She had:
brown skin, tones deeper, richer from her time in the sun, muscles hanging loosely around her bones, “like a sail”, Kapten said;
thirty-six years of life where she scratched to detach the aril from nutmeg seeds with her bare hands;
a bounty on her head from the Dutch East-India Trading Company (VOC) for slipping free from her shackles, lubricated with overseer’s Goudzugt blood, diluted from his wine addiction;
found herself amongst pirates, and decided she would pay off the chirurgeon’s debt of bandages;
the head of the Komodo dragon where one would expect a human one – the Dutch considered her a monster, or, a specimen for it;
a voice only she could hear (friendly, a little raspy) independent of her own (callous, sporadic). Orah, the mouth within her mouth.
(The ocean made you forget it all when she took us in. Paper from unsavoury archives cast off like wet pulp. Our past is kept in there somewhere, floating inside that guilty blue, splashing against our unluckier siblings. The sea and your big sister agreed to keep the myth a secret. In exchange, it will tell me anything about any boat, which is damned useful when you’re a pirate. But remember: you can never sleep on land. It might wake you up from this gentle, bobbing dream. Alone.)
“Raksasa, the top deck requires you!” A komodo stared back at her still reflection in the water. The evening orange complemented her membraned yellow eyes. Her eyelids blinked, horizontally, like warehouse doors. Scales imbricated down her neck to the crown of her breasts. They looked like a necklace of ochre green, where they darkened further into human skin.
She waded through sensations from a time before. To frown, to smile, to express – instincts touched the tips of her nerves. Salt on her tongue from the gales circling the Banda islands; the soft texture of nutmeg seeds; the hands covered in blood; the scalding tear from nape to throat; a voice growing louder from within. Nothing came to mind.
She attempted a smile. Her mouth simply broadened, a lipless line across an animal’s vacant stare. Her face was lost at sea.
“Raksasa, I hunger!” Kapten’s voice cried out from the topdeck. The commandant had a policy of three strikes. Punished after the second. No one on the ship ever let it get to the third.
Bumping her head on the porthole, Raksasa made her way through the ship she had called house for three summers now. The Merciless Azure moaned under her hurried steps. Its skeleton was distended oakwood, imported from the Rhine’s temperate forests as a point of Dutch pride, now warped by the particulars of the Insulinde.
The mid-deck appeared slipshod with barricades of barrels and clothing lines. Divisions and barricades were set up based on whatever distinction the cabin crew decided on that day. Raksasa had not been around long enough to understand who went where, or why. Perhaps neither did the crew. In any case, today’s borders drew on smell.
Behind a rampart of unwashed tunics, a sailor boy was carving ginger into delicate figures. Another boy nuzzled his shoulders, watching and inhaling his craft through his eyes and nose. Both stopped what they were doing, fascinated by the reptile rushing the stairs to the topdeck.
Kapten was splayed out over the capstan. One hand equipped with a gin cap, the other fingered the anchor’s chain. She was white – the Dutch kind – with a face bloated from alcohol. Her thin skin was pockmarked with freckles, yet gripped prominent muscles. She wore VOC vestments, a uniform damaged by time, tide, and a good share of cannon fire. She resembled a shipwreck. To Raksasa, she was attractively monstrous. She fucked like a beast, too.
“You ask for me, commandant?”
“Aye... “ She rolled over to face Raksasa, puckering her lips, resembling a starfish.
“I hope there is more to this call than a kiss on your rough mouth.”
“Agh!” She cried out with that scraping Dutch g. “You understand nothing of my pain, Raksasa... On the Azure, I am surrounded by men, and the women who make mistakes for men. Only the shores are lined with fruits ripe for my picking; no finger of mine remains undipped in sweet nectar when we moor in port! But we have been at sea for… remind me, coxswain?”
“It has been four days, commandant. Bos sa palabra mutu diskompostu...” (“Her words reek like shit.”)
“Coxswain, there you go speaking in tongues again. A translation for the audience?”
“The Kristang tongue to be precise, commandant. My own. And I said that I was so in awe of your stamina.” He clucked his tongue.
“Precisely! For four days, then, have I gone without a lady’s lustrum! Celibacy suits me none. So all I ask... is a little kiss from my dragon princess.”
