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FAIRY TALES, I
Ciela thinks she might hate him.
She’d read about sea captains before, in old books with promises of truth inked on yellowed pages, hidden behind disintegrating hardback covers. They offered a kind of valiance that couldn’t be found, they said, among common folk, landlubbers, navel-gazers. And Ciela, who until now hadn’t ventured beyond the shores of Mercay (as far as she remembers, anyway), had spent many a lazy afternoon daydreaming about the arrival of some nebulous sea captain who’d tell her the sort of stories she’d devoured in her books.
They told of legendary exploits and daring heroisms. Colossal, ravenous squids; people made of rocks and homes built out of snow; entire islands, she read, where it never rained, and seas where furious tempests buried whole civilizations in one swallow.
Now she’s not sure any of them are true. And the idea she’d believed the tales at all makes the color rise on her cheeks.
All she wants to do, really, is pen a strongly-worded letter to the at-fault editor, insisting they examine with more scrutiny the bombastic claims of their subjects.
“I have reason to believe,” she’d write, if she were big enough to lug around a pen meant for Hylian hands, “the tales of some – nay, all – sea captains are, at best, gross exaggerations of factual events and, at worst, categorically untrue.”
Ciela wonders if, before her memories had been wiped clean, she’d been a lawyer, complete with a tiny briefcase and miniature pants suit. She does like to argue, after all. It feels like an intrinsic part of the fabric of her identity.
But she’s also an optimist, so perhaps a hapless public defender instead.
LITIGATION, II
So she hadn’t been a lawyer, it turns out. Anyone can argue, but level-headedness is one among many virtues she can’t claim. She is often prone to bouts of uncontrollable emotions, and that just wouldn’t look good in front of a judge, jury, or executioner.
She had been – was now, too, – a Spirit instead. She tries with all her ardor to hide her disappointment from Oshus, who looked as though some stoicism and maturity on her part was long overdue. But among the things she’d thought she could have been – lawyer, explorer, lonely wife whose good-for-nothing husband never came back from a fateful fishing trip…
Among all of those, the occupation of religious figure hadn’t been especially high on the list.
Link takes the development, as he does everything, in stride. Linebeck, as a matter of course, does not.
“Spirit of Courage, eh?” he wonders aloud, feet kicked up on the shoddy thing he calls a table. There’s a toothpick sticking out between his teeth. “Could’ve fooled me.”
Ciela, sitting on a crate on the opposite side of the ship’s cabin, ignores him.
“Spirit of bullheadedness, maybe.” He waits, chews on the toothpick. Then: “What d’you think of that one?”
Ciela sighs, quietly enough that he doesn’t hear. Her concentration wanes like a full moon eager to reach its next phase. Link is gone, having left for his umpteenth delve into the crypt of the Ocean King’s temple. At Ciela’s behest, Link had taken Neri and Leaf with him and left her behind when she’d insisted there were things she needed to do.
“Or,” he continues, “Spirit of – of peskiness. Tell me: Do you get more than one title? Because if you do, peskiness is one and irksomeness is another. I’m not sure which one I like better.”
“Those mean the same thing,” Ciela seethes.
He smiles: Thirty-two teeth and a toothpick.
“It’s not like you to stay behind,” he observes, almost astutely. He turns his head to watch her from across the room. “What are you up to?”
“I’m not up to anything,” she insists.
“You wanted to spend time with me? How adorable.”
“Absolutely not, ” she declares. “I’m… focusing.”
“Focusing! Whatever on?”
“Certainly nothing that pertains to you .” Ciela settles on the crate. A period of allowable silence follows, and she tries to recall where she’d left off. What she’d been looking for still doesn’t come. In spite of her efforts to ignore him, she feels his presence across the room like a loaded weapon.
“Shouldn’t you be fixing the ship or something?” She asks at long last.
