Waves Crash and Seas Split
THE SETTING:
It is the year 127 N.A. The Emperor and All-God, Maliki-li, has been
assassinated.
One month later, the All-God’s wife,
Shola the Empress, died in childbed. The child died, as well. For the first time in history, there is no heir.
The Empire has split. Lands that once belonged to the All-God and
his line for a thousand years has been torn asunder. Lords once loyal to Maliki-li allowed old
wounds to be reopened. Territories and
fiefs have now been divided amongst a hundred feuding lords. This includes the oceans of the World.
The Five Seas—Crucia, Hallor, Chambri,
Kallu, and Minnon—are utterly divided into smaller and smaller sections, each
lord laying claim to various ports; the ports being so very vital to not only
the survival of their people, but to the war effort. Lords go ashore to force conscripts into
service, teaching them to sail as they go, the war intensifying as every lord
races to recruit the best shipwrights, artisans, and engineers.
The Five-Seas Accord, which once consolidated
all control of the seas to the All-God and was consecrated in the presence of
every Major Lord, has been burned. There
is virtually no order on the seas. Merchant
ships are constantly under attack from pirates.
It is not uncommon to see the remains of a sacked town on a
coastline. Villages burn, women are taken,
and children are put to the spear.
The World is crumbling.
The waters now belong to everyone, and
no one…
Sample chapter:
The Bastard
The sun was up,
the skies were wide open, and the chase was on.
The waters
roared and dashed against the hull, sending up a misty spray that filled the
air with a sweet, bracing smell. The
ship’s sharp keel cut through the water like a knife, the sails snapped in the
wind, and the horizon was coming on.
They had always
been chasing him. That is the way it
seemed. He was alone aboard the Bastard, and the Bastard was alone with him.
Together, they went in whatever direction the wind favored, the two of
them lost amid a sea so vast and devoid of hope it might as well have been a
desert. As easily pick your way across a
sun-blasted desert floor in search of food and drinkable water as find those life-sustaining
materials here.
There was no end
to the Minnon Sea, it was said. Seamen
feared it, told stories of men lost out in it, how it was easy to get turned
around. And the thirty-ninth
parallel…everyone knew to steer clear of the Minnon’s thirty-ninth
parallel. But sometimes it was difficult
to avoid it, and the Bastard had to
at least cross over that parallel. On
those days, he thought he heard voices in the wind, and at nights…oh gods, at
nights…
There was no end
to the Minnon Sea, it was said. It rolled
on and on. And it was empty. He had passed one island-studded inland sea
weeks ago—or at least he thought it had been weeks—and after that, there had
been nothing else. At times, merchanters
had appeared on the horizon, but he always veered away from them out of fear
that they would be privateers or pirates in the guise of merchant ships. After two weeks at sea, though, the sightings
became less and less, and eventually he was utterly alone.
There was no end
to the Minnon, it was said. It was easy
for that illusion to creep in because the World terminated somewhere after the
horizon, dropping off into something no one had ever seen, yet they all claimed
it was there. The ealdormen on Stone
Isle would always say you fell over into the Great Abyss, where Mag the
Serpent-Devil waited to ask you the Five Riddles of the Sea; if you answered
any one of them incorrectly, then Mag handed you over to his imp helper
Chawquas, who was only too glad to mete out punishment according to which
riddle you answered wrong first.
Of
course, on this, the chieftains on Judges Island disagreed with the ealdormen
of Stone Isle. The chieftains claimed
that there was no end to the World,
that the waters sailed clearly on and on and on, into various other lands, into
other oceans choppier than the Five Seas, where uncharted shoals constantly
shifted position in a manner un-navigable by the ships of Men. In those waters, said the chieftains of
Judges, rested Farlaxi, the Angry Mother, whose temper caused her to swim with
a ferocity that created waves that were leagues high. For this reason, men across the World had
gotten into the habit of screaming “Farlaxi
swims!” whenever powerful waves threatened to buffet their ships.
Everyone
had their own tales of the sea, and tales of what lay beyond the horizon, and
yet all the tales had one thing in common: once you went there, there was no coming
back. So, Jubar Navet reasoned, how
could anyone know what was over there if no one had ever returned from
there? “Don’t ask those sorts of
questions,” his father might’ve said.
“Asking those questions is more dangerous than not asking them.”
Jubar
looked behind him, past the aft-castle, and marveled at the distance he’d
covered. As easily count the stars in
the sky as fathom the leagues behind him.
