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sea legs – When a sailor can walk comfortably on a moving ship.

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TWO MORE MEN had tried to grab her, Jack was sure of it. And they would have done, had she not been savvy like her mother taught her. She left the treehouse every day the sun was up, and pickpocketed in the normal clustering of daily shoppers in the Fish Market. She sometimes carried a basket she'd found in an alley. The basket made it look like she was somebody’s child and with a task to do. They didn’t suspect her when she dropped her basket in front of them, pretending to have sprained an ankle. While they helped her gather up her old clothes that had spilled from the basket, she plucked their purses.

The first man to try to hurt her had snatched her wrist and dragged her into an alley to beat her. He’d gone to hit her and was surprised when he discovered she wasn't a boy. He started laughing, and between that and her screaming it attracted at least one bearded sailor coming up from the docks, limping from gout or something. He dropped his duffle and ran at the man to chase him off. Jack didn’t even thank the sailor, she just picked up her thing and ran off.

The second time hadn’t been nearly as close, but the tall, smelly sailor with a cloudy white eye had followed her for almost an hour, into The Golden Goose and away from it, down to the docks and to the Merchant Exchange, then to the Turtle Crawles. She finally lost him when she walked up to a brig called the Apollo and stood in line of sailors waiting to go up the gangplank. She pretended to be a cabin boy prepatingto leave. When she finally lost sight of the white-eyed man, Jack felt she had pushed her luck enough for one day and returned (on a circuitous route) to the treehouse.

The whole journey back she had to keep pulling up her pants. She was wasting away, and the belt around her waist could tighten no more. It wasn’t just difficult to get food for herself, everyone was struggling. “Oi! Where’s the cattle what the governor promised?!” was a cry heard often in the markets. And “Ain’t we ever going to see the fruits from Antigua that was s’pposed to be brought in last week?!” and “Oi! They’re hoarding all the fish up in the forts, ain’t they?! They must do, for how else d’ye explain the shortage?!”

There had been fights in the markets. And lines of people waiting to get their share of the fish brought in each day. Those lines were monitored by steely-eyed militiamen who walked about with cocked hats and muskets with bayonets. Jack dared not get in those lines without a parent.

On her way out of Port Royal, she swung by Mr. Cowert’s place. None of his neighbours had seen him, he might have died during the last Long Night when some claimed to have seen more of those Beasts moving between alleys. She had already mourned Mr. Cowert. She took the candle she had stolen from The Dashing Inn and lighting it over her parents’ graves. She hadn’t cried. She was too weak to cry and had not much left in her tear ducts besides.

And now as she ascended the rope ladder she held the pistol Mr. Cowert had given her, and walked through the house to make sure no monster or man was waiting on her, then pulled up the ladder and stowed it away. Then, a bright, shimmering light moved across the sky, and when she looked up she saw the clouds moving unnaturally fast under an unfamiliar pink-and-grey moon. Then she turned and looked south, where, in the corner of her eye, she’d spotted a small, crescent, green moon nearing the horizon.

Jack heard screaming from Port Royal. Men, women and children all realizing what she had just realized. It was to be another Long Night.

Too weak to care, too weak to lament for anything but her poor starving belly, Jack walked into the treehouse and when she felt her pants falling off her hips she let them puddle at her feet. She drank the water from her canteen. Water was the only plentiful thing in all of Port Royal, it seemed. And as she listened to panicking townsfolk rushing home to hide from the Long Night, and the pistols fired into the sky by drunken sailors, and the whistles and horns of the King’s Militia trying to bring about order, Jack stared at nothing and fell asleep.

____

When she woke up, it could have been morning or it could have been night. How can there ever be mornin’ when there’s no sun? she thought. What is time? Do we have time anymore, or does it disappear with the sun, and return with it? The questions of a child that bordered on the philosophical musings of an adult. Not much difference, really. Jack didn’t notice this change in herself, only the hunger that was always there like a rock. A stinging rock that sank lower in her gut and now when she scratched her ribs she could feel each of them in detail, could fit a finger between them.

There came a knocking sound. Jack opened her eyes and looked around, sensing a headache forming. A headache from hunger, no doubt. And the knocking continued, not rhythmic at all, more like intermittent. She sat up and even that felt exhausting. She picked up the pistol and pulled back the hammer and walked outside to the wraparound porch, where the sound emanated.

