The Sea Mother
Sam Arlington
Even in this, the inevitable moment of his reckoning by sword and sea, teetering on the edge of the hijacked ship’s weathered deck, hands bound, chained to a concrete block, Liwanag could not accept that his end would come at the hand of a lesser raider. He had stolen and maimed, certainly. Killed, even. He deserved and expected death at the hands of the government or rival corsairs, even welcomed it. A lifetime on the violent seas, longer than most, forged in solitude and free of worldly attachments, had left him unafraid of death and prepared to embrace his own.
But this gago Tadhana, this sadistic amateur, this was too much. Liwanag had no illusions about his own character, his shortcomings, vices, and misdeeds, but he could not abide being dispatched by a deranged fool who took joy in brutalizing elders and kidnapping children. Theirs was anything but a noble profession, to be sure, but this was not the way.
He cast a smug glance over his shoulder to watch his skiff race away over the waves, carrying his remaining men and the captives they had just recovered from Tadhana. Two sisters, stolen from their family to be sold into unspeakable servitude. It was a risky job for Liwanag’s crew, but he had been happy to take it for the extravagant pay and the chance to humiliate cruel Tadhana. He would not see the reward, but the latter could still be arranged.
Liwanag turned back and puffed out his bony chest, letting the extended tip of Tadhana’s stolen gunong, its sculpted blade gleaming in the spectral haze of the predawn moonlight, pierce the tattooed flesh of his sternum. He felt a trickle of warm blood soak the spot on his threadbare undershirt and laughed, partly to show Tadhana that he was not afraid and partly at the absurdity of his misfortune. He had bested better enemies than these, had fought storied navies and mythical beasts, had outlasted fevers that killed even the strongest among his crew. Now this, a fittingly inglorious finale to bookend his ignominious beginning, abandoned in a fetid Mindanao alley by a mother who could not or would not care for him, left to survive alone on its streets.
Tadhana's clouded eyes widened in a mixture of rage and alarm. With her free hand she angrily brushed a lock of coarse silver hair, matted with sea spray, from her craggy, twisted face. One of her men, nervous, raised a pistol and pointed it at Liwanag. Tadhana hoisted the blade over her head, poised for a fatal strike. Liwanag bared his crooked, yellowed teeth and locked eyes with his enemy. A drop of sweat fell from the tip of his thin black mustache.
“Pakyu, Tadhana,” he sneered. “I alone choose my path.”
Liwanag turned, kicked the concrete block overboard, and dove after it into the churning black sea.
The heavy block carried him swiftly downward, faster than he had expected. He didn’t know if the water was ten meters deep or ten thousand. He had been knocked unconscious in the melee and had no sense of where they were. Pressure built in his ears and chest as the weight dragged him from the warm, moonlit surface into the icy black below. He wondered as he sank whether he would first drown or be crushed by the deep. As if in answer, a rough, fast-moving mass bumped into his leg, then another. Bull sharks. They smelled his blood, but they shouldn’t have arrived so quickly. Tadhana must have chummed the water. He winced as one of them took an exploratory bite, tearing off his pant leg and leaving a gash on his thigh. It wouldn’t be long now.
He closed his eyes as the crushing weight of the water embraced him ever more tightly, forcing the air from his lungs. His ears felt like they would explode. The blackness behind his eyelids spun from bottom to top as he fought to stay conscious. The cold penetrated to his bones. A shark bumped his legs, this time more aggressively. He could sense more of them in the swirling water around him. He willed one to seize his throat and end it. One instead clamped down hard on his lower leg and he screamed, ejecting the last of the air from his lungs in a feeble burst of bubbles. The ocean swallowed the sound. He tried weakly to kick the shark with his other leg. The weight on his chest grew heavier, his head lighter. The urge to gasp for breath was overpowering his fading reason. Suddenly foolishly nostalgic for the world that was killing him with exceptional cruelty, Liwanag opened his eyes for one last look, expecting to see little but darkness and snaggled teeth.
Instead, dancing rays of rose-colored light shone from below. His leg was suddenly free, his hands unbound. The sharks vanished into the inky deep as he descended through a whirling cloud of tiny pink flowers. They radiated warmth and invited him to inhale their divine scent. The weight lifted from his chest and the pain in his ears disappeared. He felt weightless, formless. He followed the shafts of light downward, looking for their source. A gigantic, serpentine silhouette undulated through the rays of the unseen luminary below, ruby sparks twinkling at its edges as the light glinted off its surface.
Sensing movement, Liwanag looked up and found himself staring into the giant, silvery white face of a serpent. Twice as high as he was long, it mimicked the moon, rough and cratered, radiating a pale, ethereal light. Elaborately spiraled frills rippled gently in the current from the sides of its head. Woody, backswept horns adorned the top. Flowing, translucent whiskers drooped lazily from the sides of its long, ridged snout. Shimmering golden eyes regarded Liwanag with an ancient, compassionate intelligence that told him he need not be afraid.