“Nothing to fix, sugarplum,” he replies easily. He plucks the toothpick from his lips to set it down on the table and then, as if surprised by the feeling of its absence, fumbles with his coat pocket for a pipe. “The S.S. Linebeck is in tip-top shape, thanks to my handiwork.” He pauses to light the pipe. “And no thanks to yours.”
“Link’s low on potions,” she adds. “You could make yourself useful and visit the island shop.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me, Sparkles?”
“Oh, never ,” she drolls. “But if you could smoke outside I’d be greatly in your debt.”
Linebeck laughs into his pipe. He coughs, his humor materializing as puffs of smoke – one, two – that dissipate into the cabin’s air. “In that case, put it on my tab.”
Ciela huffs. “You are insufferable.”
“It’s my ship! What gives you the right to tell me where I can or can’t smoke?”
“Not if it’s –” the moment of heat passes, and Ciela finds it in her capacity to control herself. Her temper cools begrudgingly, like a single ice cube plopped into a pot of boiling hot stew. “Never mind,” she says. “I’m going outside.”
All it takes is a single jump, and she is airborne. Ciela crosses the room easily and makes her way to the stairs leading to the deck.
“Hey, hey, wait a minute,” he says quickly, kicking his feet off the table and smacking the pipe face down on its surface. “Don’t throw such a fit.”
“I’m not throwing a fit. I just need to focus for a few moments–”
“What are you talking about? Focus on what?”
She doesn’t want to confide in him – not now, not ever, really – but the inadequacy her dilemma invokes in her makes it an impossible query to pose to Leaf and Neri (never mind Oshus himself). And she somehow doubts Link, being as accomplished as he is, could understand what it feels like to be utterly deficient in a predestined role.
But Linebeck… he’d know a thing or two about deficiency.
“I’m trying to remember,” she confesses. “There are whole days, weeks, years I can’t seem to find – like I’ve misplaced something that never existed at all. People, faces, names…I thought the fusion would reunite me with all of my memories, but maybe there’s something I’ve missed.”
She stops and watches his expression carefully – for a twitch of his eyebrows, a curl of his lips, anything at all that might give her an indication of what he’s thinking.
“Go on,” he says.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this; of course you wouldn’t know what it’s like to forget whole swathes of time you’re absolutely sure you’ve lived.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he replies. “An old pal of mine once helped me empty an entire barrel of rum in a night.”
“Ridiculous,” she breathes. But she isn’t sure if his sentiment has irritated her or not. “You must find it very funny that I have some great, important calling – this title – that I can’t even remember, much less put to good use.”
Linebeck is quiet for a moment while he considers her. He is infrequently a considerate person, tossing other people’s words overboard with the chum buckets when they overstay their welcome or otherwise begin to reek.
Finally, he says, “I, for one, already told you I don’t think the title suits you anyway. Spirit of Courage. Not the first thing I think of when I think of you. Most people would agree.”
Ciela deflates. “Don’t you think I’m brave?”
“Oh, you’re plenty brave, Sparkles. Maybe too brave if you ask me. What I mean to say is a title like that is too stately for a fairy that can’t sit still or follow orders.”
“It doesn’t matter if I want it — if,” she corrects, “if it suits me — or not, I —“
“If I were in that old sea pickle’s shoes, goddesses forbid, I’d keep you clear and far away from any of the important cultural affairs in my kingdom. No, if I had to find a good use for you (and there weren’t any openings in barnacle removal services), I’d employ you as my personal attorney.”
“The Ocean King doesn’t need an attorney. As a diety, I mean. That’s part of the role, being impervious to fault… or litigation.”
“Impervious, my foot. Everyone needs legal counsel. Anyone tries to sue me, I’ll send them to you. And you can… talk their ears off, something like that. Who the hell knows.”
She feels uplifted by his own absurdity, somehow. Like watching a parade of clowns getting out of a small buggy, one-by-one. It isn’t graceful, what he’s doing. It’s almost funny. But it makes her smile.
“I’d be happy to be your attorney,” she says. “With the problems you get yourself into, I’m sure you’ll need one.”
