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The tattered rags like raven wings in motion, his hammer hand upon the bedroom door
Finally, finally, my brain works. For more than a fortnight now, I have been trying to figure out what faint echo flickered in my mind at the recognition scene between Will Turner and Bootstrap Bill in Dead Man's Chest; because there was an immediate parallel that slipped out of reach as soon as I recalled it, and it's been driving me up the wall. Lying here, listening to the storm, I've finally remembered. It's a passage from Greer Gilman's Moonwise (1991), a foreshadowing of Jack Daw.
(Cut for mythscape prose and, if people still care about that sort of thing, I'm sure a spoiler or two.)
Coming to the child, the daemon crouched, and kissed her mouth and licked her cheek, rasping and whispering in her ear. An accolade: a formal bestowing of the flesh. Moveless, helpless, Ariane looked inward, seeing with the soulstone's eye: annihilation. No scythe of iron, but the naked edge of her mortality. Unlight. Unharvest. The thing with horns.
Knife cuts wood.
The child spoke in a small wretched voice. "Ariane."
"Ariane," said the daemonic voice. "By your name, you are bidden. Eyes to ravens, soul to Annis: but the flesh is mine." He glanced from her, all greedily assured, at the child, at the man. "And all." For the barest breath, he hesitated, fleering at the tinker: so they knew he had no power to call the nameless soul. Ariane was his, and the soulless, carnal child: he could possess her as he liked.
. . . Ariane sickened. The child had called out for her, for the first time by her name; her friend had touched her face, a hand in darkness—ah, but she was lightboned with remembered shock, with a poignance of regret—and the thing had twisted and defiled their goodness to his ends, perverting trust into betrayal, and reassurance into violation. He had robbed her of the moment of accepting grace.
So, too, the moment of realization has power: when there are two Mr. Turners straining at the ropes, in the rain and the storm and unknown to one another, and it's ruined Bootstrap who suddenly sees in this young stranger's face himself at idealistic twenty.* But there's no chance for tenderness or outreach, whatever a father should say to the son he abandoned for the sea, because in his startlement Bootstrap loses hold of the rope and the cannon crashes to the deck; and it's Will who's blamed for it. The moment that Bootstrap admits that he has a son, that Davy Jones perverts into another little amusement to while away the endless dreariness of damnation, another reminder that hell is bottomless and there is always farther to fall. What he could not crack, she thought, he would encyst. It would not end. The fossil would endure in suffering. Already she knew his fell weight, immense and dry as death. The first Will knows of his father in over ten years is the lash of the cat-o'-nine-tails across his back. This is what passes for compassion among the damned.
Of course, I love this damaged recognition, all twisted out of true. And thank God I remembered Moonwise. Now maybe I can sleep.
*The physical likeness between Will and Bootstrap is remarked upon more than once in Curse of the Black Pearl, to the point that Will is once—if briefly—mistaken for his own father's ghost. Which only proves, so far as I'm concerned, that there is no situation to which the Odyssey is entirely inapplicable. "For I say that never have I seen such a likeness, / in neither man nor woman, and amazement holds me as I look— / how like he is to the son of great-hearted Odysseus, / Telemachos, whom that man left as a child at home / when for my shameless sake you Achaians / raised up reckless war and went to Troy" (4.141—146).
(Cut for mythscape prose and, if people still care about that sort of thing, I'm sure a spoiler or two.)
Coming to the child, the daemon crouched, and kissed her mouth and licked her cheek, rasping and whispering in her ear. An accolade: a formal bestowing of the flesh. Moveless, helpless, Ariane looked inward, seeing with the soulstone's eye: annihilation. No scythe of iron, but the naked edge of her mortality. Unlight. Unharvest. The thing with horns.
Knife cuts wood.
The child spoke in a small wretched voice. "Ariane."
"Ariane," said the daemonic voice. "By your name, you are bidden. Eyes to ravens, soul to Annis: but the flesh is mine." He glanced from her, all greedily assured, at the child, at the man. "And all." For the barest breath, he hesitated, fleering at the tinker: so they knew he had no power to call the nameless soul. Ariane was his, and the soulless, carnal child: he could possess her as he liked.
. . . Ariane sickened. The child had called out for her, for the first time by her name; her friend had touched her face, a hand in darkness—ah, but she was lightboned with remembered shock, with a poignance of regret—and the thing had twisted and defiled their goodness to his ends, perverting trust into betrayal, and reassurance into violation. He had robbed her of the moment of accepting grace.
So, too, the moment of realization has power: when there are two Mr. Turners straining at the ropes, in the rain and the storm and unknown to one another, and it's ruined Bootstrap who suddenly sees in this young stranger's face himself at idealistic twenty.* But there's no chance for tenderness or outreach, whatever a father should say to the son he abandoned for the sea, because in his startlement Bootstrap loses hold of the rope and the cannon crashes to the deck; and it's Will who's blamed for it. The moment that Bootstrap admits that he has a son, that Davy Jones perverts into another little amusement to while away the endless dreariness of damnation, another reminder that hell is bottomless and there is always farther to fall. What he could not crack, she thought, he would encyst. It would not end. The fossil would endure in suffering. Already she knew his fell weight, immense and dry as death. The first Will knows of his father in over ten years is the lash of the cat-o'-nine-tails across his back. This is what passes for compassion among the damned.
Of course, I love this damaged recognition, all twisted out of true. And thank God I remembered Moonwise. Now maybe I can sleep.
*The physical likeness between Will and Bootstrap is remarked upon more than once in Curse of the Black Pearl, to the point that Will is once—if briefly—mistaken for his own father's ghost. Which only proves, so far as I'm concerned, that there is no situation to which the Odyssey is entirely inapplicable. "For I say that never have I seen such a likeness, / in neither man nor woman, and amazement holds me as I look— / how like he is to the son of great-hearted Odysseus, / Telemachos, whom that man left as a child at home / when for my shameless sake you Achaians / raised up reckless war and went to Troy" (4.141—146).
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Like meeting up with a child in the otherworld, perhaps; and she has your face.
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Nine