Swords v. Cthulhu

Red Sails, Dark Moon Andrew S. Fuller

Jinny woke to the taste of saltwater and the feel of warm sand against her body, nudged by a strange tide. Fine, dark green granules fell from her brown skin as she sat up on the unknown shore. She admired the crescent beach with its perfect cerulean waves lined by a deep gingko jungle, the ragged detail of distant slopes whose peaks were lost in crawling clouds, and the tall black towers rising just beyond the bay’s far point.

Where she’d washed up from, she could not recall, nor any previous detail outside of her name. This loss troubled her deeply, but briefly, as the extravagant view and open air brought her release. She wandered freely along the shore toward the thin angular structures.

Her eyes followed the graceful pattern of breaking surf out to the rolling sea, where she glimpsed enormous dark twisting shapes beneath the surface, and the occasional green face staring back with lucent eyes from a curling wave. Strolling away from the foamy breakers, she heard a pleasing trill among the whispering trees. The resonant song drew her toward a dazzling plumage within the swaying leaves.

Suddenly a group of cats circled her legs, their soft gray and black striped bodies weaving between her feet. A dozen swift felines pressed her away from the bewitching feathers and dripping serrated beak, steering her into a straight path between water and trees. Satisfied with her direction, they leapt away into the shadows and the sun’s dim glare.

With each passing scene of eerie coastal landscape, Jinny had a disquieting sense that she did not belong, and hoped that in the city ahead she could find passage to a place where she might.

The spires grew before her, and though her feet felt no fatigue, she looked back and saw a hundred miles had passed, and many days with them.

As beach became road, she saw cottages and mills on the outskirts, and many colored sails billowing along the horizon, until she rounded the bay’s point and the harbor city came into view, proclaimed dylath-leen in carved letters on a weathered wooden sign.

Tapered buildings of stained stone and flickering windows arched over narrow streets that wound up the hilly cove, their shade layered in that of the basalt towers and settling dusk.

Loud songs both melodious and crude drew her to the pier-front boulevard, where men of three dozen hues and statures loaded and embarked on graceful crafts; the tongues of their chants were unfamiliar to her but the mosaic of lyrics formed prodigious sagas in her head. Passengers and laborers alike moved oddly, loping or rolling about, some on fewer than two limbs, others on more.

Spiced and malted aromas from the dilapidated taverns churned her sudden hunger, and she followed the newly lit lanterns along the promenade to the raucous bustle of the tented marketplace.

Passing by the canvas stalls, her mouth watered at the hanging six-limbed meats cured and charred to a perfect saffron orange, spectral filigreed stalks whose steam rained sweet crystals, and luminous, leaf-wrapped mushroom caps. A castaway with nothing to her name, she hugged her ribs tightly and found a clutch of prismatic nautilus shells in her frayed pockets. With these and pointing gestures she managed to barter a bowl of dismal soup and a small mug of, if she interpreted correctly, moon-wine.

The beverage made her giddy, and she perused the crowded bazaar, admiring many curiosities, unafraid to handle gleaming jewelry for aberrantly shaped limbs, peculiar garments, or sinuous carved statues whose faces blurred and shifted at her touch.

At the last tent, she was drawn to shining cardinal gemstones arranged on an onyx table. A closer look displayed intricate facets and peculiar runes floating within the rubies that filled her with unease. Then an unpleasant odor made her step back. The proprietor held up one of the ruddy gems and smiled at her, his mouth beneath the shabby orange turban opened broadly like a wide wound filled with soot and spiked teeth.

She tried to hustle away, but several more men in wrapped headgear blocked the market aisle, surrounding her with their moist, rotting pungency.

She ran between tents into the nearest alley, banging on cold doors, then running harder, hurdling and sliding and dodging through alcoves, careening into moonlit walls, trying to escape the footsteps behind her that rang like hooves on the cobblestones.

The alley emerged at the pier, and she stood before a baneful dark ship. Its tattered obsidian sail and bulbous pitch-black hull tainted the nearby shadows. The pestiferous stench from the vessel made her gag and weaken. The moon-wine took hold, and her knees hit the dock as the footsteps clattered forward.

She managed to kick one of the aggressors; a leg bone snapped to the accompaniment of a warbling scream. The impact of his head on the wharf dislodged the turban, exposing two curved, bony horns.

Night embraced her fully as they dragged her aboard.

