Swashbuckling

In the distance, past the harbor, if anyone had been keeping watch, there would have appeared the faintest of disturbances in the sea; a slight discrepancy from the soft, but pummeling waves crashing onto the rocks that lined it.

There in the distance, Robert was clinging to the fated piece of driftwood that had spared his life. Exhausted by the events of the past day, his semiconscious mind was having difficulty grasping the scene of safety in front of him. At first, he had assumed it was a mere mirage, a frequent plague of his recent thought landscape. Nonetheless, the waves ushered him forward, and within minutes, Robert emerged safely from the sea onto the warm and inviting sand of the harbor’s shore.

Whether he lay there for minutes or days, Robert was not aware. He only lingered in and out of a dream-like state, as the previous days seem to recount themselves again and again to him in visions of his mind. 

“Man the deck! And have yonder wench bring me some loblolly and hardtack,” Captain Cain had ordered and then disappeared below deck to his quarters.

Robert had been in the crow’s nest all morning and had been looking forward to getting in a good nap before his afternoon drudgery of mopping would commence, so the captain’s orders had hit an already sore nerve. The restlessness of the crew matched his own, having been at sea for nearly three months with no real plan to port. While pirates weren’t known for keeping schedules, to have no clear direction or vision of what was ahead for them kept them all in a suspended state of anxiety. Having no luxuries to assuage that anxiety left them vulnerable to what was to come next.

While pacing the deck, allowing the cold air to swat his face out of his sleepy stupor, Robert heard the faintest of sounds in the distance. At first glance, he saw nothing on the horizon, though he sought earnestly in all directions. He called out to the second duty guard in the crow’s nest, but found him mostly unresponsive, the byproduct of excess rum.

Robert attempted to discount his ears and continue pacing the deck, but once again, he heard the sound, only now it was slightly more prominent. He grabbed the monocular that had been hanging from the main mast and peered through it, walking the length of the ship as he did, searching for anything other than the endless, relentless waves that he’d grown so accustomed to. Robert marched dutifully and half-excitedly at the prospect of any change whatsoever, seeking for the source of the sound that seemed just out of reach enough to not be distinct, but audible enough that he could not dismiss it. After he had rounded the full length of the ship three times to no avail, he returned the monocular to its nail and resumed his pacing.

No sooner had he given up on the noise, he heard it again, but this time he heard it with clarity and distinction. There was no mistaking it. The sound was the whir that cannonballs made right before impact, though there were no ships in sight other than their own, and there was no ship in commission that could possibly shoot a cannonball to such great lengths that the cannonball could reach them without the ship being detected. Therefore, when the unmistakable sound continued to haunt Robert’s ears for the next hour up until its crescendo at about noon, he excused himself from duty with a believably queasy look about him, and retired to his quarters for some well-deserved rest.

Below deck, Robert fell into a dream trance where he again encountered the unmistakable noise of a cannonball right before impact. He was familiar with it predominantly as a result of past battles he’d had aboard pirate ships, but most recently because it had been the death of his love. 

Rebecca had been the reason that Robert was part of Cain’s crew. She was as rough as sandpaper in some ways, crazier than Cackle-Fruit in others, nearly blind as a bat, and altogether the loveliest woman he’d ever laid eyes on. What she lacked in grace, she made up for in form. She was eager to learn and ready to receive whatever came her way, so when she found herself homeless and an orphan on account of a town fire that claimed the lives of nearly 300 homes and over half of the inhabitants, she took to the seas with her cousin who heartily accepted her as the serving wench aboard his vessel. 

Robert often relived those first moments with her, the time when they had been ported and were found quite alone together on the ship. The awkwardness of it, the forbidden nature of it that made it all the more enticing, and the encounter of her, her skin, her touch, her smell, and her love. It had consumed his every thought since then. He had fallen in love with her. His plan was to work himself into the captain’s good graces and then ask for her hand in marriage. He had saved money from his many portions of booty and had planned to retire to a seaside home and settle down with her. 

But alas! The life of piracy is not for the faint of mind or the folly of heart. It was not long before an enemy ship approached and claimed the life of his dear Rebecca. Every moment since then had been a blur of strung together minutes that had lost all meaning. His numbness ate away at him daily, only occasionally relieved by the intense pain he felt during the rare times that he allowed himself to feel.

