He has been scrubbing at the red patches in the deck for hours, and they will not come out. All the abrasive salt in the sea will not take them out. They shift, backward and forward, in and out of perception like the lanterns of the sea peoples on their canoes far off on the horizon. Above him, the wind whistles through the empty spaces in the stiff, bone-white rigging.
The sun is throwing hot red sparks off the sea and the sea is empty, choppy with flakes of fire as far as he can see. The puddle at his feet reflects the sunburned sky.
He drops his brush back into the bucket, his knuckles raw and red with scrubbing. There is other work to do.
Beneath the canvas cover over the ship's wheel, the patchy shadows are already making it too hard to see. He grabs his bucket overflowing with limp fish, warm from the sun where their tails stick out of the water, and perches atop a pile of bleached white rope by the rail.
His long, sharp knife slides into the skin and through muscles and bone. It slides through the flesh, slitting tail to chin as easily as cutting a soft pudding. As his long fingers dance around the blade, pushing the innards out in sloshing piles onto the clean deck, blood splashes upward, staining the ends of the long white scarf wound about his neck.
He shivers, his wild gray hair trembling with a light breeze and the disappearance of the sun.
The knife still clutched in his hand, he lets the fish fall from his hand to the deck. A red puddle grows around his feet. There are dozens of eyes around him, buried deep under bushy eyebrows bleached by the sun, staring, malevolent. Warm liquid seeps down his shirt.
Perched atop the pile of rope, he lunges forward to stop the fish from sliding off the deck. He blinks hard and fast, shaking the fog from his brain, and returns to gutting the fish.
The sun has disappeared from the sky now and the sea glows softly from horizon to horizon. Bright streaks reveal schools of fish breaking the quiet of the waters. Dinner in hand, the lone shipman stands at the stern, watching the brilliant trails the ship leaves behind. The bloody ends of his scarf scratch his back lightly and he shivers again.
It was the first mate's fault, he recalls. The sea is a brutal master but that is no excuse not to keep your mouth shut. The first mate started it when he broke the law of the sea.
So the stripes on his back like the dark stripes in the water behind the boat were his fault. His own fault, for speaking and breaking the silent unspoken law of the sea...
The lone shipman leans on the rail and shivers with the feeling of a dozen eyes on his back, boring into his skin. They are worse at night—the eyes. Red and shining out of the darkness. Warmth seeping down his shirt front. He adjusts the scarf around his throat, drawing it up higher until it is hidden beneath the scraggly gray beard.
They were overreacting.
The phosphorescence slowly fades from the sea. Red spots seem to glow faintly from the scrubbed-white deck of the ship.
They rise from the planks, white figures with red eyes all looking at him. A look of determination about them like nothing he'd ever seen. Torn shirts hanging from their shoulders. Long knives gleaming in their hands. A splash as the sea consumed the case of rifles.
And the leader of the figures—shirtless, staggering, snarling across the deck.
He never thought it would happen to him.
Staggering, snarling, the first mate closes in, long knife clutched in his hand. His skin is nearly luminous.
The scarf is suffocating him, wrapped close around his Adam's apple. He claws at it, gasping.
It was the law of the sea, he protests. The sea is merciless. The sea is brutal. The sea will swallow you in one wave. The sea is a fiercer master than any man—
They don't care.
Long knives, sharp eyes, red fingers. Dozens of angry eyes. Warm wetness sliding down.
The easy slip of the blade and the pain and blackness afterward—he feels it as though for the first time.
Rigging empty, the ship somehow catches the wind and sails on over a silent and softly glowing sea.