Stains of ginned spit silvered her thin lips like stars. Nevertheless, Raksasa refused to kiss her when she was drunk (that was most of the time); alcohol left a bad aftertaste on her forked tongue.
“Anyway. There isn’t just the matter of Kapten’s dry spell,” the coxswain, Dato, continued. “We’ve spotted a ship. You need to identify it.”
Dato became a member of the Merciless Azure early in his adulthood. Narrowly having escaped British-plundered Penang, he stowed away on the ship. When one of the boatboys discovered him hiding in a brine barrel, he begged the lad not to tell a soul. The boy lazily picked at his ear and shrugged: but the cook will feed you if I do.
“The evening in these waters is too dangerous for the Vohke.” She said it contrary to the Dutch throat – she invoked the VOC’s name as if it were an expletive. This was her way of going against the aril, against the joint pains, against her stolen time. VOC was an acronym which spread crude oil over vast seas. Vohke was a demon that she could burn.
“Right. Ship doesn’t have a flag, either.”
“All ships must bear their brands,” Kapten added drunkenly.
Whether a ship flew the VOC’s orange-white-blue or the Azure’s mended bone, a flag displayed affiliation. The mare liberum cascaded with captured blood, and this red corner of the earth was no exception. Whatever scant honour lingered on the seas made sure every crew showed their intentions towards the blood. Sell it, move it, or free it.
No flag meant a fourth option. That was never a good thing.
Raksasa called out to the voice inside herself. Her throat vibrated, low and focused like a tahuri conch. She hummed a nursery rhyme, meant to scare children to sleep.
Orah awoke, and the ocean replied.
Orah, stop! You will be told all you need to know, but promise, promise that you won’t allow her to set foot on that ship.
(What, why? You’ve snitched on a ton of boats before. What’s different now?)
The blood it carries… it’s too much like herself. She will find one of her shed skins, one that I peeled off, and she will want to come back. I do not want her back. I do not want you back. This is as close as she is allowed to be to me.
(Fuck you, too.)
Heed my warning, and my tears!
(Your tears mean nothing, you’re already saltwater! Just tell me about that ship, damn you!)
Raksasa’s throat itched to the point of a coughing fit. Coarsely, she repeated the information given:
“Weight of a crew of almost twenty, docked for two watches at Karimunjawa. Boat now rides low in the waves, bearing 52-a-half degrees.”
Dato put his hands on his hips and closed his eyes. That was his ‘thinking stance’, a technique to elevate the mind. His explanation was elegant: thoughts bounce around in one’s head, meaning they must make use of certain angles. Replicate these corners with the body, and you can steer the direction towards a conclusion. To the British, however, this pose was deemed effeminate – therefore weak – and traditional – therefore subversive. All men in his village were explicitly forbidden from standing a certain way.
“Karimunjawa… So from Chi-li-wên, at that course… Aye, sounds like they’re headed for Sampit. A haven, depending on who you ask. Two watches means a rush job, means few witnesses. And at this hour? Could be dirty cargo. What they want to sell isn’t meant for the harbourmaster’s eyes.”
“Secrets sell for ten times more,” Raksasa agreed.
Kapten sprang to life at the promise of a heavy boat. She salivated as beasts do upon slow prey. She lept off the capstan and began raising anchor by herself, veins bulging in her arms and neck as the adrenaline made its way through her. By the time a deckhand had arrived with another bar, she was already done, and she beat him for not having lowered the sails by then. Unsheathing her cutlass from her belt, she roared.
“HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR ALL OF US!”
From inside herself, Raksasa felt Orah poke fun at her violent taste in women. She flicked her tongue dismissively, tasting the cooling night air. If she had to kill, she prayed they wouldn’t look like her.
Raksasa fell asleep while her body kept going. Or rather, while Orah took over. She let sleep wash over her, growing smaller and smaller, until she was nothing more than a voice in the back of her throat, near the pharynx, nestling in Orah’s lap. Images flashed by: panicking swains, unprepared youths, desperate hagglers. Counting one, two, three, four, five, and she was gone.
Orah clutched their skulls, packed with consciousness, and bit down as hard as she could. It was her terrible way to show mercy; a faster alternative to being sliced, serrated, or played with by the others.
