subvert thee and thus save all.”

I trotted up beside Nihil and, assuming his manner, threw my forehooves over the gunwale and stared off into the ocean, the horizon, the sky.

“Ahoy,” I said quietly.

The old stallion turned to me. His mouth was quivering, as though in sadness, but when he looked upon me, that quiver shifted so slightly as to almost express extreme jubilation. The salt in his tears, in their turn, morphed into the minerals of joy.

“O Scholar!” he said, his voice choked. “I was standing here, looking but seeing nothing, and I was praying to Mare. Said to her I: ‘O Mare, to me Scholar send thou!’ And right when I was in the middle of my greatest despair, when I thought I be not heard—then camest thou! So happy am I to see thee!”

“Your mate accosted me just now, warning me that you’d be angry if I talked to you.”

“Did she now?” He exhaled a sigh that sounded almost like a cry. “Pay her no mind, Scholar. She worrieth about things that will drive her to insanity. She’s protective over me, who have been sailing these seas long before she swallowed her first gulp of saltwater. Thinketh she that I be a maniac, sayeth that ’twill cut me and the Star Buck down, and that she is trying to prevent that. I love her, ’tis certain, but she can be incomprehensible.

“But thou, Scholar—how is it that we could have come across each other so serendipitously? I look at thee, and I say, aye, now there is a creature unlike the rest but so like me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Nihil smiled, almost as a conspirator would to another. “Thou art not like the rest. Flask seeth that, which is why she feeleth threatened by thee. Thou art different. For thee, I can see, ’tis not enough to walk, trade, talk, live, eat, as ’tis for the rest of the rabble one can see on the shore and the city. If thou did this, wouldest die, wither, emaciate as one who lacketh a certain vitamin would. Nay, thou needest more.”

“What is this ‘more’ that I need?”

“I know; I know too well. Thou needest to feel: to touch, to warm, to love. Without these, thou wouldest die. Thou spendest thy whole life looking for them who can provide it to thee.”

“How would you know that?”

“Because I’m the same,” he said. “Like creatures know each other at a glance. And I’m like thee. I need the same: to touch, to warm, to love—and, above all, trust. Why dost thou think I let thee on my ship gratis while to run through this blockade would be a service costing multiple salaries? Why dost think I named thee owner? Because I saw; I saw, and I wanted to share with thee, to see thee and be assured that I wasn’t alone!”

He turned away, casting his eyes down to the waves churning against the side of his rocking ship. “O Scholar!” he lamented. “To ones like us, the sea is more parched than the desert! Thou sawest the attitude of them on the shore. How can one love creatures like that, let alone trust?”

“Money,” I said. “It’s what motivates your mate.”

Nihil cringed, as though ridding himself of a sour taste. “Aye. Money is a constant; no matter whose hooves it lieth in, there thou canst hold it and say: ‘Now, here is matter that I can trust.’ I need not know who giveth it, where it cometh from—but I know it hath value. But what a substitute for warmth, such cold metal!”

“So you haven’t been able to find love and trust?”

He shook his head. “I wish I could, but not here, not with the unnatural life I’ve built around myself for a creature such as I. Nay, Scholar, the sea maketh not for a good nuptial bed, and he who trieth to make it such and drink from it will end up cold and dehydrated from its salt. That route to death can be comforting to some, to those who were born from the sand of the coast—but not to me, who found myself here, and had to put on a facade lest I be discovered as an outsider. Thou knowest what ’tis like to speak as they, walk as they, be as convincing as they, yet feel, in the bosom of thy soul, that thou art not as they. ’Tis sordid.”

He turned back to look at me with that same almost melancholy expression as before—now the jubilation was unmistakable; and his tears were those of one who had experienced hardship but was now seeing the first rays of the salvation that would be with him the rest of his life.

“But Scholar!” he cried. “Now I have thee. Now thou art here. I prostrate myself before thee. I, my mate, my ship—all are thine. If thou sail this ship across the world, then again, then again, five score times, I will pilot the helm myself in the same joyful attitude as now! What wilt thou show me? Who art thou? Take me to thine origins—for I don’t know mine own and want to see!”

“We’re going there now. It’s my home.”

“And Scholar . . . nay, I can’t call thee that any longer. Pseudonyms are for those who wish to hide away. But now that we have found each other, now that we know we are the same, thou canst tell me who thou art!”

“Who are you, Captain?”

