This is the story of how the captain of a ship mutilated the hands of all his crew in order to punish a mysterious crime, and how a sea monster gave birth to a virgin, a giant and twenty four stars.

These terrible events happened in the great Arabian sea very many years ago. It was in the time of the wooden ships, when young men and old would place their trust and their lives into the hands of a sea-captain in order to seek their fortunes far from the land of their birth. Leaving their mothers and their brothers, turning away from the dusty streets and markets, setting out from the noises and smells of the villages they loved, they went out, down to the harbour with their small bundles of clothing, taking perhaps a stout knife with them, and a lump of cheese or dried meat, and a bag of dates to keep them company.

In front of them stretched the great ocean, shining with light, the water clear as a dream, filled with fish and underwater forests, and sparkling with phosphorescence at night. The waves which they had known from childhood crashing on the beaches, lapping onto the harbour walls, rippling around all the anchor-ropes in the haven - these fascinating movements of the water called to them, to come away, come, come and see where I have been......

Yussuf Ali was the owner and captain of a fine small dhow, and was known to the fathers and grandfathers of the port as a reliable mariner, who kept strict discipline aboard his vessel, and who always brought her safe home to port. Many of these older men had sailed with Yussuf Ali themselves, and learned the ways of the sea from him, and had come home to their anxious mothers and little brothers and sisters with enough treasures and stories to satisfy all their demands. Some had brought pearls, some rubies, or just a few gold coins. Some had brought skinny monkeys back, or parrots. Some carried packages of spice, or strangely carved objects, or bolts of silk, or fabulous lamps. All these could be set on display in the markets, and sold for a fine price. And all of the sailors had wonderful tales to tell, of sea monsters, singing rocks, castles built on the clouds, of blind kings and withered princesses, of underwater fires and cities made of nothing but linen, of sheep with two heads, or of sorcerers whose spells could cast a person into the form of stone for a hundred years.

With these riches, the sailors could settle back into life on land, buy property, marry and go into trade. But some of the sailors went back to sea again and again with Yussuf Ali and his dhow, willing to work under his brooding eye and sharp tongue in order to increase their wealth of treasure and information. And so amongst the crew of mostly young and beardless boys, who had scarcely a dinar between them, there were one or two older and more experienced sailors. These men kept an eye on the young ones, showed them how to coil and uncoil the ropes, pull the sail up to catch the wind, or bring it neatly down when stormy winds played up, how to climb safely up the rigging, how to keep clean in the dark confines of the hold, and how to pray to the whimsical and mysterious gods of the ocean, wind and sky. They knew the stars too, the Virgin, the Giant, the Bull, the Ram and the Fish, and the Plough, and they taught the sailor-boys how to find a pathway across the deep by holding their gaze on the diadems of starlight above them. Hachim was one such, a wizened and frizzled old stick, who had sailed the seas almost as long as Yussuf Ali himself, but through exposure to the weather on deck had been burned and polished into a much older, more leathery appearance. Altogether, there were twelve sailors on board, plus the captain.

At the time of these events, the little ship had been sailing out onto the great eastern ocean for nineteen days. The crew had not seen land since the afternoon they had sailed out from the dusty white port and they had seen no other ship or craft for sixteen days. It seemed they were alone in the world. Of course they had the sea-birds to keep them company, and saw shoals of fishes around them in the waters, but sharks cruised near to the creaking wooden walls of their floating household, and strange lights flashed in the splashing of the waves round the hull, once night fell.

The young men missed their brothers and their donkeys, their grumbling fathers and their impatient mothers, and had to learn how to hide their tears of homesickness. They had learned too how to overcome their seasickness, and how to use the strange toilet which hung over the stern of the vessel. They chided each other, held wrestling matches to see who was strongest, sang about the beauty of girls they had never met, learned new wild songs from the older men, ate the fishy meals which Hachim cooked up for them, tried to understand how to make sense of the captain’s compass and the pattern of the stars at night, and thought about the adventures before them. And their captain barely spoke to them, only using his dark eyes to indicate his displeasure if something was amiss, and turning away if he was satisfied. The youths were in great awe of him. There were one or two slightly older ones among them, and these young men were not so clever, nor so quick, but it was their fathers who had paid Yussuf Ali to take them, knowing that this might give them a better grasp of how to live in the wide world, even if it was only by the reputation of having sailed with the best of the captains. These slower boys were often teased by the newcomers, but did not wish to offend or complain and often suffered private torments quite unknown to the captain.