When Raksasa came to, night had already fallen. She was laying down, head placed on Kapten’s firm thighs. Her mouth hinged open. Kapten’s dagger prodded inside, gingerly prying pieces of muscle, sinew, and bone from her teeth and gums. It was their moment after each battle. It was romance she felt, to be cleaned by a woman that left bloody piles in her wake.
“Commandant, I am awake. We have won?” She had gotten used to speak during.
“Aye, as sure as the moon drowns beneath the ocean’s silver. No, don’t look yet. The cleaning’s still occurring. Our swabbers are taking their time. There were five more than you had estimated. It seems we were dealing with a skinny crowd.”
Raksasa’s eyes strained with guilt - a wrong estimate, especially a lower one, could cost the wrong lives.
“Worry not, my dragon princess. There are no funerals on this day. Just the red waves and the shark’s feast.”
They kissed, similarly scarce in lip volume. Kapten mashed against the radial of Raksasa’s mouth. Blood stains rubbed off on the komodo, a mirror of the makeup she wore as a girl. The commandant’s hairy mouth tickled her, opening both their smiles. There was nothing she enjoyed more than seeing the commandant’s gormless, blood-splattered mien. Kapten bent down further. It was the only time in the animal kingdom a thick slug entwined with a snake of their own volition.
Dato a-hemmed awkwardly a couple of times, thoroughly spoiling the mood. “Pardon the interruption, ma’ams, but we’re dealing with a situation. Both of you, come with me down the decks.” They followed suit, lanterns in tow.
The three of them descended into the ship’s bowels. Blood seeped down through the cracks above in the deckhead. Absent were the signs of carnage or life within the interior. No blood splatters, no chunks of flesh, no sprays of red mist resulting from cannon shot. No beddings unmade or hammocks strewn, no tables hanging from the spirketting, no unfinished chow or lodgings adorned with superstitions. Just holes in the skeleton of a quiet ship.
What was present, however, was the smell. A distinct stench that smelled watery and pungent. Briny as a barrel of salted fish: something preserved and human. Raksasa’s nostrils quivered and her eyes watered at the intensity. One thing was certain: this did not belong to any wound, fester or corpse. It was beyond that, somehow. A new sort of harm. But how was it achieved…?
Dato led the other two down a staircase, down to where the cargo deck would be. Water-darkened trails painted the planks they walked on, as if bodies of seawater – human ones – had dragged themselves back on board after a sailor’s long labour.
“Nungka nada.” (“There’s nothing.”) Dato rested his hands on his hips. “I’ve given the place a thrice-over, but there’s no trace of any cargo. All the food and water barrels were up top. So were the crew. Twenty-four souls slept together, crammed into the captain’s quarters, far, far away from this place. Ginger kid even found some bedding in the crow’s nest.”
“Were we not told the boat was riding low in the waves, fattened with cargo? Was I not promised more than a hull-down?” Kapten spoke with outrage, face flushing with frustration to match the blood in her hair. Her freckles disappeared, stars burning out
“Did we risk our slaughter for a gasp of humid air?” Her neck muscles tensed up.
“I’m sorry, commandant. I can’t make sense of it either.” Dato put on a lowly and apologetic act, feigning humility. “Everything pointed to this being a good haul. And, Raksasa’s song is never wrong. Raksasa, what do you think?”
“I think when she blushes the commandant resembles a tomato.” As if on command, Kapten’s skin flushed back to pale. With a lady in her midst, she’d rather be dead, after all, than unappealing.
She continued: “there is a stink here. It is coming from some alive thing. I think the crew was afraid of what they carried.”
“Fudeh,” (“Fuck.”) “you think they threw them out to sea?”
Raksasa nodded her head. “They did, at first. But the sea brought them back.” Still attached to the fisherman’s line, or, the umbilical cord. “It does this to her urchins. It has a penitent streak.” She slid her eyes closed, recalling the outskirts of a memory. “After that, the crew fled to the highest point.”
“Away from the cargo?”
“Away from the sea.”
Hard to do on a ship.” Imperceptibly, Dato trailed his foot away from a wet plank. He was raised by wise people: deeply concerned about ghosts and their curses.
Kapten grumbled in confusion, unsure what to make of such an abstruse claim. “What could you mean, the sea brought them back? Did a wave spill the slaves back? So these boards here, you say these were drenched by those returned? Then where are they now? Raksasa?”
