For a little while I was surprised that I hadn’t drowned yet; then I decided I must have already drowned, but my soul hadn’t left my body yet. But I found that I could still move, once I had recovered from the kick in the stomach. I could move my arms and legs, I could feel myself and my clothes with my hands. I felt little ticklings as fish approached and took a nibble at me, and I swatted them away.

Not Beyond Conjecture

by Trismegistus Shandy

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Feel free to repost or mirror it on any noncommercial site or list. You can also create derivative works, including adaptations to other media, or new stories using the same setting, characters and so forth, as long as you mention and point to the original story.

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What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

— Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia

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When the war was over and I was discharged, I thought I’d go home. But home wasn’t there anymore. The houses and barns were still standing, mostly, though a lot of the roofs were leaking after going a year or two without repair; and the mill was still there, its wheel turning and turning and making the grindstone grind away at nothing. But the people — oh, the people. At first I couldn’t find any trace of them. There was no one I recognized, nobody at all but a few war orphans from some other village who were squatting in the mayor’s house; they ran away when I tried to talk to them. But there were many more laurel trees than I remembered along the streets and in the front gardens. And when I walked into my parents' house, I found a laurel growing in the kitchen, its roots dug in through the floorboards into the foundation and most of its leaves yellowed for want of sunlight, except those of one branch which stuck out the window. There was another in my sister’s bedroom, in a similar plight, though more of its branches had reached out the window. I found one or more laurels growing in several other houses I entered, as well. Some were dead, their roots and branches withered, unable to reach a window to get sunlight or to penetrate the floorboards to find soil. Those in smaller houses with dirt floors were generally better off than those in the rich people’s houses with sturdier wooden floors. I spent a few days tearing the roofs off some houses where the trees were languishing but maybe not dead yet, and tearing up floorboards to let their roots get at the soil more easily.

The orphans gradually got used to me and came up a little closer each day to watch me work. Finally a couple of the bolder ones talked with me. They knew nothing of what had happened to my family or why; they’d found the village like this when they’d wandered into the area after their families were killed and their home village burned by soldiers. They were so scrawny and filthy I couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. I thought about staying there and sowing a crop in the fields that had lain fallow for a year or more, but I couldn’t stand to stay close to those trees for too long. Sometimes I imagined I saw faces on them. And I was afraid that whatever had made them like that might affect me, too, if I stayed there.

So I set out to find somewhere less haunted. A few weeks later I was in Sikramar. It had been less damaged by the war than most cities; its walls and most of the houses were still standing, and the burned-up areas were being rebuilt faster than I would have thought possible. I swear that in the days I spent wandering around looking for work, I saw houses go from burned-out husks to completely rebuilt in five or six days. Probably there was magic involved; I knew even less about magic then than I do now, but I knew Sikramar was rich in magic.

Finally, I hired onto a merchant ship, the West Wind, as a mercenary. The end of the war meant that a lot of discharged navy men had turned pirate, and the captain of this ship wanted more men who could handle themselves in a fight. I was no sailor, but I’d been on shipboard before, four or five troop transports at one stage or another of the war, and I’d fought off boarders once; it didn’t take me long to get my sea legs back.

The captain hired a wizard at the same time he hired me, some other mercenaries, and several new sailors. The wizard’s name was Kasrigan, and I felt a vague kinship with him at first; he had a haunted look in his eyes, like he’d done things he wasn’t proud of and seen things he couldn’t forget. I knew what that was like. But he didn’t mix with the sailors or mercenaries, and I never got to know him. He spent most of his time in his cabin — he was one of only three people, the captain and the first mate being the others, who rated a cabin — and most of the rest standing at the rail looking out to sea, never answering when anybody spoke to him, unless it was the captain. Sometimes he would toss a bucket into the sea, haul it up, make mystic gestures over it, and pour some of its contents into glass bottles before dumping the rest into the sea again. He was supposed to protect us from bad weather, and he might have done a good job of that for all I know, though the fine weather we experienced might just as easily have been pure luck. But he was supposed to warn us of pirate attacks and help fight them off, too, and at that he was a disgraceful failure.