Next Jinny knew, the sea whispered coarsely against the ship’s hull beneath her head. The stench was even worse here, rank and thick, like the inside of a carcass. She breathed through her mouth and lifted herself into a corner by gripping wrought metal bars. Dull light through small round portholes showed only vague outlines of a few cellmates.

In the gloom beyond the cage, thick gray bodies hunched over oars, their globular limbs pulling and extending like draining mucus. They rocked forward into a moonbeam, divulging eyeless faces with short, flush tentacle mouthparts.

The beasts rowed harder, surging the galley forward, and she staggered to the porthole, pushing someone aside. She lost all of her meager meal through the small opening. Holding the circular window frame, she breathed the salted spray and gazed at the rolling waves and ancient sky of unfamiliar stars.

As they passed between two great hexagonal stone pillars, the ship lurched and lifted hard under her, and she fell back with her cellmates. The pull pinned her to the floorboards, but she strained to stand, returning to the window. The ocean waves diminished far below, and so shrank the distant seaport lights. It is like birds see, she thought, as even sharp-toothed mountains shriveled and flattened. Soon the thick white brume of clouds swirled and surrounded them. The milky haze gradually darkened and finally relented to an immense, limitless field of black with stars brighter and crisper than she’d ever known. The curving horizon constricted behind them as a deepening chill settled through the ship.

Jinny gasped as a thin hand touched her ankle. She saw the other prisoners huddled together, and left the view outside. For warmth, she nestled against smooth skin, wooly hide, scaled and husked bodies, as the moon’s face burned ever brighter through the porthole.

A roaring crash tilted the entire ship and they tumbled across the cage. From above came shouts and clattering metal, footfalls stamping across the deck, squeals and yowls among wet chops and meaty thuds. Some of the blind glob creatures left the oars and half-rolled, half-flowed to the far stairs, drawing curved clubs from their folded gray bulk.

The hatch opened above them, and in rushed a vicious blur of slashing longswords and hissing torches. Within the frenzied combat Jinny saw male and female attackers of many skins, but also horns and hooves, hound-like postures, and swiping paws. Their fury felled most of the spongy beasts and turbaned men, and drove the remaining few against the hold wall. In the quiet that fell over the ship like a departed storm, a single pair of booted feet echoed across the deck and descended the stairs.

Her enthralling movements whispered in dark leather and scales, the red-haired woman strode with authority to the cage, flicking black blood from her triangular blade. A gaunt, cloudy-winged creature perched on her right shoulder, larger than a bat, sable-skinned and faceless, with inward-curving horns and a barbed tail. The woman removed her gloves, uncovering pale white hands spotted with a ruby ring, and wiped bloody grime from her face. Age and measure showed in the creases around her eyes, but their green irises shone fiercely.

“Now, my friends,” she said, scanning their faces through the bars with a smile both dauntless and comforting, “come up and see the show.”

With a single strike of her sword’s pommel she shattered the lock on the cage. While one of her crew stepped forward to whistle and grunt translations in at least three languages, her emerald eyes caught Jinny’s, and her grin curled to one side.

“Well, we ain’t seen one like you in some time.”

“What you mean, Miss?” Jinny said, keeping her gaze low.

“That’s Captain Bloodrose you speak with,” her translator barked. He resembled an upright hairless dog with rubbery skin, long teeth, and carrion breath.

“It’s fine, Richard,” the captain said, then to Jinny, “I mean human, my dear.” The winged creature nuzzled her spiral curls.

Slowly and gently, the prisoners were helped upstairs.

The ship’s deck had become an abattoir, strewn with severed limbs and pulpy chunks in dull greasy blood, among the bodies of turbaned men and bulbous creatures. Another ship, sleek and crimson with sharp red sails, groaned against the moon-beasts’ captured vessel. The gibbous moon was large and closer now, while the green-blue globe was contracted far behind.

Some of the turbaned men had surrendered and removed their headwear and robes, revealing hirsute bodies with short tails. She saw some of their kind among the Bloodrose crew.

The four surviving gray-blobbed beasts were encouraged with swords and spears to balance themselves on the starboard railing. Jinny understood now that they owned the dark ship.

Captain Bloodrose and her crew lined up across on port side. “I give you a choice,” she called to the captured villains. “Jump or be pushed. We’ll see whether you fall to your moon or back to earthen ground.”

Her translator began and she lifted a silencing hand. “They know what I say.”

One of the moon-beasts made an obscene gesture with his nebulous arm.