“Dato. Would this ship have an orlop?” Raksasa ignored her captain, who made whining noises about it.
“An orlop deck? It looked like it could have one. But with the hull this low in the water, it would just be flooded. If the cargo’s in there, it would be too late.”
Her nostrils flared in disagreement. The cargo was alive, still. It was afraid, still. It wanted to escape, still.
“That is where we should look. I need this secret.”
Thick rosettes of skin arranged a hardened dermal layer around her face, making her resemble less of a komodo and more like a fat turtle. This increase in dermal and cranial pressure led to a headache, an enduring pain that held her fear in check. A pinch to wake up from the dream, never letting go.
She knew that the only thing left to do was dig down. The rotten planks under her feet could snap at any moment; a rib cage must break to reveal the heart.
The trio began to pry the wood from its fixtures. Strips of splinters, held together only by shadows, exploded into a million fragments. Orah bade Raksasa to let her look instead, trying to lull her to sleep, but it was already too late for that. As she got closer, Raksasa finally realised what the smell was: a stench of terror.
The ocean breathed salty into her ears: You were my first mistakes, Orah and Raksasa, so I shall never make you again. These ones are not cursed, these will be safe from ever understanding. They will never know.
Inside the orlop, many dozen bodies drifted, suspended in a clear, foul-smelling liquid. Heads of birds-of-paradise, macaques, sharks, and the occasional elephant. All grown from the stump where a human, immature body ended. Mis-made people, phantasms of some machine, a shoreline of neck and stitching.
This was not a womb – it was a surrogate.
Raksasa convulsed. Her scales felt hot like branding irons. She threw up in rejection. Rejection of the inhumanity, of the mirror’s image, of the evidence. Her body begged to let those fires out, but only the vomit could leave.
Kapten dipped her still-bloody hand down into the amniotic fluid. The blood vanished, dissolving instantly. In an instant, dozens of eyes flashed open. Tortured and dilated, they glittered with hungry pupils. They started flailing, frantic swimming motions propelling them forward quicker than their infantility would suggest. They clustered around the bloody smoke, nipping at the commandant’s hand. Investigating the disturbance, or hoping to be fed.
There was a grin forming in Kapten’s mouth.
“A treasure low in the waves, indeed.”
“What is this?” Dato’s voice trembled. “They all look like Raksasa! ...well. Not exactly, but the idea is generally the same…” He looked her up and down, as if this moment was the first time he used his eyes, rather than his trust, to consider her.
“They are like me. I am like them,” the dragon conceded. “But what are we like…?”
“Raksasa,” Kapten interjected, “perish immediately the thought of comparison. You are unlike what these beasts are or could be. To declare yourself one of them? Why, it is the mountain spring calling herself a puddle of mud because there is water in both. You are the princess of dragons; these are animal foetuses grafted onto headless corpses. You, my dearest, are the myth of a sacred encounter.”
Kapten cupped her hand and brought it to her mouth, drinking deeply.
“They are the afterbirths of bad gods.”
“What are you suggesting we do with them?” Dato asked.
“Ever the same we are known for, coxswain. We act like nothing is wrong.” She looked happy.
Raksasa finished tying the last of the pulley cords to the railing of the afterdeck. She looked with unease at the surrogate ship now attached to the Merciless Azure.
They set a course for Sampit. There, they would make contact with the buyers. There existed more direct methods for freeing the blood. Some abolitionists would sail the ship into a free port and effectively strand them there. That kind of piracy often led to immediate recapture, or swifter deaths.
The crew of the Azure had found that the safest way of abolition was to keep the chains on until the final destination of the supply chain had been identified. They posed as slavers until then. Kapten had an extensive knowledge on all the entrepôts, feitorias, llotjas, and factorijen patterning the Insulinde, and could tell almost instinctively which trading company was involved with what.
The ginger-cutting boy lowered the Azure’s mended bone and replaced it with a generic red. ‘This ship has the blood’.
“You don’t have to come ashore if you don’t want to, you know.” Dato had come up to Raksasa. “This is different, I can tell. Kapten acts like this is sama-sama and all the same as always, but there are bodies floating in nutrient slop in that ship. What kind of people want to buy that?”
