Mythology At Sea

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by [[[AnActualCrow]]]
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<h3>12-10-31</h3>
Within every boat, within every crew, there are ghost stories. Stories of dead men risen, beasts a hundred times their usual size, and creatures unnamed.

I do not know why sailors are full of myths. The sea has a strange effect on the minds of men. Perhaps the constant sway of a ship returns their mind to a rocking cradle, fears of boogeymen and the dark intact. Maybe the lack of nutrition and uncivilized sea air drives them mad. I do not know for certain. But my work on ancient horticulture requires me to travel from Norway to Sri Lanka, and I figure that I may study the sailors along the way.

<h3>16-10-31</h3>
It is the end of our first day at sea, and the sailors have been quite lively. The food is fresh, the spirits are high. I have already heard a couple of myths circulate. One was of a ghost clinging to the rigging, groaning with exhaustion. Another was of a rat that had gorged itself on so much food it grew to the size of a man. It put on the quartermaster's clothes and would have steered the ship into shallow water if the crew had not caught it. The crewmembers appear to flaunt themselves with these tales, demonstrating who has lived the most daring or harrowing life. They are like peacocks, although they display brilliant feathers to attract social wealth rather than a mate.

I might devise my own tale someday. For now, I will only observe.

<h3>17-10-31</h3>
For the first time, I have woken up without land in sight. I cannot determine where precisely we are or where we are headed. If the crew has decided against sailing to Colombo and is instead traveling out into the open ocean, I remain none the wiser. I cannot read the currents of the sea.

Without breaking waves or swimming fish, the ocean is blank. The sea birds that once followed us have left in search of fishing vessels I cannot see. The drinking water is warm and bitter.

There are no myths today, only the steady creaking of wood and taught rope. The anchor, whether by design or malfunction, drags through the water a few feet below the surface. I heard the first mate muttering to himself, but the only word I could decipher was "storm."

<h3>21-10-31</h3>
There is a new atmosphere aboard the ship. The crew hardly speaks beyond orders. When they do, it is always stories. A cat once snuck aboard and transformed into a band of pirates. A shark once leaped up and tore a dinghy off the port side. Another time a whale, vicious and titanic, rammed a fishing boat and sank the entire vessel. There is little joy in these stories.

Everyone is silent when the captain walks over. His boots knock on the deck like people trapped beneath, begging for release. He's been having ill dreams, but he doesn't suspect a storm. I speak to him. He tells me to only go above-deck if the crew is already up there. I need not worry otherwise. I explain to him that I am a scientist, that I can help prepare for any sort of ocean phenomenon. He says I need not worry.

<h3>24-10-31</h3>
They are hiding something from me. We resupply at a port and I talk to the crew about their stories. I explain mirages and cabin madness and hysteria caused by yeast fungus but they refuse to speak regarding where the myths come from. Their voices lack trust. I cannot reason why.

For what it's worth, I can finally shave what is anatomically a beard but, in all practical sense, is more akin to a handful of grass growing between cobblestones. You will not be missed.

<h3>29-10-31</h3>
I have come to avoid discussing stories with the crewmembers. And yet, they do no more than make small talk with me. I had diminished myself to rereading literature in my bed when I heard a shout above-deck. The captain bellowed for all hands. I stormed up, armed only with a fountain pen and the tacit faith that someone else could resolve whatever predicament I would find.

There was a frenzy on the main deck. All heads are transfixed overboard. Steak knives and cutlasses flashed in the morning sun, piercing the musket-smoke. The carpenter tapped another round down the musket with sweaty palms. The first mate snatched it from him, shouting to clear a path. The musket pointed off-deck, and for a moment I thought I saw a sailor, wrapped in foreign flesh, being strangled against the railing. Then the gun let out a <i>crack</i> like angry thunder, and the scene was swallowed in smoke.

More sailors piled in, limbs digging turbulent channels out of the cloud. A leg kicked out towards before being dragged back in. An arm was ensnared in meat before it could finish swinging a hammer. As I approached, I felt something slimy underfoot. A tentacle as thick as my leg slapped me out of the way before retracting into the cloud. As I fell onto the deck, as the smoke cleared, I saw the beast. <i>The kraken.</i>

The first mate lined up another shot, the bullet tearing a hole through the nearest tentacle. Its grip loosened, and another sailor descended upon it with a sword. The tentacle was severed with two clean blows, and the rest of the beast slithered below the water.

<h3>29-10-31</h3>
I write as if it is a new day, but it only feels so. Some part of me refuses to believe that the kraken attack was merely this morning. My hands, when separated from my pen, shiver and shake. I have had no meals save for a small cup of water.

The tentacle remains above deck, pinned on each end with railroad spikes. The other men believe that a severed tentacle is not truly dead, and may strangle someone at any moment if it is not immobilized. Yesterday, I would have called this another myth. Today, I do not know what is real.

The captain gathered everyone above-deck a few hours ago. No one is dead, but there have been injuries. A couple riggers have broken wrists and arms. Our cook broke several ribs. Our quartermaster is below-deck, concussed. When the captain allowed us to disperse, many of us stayed where we were. Some had prior encountered krakens before. Many had lost friends somewhere. Man's domain is not the sea — a truth oft forgotten.

<h3>01-11-31</h3>
The crew has begun to learn my name. Soon enough, I will know all of theirs.

I have been kept awake by thoughts of my work and my peers' work. Of every fable deemed unscientific. I hear the creaking boards and imagine ghost men roaming above. I hear the chattering rats and imagine one trying on my clothes. And why shouldn't I? What makes them impossible when that bloody tentacle is above me, wriggling in the cold air.

