Ancient Mariner Retold

I searched amongst the weary eyed people, all looking for solace from their own dreadful lives in the joining of two others in matrimony. I never understood the emptiness I witnessed in the onlookers faces, I thought it was joy they should be feeling yet I swore I saw jealousy. But that was not my purpose here.

A short plump man with sleep invading his features started when I slid up beside him and sat in the heavily adorned chair. The gossamer drape that cloaked the table entertained his fingers as I told him my story and he unwillingly listened.

...

The ship was a beautiful beast; she ate away at the waves like they were nothing at all, even when the sea grew angry and threw its full force at our helm she still held steady as a surgeon’s hand. We dipped and swayed in the dance of the ocean, seemingly endless in its tone and salty depth.

I watched as the sun breached the horizon and flood the ocean, its deep green-blue drinking in the copper light mixing a myriad of colour. As the day’s work continued and finished, our surroundings looked the same as always, endless, and again the sun sunk into the water, its finger-tendrils fighting to grip the sky for just a little longer. Then the dark took over.

The days repeated themselves in the same monotony as ever as we passed through the walls of ice and everyday as the sails swelled and emptied one lone bird, an albatross, with wings that mirrored the ice, stalked us from the sky. I know most of my fellow men admired the bird and sympathised with its predicament, we had no-where to dock for days and the bird had no land to nest on, but the look in its eyes seemed cold and calculating as they searched the depths of my soul.

Infinite days past and our breath crystallized the air, and each minute the bird flew above with the speed of the ship, our skin grew colder and our minds dim. The mocking glare of that judgmental beast grew unbearable to my withering mind, a cold and empty emotion filled my body from head to toe.

I gripped the wooden handle with bitter determination, loaded a meticulously honed arrow and fired. The albatross fell eerily quiet and landed with a thud on the deck, echoing the final beat of its heart. All eyes turned to me and the silence grew, speaking volumes from their untameable thoughts.

The next day continued as normal but the air held something, a feeling that was unattainable. Darkness ate the sky and sank into the bones of every man on board. It didn’t take us long to notice we had been touched by the devil, we were cursed. The wind ceased to blow and we became a painting, a perfect ship on a perfectly painted ocean, even in death the bird around my neck mocked me in my pitied state.

We could not breathe or drink or move or eat but death did not claim us, not for a long time. Beasts and demons came from below and crawled across our anchored feet and slid across the frozen ocean leaving slimy trails.

When we’d all lost hope and our lips cracked and crumbled like baked earth but even our blood was slow to run and nothing moved around us but the unknown in the sea; we had grown as close to satisfied as was possible in our hell. Then suddenly from nightmare itself, though we didn’t know at first, came a ship as ghostly as a condemned mans eyes and mysterious as the ocean floor. She crept up fast and made us gape at the site we then be held, the woman aboard was naught but bone that the sun shone through like jail-bars, her lips were red as though bloodstained and her voice was high and shrill.

“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!” she crooned, the glee in her voice made us shiver; then as the sun set over the blade edge of the earth, death began to whisper to us and instinct drew our eyes heavenward but we regretted that mistake. The horned mood glared at us, blood red, and judging from above.

Each man condemned under the death-moons stare cursed me with their eye. Then one-by-one as they pierced me with the loathing in their glare, they dropped like flies to the boards of the ship, just bodies in a heap, like scrap thrown out and trampled. In silence the pound of the men falling made the thud-thudding of a dying heart and soon after each soul slid from the bodies like sleep-filled drunken things then rushed past me to the unknown like the arrows from my bow. My guilt flared as each man left but their wasted bodies remained.

I was the only left to live, if you could call it that, and the isolation was worse than the parched state of my mouth, gone years without water to a lifetime of loneliness and guilt.

Only the slimy things lived on, and me; a rotting soul on a rotting deck, motionless on a rotting ocean. Then another whisper came and all I did was wish for death as my heart turned into ash. I closed my eyes and dreamed of death, of hell and burning things, but soon the dead sky and the sea willed my eyes to open and watch the dead men around me, mocking again what I lacked in life and the death that I strongly craved.