“Collectors with interests in the strange. Not just a thirst for the blood, but hunger for the body.”
Dato laughed uncomfortably. Every crew member laughed like that: a barrier of sound between him and the truth of the matter. The coxswain cleared his throat and spit into the spume trailing after the ship. It took visible willpower from him to meet Raksasa’s gaze again. She wasn’t laughing – she never did.
“Say, Raksasa…” His voice trailed off with pause. “Why did we find you on the rocks that day?”
“Because I was not in the ocean on another.” Dato, in turn, did not laugh. Orah let out a little whisper, reassuring her that it was a good joke.
She continued: “You found me there because the Vohke had hunted me. They had success.”
“The Dutch send people after runaways?” He seemed surprised by this. “The British would just inform other villages and let the jungles kill you.”
“That is also the Dutch way. But I murdered one of theirs. So they wanted justice. Or their version of it.”
“One European’s life, heavier than all their ships carrying 450,000 tonnes,” Dato sighed. “Still, nice job on the murdering.”
“It was very nice, yes. Goudzugt was his name. He forced us to grow claws so we could separate aril from the nutmeg better. I was allergic to the seeds. I looked like a fat turtle all the time. With those nails I carved out his neck veins. I filed them down on his bones.”
Her tone of voice was tender. Telling the story tasted like supper. She preserved the details on her tongue much like the air carrying summer’s leftovers. “The blood helped me remove the chains.”
It happened near the end of last summer, on the ninth year of the third harvest. Again, she felt the sensations. The pluck of the aril, the heat of the Banda islands, the consistency of Goudzugt’s wine-watered blood, the acrid vomit pouring from his slit throat, the crackle of his head finally coming undone. Though she could never claim it was her doing - her first, own kill came much later -, she only knew that her big sister was there. Orah.
Her own sense of self remained unaccounted for; it had been misplaced and replaced with fragments of violence. Treasures of momentum, of power, of freedom.
“Land ho!” Kapten’s voice crawled from the fo’c’sle down into Raksasa’s earholes. “My desires are soon to be sated! No offence to our present ladies!”
Dato rolled his eyes.
“Seems like we’re nearing port. Are you coming ashore with us?”
“Yes,” Raksasa replied, knowing she shouldn’t. But she didn’t want to stay tethered to that surrogate ship.
Sampit still belonged to a sultan, a yoke none too preferable to the Vohke. There were negotiations in place for a change in command - kings, after all, have more use for the merchant’s gold than the slave’s blood. The port had seen changes done to its streets and stonework in preparation for the takeover. Bars serving beer over wine to accommodate the young pale sailors, and brothels and game halls to serve their superiors.
Kapten was well familiar with these restless buildings, even taking Raksasa in one of them, and knew exactly where they had to go for their meeting. Somewhere dark, obscured by warehouses, with two diametric exits.
They’d taken one of the cargo with them as an example. It was stuffed into a sail, thrashing and kicking around like only children know how to. Raksasa walked slowly, trying to ignore it. The sea wailed with each step behind her, begging for its offspring back. It never begged for the komodo.
When the Azure’s party of three arrived, six figures were already standing there. Two of them seemed important: a parleyer and a man in charge. The former emerged from the shadows into the light of a nearby street lantern.
“English? Português? Nederlands?” Kapten reached out with the three likeliest candidates. No European spoke Malay or Dayak, but the VOC’s administration was frequently written in Malay. Economics doubled as dictionaries, the only communication that had to be translated were prices and transport costs. Any prior sciences were burnt to ashes – the only arithmetics those of extraction and profit.
“English will be fine.” The parleyer spoke with a British fry, heavy and wet like molasses. “I presume only you know how to speak the civilised tongue, anyway.” He cast a look at Rakshasa and Dato.
Dato squeezed the blunderbuss hidden under his doublet, scratching the itch to use it. Raksasa pinched between his shoulder blades to hold back – for now.
“Indeed I do,” Kapten lied. “On with business, then. We have procured a boatful of specimina. We have brought one for inspection.” Kapten poured herself into the role like gin into a cup.
The man exchanged a quick backglance with the man in charge, still obscured by the night.
“We had not been informed an officer of the VOC would be involved.”
Raksasa’s hand was now also on her shotgonne.