“Am I dying?” Liwanag asked the serpent calmly. He was no longer sinking.
“No, child,” she lilted in a voice of smoke and polished glass. “You died.”
He paused, bewildered. He felt not fear but lucid, serene curiosity. “Who are you?”
“I am called Chaos. I am called Leviathan. I am called Sea Mother. It is from my womb that all life springs.”
“A god?” he whispered, at once awed and incredulous. He had heard these tales in all their forms and variations and thought them the yarns of tricksters and fools.
“To some I appear as a god. To others, as the faces of their families. To a special few, my children of the sea, their minds unclouded by mortal bonds or the stories of spiteful men, as this, my true form.”
“Why have you come to me?” He could scarcely imagine this was anything but the fever dream of a dying mind or a karmic demon, come to collect for his transgressions.
“It is you that have come to me, child. I am here to guide you in your passage.”
“My passage?”
“To the next place. You faced great hardship and pain in this life, yet you resisted the wickedest fates of your enemies and did not lose your light. Now, in the moments before the memory of this cycle fades, you will know pure, unconditional love and joy.”
“Paradise,” Liwanag wept. “But how?” He was not special, not deserving. His own mother couldn’t bring herself to want him. He could not fathom why anyone else should.
“You will be born, in a sense, to a kind, special woman in the most profound depths of despair. She has boundless love to give, but her body cannot create the seeds of life.”
“I do not underst—"
“She will call you Pag-asa, for the hope you stir within her abundant heart. Though your time together will be fleeting, the immensity of her love for you will inspire her to a lifetime of selfless devotion to unloved children. She will care for hundreds herself; others will follow her example.”
Liwanag’s mind spun. He imagined what his own life might have been like had he known love, compassion, and warmth. Who he might have been. What he might have done.
“When will I—?” he began. He was sinking again. He looked up toward the serpent to see her vanish into the darkness, her forked tail whipping through the shafts of rosy light as they began to descend with him.
“Now and always. This time, the last, and the next. Farewell, child,” her tender voice echoed through the abyss.
As he sank down, down, down toward the source of the light he became aware that he no longer had a body. He began to rotate as the dancing beams that enveloped his phantasmic senses converged into a gentle vortex, tightening gradually, swirls of color along its walls flashing through the shades of the rainbow and beyond, to colors that tasted like honey and whispered like wild lemongrass in a soft summer breeze. The vortex grew tighter until it closed around him. The colors faded to blinding white, their synesthetic resonance bleeding into a chaotic sensory crescendo until there was only the distant, muffled roar of shallow surf.
#
Liwanag sensed warmth and motion. He opened his eyes to see bubbles churning through the brilliant blue-green of the sun-soaked shallows as whitecaps crashed down onto the surface above. He was being gently tossed back and forth with the rhythm of the breakers. Clammy seaweed tickled his legs. He looked down, past a little round pot belly, to find two tiny, chubby feet lolling in the water. He began to paddle and kick to right himself, then aligned his movement with the direction of the waves. Sediment swirled up from below. A big wave picked him up and lurched him forward in a rush of sandy foam. He crashed into legs. The legs yelped in surprise.
Liwanag clutched at a swath of plain linen flowing in the waves and looked up. Framed by jagged green cliffs and a cloudless cobalt sky, the tear-streaked face of a raven-haired young woman looked down at him in shock. She lifted him out of the knee-deep surf, turning him over in her hands to look for injuries. Seeing none, she clutched him tightly to her chest and wept uncontrollably. He buried his face in her silken hair. It smelled like jasmine. She held him up again for another look as she calmed. He stared, stern and unblinking, straight into her shining brown eyes, intensely evaluating her face. It was weary and sad and radiated a kindness he had never seen in all his tormented years. It looked like home.
“Who are you?” she sobbed through tears of luminous joy, scanning the sea for ships, for debris, for anything that could reveal from where he had come. She held him close again and began to sing. As he rested his heavy head against her breast and absorbed the sweet melody of her melancholy song, the last of Liwanag dimly recalled that something had happened just before this. Danger, then a gentle beast. Flowers and light. He couldn’t remember exactly what it was.
The woman paused her singing. He followed her gaze toward the horizon where, far beyond the breakers, a ridge of opalescent scales slipped silently beneath the waves, a tiny splash following a moment later as a forked tail whipped the surface and vanished. The woman beamed at him in singular adoration, her face settling into stoic resolve and understanding as she answered her own question.
“My pag-asa,” she cooed softly. “My hope. My light. My love.”
Pag-asa nuzzled under her chin. He thought he might be a little hungry.