Yussuf Ali did not come up onto the deck so often these days, trusting to his crew, and having many plans and thoughts on his mind. He was contemplating what markets and merchants he should call on once they had crossed the ocean, and how best to sell the rugs wrapped tightly in the cargo hold, and the wonderful polished oil-lamps whose manufacture was the speciality of his home-town. He knew he had secret messages to deliver, and certain documents to keep hidden on arrival. He had questions to ask and answers to give, and commissions of trust and diplomacy to fulfill. Each of his voyages had been blessed with a remarkable good fortune. One of his talents was to be able to know where he was, night or day, whatever the weather. He barely knew himself how this had come about - whether it was the sound of the waves knocking against the hull, or the smell of the wind, or the colour of his hand stretched out in front of him. No storm had ever overturned his ship. No pirate had ever seized his goods. No woman had ever kept him from sea. No voyage had ever cost him more money than he had made in the undertaking of it. No-one had ever accused him of treachery, or theft, or dishonour. He was a man known for fair-dealing, hating any liar, and never able to forget a wrong-doing. His dark eyes were set deeply into his dark face, shaded further by the windings of a thin cloth which he coiled on his head to keep the sun from burning his bald skin. He had a way of looking into a person’s eyes as if he was examining not just the visage but the soul. If he called out an order, then his command was carried out immediately. His crew knew their lives were in his hand. He had sailed every inch of this great ocean, seen every colour of sea, met and matched every pirate, stared into the eyes of every black monster from the deep. Sharks and giant squid had all kept their distance, and even the great ocean gannets who slid through the skies around the ship seemed to hang far off, not daring to land on the hot deck of the dhow if there was a chance he might turn his eye upon them.

The sea was huge, nothing to be seen on the horizon on any direction. It looked like molten bronze. The sky was so bright under the searing heat of the sun that it was impossible to look upwards anywhere. The gannets would cry to remind the crew they were still there - but they could not be seen in the brilliance of the light. The deck of the tiny ship was too hot to walk on in bare feet. This heat burned into the mind of everyone aboard, creating an unease, an ache. Each man’s eyeballs seemed to be seared into his skull.

With sails set but with little wind, and no-one needed on watch, the dhow crept along on the ocean. Hours passed. The crew were all asleep, or trying to sleep, in the spicy heat of their hold below the deck. Yussuf Ali, the crafty captain, was sitting in a stupor in his cabin, with one hand on a chart unrolled before him on the top of a great wooden chest, whose sides and lid were studded with nails, and in which he kept his compass, his charts and his dark secrets. No-one else had ever seen inside that chest. Beside him, on its wooden perch, his red parrot slept or dozed, her mutterings and whispers silenced by the weight of the sky and the unhealthy quietness aboard. This parrot had lived with Yussuf Ali for nearly fifty years, fed on fruits and biscuits and the occasional piece of fishbone, and by her strange and slightly malevolent observance she comforted him in his lonely life of command. She did not often leave his cabin but sometimes fluttered up onto the deck to play in the rigging, hanging upside down and spitting on the crew, calling out to them in a foreign tongue, and making them feel uneasy. She had the habit of dropping her dirt on them whenever she could. Surprisingly for such a quaint creature, she had no name. She was an unpleasant and decrepit bird, with a beady black eye.

In the heat of the day, trusting to the emptiness of the seas around them, and the unchanging direction of the wind and the waves, the captain and his crew left the ship to sail itself. Only later, as the sun condescended to lower itself in the great hall of the sky above them, did the men stir themselves to come up to the deck. Then they took a leather bucket on a rope, lowered it into the sea, pulled up some of the foamy salt water to tip over the deck, to cool it down. They moved steadily round the ship, checking the ropes tied round the great cleats, and tending to the small charcoal fire which burned in a brazier amidships. Hachim made sure all the spars and sails were in trim, no splinters, no shredding, no hitches, and then went and took up his post by the fire, baking bread and brewing a fragrant broth. It was peaceful and quiet, and slowly the magnificent stars began to appear in the darkening eastern sky in front of them. Fires flickered in the water around the ship.

Suddenly Yussuf Ali came onto the main deck of the dhow, and raising his face in a look of fury, he screamed out a great oath, which brought them all to a dead stop. They turned to look at him in the dusk. His arms were stretched out in stabs of accusation, his fingers pointing round him to all the crew. His eyes were burning with rage. His face was lit up by the glow of the fire in the brazier, and he screeched as if he lived in hell.

