Ideas

Story written in a series of bottled messages set adrift. The bottles found on some resort island. Not all the bottles found, leaving spaces in the tale for future filling in.

A story about a woman who turns pirate out of circumstances. She pirates against other pirates--to begin with--because her father is captured in a raid on the pirate ship she and her father were on, after being captured from the ship they were sailing on (such as returning to Ireland from an interrupted pilgrimage trip to Jersalem. They are members of the secret Irish church and were going to the Holy Land to search out esoteric knowledge related to Saint Joseph. During their trip, they are captured by a corsair ship a meet a number of Islamic pilgrims who are actually aging pirate-retirees who have commissioned the corsair to take them back to Sale from their Hajj.

Their corsair is attacked and then partially pirated by an English war ship flying some kind of other flag which thinks the ship is simply loaded with pilgrims--which it coincidentally is. The pirating is partial in that the old retired-pirates spring back into action and fight off the raiders, surprising them and then causing them to break off the raid for fear of loses. The English ship was actually engaged in a little "privateering" when it should have not been. But, they do capture the father and a important object belonging to the retirees (such as perhaps their Saint, who has gone with them to Mecca or some blessed Koran they were bringing back to North Africa/Tunis/?). This provokes the chase, namely because the "pilgrims" can't go back without the stuff that they've lost. (For example, because the woman doesn't have a place to live--having left the place where she grew up and was returning to someplace in Ireland, which was her birthplace but which she has never been, and doesn't even know the name of really [her father (or perhaps grandfather would be better] always just called it by a nickname, saying, "Back to my trees." or "Back to my streams." as in "When I was back at my streams, I would...") Perhaps she was born in Ireland, but grew up in Asia, where her grandfather was studying/practicing. Thus, although she's Christian, she is hardly aware of what that means. She has a knowledge of sword fighting. Perhaps she was in Japan, on a small island of the banished. (See Shuntan--is that the name of the Noh play about the banished guy?)

The retirees could go back, but in fact they could go anywhere. They are old and some have been transformed my their Hajj trip. Others, are reenvigorated by the fight and are willing to take up the quest of tracking the kidnapper English ship to get back their saint/book. They feel newly alive to fight for a good cause--to pirate for good.


notes:
--a fight with a cannon shot blows through a corsair pirate and through a wall of wood. she describes the delicous smell of cooked meat but she doesn't know where the smell is coming from, suspects the kitchen was on the other side of the wall.

--a dog.

--the green man walking up across the water at night. (see--Sacred Drift)

--the old guys praying on board ship and dancing some crippled dervishing, limping/hopping like elderly around a pivot foot rather than spinning. The sound of it and the music (which is beautiful and sublime and almost beyond physicality, of an old man playing a long hollow tube of bamboo (a shakuhachi ney). The contrast between the physical grace and gracelessness of the two actions. But, then the dance becomes a slowed down dervish, with a rocking at each pivot hop, and the witnessing narrator realizes the man is transformed, is drunk in his dance with God.