“I can give thee only the unsatisfactory answer of Nihil. I have no other. They gave it to me; I gave it to myself; it cometh from nothing and is nothing. Avast!” he exclaimed, just as I was on the point of speaking. “Do not say a perverted mutation of thy name now. Thou hast the fortune to have one, so do not betray it. Say to me how it ought to be said, undiluted and pure.”

I looked over my shoulder. Flask was standing a few paces behind, watching us. When I caught her eyes, she did not look away but stared at me with even more intensity. Her lips moved in the silent words of a curse.

I turned back to Nihil. “Later,” I said. “When we get home.”

He nodded, again in that conspiratorial way, and looked toward the ocean—but this time, instead of turning his eyes down to the abyss, he turned them toward the horizon. The thick clouds that were now just starting to form above seemed to be depressing the sun further down into the water.

“A storm’s coming,” said Nihil, “and not just one of the sea. Ah, and see, Scholar, over there. That tower in the distance? Here, here’s the spyglass; raise it to thine eye as such, like this. Now, dost see it? She’s a part of their blockade. There! Didst thou see that smoke cloud?” Then, counting out the seconds, he murmured: “One . . . two . . . three—hark!”

And that moment, the faint sound of distant exploding gunpowder came to us over the waves.

“There, Scholar, they see us now!”

“They’re not going to be a problem, are they?”

Nihil laughed—a familiar, derisive laugh. “There is no storm, neither governmental nor natural, that can stop Captain Nihil and the Star Buck! Thou hast nothing to worry about. But thou wouldest best stay low until the ordeal is sorted.”

Nihil said nothing more to me, but instead turned to the sea and watched the incoming ship, her billowing sails, and the unfurling clouds fast approaching, and life seemed to animate that body which had been so cold not too long ago.

Brief, sharp, unintelligible exclamations surfaced among the sailors. Where Nihil now was in mind, I could not say. Despite my desire to find out more about him, his ship, and his crew, the task ahead monopolized his thoughts and did not allow me to get any meaningful responses. When normal interrogatives failed, I tried guile. I told him that I was doing a corpus study on the Fillydelphian Coastal Dialect, and if he had any papers or writings he didn’t mind my seeing, it would greatly help in my research. He nodded a vague assent and levitated out of his cloak’s pocket a large key ring.

“Take my room,” he mumbled. “I won’t be sleeping tonight.”

I hastily grabbed the key ring with my own magic before he had the opportunity to change his mind. Before quitting him entirely, I turned back to look. Nihil stood, with a forehoof on the gunwale, watching the approaching vessel. Though his crew yelled, rushed to their stations, their moving bodies continually blocking my view of him, he stood unperturbed, his body undulating only with the rhythms of his ship. There was something almost like a twinkle in his eyes, turned as they were on the enemy in the distance.

But before I slunk away, I caught Flask as she was passing by the mainmast and accosted her in a voice that even I, the moment the words left my mouth, thought was brusque and indecorous:

“When do we eat?”

“Eat?” she drawled incredulously. “Thou insinuatest thyself on board gratis, but ’tis not enough? Now thou wantest a meal? What creature art thou, such as to have been born with an audacity like thine, which maketh thee think that question be apposite at a time like this?”

“I’m hungry,” was all I could offer.

“Dost thou think that we carry stores to dole out to those who do not pay, who are still unable, and who still do not offer?”

“But Captain Nihil said—”

“Bah! Whether thou be a stowaway, or the owner as the captain insisteth, the Star Buck is not a luxury liner. Food cometh not ere we be safe, too tired to row, and Mare fill not our sails with her blessings for work. Thou wilt not starve.”

I wanted to protest, but at that moment her attention was drawn away to something she judged to be more important than I.

I hadn’t eaten the entire day. My mind was becoming fogged. I could think about nothing but food, what to eat, when to eat, and how to get it. I tried to turn to other things, to take in the sights and sounds of ponies preparing to give battle; though their voices were more coarse and overbearing than seagulls’ caws, still they failed to take my mind away from food. I tried to recall paradigms and declensions, but they were muddied and sifted through the images of fresh meat.

I nearly sprinted down the stairs to the lower decks, for if I’d stayed any longer on the surface, I would’ve hurled myself overboard in search of a fish or two.

Flask gave her orders. If the crew were paying attention, they’d have noticed that her voice was much quieter and somewhat distracted. But the prospect of giving battle, of the opportunity to use the new fourpounders, the use of which the peaceful waters near Equestria rarely gave them the opportunity, distracted them equally as much externally and she was internally, and they did not heed her tone, only followed the literal import of her words.

