Treacherous Waters

The sailors finished the prayer as a chorus and Castillo headed to the captain’s quarters to have his dinner. I said amen quietly to myself. Hopefully, pride was not all I would be bringing home at the end of this quest. A title was my deepest desire. In my mind, I had been imagining what they would call me in history books one day: Luciano Mirasola, Righteous and Intelligent Navigator of Her Royal Highness’s Galleon, the Esperanza. If I was the one responsible for finding new land, perhaps I would be given this title or, better yet, a knighthood. As a knight, nothing in life would be barred to me. As a knight, life back in Europe would be heaven on earth.

The crew dug into dinner, alternating between spooning stew into their mouths like they hadn’t eaten in months and telling stories as loud as they possibly could. I ate my stew in silence, preferring to listen to the conversations of my friends instead.

“Oh yeah, back in Oporto, all the girls loved me,” Rafael was bragging on my right. He was my age, nineteen, and we had become fast friends in the first few weeks on the Esperanza. I considered him one of the most lively and confident people I had ever met in my entire life.

As he painted stories of jealous love triangles and passionate romance, I noticed a stray lentil had come to sit on the corner of his mouth, making the other men hold back chuckles. Rafael took no notice, exclaiming, “They used to say not only was I named after an angel, but that I looked like one, too.” Everyone openly laughed as he flexed his biceps and raised his eyebrows in what I supposed he hoped was a seductive manner.

“Alright, boy, that’s enough. You know they say about vanity on the sea, don’t you?” a voice called out. It was Santiago, one of our sailmakers, leaning against the mainmast just a few feet away. He was a swarthy man, thick as a bull with gold hoop in his ear just like one. He was distant from the group, literally and figuratively, never sharing opinions on anything we ever talked about until tonight.

Rafael wiped his mouth with the tail of his shirt and glanced at Santiago, eyes widening when he realized who had spoken. “N-no. What d-do they say?” Santiago lumbered towards us and sat in the midst of the larger men of the group, directly across from where I sat. His bald head shone in the setting sun’s dying rays and his dark eyes watched all of us deliberately. Waiting.

“Back when I was your age, Rafael, I worked on a ship much smaller than this one. Only twenty men, and the cooks had barely enough food for all of us. I had just become a sailmaker and it was my first real journey onto the ocean so I was still used to land life. You see, I was vain. I believed that I should be fed more than the other men because I was the youngest, the strongest, the most handsome. I needed the sustenance, not the older men who would die soon anyways.

“I began to steal food from the brig. I ate twice at day while the other men could barely have half a meal to themselves. I was sure that what I was doing was right and that it was a good thing. Then one day, the captain found me. He was furious, more than I’d ever seen him before.

‘Do you know what this means?’ he asked me. ‘No,’ I said because I thought what I was doing was right. ‘They will come for you,’ the captain said. ‘They smell your pride and they will feed off of it. They like the strong emotions: hate, fear, pride, love. It gives them strength.’ ‘Who, captain? Who will do this?’ I asked.”

He paused for a moment to take a swig from his cask. All of us were leaned in, listening with eager ears. He drank for a good minute, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and looked back up at us.

“ ‘Santiago, the sirens,’ he said. ‘They will know. They will always find you and they will feed off of what you feel the most.’ But the sirens never came. They never took me, never took my feelings. And here I am alive and well today, but I have learned my lesson: vanity is a man’s enemy.”

We all stared silently at him. Quiet sat in the air like a thick fog, blanketing our uncomfortable natures.

At last, Santiago laughed, a dark rumbling sound, and said, “You are all too serious. It was merrily a joke. That never happened, I just wanted to give you all a scare.”

Everyone gave a half chuckle, uncomfortable from the weirdness of it all. Why did Santiago suddenly have a story to tell when all the other nights on the ship he never said a word? Why was the story so detailed if it wasn’t true?

Santiago retreated back to the mainmast and chatter resumed among the men. Rafael looked at me and we both shook our heads. “That was odd,” I said, peering around Rafael to look at Santiago. He was

alone picking his nails with a knife.

“You said it. I didn’t even know he could talk!”

“Yes, that was quite the shock.”

Rafael slapped my arm. “Let’s get over it. Even if there were ‘sirens’-” he rattled his hands as if to prove how ridiculous the idea was “-they would never come for us. We’re much too skinny.”

