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The boys thin body fell back and struck the water hard, the hasty gasp of air he had managed before the foreman's boot hit hit his chest knocked away. An indefinable instant later the brackish water poured over his face, and his vision pounded with frightened colors as the sunlight quivered and retreated. Elijah instinctively tried to sprawl and swim but his wrists had been bound together on a short leash to his throat by grey anchor rope, the same of which stretched above him in abstract dances to the surface. Though his panic dulled his nerves he could feel the thick rope cut into his neck as he squirmed. Water flooded his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears as he kicked blindly, at the moment upside down in the water. He could not even trust his own buoyancy to guide the way to the light, for it had no effect on a creature of lean bone and tendon, and he only sunk deeper for his efforts. It was not long before he had taken the slack of the rope down with him and it went taught as a muscle, and jerked his head up above his feet; were he breathing he would have suffered from it. Now he kicked and saw himself move upwards towards the bright surface. His heart was in his ears and at his strangled pulse points as his ribs contracted, trying to force him breathe. The light seemed so far away.... The pressure of the water lessened. That shimmering light came down and split against his face and shoulders and he shot up into the hot summer air. Air! Elijah gasped and slipped down again, though only for a moment, and bobbed to the top once again to gag and sputter and choke. Blood rushed up into his skull and his vision turned red with the force of it. There was laughter. It was tinny and distant, for his ears were filled with the black water, but he heard it. He spun in the water till the rise of the retaining wall bobbed into view, grey and slick and glistening, and topped by two pairs of boots with two sets of legs atop them. Elijah didn't need to look up to recognize the ship master, whose boots were heavy and hard, but the second pair did not belong to the foreman. He had already let his throat go in a hoarse stream of romany curses when he squinted up against the painful light and saw who stood, grinning, on the wall. Elijah kept cursing. It was Bill Jukes. His fellow romany reached a dark tattooed hand down the slick side of the retaining wall and fetched up the slack of the rope. The ship master called something his ears couldn't distinguish and laughed as the boy dragged forth a burlap sack to the edge of the wall. The other end of the anchor rope was tied to the mouth of it and it's fat belly clattered and shifted with the weight of many stones. Elijah's panic resumed and he felt his pulse in every corner of his body. There was no second rope tying him to the wall this time. There wasn't any way to bring him up. Jukes waved and kicked the burlap sack into the water. The rope tightened around Elijah's neck. He went down. Elijah woke to the darkness thrashing, unable to breathe. His throat was sealed shut too tightly and he clawed at it, but when his nails broke the skin the sensation sparked his awareness. He wasn't in the water. He wasn't bound. He was miles and miles away from that place now, and a year distant from the event. His eyes began to distinguish the vague shapes of sleeping crewmen in the darkness and the adrenaline began to slow. After the first noisy gasp the rest were easier, and he lay himself back again in the hammock, chest heaving while the sweat dripped down into his ears. Someone shifted in their sleep, but no one awoke to witness him. It was too dark below deck. He needed to see light, to prove to himself that he was was aboard the Jolly Roger, and to get away from THEM. This time, for once, he remembered that he couldn't just stand up on his own from bed (though there had been many times he had NOT remembered, and he still recalled the laughter of the pirates when he cracked his chin against the flooring.) He set a searching palm against the rough hewn floor boards. In only moment his fingers touched something cool and rough and angled; the top most iron buckle of his surrogate leg. He snatched it up with the clunk of wood, the clat of metal, and the slippery shift of new made leather against the floor. The buckles didn't match. Cinching the lowest strap, that rubbed the back of his knee and blistered, was a thin bit of silver no wider than the thumb's knuckle. "A spare." Hook had commented off handedly, when he'd dropped the little thing into Elijah's palm. The boy had seen the shapes of identical little buckles through the linen of the captain's sleeve, and he had wanted so very badly to glare and spit at him. But it was what he needed, none the less. The second strap was thick and only inches below his crotch, held by something black and unfinished that he had found in Billy's forge. It worked, somehow, his leg; it's hard pressure against his bone and it's respective metal components reminding him always of his different slaveries. He pulled the straps too tightly and teetered upward onto his limbs. After an unsteady moment he held sure, and the crewmen's dreams were infected with the clunking, limping echo of his steps as he made his way from the cabin. The moon was sick that night. So very hard did it try to be a sanguine moon, yet looked more bloodless than filled. It hovered over the point in the sky where the distortion of the horizon began, making it sag and look diseased as it sat there all stained and discolored. In three nights it would be full. Until then it was only waxing, becoming pregnant; with a brood of spiders and gnats, he felt sure. As it was it drown