“Yes yes, and I wasn’t expecting a four man firing line.” She flashed a sly grin to the parleyer. “My crew has become fidgety, you see: believing the ghost stories they themselves made up about the damn monsters. I’d risk a mutiny hadn’t I transferred them all on to a second, VOC ship. Now, are you ready to do business? We’d rather not sit upon a hold full of these ones for too long.”
There came a nod from the darkness.
“We… appreciate the clarity. Yes, we think trade can occur. All 38 Kindekes will be bought for the agreed-upon tally of 89,000 florins, provided all are accounted for and in pristine condition.” The child on Raksasa’s back gargled in panic, screaming with their lungs full. “Ah. Be so kind as to have yours reveal the example.”
Raksasa almost responded to the command, but stopped herself and waited for Kapten to ‘translate’. She poured the sail’s contents out on the street. The head of a shark appeared followed by a meek, ashy body. A taxidermied animal, with a flopping human body behind the neck.
The shark quickly received the parleyer’s kneeboot. He bent down, inspecting the terrified little thing like a chirurgeon appraising a body for autopsy. It infuriated Raksasa to see it like this, but could not permit herself to react. Orah was gyring in her skull.
“I lack the discerning eye to judge its, a-hem, quality. But I can assure you none of them have been molested. Kindekes, you called them? ‘Kiddies’ is a rather endearing descriptor for, well… what exactly are they?” Kapten’s neck muscles tensed up. That was her tell - she was forcing herself to stay calm.
Again, the negotiator looked back at the one in the dark. Another nod.
“They are miracles. There is the myth of putri naga, some island tale about a dragon and a princess emerging from the same womb. Clearly not the case, as you can see, but valuable to us all the same. More durable and obedient than any slave. We trace these legends to random villages that revere and shelter them. Then we pay or threaten a crew to bring them to us. And now we will take them from you.”
“Peculiar,” Kapten resumed. “I thought Sampit belonged to the sultan. There are no entrepôts that fall under British control. Carrying these Kindekes to your harbours yourselves would be less of a hassle than smuggling them in, no? Why meet us here, in this lawless port?”
In response, the man in the dark finally stepped forward to reveal himself. An absurd physique, barely spilling out of a VOC overcoat. A crocodilian voice, not dissimilar to Raksasa’s, barreled out with a Dutch cadence resembling Kapten’s.
“That would make sense if these bodies were serving the good old king of England!”
Raksasa’s osteoderms began swelling.
“Quelle surprise, a colleague. Republic of the Netherlands, then?”
“Wrong again, sweetheart.”
“Call me that again and I’ll serve your prick to the shark.”
They both laughed uproariously, as that was the social consent between traders; it ought to be this style of humour that accompanied this type of trade.
“It’s funny, lass. It’s because of kings that we’re doing this. Understand, we’ve grown bored with the VOC, BTC, all the companies. Colonies and plantations, dots on the map with arrows pointing at some monarch’s coffer. It’s all so inefficient – the dirtiest deed done for the sake of a couple of men who already have everything.”
“Your objection to terraqueous slavery is its inefficiency? I’d love to see the plantations you run.” Kapten scoffed – Raksasa recognised it as nervousness. “What unspoiled node do you operate out of? Timor? Sumatra? Banda?” She normally operated with much more subtlety.
“Let’s take yours as an example. You use it as a deckhand? Such a waste of potential! And you claim you’re VOC? They must have taught you how to treat the ones feeling sorry for themselves. Kindekes can’t even do that. Feel. Understand. Remember. Any of that.” His eyes glided down Raksasa, auctioneering. The free market and its Medusa-like gaze. “Imagine the crop yield with a work force like that.”
The bespectacled negotiator interjected: “boasting about this new world order aside, we have to actually put the plans in motion. We will take over the boat containing the Kindekes. You will be paid. We will leave. And you will not tell a soul. Even if you gave up our names to port authorities, who would believe you?” He excused himself with a curtsy. “We’re all supposed to be dead, after all.”
The negotiations neared their end. Without any information about location or factions, the Azure would risk becoming actual slavers. Stalling, Kapten asked, “for true, then? You serve no one company? No place to call home or headquarters?