The
smell of salt water and the soft ocean breeze lulled Jubar, almost to the point
that he went back to sleep, back into his mad slumber. And then, all at once, Jubar’s stomach seized
up on him. He fell to his knees, holding
his midsection, temporarily crippled by the intense hunger. How
long? he wondered, as the Bastard
streaked across the World. How long have I been at this? It seems like years. Though, he knew it to be only three
months. Hunger robbed a man of his good
sense, though. He could both know what
time of day it was and yet not know—that is, he knew the time logically, just
not viscerally. All of the senses were dulled. Well, all except for a man’s scent, which
seemed to find the scent of food within every fragrance, even the thick, salty
air of the sea.
The
ship moved gratefully alee. New wind
whipped into the sails in the mizzenmast overhead. Jubar looked up at the newly-patched sails
looking bloated and pregnant. That was
good. He had had fickle winds of late. The only good thing about that was that the
ships chasing him would be suffering the same problems.
No, he thought. That’s
not true, the hunger is making me forget details. The other ships had something he didn’t: a
crew. And a crew had oarsmen. Oarsmen with mighty arms, some of them born
into the boat they served, some having traveled for leagues around to offer
their leal service to would-be emperors, and still others forced to smack the
waters with their wooden planks under threat of death by whatever warlord had conscripted
them.
The
Bastard had set out with its lone
occupant at night, amid a storm, along the twenty-seventh parallel. Kingsmen and Emperorsmen and desperate men
followed. They had hounded him through more
than half of the Minnon Sea, the relentless bastards never quite
disappearing. Sometimes, they cruelly
vanished for a full week, or sometimes two, before reemerging once again from
the south or south-east, crushing his infant hope. They hounded him even though they must be
running terribly low on food and supplies, even though they were spending more
time and resources than Jubar deserved to have spent on him, even though there
was nothing for them to collect now besides a broken, hungry man who was
considering flinging himself into the waters very soon. And
they want me to jump the plank, he thought, bemused in the way that only a
man suffering from famine could be.
The
pain in his stomach intensified, reaching a new level of agony he hadn’t
experienced since perhaps he’d been a boy, and the blade his cousin had run
through him had utterly ruined his guts until the bonesman had worked his
miracles with humors (and some said his sorcery) on Jubar Nine Dusks.
Jubar Nine Dusks, he thought. That’s
what they called me…because I ate my
way out of my mother’s womb. They said I was cursed for that, but I
didn’t believe them. But they were right. They
were right.
In his
hunger-induced madness, he was the boy considered cursed by his people for the
omen he’d brought to their village. He’d
been born from the womb of a woman dead one day from plague, falling out of her
like a sack of viscera just as the bonesmen and priests had been preparing her
body for the water-of-the-last-breath ritual.
The villagers had said he’d eaten his mother’s insides in order to
subsist, that he’d been born with the teeth of a fully grown dog, and that he
was the son of Mag. He’d been born at a
time of year when the sun didn’t seem to set for nine days straight, it merely
rose and fell, creating nine twilights that never quite fell into the full
blackness of nightfall. Some said it was
only a strange mist that played tricks with the sun’s light, a phenomenon
common at that time of year, that some of the village’s eldest ealdormen had
seen it before, but Jubar’s wicked birth was what most pointed to.
I ate my way out of my mother’s belly,
he thought insanely. And now hunger eats at mine own insides. This is
retribution from the gods. This is Mag’s cruel trick, his final jape at
the end of a lifetime of them.
Jubar’s arms had
gone numb. He looked at them now with
supreme detachment, certain that this was the first stage of death. He was afraid, but too weak to truly react to
it. Water from the skies had been
plentiful in the first two months, and he’d captured a turtle on his second day
of the voyage—all had appeared fine, the gods were on his side.
Then,
no more food was to be found. His nets
caught no fish. Not only that, but his
pursuers hardly ever let him sleep or work on aught besides gaining speed and
distance. They’d hounded him, oar and
sail, utterly exhausting him. Almost
every time he’d climbed to the top of the masts to work on patching the sails
with his pickers, seam rubbers, needles, and sailmaker’s hands, Jubar had
spotted the ships on the far horizon. It
was all he could do to patch the sails in time to maintain his lead. Days and nights were wasted this way, with
two-day-long chases leaving him without a wink of sleep. A mist had come along one morning, allowing
him to change his heading without being noticed—however, Jubar had gotten
confused about where he was pointed, and for a full day had sailed deeper into
the blue seas, farther away from land than he’d intended to go, and was now
paying the price for it.
