Sea-Witch

       Hence the storm came, and tore across the endless wastes of the sea.  Green glass shattered, frothed, billowed at the seams.  Guls cried along the growing winds, their voices going lost in that plutonic gloam.  Waves the heights of mountains rose to block the setting sun—that great, orange sore upon the world.  Its heat was yet irous, grown jealous of that blossoming cold which set upon encroaching night with the speed and wrath of a forlorn specter.  Plumes of basalt dust—shorn and carried from some unseen cliff-line—twirled amidst the wracking air.  The dust sparkled like fey wings. 

            Upon a lonesome rock which bore then, and would forever bear, no name, a sea-witch sat.  She the fish had named Esupiyo, in their ancient, gill-spilt tongue.  Esupiyo Esmeralda Espinoza III, Queen of Reefs and Mistress of Sea Lions.  Her den was kept deep below the endless, shifting, sage-glass sea in a place forbidden to men.  And there, beside the swaying ship-wreck carcasses of yester-years, her trove of doom was placed.  It glittered endless, so would say, the brave buccaneers who dared to spy it.  Though unobtainable—this they all knew—for her many curses and whispered dooms.  Pearls of the ancient days, forged by forgotten mollusk tongues, were hung there within her halls, shining forever with that primeval light of the Earth’s first volcanoes.  Nine of the ten Atlantean cauldrons, she possessed.  Eight of the forty-seven eyes of the Great Serpent too.  Sunken sirens, blasted mast-heads, corpses of marooned kings.  Her dungeons were endless, water-logged warrens spread deep below the world.        

            Storm blossoming overhead, she sat and flicked the long, purple tendrils of her tail, scales shining in the dusk.  Her torso—mortal-seeming—was bare and glistened with the wet.  Her hair—ever-changing—fluttered wildly in the wind.  A diadem was upon her brow, fashioned from a fin whale.  Though to her a simple treasure, it spanned the length of many men.  For she was greatest of the sea-wise mermaids, and her form terrible to behold.  By a sweep of her left hand, great cruisers tipped and sank; flicking her right, she sent tsunamis spiraling to the coasts.  Yet, she was contented to study the storm for the time.  It possessed great beauty.  Esupiyo, with a great, brass looking-glass in hand, watched the sun sink.  A green flash followed.  The winds, at once, quickened.  They whipped and lashed and eddied, and played as great seals in the sky.  Albatrosses, no longer able to contend with the storm, sat upon the shifting water, or landed on her shoulders.  Thereupon they whispered many things to her about the world beyond.

            Said one, “There is a place many leagues from here where they hunt woolly whales.  Great, baleen beasts which glow in the deep, perma-dusk waters.  They are great hunters—those who hunt the whales.  Tall, almost, as you.  Their spears are many-barbed and rune-inscribed, and their boats as long as islands.  They wear the wool of their foes with great pride as they feast upon the blubber.”

            Said another, “In a bay far to the south, where palms grow in strange rows, the hairless apes have made boats that need not oar nor wind.  Strange boats which chug and spurt and spasm along the surf.  Ugly, artless things which churn the waves black with oil.  And they watch us with malcontent.  And they shoot at us, and lure us with false offerings.  I watched a sailor-man throw a stone and kill my sibling, and take the carcass as a necklace.”

            Esupiyo, listening to many voices all at once, nodded.  A flag fluttered down.  Torn from a distant ship, wrapped in the wind’s embrace, now dropped beside the sea-witch’s rock.  Taking it up, she studied the banner.  It was green and gold and strange.  Upon it, embroidered in black, was a fish-tailed woman with her head lobbed off.

            Spake the sea-witch: “Where from did this meager thing fly?”

            Spake her white-winged cohort: “From the north-west, no doubt.”

            “I know,” said a lone tuna come to her rock.  “For I have seen such a flag but an hour ago.  A crude, gold-plated ship now sails the open water, mistress.  I will show you the way, should you wish.”

            Esupiyo, lowering her hand into the water, took the tuna in her palm and brought it to her lips.  Thanking the fish, she swallowed it whole and took its knowings into herself.  The tuna’s mind whispered between her ears; she saw a ship of gold carrying lavish men and their ill-made brides.  As seamless as death, she dove from the rock.  All there within the water—every bird and fish and whale and crustacean—knew to bow as she passed, slow and dreadful as life’s last breath.  And the conches she had bound within her hair rang a wrathful tune in the wake.  A shadow was overhead.  Not now just the storm, but a concrete shape.  Long and ovular, like the belly of the whale.  Save, this belly was of wood and nail.  Here, then: the ship.

            Ah, what a crude vessel it was!

            In the distant seas of Myermer, Esupiyo had seen ships carved of jade.  The Atlanteans had modeled their ships after her!  And this ship was squat and crude—its lathering of gilt could not change this.  Esupiyo, watching the vessel, let it be for a time, curious if the storm would not take it first.  When the ship showed no pause in the face of the great waves and greater winds, the sea-witch struck.  

            Quick and subtle as a mako she sprung up, strong and wrathful as a humboldt.  Maw extending, wrapping out like a deep-sea dragonfish, she bit into the ship and ripped it in twain.  Wood snapping, canvas tearing—drooping—the ship faltered and failed.  Along the sundered logs and desperate last moorings, tiny people screamed and begged.  Men in red coats waylaid her with noisome weapons.  Overhead, lightning burned silver-blue.  Esupiyo laughed and chided the hairless monkeys.  Her urchin-barbed fingertips raised, she dashed down on those maritime trespassers and shore them to bits.  At last, meager mortal blood running through the sea, Esupiyo raised up their silly banner.  This she scoffed at and devoured.

            Raging on, the storm carried off the last of the mortal pleas, and Esupiyo was left with the bubbling crack of the sinking ship.  She, diving down, counted the drowned corpses and stung them across a great hook a kelp.  Beyond the water’s skin, the storm moved south and the sky cleared.  Stars bloomed.  About her, the blue phytoplankton of the coveted deep glowed, dousing her with blue flame.  Taking forth the souls of the ship-wracked people, Esupiyo moved on.