The captain’s face immediately churned with anger. At the snap of her fingers, the black creature took flight from her shoulder. It tucked in its diaphanous wings and dived at the gray beast. Its claws tore off a warding arm as its sharp tail pierced the tentacled face. Then that face was ripped off for good measure.

The ruined gray body fell away.

“Thank you, Emalee.” The flying creature returned to her.

It took only a moment for the other beasts to decide. Their plump, amorphous forms tumbled overboard.

“The rest of you may join my crew, for you cannot stay here. We take turns at the rigging and the work. We may get you home to Leng soon, or never.”

They boarded the Arkham Rose, unhooked grapples, and threw oil and torches back over. The black galley listed and rolled aflame into the dark infinity beyond the planets.

“And you, my dear…” Captain Bloodrose placed a hand on Jinny’s shoulder, then removed it just as lightly. “You may choose between the crew bunks, or my quarters.”

The captain’s spacious cabin was finished with exquisite hardwood walls, displaying dozens of weapons. Curved and angled blades etched with obscenely elaborate patterns and inhuman symbols, fearsome hooked axes, worn stone clubs, curved bows crafted from mingled woods, dozens of knives each a different honed shape, and some oddly twisted implements not forged for a five-fingered hand. They all exhibited nicks and scrapes from heavy use.

Captain Bloodrose seemed engrossed in polishing her battle blade, so Jinny stood in waiting, as night’s chill settled on her skin. She worried at the choice she’d made.

The painting hung over a map-filled desk caught her attention. She studied the brushstroke detail of the single tree in the harvest field, where something sinister seemed to wait, and she looked away.

The captain hung her sword and sat heavily at the desk chair, as her gaunt pet flew over to an iron perch by the window. She tried to tug off a boot, and was unsuccessful.

Jinny knelt and assisted. She paired the footwear together against the wall.

The captain sighed. “Here I was trying to be so alluring.” She undid her hair tie and curls fell past her shoulders.

“You look fine, Miss.” And she meant it.

“I’m sorry — what’s your name, young lady? And where are you from?”

“It’s Jinny, Miss.” She still could not remember anything before the weird beach. “I can’t…”

“Georgia, by your accent, or maybe Louisiana?” The captain rubbed her feet.

“I don’t know such places you say, Miss.”

“You should, I think. We’ll work on that.”

Jinny frowned. She looked back at the painting and was startled to see it now depicted carnivorous-looking mountains. Unearthly fires burned on their slopes, around which ominous figures danced.

“Richard painted this for me,” the captain gestured. “Like all my crew, he had a very different life before joining us. Come now!” She stood and pulled Jinny upright, rubbing her cold arms. “You’re freezing! You need a hot bath.”

“I’ll warm some water, Miss.”

“Now, you must call me Captain out there. In here, you can call me Pyrena. Or if you get cross with me, Pyrena Coccineous Meredith Rose.” Then she barked at the door. “Richard!”

Soon the ghoul brought buckets in his powerful paws, and filled the clawfoot tub in the corner.

“Miss Captain… Pyrena, have you been to the moon?”

“It’s my aim to do so. I’ll need more ships to get there.”

“It always looked far away and colder than ice.”

“True. In fact you cannot breathe upon it at all, nor in the gulf of space between.”

Before she could ask more, Pyrena held her gaze and said, “This is one of the ways, Jinny, that we know we are dreaming.” Without looking, she pointed again to the painting. It now showed a verdant garden with a primeval arch crumbling over a yawning, murky pit.

Pyrena Rose fetched a drying cloth and sendal robe from the closet, and turned away while Jinny dressed. Then she led her behind a folding partition to a gossamer canopy bed. “You sleep here and I have a sofa.” She paused, pulling back the covers. “Until — or if… you should ever like me to join you.”

Jinny felt a warm sensation she was sure she’d not felt before.

“We’ll start your training tomorrow. No telling how long you’ll be here.”

“I’d like to stay, Miss. Miss Pyrena.”

“I’d like you to. There aren’t many women here.”

The fine threads of the bed sheets glowed gently, and Jinny slid deep into their celestial sensation.

She woke in horrendous pain, elsewhere. The skin on her back roared with a deep, itching fire. The air was different, muggy and plant sweet. Mosquitoes whined and bit. Someone touched a damp cloth to her forehead and sang softly of a sweet chariot. And Jinny slipped again. Away.

The tremolo song of seabirds and rhythmic waves against the ship’s keel eased Jinny awake. Sometime before dawn they’d settled back into terrestrial ocean. The gaunt creature huddled under its wings in the morning sun. The captain was absent, so Jinny dressed in the folded clothes and boots laid out for her. She noticed the unrolled maps and sat at the desk, trying to ignore the painting above it showing a stalactite city hanging in an umbral cavern.

