Pip Vaughan-Hughes - Relics

Or so it seemed. Now it is easy to see that I was not looking directly at the world. Instead I was peering into the mirror held up for me by melancholy, which distorted and corrupted all that appeared in it. So I did not see Anna's happiness for what it was: the proof that my fears for her were groundless. Instead I searched the mirror for a more sinister meaning, and it was not long in revealing itself. For there stood Will, my worldly, wicked friend, and the look he was giving Anna was one I had seen a thousand times before in the low houses of Balecester.

The unwholesome epiphany I was granted from Anna and Will's mackerel-fight worked a miraculous cure, as epiphanies are wont to do. From that moment on I found my senses clear and life once again humming within me. I was mistaken, though, if I believed that my melancholy humour had been cast out. It had instead transmuted itself from the base matter of despair to the harder, brighter metal of jealousy. But like any good poison, this one did its work slowly and insidiously, although I would not understand this until it was too late. At that moment, standing bare-chested in the hot sun with my arms full of slimy, writhing fish, I was suddenly feeling something like my old self. Without thinking, I lobbed the mackerel in my hand at Will who, faced with scaly assault from two quarters, ducked behind the mast and aimed another fish at me. It went wide and hit Carlo in the stomach and he, thinking Dimitri behind the wicked deed, launched an attack of his own that signalled out-and-out war on deck. If a flying-fish had chanced to peer over the rail as he glided past he would have been treated to the marine version of hell itself: a writhing bedlam of half-naked men hurling fish, beating one another about the head with fish and treading live fish underfoot, hooting and screeching the while like a legion of Beelzebub's fiends. It had been long months since the men of the Cormaran had been allowed their heads in this way – they had missed a true shore-leave in Dublin and Bordeaux – and the Captain let the melee run its course, even permitting Istvan to belabour him with a fast-disintegrating dog-fish that had thrown in its lot with the wrong shoal.

Once some sort of order had returned to the Cormaran it became clear that we would have to pay for our jollity. In many ways life aboard a ship resembles that of a monastery, and that perhaps was one reason why I felt so at home on the sea. It is a self-sufficient community of men in which a life of labour is regulated by bells. There is always much to be done, but on ship as in monastery, idle hands are the greatest danger to order and work must be found for them. I spent my boyhood scrubbing floors and polishing wood at the abbey, and now I found that my days passed in much the same way. So it was with mounting panic that we stood, fouled with scales and blood, and regarded the chaos we had wrought.

The deck was creamy with the trodden guts and mashed corpses of fish. Many survived to be pickled, and the rest went overboard. Fafner emerged from below, his whiskers fairly trembling with excitement. A cloud of seabirds appeared as if from nowhere to feast on the oily, stinking trail that the Cormaran dragged like a slug across the pristine sea. We set to work sluicing everything down with sea-water, then scouring the deck with sand and stones. It was somewhat purgatorial, as the sun heated everything to the rotting point almost straight away, and we laboured in a rich fetor of putrescence. Black slime had to be scraped from almost every surface. In the end we had to scatter lye, which made our eyes water, and wash ourselves down with sour wine, but it was days before the ship – and its cat – lost its pungency.

Meanwhile, fish had come to feed on the debris in our wake, and greater fish to feed upon the smaller ones. A shout from the steering deck brought me running, grateful for a respite from my scouring-stone. Nizam was pointing down into the water, and Anna, who had wisely taken refuge up here after starting the melee, was bouncing on her bare toes with excitement – or perhaps fear, for when I followed Nizam's finger I saw a strange and wonderful sight. Great silver-grey fish, the size of dolphins, were roiling and thrashing on the surface, seemingly driven mad by the mackerel blood. 'Sharks,' someone beside me said, awe in his voice. Now I understood why sailors fear that beast above all others. I saw little fish disappearing into wide, toothy maws; pointed heads lash at water, at other sharks, even at the seagulls who hovered just overhead. Then Anna let out a scream of real terror and a couple of the crew stepped back abruptly from the rail. A monstrous grey shape had scythed into the churning pack. It seemed as big as two oxen stood nose to tail, and its jaws gaped wide as a door, all studded about with a thicket of curved, needle-pointed teeth. But the monster's eyes were the worst: two black sockets that seemed to open onto night itself. No expression was there, no glimmer, no sign that any spark of life dwelt inside that merciless head. Instead it seemed driven by remorseless hatred for all that moved. It fought briefly with the other sharks, turning the water into a red ferment, and when they had fled or died it turned its appalling eye on us and drove straight for the rudder. There was a thud, the deck shook and Nizam went sprawling. The tiller juddered. Then the monster was gone, sunk to whatever bleak depth it claimed as its kingdom. I turned to find reassurance in a human face, to wipe away the memory of those empty eyes, and saw that Anna, in her fear, had pressed herself close against Will.

I could not get the memory of it out of my head. All the rest of that long day I scrubbed the deck like a madman, until my hands were numb with the constant grating. But my mind was anything but numbed. So recently dead within my skull, it had awakened and was buzzing like a nest of wasps, yellow as the gall of jealousy I could all but taste upon my tongue. Had I troubled to consult Isaac, he could have told me that the melancholic black bile that had devilled me had been driven out by an excess of yellow bile – so out of balance had my body become that I had begun to swing, like a pendulum, from one extremity to another – and this choleric humour was now driving me helplessly before it. I think he saw us all as a collection of vessels more or less full of foul or fair liquids, to be topped up or drained at his discretion. But foolishly I did not seek him out, and instead allowed the image that had painted clear upon my inner eye – Anna leaning into Will's side – to grow and grow until it became first a glowing Veronica, then a gigantic thing that filled my world as. if it were painted on the sail itself. In truth, what had I seen? Nothing more than the simplest urge for protection against an all-devouring fear, and had I not felt the same thing myself? But the grand Veronica of my jealous fancy was my work and mine alone, and like any painter I began to add details: had Anna's hand reached for Will's? In my mind's eye it had. Anna's face: had she turned it to Will, helpless, beseeching? Certainly. Had a look passed between them, secret, complicit? Yes, hell's shark-toothed mouth swallow them both, yes.

I laboured through another white-hot day, then another, and dreamed bitter dreams each night. Finally I woke to cooler weather with a steady wind out of the west, and caught my first sight of Corsica to starboard. As we drew closer, the island seemed a great wall of stone topped by a head of white cloud. By midday it had resolved itself into a jagged collection of mountain peaks, among which the vaporous clouds seethed and twined. Towns lay under those peaks, apparently, although the thought of living in such a forbidding place made me shudder. Nizam pointed out Calvi and the Red Isle, and with some difficulty we turned our course north-north-east.