Work Text:
The first moment his one remaining foot comes down on solid land, his guts roll like frenzied eels. Ahab has not suffered such rumblings of rebellion from his stomach in a dozen years. Ahab’s gorge did not rise when his leg was torn away, nor when the ragged end cauterized with iron saved his life’s blood pouring out, and he smelled the scorch of his own ill-butchered meat.
But now the blunt, grimy jumble of the street cobbles seems to reject him, only for his dismasted, unbalanced body to reject it in turn. The eternal roll of waves in his blood crashes against the rock of that simple step and then plunges back into his depths, leaving him haloed round with sick miasma as the sea air encompasses the hanging weight of invisible brine.
He swallows down the harsh back-throat breath of bile, and the sudden stale saliva that seems to seek to wet the way forth. He aches, not from the hanging sack-weight of his stump, still raw where it jams into the yoke of the sturdy peg, but in the ghost foot, ever-mangled, stubbed on every rock and wreck as if he had dragged it behind him across every inch of the sea-bottom between the whaling grounds and Nantucket. He leans on a pale, curving crutch to avoid too much of his weight on the newly-hewn joint, fashioned of a bow-legged rib, ignoring the stab of that same weight against the rubbed-raw skin beneath his arm, and hobbles at the briskest pace he can muster about all the business of a captain coming ashore at last.
Starbuck flutters around him, like a gull about the dockyards or a shark about the stripped corpse of parmacetti, yearning to usurp Ahab’s duties but without quite the temerity to suggest it. He at least makes himself useful carrying all the heavy rolls and logbooks, for catch, barrels, supplies, crewmen injured and their recompense to be paid, lost with widows and without, the remaining full lays. He could have sent the cabin boy on such a task, such a last duty being entirely fit to his mean state, but he had not, the better to impose his worried face on the execution of Ahab’s occupations. His silence cannot be reprimanded, though there is reprimand in it; so Ahab endures his shadowed eyes and close, careful steps, at the ready to seize upon Ahab’s arm should his pole buckle or his remaining ankle, like the mortal spot of Achilles, betray him.
Ahab does not spill himself across the stony streets, nor upon the salt-warped floorboards of the owners’ offices, nor on the two uneven steps up to his wife’s abode - for surely it could not be called his own, when he has not sheltered beneath its thatching for the pale blind eye of the full moon to witness more than thrice in a week of years since commencing his matrimonial life.
“Ahab shall have a nursemaid enough within,” he growls. “Begone with thee.” And Starbuck obliges him.
This mundane prophecy fulfills itself with all the prompt, ungainly enthusiasm of a newborn foal heaving and plunking itself into the world, but perhaps, also, no less tenderness. His wife was always a practical girl, as much captain of the household as Ahab of his ship, and so with no time to wonder at it he finds himself confined to a chair, forbidden from whacking about with his bolstering staff, scratching her floors and knocking china from the shelves as though he were a restless earthquake; and has his face and hands and hair all washed from her largest basin, with water that seems to him fae and strange without salt, as much light as liquid, sweet where it touches the corners of his cracked lips, more mild than the sea breeze where it drips in his gray lashes; his remaining boot is removed and the limb left to soak in that same pewter tub; his bare whalebone calf is examined more gently than it had been attached, and the sore sorry stump above washed and wrapped with the same unflinching care in soaked, shivery-cool dressings to dull the ruddy, sulking remnants of fever in it; and fresh bread and clear broth are set out for him, before she sits across from him, taking the rib-bone crutch over her lap and beginning to scrape down the upper end of it into a more amiable curve to carry him forth, demanding he disgorge the full tale.
He had married her for that manner, for quickness and thoroughness of action and bluntness of speech, and the eye to find which was needful. She remained a bewildering glory of youth, beside his white fringe and gnarled hands, but she had grown into it, while he stalked the seas under harsh tropical suns, and it holds better sustenance for him than the bread, though that tastes warm and fine. There lives no speck of madness in her, as he has been told there lived in his own mother, as he knows the bright jagged effulgence lives in him also.
Lightning, he muses, as the tale flows out of him like the whale-line from its coils, seeks not only the ocean, but also the steady earth.