“Topgallant!” she cried, at length. “Present thyself!”

A unicorn with a row of rings through one ear at once leaped in front of her and stood still. Flask did not speak at once, but stared off into the distance. Her subordinate looked too, trying to see what the mate had cast her eyes on, but saw nothing material. The unicorn’s knees twitched, as though yearning for the touch of a cannon.

“Ms. Flask? Calledest thou?”

“Aye.”

“What dost thou ask?”

She stepped closer. “Wouldest thou . . . wouldest thou be able to subdue a stallion if it be required of thee?”

“Aye, Ms. Flask. As thou thyself wouldest know, a mare would not fare well on the shores of Fillydelphia, much less on the Star Buck, have she not that ability. She’d be very unhappy otherwise.” When Flask didn’t respond, Topgallant spoke again, a cruel grin spreading on her face: “Is there a certain somepony who hath captured thy heart and to whom for thee thou needest me to put in a good word?”

“Aye . . . well, nay . . . I don’t know yet. But if I need thee, say, tonight, wouldest thou assist?”

“Ah, of course, of course!” she replied, laughing. “I gather thy import. Doth the lucky fellow have only us to please him, or will he need more?”

“I can’t say . . . maybe I’ll call your brother Flying Jib. We’ll want to be methodical about this . . . but, away, away to thy station! Let me not impede thy mind with the future danger. Concentrate on this first problem.”

And when Topgallant left, Flask added, to herself: “The first, and possibly, the less pernicious.”


*


Narrow, dark, damp, slanted corridors interweaved each other. Only the occasional lantern burned here and there, choking and wavering as it tried to thrive in this humid environment. The rain was upon the ship now, and the hallways listed as she battled the disturbed waves.

The rooms and decks were unmarked. Most of the doors were opened, which exposed rooms filled with bunk beds (“berths,” in the sailors’ terminology) and dirty linen strewed over the floor. In another room were tools: top-mauls hung neatly on racks, harpoon shafts and poles entangling themselves in webs across the floor, life preservers, etc.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. A quick glance inside these rooms convinced me that there was nothing of interest. I came upon a locked door at the end of the crew’s quarters and opened it with a key; it was a room the same size as the others, but in this was a single bed and a small desk. The location of the room, its size, the variety of articles strewed about it—and, most of all, a peculiar aroma, not so much a physical smell as a pervading aura about the room . . . it was the mate’s quarters. I knew there was nothing I needed to see here, and any attempt to scrounge the room would be invidious to whoever did so; the atmosphere communicated that to me.

So I walked on. There were no more rooms on this deck. On the lower decks, there was even less. I came across the empty mess, and the mere sight of it was enough to remind me of my hunger. My thoughts were becoming muddied with exhaustion. Just find Nihil’s cabin, I thought; find Nihil’s cabin, and then find something to eat.

It was on the lowest level of the ship, beneath the level of the water. A solitary lantern burned at the foot of the stairs. Long, angular, murky shadows tongued the depth of the hallway. I raised the lantern from its holster, cradled it against the humidity in the air, and moved forward, every so often stopping to pause, my ears perked up, wondering if what I heard were footsteps above or water seeping through the cracks in the walls.

There were no offshoots on this deck, nor were there any doors. It was a narrow hallway, which slanted downward and seemed to grow tighter as it moved on. The lantern flickered, gasping for air, and the impenetrable, unfathomable blackness in the apex of the cone cast by the light made my eyes blur.

At the end was a single door. I inserted the key; when I turned it, tumblers sounded somewhere, distant and murky.

A single berth was in the corner, a chair and a writing desk in another. To the eyes, it was just a normal, spacious cabin—but the nose inhaled sweat that permeated the air; the ears were scratched with the creaking of the bed used to a specific weight; and the tongue tasted the anxiety, the wrath, and the capriciousness. . . . It was certainly Nihil’s room.

I sat down at the desk, lit the deformed, half-used candle on the table with what was left of the flame from my lantern, unlocked the drawers, and started leafing through his papers. But aside from his strange stylization of the letter s, which he uſed as ſuch whenever the letter began a word or was in the middle of it, there was nothing that gave me any hints to who he was. His diary, or log, was there; it had the usual records apposite to a ship: dates launched, headings, speeds, etc. Interspersed with it all were Nihil’s feelings, fears, and reservations. But with no context to them, the words spiraled out of control as they reflected the incomprehensible agitations of his mind, and left me only with more questions. I could find no personal letters. Who was he? Where did he come from? What about him and his aura bespoke of feelings so familiar? Why did he shroud everything away, not even leaving a trace of it in his personal journal as evidence to uncover his mystery?