“Aye, kapitein! We are travelling galleries. We show off the Kindekes and purchase support for our new market. The whole fucking Insulinde is carved up. A line for the British, a line for the Dutch, even the Portuguese are making a comeback. We all do the same thing, want the same thing, but not want to serve the same king.”
He smiled, spiked teeth arrayed in long gaps in his gums. “That’s a problem of kings and of borders. Out here, on the oceans, do you see a goddamn thing that can stop us?”
“So, you compete with us. The VOC, I mean.”
“What does that matter? This supply chain hooks us all together. Better yet, it gives us something fun to do. Tonnes and tonnes of cargo for every European without tariffs, trade wars, or thrones. We shall own the only blood that matters, to hell with the blue kind.”
Orah, who existed as words, was at a loss for what she was. The gun in Raksasa’s coat pounded with each heavy heartbeat. Each grain of gunpowder trembled, risking to set it off. Whatever pieces of her lay broken, the smelting hate she felt for this man fused them all back together.
“On that matter… how much for a 39th?” He dared to ask.
“This one’s mine and mine alone.” Kapten’s neck trembled with the strongest of angers: those born of love. Tendons ready to snap off and whip this man in the throat.
“Ah, a trophy then.” No, her whisper assured. “Well. I believe we have a deal. Let’s shake on it. Long live the guilty blue sea!”
“Very… very well.”
Her pale hand left the sleeve of her overcoat as his emerged: a scaled appendage, torsioned into a reptilian claw. Man and monster clasped each other’s greedy paws, muscles burgeoning and about to burst.
“Kapitein Liefdeloos,” Kapten introduced herself with her nom de guerre.
“Goudzugt,” came the reply.
In an instant, Raksasa felt her body convulse with scalding, lava-like emotion. Her scales hardened past the point of any lizard’s hide - almost like armour, keeping herself from boiling over. Her body knew: it had to become the closest thing next to steel to kill what came after.
“Fudeh…” Dato let his composure slip, recognising the name that Raksasa told him. “You should be dead! Nkga kafri!” (“Devil ghost.” He wasn’t wrong.)
Every set of eyes locked on to him – aghast.
“That fucker say something? That was English!”
“Captain Liefdeloos, that boy of yours just spoke the clearest words of English.” The parleyer cut in, accusation holding the situation at knifepoint. Kapten struggled to free her cutlass from her belt, but she was stuck in the handshake. Dato’s coat swayed as he tried a desperate reach for his blunderbuss. It was too late. Five hair-trigger flintlocks appeared from behind the towering reptiloid man. They were outnumbered, outmatched, outgunned. Any resistance made irrelevant by the mere crooking of five fingers.
“Jongens! We were set up. I knew something was up when I saw that second boat. Doesn’t matter. Kill the talker, keep the beast. Get ready to board their boat.” Goudzugt’s words were followed by a quintuple click of priming pistols.
Raksasa’s eyes split open and reddened with rage. Orah remained quiet. She shouldn’t be. There was nothing stirring inside her, and for the first time, the woman truly felt alone. With the sounds of her voice gone from her head, she tried to remember what her sister had looked like. It came up as a blank, vacant stare, identical to her own face. A troubled image in the water.
The only option Raksasa had left was to lunge forward. To close the distance between her teeth and their skulls as quickly as she could. For the first time; if that meant death. She refused to survive without Kapten. She refused to lose her freedom, having yet saved nothing.
But her body refused to move alongside her courage. Or rather, she witnessed that it refused to. It was no longer in her control. She looked on from inside her pharynx, once again in the brig of her own brain stem. Orah had come back after all. At this, she expressed honest relief: her sister always ensured they made it out of a direct confrontation. This time, Raksasa decided, she would stay awake and savour the show. To see Goudzugt die a second time…!
But, the body would not take any steps further. It stayed, wasting the precious few moments Dato and Kapten had left. A chill emerged from deep down the spinal cord as she observed an alienated hand reach for her blunderbuss, and carefully place its barrel toward her chest. No thought formed a migraine loud enough to reach Orah, so deep inside her head. Her finger crooked quicker than the opposing five. The pellet was quicker than the ocean’s pleas to stop at once.
(Wake up, sister.)
