Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 10
Chapter 10
Table of Contents
If you’re new to the story, I suggest beginning with the table of contents so you’ll understand the origins of the text and why I say it was co-authored by Herman Melville.
And now,
Kraken in a Coffee Cup.
Chapter Ten
I am a man cut away from the stake, saved from the fire which first wastes all the limbs and then consumes them, but in the captain, there seems no sign of bodily illness about him, nor its recovery. His whole high, broad form, seems made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mold, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. He is no ragged old seaman counting off his remaining sails, if such a passing ever comes to men beneath the waves. I cannot fathom what the captain, if not the captain, means to be.
“On my maps, you’ve seen ourselves multiplied across the sea,” he says, and I agree that this is true. “Ours is the ship of Theseus, and what you’ve seen is both truth and deception; they are not us, nor can they be. They are older and younger ships, and older and younger crews. On some, you sail, and on others, you’ve not yet arrived.”
I attempt to articulate his point in a form I understand. “We are split in time, not in matter.”
“It makes no sense to wonder how much time I’ve spent upon this calling, but it’s been time enough. There came the day when the map showed our ship sailing seas I’d not sailed, and I imagined it sailed without me. It became my intent then to train up my first mate and find a way free. I’d pick my time and place to walk ashore and embrace a future enriched by fate, but that Christmas came while I still formulated plans; the beast struck, and, for a time, I saw in it retribution.”
If retribution, it took the wrong man.
“Then you fell upon my deck,” he says, “sent to join a widow’s husband at sea.”
The tavern’s air, for a brief moment warm, carries again the sting of ice.
“Ask Ligeia the meaning of your arrival; she knows my intent; we formed it together. We came here to mourn and communicate her loss. I confessed my desire to be delivered and the end that desire wrought against her lover. It was she who disabused me of such notions and taught me to harness our calling’s power for my own coveted end.”
My mug, though firmly in my grasp, remains untouched. “Dare you tell me her solution?”
“Find her. Know your name, for it’s time for us to sail. Beseech her to complete the truth she began; your very arrival is proof of a life I’ve not lived and a love I’ve not known.”
#
It strikes me strange to couple (in mind) the mast-heads of the land with this pinnacle at the bottom of the sea; but in the early times of Nantucket, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. The image comes as I ascend the tower without Ligeia’s swift assistance.
I think, too, of the mast-heads upon the sea, where I stood in voyages past, a hundred feet above the silent deck, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath me and between my legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There I stood, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolled; the drowsy trade winds blew; everything resolved me into languor, me, whose job was to be alert. Such is the Sirene pinnacle; risen to keep watch, yet slumbering through these many years of darkness. It has purpose, yet not purpose fulfilled.
What’s my purpose, ancient tower? Why have I sunken to such depths? The torrents of emotion have given way to numbness, and in the balances, hell weighs against the captain’s chair; and I’m moved neither to joy nor terror. Be it what it will, for good or evil; the body of this tale was writ without me. I’m but a player on the page.
#
I reach the tower’s topmost plateau and find it empty, and though I should not expect to find her waiting, even if to this very spot the captain directed me, it’s much more to be deplored that this mast-head offers neither shelter nor comfort. It is in this way akin to a southern whale ship which are unprovided with those enviable crow’s-nests in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas.
(Stop speaking; stop. Your own comparison shames you. This position presents neither weather nor sun, and as for the unforgiving surface, you float, suspended. Wait in silence; she comes soon enough.)
I wait and wonder if the crew continues in their drinking.
(They do not; they prepare for departure, for launch will come at your arrival. They work, while all that is asked of you is that you wait.)
I still feel my own drink within me, both buoyancy and weight within my veins.
(...go on.)
Perhaps, I’ll be sick.
#
If the southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as the Greenlandmen, that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which they mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging, resting in the top to have a chat with anyone off duty; then I’d ascend a little farther and throw a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.
Beware of enlisting in vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with philosophy instead of mathematics in his head. Beware of such a one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint the richer. The whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many who are as I used to be: romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the worrisome woes of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. The Byronic hero perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless, disappointed whale-ship, and cries:
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.
The sea is no place for a philosopher, unless his fare is paid, and my only fare was assumed by the captain who gave me to the sea. I was my own payment and his as well; perhaps he thought by disowning me from the sea he might appease the gods and bless his sailing. I feel the poverty of his capitalistic superstition.
Still, Ligeia does not come, and I see at last what there is always only there to see; roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean.
(Go to Chapter 11)
—Thaddeus Thomas
And now…
Become a Super Fan! (or just grab the book of your choice)
Become a patron of the literary arts; “achingly human fantasy” awaits you.
Get free and discounted books!
Subscribe to the Sibyliad fantasy series!
an epic fantasy of myth and history, told in a series of 100-page novellas
the first books is free
Or get EVERYTHING with the Super-Fan Subscription
Download anything and everything in the bookstore
Get early access to the dog-in-space novella, Warp & Woof. It releases to Super Fans a full week before anyone else can get it!
Can’t wait to finish Kraken in a Coffee Cup? The entire book will be released for Super Fans before the next installment hits the newsletter! Everyone else will have to wait until the serialization is complete.
Exclusive access to a book so racy, I thought I’d hide it away forever—my adults-only horror novel: Ritual and Racita.
Exclusive access to my works-in-progress: The House of Haunted Women and Heartfelt Among the Flying Islands.
There’s no feeling in the world like a bookstore—and when it’s a single-author bookstore where you’re buying directly from the writer, that’s a magic all its own.
Steampunk Cleopatra: From the title I was expecting swashbuckling adventures against a vaguely Egyptian backdrop, but instead I found a finely crafted and exhaustively researched work of historical fiction, full of mesmerizing detail. The book is studded with details that make the world seem richer and slightly more unfamiliar than you'd expect. These are embedded in a story of palace intrigue, scholarly curiosity and - most importantly - several very different kinds of love.