It was after we’d stopped at Bapram and headed out to sea that we discovered he was getting drunk on the seawater he’d been turning into brandy. The captain was angry, and talked about discharging him at the next port, or at least the next time we put into Sikramar, if he couldn’t find another wizard for hire in Fasrimar or Tamu.

I happened to be walking the deck late one morning near the wizard’s cabin when the captain barged in and tried to wake him. He got nothing but incoherent mumbles for a while — he left the door open, and I happened to linger there looking out to sea — and then the wizard said:

“Go ‘way. I don’t need to be awake ’n sober all the time. Two or three hours a day’s all I need to renew the protective spells.”

“That might work for weather,” the captain said, “but if we meet with pirates, I don’t want to rely on your passive protective spells, I want you alert and casting offensive spells against them. Send them to the bottom of the sea, or better, kill all the pirates and leave their ship for us to take what’s useful from it.”

“Sure, I c’n do that. Just give me another couple of hours to sleep this off.”

The captain grew angry then, and I won’t repeat what he said, for I’m not a foul-mouthed man, though I was a soldier for so long. I walked further along toward the bow and looked out. The nearest land was much too far to see.

There were four other mercenaries on board, besides the sailors, some of whom could handle a sword well enough. Between the five of us we’d fought for three of the four factions in the war; I didn’t hold it against them, as they probably had no more choice about it than I did. We were under the command of Sumar, who’d been a sergeant in the Datrafi army until they were defeated, and then spent the last couple of years of the war in a prison camp. He had us, and whichever of the sailors weren’t busy with nautical duties nor asleep, doing sword drills a couple of times a day, morning and early evening; the rest of the day we were free to do as we pleased, though at least two of us had to be awake and on deck at any given time. Archery drills required more coordination with the officers and sailors, to be sure that no one would be on deck downrange of the men shooting, or coming in and out of the cabins in the stern. We were supposed to put our arrows in the center of a target hung between the doors of the captain’s and wizard’s cabins, but most of the misses hit the wall or doors; we lost only two arrows in the sea during the three archery drills in our first eight days at sea.

We had a bit of luck when the pirates found us, for it was morning, and all of us soldiers were on deck. When the lookout called out the warning, we left off sparring with practice swords and got out our real swords, then ran to the stern and looked out. Only Timusram, the sharpest-eyed of us, could see the pirate ship at first, but it soon approached close enough for even me to see it. Sumar sent Umiru, one of the sailors who had been drilling with us, to wake up the wizard and tell him about the attack, and the captain put the others to work raising additional sail to try to outrun the pirates.

The timing of the attack was all the luck we had that day. The pirate ship was faster than us, and had more and, I must confess, better fighting men on board. We killed or disabled a handful of them with arrows in the last moments before they came alongside. They tried several times to grapple us before they got their hooks to stay — I think that may have been the result of Kasrigan’s passive protective spells. If so, they didn’t help for long; on the fourth or fifth try they grappled our hull and swarmed over the side, and it was hand-to-hand from then on.

Some of us, though good enough fighters on land, had only gotten our sea legs within the last few days. The pirates were in their element, and too many for us. I saw Timusram cut down from behind by one pirate after holding his own against two in front. Fira was wounded and disarmed, but not killed, as it turned out — despite his injured leg he managed to trip up a couple of the pirates coming at me before he passed out from loss of blood. Sumar and I fought with our backs to the wall of the poop deck for some time before he was killed with a thrust to the eye. I fought alone for a little while that, vaguely aware of Midrun and some of the sailors fighting the pirates here and there on the deck or in the rigging — fighting, and mostly losing — until I took a sharp blow to my sword arm and my sword suddenly dropped from my nerveless fingers.

“Do you surrender?” one of the men surrounding me asked. I glanced at the bodies on the deck around me and nodded, gripping the wound on my right arm with my left hand to stanch the bleeding.