Raksasa awoke, though she couldn’t tell if she was in control. Her body burned with pain, covered in warm blood. Unable to move, she tried each of her senses. Slit eyes observed the orange dawn, slowly rising over the nearby warehouses. Forked tongue slithered from her mouth, tasting the air soaked with salt and salpetre. Earholes listened to the low, bloody whimpering happening here and there. Nose caught the scent of something she had smelled before, on the surrogate ship: terror.
“Orah, what has happened?” Her chest bubbled, the breath of her strained voice filled with blood. Good, she thought, I can speak. I am here and together. Orah did it for me. You’ve done it, right, Orah? I will not be mad at you for stealing my courage away. I promise, Orah. So, come out, my sister, my dear sister. Summer is almost over…
No response. She pleaded again to silence. A noise appeared from below her pharynx, crawling up with quivering hands. The new timbre of a hollower soul. There was no Orah occupying her oceans, no box where she could retreat into. She was sisterless.
“Where did you go?”
Answering her question was the ocean’s breeze. Its voice was overbearing and cold – containing too much life, and ending too much of it. Feast and fodder.
With a loud bang, you fell asleep on land. You woke up from the dream, my bulwark. So did the rest of my children. You were the first to awaken, putri naga, before you joined the Azure. You were born in my waters, the Dragon and the Girl adjoined in the womb. You were also the first to die. Neck cut, artery severed, bone cracked by Goudzugt for a trifling matter, for sport. A collector’s item. That was when Orah hid you in her throat. She emerged from the stump of the neck. To hurt the dragon, to hurt its children, is to invite the curse. I vowed this, long ago, and any oathbreaker would meet my vengeance.
That was how it ought to have gone. But I did not make anything happen. Europe had come from my peripheries and arrived at my core. It conquered the waters closest to my heart. I could only observe, as Orah had for so many years. Nothing the trading companies did was a boiling point. They were already here, because I let them get this far – to rule the archipelagoes as a charter of trading routes and merchant outposts. I let them take my children, the perfections of land between sea, and turn them into engines. They farmed you and bred you for some flavoured dust for on their meals plates, continents away.
In the end, your sister saved you. And in the end, your sister saved everyone. Your siblings have woken up. They have inherited the meaning of the Azure. They shall do what they have been dreaming of – endless, ceaseless revenge. Now they shall escape. Now they shall be afraid. Now they shall be alive. They shall tear pale skin from paler bone. I will remain, serving as your vessel, this guilty blue.
The answer disappeared from the flick of her tongue. With a start, Raksasa sat upright and gasped for air. The hole in her chest had stopped bleeding. Where the bullet perforated her was grown over with a thick, ochre layer of reptile scales. She had traded deaths, once again, with her sister. Raksasa wished that now she would have a gentle, bobbing dream.
A familiar sight of carnage came into view as she looked around her. But unfamiliar was the method it was made: clearly not with the firearms or blades each party had brandished. Limbs were strewn about, bodies lay torn, skin bore grueling wounds and deep lashes. Bones were bitten, pecked, smashed. The rage in this scene contained no remorse, mercy, or restraint. In its own way, it looked childlike.
The shark was gone. So was Dato. So was her commandant.
Many hours had passed – none of the mangled corpses were still bleeding. She counted six of them, all bearing the vestments of various trading companies. One of the bodies suddenly started. It had no legs and only one arm to do so with. It began pulling itself forward. It raised its head, and it seemed to smile. Amused to be at death’s doorstep, but never setting foot inside.
Goudzugt grasped the ground as if it were his own life. He had survived whatever attacked him, clothes and skin ripped to shreds of paper. What remained of him was a chimera. His head, human, but from the neck down, his flesh curdled with a sickly, milky colour. The same hue of a coconut’s innards. Everything about him was pockmarked and barnacled - as uneven and rough as the underbelly of a whale, drilled through with ship spikes to hold it all, whatever it was, together. If she was beast, he was worse. She was born. He was created. Salvaged.
Raksasa stood up, striding over to him. He didn’t seem to notice her. She flipped him over like a fish and knelt down on top of him.
“I hope that you are watching, sister. This is how you do it.”
It did not take long for his head to come undone. His smile had given way for the horrible realisation that the rich man, too, will die. One by one, the other chimeras jerked back to life. She would be the one to clean up after her siblings’ mess.
And on Azure’s mast, no more flags flew. They became a fourth option: the scourge of the Insulinde’s slavers.
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