’�Aaaaieeee! Who? Who is it? Which one of you? You miserable worms! One of you, yes, one of you knows what I mean? Which is it? Which disgusting beggar of a bitch is the thief? You murderers! You bastards! You sons of dogs! Who has done it? Step forward! Now!’�

And he dragged out from his belt a sword, and jumping from man to man, thrust the sword into the face of each, stabbing and jabbing so that the young men staggered back in horror and fear, not knowing what he would do next. No-one said a word.

At last, Hachim stepped forward and said, ’�Captain, steady, captain....’� and no sooner were the words out of his mouth than Yussuf Ali rounded on him and seizing Hachim by his collar almost throttled him with such a ferocious grip that Hachim had to put his hands up to try to wrest the captain’s hand from his clothing. ’�Captain, Yussuf Ali, I beseech you - let me breathe’�.

And Yussuf Ali let him go, his face flaming and his chest heaving, and filled with a terrible anger.

’�Captain, we are all listening. What is it? Tell us,’� said Hachim, and the young men were very relieved he was there. They stood looking at each other with great uncertainty, and suddenly felt they were very alone in the middle of this great ocean, in charge of a man who seemed to have gone mad.

And the captain said, wailing, that someone had taken his parrot. They all denied it, they had not seen the parrot. But when he dragged them down to his cabin, to the chest with its studs of metal, it was clear enough for them all to see. The parrot had gone. The perch was empty, with only a pile of white droppings on the floor behind it. The bird, malevolent to the last, had made its departure without anyone noticing, choosing such a malign route out of this world that each of them would suffer for it forever. For the parrot, finally overcome by a sort of avian nausea brought on by the heat and the quiet, had strolled unnoticed up onto the deck, and hung upside down for a while on one of the ropes hanging beside the prow of the ship, and then, thoughtlessly losing her grip, had carelessly fallen into the black water, and before she could spread her dusty wings or utter so much as a squawk of outrage, a shark, one of Yussuf Ali’s constant oceanic companions, had opened its huge, dark and horrendous mouth and taken the bright little feathery morsel in one gulp. Squeezed and clamped inside that foul-smelling, claustrophobic and rough-skinned tunnel, the parrot lived for just long enough to remember the cool green glistening forests of her youth, the echoing sounds of all the forest creatures, the proud croaks of her mother, the taste of mango, the fondling of men in the market-place, and the long list of oaths she had diligently learned all that time ago before being bought by Yussuf Ali, and taken away to sea for nearly fifty years. These curses echoed inside her head as she fell into a stifling unconsciousness. After a while, with the shark still lazily skimming along beneath the ship, all intelligence from inside the vile fish was quiet. The parrot, if it still existed, was now no more than a bundle in the acidic belly of the eating machine which through long association had accompanied Yussuf Ali back and forth across the ocean, having made the same trip for a hundred years before Ali was born, and contemplating a happy destiny of swimming with two or three more generations of sailors along the same route before finally sinking into the cold dark deep of the unknown where only shapeless creatures dwell.

But Yussuf Ali did not, could not, believe that the parrot had wrought its own demise. He only knew, for the first time in his life, that disaster had overtaken him, and that someone or something had deprived him of his lifelong companion. All the perils of the sea, all the dangers of the storms, all the evil plots of men and ministers swirled into his outraged mind, and he was suddenly in the grip of a terrible sense of vengeance, just as the poor parrot had lately been in the grip of the shark’s teeth. He seized the nearest sailor boy, one of those with a slow mind but unquestioning loyalty, and screamed at him ’�You! Dog! Did you take my parrot?’�

And the boy, seeking only to please his captain and hardly knowing what any of the words meant, said ’�I, Captain? I? Why yes, whatever you will?’�

And the captain with one sinewy arm swung his sword up into the air, and holding the lad’s two hands in front of him on a great block of wood used for hauling on a rope, chopped these two hands clean off. Scraping up the two useless hands from the block of wood, the captain hurled them, one - two over the side of the ship into the hissing darkness of the sea. The boy fell in a faint on the deck, and the captain turned immediately to the sailor beside him and to the horror of all those aboard, proceeded to chop the hands off him too. Again the sailor’s hands were tossed over the side and into the water. The blood streaming from those items, those hands which had been so strong, so brown and supple, but now so tiny and lifeless - the blood leached out from the severed wrists and streamed into the water, and brought that great shark up to the surface. With barely a movement of its massive body, it slid past the little fleshy stars as they tumbled silently down into the water and scooped them up into its great mouth.