Jubar’s
pursuers had managed to get between him and land, and they knew it. Their ships ran parallel to him, preventing
him from suddenly changing direction and moving towards the coasts, none of
which he could see anymore. He’d given
up looking ages ago. Neither gull nor
sparrow had alighted on either his prow or his stern for at least four days.
The
pain!
The
hunger was deep. It had taken root at
the core of him, and it was determined to rot him from the inside out. His stomach was as hollow as his hopes, and
for both of them it seemed no nourishment was coming anytime soon. He’d surrendered to this knowledge.
Presently,
Jubar stood at the prow of the Bastard,
looking forlornly west, west, west, until his eyes lost all focus on the haze
where the clouds almost touched the horizon.
The winds couldn’t have been better, yet nothing else was in his
favor. Stealing the Bastard from where it had been moored had seemed like the perfect
plan. After all, the draftsmen that
dreamt her up had touted it as a modern marvel, one that could outrun the
fastest ships in existence with only a pilot and three “winders” as they were
being called. Oarsmen were not required,
and, indeed, there was no place at all for them aboard the Bastard. Its design had been
dreamt up by the great shipwright and designer Morl S’both, who, along with the
famous explorer Krissen North, had started work on a ship that did not work in
the way of a normal galley, one meant for a minimum of explorers to take them
quickly to wherever they needed, operating solely off of winds and a singular
propeller.
The
pilot did all the driving, while the winders wound the propeller day and
night. At least, this was the way it was
supposed to work. Without winders,
though, it all fell on the shoulders of the pilot. This was what had taken Jubar away from his
normal duties of netting for food. He’d
been down in the lower deck, winding and winding and winding, racing between the
lower deck and the wheel. Steering above
and then run belowdeck to wind, then back up to steer, then up into the sails
to adjust the angles, then back down belowdeck to wind, then back to the wheel…
The
Bastard’s narrow, spear-like shape at
its cutwater gave it an advantage, though.
It cut through the seas, parting them with scarcely any sound. The bow of the ship had been made of a wood
brought in from the Chulkenlands, and had been treated over fires and glazed
with some strange, sap-like substance of S’both’s creation. Once the sap hardened, it had made the wood
more like steel, and the sharpened bow might cut an absentminded man if he ran
his fingers along it to quickly. The Bastard cut cleanly through the water
like a heated knife to butter; this was Jubar Navet’s one boon.
The
Bastard’s only fault was its narrow
design, which would not do well in a storm.
However, as long as its winders and its pilot communicated and
coordinated well enough, it was said that the Bastard could maneuver between waves in a way that had hitherto
been unmatched. The shipwrights that
Jubar had spoken with had told him how this unique storm-avoidance system
worked, and he believed he had the principle down enough. It had been during a storm when he stole the Bastard, in the dark and with his crime
lit only by the occasional crack of lightning.
He’d
had to flee. He’d had no choice. It was either that or die.
THE
HUNGER SPELL
broke from time to time, but only for mere moments, and when it did it left his
mind far afield. Jubar knew this was not
a good thing. He had spent enough time
at sea in his youth and had listened to enough of his father’s terrible stories
about cannibalism at sea to know that the shaking was about to come on
him. Terrible, violent shaking that
would consume his every thought until he ate something. In fact, his hands were already trembling to
the extent that he wasn’t certain he could replace another sail. He’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but it
was time to eat his leather satchels.
Such
a last ditch effort was sometimes necessary, his father had told him. It wasn’t ideal, and was likely to make him
feel sick afterwards, but it would provide him some sustenance, and perhaps the
energy necessary to make it a bit farther.
“That’s
all I need,” he croaked. “Just a bit
farther. Just a little farther.”
Preparing
leather satchels for eating was a thing most people had believed
impossible. That was until men stranded
at sea had found a way. “Sometimes,” his
father had once told him, “the greatest advances are made by simple men under
great pressures. This has always been
true of shipwrights and seamen. You
should always feel honored at following in our family’s craft and trade.” He’d said this during one of their long, long
evenings of inspecting the watertightness of a ship they’d been working
on. Now, smelling the sea air, Jubar
fancied he caught a whiff of the caulking iron at work in his father’s
hands…and the smell of the other men working shoulder-to-shoulder in those
close confines…and he could hear Ryam’s bawdy jokes…
“Stop
thinking,” Jubar said to himself. “It’s
time to eat leather.”
