Out of Soundings

I am oft misnamed a god, but among my mortal shortcomings one certainty proclaims itself the most plainly: a god cannot starve. I am famished to the point of death.

I know it is September by the upset stomach of the North Sea, by her grinding teeth and grey muscle. Having long lost count of the turning tides since my last feed, I've taken to tracking the passing moons instead. I hear the warnings bellowed between sun-freckled sailors on the shores of Orkney to heed my outline in shallow waters, but I am not so close. Ever too much air. I tread as deep and as long as my lungs allow, prowling the storied passage north to Norway. I am alone, 'til the ships which bear my feast. Then alone again.

The cries of those men - Manannán mac Lir! Sàbhail mi, a Dhia na mara - their barters with me, the Son of the Sea, their god, to spare them, hit me wetly and land uselessly with them in that bloody pile at the base of my throat. I am as earthborn as them, as breathless and creatural. Only hungrier.

The hunger breeds the song that brings him to me. September's storms churn me back and forth, knock my ribs loose in my chest. The emptiness wails and escapes, sounds of pure yearning from my lips. Cold, electrical. My siren songs float over every deaf ear until they find purchase in his chest. My fated, anam cara. He hears me, and he comes.

They say Magnus Drever is away with himself, and maybe he is. Flett's concerned more over the state of their shared vessel than the wavering sense of his friend. Their small-decked cutter is seaworthy for fair-weather work; the usual merchant routes Magnus tends or Flett's fishing. Aye, not this. These queer gales, the sleet slicing sideways through frigid air... it's fierce enough on the shores, nevermind open sea. Still, Magnus, tight-lipped and steely, runs a weathered hand over rigging with an arresting sturdiness.

With Magnus nearly two decades Flett's junior at thirty-one and half his stature, stopping him from setting out should've been a cinch even if it came to blows (though that's scarcely Flett's style). But there's a conviction about the younger sailor bordering unworldly, a set to his shoulders and a frenzied snarl to his efforts that’s sent Flett's hand drifting toward his crucifix more than once.

"She won't sail," his teeth grind with the effort to subdue the cresting wave of dread as he takes the scene in dockside, their cutter's heavy storm canvas billowing with an unsettling ferocity. The horizon is hazy and nearly brown with the promise of a fierce squall out of the North.

Magnus only widens his stance at the helm, coughs and spits into the sea. "I'll not be gone long," he says for the fourth time by Flett's count. "Just enough to quiet it."

Instead of delving any deeper into the perplexing back-and-forth of the previous two evenings, Flett resigns to the heavy silence between them. The damp fog from his breathy prayers barely makes it over his own head before being blown apart into frigid sea air.

He knows from the harried whispers between their wives that Magnus has not slept in three nights. That he paces the hearth by the room where his children sleep, worries bitten-down nails through the salty strings of his own hair. Pulls out rust-coloured clumps and scrapes at his ears. By day he stumbles like a drunkard through the cobbled streets and falls to his knees at the shoreline, his wide chest heaving in desperate, barely contained sobs. To any passerby expressing anxiety over him Magnus only gives a reproachful, bitter stare. It's as if the man was pleading until his voice went hoarse, yet no one could hear what he begged for.

Others may have been driven away by this episode - all but Flett. A loyal comrade years gone and somewhat of a mentor to Magnus besides. Always prided himself on his patience, the godliness of his ability to outlast, to forgive. And surely, he reasons, a sudden bout of madness might be forgiven. But Lord knows, for the sake of their families, the loss of their boat would not be. So on that bleary morning he surrenders to Magnus's brute determination to sail, that iron will bent toward death. Flett boards the cutter unnoticed and stows away in the cramped lower deck. Tucked in with knees to his chest, he holds in trembling hands the sole hope of speaking some sense into his friend before they're borne too far north. Clings to that, and his cross.

I know Magnus has long understood that he alone hears my song. Gone are the pleading glances left and right to somebody, anybody nearby for a sign that my voice reaches them, too - that the core of their being also shudders violently with absurd need, a calling, at the lilt of my melody. Finfolk are a fantastical legend among the North Sea people, though the God-fearing ones keep their distance from us as we do from them. But for his own reasons, Magnus Drever fears no god. And I knew the moment my voice touched his ears that no angels stood between us. So then, he became mine.