One of the pirates tied my wrists together with a piece torn from my shirt, in such a way that the cuff doubled as a bandage for the worst of my wounds; then he stood guard over me and a few other wounded men while the last few skirmishes came to an end, the last of the sailors and officers surrendering or being disabled or killed. Most of the fighting was already over by the time I was disarmed. I saw the captain and first mate both stretched out dead in pools of blood; they weren’t far from me, and I wondered how I had failed to see them die. I realized then that I hadn’t seen any sign of the wizard.

That mystery was soon resolved when two of the pirates emerged from the wizard’s cabin, pulling him roughly along, his hands tied behind his back and his eyes bleary and bloodshot. I cursed him, knowing that if he hadn’t been drunk last night, his magic might have tipped the balance for us against the pirates this morning.

“Listen!” cried one of the pirates — their captain, as it turned out. He was a tall man with a grey beard covering half his face, the other half disfigured with burn scars. Though most of his hair was gone and what was left was grey, he looked strong and healthy; he still had most of his teeth, unlike most sailors of his age.

“Many of you fought well,” he said to us prisoners. “And I always like to be generous to an honorable enemy. Those of you who fought hard and didn’t surrender till you were too bad hurt to fight, I’ll give you a choice. Those who hid or surrendered just because they were outnumbered must suffer the fate I mete out.”

The other pirates gave a cheer at that, and my gut clenched. Would he consider me to have been too badly hurt to fight any longer, when I surrendered? And what kind of choice was he offering? I soon found out:

“You,” he said, and he pointed out several of us, me included, “plus a few of your unconscious comrades, if they live through the next hours, are welcome to join my crew. You’ll have the same rights and duties as any new sailor who signs on in port — one share of all our loot, with a chance to earn more shares as you prove yourself. If you don’t wish to join us, you may choose: die an honorable death, jumping overboard under your own power, or be sold into slavery with your dishonorable comrades who surrendered.

“You don’t have to choose instantly. Think on it for an hour, while my physicker attends to my wounded men and then, if it’s not too late for them, to your own.”

“I c’n help,” Kasrigan said. “You might want to make an exception for me.”

“Oh? And why shouldn’t I sell you as a slave along with the others? My men tell me you didn’t put up much of a fight — slept through the whole battle, and struggled feebly with them when they pulled you out of your bunk.”

“I’m a wizard,” he said. “If I’d been awake when you approached, you’d all be dead. I know I’m not much use, drunkard as I am, but I’m more use to you on shipboard than in a slave market. Untie my wrists and I can heal some of your wounded men.”

“You aren’t much of a wizard, if two of my men could subdue you so easily.”

“I was sleepy and hung over — by the time I woke up enough to think of casting a spell, they had my wrists tied. I’m not quite helpless, though, now that I’ve woken up enough to talk.” And he said something in another language that made my head hurt to listen to; the tunic and trousers of one of the men who’d hauled him out of his cabin unraveled then, all in a moment, leaving him naked in his boots with a tangle of threads dangling around his ankles and wrists. He cried out and stepped away from the wizard, drawing his sword and pointing it at him — his belt, like his boots, was still intact.

“Just a harmless trick,” the wizard said, “to prove I’m what I say I am. I need my hands free to heal your wounded men, though.”

“I’ll do that when I can be sure you won’t turn against us,” the pirate captain said. “Swear by the source of your power that you will join us, sharing in the risks and rewards of our profession, and never act against your fellow pirates except in a declared and formal duel.”

“I so swear,” Kasrigan said, and repeated that oath pretty much word for word. The pirate captain nodded, and the other man standing by the wizard, the one who hadn’t lost his clothes, untied the wizard’s wrists.

“Now,” the wizard said, standing up and rubbing his wrists to get blood circulating in them, “who seems to be most badly hurt?”

I and other prisoners sat there under guard, watching the pirates' physicker and the traitor wizard heal the pirates we’d wounded. After a while, the wizard turned his attention to some of his former mates, healing a few who’d lost consciousness from their injuries. Fira sat up groggily, still looking pale, but miraculously alive — for how long, I wondered? I didn’t think he would turn pirate, and didn’t know if he’d be willing to live as a slave. A pirate had tied his wrists behind his back while the wizard healed him; once he was awake, they unceremoniously hauled him over and dumped him next to me and some other prisoners.

