Navikas on the Open Ocean

Navikas on the Open Ocean is a short story by an unknown Hallandrüne poet. Written around the time of the Caydefather, it tells the tale of a sailor named Navikas, though he is also referred to by several other nicknames in the text. It centers around 2 characters, Navikas and an unnamed woman, presumably a captain of another ship, and narrates the few interactions they have over Navikas' sailing on the sea carrying cargo. It references several folkloric themes, such as the shifting constellations as well as one of many Hallan creation myths.

Navikas on the Open Ocean
All his journeys tend to start off just the same, as is their way: in the dawn-dark, a mug of Pen’s best (or worst, depending on who you ask) coffee burning a ring on the control panel of the boat beside him, the hinges rolled down just enough for the sea breeze to turn his nose tip red. The record player, on, but silent, until he hits the open ocean and can see nothing through the frosted glass windows of his vessel save the bleak, unyielding line of the horizon.

There’s a photograph taped to his dashboard, now ten years old, of his wife standing on the beach beside Vythia with their boy in her arms, all the round, living warmth of her distilled into a single fleck of colour that the starlight will illuminate, briefly, briefly.

For a night and a day he’ll sail in straight lines, speaking to passing strangers and old, old friends and everything in between. Old Slow and Steady, a king amongst kings, whose voice seems weighed to a riverbed by the thought of every fathom left to go, grousing on about his “no good, cheatin’ wife” and the boy he feels he hasn’t seen in years. Horseman, ageing, sharp-tongued, who booms when he speaks and rumbles when he laughs, deals advice like a well-worn deck of cards, boasts of his multitude of children. And Manny, who jabbers on about the woman he’s married, “the prettiest woman in the galaxy,” and goes a mighty shade of sour every time another man wonders if he shouldn’t be worried, leaving her alone for so many days at a stretch.

“And how ‘bout yourself, Wiley Coyote,” they say. “How ‘bout that lovely lady n’ that diner o’ hers. How ‘bout that kid.”

It’s well, it’s well, he answers, and he will fill the cabin with the crackling sound of their laughter, drink his wife’s gut-churning coffee. But all the while, he’s waiting, for the second evening and the silence that falls as each man turns inward, towards the centre of himself, in a way that is only possible with nothing but ocean ahead and ocean behind and an endless desert to either side.

He’s waiting for the voice that comes, a little after midnight. For the crackle, the hiss, the smile he somehow knows is spreading on the other end. She always says, “Evening, Coyote,” like a Westerner, like a cigarette burn, like an oil slick, and he always lets her in.

Navikas is quite never sure where she’s from. Her accent says the far east, somewhere hot and flat where the water always reaches for the sky, but she talks as if she’s seen the world and then some. She says she’s been to all six seas, tells him, “Wiley dear, I think you’d like it there.”

Navikas is never quite sure when she arrives, either. His memory of her has shifted over the years until it’s a mess of black empty nights, her voice like a drum beat. She fits into his life as though she’d never been anywhere else. His recollection of what came before she did is wasted, a desire to discover time before time.

“Shit, Grey Eyes,” he says, somewhere not far from Antisnoq, mid-Harvest and a broken moon in the sky, “just where the hell did you spring up from?”

She laughs, loud and long, until he thinks the sound might just split his head in two.

His wife, who’s always loved his stories without ever taking them too seriously, asks after “Miss Lady Grey” with a twist of her left eyebrow each time he comes home. The way you’d inquire after neighbours and sick aunts. She always knew she’d hitched herself to a man with wandering feet and a heart that had planted itself, strong and square, in the thin, dry earth of Hallandren long before he ever sat behind a wheel.

She had her own name to make—Pen, never Penny—a lino countertop to stand behind, a shotgun taped beneath the cash register, and a neon sign out front. The best pancakes in the country. Nobody’s anchor, nobody’s goddamn lighthouse, just a business, just paying the bills. She knows where she is.

As for Navikas, he’s always tried his best to leave the ocean at the door. She can’t ask much more than that. In the nights she takes for herself, she sits them down on the living room sofa, lays his head in her lap. Twenty years, she thinks to, counting his wrinkles, her hair falling over them both when she bends down to kiss his old, familiar brow.

The summer his ship breaks down off the coast of Valentia with a cargo full of cobble, Navikas turns on his dome light and pretends like he’s planned this all along. He kicks open the cabin door, leaping into the hot, night air, settling himself against the on the deck with one elbow crooked into the open window.

“Smooth sailing, Wiley?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.” He lights a cigarette. He can hear the rustle of her clothing, amplified, and the pinging of his engine as it cools.