I tread south to him in long, laboured strokes. The effort of swimming and calling at once slows me; hunger reaps at each of my senses until I fear that Magnus may overpower me. Though stretching out my tail alone spans nearly the length of his vessel, I can no longer ignore the sinking of my cheeks, the inward collapse of my torso. The slightest hitch of my breath perceptible in my neck. All the while he pulses harder with life the closer we get; adrenaline fizzes out of his pores like sea foam. I vocalize my need and he hears me, his muscles pumping harder in response.

Magnus works his cutter by instinct alone. His years take the helm amidst the deluge and his boat remains afloat, due North. Ease, haul, cleat. Grey day by black night. At the precipice of each green, surly crest slamming in, the cutter breaks it on her bow and leans into the gust at his command. Then back, taking it on the quarter and driving on. Crystals of dirty white shake from his boots as he shoves ballast back into place through the lurch. I howl with the storm and he answers by riding her faster still.

It's not quite sleep that comes over Magnus at last. When his broad shoulders finally slump and his chin dips to his chest, his feet are still planted firmly at the helm and legs held strong. His head snaps back up with a start and salt spray pricks his eyes when the tiller wrenches in his grip. With the distance between us closing I try to extend my voice to rouse him, spread my tendrils even further into his brain to keep him from collapsing. Alas, he's fading faster than me now and needs another shot of adrenaline. A shock.

That's when I know I have to draw him out. Flett's journey thus far has been wrought with disorientation, panic, his own sick. Every time he thought it the right time to show himself and command their cutter home, he's drawn further inward with fear when he hears his old friend cry out, or throw himself across the deck like a man possessed. The fisherman's exhausted every prayer he knows - I can tell because each one is like a set of claws piercing my chest and dragging down, and it’s not ‘til the moment it finally stops I can take a full breath again.

My voice is upon him the moment his protections yield. Only instead of song, I fill the cracks of his brain with a searing torment; I howl brokenly into him, and let it flow out of his own mouth unbidden, without breath until he is writhing, scratching at the larch surrounding him and drawing blood from his nails. At the commotion, my sailor turns his head.

The hatch is ripped open and there, entangled among netting and casks, wriggles a man Magnus should know by sight alone. But the sound that comes from the creature below is ghastly, satanic. At the strain of this I can feel my hold on the younger man slip for a moment, and it's then that he grabs Flett by the sweat-soaked collar and hoists him up, bewildered into silence. His hold is strong and sure but his eyes give him away, searching frantically among the keening, feverish heap in his grasp for any familiarity. A single sign that his oldest friend, his brother, is still within. That this is even him at all.

Whatever Magnus searches his face for in that moment - beyond the bursting blood vessels, the tongue bitten to shreds - he does not find. And then at once, he realizes: all he hears is anguish. His own breath coming in ragged, desperate heaves. And Flett's, though his hold on the man's neck leaves him with little more than a wheeze. What he cannot hear is my song.

Shrinking away from him, even for the briefest of moments, kicks up a new agony that renders me motionless. For the duration of the encounter aboard the men’s boat, I am rocked back and forth by the freezing swells of the North Sea whilst the hunger rips me from the inside out. With my senses weakened, I cannot see the scene unfold from his eyes. Instead, it’s as if I watch from above, ascending further upward into the weeping sky. As if I’m already dead.

A humble fishing cutter, but a sole blemish upon miles and miles of unbroken angry ocean, staggers northbound as if cursed. Her sails bloated and stiff, quivering along the stays. Aboard, two bodies stumbling toward the taffrail. Entangled, petrified. One man larger than the other but collapsing inward until he appears puny, overpowered. From up here, over the wind’s howl you can scarcely hear him babble weak pleas upward, first to the man who’s backed him hard up to the rail, then higher. Through the furious weather into that mysterious serenity beyond the clouds.