The sound of the next whir woke him straight out of his dream state and he instinctively rolled out of his bunk on account of not having enough room to sit up. Standing there in lucidity, he had a stark and incomprehensible, yet certain realization. He realized that the cannonball whir was not haunting him as he had supposed. It was warning him. Reluctantly, he admitted the preposterous. It was a premonition. 

Robert was not a particularly spiritual man, nor did he believe in a higher power. Most of his life he had considered those preoccupied with such trivial things to be inconsequential. However, he was partially raised by his grandmother Ethel. She was the epitome of this type of person, but she was also very dear to him. He did his best to question her about her beliefs of intangible things, but she never answered him satisfactorily, and so after a while, he concluded that she must be crazy. That is how he came to love the crazy. It was because his grandmother, unsound as she was, also happened to love him with a love that superseded her instability of mind and had left a remarkable impact on him. 

Ethel had told Robert stories from his early youth as a form of entertainment. These stories, however, were also mostly allegorical. She told him of encounters she had had with the “other side,” and how there are inexplicable things that sometimes happen to mortal men that cause them to believe the unbelievable. She often included stories of premonitions, which seemed prevalent in all cases where a warning of danger or fate occurred. Ethel had inadvertently prepared Robert for this very circumstance, as though she’d had her own foresight of it.

While Robert felt uneasy about it, and tried three times to dismiss it, he could not help but conclude that this whirring sound wasn’t in his head, but was indeed a clear premonition. He realized that if his former self of yesterday had approached him with such a ludicrous idea, he would have criticized himself for it, but the trance he’d been in for the past few hours had convicted him of the impossible in a way that he could not pinpoint, but that he could not shake, either. 

After a while of arguing with himself over the validity of his claim and his sanity, he was impelled to bring his findings to the captain who immediately thought the fever must have gripped Robert and sent him to the quarantine cabin. The cabin was located at the very bottom of the ship’s quarters and was isolated from the rest of the ship. As he sat there in solitude, he didn’t blame his captain one bit for the swift and certain sentence, but he still couldn’t shake the idea that the whirs, which were now so clearly audible that the sound literally drowned out the sounds of reality, were the premonition of an impending attack. He sunk down to the floor, grabbing his knees and rocking back and forth, fearing the inevitable. His demise was certain regardless of the outcome of this lapse in judgment. He was either correct, or unfit for duty.

At precisely 9:29am the next morning, the attack came. The enemy was fierce and unrelenting. The ship was wounded badly and began to sink. Robert had been pacing the quarantine quarters, wondering how to backtrack his former psychotic episode, when he found himself abruptly shifting gears to fighting for his life. What had saved him had been the position of the boat he’d been in. When the boat began to sank and its weight shifted, it provided just enough thrust to propel him out of harm’s way after he had managed to escape to the starboard side stairwell. The fleeing enemy had not bothered to loot the ship. This attack was planned and executed out of revenge, and blood was their only motive. When Captain Cain had been murdered and the ship’s fate sealed, the enemy did its best to exterminate the remaining crew and left the remnants to fend for themselves in the open sea. As it happened, only Robert had remained.

The waves that softly pummeled the shore had kept rhythm with his visions and had perpetuated them, but a disruption to the synchronicity woke him from his timeless slumber. He looked through groggy and squinted eyes and saw a woman staring at him with eyes like the ocean, sun and sky. She was smiling at him and it reminded him of his grandmother. He sat up, shaking his head and focusing on her, wondering if he was still asleep or not.

“You’ve been in and out of it for quite a while now. I couldn’t carry you, so I just stayed with you instead,” she said.

Her voice sounded so familiar, as though he’d known it from a long time ago. It was comforting, and arousing, and he felt something, something more than pain, something that relieved the numbness. He felt warmth. He thought he must still be dreaming and decided he did not want to wake from this dream.

“Who are you?” he asked. 

“I’m Angel. Don’t you remember? We met ages ago in school together, and then I ran into you at the bonfire last night. You hit your head pretty hard on that piece of driftwood you tripped over and you were in and out of consciousness all night, but you begged me not to take you to the hospital on account of the rum, so I stayed here with you. Remember?

“Oh, yeah. I remember. Why did you stay with me?” he asked perplexedly, while gently rubbing a painfully sore spot on the right side of his forehead.

“Because you asked me to,” she said.

Robert shook himself awake and shook off the dreams he’d been having for the past 18 hours. He looked into Angel’s eyes and he saw Rebecca. He knew what the dream had meant. He looked up into the twilight of the sky at the emerging stars and thanked his grandmother for premonitions. Then, he leaned over and kissed Angel.