Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

I nodded, to acknowledge that eternal truth; females choose males.

“I shall never see you again,” I said, and walked out of the Chief Trader’s cabin, to begin my new life.

I felt so very sorry for him.

He was, like all the new ones, angry; and savagely so. And bitter; unreachably so. Possessed by a wild desire to take revenge for what had happened to him and his people; and deranged, too, by grief and sorrow, at the loss of everything he had ever known.

And, as was always the case, he vented these feelings upon me.

“You murdering daughter-of-a-pustulent-rapist-who-fucks-whores bitch!” he roared, and then he spat at me, a rich mouthful of acidic spit that stung the soft skin of my face and left a sticky residue on my cheeks.

“You malice-tainted shit-eating-sloshy-farting father-fucker, how could you do it? How could you do it?” he roared, accusingly.

I yearned to touch him, and to soothe his rage; but I knew that my-from his perspective-monstrous appearance made my very presence an ordeal to him.

“Monster! You’re uglier-than-a-two-headed-mutant-baby monster!” he angrily told me, as he paced around his confining cabin.

“If you say so,” I replied, in the mildest of tones, but that just enraged him all the more.

All in all, my heart burst with sympathy; I knew just how this poor, sad creature felt.

For I had once felt that way myself, many years ago. And I remembered my rage then, and marvelled at its absence now.

“Let me explain to you,” I began gently.

“I’m going to fuck you with a spear in your throat and your eyes and arsehole!” he screamed.

“I wouldn’t like that,” I informed him, “very much.”

“Evil-bitch-that-even-a-fat-arsed-Southerner-wouldn’t screw! Festering cock-meat!” he screamed, spittle falling from his mouth. He was quite hysterical now, and entirely oblivious to the gentle irony of my last comment.

“Later,” I said, kindly. “I will explain it all, later.”

“I don’t know how you can tolerate that foul-mouthed creature,” Fray said to me.

“At least,” I said, as tactfully as I could, since Fray was legendary for her indolent refusal to help her fellow captives, “I’m doing something to help the poor unfortunate soul.”

“You think so?” sneered Fray, with that tone of hers which implied only a fool would say such a stupid thing.

“I do,” I said softly. For it is my self-appointed role: I greet the new ones, teach them the ways of our world; and thus I ease the pain of their transition.

“You sad pathetic arse-sucking beast,” Fray said to me, shaking her head bewilderedly. And then she roared, a powerful rising roar that deafened me, a raw hoarse trumpet sound that embodied all her rage, and pain, and grief.

I took a moment to let my hearing return to normal.

“He’ll come to terms with it,” I said, quietly and sensibly, “the same way we have.”

Fray roared again, implying she had by no means come to terms with “it,” and the sound made my skin prickle with fear and regret.

I watched the sun go down. It was a beautiful sight. The yellow orb became a red staring eye; its gaze swept slowly across the landscape, shedding a scarlet radiance on the white snow-capped mountains and the calm blue lake. As I watched, ivory clouds were metamorphosing to become daubs of orange upon an orange-black sky.

The richness and beauty of this setting sun effect was, as it was every night, awe-inspiring.

Then the sun was switched off, and pitch-darkness swathed my world. I lit a torch, and its faint beams cut a tiny slice out of the night. It was time to retire to my cabin.

That night I told my cabin friends a long and, in my opinion, delightful story about my mother. She was-or rather had been-a wonderful creature, full of warmth and love, and I had never seen her flustered or angry. (Except of course, at the end, as she embraced me, her only surviving child, in those soul-wrenching minutes before she died.)

And this was the hilarious story of my mother’s journey to the seabed to fetch pearls from the jaws of the vast and fearsome kar-fish. It was the day of the tenth anniversary of my birth, and when she arrived at my party, bloodied but triumphant, she was able to shower me with the richest of gifts: black pearls that sang and were warm to the touch; shards of coral-fish-fragments that caught the light like a rainbow; and live seabites that I could hold beneath my tongue, and which made me feel as if I were (as my distant ancestors had been) a lazy seabeast swimming through the oceans, allowing food to drift effortlessly into my mouth.

That was my mother! She’d risked her life to make me happy that day. And such kindness, in my opinion, is a rare and a special thing.

There was gentle applause when I finished my story.

“You loved your mother?” asked Fray.

“I did,” I told her.

Fray snorted.

Her species, I knew, had no concept of maternal love. One time Fray had told us, with relish, a story about how Frayskind mothers loved to eat their young; and she’d gone into considerable detail about how enjoyable it was to crunch upon the bones of newborn Frayspawn, and to munch the skulls of toddlers who had, in some unspecified way, been errant. Our response to her tale had been unamused, and indeed hostile.

Fray had, I recalled, been extremely offended at our narrow-mindedness and lack of empathy for her culture’s moral values.

I watched the dawn. The sun was a rich and glorious ball of fire, as it always was. And its red rays lit the waters of the lake and made them ripple like flames furiously flickering, as they always did.

I looked at the Tower, standing bleak and eerie on its craggy summit that loomed upon the island at the centre of our world’s only lake. And I felt a breeze on my face as the wind was turned on, and the fields of purple grass began to sway.

I drank from the well of life, and it was rich and refreshing, and cold. I tipped the dregs from my cup over my face and felt my black hide moisten.

“You must eat,” I told the prisoner softly, for the hundredth time. It is one of the most important things the new ones have to learn; the necessity of eating both regularly and well.

“Eat,” I said, but he ignored me.

“Please, I beg you, eat,” I implored, but his eyes were blank and he did not move.

Then he turned to me, and his face became a sneer, and once again he spat at me (clearly a gesture of disdain in his culture), and he screamed, with spectacular fury: “Fuck your puckered-arsehole, you soul-stealing fucking bitch!”

And I could tell he yearned to be able to attack me, and mutilate my body, and perhaps even kill me; but he dared not, for my every tentacle was larger than his single torso.

He was, to my eyes, a quaint and tiny creature; very prone to rages, and gifted with an extraordinary breadth of eloquent invective. Most of his insults cast aspersions on aspects of my femininity-for my voice to his ears was unmistakably female-or my inability to practise monogamy, or the size and condition of my sexual organs. Often, he ascribed to me a fondness for eating my own excreta, which in fact I do, so I wasn’t too offended by that one. And, on other occasions, he indulged himself in vivid fantasies about my demise.

One of his favoured insults, as I recall, was: “May your small-brained children eat your mouldering-fucking-flesh so they can shit it out and feed it to the fucking Baagaa [rodent-like creatures who were indigenous to his planet]!”

Another classic taunt was: “You’re just an ugly mother-raper-whose -children-ought-to-turn-into-mutant-freaks-so-they-can-fuck-your-arsethen-eat-you-alive!” Or rather, this is how it came out in translation; in his language, he later told me, all this could be expressed by a single one-syllable word; a miracle of linguistic economy, in my opinion.