On board the ship, the crew were utterly dismayed, quite unable to move. The captain moved amongst them, and hacked at their hands, one after another, screaming at them, holding them with his eyes, and the carnage all about them seemed to mesmerise them into an acquiescence or collusion with the man in his derangement. They almost assisted him in his filthy work. Obscenities and screams flowed out of him as freely as the blood flowed from their arms. And all those severed hands were thrown into the sea. The captain was screaming his rage as he worked amongst them.

’�You! you all betrayed me! You, whom I have loved and cherished! You took from me my only true possession, the one thing in the world that meant anything to me. You are the filth, the scum of the earth! You are not fit to hold anything in your hands! What worth have you now, and what can you say in your defence? You are all bastards, born of the devil, conceived in evil and damnation, and may you rot in hell! Where is my beloved? What answer can you give me? What are you without me? I am the one who has taken you across the great oceans, it is to me that you owe your miserable lives! You are nothing without me! Where can you go? Who can you turn to? Do you think you can escape my vengeance? It is written, it is a truth throughout the world, that a thief will be punished by the cutting off of his hand. And you, you miserable miserable bastards, you have stolen not just once, but twice. Once! you have taken the bird from me! and Twice! you have stolen the life from the bird! This is murder! I should throw you all overboard......’�

And so he went on. Sweat flew from his brow. The thudding sound made by that sword punctuated the screams that fled from his mouth. With each terrific blow, the whole ship rocked in the water. Yet none of them moved. Like automatons they waited for him to attack them. Neither their eyes nor their ears saved them, or awoke them to their predicament. Even Hachim, that stout fellow, was so overcome with horror and the pain of the massacre in front of him that he too allowed his hands to be chopped from his dark arms, and he too fell in a faint from the agonising pain that scorched up his arm as the nerves were cut.

And now followed a dark time indeed, for all these young fellows were unconscious or moaning on the deck of the ship, and unable to do anything for themselves. They could barely lift their heads for giddiness and shock. They could not comfort each other. They wept, they burned with fever, and they shuddered with shame and confusion. They passed that night near to death. The smell of blood hung round the ship. The gannets came closer in the air overhead, and that shark moved restlessly in the water beneath them all.

Yussuf Ali, having maimed them all, every one, finally ran down to his cabin, falling into a deep sleep, and when he woke early in the morning, he came back up to the light to discover what he had done in his rage. He was not moved to pity, but considered what he must do next. He lowered the leather bucket down on its rope into the sea, and brought up cold water to pour over their wounds. He looked in each bucketful to see if by chance one of the hands had been caught in it, but saw nothing to give him or any of the young men any satisfaction.

They were calling out for water. Their blood had run out onto the deck, had dried and congealed. Yussuf realised that he would have a lot of work to do to keep them from dying of thirst or hunger, and he found he barely had time to stop between fetching fresh water from the jars below, and making balls of rice over that little fire amidships, and getting them to take sustenance in their pale pale mouths. He had to move them into the shade beneath the sail, and he tried to swab the deck down with water from the sea. When the winds changed direction, even a few degrees, he had to trim the sail. When the waves grew more menacing, he had to slacken the sheets and take the steering of the ship in his own hands. He was now of course the only man with any hands on the vessel. So day and night, he alone had to care for all these bleeding, weeping, cursing men. Perhaps because they were so far out from the land, there were no flies to worry them. He took sheets and towels from below, and used his fearful sword-blade to cut the material into strips to form rough bandages which he wound tenderly about their inflamed and tender arms.

Fever set in. The sailors were in a pitiful state. Delirious now, they could only retreat into madness to survive their pain, but wild-eyed, they called out for their mothers, for their little sisters and brothers, and for vengeance. They had only their vile captain to care for them, and he was so hateful and terrifying to them they could not bear to look at him, and they flinched as he approached them. He could not understand it, in his own misery and rage, and shouted at them to stay still while he tried to bathe their stumps with trickles of sea-water, and to wind the ragged cloths around their bleeding bones. As he tried to remove the old dressings, they screamed again in pain and fear, and as he took these blood-soaked bandages from them, all he could do was throw the matter over the side, and there the shark swallowed it all up, relishing this small but regular appetiser of human blood on cotton swabs.

