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Of Rum, Madness, Thunderstorms and Prayer
by
Ben Burgis
My name is Jake 259thShip, and I am a butcher of the innocent.
I won't try to deny it.
If I'm going to hell for my sins in any case, there's little enough point to adding liar or hypocrite to the list. The plain fact is that I live by the point of a sword, thieving what other men earn and killing those who try to stop me.
Today was no exception.
When the priest raised his hand to me, I sliced off his head.
Kate had dispatched me to the temple to capture him. It's always good to keep a priest alive, if you happen to find one. A lot of sea brigands respect priests, won't touch them, as if they think that will stop the Gods those priests serve from damning them to hell.
Not Captain Kate.
She's never told me why, and I've never asked, but she hates priests the way a farmer hates Mandars, the way a shopkeeper hates sneak thieves, and she thinks nothing of using them for her own purposes. If this one had been a good boy and left the fighting to the pair of soldiers that were supposed to be guarding him, he'd be the bargaining chip if anything went wrong.
Unfortunately for him, he wasn't such a good boy, and my instincts kicked in before the soldiers could intervene. He didn't even have time to utter a curse against me, to swear or scream or beg for mercy.
One second, he balled his hand into a fist. The next, I swung out my sword to separate his neck from his shoulders. His eyes widened in shock. He gurgled something that might have been an attempt at speech or might have been a stillborn scream. His head rolled onto the ground just as the soldiers came up behind him.
The Central Confederacy never bothers to station too many men in shit port towns like this one, and they never waste the experienced soldiers. From the looks of these two, they were no exception.
Outraged by my blasphemy, the younger of the two ran toward me, swinging his sword in huge strokes. He screamed something. I don't know what. When I'm in the heat of things, all sounds blur into one sound, one thing, like a dull roar echoing through the silence.
Crumbs from whatever he'd been eating before he was called out to do his duty landed in the soldier's blond beard as he screamed. The hand that swung his sword was shaking in fury. All of my concentration was focused on that arm.
I edged out of the way, keeping my blade low, but angled up to deflect any sudden blows. Come on.... Right on time, he obliged me.
He swung his sword upward in a huge arc...
....and I plunged my own into his exposed neck. Blood spurted like a fountain, splattering everywhere.
His corpse collapsed onto the ground.
His comrade kept on coming toward me, his sword held at the ready, his eyes wary.
Shifting my shoulder pack to the other side, I raised my sword level with my eyes, on guard but making no move toward him. “Look, I'll be on my way soon enough.”
The soldier laughed. “Why should I let you go, pirate?”
It would have been more convincing if his voice wasn't shaking, but under the circumstances, it seemed unwise to point that out.
“Because,” I said instead, very slowly and very reasonably, “that way you won't die.”
His response came in the form of a swift thrust of his sword. I parried, just in time, and danced out of his way.
Our blades clanged together, again and again, as we struggled for advantage. He swung out a final time. I parried.
For a second, our swords were pressed together, neither of us able to thrust forward, neither of us able to tear away. I could smell the sweat soaking his white soldier's blouse. I pressed forward. He held his ground. I braced my shoulders...
...and both of us froze where we stood. A sound separated itself from that dull roar, penetrating my awareness with an irresistible force. No one who'd heard that sound before could have reacted differently.
A pack of Mandars was storming through the town.
“Truce,” soldier-boy gurgled, so low it was almost a whisper. I nodded, and relaxed my stance.
We stood there for a few seconds of frozen indecision, then I ran out into the night.
I'd seen Mandars before, but always from a healthy distance. These ones now, though, some of them were so close I could have thrown a rock and hit one from where I stood.
If, that is, I'd had overwhelming urge to die.
Each of them was as long as seven or eight men, their feet planted on one another's shoulders, would be tall. One of them was so close I could see the slime dripping from its body, all eight of its heads scanning for humans or other animals to eat. Its tentacles swept beneath it, supporting the mass of its body as it scuttled along the street. Every time a gob of slime fell from that body onto the ground, it exploded into blue flame and bored a hole in the cobblestones.
For the first time in my life, I was face to face with one of the original inhabitants of this world.
***
This is the story of the Crash, as told to me by my father when I was small, and by his father to him, going back three hundred years.