Not until well midnight does the churning, vomitous urge make itself home in Ahab’s visceral regions again; he stumps his way on the newly-shandered crutch from their bed back to the alcove of the kitchen, and retches himself empty over the same bowl that held the broth, hours ago, as it must be as easy to clean whether the broth went hither or thither.
But he does not spew back the thin broth.
Instead, he hacks and chokes on something altogether otherwise, a thick waxy lump, as though the bread had been pitted with lard, as though he had gone dog-mad and chewed her white candles. The foul, briny, fecal scent locks fishhooks of recognition in his throat and hauls the rest up behind. Through the watery moonlight spilling from one window, Ahab beholds a plum-sized chunk of fresh, wet ambergris.
*
He had still been raving when the surgeon banded the ivory brace below his knee, winched in his swollen, ragged, gnawed-off nub like a barrel in its hoops.
He must be fitted before the flesh heals, or it shall never fit. As plants only graft when cut, as tree roots grow into the cliffside. He shall reshape himself within the cuff, become one united thing with it, the better for a lifetime of maneuvering upon it.
In his memory, the voice is full of crashing waves.
He had not screamed when the raw meat of him, edges that should have been insides, was bathed in cheap, hard whiskey against infection. He had not screamed when crushed splinters of bone were picked from him with tweezers, like the long thin beaks of terns, spearing little white fish from the water.
But he screamed when they put that brace on him. It had taken three men to hold him down, almost more than his cabin could fit, with Starbuck pinning his right arm and chest. The instant the ivory touched the wound, it was the whale’s teeth once again. Ahab was bitten, again, with all the force and agony of the first amputation, and none of the blunting blinding rage of the chase and the spearing and crashing water.
The mere pain could not have moved him to such animal clamor. But there had been a deeper revulsion, as of a violation of nature itself, as though a tree had opened weeping eyes before him, or placid lambs devoured their shepherd boy. He felt himself gripped by invisible as well as visible hands, thin demonic fingers reaching inside him, beneath the rent skin, to hold open the way the whale had made. He felt half demon himself, his bones no longer all his own, his flesh in the belly of one who had become his own flesh, both cambion and cannibal. Flesh of his flesh; bone of his bone. The whale tore at him, and he was the vast, pitiless maw, and the chum shredded upon the foam, and the ruined seaman, a great beast of disparate, thrashing parts, adjoined at the joint.
*
The fever passed on with the storm. When the surgeon came again to clean the wound and drain off that which had died before it could poison the rest of him, Ahab needed no other man’s hands to enforce his own discipline.
“Art thee thyself again, captain?” Starbuck asked upon the man’s departure, the first of many moments of such useless fluttering. Ahab felt that if he were to open his mouth, not only curses would pour out, but the very bolt of lightning that lived coiled in him, that held the armistice line at the knee, between death and his living thigh, that had marked him crown to sole, which sole snapped off, had grown frayed as the rest of him.
Ahab turned his face to the wall, swallowing all the scorching fulminations inside of him.
Starbuck crept closer, and set a hand on his hip, quaker-gentle, sea-rough.
“I have always been myself,” Ahab rasped. “In every raving. Whatever damnations I have heaped upon thee, I recant them none.” He remembered the words not at all. But he remembered the sick fury, as it seemed his very soul were spliced into the most hated creature, and he must have spat forth every excoriating condemnation his tongue could shape.
He must have been himself still, then, in the deadly, windless quiet after that terrible binding, or he should never be himself again.
”But dost thou also repeat them? Thou has not bid me begone.”
The whale’s jaw on him, in him, of him, was larger than his own; large enough to carry the whole weight of him. He could not answer. He felt pinned by the weight of the new white leg; he felt his throat full of saltwater.
“It will aid thee,” Starbuck insisted, and when he sat beside Ahab on the thin sickbed, the solid warmth of him against Ahab’s spurnful, scornful back felt warmer than blood, more solid than stone, more tempting than his fingertips mincing their way beneath his trousers. “For thy body to feel aught that is not pain.”
Have I not had aid enough, Ahab wished to spit, but he did not wish Starbuck gone, and himself alone again, bobbing on the empty, endless sea that seemed to gurgle up inside him from the half-healed wound, like the very infernal version of those inexplicable sainted springs where pilgrims flock to wash in the Virgin’s blessings. No such for Ahab, washed in saltwater within and saltwater without.