As the ship drifted, barely moving in the heat of the ocean, the men rapidly declined, exhausted by the heat and pain. One in particular, the first to have been attacked, one of those rather clumsy-minded fellows, subsided into complete unconsciousness, and said nothing, and moved not at all. The captain could not tell if the man was dead or alive, but scarcely had time to worry, as he worked without cease trying to nurse his other charges. One minute he was bringing fresh water, another minute he was stirring weak broth in a heavy pot over the fire. Then he had to trim the sails, check his compass, mop the brows of the wounded, keep an eye out for pirates, clean the once-shining blade of that awful sword, find fresh sacks of meal in the galley to grind into flour for bread, set beans to soak, cut up the dried meat and onions to make yet more broth, wash the bodies of his victims as they huddled on the deck unable to move, and try to keep that deck clean of the horrible fluids that leaked from them as they lay inert or moaning in the heat. At night he had to get a fix on the stars, and try to catch a few moments of sleep, not knowing if he could ever sleep again. Now there was no muttering parrot to encourage him as he laid down his head, to tell him that all was well in his world.

So, night and day for seven more days, becalmed on the shimmering ocean, the captain laboured. And slowly the enormity of what he had done was borne in upon him.

At first, he just missed the dead parrot. He found he missed the damned bird, its squawking and mockery, and its beady eye. He thought of her as some sort of mother to himself, a knowing harridan who watched his moves and kept him in line. Now the thing was gone. He was lonely. He wept. He felt tears fall down his cheeks, and he mourned for his bird and felt a rage in his heart at the blackguard who had destroyed his true friend. He tried to imagine which of those fellows out on the deck was the one actually responsible for taking the bird, and then, with a sudden shock, had to admit to himself it was very unlikely that they had all plotted together to deprive him of his companion.

Then for the first time, he began to feel remorse. Perhaps it was only one of those bastards who had done this, and he had punished them all when only one merited his retribution. But, he thought, none of them had owned up, or indicated which of them was the criminal. No, no, he thought, they all deserved it.

He thought of all those hands, flying over the ship’s rail into the briny water alongside, and saw in his mind’s eye all the fingers and the trail of blood in the air as they spun up and down into the darkness. And he began to think of the mothers back in the port, the proud fathers, the helplessness of them all when they got back to land. And he wondered what he was going to say to all these people to explain what had happened. It seemed a terrible puzzle to Yussuf Ali. He remained undecided, but worked on.

And still, he knew, that shark was swimming along underneath the dhow, licking its metaphorical lips.

Then, on the twenty-seventh day of the voyage, three things happened. The slow young man who had been the first to have his hands cut off, died.

Yussuf called out his name, ’�Gamel! Gamel!’� in the hope of bringing him back to life. He was really not sure if he was sad or not. The man might have been the one who took the parrot, in which case, good riddance to the dog. But if he was innocent, then it was a tragedy, and Yussuf Ali had to prepare an account of everything to give to Gamel’s father and mother. He wrapped the poor youth in a sheet, made the signs of infinity and blessing on his forehead, said a few remembered words from the sailors’ holy book, and slowly tipped the shrouded corpse over the side. From out of the depths came the huge jaw of the shark, and the body slipped straight into the great gaping mouth. The captain saw the sideways look that the shark gave him, saw that hard eye lying neatly behind and below the mouth, and knew he had seen that face often before, without realising it. He raised his hand in a respectful greeting to the shark, but the great fish had slipped away behind the boat out of sight, thrashing slightly as it swallowed its lunch. Yussuf Ali was not to see it again for several days. He did not allow himself to wonder if that was where the parrot had ended up.

And then the captain realised that despite the length of time they had been at sea, they had in fact sailed nowhere, but were still in the middle of the ocean. Through his lack of attention to the setting of the sail and the rudder, and by an unusual combination of tides and winds, they had moved barely three furlongs on the surface of the sea. There was another three and a half week’s distance to travel before they reached their destination - or they would have to turn and go back to the home port, empty-handed, so to speak.

It didn’t take him long to decide that he should sail on. He knew, of course, how to turn the ship and could have done so single-handed in the roughest of seas, but then they would have to sail directly into the wind, tacking night and day, a far more difficult task for a man alone. And although he was neither scared nor apologetic, he admitted to himself it would be hard to justify a return to the home-port without any of the wealth he had intended to bring back with him. If he sailed on, he could still trade with those foreign merchants, and still bring home his handless crew, and perhaps afford to pay them something for their pains - since they would be unlikely to find any riches successfully for themselves. If he knew exactly which of them had taken the parrot, he could more easily make amends to the others, whose crimes, after all, had been slight. But while he remained unsure of them, all he could do was try to nurse them as best he could, treating them all the same. Accordingly, his manner with them was gruff. With each of them he was as kind as he could manage to be with someone who might have murdered his mother.