Humans didn't always live in this world, and perhaps some still don't. Once, they lived in another place, another world like our own, with its own oceans and suns and sky. They had machines of a kind that the priests and scholars and clock-makers of this world can only dream of, and built ships that traveled between the stars.
Some people say that they used magic to do this, but I've never believed that. I was a clock-maker's apprentice for five years, and I know that building a machine to do an impressive thing is a matter of skill. I can believe that other men, in other times, had greater skills than our own, but I won't believe in magic until I've seen some with my own eyes.
These airships were a product of tremendous skill, but they weren't perfect. A fleet of five hundred of them, carrying a thousand thousand men and women who were the ancestors of every man and woman alive today, came to settle this place three centuries ago, knowing that it was a world whose air could be breathed and whose water could be drunk by human mouths.
As it happened, they didn't so much land as crash, and half the men and women aboard went to their deaths.
Many ships remain to this day, preserved as monuments and tended by priests, but no one with the skill to understand what could have gone wrong with five hundred ships at once, much less to repair them and take them back to the stars, survived the crash. All that remains of that skill is hoarded among the metal men who'd been used as slaves on those airships.
Their former masters dead, the metal men retreated to the mountains. They live in their own cities, to which no man of flesh and blood is allowed entrance, and keep their knowledge to themselves.
The rest of us had to fend for ourselves, learning to farm this world's soil, to build ships to sail its oceans and to forge swords to protect ourselves against one another.
No one, though, has ever learned quite adequately how to protect themselves against the creatures who ruled this world before we came.
***
I didn't look at these Mandars for more than a few seconds before I ran back into the temple.
The soldier was gone. That meant that there was an exit on the other side. I ran back to find it.
On my way, I almost tripped over the priest's head.
I picked it up and, for a fleeting moment, looked into its corpse's eyes, still wide with incomprehension. I tore my gaze away and tossed the head into my shoulder pack.
Forcing the image out of my mind, I ran to the back doors of the temple and stepped out into the humid darkness.
Smoke rose everywhere, the city's wooden buildings ablaze from the Mandar's slime. I couldn't see any Mandars from this side of the building, and the temple wasn't far from the docks. One quick sprint, and...
I looked out into the ocean.
The Holy Eater of Gods, Captain Kate's ship, had already released its moorings. They were leaving without me.
***
I took off as fast as I could, aching with exertion as I ran to the docks. The howling of Mandars reverberated in my ears. The warm ocean breeze beat against my face.
I couldn't stop running. The moments it would take me to catch my breath could make the difference between my making it to the ship on time or...
Well, best case scenario, I could find somewhere to hide until the Mandars moved on. Maybe that way I could live long enough for the townspeople to string me from the gallows for my crimes. Worst case scenario...
Best not to think about that. I picked up my pace.
People ran everywhere, crowding the docks in a blooming, buzzing confusion as they tried to get on any available ship. I paid them no mind, and vice versa. They'd kill me readily enough if I stuck around, but right now, no one had time to think about that.
Every ounce of my concentration was centered on the Holy Eater of Gods. It had just started to drift away from the shore.
I waded into the warm water, then swam, keeping my head in the air as best I could. Any second now, they would put the oars to it and there'd be no way I could catch the ship.
As I came up to the Holy Eater's side, I screamed as loud as I could. “Oy there!”
If anyone on deck heard, they didn't come. I treaded water and screamed again. “Hey! Damn it, Kate, hey!”
I rummaged around in my shoulder pack, the few items within it floating in water, until I found a half-empty bottle of rum. “Hey!” I screamed again, and tossed it with all the force I could muster. It disappeared, up on the deck, and I heard a smash.
Finally, a face and matching shoulders emerged over the railing. It was Captain Kate 498thShip, terror of the western seas, her tropical bird Christina perched on her shoulder. Kate looked neither shocked nor relieved, but rather amused to see me.
“Fucking hell, Jake, what have I told you about wasting rum like that?”
I shook my head and smiled despite myself. “Yes, I am alive, Captain. I'm touched by your concern.”
Kate threw back her head and laughed uproariously, her long blond hair spread out in the wind. All three of Christina's heads echoed the laugh. Kate stepped back, and a moment later two crewmen lowered a ladder to me.
Kate waited for me on deck, her arms crossed over her ample chest, her lips twitching in amusement. We stood looking at each other for a long moment, until Christina broke the silence.
