Hamlet's High Seas Adventure
Treachery begets treachery
AI Assisted Fiction
The ship rolled beneath my feet, and despite the queasiness that roiled gently in my gut, I found myself oddly comforted by the rhythm. After weeks of pretending to be mad—or perhaps not pretending, I’d lost track—the simplicity of the sea was almost peaceful. No courtiers watching my every move, no Claudius with his practiced smile and murderer’s hands, no mother with her bewildered, disappointed eyes.
Just me and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unfortunately.
They hovered near me constantly, like nervous moths around a flame they’d been paid to watch.
The two of them paced the deck, never straying far from me, though always careful to maintain that not-quite-incidental air of proximity designed to seem accidental. Old friends from Wittenberg, they had announced themselves upon arrival at Elsinore, all hearty slaps on the back and affable reminiscence, as though we had not drifted apart years before, as though the air itself did not reek with the staleness of their apology. They made much of the coincidence, the happenstance of their presence in Denmark; such a lark, they had insisted, being summoned to court, and oh what luck to find me ensconced there, a prince grown thin and strange. Their words rang hollow even then, spoken with forced joviality—like a poorly-cast bell with a hairline fracture, promising a note but never truly delivering it.
None of this fooled me, of course. I had seen Claudius’s eyes flick to their faces, the nod exchanged, the unguarded moment of calculation as he weighed their loyalty against my own. Spies, both of them, though Rosencrantz could barely keep a straight face and Guildenstern pretended at obliviousness with a skill that nearly earned my grudging respect. I watched the way their hands strayed to their purses, bulging with coin heavier than any student’s stipend, and I could almost hear the clink of Claudius’s gold alongside their hollow laughter.
Yet something in me still ached at their presence, a nostalgia for simpler days in Wittenberg when our nights stretched long and wine-soft and we debated the nature of man and fate until the morning bells. There was a comfort in the memory of reciprocity, of trust so basic it seemed woven into the marrow of my bones, and I think that pain—the betrayal of it—hurt more than any dagger could have. Now, though, they watched me with furtive glances and whispered when they thought I could not hear, and I found myself performing madness less for the court than for the benefit of these two ghosts who haunted me with their half-remembered laughter.
Still, the farce continued. We circled one another with words, each pretending at innocence, while the truth sat between us like a third companion. Even so, there was a rhythm to our interactions, a familiar beat that echoed the old days, albeit soured and off-key. I wondered, sometimes, if they ever regretted their bargain or if the silver in their pockets muffled the sound of their own consciences.
It was during one such silence, weighted and uneasy, that Rosencrantz sidled up beside me, hands clasped behind his back in a gesture he must have thought ingratiating.
“The captain says we’re making good time,” Rosencrantz offered, approaching with that careful smile he’d perfected lately. “England by week’s end.”
“How delightful,” I said flatly. “I’m sure the change of scenery will cure my madness entirely.”
Guildenstern laughed nervously. They both did that now—laugh at things that weren’t jokes, frown at things that were. They’d forgotten how to talk to me normally, which was fine. I’d forgotten how to be normal.
The second night at sea, I couldn’t sleep. The ship creaked in ways that sounded like whispers, like my father’s ghost describing the poison creeping through his veins. I left my cabin and walked the deck, then found myself outside Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s quarters. The door was ajar. They were snoring—of course they could sleep.
The sealed letter sat on the small table between their bunks, Claudius’s royal seal catching the moonlight through the porthole.
I had always been curious. It was my fatal flaw, Polonius had once said, back when Polonius was alive to say irritating things. Back before I shoved a sword through the arras and into the old fool’s chest, thinking it was Claudius hiding there. A mistake. Everything lately had been mistakes stacked on mistakes, a tower of errors reaching toward heaven.
I took the letter.
In my own cabin, working by candlelight, I carefully lifted the seal. Claudius’s handwriting was as pompous as the man himself:
Upon receipt of this letter, and by the sacred bonds of our alliance, we request that the bearer, our beloved nephew Prince Hamlet, be immediately put to death by whatever means seems most convenient to Your Majesty.