She studied the hand-inked papyrus filled with jagged mountain coasts, reclusive islands, boundless deserts, and swirling seas labeled in script with names like Sarnath and Xur, Hatheg Kla and Inganok. The continents and islands remained more or less consistent across the maps, but among all the renderings, one location was not fixed. The land called Leng seemed to move.

The cabin door opened to a panting hooded figure. “The captain is ready for you.” Richard lowered the cowl and huffed.

Out on the deck, crew scurried like insects among the ropes and spars. The captain and two of her officers stood by the center mast below the largest sail.

“Good morning, crewman Jinny.” The captain’s expression was devoid of warmth. “Up the ratlines with you to the main top.”

Jinny did not know what she meant, but followed the captain’s steady glance upward. Her stomach dropped.

She climbed the rigging very slowly, shaking with terror. Once she reached the crossbeam, she looked out in every direction, where an occasional massive shadow moved beneath the cobalt surface. She remained aloft until she could let go of the mast and stand freely on the yardarm, balanced against each wave and gust.

She learned the parts and areas of the frigate, from mizzenmast to bowspirit, from headsail to escutcheon. She learned to reeve a rope, gybe a sail, and lash a trice. She learned, and became less afraid.

When she returned exhausted to the cabin, the captain smiled pleasantly and threw a naked sword at her, point first.

Jinny closed her eyes, flinching from the expected pain, but then she felt the sword handle tight in her hand and opened her eyes.

“Good,” Pyrena said. “I thought you had a thing about you. Few can do this.”

“But how did I…”

“Don’t think on it. Just be as you want, and will events to be. It doesn’t always work. But it can in this place.”

Jinny’s confusion became frustration. “And where is this place?”

“You remember what I said last night?”

“That we’re… dreaming. Tell me, will I ever wake?”

“That may be up to you.”

Jinny gripped the cutlass firmly, swung it to a controlled stop.

Pyrena attacked with her blade. When Jinny parried the slashes and thrusts, Pyrena snuck a solid elbow into her cheek and swept her legs.

“Don’t assume it can be easy, that you’ll wake up whenever you want.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Decades. More than I remember. Probably in a coma hooked up to life support. I have two daughters. Now, stop asking questions.” She nicked her blade edge over Jinny’s forearm. The blood came immediately. “There is real pain here.”

Jinny’s training began in earnest with the wooden bō staff and many bruises. It would finish with the knife.

They followed the Southern Sea trade routes and prowled the Zar coast near the Forest of Parg until the lookout spied black sails in the fog. They doused lamps and slid in fast through the white mist, ramming the Arkham Rose’s rostrum into the black ship’s forecabin.

They boarded in a wedge formation. Jinny watched from the far quarterdeck as Pyrena danced through the swarming ruckus, swung and cut in graceful fury, slashed, ducked and rolled among the fray, delivered knee strikes and headbutts, spun and pierced. The captive Leng servants fought hard, and at each scuffle she stepped back to let them flee or surrender. Those who charged again she cut down, the moon-beasts flowing up malodorously from below.

One of the toadlike creatures felled two of the mercenary crew, oozed over the railing, and advanced on Jinny with an onyx club. Its tentacled face writhed angry red as its form stretched, looming taller. At the last moment Jinny lifted the bardiche axe from behind her and cleaved the gorger from soft skull to softer belly. Her heart thundered.

When the battle was won, they hauled crates from the ship’s putrid hold. Captain Bloodrose pried off one of the lids and they gasped at the many thousand glinting rubies. Then they dumped the crates into the frothing brine.

“Why waste so many jewelstones?” Jinny wondered aloud. “You could buy an armada.”

One of the Leng women, now a boatswain holding a gory spiked war mace, overheard. “Not everyone the moon-beasts take to their bleak satellite become slaves. Each terrible gem is fashioned from the blood and essence of a stolen life.”

After dinner, Jinny searched the ship for the captain, and finally climbed high above the mainsail to find her in the crow’s nest. Wordlessly, she lifted Pyrena’s hand bearing the ruby ring and held it to her own chest. Then she embraced the woman. Annoyed, Emalee flew off. Jinny held Pyrena firmly until the sobbing ceased, and into the night.