One hot drop fell upon his cheekbone from above, as he answered the mate’s ministrations in rough, wrenching gasps and low, wordless song. He could not answer with his own gritted jaw, but the whale’s jaw gave him a new tongue, untouched by the curse of the babbling tower, all haunting, echoing, crooning sounds.
If Starbuck noticed the noise emanated from no human heart, he did not go running in alarm, nor trouble Ahab with his revelation, anymore than Ahab asked whether the scant water fallen from face to face were sweat, or tears.
*
On land, Ahab struggles to eat. The bread he might have with little trouble in the moment, as similar to hardtack as fresh grapes to wine, though he sometimes catches an off-taste, as though he has gone down to the ground like cattle and cropped at the grass. Fresh meat he struggles with, even when it is the self-same animal as many a ration from the hold. Beef and pork without their stiff salting for the journey fill his mouth with blood; he chokes them down. He manages hard cheese, and an apple not so leathery as he has come to expect. But ripe red autumn cranberries he cannot have, though he knows Flora had found them so he might have something fresh, after the impossibility of such luxuries at sea.
He gives his portion instead to the boy, who seems vertiginously small and large at once: a fully-formed creature, now, of few words and thoughtful eyes, nimble at his work and quick to cover the whole island and bring back whatever his mother required, with no fuss nor tarrying, and never once forgets any item of his instructions. Ahab had left behind an overgrown babe, unsteady on his feet, eager to babble yet with little to say, unschooled enough in human dignities to reach out a pudgy hand for the white scar through Ahab’s eye whenever Ahab raised the boy into his arms.
Aban is polite and precise, now, but no less undaunted. It is his very fearlessness of his unknown father, his quiet, patient assessment, which makes him seem most terribly miniscule, surrounded on his island home by such things as he has not yet seen clearly enough to fear. Ahab cannot stop imagining him lost at sea, lost like a single speck in a great field of shifting waves, crushed beneath a sky with no staggering treetops or sturdy steeples to help hold it aloft. He could be swallowed as easily as he swallows the cranberries: whole, by the dozen, chewing only for the pleasure of prolonging the moment of mastication.
He bids his wife serve fish, until he must depart again. That, at least, he can eat fresh without battling against his throat’s own retching, and although his heart is cold with all he struggles not to think on, his belly holds its catch.
*
Reembarking aboard the Pequod, he is braced against his own weakness, plotting warily against any flinch seeking to come upon him, like tremors after a great quake, or the rumble of thunder after the dazzle of lightning has already faded, the gloom of a ghost hanging over the site of bloodshed.
He knows Starbuck and Flora are likewise fretting, lest he be overcome by the memory, as though it did not live in him, latched on all hooks, like the barbed head of a harpoon. Starbuck comes to accompany them on the final walk to the harbor, ostensibly in case there should be any difficulty; truly, he suspects, only for the opportunity to take huddled whispering counsel with Ahab’s wife. He mislikes them getting along so well, for such closeness seems fit to breed conspiracy. Starbuck, at least, had the decency to look abashed at this complaint, two voyages back, when Ahab was newlywed, if new in no other manner, and they first made one another’s acquaintance. Flora had only clucked her tongue, and suggested he might mislike it worse if they did not find one another so amiable, and Ahab knew well enough not to contradict her further in her own domain.
But for all their separate apprehensions, no such shadow encloses him upon returning to the ship. He knows every plank of it, repaired and washed and holystoned as befits a fresh voyage. He returns to the very cabin where he was remade, where he spouted his madness.
“I am very well,” he tells Starbuck firmly. “Thou needst not trouble thyself so in hovering, or the hands will mistake thee for a gull.”
“Aye, captain.”
There is much yet to see to; he departs.
*
It is not until nightfall that the past comes for him, in his dreams.
He hears songs he cannot describe: swooping and triling and clicking, a song of eerie moans and endless rippling ululations. He dreams a terrible cold that holds no chill, a deep cold untouched by light since the Lord divided the land from the waters, and yet it feels to him only bracing, a fresh delicious cold that embraces him, soothes him, sinks no icy teeth into him. He moves in the dark like the face of God on those same first waters. He rolls, arches, dives ever deeper, feeling the weight of the cold dark like Atlas, a burden vast as worlds, and yet not equal to his strength, a marble goliath.