When the knocking happened again, she peered over the rail and looked at the source. Two small boys with brown or black skin. She gasped. Except for headbands and body paint they were naked, and they had what appeared to be a rope with a rock attached at the end, and they were throwing it up at her porch hoping to wrap it around the railing.

“Who are you? Go away!” she said, pointing her pistol down at them.

They stared up at her. The two alien moons gave their white eyes ghostly glow. One of them spoke, and it was in the most incomprehensible tongue. She knew at once they were Caribee, natives that had been here before even the Spanish came to settle. That was the tale her mother told her. There were few of them left in Jamaica but they were all throughout the Caribbean islands, and rowed small boats up and down rivers and even sometimes across the sea.

“Go away!” she said again.

One of the boys opened his mouth and stuck his fingers in it, miming eating.

“No, I don’t have any food. Now go away!”

But they did not leave. Indeed, they kept trying to throw the rope up and it kept bouncing off the bottom of the porch, falling all the way back to the jungle floor. They would dance out of the way, reel in the slack, and try again.

“I mean it!” she said, pointing the pistol at them. And she did. And she was about to fire when she heard rustling in the forest.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The two boys looked behind them and greeted a third boy who held something in his arms, something fat and squirming. Jack’s stomach nearly throttled her when she realized what it was. A pig. A big, black, fat pig that was so heavy the third little boy could barely hold it up. She knelt on the edge of the porch and peered down at them. The first two boys once again put their fingers in their mouths.

They weren’t asking her for food. They were offering her their food.

Or were they?

Hunger makes men stupid. That was her father’s ghost speaking to her. He’d spoken of the days before he had his sea legs, back when he and the men of the Copper-lick had been becalmed for almost two full weeks. No wind, no rain. Some had thirsted with lips so dry they cracked and bled. And hunger made them see things on the horizon, phantom ships on the horizon that disappeared as soon as you blinked. It made men argue over rations, made them draw weapons on each other. Nearly made them kill.

Jack had never wanted to trust three strangers more in all her life, but she that if she threw down the rope ladder she was giving them an easy means to attack her. They looked old enough to do evil things. How old did boys have to be to do such evil things? She didn’t want to find out.

But her stomach clenched, and she felt almost nauseous. It was a strange feeling, this starvation. You wanted to eat but at the same time the thought of eating made you sick. Sometimes the hunger evaporated into a grey fog of endless thought and suffering and you became numb to every sensation. And yet when you saw food you felt pulled towards it, compelled to do hellish things, obscene things, if only to sate your belly.

Her hand was on the rope ladder. The three boys nodded eagerly, gesturing for her to come down and join them in eating the pig. The pig squealed in the other boys arms and to Jack’s ears it sounded so sweet, like the promise of life.

Then, the boy out front did something so shocking that it temporarily pulled Jack out of grey nothingness and made her question if she was dreaming. He pulled out a dagger, and knelt. He put the blade to the right side of his head and it glimmered in green moonlight. With his left hand he pulled down on his ear. Then with a swift outward slash he cut off the lobe of his ear and tossed it into the jungle. He stood up, bleeding, showing no pain, and flung the knife up onto the porch, where it landed a few feet away from Jack.

The night stood still. The pig squealed. The boys didn’t move and neither did Jack.

The wounded boy stood there, bleeding, looking up at her with plaintive eyes. He pointed north, into the jungle.

Jack did not know when her hands began moving, but before she knew it they had lifted the rope ladder and flung it down, and then her feet betrayed her and she began descending. She looked at them, half expecting to be killed or eaten. In this dream-like state she almost didn’t care anymore.

The boy with the cut ear pointed again north. Into the jungle. Jack started that way and they followed her.

____

The boys knew how to roast a pig as good as any white man Jack had ever seen. The fire had not been going when they reached their campsite, but there was a pit already prepared, with kindling ready to go. The boy who had cut his ear used a bow-drill to start the fire, while the other two tossed punk onto it and blew into it. The pig squealed as the boys held it down, and the words they chanted chilled Jack to the bone for some reason. They cut its throat cleanly and swiftly, and as it fell dying in gouts of blood the boys danced around it and sang up to the alien moon, as though this had been done in its honor. After singing some strange song, they tied the pig’s legs together and rammed the steak through the opening in its neck and out its backside quicker than any men she’d seen do it.