Each man that lay on the cold deck of the ship still stared through my flesh and soul. The feeling of a dead man’s eye is something that eats at you and you never forget. For a week I waited, alone, guilty, starved … alive.

And still I could not die.

I amused myself in my endless state by watching the water-snakes swim, the blue and green and velvet black that streamed golden fire bemused my tired eyes; my love for them grew and grew with their blessed company. In a moment of dazed time, the bird that hung about my neck like a statement of my sin and slid off my shoulders into the sea and sunk like lead into the depths of the, as if the hand of a saint itself reached out to me and cast my weight away.

Finally I was allowed to sleep.

I dreamt of buckets, of water, as they filled with due and I woke to the sound of rain. Despite drinking my fill in my dreams I drank again and again; my lips grew wet and whole again, my throat was cold and soothed, my clothes were wet and still I drank. I was able to move once more as the pre-light of the dawn brought the promise of day to the horizon and I could have sworn by all the sanity I had retained that I had died in sleep and I now witnessed this beauty as a ghost.

A roaring wind lashed the sky; rain and lightning stung the air but calm and a cocoon of silence surrounded the boat. Then the dead men began to stir.

The boat sailed on with a phantom wind as the howling about us still avoided the hell that enveloped us. The dead men groaned in protest as they all rose to their feet and began to work as usual; I pulled at a rope with my brothers’ dead son and marvelled at the sight before me. Men used their limbs like lifeless tools, groping at ropes and pullies; we were a ghastly crew on a ghostly ship with an unknown destination.

But the dead crew only stayed one night to refresh me of my guilt and as the sun uprose again they each followed it into the sky, disappearing into its fiery depth. Not long after the empty sky filled with conversations from the birds and despite the simplicity of the tune, to me it was angel’s song, sweet and lonely and mournful. The birdsong died and the sails took over my ears as I sailed on till noon, the fluttering on the cloth in the breeze was comforting but unnerving as not a wisp of a breeze was blowing, and the ship moved onwards from an unknown power below.

Far beneath the dance of the waves in the murky unknown depths a silent spirit slid through the water as it made the ship sail on and I stood on the deck of the venerable ship, a mere speck on the oceans wide. Then as if the sun held the spirit in its grips form the highest point in the sky, it held my ship in custody and silenced the sails also. Just as the minute ticked over and the sun lost its grip the mast, the ship or the spirit began to stir then jerk in and uneasy motion forcing the ship to jolt forwards and backwards throwing about like a toy in the hands of a child in a bath.

The ship flew forward as if thrown in a tantrum and left me stunned on the boards of the deck without the knowledge of how long I had been there and whether or not I was dreaming. I heard voices that judged and questioned me but I was unable to answer; they talked of the albatross, the boat and a spirit and of more things I didn’t understand.

I woke again as the ship move on to a sight that made me cry, I begged the spirits that brought me here that I was either awake or that I never would. The site of the harbour was ambrosia to my eyes, the light shone bright as if the mood was reflected in glass and I refused to look back for fear I would see the hell I had just emerged from. Then like a blessing fell upon me a boat came to my side, a hermit came to wash my soul of the poison of the albatross’s blood. I climbed aboard the saviour’s boat and just in time I turned to see my ship split in two with an all mighty crack as the spirit drew it under.

Just as I thought I never would again, I stood on the solid land, unfazed by the looks that each man who had witnessed my arrival turned upon me, or the questions that they asked. Yet as I stood there on the shore I knew in my burning heart, my hell would surely come back to haunt me unless I warned others of sins and told my story.

To this day I’ve not forgot the terror of that ghastly trip, this soul you see has been all alone on the varsity of the sea, so isolated that even God himself seemed lacking in presence.

“I beg you sir to never forget the lesson I have told you now and to teach this lesson to countless others so they never commit the same. Farewell to you and at last I say that: he who loves both man and bird and beast, and he who love all things great and small, God will love you as He made things to love them all.”

I knew that on the morrow, that poor unaware wedding guest will awake wiser than before.