“Always glad to provide gainful employment,” he quips. “I’ll go outside if you want some peace and quiet.”
Pipe in hand, he goes upstairs before she can say anything else.
And it is the first of two times that Ciela wants to tell him to come back. She doesn’t now, and she won’t later.
So much for being brave.
WAX SEAL, III
Linebeck needs a divorce attorney.
Ciela decides this one afternoon while she reads through his mail without his knowing. He’s out shopping. Or drinking. Or hitting on bar maidens. Perhaps he’s accomplishing all three at once.
Linebeck’s mail, which Ciela was happy to accept on his behalf (“I’m his wife,” she had told the postman, which made the poor civil servant make all sorts of faces in first – confusion, then disapproval, then curiosity, and then, finally, disgust), included a monthly subscription to a raunchy mermaid postcard fan club, an overdue jury duty notice, an unpaid bar tab, a bench warrant for his arrest on an island she’d never heard of – and a letter in a bleach-white envelope, sealed shut with the unmistakable shape of a lipstick stain.
Dear Linebeck, the letter reads, once Ciela has thrown away the court summons (she’s sure it’s a scam), How are you? I’m well. Can’t complain, really. Treasure hasn’t been lacking, and my little sister – Joanne, I’m sure you remember her – says she’s getting married. I haven’t met the guy, but as long as she isn’t marrying you, I can’t imagine I won’t approve.
Speaking of, you still owe me. I’ll accept payment in the form of cold, hard rupees. Or – and I like this option better – you can have a lovely, candlelit dinner with the end of my sword. On the house.
The choice is yours.
XOXO,
Jolene
At the bottom of the letter is a crude drawing of Jolene decapitating a figure that, going by the x’s where his eyes ought to be and the bags underneath them, could only have been meant to represent Linebeck.
It’s fairly obvious to anyone with even the least intuition that Linebeck and Jolene have a history. It’s clearly not a very good history, either; hence the death threats and Linebeck’s demands to put as many nautical miles between his steamship namesake and her sailing ship as possible.
It’s the oldest excuse in the book: crazy ex-girlfriend. Sure, you never did anything wrong. Sure, she grossly misunderstood something you said. Sure , you put just as much effort into the relationship as she did, and you never, ever lied.
Nobody believes him. Ciela least of all.
It’s perfectly possible they were married once, Linebeck and Jolene. And though he doesn’t seem like the type for commitment, it doesn’t mean he isn’t impulsive. Then she wonders if they might still be married, legally, and Linebeck owes her some serious back pay in alimony or— child support? The situation might be more complicated than she’d thought, and Ciela doesn’t know if, in this esquirial fantasy of hers, she’d even want to defend his sorry ass.
Reading the letter won’t do him any good, Ciela decides. It will only put him in a tizzy, and she doesn’t want to ruin a perfectly good afternoon.
The letter doesn't leave any specific instructions for a meeting, or even how much money she wants, so Ciela thinks it’s safe to dispose of the thing. She can’t just leave it out on the desk — the seal on the envelope is broken and she doesn’t want Linebeck (much as she is indifferent to his opinions) knowing she’d read through his mail. It is a crime, after all, and Ciela is no criminal.
It takes some effort, but she manages to lug the letter and its kiss-sealed envelope to a porthole left ajar.
She lets go — and watches with religious devotion while both pieces flit, float, spin from the air to meet their watery dooms. Face down in an obscene imitation of drowning, the letter bleeds ink until Jolene’s words have all but trickled away, once again liquid, sans quill and ink pot. The waxy lipstick, though, holds fast to the envelope like a vice.
The single page and its companion piece are lurched by a dismal wave underneath the nearby docks, where fish will nibble on its pulpy corpse.
They are out of sight, and Ciela is, like the letter, dissolved of guilt. A paper trail literally does not exist.
In a matter of hours, it will be soggy beyond recognition. She feels a twinge of, not guilt but sympathy for it. After all, she thinks, considering her mayfly wings, she can’t swim, either.