“What’s going on?” he asked me.

“We lost, and the wizard joined the pirates. I thought you were dead, but the wizard healed you.” I told him about the pirate captain’s offer.

“I’ll jump overboard,” he said firmly. “I might not mind being a slave if I could be sure I’d be sold to a kind master. It would be bad, but better than death. But there are many masters worse than death — perhaps most of them, in the slave markets we’re probably bound for.”

“So you won’t turn pirate,” I said. “I didn’t think so. Me either. We’ll drown together, and curse the wizard and the pirates with our last breath.”

The wizard healed Midrun too; he wasn’t quite as bad as Fira, who’d seemed to be dead until the wizard checked his pulse, but he’d been groggy and confused from a blow on the head. Once he was alert again, Fira and I filled him in. We were the only survivors of the mercenaries; there were several sailors tied up next to us, who’d put up a good fight against the pirates. Those who’d surrendered quickly or just hidden from the pirates were tied up at the other end of the deck, or belowdecks.

“I’ll let them sell me,” Midrun said. “I figure with my experience, I’ve got a pretty good chance of escaping sooner or later.”

“But,” Fira urged, “remember they have the wizard on their side now. Who knows what spells he might work on the enslaved men before they reach port and sell you? You might not want to escape, or you might want freedom but be unable to try to escape.”

“I don’t know for sure what this wizard can do besides turn brine into brandy and unravel a man’s clothes,” I said, “but it’s sure that some wizards can do what Fira said — fiddle with your mind so you won’t be able to do what you want, or so that you’ll want whatever he wants.” After that, Midrun decided to jump overboard with us.

It wasn’t long after the wizard healed Midrun that the pirate captain came back to where we were tied up — he’d been inspecting the ship, giving orders to his men to take down the extra sail we’d put on when trying to outrun them, appointing some of them as a prize crew to man our ship and some to return to their own vessel. After an hour or two of that, he returned to us and said: “Well? Have you made your decision?”

We had. We mercenaries and several of the sailors decided to jump overboard. Two of the sailors joined the pirates; only one preferred to be sold as a slave. The pirates untied the turncoat sailors when they had sworn an oath like the one the wizard had sworn. The man who’d chosen slavery was dragged belowdecks. And then it was our turn.

“Who will jump first?” the pirate captain asked. “I’ve already given you more time than I promised to make up your minds, so you should have said your final prayers by now.”

“I’ll go,” I said, and stood up, unsteady and off-balance with my hands tied. The pirates spread out and gave me room to get to the starboard rail; one of them touched his cap respectfully. I walked to the rail, still dripping blood slowly from the bandage that bound my wrists, and paused.

“If you untie my wrists, I can climb up and jump,” I said.

“Someone give him a hand,” the pirate captain suggested. Instead of untying my wrists, though, two of the pirates took me by the shoulders and legs and tossed me overboard, a surprising distance from the ship. In the moment before they tossed me, I thought I saw the wizard make some mystic gestures behind the pirate captain’s back, not unlike the ones he used to turn brine into brandy. For a moment I hoped he was going to save us; and then I hit the water.

I didn’t know how to swim well, and I had gotten some water in my lungs when I first plunged under. My blood was spreading out in the water from my bandaged wrist, and I knew that the sharks would soon gather; I hoped I would drown before they started tearing chunks out of me. But I struggled, knowing it was hopeless but still unable to make myself relax and sink. Thrashing there, I saw Fira climb clumsily over the rail and drop into the water right by the ship. Moments later one of the sailors, Tiram, was tossed by the pirates into the water near me. In his thrashing around, he kicked me in the stomach, and I went down for good.