I laughed—a short, sharp bark that surprised me. Of course. Send the madman away and have him quietly disposed of. No messy Danish execution, no questions from the court. Just Hamlet vanishing into English fog.
I looked at the letter for a long time. Then I found parchment and began to write, mimicking my uncle’s elaborate script:
The bearers of this letter, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, have committed grave offenses against the crown of Denmark. We humbly request Your Majesty execute them without delay.
I sealed it with my father’s signet ring, which I still wore. Close enough to pass.
Back in their cabin, I replaced the letter exactly where I’d found it. Rosencrantz stirred in his sleep, mumbling something about home. Guildenstern’s hand twitched, as if grasping for something just out of reach.
Once, long ago, before the world turned sour and every word between us felt weighted by suspicion and the stink of treachery, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had been more than shadows dogging my heels. We had been friends in every sense of the word—sneaking late into the kitchens at Wittenberg to filch crusts and old cheese, reciting Latin dirty enough to make Erasmus blush, sprawling on the grass at the edge of the river and arguing whether man was beast, angel, or some muddle in between. We shared wine, dreams, fears, farts. We mocked our tutors mercilessly, and when one of us failed an exam or lost a lover, the other two would drown out the shame with laughter and a bottle. The memory of those days came back to me sometimes, unbidden and raw, and I felt a pang so sharp I almost pitied them for how the years had diminished us all.
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen it coming—the little betrayals, the way coin could soften a man’s spine and turn the bonds of brotherhood brittle. Yet even as they circled me now, self-appointed Cerberuses on borrowed leash, I could not hate them entirely. They looked almost as miserable as I felt, and I wondered if, in the quiet of their own separate bunks, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern mourned what we had lost. I wondered if they thought of me as the monster or the victim—if it gnawed at them to know their complicity, or if they had banished such thoughts in favor of the next morning’s certainty and a bowl of steaming oat porridge.
That night, I watched them sleep: Guildenstern’s hand curled protectively around the pouch at his belt, as though he feared the gold might sprout legs and flee, Rosencrantz’s face soft and unguarded, a little line of drool dampening his pillow. I could not bring myself to despise them. If anything, their failings seemed so human, so ordinary, that I almost envied their ability to muddle through with such small ambitions. Did they ever remember the river, the taste of cheap wine, the endless arguments about fate? Or was I the only one cursed with this graveyard of memory, picking through the bones of old friendship for something warm and living to hold onto?
And if I was, did it matter? They would be the death of me. That was the truth of it. My only companions on this voyage were the men who would see me to the gallows, and I could not decide if that was bitterly funny or simply inevitable.
“Sorry,” I whispered to the darkness. I wasn’t sure if I meant it.
The pirates attacked on the fourth day.
The first warning was a dull, resonant thunk—then another, and another, a staccato rhythm hammering against the hull. Somewhere aft, someone shouted, the word lost to the sudden cacophony. I shot upright, hands braced against the rail, just in time to see the first of the grappling hooks lurch over the gunwale, followed by a tangle of frayed rope and the wild, tattooed arm of a man who looked like he’d been carved from driftwood and hate. Then more: they came in droves, swinging or scrambling over, howling for blood and plunder, their faces distorted into grotesques by the brine and the moonlight.
In the chaos that followed, Rosencrantz tried to barricade our cabin door with a chair and a broken oar, while Guildenstern drew a dagger from his boot and immediately dropped it on his own foot. I had a knife as well, the one Horatio had pressed into my palm as we embraced goodbye at Elsinore, but it seemed almost laughable now, a child’s plaything compared to the cleavers and pikes wielded by the men spilling onto the deck.
The merchant crew assembled a ragged defense near the mast, their formation barely holding as the pirates set upon them with the casual brutality of men who knew, intimately, that most men would rather live than die. I ducked low, dodged a swinging belaying pin, and found myself pressed against a coil of rope, heart stuttering in my chest. The air was thick with smoke from a fire somebody had started—accident or tactic, I couldn’t tell—and the mingled screams and curses blurred into one ceaseless, keening note that seemed to vibrate my bones.
