The Stowaway

I was not asked permission to board. I have never been much for asking.

The ship left Portsmouth harbor three days after my turning. I had spent those three days learning what I was, which is to say I had spent them understanding in a rather fundamental way that I was now a creature of different requirements than I had previously been. Sings-in-Woods taught me what she could in three nights. There is a great deal she did not get to.

I chose a merchant vessel bound for the Caribbean. I chose it because it was the largest ship in the harbor and I had decided, with the clarity that sometimes comes when you have just let go of everything you were, that I would go as far as possible from where I had been.

The hold was dark and smelled of salt cod and mildew and rats. A family of rats, to be precise, who were more startled than I was when I arrived. I made my arrangement with the dark and the cold and the rats. By day I did not move. By night I came up and watched.

I watched the sailors work. The rigging, the sails, the way you read the wind and adjust for it; the way the ship herself had preferences, tendencies, a character of her own that the crew was always in negotiation with. I watched the man who held the wheel and the way he spoke to the water without words. I watched the stars and learned which ones were where and what they meant for where you were going.

No one saw me. I was very good at not being seen. I had been in training since the age of eight.

By the time we docked at Nassau I knew the name of every knot and what it held and how to undo it without being noticed. I knew how to read the sky for weather three days before the weather arrived. I knew how to move across a deck in darkness without a sound.

All of this would prove useful.

There is a thing I want to say about those weeks in the ship’s hold, alone for the first time in my life without Sings-in-Woods within reach of a night’s walk. I was afraid, at first. Not of the dark or the rats or the sea; those things I had already made my peace with. I was afraid of what I was now, of the new requirements, of the hunger that was not the hunger I had known as Sarah. I was afraid of myself.

Then the fear passed, the way fears do when you have enough darkness to sit in and no one requiring anything of you.

I arrived at Nassau with nothing but what I had learned, which has turned out to be the only way to arrive at anything worth arriving at.