1
Silverfin and the
Red Pirate King
One night as I lay on my bed, I lay so fast asleep,
When the thought of my true love came running to my head.
And poor sailors that sail on the deep.
?Traditional Folk Ballad
DESPITE HIS NAME, SILVERFIN did not have a silver tail. His tail was still quite striking, if he did say so himself, a tawny gray with dark stripes much like the large predatory fish that swam in the corals where he lived, near the vast landmass that the first bipeds had calledXaymaca. But it was certainly not silver, a fact which rather irked him at times and was the subject of many a raised eyebrow. Unfortunately, a name passed down from your father and his father before that was rather hard to shake.
What Silverfindidhave was an unfortunate preoccupation with pirates. Which was also rather hard to shake.
He wasn't the only one of the merfolk to seek out the presence of bipeds. But there was little satisfaction for him in playing games with fishermen or hanging around in great seaports.
Not when there were grand sea battles to behold.
Not when he could scale the side of a boarded prize and peek through the portholes at the epic battles that were waged aboard. He would hang there, his tail stroking the slippery, wetside of the hull, safe in the knowledge that beneath him was the sea, and the sea was his home.
That is, until the day he saw the Red Pirate King. That wasn’t his name (and, truth be told, Silverfin couldn’t be bothered with biped names), but rather what Silverfin had called him inside his mind, on account of his hair. It was the color that one sees in some coral reefs on the algae, or when it washed ashore to be dried by the sun, and laid there in beautiful, golden threads.
It would have made magnificent merfolk hair. Not as beautiful as Silverfin’s, of course. His hair was long and lush, flowing all the way down to his scales, and had been the envy of the seven seas.
Then again, bipeds weren’t generally known to be very attractive. Their fleshy, knobby, scrawny lower limbs had none of the beauty and grace of a mer-fin. Not to mention the strange, flapping phallus that dangled between their legs like some repulsive barnacle.
Bipeds were grotesque, but part of Silverfin was convinced that the Red Pirate King must have been a man apart. The clothes he covered himself with hugged the curves of his body like a second skin and were of obviously higher quality than those of the men under his command. On deck, he exuded authority, his very presence glorious like the sun. In battle, he fought with unrestrained ferocity, cutting down foes with sure strokes of shining steel. And in private....
Ah, in private. Silverfin felt a rush of pleasure at thoughts of the nights he'd sat on the hull outside the king's cabin, peeking through the windows. Even with those strange “legs” he couldn't help but admire the pirate's body, the strength in his bare chest, also adorned with that silken, golden hair. The cloth thatcovered these strange “legs” made them look glorious, hugging the curves of his rump, pulling along his muscles as he moved across the cabin.
Silverfin had spent hours watching the king alone, his attention focused on the flimsy paper and leather collections of writing that bipeds called “books,” his face peaceful and handsome in its serenity.
Surely the Pirate King read tales of the same thrilling battles Silverfin so loved to behold. After all, how else would he have become so good at them? Perhaps there were even tales of battle on land, though Silverfin couldn't imagine how that could possibly be nearly half as exciting, with the combatants trapped on the restrictive plane of ground. Or perhaps the tales he read weren't of battles at all, but of people; of biped kings and queens, or powerful goddesses, or lovers, tangled in an impassioned embrace.
Sometimes the thoughts of what those flimsy books might contain was almost as enthralling as the Red Pirate King himself. Sadly, the few that Silverfin had managed to recover after shipwrecks inevitably disintegrated under water before he could read them himself.
But the Red Pirate King’s face was not always peaceful. At times, those lovely eyes that reminded Silverfin of the color of the shallows at sunset would grow dim. A faraway look would settle over the Pirate King’s features, a profound melancholy the cause of which Silverfin could not plunder.
He longed to. But of course, he could never dare reveal himself long enough to speak to the one who had so captured his imagination. And even if he had, what would he say? The reason that merfolk had been so successful over the years -stealing from those who stole, at sinking ships, and acquiring lost treasures - was that their very existence was shrouded in myth. To reveal himself was to doom all merkind.
And so, Silverfin would swim away, away from the coast of Port Royal, away from the hull of theOrca, down among the corals and the floating kelp, to his own kingdom where bipeds were fish food and Mami Wata reigned supreme.
Coming to Port Royal - taking on this identity, becoming a pirate - had always been hopeless. If Captain Hawk was to be entirely honest with himself, which was in no way his forte, he’d have to admit that finding a life where he might possibly be happy again had been a dream from the very beginning.
From the moment he had set foot into that boat that took him away from London, he had been dying a little bit more each day. Not in the way that was measured by 'time, with its bending sickle's compass' and so on, but in a way that ate at you each day, like the waves eroding at the foundations as they batter it. So too Samuel Wilkins’ soul had been battered, thrown and smashed upon the rocks, and from its ashes had risen Captain Hawk, a spectre, a shadow of a man.
At times he could push it aside, forget his pain in the savagery of the hunt, the bloodlust of battle. The things that gave Hawk power. But he couldn't help but think in quiet moments, that it only made things worse. That each prize the men took under his command sent him deeper into Hawk and took away a little more of the man he had been. The man Lucas had loved.
What would Lucas think of him now?
Lucas.
Hawk closed his eyes with a shudder of pain, remembering when the heat that had pressed to his lips was Lucas' mouth instead of the bottle. On a night like tonight, he'd have been in Lucas' bed, heated limbs tangled together as they gave in to their deep, abiding need for each other.
Lucas had made Hawk feel truly alive for the first time from the moment their eyes had met, lifted him from the gray mundane of the everyday and made him believe that his life could be more. Under Lucas' touch, Hawk's body sang, bright with golden happiness.