But this gago Tadhana, this sadistic amateur, this was too much. Liwanag had no illusions about his own character, his shortcomings, vices, and misdeeds, but he could not abide being dispatched by a deranged fool who took joy in brutalizing elders and kidnapping children. Theirs was anything but a noble profession, to be sure, but this was not the way.
He cast a smug glance over his shoulder to watch his skiff race away over the waves, carrying his remaining men and the captives they had just recovered from Tadhana. Two sisters, stolen from their family to be sold into unspeakable servitude. It was a risky job for Liwanag’s crew, but he had been happy to take it for the extravagant pay and the chance to humiliate cruel Tadhana. He would not see the reward, but the latter could still be arranged.
Liwanag turned back and puffed out his bony chest, letting the extended tip of Tadhana’s stolen gunong, its sculpted blade gleaming in the spectral haze of the predawn moonlight, pierce the tattooed flesh of his sternum. He felt a trickle of warm blood soak the spot on his threadbare undershirt and laughed, partly to show Tadhana that he was not afraid and partly at the absurdity of his misfortune. He had bested better enemies than these, had fought storied navies and mythical beasts, had outlasted fevers that killed even the strongest among his crew. Now this, a fittingly inglorious finale to bookend his ignominious beginning, abandoned in a fetid Mindanao alley by a mother who could not or would not care for him, left to survive alone on its streets.
Tadhana's clouded eyes widened in a mixture of rage and alarm. With her free hand she angrily brushed a lock of coarse silver hair, matted with sea spray, from her craggy, twisted face. One of her men, nervous, raised a pistol and pointed it at Liwanag. Tadhana hoisted the blade over her head, poised for a fatal strike. Liwanag bared his crooked, yellowed teeth and locked eyes with his enemy. A drop of sweat fell from the tip of his thin black mustache.
“Pakyu, Tadhana,” he sneered. “I alone choose my path.”
Liwanag turned, kicked the concrete block overboard, and dove after it into the churning black sea.
The heavy block carried him swiftly downward, faster than he had expected. He didn’t know if the water was ten meters deep or ten thousand. He had been knocked unconscious in the melee and had no sense of where they were. Pressure built in his ears and chest as the weight dragged him from the warm, moonlit surface into the icy black below. He wondered as he sank whether he would first drown or be crushed by the deep. As if in answer, a rough, fast-moving mass bumped into his leg, then another. Bull sharks. They smelled his blood, but they shouldn’t have arrived so quickly. Tadhana must have chummed the water. He winced as one of them took an exploratory bite, tearing off his pant leg and leaving a gash on his thigh. It wouldn’t be long now.
He closed his eyes as the crushing weight of the water embraced him ever more tightly, forcing the air from his lungs. His ears felt like they would explode. The blackness behind his eyelids spun from bottom to top as he fought to stay conscious. The cold penetrated to his bones. A shark bumped his legs, this time more aggressively. He could sense more of them in the swirling water around him. He willed one to seize his throat and end it. One instead clamped down hard on his lower leg and he screamed, ejecting the last of the air from his lungs in a feeble burst of bubbles. The ocean swallowed the sound. He tried weakly to kick the shark with his other leg. The weight on his chest grew heavier, his head lighter. The urge to gasp for breath was overpowering his fading reason. Suddenly foolishly nostalgic for the world that was killing him with exceptional cruelty, Liwanag opened his eyes for one last look, expecting to see little but darkness and snaggled teeth.
Instead, dancing rays of rose-colored light shone from below. His leg was suddenly free, his hands unbound. The sharks vanished into the inky deep as he descended through a whirling cloud of tiny pink flowers. They radiated warmth and invited him to inhale their divine scent. The weight lifted from his chest and the pain in his ears disappeared. He felt weightless, formless. He followed the shafts of light downward, looking for their source. A gigantic, serpentine silhouette undulated through the rays of the unseen luminary below, ruby sparks twinkling at its edges as the light glinted off its surface.
Sensing movement, Liwanag looked up and found himself staring into the giant, silvery white face of a serpent. Twice as high as he was long, it mimicked the moon, rough and cratered, radiating a pale, ethereal light. Elaborately spiraled frills rippled gently in the current from the sides of its head. Woody, backswept horns adorned the top. Flowing, translucent whiskers drooped lazily from the sides of its long, ridged snout. Shimmering golden eyes regarded Liwanag with an ancient, compassionate intelligence that told him he need not be afraid.
“Am I dying?” Liwanag asked the serpent calmly. He was no longer sinking.
“No, child,” she lilted in a voice of smoke and polished glass. “You died.”
He paused, bewildered. He felt not fear but lucid, serene curiosity. “Who are you?”