I laughed and said, “They would probably turn us away.”

We giggled, handing off our dinner dishes to a paje, one of the young boys who did menial tasks around the ship. Rafael reached behind him and grabbed his mandolin, a treasured instrument he had since he was a child, or so he told me. Tuning it quickly, he stood up and stomped the deck twice, our ship’s sign for quiet.

“Good evening all! Tonight, I have a rather special set planned for you. My inspiration tonight comes from Santiago. I hope I do you proud, good sir.” I bit my lip to keep from laughing. I hoped in my heart that Rafael was not going to do what I thought he was. He cleared his throat and began to hum a bright and lively melody. He strummed the mandolin and sang an old seamen’s tune, bright and clear in his rich tenor voice. I felt my feet begin to twitch, tapping the beat on the deck. I stood and began to dance, feeling my body move as it had never moved before. It was like someone else was in control of my body, someone vibrant and fun, not the uptight navigator I always strived to be. The other men joined in and we formed a great circle, cavorting around Rafael and his mandolin. Only Santiago remained outside the circle, not angry or upset but more curious and intrigued.

Soon, I was the loudest singer, the most boisterous dancer. Rafael changed songs, and he began to speed up, the rhythms becoming more primal. We became shadows under the lantern lights. Each of us sang proudly, deep voices mingling with the crashing of waves. I felt that I could never come down from this high, singing and dancing like some sort of wild being.

That is, until I heard one group of voices rose above the others. It started with what I thought was the wine from dinner going to my head: the sound of a single woman’s voice singing along with the rest of us. It was clear and high, like a chime in wind, resonant for a moment but gone the next. I kept party-

Then it was a group of women singing. The voices were enchanting, seductive, and brilliant like crystals. I saw the other men hearing the voices, too; their faces were confused but they still danced and sang regardless. The women began to get louder, to the point where many of us stopped singing. Eventually, not a man’s voice graced the air, and the only sound piercing the night were the voices of hundreds of women.

It was eerie and captivating at the same time. There were no women on the ship whatsoever, let alone hundreds. The breathy voices harmonized, cold and distant but so, so mesmerizing. They all sounded desperate, as though they mourned something.

“What is this?” I whispered.

No one answered but a few shushed me. Where were the voices coming from?

In an instant, all of the lanterns on the ship were out, dark as the rest of the night. There was no moon but a soft silver glow emanated from the water around the ship. Part of me wanted to check what it was but I found my legs hard to move, as though they were encased in honey. My mind was in a stupor, the allure of the voices drowning out my own thoughts. A thick, milky fog suddenly surrounded the boat and wrapped itself like a blanket around me and the other sailors. I could not see a single thing but the whiteness of the fog and occasional sparks of a glowing light. My mind only heard the song and it soon became my only thought. I knew that should the song stop, I would too. I needed to hear that song like I needed to breathe, like I needed to get back home to… who did I need to get back home to? It like hours, days, maybe even weeks passed before the fog swirled away. My thoughts cleared sufficiently, but no amount of thought could explain where I was. I stood in a gigantic throne room with an ivory floor and glittering marble walls. Swaths of sapphire fabric were draped across the walls and a long black carpet snaked across the length of the room. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, covered in pearls and sea glass. At the front of the room was an incredible dais topped by an ornate throne. In the oddest way, the throne seemed as though it was made solely for me. I knew somewhere deep within me that sitting there was where I belonged.

I crossed the room slowly. No one else was around and the room had no exits or entrances but for the giant windows in the ceiling of the room. I couldn’t see anything outside the windows, just cold white light. I trudged up the steps and approached the empty throne hesitantly. Who wouldn’t want to sit on a throne like this? I suppose I will have to, I thought. But you’re just a sailor, another part of me objected. If anything is true, it is that I am king, my whole being screamed. I sat down on the throne and placed my hands on its arms. Immediately, I felt a change in my countenance, a new sense of power that had not been there before. “Doesn’t it feel glorious?” a lilting voice asked in Italian. I turned and there stood an angelic young woman with long white hair that fell to the floor. A voluminous silver gown floated around her, the skirt covered in many layers of translucent fabric like scales and silver crown decorated with pearls kissed her brow.