As they sailed past Hlanith into the Cerenarian Sea, Jinny gently turned Pyrena’s head, arms reached back around her neck, and their lips sealed together, trembling at first. The warm ocean wind tried to part them, but they pulled closer as their yearning hands and tongues revealed and fed their starved passion.

Barely able to pause their ardor, they descended the rigging. Once behind the locked cabin door, they slowly undressed each other to unwavering eyes. They embraced again in the canopy bed, as excited touch provoked warming skin and roused thrilling breaths. Three times Jinny’s pleasure peaked, and three times she cried out in intractable joy.

She tried eagerly to return the bliss, and with Pyrena’s patient instruction, found success.

Long after the launch of Pyrena’s purring snore, Jinny found herself awake. She untangled their limbs and stood nude by the window in the nocturnal sheen, scowling at the moon. Thinking there would be no answer, she whispered, “You said two daughters, but only wear one ruby.”

“Well, Emalee is with me every day.” Pyrena sat up in bed.

Jinny turned and tried not to stare.

“She’s only seven years old.” Pyrena gestured at the winged creature on the perch. “She visits her father when our travels take us near Oriab Isle.” Then her smile faded and her voice filled with sorrow. “Before her, there was Babette.” She touched her red jeweled ring. “Babette was taken on her thirteenth birthday. I lost her in the market crowd in Dylath-Leen. I searched for hours and came to the docks just as they pulled her wailing aboard a black ship.” Her forest eyes burned brilliant with tears and resolution. “Two years later they tried to sell me a ruby in the same marketplace. The stone screamed to me. I stole it and ran.”

“And her father?”

“I was pregnant when I arrived here. He never followed.”

Jinny returned to bed, her body shaking with fury. “Pyrena. I will help you to change the tide.” But even after her lover’s breathing calmed, she did not sleep.

They trained and sparred for hours each day. In time, Jinny learned not just to swing, but a dexterous flow with many swords: epée, cutlass, spadroon, and hwandudaedo. She learned to spin and hook the crow’s bill pickaxe, strike fast with lathi sticks, make sing and snap the qijiebian chain whip, and hurl from bow to stern the barb-tipped sibat spear, planting it squarely into a penny’s face. The weapon with which she forged the strongest bond was the forward-curved panabas axe; it became an artful extension of her arm, and of her emboldened will.

Captain Bloodrose’s bedside cabinet contained many lewd implements that Jinny also learned to wield, from the clockwork resonating slender (in both manual and wearable forms) to the undulating mollusk glove, from the incandescent feather to the pulsing lambency baton. On one voyage Pyrena diverted their course to the cultured city of Celephais, where she procured a few customized items from her favorite shop.

On the days that followed those late nights of pleasure, the combat training seemed doubly fierce.

On her twenty-firstraid, boarding a black biota cargo ship east of the Sunken City, the two war dames of the Arkham Rose swung each other by the arm into the melee, placing themselves back to back and laughing as they traded foes, when Jinny noticed the sparse crew, many of whom fled overboard. The exchange finished quickly.

It took the mauls of two crewmen to break the lock on the hold. Before the latch was lifted, the hatch erupted open and a giant shaggy beast roared onto the spar deck.

Covered in dreadful black fur and serpentine scales, taller than three men, it brayed glottal rage at the sun through a vertically split mouth of gnashing yellow teeth. Whipping two powerful arms that ended in four taloned claws, it rent a sail and bludgeoned a dozen fighters, sending them rolling across the deck in a volley of snapping bones.

They tried to drive the brute back with spears and atlatls, but the behemoth stormed across the deck, great claws scraping the planks.

All the other crew fell away, and soon Captain Bloodrose found herself trapped against the railing. She looked up at the monstrosity, and swapped hands with her sword. With a thunderous downward fist it crushed the captain’s left arm against the stout wood in a spray of blood and splinters. The captain staggered to one knee and dropped her weapon, panting weakly.

Jinny slid between them, slashing her blade into the giant fiend’s crotch. When the monster convulsed forward, she cut again, two-handed, and severed the terrifying head into the sea.

The pulverized bones of Pyrena’s hand were beyond healing, and she did not cry out or weep when they sawed it off at the forearm, nor when they applied the searing hot iron.

When the sweats abated, Jinny stood before her partner and took a deep breath. Her feelings became a maelstrom inside her. “Captain, I request to stay my nights in the bunks among the crew.”

“It’s ‘Captain’ now, is it? If that’s your wish.”

“I don’t want the crew seeing me different.”

“Is that all?”

“I… don’t want to become soft.”

“These are all choices. What do you really want?”

