November 22, 1718 - Captain's Cabin on The Goblin
When John Rackham entered his quarters, his captive was already out of her box and trying in vain to pick the lock on her manacles with a knife. She sank the blade into his desk with frustration when she saw him.“Naked, chained, and in a box,” she said simply, “For hours.”
“I suspect if the naked part really bothered you, you wouldn’t have tossed your blanket aside. Or is prancing your bare ass about my quarters part of some plan to seduce me and earn your freedom?”
“Ugh, don’t make me sick.”
John laughed, “Am I really that bad?”
“Not with your mouth shut, but the notion that I should pleasure you sexually to earn anything would be repellent to me no matter what you looked like.”
“Well, I was being sarcastic. Look, maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Name’s John Rackham, though most call me Jack.”
“Hi John, I’m ‘Fuck you let me out of these things.’" The woman jangled the chains on her wrists, "Nice to meet you.”
“Do you have a shorter name?”
“Adresteia,” the woman sighed.
“That’s an unusual name. Why does it sound so familiar..?”
Adresteia shook her head, as if she found the whole situation absurd. She walked over to the book shelf behind him and laughed.
“What is it? What’s so funny?” John asked.
The woman pulled one of the books off the shelf and began flipping through it, “You have a copy of the Odyssey.”
“Hey, careful with that!”
“Why? It’s not like it’s a signed first edition.”
“My father gave it to me when I joined the British navy. It was the last time I saw him alive.”
Adresteia stopped laughing and changed her demeanor sharply. She traced her fingers across one of the pictures in the book.
“You miss him?” she asked.
“Most days,” John said.
“I know the feeling. I’ve lost a lot of people over the centuries. Makes it tempting to just... shut people out.”
“Centuries?” John asked.
“Right, you still think I’m crazy.”
“No, given Captain Vane just threatened to literally bite my head off, I’m very open to hearing what you have to say.”
“Hm, seeing is believing.”
“Right, I’ve seen with my own eyes that Vane’s transformed into some sort of monster. But you say that you’re more dangerous still than him; who are you?”
“Adresteia’s as much my name as any other. I’ve been using it for… two and a half millennia?”
“What? No, if that’s true you’d be older than…”
“Than what’s in this book?” Adresteia asked, “I was already centuries old when I met Odysseus. You know, he had no love of pirates, but he might have liked you. I think you have that same smartass attitude he always had, albeit, shifted more towards the ‘ass’ end.”
John studied her face. He’d known plenty of grifters who could sell the most minute details, and confidence men who could convince you of outrageous things, but every instinct told him the look on her face was sincere.
“You loved him?” John inferred.
“We were friends,” Adresteia said, “Intimate friends, but nothing more.”
“Friendship and sex, what more is there to love?”
“Plenty, when you can’t have it,” she said sadly.
“So, if you’re not human… what are you?”
“Unique. I was engineered from the blood of various powerful Titans, including the Olympian, Zeus.”
“Engineered?”
“Yes, by Hera. To serve as their enforcer and assassin. They needed someone to keep the humans pious. Their power depended on worship – without devoted followers, they would languish.”
“What about you?”
“I draw my power from the fear of the unrighteous,” Adresteia explained, “The worse their transgressions, the more power I can bring to bear.”
“So, I imagine in your mind, pirates are…”
“I’m not fond of your kind, no. But I’m not unreasonable. Free me, and I’ll deal with your problem, and spare any who are still human.”
“If you’re so powerful, how are those shackles keeping you in check?”
“They’re iron. So long as I’m bound by these shackles, I’m too greatly weakened to break them. Ferric metals, especially pure iron, are among the few things that can hurt my kind.”
“Well, a steel blade didn’t do much to Vane.”
“Your Captain Vane is not like me. As I said before, he’s a mortal man transformed by a divine plague into a bloodthirsty abomination. Metal weapons will injure an empusa easily, but any wound less than an amputation or a decapitation will be superficial, cosmetic. It helps them pass for human.”
