(This is based less on the Nameless Hero’s journal and more on the writings of the venerable Marie.)
How the sea called to him with her mournful gulls, promising surcease from his perpetual flight. His knuckles were white, wrapped about the pier’s railing, white like the floating foam. He longed for her embrace, to be wrapped in her waves, to sink, to drown within the anonymity of unattested death and rest upon her gloomy bed there never to be sought out nor found.
So long ago now, he had stolen a cross to mark his mother’s grave[1], and enslaved, passed from master to master, he’d finally murdered the only good master he had ever had. From crime to crime, sin to sin, slavery to slavery. He had nowhere left to flee but back into the sea.
My father came in from the sea and sailed back out to sea long before I was ever born. He sowed only misery, as I have sown only blood.
That was when she came to him. Her steps upon the wooden planks, he heard them start only to stop, and stop only to start again. He sniffed the air, and through the salty atmosphere of fishy odors, caught a whiff of her. He turned and saw her there adorned in dark but simple clothes.
Her face was quite like her sister’s but unpainted, and her eyes, like the sea, blue and mournful, blue and mournful and deep. He met her eyes, and she met his.
“Excuse me,” she exclaimed, and looked away, but then she took three quick paces forward. Coming by his side, she looked out over the misty bay. “It’s something,” her voice shook, “to see when things get clearer. The cliffs are so beautiful, and when the sun rises, after a storm, the bay grown still as glass, it, it, it’s worth the storm. I was very frightened once by the storm, just a girl, and my father led me out here, and we watched the sunrise. I remember it so . . . ” She grew quiet, her head bowed. “John tells me you tried to pass the blockade in his boat.”
He gave one solitary nod. “Didn’t know there was a blockade.”
“Where were you going?”
“Home,” he said without thinking.
“Where’s home?” she asked.
Taciturnity returned to him, and all he did was stare out into the mists his eyes could not pierce. He sighed, knowing he had no answer. She touched his arm, and at that touch it was as if a thousand pounds or more fell from his shoulders and dropped into the sea. He gasped.
“Your life is heavy on you,” she said. “It’s heavy on all of us, but you carry much.”
Again he nodded. “I’m a murderer, a betrayer, and the avenger will not let me sleep or find a place to rest. I see only one place to go,” he said, his eyes falling upon the lapping waves.
“No,” she said suddenly, her little hand clenching the swordsman’s arm. “That’s no escape.”
“How can I go on?” he asked. “I am not your beloved Christ. Your fat preacher told me how He suffered for me, but how could more blood unspill the torrents which I have loosed? How could one more murder rob death of all my victims?”
Her hand fell from him, and he felt the coldness of its absence.
“Look at me,” she said, but he would not lift his head. “Look, please.”
The softness of her voice and the gentleness of her plea overpowered his will, and his head turned to face her.
“I don’t have all the answers,” she said. “As a child, man put a sword and your hand and told you to kill. As children, my sister and I were only taught to heal, to bind wounds, to mix herbs. My sister and I aren’t so different, but I gave what was in my hands over to Him. He accepted it. He’ll accept what’s in your hands too.”
[1] Yes, to those theosophists who blathered on about the passages regarding the cross which I published in the first half of this work, here the Nameless hero mentions in some melancholy ramblings that he placed the cross above his mother’s grave, though a colleague of mine argues that the passage reads closer to “in” his mother’s grave.
Tale Told 