“He looks fine,” Chris, the leftmost head, offered.
“Not a scratch,” Ti, the middle headed, added.
“Really,” Na finished, “you shouldn't have worried.”
Kate knocked Christina off her shoulder with a playful swat, and shook her head. “The bird is a liar. I couldn't have cared less what happened to you.”
I shook my head in disgust. “Where would you find another man as good in a fight as me?”
Kate snorted. “There are at least half a dozen men on this ship who are better at that.”
“But Captain...” My voice was the very essence of wounded pride. Very tentatively--she was in fine spirits for the moment, but she was prone to abrupt and wicked changes of mood--I stepped forward to put my hands on her hips. “Where would you find another man who was as good at the other thing?”
Kate pushed me away, hard, but her smile deepened. “There are a dozen men on the crew who are better at that.”
The other mates standing around the deck snickered at that, but I paid them no mind. A moment before, I'd remembered what was in my bag.
“Well, be that as it may, I have a present for you.”
“Oh?” She raised one eyebrow. “I like presents.”
I tossed her the holy man's head, still sopping wet with blood and sea-water. She caught it in both hands, and examined the priestly collar, still stuck to the folds of flesh just below the chin. For a long time, she gazed into the corpse's eyes, lost in thoughts I would never be able to guess. Finally, she shook her head and tossed the trophy to Jack 214thShip. He took it without comment and wandered off.
Thunder cracked in the distance. The first few drops of rain pelted the deck. Both of us ignored it.
“Well.” Kate grabbed my belt buckle to pull me toward her. She was about a hundred times stronger than she looked, and my breath went out as she did that. “How did you know? It was just what I wanted.”
She reached up to roughly grab the back of my head and then Captain Kate 498thShip, the most ferocious pirate in the western seas, the woman I was going to hell for, pulled me down into a long and lingering kiss.
***
The first time I'd met her, she hadn't been nearly so friendly.
It was five years to the day since my father sold me to the clock-maker. During the lull between thunderstorms on an autumn afternoon, the Holy Eater of Gods washed up on our shore. I doubt they'd have bothered raiding our little town if the storm hadn't sent them in our direction, but Captain Kate was never one to miss an opportunity.
The clock-maker was in the volunteer militia. When Kate's raiding party came, he resisted. I resisted too, if only to avoid the beating I knew I'd earn if I ran off during the fighting. Even if I'd had a proper sword instead of that glorified knife they'd given me, I wouldn't have known what to do with it. I learned how to do that much later, on the Holy Eater of Gods.
Kate and her boys gave us a chance to surrender. My betters refused. I fought. We lost.
Captain Kate herself knocked the blade out of my hands, and almost finished the job.
I was on my back on the damp street, her sword on my neck, its point boring into my flesh. She muttered something, that in the years since, she has never admitted, “What a waste, handsome boy like that.”
Oh, she's had me often enough in my years on the Holy Eater. She's had every halfway decent looking man on the crew at least once. Still, admitting a thing like that would give me notions, make me think I was something special. As such, she's always insisted it was, “What a cowardly boy is that.”
“Please, no,” I managed to say, even though working my throat to speak like that just made the sword's point hurt all the more.
“Now, son,” she told me, in that suspiciously educated diction she lapses into whenever she forgets not to talk that way, “I can understand your point of view, but please understand mine. I really can't spare anyone to guard you, and if I don't finish you off, you're going to alert the rest of the town.”
“No,” I managed. “I won't.”
“And I would love to believe you, I truly would. But how can I be sure?”
“I swear by the Goddess of the Sea,” I offered. I think I'd heard in stories at the tavern that pirates swore by the Goddess of the Sea.
“Try again.” Kate spoke from between her teeth, and pushed the sword further into my neck.
I realized that there was at least one thing left to try. I won't claim that it was just survival, either, that made me say what I did.
In that split-second of decision, a lot of things rushed through my mind. I had ten years left on my term of service. Even if the clock-maker died, some butcher or shopkeeper cousin of his would inherit me. They would work me, hard, and they'd be no more shy about discipline than the clock-maker ever was.
I thought about that, but it was a lot more than that. I thought about the way the ocean smelled, the way wind felt against my skin at night, the fact that I'd never traveled further than fifty miles in any direction from the town I grew up in.
And with the next words I spoke, I committed myself to a life of thievery and murder, and bargained away my immortal soul.