“Then they’re invincible.”
“Not at all. Artemis didn’t take well to Dionysus’s plagiarism of her masterpiece, and she enlisted the help of her twin brother, Apollo, to curse the abominations so that they would never overrun the world as Dionysus had intended.”
“Apollo? He was the god of the sun, right? So is that why Vane and his men have been keeping to the dark?”
“Apollo was a god of the sun, for what the good there is in the word ‘god’, but yes, that’s why. The light of the sun brings life, even to unlife, and it makes them weak. It restores their breath, and makes their heart beat again. Even the light of the full moon is enough to stir their blood to some degree.”
John was confused, “That doesn’t sound like a bad thing…”
“Anything that breathes can be exhausted, anything with a heartbeat can be killed.”
“So, by the light of the day they’re human?”
“Not quite. The sunlight does not abate the empusa’s thirst. If anything, it makes it more intense – driving them to the edge of sanity. In fact, some Norse empusa would subject themselves to it voluntarily, stripping off armor and clothing before stepping on the battlefield.”
“Berserkers...” John had heard some stories of the long past Vikings. They were, after all, icons of pirate lore.
“Yes. They’d fight with inhuman ferocity under the light of the sun, but the sunlight also gave them human weaknesses - for those seeking entry into Valhalla, that's not a disadvantage.”
“So the easiest time to kill one is when they’re at their strongest?”
“The gods were always fond of ironies, but there is another way. Artemis loved trees and bows, so she made sure that – day or night – a wooden arrow shaft would always fell an empusa as well as any mortal man.”
“I’ve never shot a bow…”
“And you needn’t learn to now,” Adresteia assured him, “Any wooden weapon – a club, a tent stake, even a piece of furniture – carries enough sunlight infused into its essence to hurt them as if they were human. Fire will also hurt them, provided it’s fueled by wood or something derived from a plant. Olive oil works if you can get it hot enough.”
“Or pine tar,” John reasoned. There was always plenty of that on a ship. “How would you do it?”
“If you freed me?” Adresteia said, “It depends on how lazy I’m feeling. I might just beat Vane’s face into the deck of this ship until his head caved in, or maybe rip him in half.”
“You’re that strong?”
Adresteia jingled her chains, “Don’t you want to find out?”
John had the key from the ship, but he still wasn’t sure about the woman. He believed she was who she said she was, at least, as best as he was able to believe in such things, but just because she was telling the truth about that didn’t mean she wouldn’t rip him and his men apart as an appetizer before taking on Vane.
“Why were you hiding on a Spanish ship, naked?”
Adresteia shrugged, “Among my abilities, I can assume the form of a bird…”
“An albatross?”
“Or a gull, an eagle, a sparrow… any bird, really. I perched upon Athena’s shoulder as an owl for the better part of thirty years. Unfortunately, I can transform myself, but not my clothes.”
“That explains the naked part, but what were you doing there? How did you get caught?”
“For the past few years I’ve been searching the Atlantic for something very valuable – a coin.”
“A single coin? What coin is that valuable?”
“It’s Fortune’s coin,” Adresteia said, “and it confers her blessing onto any man or woman that possesses it.”
“What do you need a lucky coin for?” John asked.
“Need it? Ha! I abhor luck. It’s antithetical to justice. It elevates the incompetent and punishes the hardworking.”
“So you want to get rid of it. Okay. How did you end up captured?”
“I was… distracted by a barrel of apples.”
“What? Seriously?”
“I’d been living off of live fish for three months patrolling the shipping lanes. It was difficult to pass up a meal of fresh fruit. Unfortunately, while I was raiding the ship’s food stores in human form, the ship’s cook caught me from behind and struck me over the back of the head with an iron skillet.”
“What sort of man attacks a naked woman with a skillet?”
“What sort of man cowers below decks while his crewmates die fighting pirates?”
“Fair enough.”
“Now, please, Captain Jack – release me so I can solve your problem.”
“I’m fond of gambling, but not with my life. I need more time to think on this.”
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