I’d expelled my breath when he kicked me, and couldn’t stop myself from taking in a lungful of water. I sank then, too stunned to struggle against it. I saw above me the sunlight on the water, and the shadow of our ship’s hull and the smaller shadow of the pirate ship, and the chaotic ripples around Tiram and Fira where they were trying to stay afloat for a few more moments. As I sank deeper, I saw more splashes as more men jumped or were thrown overboard. Some of them sank right away, some paddled or even swam for a while before their strength was exhausted. The sunlight far above got dimmer and dimmer, and everything around me went black, as I sank deeper. But I didn’t lose consciousness; not entirely. For a little while I was surprised that I hadn’t drowned yet; then I decided I must have already drowned, but my soul hadn’t left my body yet. I’d heard the priests say that the soul stays in or near the body for three days after death, and I figured that must be what was happening to me: I’d be a prisoner in my drowned body until it was devoured by the fish, or until three days had passed, and only then would I go wherever the gods decreed I should go... But I found that I could still move, once I had recovered from the kick in the stomach. I could move my arms and legs, I could feel myself and my clothes with my hands. I felt little ticklings as fish approached and took a nibble at me, and I swatted them away.

I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t dead, but after an interminable time trying and finally succeeding in untying my wrists, I decided to try to swim toward the surface. I wasn’t any better at swimming than before, though, and in that lightless, weightless world I had no idea what direction the surface was in. I paddled aimlessly for a while, and then drifted aimlessly for a while. I grew hungry, and the next time a fish nibbled at me I grabbed for it with both hands. It slipped from my fingers, but after three tries I caught one, and ate a good part of it raw. Something felt strange in my mouth, as I ate, and after I’d finished off the fish and let its bones drift away, I put a finger in and felt around. My teeth were sharper than before, and there seemed to be more of them — a second row coming in behind the first.

When I realized that, I felt myself all over, head to toe — pulling off my useless clothes and shoes as I did so. (The cold had ceased to bother me by then.) I found two more strange things. Running along my neck there were narrow grooves, which opened and shut rhythmically. And further down, my penis and testicles seemed to be partly fused into the flesh of my thighs, which were growing together; I couldn’t spread my legs, and my crotch was several inches lower than it had been.

I continued to drift in the dark, cursing the pirates and the wizard. I was sure he was responsible for what was happening to me, but I didn’t know what he was doing to me — obviously he’d made it possible for me to breathe underwater, but what were the other changes? You must realize that I had grown up far enough from the sea that I did not hear the sea-tales which children on the coast hear growing up. And the previous times I’d been at sea, on troop-ships, I’d had little to do with the sailors; even on this voyage I’d spent more time with my fellow mercenaries than with the sailors, and had heard only a few of their stories.

So I didn’t know what was happening to me. I continued to drift in the dark, feeling myself change slowly into I knew not what. My thighs continued to fuse together and absorb my manly parts until they were a smooth extension of my belly, all the way to what had been my knees, and it didn’t stop there. Webbing grew in between my fingers on each hand, and between my upper arms and my sides. My second row of teeth grew in fully as long and sharp as the others.

And the darkness around me grew less silent. I realized I was hearing an almost constant background of distant whistles and rumbles; nearer, I heard or felt the soft rustle of fins as fish and other sea-creatures swam about. With my new webbed hands and arms, I could swim better, and with my new senses, I could perceive fish before they got close to me; I turned hunter, and found I could easily catch enough fish to satisfy my hunger. Soon enough I no longer felt any distaste at the raw fish, and I learned to distinguish different kinds of fish by the rustle of their fins, their feel in my hands, and their taste — though I had no idea what they looked like.

My legs fused together all the way to my ankles, where my feet remained distinct but turned outward, the toes fusing together or being reabsorbed. It seemed that my lower parts were taking on the shape of a slender dolphin, with a horizontal fluke. By the time my legs had taken on their final form, I was a much better swimmer, and it was about that time that I heard the singing. I swam toward it, and felt a gradual increase in the temperature of the water around me. Something else changed too, though I wasn’t sure how to describe it, and I felt that I needed to go slower, that it would be dangerous to go too fast in this direction — though I still wanted, needed, to reach the source of the song. As I forced myself to pause and drift in the darkness that was already a little less dark, I found that I was singing in response.

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End of part 1; I'll post part 2 in about a week.

When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format and from Smashwords in EPUB format.