The younger one, swollen with ferocity, breaks the fix of his eyes from the cowering form beneath him for only a moment. Tilts his chin up and cranes his neck so his stare sets northbound; jaw set firmly, saltwater blurring his vision. For that fleeting moment, he scours the horizon. Searches. Then, the wriggling creature in his arms bleats, and he is brought back in an instant. Without another pause, he hauls upward. The very last of the older man’s skyward prayers spiral through the air, and he is swallowed into the churning sea.

I come to him gradually, closer hour by hour as I regain my senses. The cutter strays from her due path, carried obediently by the changing winds while Magnus is suspended at the stern. Knees digging into soaked wood, he kneels with arms outstretched above his head, gripping the taffrail. Head bowed, eyes screwing shut when the sight of the passing waves threatens to keel him over. He can only listen.

My song searches for him and my body follows.

A true sailor can never lose his way. The harrowing absence of the melodies leave Magnus with only these words. Words barked at him from elder seamen when he was only a child; his father, elder shipwrights, merchant skippers, veterans in the trade. Flett. A sailor is never lost. Still, sitting in the eye of an infinite storm with his pursuit gone deadly silent, Magnus cannot conjure any other word for it. LOST pounds behind his eyes like a flare as that unrelenting, cryptic need gnaws through his body. And when at last he stands, loosens the canvas, and finds the tiller with one instinctual hand while the other wipes the salt from his face - it’s as close to a prayer as Magnus Drever has ever come. Ever my sailor, he drives on.

I feel a hot, searing shock all the way to my fingertips the moment my voice finds him again. He feels it like ecstasy, my sounds pouring through the folds of his brain like warm honey. My path fixes straight and true to him. His cutter follows his gaze north by the exact degree, as if a part of his body. And before long I can see him break through the low-hanging fog, tall and broad at the helm. I dip beneath the surface completely before his eyes can adjust to see me, and beneath the swell I close the distance between us in one deep lunge. The effort causes my heartbeat to catch and my bones to ache, but my voice only comes out stronger.

Still submerged, I circle him slowly and hum a lilting melody, almost playful despite my imminent hunger. A surge of energy seizes me as Magnus reacts, abandoning his post and stumbling to midships. As the vessel is wrenched about, he’s nearly thrown over the toprail on either side searching the sea beneath him. Where he’s finally hearing me somewhere outside the recesses of his mind. I am so near now I can feel the heat of him; the overcoming desire that sends him begging, pleading into open air. I can no longer resist him and with the very last bit of my strength I spring from the depths into the sky. Arcing my long, lithe body overhead, time is bent at my will and seconds drag by lazily, coursing like hot sap around us. My mouth drops open wide, jaw stretched taut.

And our eyes meet.

I’ve imagined the moment of purchase many times since. His skin; the soft break, his salt. I remember the sight of him underneath me. Arms outstretched, dripping face upturned, a haltingly beautiful soul, wide open. The very shape of my hunger looking up at me as though being devoured were a kindness. The man who feared no god, begging to be taken.

It was the very same moment I knew that I wouldn’t.

It was the thought of him, fragmented and cold in that pile at the base of my throat. And the thought of me, after. Unmoored. Another god-shaped thing drifting without want, without need. No music, no longing. Some vacuous chamber within me closed then, and I let my shadow slide over him as I fell downward, the sea taking back its space between us. Leaving him alive because I couldn’t bear to lose the one voice that answered mine.

Magnus Drever’s boat carries him north, and I swim south. Our distance grows and my melody becomes scarce, discordant as I fade. Slowly, the spell breaks. Certainty falls over the sailor that he cannot return home. Can’t face the new version of home that awaits him; the faces of the family he deserted, what it means to return without his friend. Bit by bit, the fog that he sails into swallows the memory of our meeting, and eventually all that remains is a vague recollection of two ships passing in the night.

Southbound in long, slow, strokes, I know that I will die before I come upon Orkney’s shores. My songs will escape me in fractals, floating without aim around the empty chamber of my body until I am no longer alive to contain them. And among those certainties - that a god cannot starve, and that a sailor cannot be lost - there will be me. The creature that did both.