And then he had to face the approaching problem of hunger. The supply of beans and dried meat and dates was running out. Normally, the crew would have been catching fish, to help maintain supplies, but without hands, and lying inert on the deck, they had done and could do nothing. They had eaten the supplies far too fast. He realised that apart from some flour and water, there was soon going to be nothing left to eat on the ship. He could make a reasonable flat bread with what he had to hand, but wished Hachim was there to do it better. One day, he came to Hachim who was slumped on the deck, and taking him by the shoulder, shook him awake.

’�Hachim! Hachim! you dog. Tell me, what must I do to make the bread? All I can manage is a flat biscuit, and these fellows need building up.’�

But Hachim could only stare at him with dull eyes, unable to speak.

Yussuf Ali saw one day that the gannets, instead of staying up in the hot air above the ship, were actually standing on the rail, looking at him. At close range, they were enormous birds. Their beaks were as long as the span of his hand, and like the parrot, their eyes were dark and impassive. He saw they made no move to harass the crew lying in front of them, but kept their gaze on the captain. He thought, They know something about me.

He tried over and over to catch one but each time they flapped lazily out of his way, leaving him grasping at thin air with his clutching hands. He tied fine twine around the rail hoping to trap them, but they just stood upon it, and he was left struggling to untie the knots with his thick fingers, needing to reuse it as a fishing line.

And every day he had to keep up his nursing work, washing, feeding, giving them water. The biscuity bread he made each day on the fire was dull and hard and lacked salt. Around him the sea glittered and danced, and he saw the shoals of fish there, waiting to be caught. Having painfully disentangled the fishing line with which he had failed to trap the gannets, he put together several fishing lines with hooks, and baited them with crusts of the bread. In forcing the crusts onto the sharp hooks, he impaled his finger onto the metal, and felt the steel go into his flesh and then tear its way out again. He yelled out in pain, and then remembered what was happening all around him, what he had done. So, for a moment he shut his eyes, and tried to concentrate on the job to hand. He finished baiting the hooks, tied the lines securely to the rail, and trailed the lines into the water alongside the boat. He had not lost his knack of fishing, despite having left it to his crew for so many years. It was almost an automatic skill for him, just as, in future centuries, boys would learn to ride bicycles and take their hands off the handlebars without falling over, and know this was a trick they could repeat till the end of their days.

So he caught fish, beautiful gleaming golden mullet and scarlet bass and brilliant blue-black sea-babies, and he scaled them and grilled them and fed them carefully to the men on the deck, cooling the morsels of flesh with his own breath, and pressing the fish into their parched mouths with his great square fingers. He poured water into them, and over them, and dried their faces with his sleeve, and turned them when they ached, and moved them into the shade as the sun came round, for none of them wanted to go below into the darkness, despite the heat.

Anxiously, he asked them what they wanted, or how they were. None would answer with more than a fearful grunt or groan, for which of them would risk offending him, when they had seen and felt his great sword in action, and seen poor Gamel go over the side. They did not know about how the shark had taken Gamel, but they had not heard a splash either, and they had seen Yussuf Ali raise his hand in salute to something, and who knew what that might be? Each night they slept under the brilliant light of the cold eternal stars, and each day they stumbled in and out of lurid dreams in the harsh light and heat of the deck. Yet, slowly, they began to recover. It was the care he took with them that helped them each to regain his strength. From inside the great chest in his cabin he took a small round metal box. Inside it was a green paste which he carefully smeared onto their wounds. It was a healing ointment kept by the sailors in the old days, combining oils from the east, herbs from the north, unguents from the south and magic from the west, and it too helped to soothe the pain and cause the skin to grow back across their deformities. He made the healing signs over their still bodies, even though they turned their heads away, and in a rough throaty voice he sang some of the old incantations against evil and bad fortune, which he knew had kept him from harm when he was no higher than a donkey’s head.

With fresh fish, and bread of sorts, and a light following wind, the little ship slowly made its way across the vastnesses of the ocean, until one day, Yussuf Ali knew that soon the men would be able to stand and walk, and he had to admit to himself he did not know what would happen when they did. Perhaps they might turn on him, and even without their hands, they would make a formidable enemy as a group. He did not in fact think he had done anything wrong, but understood that the crew, in their fear, might decide to turn against him, despite his fame and reputation.

