"This is a ship of fools. There will be no call to port. You, boy, are lucky enough to be alive. If you intend to stay that way, you can expect to struggle with the very essence. You will expect to endure pain. You will find a way to defy the gravity of time and abandon your sense of entitlement. Nothing will come easy but for the appetite to evolve. That much you are granted. You are going to feel what it is to be your right size. You will be humble and you will learn to be teachable." The captain addressed with a speech that had fingerprints and ages of dust upon it.
"The sun will give your rubbery skin a cure. The salt will seal your filthy and mortal hull. You will become seaworthy. This much you are promised in exchange. Nothing more. Your muscles will come to form and your wasted joints will snap to life. You are bipedal, so you will learn to stand and stand tall. You can rely on that." He went on, "Life owes you nothing. You will earn your breath. Your lot will be just that, and in accepting it you will profit. Your hands are for more than reaching for bottles and breasts, wiping your snot and holding cigarettes; they will work to ends you may not see." He closed his ranc with a pause, a stare through glassy red eyes and a thunder, "YOU WILL NOT UNDERSTAND ~WHY~. You will do well to get on with it. You MAY live another day, if you are so fortunate."
Omar felt an overwhelming strength. He was aboard the Echnaton. Her captain, Martis, had taken the small junk 罂粟 and killed her Mandarin crew. They were on the nod and the Echnaton made her with no resistance. Only Omar spoke any lingua franca and only he had given the pirate any salutation. The others were promptly dispatched like raccoon dogs. As they drifted away from their brided ship, their souls rose through the dead air and Omar was moving their cargo across rattling, creaking planks as the sun rose on a day they would not see. If their lives had amounted to anything it was not aboard the Echnaton. Though Omar would mourn the night, it would not be today.
"I have transferred all of her cargo, nourriture, and liquor, sir. We had no weapons or powder, sir." Omar reported. Martis swung a round baton and broke Omars ear open. Omar slowly returned his head, deferentially and with a narcotic calm repeated, "Sir, we had no rifles, sir." This time Martis looked with curious interest at Omar, "Then what if you should encounter a monster like me?" Omar was given an immediate answer, "Then god should show me the way." Martin's lips curled into a smirk. "And whose god? The one that granted this bullet your leg?" The pirate shot Omar in the leg, just above his ankle. Omar could feel his flesh sear with pain, the muscle flayed and a bone splintered. He fell on the deck. "You'll be of little use to me as a lounging boy. Is this your end?" Omar felt a hate rise through his head. His eyes were steady and some strength grew in him.
He raised himself by the rail. Standing with his weight on both legs, "This will not be the end, sir." A blade of resolution honed itself to an infinite point in the blackness of his eyes. The death of this man would be his blessing. "You will wrap your useless limp and prepare yourself to mark and make a course for open waters. Those soggy shits will not bring death aboard the Echnaton. Let your god see to that, boy." Omar had no name on this ship. All of the love and hope he had set out from Bangkok with was drifting with his shipmates towards some sea bottom. He prayed, "Thy will be done. Maktub." At this moment he could not muster to give more to living. As he looked around himself for a banner of sail or a strip of old rope, anything to tie up his throbbing leg he saw nothing but evil in the wood and iron, the grit and tiniest filthy imperfections of the Echnaton.
His faith was tried. He could not feel god through the pain and he could not see god in the brutal dispatch of life. The sun saw the 罂粟 a sterile bleakness, a memory to slide along like frames of projected film. She would find her own end in the horizon, either picked up and salvaged or tangled up and broken on a reef. Her fate was not Omar's charge, he knew, and the business of fortifying his bleeding gunshot wound and broken bone consumed him. He took a strip of small rope tied around the rail and ripped the silk sleeves off of his arms. The fabric undulated in gold and brown, seeping a maroon as he wrapped his leg. He unbraided the rope and wound it around his leg, a coil of support. When he finished, he breathed slow lungfuls of air and interrogated the pain.
As he focused more and more on the sensation it grew less severe. The throbbing reminded him that he could not use the leg but he was sure in his dressing and the blood had dried the silk and rope hard where it needed it most. "This work could not have been done by a man," he thought to himself. "I am not as clever as this; I am guided." The sun had freed itself from the water and the wind was beginning to push. The small crew of the Echnaton had peered at Omar, but none had addressed him. One of them was colored like Omar, a golden brown. He came to Omar with a tin cup filled with water. When Omar drank, he tasted a strong bitterness. The bastard had given him opium in his water. It was indeed the work of a greater master. He knocked the cup back and filled his stomach with the potent tea. "Merci, marin." he showed exhausted gratitude. "Be easy. I am called Argento. You will be sound again soon." the pirate mate showed a fraternal mercy. "Appelez-moi Omar."
Captain Martis came forward and stood above him. "You are a navigator. Are you studied in the stars?" Omar distilled his loathing for this piss of a man and acknowledged, "Aye, sir. I have sharp eyes and know the firmament better than I've known any other home, sir." A silence and shift of the winds slapped the sails. He felt the "Ahh. To be so bold with your tongue. You will never find the chance to eat those words on my ship. You hold what is left of your life in your hands as you hold the Echnaton. You are her helm tonight. Rest now, and be sure that your paws are of use to me." Martis eyed Argento, "Take him below."