“I could come with you.”
***
It had rained all night, but when I woke up the morning after the Mandar attack, the first sun, William, was shining through the window of my cabin. My dreams of the previous night were already a fading memory, a jumble of water and darkness and the hollow eyes of a dead priest.
I had my usual struggle with my parched throat, said throat insisting that I go below deck for a drink and the rest of my body pleading for another hour of sleep. The throat won.
The throat always wins, sooner or later.
I stumbled below deck to the pantry, grabbing a wooden cup and a loaf of bread. I filled the cup with two parts water and one part rum, and used it to wash down the bread.
Most of the ship hands don't bother with the water for their first drink of the morning, but Kate insists that the fighting men do so. Letting the sailors drink it straight is better for discipline, but alertness is more important than discipline for those of us expected to go on raids.
I finished my bread, poured myself another cup of rum and water, and wandered above deck to find the Captain.
She stood on the railing of the ship with Tommy 214thShip, watching the second sun, James, rise in the west.
Tommy said something I couldn't quite make out. Kate threw back her head and laughed.
I stood a ways away, wondering if I was interrupting something, but Captain Kate waved me over. She held a glass bottle of very dark rum. Her bird perched on the rail, purple and yellow striped wings spread out to take in the sun.
“Morning, Captain. Tommy.” I glanced at the rum and raised my eyebrows.
Kate followed my gaze, shrugged, and took a swig directly from the bottle. “I don't expect we'll see any action today. Anyway, I'm in a celebrating mood.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Don't take that impertinent tone,” Chris chided me.
“Disrespectful,” Ti added.
“She is the Captain,” Na pointed out.
Kate snickered. “For once, the bird is talking sense. I don't know why I tolerate this level of impertinence from the likes of you.”
While I tried to think of a response to that, Kate poured some rum into my almost empty cup. I clinked it against her bottle, and we both took swigs. My throat burned as I gulped it down.
I closed my eyes for a moment, savoring the spices. The Captain must have visited a nobleman's pantry the night before.
When I opened my eyes back up, my vision blurred.
Tommy snickered, seeing my expression. “Good kick to this stuff, eh?”
“Huh?”
Kate rolled her eyes. “The rum, Jake.”
I smiled. “Pray it's the rum and not the first sign of madness.”
The Captain back-handed me across the face. It took me a long moment to realize what I'd done wrong.
“Prayer,” she explained, very calmly, “is the highest form of madness. What else do you call believing yourself to be in communication with invisible beings who cater to your will?”
I nodded my agreement. Tommy interjected as I was still trying to come up with something placating to say. He pointed out at the horizon. “What's that, then?”
I hadn't realized, until then, just how far last night's thunderstorm had blown us off-course. Almost nothing around us was recognizable. Following Tommy's gaze, I caught sight of a huge ship sliding through the water in the distance.
It shone so brightly that I wondered if it was made entirely of metal. For a certainty, it looked expensive, and no flag or marking identified it as either military or another brigand ship. Only one conclusion could follow from those two premises. “I guess we'll see some action today after all.”
Kate nodded vigorously, her face the picture of joyful anticipation, and turned around to bark orders at anyone in shouting distance. I went off to find my sword and splash cold water in my face.
Half an hour later, we boarded the ship.
***
It was like no ship I had ever seen. It really was made entirely of metal, bow to stern, deck to hull. The deck was entirely flat, with no wheel, no ropes, not even a sail. Whatever was left of an apprentice clock-maker in me couldn't stop wondering how it worked.
Logic said that a ship with no sails should drift aimlessly. My eyes said this one slid through the water at a good pace.
Right now, we had more important things to worry about. There were people everywhere on deck. And not just people.
There were metal men.
Coming upon a metal man walking around outside of one of their mountain strongholds was a marvel, the sort of thing people told stories about in taverns, but it wasn't unheard of. Seeing one in the company of human beings, though? That approached the realm of the impossible.
Never mind that, even, the people were odd enough by themselves. They wore strange clothes, black and rubbery, shining in the sun. Some of them held devices of a kind I had never seen before, and whose purpose I couldn't begin to fathom.
The strangest thing was that none of them were armed, and none seemed to be alarmed by the presence of Captain Kate 498thShip and a dozen men, all of us carrying swords, standing on their deck.