Terrible sucking tendrils wrap his face; he opens his mouth triumphant, careless of the rush of brine, heavy as tar in the weighted, crushing depths. But he cannot be crushed: he opens and devours, sinks his teeth into flesh, into leather and jelly, spears through the wriggling thing that squirms and pulses and dies in his mouth, with a terrible rush of bitterness that offers no cloud of safety here.
Ahab wakes with an explosive breath, hard with the raw animal satisfaction of the hunt, his mouth thick and dripping with something that tastes of iron. He turns and spits what looks like a full pint of black ink on the floor of his cabin.
He does not bother to clean it, nor even wipe his face, before taking himself in hand, stripping himself with ferocious, thoughtless need. For the rest of the voyage, waking or retiring, he cannot escape the shapeless shadow of the faint black stain on the floorboards.
*
When they find the squid’s body, undulating arms and massive suckers, ghostly formless herald, Ahab wants nothing more than to have the taste of it again, to sink his teeth into the strange yielding toughness of its meatless meat, to feel the way it would resist and then surrender to his bite.
He does not let himself linger.
*
“I have seen ye there,” whispers Pip, and Ahab knows it is no lie, nor mere sunstruck madness, but the deeper, truer thing. “I see ye there, and yet ye be here. Not like Pip’s bones.”
“Aye,” Ahab agrees. “By bone and blood both, I have gone down to dwell there. A double half-life, but I must cut the tether of it, and be my own soul with no puppet strings, no leash nor line upon me, even should I bleed out my last drop upon the severing of it.”
It is a terrible relief to speak plainly of the thing, which even Starbuck would not hear but with quailing and wringing of hands. He can feel Moby Dick, the closer they close upon their quarry, the closer the prophecy closes its shrouds about him. Death has its bone-white fingers clutched in him; he can feel the gnash of the leviathan’s teeth, a constant grinding.
“Wheresoever thou art below, yet takest thou my hand,” he orders.
“Aye, Captain,” he is answered, and the boy makes no move toward him, and yet Ahab feels the press of his fingers.
He keeps Pip by him until the very end.
*
The line takes his throat; the whale takes him down. Down and down and down, amid the shattered wreckage of his own ship, splintered shards and drifting bodies. Down beyond the last of the light, and Ahab wonders if this dark is the hell they were both promised.
Down and down and down, they swim past mountains unbroken by tree roots and never kissed by the wind, and Ahab does not drown, for his conveyor never falters. Ahab is warmed in the wash of his blood even as the water’s chill deepens beyond mortal bearing; his lungs burn until he forgets to need them. Flesh of one flesh, breath of one breath, death of one death. He wonders that he ever thought he might drown, a man already one-eighth death, a blood dowry given in a terrible mongrel union.
Ahab hauls himself along the line, hand over hand, as he might do among his own rigging, strangled and fighting the rushing water, but still, he climbs. He is scraped to ribbons by barnacles; his clothes hang in fluttering rags, and salt electrifies the long laces of his wounds, dragged over him like the welts of a lover’s fingernails.
His hands are skinned raw and his throat is a slashed ruin, but he has already fought death to a standstill; it holds at his knee, and dares advance no further. He reaches the lance at last, gripping it with numb palms. He tangles his living leg in the forest of dangling lines and failed strikes foresting the back of his prey. Then he yanks free his own blade and plunges it in again, again and again and again, until a jackknife twist of the pale mountainous mass shrugs him off like a horse shudders away a fly, and he tumbles down, and down again, to vast lightless plains, and strange palaces of the wordless world.
Down to the court of scuttling things, where the hallways are lit with the lanterns of needle-toothed silent sirens and the phosphorescent fronds of rippling, swirling creatures neither plant nor animal, and the steaming glow of the earth’s own molten blood, oozing fire and pouring forth boiling smoke.
Moby Dick lies in a great caldera of grey gravedirt. Unnamed creatures never offered for Adam’s nominations arrive in caravans and brigades, crawling things and squirming things, tearing things and boring things, tiny red hands, vivid yellow clouds. A vast surrounding crowd, come to pay homage to a fallen king. Ahab, too, is the king, even with his bone-leg broken off a third time, even with the baleful white fire in his heart doused to a few mere embers, barely flickering. Still, they part for him.