This
was something all seamen said at some point or other in their lifetime. Anytime food became scarce, or they’d been
too many days without going ashore, they would say to one another, “It’s time
to eat leather.” Or they might say,
“It’s getting that time.” Everyone knew
what time it was. Of course, no seamen
that Jubar had ever met had ever had to do it—though some claimed to have done.
Jubar had spent
his entire life as a shipwright’s son, with very little time to actually do any
boating or sailing himself. He had fled
aboard a boat, though, absconded with a ship he and his father had helped to build,
a ship they had chiseled, treated with tung oil, and set the keel in place with
their own hands.
“And
now here I am,” he said aloud, chuckling to himself and looking skyward. The sun was going on noon, midway through the
Hour of the Horse. “It’s that time. Time to eat leather.”
Time
to eat leather. It became a chant,
something that removed romanticism and dispelled vagueries. Vagueries only blurred the truth and fostered
illusions. Like his father, Jubar
preferred to conduct himself in reality.
The
two leather satchels he’d brought with him had originally bore his food. Now they were utterly empty, except for the
bloated waterskins. Water hadn’t been
the problem. Indeed, it had come down in
terrific rainstorms without creating the dangerous waters associated with the
cracking of ships. Nay, Kotep, the Lord
of Wind and Rain, had been merciful, and the water was plentiful. It was Kotep’s brother Koji, the God of Sea
Creatures, who was being stingy with his food stores.
“It’s
that time,” Jubar said again. He started
by searching for his knife, and for a terrible moment he thought he’d lost it,
until it turned up strapped to his right thigh, exactly where it should’ve
been. My mind’s going, he knew, unable to do anything about it. He withdrew the steel knife, made by his
sister’s husband, Yalkin, the smith’s apprentice, a true prodigy. She
married well, he thought absently, once he started cutting the leather
pouch into long strips. This was the
first step. The next required him to get
some large containers and fill them with water, so that he could soak the
strips.
“It’s
that time,” he said once again as he stepped belowdeck, instinctively turning
over the hourglass as he went by it. He
was in search of a good cask or a bowl, anything that would hold a significant
amount of water. The Bastard had hardly been christened
before he’d stolen it, therefore there had been no food stores, no cattle
readied, not even any rum or sugared water placed in its stock. Indeed, there hadn’t been a morsel of food on
the Bastard besides what Jubar
brought with him.
He
finally found what he’d come belowdeck to look for. He’d spotted the shipwright’s tool crate
beside the tiller, knowing it by sight since he’d worked nearly every day of
his life with one close at his side. The
crate came with all the tools necessary for crewmen to make quick repairs while
at sea—jerry irons, caulking irons, adzes, pitch, auger, chisel, oakum, and of
course hammers—all of which he now dumped onto the floor so that he could use
the watertight crate. It had to be
watertight, of course, because water was bound to get into the ship at some
point, and if tools suffered water damage then there could be no repairs.
“It’s
that time,” Jubar said, pouring water from his skins and flask reserves. “Time to eat leather.” The chant propelled him, it was restorative. He was uttering it under his breath every few
beats, almost singing it in a song at times, and anon dedicating it to Kotep
and his brothers, Koji and Kask’je. “It
is that time, My Lords,” he told them.
“You’ve brought me to this.”
Jubar
soaked the leather strips, dipping his hands into the water and stretching them
out, his stomach lurching at the thought of having to eat these. He knew it was only going to make him sicker,
especially on such an empty stomach, but if he could keep it all down then it
would keep him alive a bit longer. “It’s
that time,” he said, chuckling.
The
ship croaked and croaked; the steady sounds of cordage and sailcloth being
strained. She was heeling two strakes
under her topgallantsails. The wind was
just abaft her beam. Things were steady
enough to do the work.
It
took a couple of hours to thoroughly soak the leather strips. He tenderized them by beating them with the mallet
from the shipwright’s toolbox. Then, he
rubbed them down, pressing them against a table where no crew had yet eaten a
real meal, and then beat at it again with his hammer before soaking it some
more. He was like a true explorer just
then, one that must experiment and improvise while on the move, with only his
dreams of a faraway home and a fugitive wind to keep him company.
