Mermaids [Pirates of the Caribbean, Calypso/Annamarie, PG]
Annamarie stood over the charts in her small cabin trying to plot the course to the next port. She was having a difficult time of it. Her crew was raising a ruckus on the deck outside. In frustration she threw an unneeded chart across the room and stalked out onto the deck.
“What goes on here?” she bellowed.
Silence spread through the men. They were gathered around something tangled in the nets they had pulled onto the boat when Annamarie called to weight anchor. The men looked at her.
“Get back to work.” Not a soul moved. “NOW!”
It was a small ship, but the men were as far from the captain the small confines would allow, running aft and fore and climbing the riggings faster than the monkeys in the wildest jungles. Only three were left around the source of interest, which looked to be a wet bundle of rags and seaweed.
“Dis?” she asked, anger simmering not quite under the surface. “DIS is why my boat was left adrift?”
“Cap'n, Cap'n . . . she . . . it’s. . . It’s a Mermaid,” one of the men answered, awe threading through his voice, as an eel slips through rocks. The other men started speaking, backing his story up. They talked over one another and gestured broadly, their arms flailing wildly.
Through all this chaos, Annamarie thought she heard something from the bundle of rags.
“Quiet,” she said sternly and two of the men stammered to a halt. The one who had first answered her, determined to be heard, pressed on.
“… fins she had and a great claw on her right arm.” He looked straight into his captain’s eyes. “I’m telling ye, she’s a mermaid.”
“I am no mermaid.”
The low, lyrical voice was coming from the rags and seaweed. As Annamarie and her crewmen watched, the pile moved, rags unfolding and lengthening to become a skirt. Seaweed slipped down to the deck, revealing locked hair woven with shells and trinkets.
“I am no mermaid,” the voice said again as the woman who had emerged from the rags and seaweed turned around. “I am de sea. I am life. I am Calypso. And him is gone.”
Annamarie’s crew scrambled farther away from the self proclaimed goddess of the sea, but Annamarie stood solid. No one would move her on her own boat. Not even the goddess of the sea.
The other woman gave a strange, sad smile and tilted her head curiously. “Do you know where him is? Him who love me, him who gave his heart to serve me?”
Annamarie was speechless and the ragged woman walked closer, concentrating solely on the tiny boat’s captain.
“Did you steal him? Is he wit’ you?” Calypso stopped, smiling. “Does you know the feel of his face? Does his tentacles caress you at night?”
Annamarie steeled herself, resolved not to give the crazy, marooned woman any quarter. “How did you get in our nets?” she asked.
Calypso ignored her, turning her attention to something she held in her hand. Annamarie felt her gaze drawn to what the woman held. It was a squid, or octopus; all she could see were tentacles.
The woman stroked the tentacles tenderly. “Now him have face and all, and I am me, but him is not.”
Annamarie was more than tired of the insane woman’s ramblings and more than a little apprehensive. Stories from the ports were that the Pirate Lords had released Calypso from her prison, but she wasn’t one for superstition. She was the captain of her own boat, after all, and women were supposed to be bad luck on ships.
She was about to tell the woman they would leave her at the closest port of call when she was stopped by the woman’s intense stare. The woman’s locks had fallen across her face, almost hiding her sly smile. Annamarie forgot what she was going to say under her intense scrutiny.
Finally Calypso spoke. “Are you the captain's wife? A fish wife? Are you his woman - his. . .whore?”
Annamarie pulled herself up to her full height, shaking with fury. “I am no fisherman's slave. I AM THE CAPTAIN. This is my boat!”
Calypso tilted her head and after a moment said, “It is a good boat.”
“It is the BEST boat.”
Calypso merely smiled. Then she bent her head, mumbling incoherent words. Slowly the mumbling grew, still unintelligible to Annamarie but she recognized the type of chant from her time on the islands. The woman was either blessing them or cursing them.
The woman threw back her arms and shouted one last phrase to the winds. Annamarie found herself looking in to the sparkling dark eyes once more.
Calypso leaned toward her slightly and said. “You be mine and be safe. No fisherman's slave. Do not forsake me.”
Then the woman was gone, a thousand stone crabs spilling from where she had stood, flowing over the side of the boat into the sea. Annamarie knew she would never forget this day, especially on dark nights when the sea was troubled and the wind howled in the rigging.
But now, in the sunlight, there was cargo to be delivered and fish to be sold.