A limb with its own mind, like a stranded member of a sailing vessel. I wonder if it thinks. I wonder if it fears us.

<h3>04-11-31</h3>
The crew's injuries have harmed our ability to travel. We do not know the way forward. I am no doctor, but I have seen injuries become rapidly infected. Even if our cargo arrives a little late, keeping our injured crewmates at sea risks a miserable death. The first mate reaffirms the value of the cargo, provides a rough estimate of the money we may lose if we go to port while the seasons are changing. Anton, the navigator and closest thing I had to a friend aboard, gives his own story of a mate who died of a staph infection after losing two fingers to a snapping rope. The salty air carves into wounded flesh and no boat is equipped for the nearly dead. The majority of the crew was on our side. The captain decided that we would pull into port.

That night, when Anton and I were exchanging stories, he told me that he never lost someone to staph infection. He'd made it up.

"Why?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I don't know how many people would take your word over a first mate's. But I trust you."

In return, I told him about another story. One that I'd once forgotten about but may have been real. About a creature with the body of a woman and the head of an owl that my father had seen as a young child. She watched him on snow-covered days from the forest's edge. She never let him within arm's reach, but he once left her a mouse he'd caught in the cellar. My father woke up the next day to find a sparkling polished stone on my windowsill. He kept it on his desk for a few years before his work required him to move to the city center. The stone was lost during the moving process. He never saw it or the strange woman again. Previously, I'd convinced myself my father's story was a recurring dream.

The tentacle has started to smell of death. Even so, it sometimes writhes in place.

<h3>06-11-31</h3>
We reach port in the late morning. A handful of men carry off the injured, and what little muscles I have are not needed. Instead, I occupy myself by standing on the dock and inspecting the damage the kraken inflicted onto the ship. The outside of the hull has shallow scratches, the cuts becoming deeper around the railing the beast so desperately clung to. The water here is dirty, steeped in human sewage. And yet, life dwells underwater.

A red suckered arm hesitates for a moment before breaching the water's surface. It reaches towards me and I leap back, only for it to escape further. Its reach is longer than any man, inescapable as fate itself, seizing me by the forearm. I call for help, but the beast and I are alone at the end of that long dock, and the air further up the dock is saturated with the clatter of wooden crates and the barking of orders.

I am not a strong man, but even the burliest laborer could not resist the kraken's pull. I cede step after step, desperately trying to stay on the dock. Then I take a breath and am dragged under.

The acid filth burns my eyes, but through the sting I can see it — the kraken, climbing up the anchor chain. It must have hung on to the anchor after our first encounter, waiting to reunite with its lost limb. It drags me down as it climbs up, its full form coming into view. Its monstrous tentacles connect to a barrel-shaped head the length and girth of a horse's body. Two fins stretch out from the top of the head, two colossal eyes watching me from the bottom. Its eyes judge me, each larger than my entire skull.

I do not struggle as it drags me down. To try and pry it off me would only sap my oxygen. For the first time in many years, I find myself praying.

I am dragged closer. The shorter limbs unfurl and I see the beak of a parrot, larger than my fist, anxiously waiting for me. The limbs move to surround me, move to ensnare me, and my world becomes flesh kaleidoscopic. But there is a gap in the vortex of tentacles, an absence of one limb severed two days ago.

I remember the tentacle.

Which makes me remember the attack.

Which makes me remember my pen.

It's still in my breast pocket.

I grab the pen out of my coat with my free arm. The kraken feels me struggle and pulls me closer. I thrust my hand through the gap and aim towards one of its ginormous eyes. It cannot screech, but every part of it spasms in a different direction. It's pupil shrinks, iris closing around my wrist. Bracing myself against it I pull my arm out and stab again. I try forcing myself away from the snapping beak but my hands keep slipping on its slimy smooth body. My coat gets caught and it pulls me closer. I stab again and again, until I cannot tell whether the ink in the water is my pen's or the beast's.

My lungs are burning. My clothes are bloody. My eyes will not open. The kraken's grip loosens as it starts to sink. Just as it did the last time, the beast disappears in a dying cloud.

<h3>Afterwards</h3>
If anyone else had witnessed the full body of the kraken, I would not have reached the surface. I only forced myself upwards through scholarly determination, through the will that this knowledge would not die with me. The captain found me in the water, arms clinging to the anchor chain and to life.

I write this wrapped on the bed of a hospital, mummified in bandages. The toxic water filled my cuts, but the merciful hands of nurses have prevented almost all infection. In my delirious state, as I was being carried to the ward, I asked to be handed over to the nuns that oft run wards near universities. Kind as they are, convents are not built near busy ports and nuns do not treat sailors.

What a life, that in these moments I may be considered a sailor?

I do not know when I will reach Sri Lanka. Anyone who had expected me would find a different man upon arrival — one who cannot turn his nose up at tradesmen or scoff at their stories. I write this as a record of what I know to be true, yet I fear that I cannot share this with other scholars or their fact-minded editors. I would be a joke amongst peers, another fool deluded by uncivilized sea air.

I had wanted to bring them proof. Once I'd returned to my senses, I sent for the captain and requested a specimen of the tentacle pickled and preserved. He sent me back what he could in a tall glass jar, but the rot had already begun to set in, and the vinegar only turned it into a cloud of half-decayed feed. It's sitting on my desk, but as soon as I'm healthy I plan to send it back to the ocean. Some truths are better kept as stories.
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Mythology At Sea

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