The
ship had rocked and heeled across the Minnon Sea as lonely as you please, with
only a half demented shipwright’s son for a pilot these last months. The Bastard
deserved better, he knew, but she wouldn’t get it. She
gets me. Sorry, old girl.
Jubar repeated
the tenderizing process on the leather strips several times, enjoying it because
it distracted him from his hunger, which had returned and was causing him
severe cramps again, some of which bowled him over. He drank water, and cursed Koji for being so
stingy with his haul. An instant later,
he apologized to the God of the Sea Creatures and asked him to be
merciful. “You always want to speak
kindly to the Three Brothers when at sea,” his father had told him on their
first voyage ever, as they had spilled wine out over the ship’s prow, hoping that
Kotep and his two younger brothers would accept the offering.
Maybe that’s my problem, Jubar
thought. I never brought anything to offer them. But I
was in such a hurry when I left Heern Harbor. Surely
the gods are understanding of mortals in a hurry.
“It’s
that time,” he said once again, now finished with tenderizing the leather
strips. They were now as flimsy as
freshly peeled flesh, or at least close enough for Jubar’s tastes. Now, he had to scrape off the hairs. He had no quality scraper, not even among the
shipwright’s tools, so he used his fingernails and dug deeply into the leather,
scraping off every follicle that he could find.
With trembling, desperate hands, he did this. He did this while alternately cursing Koji
and praising him. Finally, after hours
of doing this, it was time to build a fire.
For that, he’d need to go upperdeck.
HE
BROKE DOWN
the shipwright’s tool crate to make decent tender. Fire wasn’t so easy to make with shaking
hands, but he’d need the fire to roast or grill the leather strips. Jubar chopped the crate up using his
adze. He was able to use his knife to
scrape off enough pieces from the crate’s wood to make some kindling and punk,
and then gathered them together with slightly bigger strips of wood, forming a
pyramid to build a fire from the bottom up.
Once
he’d successfully used his knife and flint to make a spark, Jubar praised Boro
for giving his sister’s husband the wit and skill to make such a fine
knife. Jubar was able to make a spit,
over which he hung the strips of leather he’d prepared, and roasted them for
what he gauged to be half an hour; this estimate according to his reading of
the sun, which could hardly be trusted in his near delirious state, and he knew
it. Looks
like five o’ the clock. The Boar Hour. Hunger had robbed him of half his memory, so
he forgot all about the hourglass.
Satisfied
that he’d done all he could think to do to prepare the strips, Jubar lifted the
best-looking pieces from the spit. Of
the thirty strips he’d been able to cut free of his satchels, about ten of them
looked like he’d done the job right. He
now had to cut them into bite-size pieces, so that they wouldn’t be a further
hindrance to his bowels, which were already irritated and had turned to water.
His
father had always told him that he’d heard the best way to eat these bits of
leather was with a serving of water, and lots of it. In this, Jubar still had no problem. He had plenty of water leftover from soaking
the leather strips, and soon he was eating the leather pieces with as much
reticence as he’d ever eaten the hardest and most spoiled hardtack. No amount of hunger could make the leather
more palatable. In fact, Jubar ate
reluctantly, not enjoying an ounce of it.
His stomach protested, entreating him to think again on this, asking him
if he was sure he fully understood what it was he was asking it to do.
Still,
with an effort, he ate. He ate because
there was nothing else he was strong enough to do. After having beaten the leather strips and
sweated himself over all the details in preparing this meal, Jubar didn’t
believe he had the strength left to even climb the tower, or to wind the
winders, or to toss the line to judge the fathoms of depth below him, or to
attend his netting, or to look upon the wind gauge, or to do anything except
let the Bastard’s sails carry him to
whatever end.
The
gorgeous day was turning into a gorgeous twilight, with bright white dots
appearing across the sky like granules of dust reflected off the waters, to say
nothing of the moon itself, which now shared the sky, if only briefly, with the
sun. Very soon, true nightfall would
surround him and he would be locked in the serenity of Sersa’s embrace.
This
meal might keep him going another day or two, or possibly even three, but soon
enough he would be too weak to even move.
He’d just be lying there, just as he’d once seen his Uncle Zeth do when
he had come down with pox, which had him throwing up anything he ate. Uncle Zeth had eventually been too weak to
even open his eyes. Starving and trapped
inside his own body, he’d died.
“It’s
that time,” he said, eating another morsel of leather. Then, on the heels of that, “Lord Koji…you
bastard…”
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