“I am called Chaos. I am called Leviathan. I am called Sea Mother. It is from my womb that all life springs.”
“A god?” he whispered, at once awed and incredulous. He had heard these tales in all their forms and variations and thought them the yarns of tricksters and fools.
“To some I appear as a god. To others, as the faces of their families. To a special few, my children of the sea, their minds unclouded by mortal bonds or the stories of spiteful men, as this, my true form.”
“Why have you come to me?” He could scarcely imagine this was anything but the fever dream of a dying mind or a karmic demon, come to collect for his transgressions.
“It is you that have come to me, child. I am here to guide you in your passage.”
“My passage?”
“To the next place. You faced great hardship and pain in this life, yet you resisted the wickedest fates of your enemies and did not lose your light. Now, in the moments before the memory of this cycle fades, you will know pure, unconditional love and joy.”
“Paradise,” Liwanag wept. “But how?” He was not special, not deserving. His own mother couldn’t bring herself to want him. He could not fathom why anyone else should.
“You will be born, in a sense, to a kind, special woman in the most profound depths of despair. She has boundless love to give, but her body cannot create the seeds of life.”
“I do not underst—"
“She will call you Pag-asa, for the hope you stir within her abundant heart. Though your time together will be fleeting, the immensity of her love for you will inspire her to a lifetime of selfless devotion to unloved children. She will care for hundreds herself; others will follow her example.”
Liwanag’s mind spun. He imagined what his own life might have been like had he known love, compassion, and warmth. Who he might have been. What he might have done.
“When will I—?” he began. He was sinking again. He looked up toward the serpent to see her vanish into the darkness, her forked tail whipping through the shafts of rosy light as they began to descend with him.
“Now and always. This time, the last, and the next. Farewell, child,” her tender voice echoed through the abyss.
As he sank down, down, down toward the source of the light he became aware that he no longer had a body. He began to rotate as the dancing beams that enveloped his phantasmic senses converged into a gentle vortex, tightening gradually, swirls of color along its walls flashing through the shades of the rainbow and beyond, to colors that tasted like honey and whispered like wild lemongrass in a soft summer breeze. The vortex grew tighter until it closed around him. The colors faded to blinding white, their synesthetic resonance bleeding into a chaotic sensory crescendo until there was only the distant, muffled roar of shallow surf.
#
Liwanag sensed warmth and motion. He opened his eyes to see bubbles churning through the brilliant blue-green of the sun-soaked shallows as whitecaps crashed down onto the surface above. He was being gently tossed back and forth with the rhythm of the breakers. Clammy seaweed tickled his legs. He looked down, past a little round pot belly, to find two tiny, chubby feet lolling in the water. He began to paddle and kick to right himself, then aligned his movement with the direction of the waves. Sediment swirled up from below. A big wave picked him up and lurched him forward in a rush of sandy foam. He crashed into legs. The legs yelped in surprise.
Liwanag clutched at a swath of plain linen flowing in the waves and looked up. Framed by jagged green cliffs and a cloudless cobalt sky, the tear-streaked face of a raven-haired young woman looked down at him in shock. She lifted him out of the knee-deep surf, turning him over in her hands to look for injuries. Seeing none, she clutched him tightly to her chest and wept uncontrollably. He buried his face in her silken hair. It smelled like jasmine. She held him up again for another look as she calmed. He stared, stern and unblinking, straight into her shining brown eyes, intensely evaluating her face. It was weary and sad and radiated a kindness he had never seen in all his tormented years. It looked like home.
“Who are you?” she sobbed through tears of luminous joy, scanning the sea for ships, for debris, for anything that could reveal from where he had come. She held him close again and began to sing. As he rested his heavy head against her breast and absorbed the sweet melody of her melancholy song, the last of Liwanag dimly recalled that something had happened just before this. Danger, then a gentle beast. Flowers and light. He couldn’t remember exactly what it was.
The woman paused her singing. He followed her gaze toward the horizon where, far beyond the breakers, a ridge of opalescent scales slipped silently beneath the waves, a tiny splash following a moment later as a forked tail whipped the surface and vanished. The woman beamed at him in singular adoration, her face settling into stoic resolve and understanding as she answered her own question.
“My pag-asa,” she cooed softly. “My hope. My light. My love.”
Pag-asa nuzzled under her chin. He thought he might be a little hungry.
Sam Arlington is a former civil servant and amateur wine critic who comes from a very short line of semi-accomplished authors. An odd child even by Rust Belt standards, Sam grew up hanging out in cemeteries and was profoundly and permanently affected by the death of Artax, so much so that it features in a three-sentence bio decades later. Sam's work has appeared in Horrific Scribes, Epic Echoes Magazine, and Flash Phantoms, among other publications. Sam can be found on the web and on BlueSky @samarlington.com