FISH STORY, IV
It is hours to the end of the world, and Linebeck has plans to drink like a fish.
“This here, Sparkles,” he says. The bottom of the glass bottle hits the surface of the table with a smack. “is rum. It is a sailor’s most loyal compatriot in the best of times, and his lifeline in the worst of them. And if ever there was a most appropriate moment to drink an entire bottle of his majesty The Ocean King’s finest reserves, it would be now.”
Linebeck uncorks the bottle. Ciela wants to inform him that the Ocean King has no reserves of rum – a deity has no such need of imbibement — but she sees on the bottle’s sticky label that it is a manufacturer’s name to which he refers: The Ocean King’s Distillery.
Ciela doubts Oshus would approve. She doesn’t approve either, as a matter of principle.
The S.S. Linebeck and its crew are cutting a sharp line through the turbulent waves with a particular sense of urgency. Link has the Phantom Sword in his charge thanks to Zauz’s craftsmanship, but the blade is incomplete without said deity’s blessing; it cannot be wielded yet. And Link, who is anything but patient, stares at the unhilted sword spitefully.
But it’s getting late. And even young heroes, hardened by battle, need to sleep. Sometimes Ciela forgets he’s hardly fourteen years old, still in many ways just a boy. She watches while he clambers into his hammock, kicking off his boots on the way up.
Good, thinks Ciela, almost maternally. Almost.
When she turns her attention back to Linebeck, she sees that he has already poured himself two fingers of rum. He drinks about half of it in one go.
“You really shouldn’t drink at a time like this. What if the ship comes under attack?” She worries uselessly. “Bellum’s grown so powerful.”
In the lamplight of the ship, under the dark sky of the Northwestern Sea, it almost doesn’t matter. Bellum feels so far away.
Linebeck gives her a look over the rim of the glass. “I bet you’d like to try some, wouldn’t you?”
Ciela bristles like a thorny yellow flower. “No, I wouldn’t.”
“You do. I can see it; you want to try it.”
“I don’t,” she insists. “What good would it do, anyway?”
“Settle your nerves. That’s an easy one.”
“That says a lot more about you than it does me.”
“I drink for pleasure,” Linebeck says. “ Not because I am in any way apprehensive. I am… drinking to Link’s impending victory. And it would be rude not to toast to his health, you know.”
The little fairy scoffs. She feels especially indignant. “I’m not even sure fairies can drink.”
“They can. Unless you think Leaf stole an entire bottle of my favorite ale for some other reason.”
She isn’t sure if she wants to take his word for it. He could be lying. Linebeck does lie, and he lies often. Maybe not pathologically, but conveniently: tall tales, withheld truths.
“Fine,” says Ciela. She burns with curiosity and stubbornness. Its hold leaves marks on her skin. A nearby thimble catches her notice and she points at it. “Fill it up.”
Linebeck does little to conceal his happiness. Their journey is almost over and he has finally found in her a co-conspirator, a corruptible crack in her manicured demeanor. He carefully tilts the dark bottle until one drop, then two, fill the tiny metal cup.
There are old wives tales like this. Leave a thimble by your doorstep and you may be visited by a stray fairy who lost her way back to the fountain. This is almost similar. Ciela has no fountain to call home, not like other fairies. And she doubts the children leave hard liquor on their stoops, unless they are very naughty children.
The thimble is heavy. She wishes Linebeck wasn’t watching her. But she supposes it must be hard to look away: virtuous Ciela, who’s always right, who always knows better, finally falling.
But it’s just a liquid, after all. Non-permanence. And maybe it would settle her nerves after all. She’d like that.
Ciela drinks. The bitter taste goes straight to her brows, which she furrows, and her lips, which she purses.
“That’s disgusting,” she decides. “How do you drink so much of it?”
“That’s the fun part,” he says, pouring himself another glass. “The more of it you drink, the better it starts to taste.”