He began to prepare a raft, taking a few planks of wood, some coils of rope, a leather bottle of water, a small sail, a knife, a length of line with some hooks, and stowing these near the stern of the dhow near the toilet which rose like a crazy castle over the back of the transome. From time to time, when he felt he could afford not to be on deck, he went and stared into the chest in his cabin, wondering which of the precious items therein he might bring with him, or which might be left behind without too much risk. But since he did not know what was going to happen, he found it really impossible to make any firm decisions about what he might choose to take. He occasionally wondered if he might take the whole chest with him, riding on it across the waves, but he thought the weight of the nails and all its precious contents would keep it too low in the water, and even with his astonishing skills of navigation he accepted it would be unlikely he could steer it to a safe haven.

Then one day, as he suspected would happen, he came up from the hold carrying two full buckets of fresh water across his shoulders, to find all the men standing together on the deck waiting for him. They had clearly been talking quietly together in his absence, perhaps over a period of several days, never in his hearing. Hachim stood centrally among them, an old warrior among the young men. Not one of them had a hand between them, but they stood straight and tall.

For a moment, it flashed through Yussuf Ali’s mind that they planned to chop off his hands too, and both horror and a kind of fatalistic laughter made him yelp. He said, straightaway, ’�But how can you do it? You have no hands? And how will you sail the ship unless I am here with my hands to work the ropes and sails, and drop the anchor, and to make bread and broth for you?’� but then he saw this was not on their minds. They had not thought of this at all.

’�We want to catch that shark,’� said Hachim. ’�He took Gamel, and now we will take him.’�

Perhaps the crew are crazy, thought Yussuf Ali. They mistake me for a fish. It was I who harmed them, but they have forgotten it, and want to punish the sea-monster.

’�How do you propose to catch the shark?’� he asked.

’�We need bait,’� said Hachim, looking straight at Yussuf, for the first time since the day all the hands had gone over the side.

Yussuf thought, Do they intend to use me?

For a moment he saw himself being trailed through the water behind the ship, lashed round with a rope, just waiting for those great teeth to close round him, but he knew that plan could not work, as they would hardly be able to pull the fish in without any hands. He said, ’�How shall we pull the monster in?’� and Hachim smiled a dark smile. ’�Captain, you will pull that fish in, as you are the only one with hands to pull.’�

Yussuf looked back at Hachim, and nodded, and then turned away to his tasks.

It was a strange sensation, being both Captain and crew, with all the men still treating him with a fearful respect but quite unable to do anything for themselves. They could not even move to the toilet to urinate or defacate without him undoing their leggings, and neither could they eat nor wipe the sweat from their brows without him. As well as being their navigator and helmsman, he had to be their mothers, their sweethearts, their nurses and their servant. They did not need him any longer to move them into the shade, and they could take shelter from the heat of the sun by slipping down below - but they watched him, day and night, watched him as he threaded the bread on those little hooks to catch the fish, watched him as he made gruel from the bread and bones of the fish, watched him as he tipped fresh water from the buckets to the bottles and then poured the sweet water from the bottles into their mouths. They watched him as he scrubbed the decks, and washed their reeking clothing, and cut their toenails with his broadbladed knife, for their feet were even more precious to them now. Some of them began to practice tricks with their toes, picking things up from the deck, kicking each other appreciatively, scratching their sore stumps with the rough skin on the soles of their feet.

They began to fight with each other in practice again, wrestling and wriggling, and delivering great sideways blows with their arms. They could sing, too, low, rough songs of venom and aggression, growling out their chorus and stamping their feet to keep time. One found a way of balancing a flute into a nick in the rigging, while another plucked roughly across the strings of a guitar with his feet, so that they even had a band of sorts, whose heavy metallic music seemed like an orchestration from hell. One or two of the youths who had set out without beards now had shadows across their faces, and stared into the buckets of water to try to catch their manly reflections, and rubbed their chins onto their shoulders to learn what the effect of their new beards might be on smooth flesh.