“You were meant to be king, Luciano. Your soul already seems to know.” Her voice sang out in my native language; it was like hearing home. After months of brokenly attempting to speak Spanish with the sailors, I felt at peace to hear something I knew so well. She moved toward me softly and her skirt appeared to change colors under the light. There was something ethereal about her but I couldn’t decide exactly what it was.

“B-but I am only the navigator of the Esperanza,” I protested.

She tilted her head slightly and pointed to my left. “Are you really?”

I glanced left and saw a full mirror standing beside my throne. I stood up and looked at myself in it. The jerkin and breeches I wore every day on the ship were gone. I wore the brocaded doublet of a king, tall black boots hugging my legs and a broadsword hanging off of my waist. A velvet cape tapered to my shoulders swung out behind me and a bright gold crown sat on my head, my normally long, grimy hair freshly washed and trimmed. “How…”

The girl stood behind me, her reflection apparent in the mirror.

“I know you, Luc. I’ve been watching you closely and I have seen something flicker in you. Pride, isn’t it? You feel so… mm, what’s the word, pleased when you come out on top, yes?” She purred gently in his ear.

“I…I don’t know what you mean.”

The girl swooped in front of him and looked deeply into his eyes. “Luciano. You like being the best. You love being the best. It’s why you joined the Esperanza, isn’t it?” I thought of how I had wished for work on the Esperanza, how I had hoped that I would be chosen as navigator so that one day I would be able to brag that my work had made a real difference in the world. I thought of how nice it felt to prove others wrong back when I was in school. I thought about how fantastic it would feel to be king, if only for a single day.

I nodded.

“Then accept that, my darling. Do not lose sight of what has so promptly defined you. You’re already their king anyways, fair Luciano.”

“Whose king?” I asked.

“Their king.” She waved her arm away from the mirror and I turned back to the giant room beyond the dais. It was filled with hundreds of people, many that I recognized. Rafael, Santiago, and my mother and father. Captain Castillo and the whole crew of the Esperanza. They all cheered for me, for me. I was king and they loved me.

The girl beamed and led me to the bottom step of the dais. She placed her delicate arm in the crook of mine and rejoiced, “All you need do is take one step and you will be with them, Luciano. You shall be their king and I shall be your queen.”

Everything was right. I turned to her and stared again into her eyes and I realized what was wrong. Her eyes were the solid black color of a deep sea predator about to pounce on her prey. They were two wells, bottomless and neverending, pits straight into the depths of the ocean. I stared into her eyes and stared into truth.

I stepped back away from her. “You will never be my queen,” I growled. “You and all of this are little more than just an illusion.”

The girl smiled serenely, as I if this was a compliment. “Luciano, you don’t really feel that way, do you?”

“I feel that I want out of this nightmare,” I snarled. “Very well. I can do it your way if you please.” She waved her hands as though she were casting a spell. The mirage shattered and I was standing on the deck once more. The girl was

was gone but a silver glow still surrounded the boat. I ran to the deck’s edge and looked down into the water. The water glowed silver but its surface was littered with limp, water soaked bodies, all dead.

“What have you done?” I murmured.

“Nothing,” the girl’s voice called out from behind me. I turned and there she was, the same hair and dark eyes. On her torso, she was covered by plates of armor the metallic color of shark skin but from the waist down, she had a long razor spiked tail like a barracuda. “I’ve merely enhanced what you felt before.”

“Pride?” I gasped. “Do you think I’m proud of this?”

“Nooo,” she laughed, glitter staining her voice. “But I know it makes you angry. I know how you wish you will one day be someone famous but you know you will never achieve that and that makes you angry. I know how you wish to come home with a title so that you can ask a certain lord for his daughter’s hand in marriage but you know that your title will never come and that makes you angry. Most of all, I know not by distracting you so you would not be able to defend your countrymen I have made you angry. I know your weakness, Luciano. You cannot escape your fate.”

“I am not angry,” I seethed. “You will not take me as easily you took my friends, my family.”

She smiled, her tail twitching anxiously. “With every word, you get more tasty, navigator.”

I tried to hold back, curb the anger she so craved. “I am in control of my own fate. I will not release my life as you wish I would.”

“Too late,” the girl breathed. “It seems that you’ve already let go.”

And with that, my world turned the color of her dark, bottomless eyes.