So they drink more. Linebeck, experienced as he is, is right. Two thimbles disappear like a simple magic trick. Ciela is nearly proud of herself for the accomplishment, the risk, the dare. And then she stops being proud, because she starts to feel other things, like giddiness, and then self-importance, and then self-loathing.
An hour passes like water under a bridge. The metaphor isn’t lost on her. The alcohol has softened her resolve and she is drowning in her own regrets. There’s nothing wrong with him, she realizes, her vision swimming, treading water. There’s everything wrong with him.
“Feeling okay, Sparkles?”
Linebeck isn’t a quarter so drunk as she. She’s not even certain she can call it drunk; there’s something about her physiology – perhaps her diminutive size, or the fact that she’s a fairy, or the divinity in her blood – that fundamentally disagrees with the rum.
She is sunk by a devastating feeling of fondness. Or maybe nausea. They’re easy to mix up.
“I’m fine,” she says, with the over-enunciation and deliberation of a harpsichord. “I feel fine.”
She must not look fine, lying recumbent on the table like an overturned firefly, wondering what had ever prompted her to be so unkind to him. She can hardly even think of it now. His coat? Was it his coat? Did she really hate him because of his coat?
“Whatever you say.” Linebeck wipes away the sweat that has accumulated on his forehead and feels around in his coat pocket. “Do you care if I smoke?”
“I don’t mind,” she says.
“I seem to remember you minding a lot.”
“I don’t mind right now,” she says, and then watches with interest when he shrugs and procures the pipe from before. It makes him look much older than he is. She’s seen him smoke cigarettes before; she likes those better.
“I won’t ask you if you want to try it,” he laughs. The image is funny. Ciela laughs, too.
He lights the pipe with a match. The cabin fills with the tobacco, and she tries to memorize the distinct smell.
Or was it the delusions of grandeur she hated? Probably, thinks Ciela. That’s much more justifiable than hating a coat. And Ciela, the mature and dignified Spirit of Courage, is anything but juvenile.
“How old are you?” she asks.There must be some kind of saying for situations like this. In vino veritas. But she’s not drinking wine, and she’s not speaking a truth. She’s asking for one.
“How old do you think I am?”
“Seventy, eighty years old,” she wagers listlessly. “A hundred-and-five.”
“Close,” he says, returning his matchbook to his coat. “You’re off by a few decades.”
“In which direction?”
Linebeck snorts. “They say it’s impolite to ask someone’s age. But you wouldn’t know anything about manners now, would you?”
“How old,” Ciela repeats, “are you?”
He takes a long, contemplative drag from the pipe, as if doing a calculation. “Hmm… well, seeing how it’s past the rainy season, summer’s not quite over, and the moon is in the constellation Malo, I’d put myself at… thirty-seven.”
“That’s old.”
“So I’m told. How old are you ?”
“Oh, I’m very old, Linebeck. As old as the ocean itself in some ways.” Ciela sighs. Her lungs are the size of uncooked kidney beans. “But I don’t feel it. I feel like someone who still has a lot of time ahead of her. Which I suppose I do. Eons of it. Speaking of… how far are we from Mercay?”
“Still a few hours out,” he says, looking up as if he owes the smoke rings for the answers. “Why? Worried the old man won’t approve of…” he gestures vaguely to her, the glowing smear on the table. Even the light that usually envelops her struggles to maintain its spherical shape. It melts, it wobbles.
“I’m not worried,” she answers. “But you should be. You did this to me after all.”
“I certainly did not ,” he huffs. He blows a ring of smoke in her direction. “I offered. You accepted. But I’m happy to endorse the wonders of booze on your behalf if you’d like me to. I’ll be your expert witness.”
“I’ll pass,” Ciela says with a flippant wave of her hand. “Maybe I just won’t say anything. If I keep really quiet, he won’t be able to tell.”
“Believe me, if you’re any quieter than you usually are — which is not at all, by the way — he’ll notice something’s amiss.”