Out in the ocean, a multitude of shifting, yellow-green dots mark the presence of other life. They howl and yip and never come too close, like they’re waiting for him to get down on all fours and follow them into the dark.

“Old man, it’s rude not to say ‘hello’ when your family comes callin’.”

Navikas tips his head back and exhales smoke all up and down the cosmos. Somewhere in the world, Grey Eyes takes a short, sharp breath, and the next sound she makes is long and high and not quite human, as ancient as the petrified, sodden wood beneath his heels.

She’s a clever old soul. Chains her secrets up like dogs to a post. Two weeks before the solstice, just outside Isla de Fugu, he makes his voice casual and says, “What’s your sky right now, Grey Eyes?”

“Won’t get ahold o’ me that easy, I’m afraid.”

As always, it’s he who ends up confessing, “Southern Arrows, Spiders, Crossbow,” one right after the other. “Spiders,” Grey Eyes says, “they bring the rain, did you know.”

She might be twenty-five or she might be ninety. Sometimes, dozing by the helm, he thinks she might be nothing at all. A fiction, a memory, a story he tells himself to keep the loneliness far behind. When she gives him riddles they seem to come from a time and place imagined.

“In the middle of the land is a big round column, and in the middle of the big round column is a big, round temple. N’ all around the column are twelve cities, n’ all around each city are thirty towers, n’ all around each tower go two women, black and white, moving in circles. So—what’s the temple?”

Two hundred miles later, he leans down and says, “The world,” and each city a month, each tower a day, each woman a dawn, a sunset. He feels terribly old. He thinks of the women and their bare feet on the warm tower stones, circling, circling, without tiring, without pause. He hears Grey Eyes’ smile.

Later that night he dreams of his wife, sitting beneath a tree he doesn’t quite know, in a house he doesn’t quite recognize. There’s a thread between her hands and she looks like she’s heavy with grieving. He wants nothing more than to ask what her troubles are, but there’s a voice in his ear urging silence, and so he stands, still and trembling, and when she finally lifts her shining face to see him, he wakes.

“Grey Eyes, you there?”

“I’m here.”

“What’re you carryin’?”

She laughs. “Oh, just a bit of trouble.”

He leans back to watch the waves pass. “Say—Do you ever feel like… Like you’ve been down this way before? Trapped, I mean—A hundred times over and over again. Do you ever feel that way?”

Grey Eyes doesn’t answer straight out the gate. Instead, she shifts her hands on her helm, shifts in her seat, and tells him the story of how the world was made.

“Way back when everything was new, there was a clever old thief with the sharpest tongue in all Creation who took it ‘pon himself to people the earth. So he stuck his paws into the good mud and shaped the bear and the buffalo, and the elk and the deer, and all the birds n’ all the fish. When that was done, he made himself a man and a woman, and breathed his air down their muddy throats. And as if that wasn’t enough, he gave them all his cleverness too, all his wit and his quickness.

“But it wasn’t his place to give such a gift away. So he was chained to his tower, this thief, and—”

Navikas shakes his head. “I know how it ends, Grey Eyes.”

“Oh?” Her voice has turned hard, the way it sometimes does, when he is impatient, and leaves too many knots undone. “I don’t think you do, old man.”

They pass a cluster of flying fish, a school of hammerheads, a reef, glowing like stars. When the silence grows too big, he sighs and says, “Alright, madam. Tell me how it goes.”

For a moment he thinks she might have left him. But after a time, he hears her open her mouth and say: “It goes with a trickster talking his way loose the way he always will, ten years at sea or ten days on the road, and always in a circle, always headed home the long way ‘round.”

He pauses, to mull this over. “Alone?”

“Mm… Not quite.”

She’ll speak up less and less as the years pass. This he knows already. One evening, soon after midnight, he’ll turn up the radio and call out her handle and there won’t be anything but a hiss and a crackle. Manny’s wife will run off with a rodeo boy from Butte; Slow and Steady’s son will take a knife to his ma and her lover; and Horseman will cross the big river, Lord rest his chattering soul.

“Grey Eyes,” Navikas says, and he can see home now, a distant flicker just where the stone meets the sky, “this tale of yours ain’t got an ending.”

“Good.” She sounds very far and very close, all at once. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Springtime. A cargo full of fish guts, travelling southwest. Navikas rolls his windows down so the wind can comb his hair and says, “Alright old lady—‘fess up: what kind of stars you seein’ tonight?”

Her voice comes down like a miracle, like a divinity. “Wiley Coyote,” she laughs, “don’t you ever learn. The answer’s all of ‘em, all at once.”