And at last the day came, with a firm and strong wind blowing from the west, driving the ship on with a steady force, when Hachim said to the captain, ’�Yussuf Ali, today you must catch that shark’�. And so Yussuf took a great loaf of bread he had kept for the purpose, and then taking his sword he sliced a great gash down the side of his body, and holding the bread into the wound he soaked the blood as it flowed into the loaf. Then, wrapping the loaf round with yet more rags of clothing, he made as large a bundle as he could and tied the whole thing up with rope and with fine line. He walked to the stern of the dhow, standing beside the steps leading up to the toilet-castle, and all that handless crew crowded round him. Then the captain took the longest line he could find, and made it fast round the bloody bundle of bread and rags, and coiled the free end onto the deck, with the tail tied round the mast. And he waited and watched until at last that great monster shark loomed into view out of the black water behind the ship. And Yussuf Ali, bleeding and weak as he was, threw that bait out into the sea, and the shark opened its great lazy mouth and took it. For a while, the ship sailed on, and the shark did nothing, and all the men watched to see what would happen. The rope went down inside the shark’s mouth, but the fish appeared not to notice. The line coiled on the deck slowly began to unwind, as the shark slowed down behind the vessel. And when it finally had reached the end of the line, the shark began to feel that there must be a connection between it and the ship, a sensation quite new to the fish, and not to its liking. It turned, first to one side and then to the other, and the ship shuddered violently. Nervously, the younger men looked up to the sail, to see if the wind would continue to carry them forward, for they had no wish to be tied to a great sea-monster and be pulled backwards across the ocean, or even worse, down into the depths where the shark might wish to flee.

An hour or two passed. Yussuf Ali and the shark kept their eyes on each other, and the crew kept their eyes on the two assailants. At last, the captain, bending forward to pick up the rope, said ’�I think that bastard has had enough now, that dog of the sea. I shall pull him in.’�

And so, with his muscles pulled tight, and the only two hands left on the ship tightly gripped round the rope, Captain Yussuf Ali struggled and strained and pulled and sweated, and slowly that mighty monster was hauled out of the water. As each inch of rope was pulled aboard, the captain swung it around a capstan, so that it could not slip back as the shark resisted. Great waves of foam were splashed up into the air, and the sailors almost thought they heard the fish roaring in anger and resistance as the dark-eyed man pulled it out of its element. When he finally had it on the deck, where it thrashed and snapped and tried to leap back over the rail into the sea, the captain had to gather his strength and taking his sword in his hands, find the point of weakness, and then drive the blade deep into the belly of the fish.

The skin of a shark is like rough steel, as strong as stone but tensed with energy, and it took a further hour before the battle of the man and the shark came to a dramatic end. With a great rush and slice, the captain who was weak from his own loss of blood and the rawness of his hands from pulling on the rope, managed to make a great slit right down the underside of the monster. For one magic moment, the captain and the crew could see right into the belly of the shark.

And there, to their amazement, they saw a scarlet virgin, a sleeping giant, and twenty four shining stars.

The shark was dead, no doubt about it, but once again, in their consternation, the men could only stand and stare. For the scarlet virgin spread her mantle across her face and opened her dark impassive eyes. And the sleeping giant awoke, shrugging his shoulders and rubbing his eyes with the back of his arm and looking about him. And the twenty-four stars sparkled in the light of day, and stretched out their fingers and twisted back and forth.

And Hachim cried out, before any of them, ’�Why, it’s the parrot! That’s not a virgin, it’s the captain’s parrot!’� and the parrot lifted her malevolent head and spat at them, then strolled out of the sticky darkness of the shark’s belly, and uttered a string of curses such as even the captain had not heard, and he was seen to blush right up to his turban.

And then one of the handless boys pointed with his stump at the sleeping giant, and cried out, ’�Why, it’s Gamel! Look, he’s alive, he’s still alive!’� and with that he rushed forward to try to drag his friend out of the mess, but Gamel it seemed needed no help and staggered forward into the open air, beaming a wide smile as he came.

And then the youngest of the handless crew called out in a piping voice, ’�Why, look! those are not stars, they are our lost hands!’� and with that he burst into tears and tried to run forward into the shark’s belly as if to find his hands again. And all the other handless boys ran forward too. At length, they laid all the twinkling finger-stars out on the deck in order, and decided whose was whose, and then with the gannets wheeling overhead, and the captain’s green ointment, and with bindings made from the captain’s own fine linen bedsheets, they bound the stars back onto their poor endless arms, and then they all, including the Captain and the parrot, heaved the body of the shark back over the side and into the deep, where it sank to the darkest reaches of the bottom of the sea. Weary with their labours, and relieved to be restored to some sort of health again, they all went down below to sleep. The gannets picked at a few floating shreds in the water, the phosphorescence flamed at the bows of the ship, and the stars of heaven shone brightly through the night to keep the little ship safe.

By the time Yussuf Ali’s dhow had reached the merchant port across the sea, most of the wounds had healed. And by the time they returned to their dear home-port, each of them knew he had a wonderful story to tell, about the catching of one of the greatest of all the sea-monsters who had ever lived, and how a scarlet virgin, a giant, and twenty-four stars were found inside its belly, and how a captain took off the hands of all his crew, just for the love of a parrot.