the stars. How malignant could the moon be? He didn't want to know. He almost remembered....something thin and silver. The dying moon. The first night he had sat alone on the sand it had stared down at him a disinterested old woman. Why should it care? It was about to die. When it came back again a little girl would it even remember that he was there? He had hated her, then, only hours after the ship that had marooned him went on about her way. She could see him down there on the beach, wet and shaking in misty air, and yet there was nothing to be done for it. She could have at least stopped looking. Why hadn't she stopped looking? Elijah limped till his hand touched the bulwark, and leaned his weight into it, taking the pressure away from the end of bone left in the meat of his severed leg. Before and below him the water danced eagerly against the sides of the ship, reflecting the moon's pregnant disease in cryptic lines and languages that only flashed across it's surface and was gone. The sky was admirably silent. In it's topmost crown the select of the stars glistened like wet marbles up in the sky, the only stars to resist the moon's will. 'The best and the brightest of the souls who died that night.' his mind recited, as he remembered a story he had heard once, when he was still a little boy. "The weak and the cowardly among those men are the last stars to show and the first ones to leave. The bravest and the proud come the first and leave the last, and cannot be denied save the brilliant light of day." Funny. He couldn't remember why they had died. Below him the water spasmed, and his hands tightened on the porous wood automatically. Up from the water came a glistening white moon streaked by clouds. A webbed hand slipped across it's surface and pulled the long tangled strands of hair away from the mermaid's face. A necklace of wet stones hung limply from her throat and below that he could only see the blurred whiteness of her treading arms, and the spark of greyish scales here and then as her tail worked. She seemed a very nearsighted beastie, and she squinted up at his face haloed against the diseased moon. He didn't like her, he decided adamantly, and her white corpse face bobbed up and down as she decided what she thought about him. He searched through his pockets for something hard to throw at her but she beat him to the strike: she curled her head below her, coiled her tail, and heaved with all her might a spray of brine up over the bulwark. Elijah stumbled back and sputtered, slipped, and fell on his rump. He could hear her giggling down below. A spark of fuming anger went up below his belly: he was being laughed at, by a woman! There came a scrabbling up the wood and her hands found their way over the side of the ship, fingernails digging in deep as she popped her arms up straight and held there, scaled body dangling off the edge. She was breathessly giggling in the most nasty way and she was dripping, shiny, and nude. He glared against the burn of the brine in his eyes. When her tongue came out he gave in to his reaction and kicked her hard with his good leg, hard against the sternum, and with a hoarse little bark she lost her grip on the edge. He'd almost felt satisfaction for that breif and fleeting instant until her clawing hands, afraid to fall, caught hold of the cloth of his trousers and did not let go, even when her weight pulled them both over the side, to plummet twenty feet and land with a hard slap against the shuddering skin of the ocean. Elijah was struggling before the mermaid had recovered from the shock of the impact. His flailing brought his fingertips within an inch of the water's skin, and he thought he would make it. The mermaid had a different idea. Giving no attention to the deflated air bladder in her belly she sunk, as hard creatures of muscle and bone are wont to, but she tightened her nailed grip around Elijah's leg. The glittering surface and it's distorted, infected moon fell further above him as her dead weight pulled him down. His mind burst with malignant flowers of panic. He could feel her hands climb slowly upwards over his body, thick deadly spiders, and he kicked ineffectivly at her. The breath burst out of his lungs in a silent and illogical scream that left him empty and burning. Then in an instant that didn't matter, as her hands made their way about his throat and began to squeeze, cutting off the flow of depleted blood from his brain. Each frantic thump of his heart brought a burning pain as the overfilled veins and vessels were unable to purge themselves. Elijah gouged his fingernails into the cold flesh of her wrists but her skin was hard and toughened. Then, for no reason at all... ...she let go. Elijah's first reaction was to gasp for air, but he clamped his lungs shut. He put both arms above him in the black water and clawed upward towards the surface, unable to see anything save the faintest rippled glow so far above him of the sickly moon. The glow shot towards his eyes and he could feel the pressure of the water slide away, his lungs screaming obscenely at him as his face broke the surface. Cold gasps of air came with the burn of sea water. The moon was still watching him. Distant. Pregnant. Infected. It drifted in his vision as he sought blindly through his panic for the shape of the ship. Instead his sight caught the moving trail of something deep below him. A sleek shape of grey and white was circling slowly upward like an inverted vulture. There! A vast and towering absence of light behind him, the rough and greyish wood of the Jolly Roger. Elijah scrambled towards it. His fingers scrabbled against the wood as he tried to get a grip to climb, but the ship was not silent in the water; it bobbed with the