“Ugh.” The notion makes her want to drink more. How easy it must be to be human. Slipshod remedies for unsolvable problems.
The rum has given her the illusion of warmth. Her capillaries – no bigger in diameter than a bit of fine thread – expand under the chemical reaction. It doesn’t settle her nerves, not literally, but it makes her otherwise rapid-fire heart feel like a lazy drum. She feels fantastic. She feels terrible. She feels nothing. She feels everything. If this is how Linebeck feels all the time, then she feels sorry for him.
“I’ve been wondering about something,” says Linebeck. He holds the pipe between his forefinger and thumb. A lagoon of smoke pools from his mouth. “About— about after this is all done.”
Linebeck seldom lets on what he’s actually thinking. It could be anything. Ciela, after some effort, sits up and watches him with semi-rapt attention. Everything she feels is slow and intense, like a three-hour symphony, performed in the dark, the instruments erotically out of tune.
“What is it?”
“I was wondering,” he says with excruciating slowness, “what happens to you, and the old man, and the other two cotton balls–” He gestures to her with the pipe, as if she represents them all. “–when all of this is over. Link goes home, I assume. He and his little girlfriend. I go back to — well, whatever it is I feel like doing. A life on the high seas, maybe. But you, Ciela: I’m guessing you have important work to do.”
“Yes,” she says. She thinks of almost nothing else. “I’m planning to open my own legal practice, specializing in divorce.”
“Really?”
“No,” Ciela replies. “Pour me some more rum, will you?” The bottle is far away and she has never felt smaller than she does now. Her heart, the size of a pea, aches.
Linebeck must understand. He doesn’t deny her the request.
STAR STUFF, V
In the end, she has to say goodbye.
Cosmically speaking, it’s not important. Ciela has lived eons and she’ll live eons more. What are a few people to her, really? Machinations of life, DNA replication, cellular respiration. Tiny dots on a greater, much more important fabric that’s her responsibility to maintain.
And what is she? She’s not a fairy – not anymore. That had been a convenient vessel when the moment had necessitated it. Needless to say, the Ocean King is no whale, either. It would be more accurate to say they are star stuff, a kind of unknowable material to which no laws of physics or biology apply. Ciela is a Spirit in every sense of the word. She doesn’t have cells or any genetic material to speak of, not hardly a body to call her own. She simply is.
And though she is the Spirit of Time and Courage, the former seems to move ahead without her permission.
Years pass.
Then more. The world continues because she, the other spirits, and the Ocean King will it to continue. That she once ever wanted to be a lawyer, or an explorer, or a fishwife dwindle in importance until these words are almost altogether meaningless.
Still. She’s Ciela, after all. Sometimes the name is even said with reference to her, though it’s become increasingly rare. There is a part of her that isn’t made of fractions. Something nebulous and still alive— fluid, flesh, blood, regret. Eternity is a very long time.
Of course, she can see the goings on and happenings of the mortal world. But it does little else besides fill her with rage and envy, and these are feelings she doesn’t experience with enough frequency to have kept any resistance. Jealousy is a fiery, angry disease and there is no anesthetic powerful enough to abate its symptoms.
For instance— there are things she’s done before she’d like to do again: fly, sail, read, drink; and things she’s never done that she would like to try: swim, kiss, fight, smoke.
Eternity domesticates Ciela like man breaks a wild dog – depravation, control – until all the time and space in the world no longer appeals to her sense of liberty.
She should pity them, she realizes one day, watching the functions of the Real World like the cogs of a dutiful but obstinate grandfather clock. She should pity them, its people, its animals and plants and rocks.
She should pity Linebeck, who’s nearing sixty years old and is starting to feel the aches of an old bone disease. He has a teenage son with a violent rebellious streak, who sometimes disappears for days at a time.
She could even justifiably pity Link, whose carefree boyishness has succumbed to the stress of building and operating and defending a new kingdom.
But where she thinks she ought to feel pity, she doesn’t.
You know what she feels. It’s already been said.