There were some other letters and documents in the desk, but I couldn’t concentrate. Not only had his words put me in such a state of consternation, but they were powerless to distract me now from my hunger. It had reached the point where I wasn’t in control of myself anymore. Nothing mattered but a meal. I swore at the consequences of rummaging for food and sneered at the seemingly irrelevant possibilities of risk.

I left the cabin and went back to the deck where the mess was. It was a small, simply furnished area with a few tables and chairs, all out of place and misaligned due to the listing of the ship. In the galley, however, there was nothing on the shelves or in the cupboards. Frantically, getting dizzier by the moment, I scrounged, looking for anything. I clawed at a closed door near the galley for about ten seconds, trying to pry it open, before I remembered that I could just unlock it with a key from the ring.

It was the pantry. Around the floor’s area were upright wooden barrels, sealed shut, with no visible way to open them. No matter, I thought, with an odd sort of smile: there is no substance harder than a changeling’s tooth and no edge sharper than the points of his canines.

I dropped my facade and immediately plunged a canine into the top of the first barrel I saw. The wood split with a crack; my tooth sank into the resulting hole, but still the general integrity of the barrel was unmolested, and the surface resisted the pivots of my canine. I released my grip; and, after repeating this sawing process a few score times, I managed to cut a very jaggedly circular hole in the top of the barrel.

I was exhausted, but pleased, ready to fill my impressing stomach with the reward it deserved. But when I turned the barrel over, only dried, withered turnips spilled out! The smell was enough to make me gag.

I went to another barrel; after twice the time I’d spent on the first one, I opened the second—and in here were only carrots. I was hungry enough to try one; I chewed and swallowed painfully, in tears, and when it was done, I had not the courage to try another.

I was halfway through the lid of the third barrel when there was a sickening crack that split my skull, a sharp pain; and I fell away as though struck down, seeing in horror that my canine had remained stuck upright in the barrel’s wood.

Desperate, and in a panic, I leaped to my feet. I was convinced if I didn’t find something to eat, I would not survive the night.

Just then, I saw, in the corner of the pantry, a short chest secured with a padlock. I threw myself desperately against it and fumbled with the key for an agonizing minute before the lock finally released and the chest came open.

Here, there were canned foods, peas, beans, and more wretched, indigestible plants. But, underneath it all, was a glass bottle, fat at the bottom and with a skinny neck, secured with a cork, which contained a good amount of a translucent brown liquid. It was more out of ease of getting to that liquid than out of desire to taste it that I popped off the cork and swallowed a mouthful of the bottle’s contents. It was only once the liquid had made its way to my stomach that I gagged—the bitter concoction had left a strange aftertaste in my mouth and had burned my esophagus on the way down. But, after the initial revulsion was gone, a strange, pleasant sensation effused through me, first from my stomach, then to my chest, my shoulders, my head. My hunger, though still persistent, didn’t seem to matter as much to me anymore. I didn’t know what was in the liquid, whether it was nutrients or some trick of chemicals, but it was the only thing in the pantry that had mollified my anxiety to any extent. So I finished off the rest of the bottle; every swallow burned less than the last.

When the bottle was empty and I stood up to make my next course of action, the room seemed to me thrown from its foundation. I took a step toward the door, stumbled, and knocked over a few barrels. The ship was listing, I thought, through the waves, through the storm that I’d seen brewing earlier. In this condition, I couldn’t look for anything else. I could barely think; my thoughts became confused, distracted, and wandered away untamed by my will.

I’d forgotten where I’d put the lantern, and I didn’t want to start looking for it. I stumbled through the decks, wandered about for what seemed like a year in the darkness, trying to find the stairs, and once or twice almost broke my neck when I encountered them.

At length, I made it back to Nihil’s room. The papers were there, where I’d left them, but the words appeared to me immaterial and irrelevant, and the thought of trying to read and dissect them at the moment made me nauseated. Instead, I collapsed, quite apart from myself, on the bed, as though in a faint, and slept—a hard, sound, deep slumber; the humidity and warmth made their way to my brain, and confused my dreams into bizarre, strange, and happy images.