sailors were fool enough to do. It had taken a long while for him to go down. They had told the widow the water washed him overboard.
Later, Jeluc believed that the ship had eyes painted on her prow, and these saw her way, but now they closed. She did not care where she went. And then too he thought she had a figurehead, like a great vessel of her kind, and this was a woman who clawed at the ship’s sides, howling.
But he woke up, in time.
He kept awake all night.
In the morning the sun rose, lax and pallid as an ember, while the ship burned red as fire.
Jeluc looked over and saw her red reflection in the dark water.
There was no land on any side.
He made a breakfast of undercooked meal cakes, and ate a little. He felt her tingling through the soles of his boots.
He tested the sail and the lines, her tiller, and her compass. There was something odd with its needle.
No fish gave evidence of themselves in the water, and no birds flew overhead.
The sea rolled in vast glaucous swells.
He could not help himself. He slept.
There were birds!
He heard them calling, and looked up.
The sky, pale gray, a cinder, was full of them, against a sea of stars that were too faint for night.
And the birds, so black, were gulls. And yet, they were gulls of bone. Their beaks were shut like needles. They wheeled and soared, never alighting on the mast or yard or rails of the ship.
I’m dreaming, God help me. God wake me—
The gulls swooped over and on, and now, against the distant diluted dark, he saw the tower of a lighthouse rising. It was the land, at last, and he was saved.
But oh, the lighthouse sent out its ray, and from the opposing side there came another, the lamp flashing out. And then another, and another. They were before him and behind him, and all round. The lit points of them crossed each other on the blank somber sparkle of the sea. A hundred lighthouses, sending their signals to hell.
Jeluc stared around him. And then he heard the deep roaring in the ocean bed, a million miles below.
And one by one, the houses of the light sank, they went into the water, their long necks like Leviathan’s, and vanished in a cream of foam.
All light was gone. The birds were gone.
She came, then.
She was beautiful now. He had never, maybe, seen a beautiful woman.
Her skin was white, but her lips were red. And her hair was the red of gold. Her gown was the red of winter berries. She walked with a little gliding step.
“Lady,” he said, “you don’t want me.”
But she smiled.
Then he looked beyond the ship, for it felt not right to him, and the sea was all lying down. It was like the tide going from the shore, or, perhaps, water from a basin. It ran away, and the ship dropped after it.
And then they were still in a pale nothingness, a sort of beach of sand that stretched in all directions. Utterly becalmed.
“But I don’t want the land.”
He remembered what the land had given him. Old hurts, drear pains. Comrades dead. Wars lost. Youth gone.
“Not the land,” he said.
But she smiled.
And over the waste of it, that sea of salt, came a shrill high whistling, once and twice and three times. Some sound of the ocean he had never heard.
Then she had reached him. Jeluc felt her smooth hands on his neck. He said, “Woman, let me go into the water, at least.” But it was no use. Her lips were soft as roses on his throat.
He saw the sun rise, and it was red as red could be. But then, like the ship in his dream, he closed his eyes. He thought, But there was no land.
There never is.
The ship stood fiery crimson on the rising sun that lit her like a bonfire. Her sides, her deck, her cabin, her mast and sail, like fresh pure blood.
Presently the sea, which moved under her in dark silk, began to lip this blood away.
At first, it was only a reflection in the water, but next it was a stain, like heavy dye.
The sea drank from the color of the ship, for the sea too was feminine and a devourer of men.
The sea drained La Dame of every drop, so gradually she turned back paler and paler into a vessel like ashes.
And when the sea had sucked everything out of