One called out to us in some sort of foreign language. We all stared at each other in confusion. Kate shrugged, and started the usual speech. “You are under the custody of the Holy Eater of Gods. If you surrender your goods, you may keep your wretched lives. If you resist, this is the day you die.”
One of the men in the strange black suits walked up to us, so close that I could have killed him by stretching out my arm. He spoke again in the foreign language and then, as if embarrassed to have forgotten a social courtesy, he shook his head and took something out of his pocket. It was a gray, metallic thing, with a button in the middle. He pressed the button and began again to speak.
His mouth moved as before, but this time, his voice came from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular, like he was speaking directly into my head. What's more, he was speaking ordinary Kingspeech. “Greetings. My name is Commander Amson Beck. We are on an exploratory mission from the Earthspace Colonial Authority. We will return to our”--he paused for a moment, and then continued--”airship, once we are done with this expedition. I regret that we cannot spare any of the goods on this vessel, but I mean no disrespect to your local customs.”
For the first time in the years that I had known her, Kate's mouth was open, but no words were coming out. Finally...
“Airship?”
“Yes.”
“You're lying.”
“I'm not,” the voice assured her.
“I don't like liars.”
I braced myself when I heard that, gripping my sword in both hands. Anyone who'd ever been on a raid with Captain Kate knew what was coming next when she said a thing like that.
She lifted her sword. At the same moment, one of the metal men pointed its arm at her.
In the split-second before she had time to slice off the speaker's head, a beam of green light shot out of the metal man's hand, and pierced Kate between her eyes.
Her sword clattered to the deck. She sank to her knees. She teetered there for a moment, her teeth chattering, sweat beading down her forehead. Then she collapsed.
The dull roar of silence started in my ears. I raised my sword.
“Stop,” the voice-from-nowhere told me. I stopped, as much out of wonder as out of fear. At that moment, I saw something out the corner of my eye that could not be.
Three of my shipmates failed to heed the command. They rushed forward around me, oblivious to the wonder across the ship. Three beams of green light stopped them. My hands quivered with rage around my sword, but I held still, stopped by awe as much as fear.
On the other end of the ship, quite oblivious to our altercation, a woman in a black rubber suit was holding a large bag, made out of some sort of transparent, stretchy substance. A tag was stuck to the bag, with foreign symbols written on it.
The bag held the severed head of a Mandar.
“Don't worry,” the voice-from-nowhere told me as the speaker followed my gaze. “We are only taking a few samples of the local wildlife. Your ecosystem shouldn't be affected.”
I opened my mouth. I closed it again.
I tore my eyes away from the captive monstrosity. Instead, I looked at Kate's body, lying limp on the metallic deck. I felt my hands tighten on the handle of my sword.
“She's not dead.”
In the most absurd day of my life, that made the least sense of all. Why would he try to tell me that? I had just seen the metal man kill her.
“She's asleep.”
I stared. I closed my eyes, opened them back up and stared some more. It was true. I could see her breast rise and fall. Sleep.
“All four of your friends are asleep. We will return them to your vessel. We have no desire to interfere.”
“Don't.”
I didn't know I was going to say that it until I did.
In that split-second of decision, all sorts of things rushed through my mind. The faces of the people I'd killed. How much I'd like not to merit residence in quite such a deep and fiery ring of hell when I died. How much I'd like to have a different life.
I thought about all of that, but there was more. I also thought about the way the stars look on a clear night, and how much I'd like to fly.
“I could come with you.”
***
After a month of traveling the oceans with the men from the stars, and six weeks of intensive study, more numbers and words and facts than my old master clock-maker would have been able to hold in his head, I was on board the airship.
An actual airship, like the ones I'd seen preserved from the Crash, but more advanced. The inside was all sleek surfaces and shining displays. It hurt my eyes just to look at it all, but I didn't ever want to stop.
Just before we took off, I asked them to open up the hatch. The take-off pad was only a few yards from the water's edge, more than close enough.
I threw my arm back, and tossed my sword into the sea.
Later, I watched the world, the entire world, become smaller and smaller through the window until it was tiny green ball and then until it disappeared altogether. It was the most frightening and the most breathtaking thing I'd ever seen, but I already knew that I'd see more amazing things before long.
I couldn't wait.
My name is Jake 259thShip, and I am a traveler among the stars.
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