He walks, one-legged, with the lance for his crutch, though it sinks deep into the sand, leaves a dark bloody trail of new wounds in the very earth. There his ship: caught in the whirl of its own whirlpool, a bauble of doom, which the ocean has taken down for mere delight of it. No shipwreck ever alleviates the strangeness of another: here, wood is a thing stranger than star-iron on the surface, for a man may see stars and meteors in the sky, though they remain ever remote. Not one of the creatures at the elegy could even imagine a tree.
Pip finds him, catches Ahab’s hand. He is eaten down to the bones, now, some of those same strange vines woven through his ribs, and an indifferent armored thing the size of a cat clings to his thin shoulders, ghostly mandibles nibbling his cheek.
He drops the lance at last, as the final cinders quench in his chest. He does not need it to hobble, when the water bears him up. He is unbearably cold and unbearably light; Pip clings to his fingers as he starts to rise. He catches the edge of the swirling bubble around the ruined remnants of the Pequod. He seizes Starbuck in the other hand, hears a few low cracks as his hands are wrenched away from their frozen death-grip on the rails.
So Lot escaped the doom of all his folk, saving only two daughters. Two, then, he dares to demand back from the pitiless pitted heart of the sea, and without Moby Dick’s terrible strength in him, the weight seems more than any carcass that ever bent a mast or tilted a ship on its side against the hauling-up. He cannot haul himself as he did on the way down, hand over hand. He cannot kick with only one leg. He can only force himself to rise as dead men float. So he climbs back again, retraces his steps to the upper air, with not even fury left to sustain him, but stubbornness alone. He leaves the shards of the broken jawbone leg, and the spent brass casing of his heart’s hot shell, and all the salt in his blood, as ballast dropped to buoy them up.
He forces himself up, and like Lot, like Orpheus, knows he can never look back, or he will sink again with all his cargo, will lay down in Moby Dick’s quiet gullet to be devoured by the same carpet of blind seeking creatures, will melt into him at last and entire.
But Ahab will only be Ahab. He does not look back, not for all the wonders of that fathomless reign, not for the sight of God’s own footsteps in the ancient stillness of that lost and buried sand.
*
“We are exiles now, are we not?” Starbuck asks him, as the Rachel pulls into Nantucket’s dock. Ahab cannot speak. Even when all the bandages desert the ruin of his neck, he will not. His voice was left with his leg, with the lance and the line, in the world below.
“We can never go to sea again, or we will not be spared that devouring we so narrowly escaped.”
Starbuck is only guessing; he remembers almost nothing of that world or its judgments, the dark beyond dark, the cold beyond cold, the light and heat that nevertheless flashed and flared there. His sanity is too firm to bear it; it slides away from him like water on oiled cloth; his body rejects it, as Ahab’s body now rejects fish. He cannot eat clam nor cod nor even seaweed. He can take nothing at all, now, from the sea. Starbuck’s broken fingers are clumsy, but his knowledge of navigation and steady head might still have furnished him a place on another whaleboat, if the instinctive horror of it had not so readily made itself a home amidst Starbuck’s natural superstitions, with no greater explanation required.
Ahab nods, slowly.
“Perhaps…we might go a little West. Thy family and mine. It seems a rough road, to be islanders who cannot stomach fish.”
Ahab nods, slowly, again. He does not know where they will go, or what they will do. But he aimed to make himself untethered, to cut the line and scorch the book of fate, and now he must face an unplanned future. It will be as well to have his mate along.
“Ready to be off, sirs?”
Pip, of course, has recovered best of all of them. The strangeness sits more lightly on him now, although it is not gone.
“I am whole,” he promised Ahab, when the latter first awakened after the last hunt. He will never forget the wonders and inexpressible wilds of the world below, but he is not stranded there any longer, and he knows well enough to speak of them only with Ahab, who does not speak.
Ahab drapes an arm over each of them. He will have a new leg of wood, when he can find the right carpenter to fashion it, but until then he has done without, rather than lean upon ivory again. So they must carry him, this last ungainly stretch down the dock. This time, when his one remaining foot touches stone, he remembers in a shocking surge how to breathe, and he fills his lungs with air.