motions of the fluid and the waves slammed the boy unexpectedly against the side. The breath left him in a puff and he slid down again, his ribs aching. The mermaid's giggle slipped into his ears and rang like tin. She'd popped out of the water behind him and drifted there, looking utterly satisfied with herself and pleased in the way a little child is pleased when he sticks a fishhook through a worm and watches it writhe. In the yellowed light he could see the blue and red bruise allready starting to form on her chest. The boy's hands found the frayed end of grey fibre from the snapped ropes of the hanging mat. His fingers closed so tightly around it that his own fingernails pushed into his skin and marked him, though he couldn't feel the sting. The mermaid didn't move to stop him as he rose hand over hand so slowly up the twisted strands of the decaying rope. Elijah, of course, could not simply leave things be. He was angry, humiliated, and terrified, by a scaly unclothed woman, none the less, who didn't speak a word of any language and hadn't two feet to stand on. He turned his head over his shoulder and, with confidence he didn't feel, told her she was many things that would make the captain red to hear him speak and that she was was an abomination to boot. Curses are one of those strange things that need no translation no matter what the language. The mermaid's jaw dropped down and her thick bluish tongue shown behind her teeth. A moment later her white face distorted with fury and Elijah heard with a hammering heart her nails pulling her up the side of the ship. They were as hard as bone, those nails, and laquered thick green, and they didn't break as the whole of her slippery bulk came slithering up the wood. She overtook him easily and parked herself a length above his head, and with one swift motion the hard muscled side of her tail cracked against the flat of his head. Elijah let go the rope. He hadn't even realized he had fell until the water covered over him and began to pull him down. He was too dazed to swim but he knew better than to breathe, and in a moment the water shifted again as a white and grey dart dropped down into the sea and swam up under him. Her. Again. The mermaid caught hold the back of his shirt and swam down...and down....and down.... She was thirty meters below the barrier before she let go, as simple as that, and watched the little roma boy flail upwards towards the air. His head vanished above the water and she started up after him again. He had hardly enough time to catch a single breath before her thin clawed hand grabbed his ankle and pulled. The boy went down and bubbles escaped the mermaids mouth as she purged her air bladder to make herself denser. Adrenaline brain flowers popped along the crease of his brain and the arteries in his neck pained with the force of his heart. He heard a scream distorted through the water. Marco! Marco had screamed. With his legs and wrists tied together, the foreman pushing him off the safetly of the retaining wall for the second time, he had screamed. Then there had been nothing but bubbles, then smoothness over the water. His brother's head hadn't come up when the forman pressed a boot against Elijah's chest and sent him down to the sea once again. Stop.... ...stop... ........STOP! Elijah's eyes flashed open and the scream left his ears. He struggled. The thick water slowed his motions till there was no force behind them when they finally struck her body. They were deeper than thirty meters, now, going on forty, and she didn't show signs of slowing. Without thinking he brought the knee of his damaged leg up to his chest, glared down at her shimmering body, and brought the wooden end down upon the delicate shadow of her shoulder blade. She let out a screech and the pressure on his ankle released. The delay of her pain gave him just enough of a head start that he had grip of the ship's mat ropes before her furious round little face came up from the water. He didn't have time to feel pain of pulled muscles and hauled himself in record time up the frayed rope, till his hands came over the rough edge of the deck and he pulled his body through the upright poles of the bulwark. The boy pressed his taught little back down against the boards and lay puffing for a moment. Either his vision had distorted or the infected moon had finally succeeded in becoming sanguine; he wasn't sure which was better. He almost didn't hear it when the scrabble of fingernails began it's ascent upon the wood. It was yet for his heart to slow it's frantic thumping, so he could not really say whether the noise frightened him any more than he allready was. His head shot up from the deck and his arms reached behind him to prop him up. There, over the side, came a set of green laquered claws, and the white face of a wet and glowering moon came up behind it. Elijah scuttled back until his back hit the base of the mainmast, rather painfully. Up came the rest of her, favoring the cracked shoulder, till her human segment lay prone on the deck. Elijah was too far away for her to reach but he tucked his legs to his body anyway, and stared with fascination as she tried to wretch herself up further to get at him, her face a terrible mask of wrath only women can show so effectivly. It was no good though. She could not get the rest of her onto the deck without becoming helpless there, and scraping off scales in the process. With a nasty snarl she pushed herself backwards and slipped from the side of the ship, the water splashing down as she hit. Elijah dropped his head back against the wooden mast and shook. He didn't move again until morning. The moon stared down at him the entire time.
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