They gave her water and some bread while she waited. The bread had dried fruits and herbs baked it, which made her think this wasn’t theirs. She didn’t think the Caribee even knew how to make bread. So they stole this. Probably stole the pig, too.

It did not matter. The Hunger did not care where any of it came from, the Hunger was an absolute authority and took what was needed, and she ate what they gave her, slowly, until the pig was deemed ready and slices were cut off and passed around. One of the boys had a leather satchel that held various supplies, and he passed around wooden bowls.

Their three sets of eyes glittered in flickering firelight as they stared and watched her eat. She ate ravenously, occasionally glancing at the painted symbols on the boys’ arms and faces. They watched her the same way she watched them, like they were creatures spat up from the Long Night, alien, perhaps monsters.

One of them came near and slowly reached out to touch her hair. Jack became scared and jumped away. They looked old enough to do evil things. Plenty old enough. But the boy held up his hands as if to placate her. Then the boy who had cut his ear stood up and hissed at the other, argued with him, and gesticulated strangely with his hands. Chastened, the boy that had approached her sat back down.

And now they continued watching her.

Jack thought about running, but the Hunger controlled her now and she move tentatively back to her spot by the fire and continued eating.

They watched her all night. They watched her until she huddled near a tree and drew her knees to her chest and hugged her knees and fell asleep watching the fire.

____

She awoke to music. And pain. Not agony, but just a cramp in her stomach. She might have eaten too much. But when she looked around she became frightened for many naked men and women were frolicking around her, all carrying spears and clubs, shouting and ululating. The three boys were knelt by the fire. They each held statues in their hands. Each statue was the size of their heads and appeared to be carved out of stone. They held them up high over the fire. The statues were terrifying faces of men with their tongues hanging out and with jagged teeth.

Jack tried to stand, but she was a little weak. The Hunger had not quite abated, the food had not had time to fully energize her body, and her stomach was getting used to the process again. She wobbled, and fell to her knees. She stood up again and started to walk away from the fire.

Then she heard screaming, and felt a hot wind. That wind stunk like dead fish. The wind came from behind her and rattled the trees. The leaves and grass shivered and that stench grew. When Jack looked back, she nearly screamed. Something had come crawling out of the jungle, something on the far side of the firepit. It was big. Trees split and fell like weeds as it came trudging up to the firepit, up to the three boys. Jack saw only its face, a terrifying visage with many eyes and many mouths, and yet none of the Caribee fled. Indeed, they dropped to their knees in rapture and swayed like how her father told her seaweed did in a gentle current.

The Monster approached one boy, and held out a long, tenebrous, stalk-like arm, its three fingers pointy like a spider’s. The hand hung above the boy’s head, and the tribespeople all went quiet with anticipation. Jack stopped running, stunned, apparently dreaming. Then that huge hand plucked the boy off the ground, broke him in half, and emptied his innards into its many chittering mouths.

Jack didn’t scream. She couldn’t scream. But a small gasp might have escaped, because some of the tribespeople turned towards her. She dashed into the night, in the direction she hoped was home.

____

That night she did not return to the treehouse. Instead she slept in Port Royal, in the alley behind Mr. Cowert’s shop. The pistol was in her hands. She woke up sometimes thinking it had been a dream. She gazed up at the alien stars and the alien moon and she realized it was just as likely that he previous life had been a dream, that her father had never been a sailor and had never died at sea, and that her mother had simply never been her mother at all.

She looked at an ant crawling along her arm. Maybe she was that ant, and only dreaming that she had been Jacqueline Weekes. Jack. Whoever. She heard gunfire, and someone screamed. Three or four militiamen ran down her alley to see about it. They ran right past her, one of them even stepped on her hand. None of them saw, or if they did they didn’t care.

Two men were getting drunk somewhere nearby and singing chanties. They called out to a woman, a whore, and Jack heard them flirting with her. She gave a yelp and a giggle and then they made the most awful sounds.

She fell asleep.

A dog woke her up by licking up water from a puddle nearby. It was one of the dogs that had followed her a few days ago. And soon his friends joined him and they all curled up near her.

There was another shot fired somewhere else in Royal.