The pirates were led by a man larger than the rest, his head shaved save for a single greasy braid and his bare arms inked with what looked like entire sagas. He cut down the mate with one blow, then turned and bellowed an order in Danish so guttural it seemed to rattle the very boards underfoot. All at once, the violence stilled; the merchant sailors were herded together, a few bleeding but most simply cowering, and the pirates began the systematic business of looting.
It was only then that Rosencrantz, trembling and pale, released the breath he’d been holding, while Guildenstern, to his credit, managed to retrieve his fallen dagger and cradle it to his chest like a child’s doll. I could not tell if they were more terrified of the pirates or of the swift and efficient end their mission to England had just met.
The pirate captain stalked the length of the deck, surveying the spoils with a disdainful eye. He barely glanced at the merchant barrels and crates; his gaze was fixed on the passengers, his mouth twisted into a hungry grin. When he reached us, he paused, leaned in, and sniffed the air as though testing for some scent only he could detect. I met his gaze and saw, with a chill, that he recognized me—not as Hamlet the prince, but as Hamlet the marked man, the one out of place and out of luck.
The merchant crew put up a token resistance, but they were traders, not fighters. The pirate captain, a weathered Dane with arms like tree trunks, surveyed his catch with professional interest.
“Passengers?” he asked the merchant captain.
“Three young gentlemen, bound for England.”
The pirate’s gaze found me, took in my fine clothes, the bearing that no amount of feigned madness could fully hide. “That one. He’ll fetch a ransom.”
In that moment, I saw it all—the perfect absurdity of it. Here was my escape, delivered by criminals and chance. I could have resisted, could have protested. Instead, I stepped forward.
“Gentlemen,” I said to the pirates, “I believe you’ve just solved a rather pressing problem of mine.”
They grabbed me, pulled me toward their vessel. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stood frozen, eyes wide with shock.
“Hamlet!” Rosencrantz started forward, then stopped, uncertain.
“Tell my uncle I’ll see him soon,” I called back, and couldn’t resist adding: “Give my regards to the English king.”
I saw confusion flicker across their faces just before I was hauled onto the pirate ship and the two vessels separated. They’d figure it out eventually, when the English king read the letter. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d go to their deaths still confused, still wondering what went wrong.
The pirate captain turned out to be surprisingly reasonable. “Prince Hamlet, is it? We’ll have you back in Denmark within the week, assuming your family pays. We’re businessmen, not barbarians.”
“And if they don’t pay?”
The captain shrugged. “Then we’ll probably keep you on as crew. You’d be surprised how many nobles make decent sailors once they get over themselves.”
I found myself laughing, really laughing, for the first time in months. “You know what? That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It’s not,” the captain agreed. “Better than wherever you were heading, from the look on your face when we grabbed you.”
“You have no idea,” I said, thinking of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sailing on toward England, carrying their own death warrant, probably still trying to figure out what I’d meant.
The wind picked up, driving us back toward Denmark. Back toward Claudius and my mother and whatever blood-soaked ending awaited us all. But for now, for this moment, I stood on a pirate ship in the middle of the sea and felt something I hadn’t felt in months: free.
Even if it was just the freedom of falling, it was still freedom.
The pirates were teaching me a sea shanty when I saw the Danish coast appear on the horizon, dark and waiting, like the final act of a play I couldn’t stop performing.
“Ready to go home?” the captain asked.
“No,” I said honestly. “But I’m going anyway.”
The captain clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit. Face your doom with your eyes open. It’s the only way to live.”
Or die, I thought, but didn’t say. The distinction was starting to matter less and less.
Strange how a voyage meant to be my death had become my resurrection. I’d left Denmark a madman being sent to his execution. I was returning as something else—not sane, exactly, but clarified. Sharpened. Ready.
Claudius wouldn’t be expecting me back so soon. That was good. I’d had enough of being the one caught off guard.
It was time for my uncle to learn what it felt like to see a ghost.
.