“You were showing off today. You could have died.”

“I saved my good arm. What is it you want?”

“I want my own ship. I want to sail you to the moon and hack it to pieces.”

“I’m very proud of you, Jinny.”

Jinny was on her way to speak with the captain about building a fast corvette when she saw her invite one of Leng women to her cabin, and heard the lock turn. Jinny stood on the deck of the ship for a long time, reminding herself of her choice, and barricading the tears. Then she relieved the wheelman at the helm. As the sun set behind the endless waves, Emalee glided in to perch on her shoulder.

When they acquired a second ship, Pyrena gave its command to Richard, despite his nocturnal proclivity.

Jinny spent more time with Richard, listening to his grunted poetry. She stayed up all night with the men and women of Leng, downing mugs of zoog rum and bellowing sea shanties of old Sarkomand with the natives of Parg. She read most of the ship’s library, from the expansive Pnakotic Manuscripts to the living fables of Vemoqi and the Crystal Leaves erotica. She spent hundreds of hours at the forecastle hearth with the old serpent man Ophidian Drake, until she could forge a blade folded with ebon ore from the Peaks of Thok. When finished, the honed steel coruscated darkly even in the high sun.

For a seven-year campaign, they raided, fought, and pillaged. It took that long to build a loyal company and fleet of a dozen vessels. They slew many. When they finally chanced upon the elusive plateau of Leng, none of the native crew wanted to depart.

Jinny’s skill with a blade was now unmatched. In all those years, she could not remember sleeping. When they finally launched the crusade for the sinister moon, she captained her own craft and an elite guard of cats.

“Onward now!” shouted Admiral Bloodrose from the bowspirit of the Arkham Rose. “We leave Kadath far astern!” She thrust forth the iron point of her hooked hand.

The thirteen red ships sailed through the basalt pillars and lifted from the ocean waters, past the horizon’s cliff, they rose into the cold breadth of space, their figureheads aimed at the moon.

They would lose many, but once the lunar beasts were conquered, they would be free to sail beyond, to anywhere, into new dreamlands.

Jinny adjusted the jib of the New Orleans, and made calculations. Her palms were damp on the wheel. She was alarmed to see the commander’s ship had broken formation and slid alongside hers. Just yards away, the admiral was looking only at her, puffing on her pipe. Jinny did not recall her smoking, but the aroma was very familiar.

A flash of sadness crossed Pyrena’s face, and she smiled tearfully. “So soon, my love…” she said, her face shrinking away.

She dwindled with every surrounding detail, losing vividness and color, out of view.

Jinny realized herself falling, away from the ship and the moon, ripping through dark and light, silence collapsing toward nothing.

All was gone, replaced with something new.

She woke on a dirty cot in a humid shack.

“Oh, Jinny,” said the black woman dabbing her forehead, “the fever all broke now.”

She staggered out into the yard, and was assaulted by the scene. The colonial white columned house surrounded by draping magnolias and live oaks, the song of cicadas, the smell of fresh tobacco leaves, and the branding scar on her calf. The awful familiarity of every sensation rushed back, as reality petrified around her.

The white-suited man on the great wraparound porch stood from his wicker chair and stared at her, removing the pipe from his mouth. Seeing Mr. Hightower’s face, the burning lacerations flared on her back. And seeing his mischievous young son Trevor standing next to him, she remembered the missing silver butter knife and every one of the thirty lashes and why she would no longer work in the house.

Jinny howled at the sky and the hidden moon. Let them think her mad.

She worked every day in the fields from sunrise to sunset, where blisters became calluses, her arms grew hard and weary, and the true world annealed. The scars on her back closed and settled to a distant gnawing.

She fell to exhausted sleep each night, but could not find the key to her dreams. The coast of the Six Kingdoms eluded her; no more did she smell the spindrift of the Cerenarian Sea, or feel the rise of the main deck beneath her feet. When she wept, she kept it behind her eyes.

Time got on, until one day in the spring, when Jinny cultivated the tobacco seedbeds at dusk and a wide shadow passed over the field. The workers all looked up in fear as a black galleon slid impossibly across the face of the rising full moon and swept around out of the sky to ground among the crop rows. The overseer fell from his horse and scampered away toward the big house with the rest of them, every soul on the plantation quaking with terror… save one.

Jinny dropped the hoe and took up the overseer’s fallen machete and pistol. She advanced on the reeking dark warship as the gangplank lowered to the earth.

She would paint those black sails a hot glistening red.