Argento waved down the slide for the steerage. Omar felt the opium in his head, like he was bouyed by some salty air. He laughed from his gut at the absurdity of the circumstance. His leg was very fragile, but he was not. The dopy strength he found was matched by sleepiness. Argento knifed a wool blanket in half and gave Omar enough to cover his body. As he laid down on the smashed mat, his arm brushed the polished smoothness of the wood framing the side of the bunk. It felt silky like a woman's leg and he drifted off in his mind to that beauty and comfort. Soon he was breathing heavily through his mouth, his leg propped up on the other, his hands folded into his chest like some eternal repose.
"OI!!! You-are-called-up!" a voice dragged Omar from some safe sleep worlds away from the Echnaton. "aye-AYE!" he reported with no delay. He swung his legs over the bunk and gasped when he felt his bone grind at the break. "It is no thing," he told himself. Before he set foot in the companionway, he prayed. As he emerged from the slide, Argento gave him another tin cup. "You're awake then, boy? Let me see your color!" and Martis grabbed his head from the cup and thumbed Omar's eye open. "Keep them so, or you'll not open them again, hear?" Omar acknowledged and finished the opium coffee. "You'll keep her course in five degrees, boy. Have you a better name?" "Aye sir. My name was Omar, sir."
"Like a father who sailed these seas. Rather pathetic that you're so short of the name, but I'll grant you the one chance to grow into it." he condescended. "Aye, sir," Omar eyed him, "and you will." The captain looked challengingly into Omar's eyes. Omar stood silent and still, meeting Martis. Martis sensed some worth in Omar as an opponent. The heart of the pirate did not love, but showed infinitesimal regard. Omar saw this as well as Martis saw Omar. Some ancient battle would be fought and these two lions of men would perform the rituals. "Don't cry over spilled blood," the captain advised him, "and you may maintain your own."
It was bizarre, Omar felt, that the pirate should want to nurture such adversary. "How could it be reasoned, or even intuited, that an enemy preserved the very contest of life against himself?" he asked himself. Martis dragged him from the luxury of consideration with a cold snap, "At the helm, boy, and keep alive!" "Aye, sir." The sun lit the high clouds from below the horizon. It showed them gold and red, silvery and bright. The colors spoke to his burdened heart. He breathed in fully through his nose and let three ticks of the clock pass before pushing the wind out of his lungs. The night would show him the way. To the Orient, the moon showed herself waxing gibbous. Martis' eyes followed Omar's. "It could be worse, sir," Omar extended an olive brance. Martis clipped, "And you'll know how."
Omar kept his eyes on the moon. She gave him a hope and a courage. No doubt or fear crept in, for Omar was defending aught but his life, the life he was given and the life that was his. Man could make him bleed, but his soul was unbound. He knew the pain but his animal instincts pressed him forward. The leg refused to hold weight. Argento gave him a square length of beam, he rested upon it gratefully. The fraternity relieved his shoulders. The astrolabe was situated so that Polaris marked her. He saw that they were keeping west on the 8th parallel. The sun was strongest here, and the current carried them toward Africa. As he situated himself into her course, the Echnaton became easy and light. Her sail had been fixed and she knew her way. Argento had left him dried fowlmeat. It gave his mouth oil and calories.
Even the most savage of men have a sense of brotherhood. These pirates, though they were given to the rape and ransack of the unguarded, had some code. In no clear way, with the wound of the captain's pistol he had been given an opportunity to make the ultimate his own, to follow the hand of god and to trace the lines in acts and speech. The blood of his mates was not innocent, and neither was his. There was, though, a gold like that of the sun that coursed through it. He knew of magi who knew matter and magic, who had given gifts of gold to kings and whose names pass lips far and wide. They were told to know of ways to make gold, bright and heavy. Omar prayed that god craft his soul so pure, so that he may reflect the brilliance of the heavens. It was selfish, he thought, but in a spirit of honesty. The evil aboard the Echnaton was in the desperation of her captain.
That which Omar saw came to him intuitively, like a birthed sense. As he set into keeping his course and watch and as the opium wore off he was whipped by the cold air. The small and constant infliction on his skin made him resign from defying it. He was still drugged enough so that he wasn't compelled to shiver. Still, he felt very much alone. The comfort and love that woman had shown him was far away, and a small nostalgic fear stole the hope that he would again lie warm and satisfied with a beautiful woman. This night and aboard the Echnaton in a world so different made those memories seem impossible. He tried not to think of love and beauty.
When he left Amsterdam so many years before he was followed to his ship by a young girl who loved him. She made him promise that he would see her again. He could tell by the fear and anguish in her eyes that she needed it, and it was not a bratty or petulant demand. It was clear to him that she needed him to return to her, and she meant what she meant when she said through her tears, "Do you promise I will see you again?" His first response was to observe the truths that he could not control some circumstances, life and death and the whole host of other possibilities only under understandable as god's governance. She would not accept it. She reiterated her demand.
"I promise I will see you again. Wherever you are in the world and wherever I am, I will spend my given life when the time comes to returning to your side. Now though, I have a fortune to seek, and a destiny to meet." She nodded and kissed him and he took the gangway to the Saturn. He chose not to look back, and when he did she was gone. On this forsaken ship, as he leaned with his weight on one aching leg and supported the broken one with the uncomfortable crutch, he thought of that promise and how much he'd wished to have given himself to returning to the Netherlands and seeking out his words.
In times of trouble he was given to rifling through poetry and notions in his memory. Divine comedy sometimes carried him through. Some lines echoed the profane way that destiny has for weaving our lives and the great loom that serves to thread them together. The blood of Martis, as he felt was his right to see spilt, was a small consolation for the humiliation and pain he was enduring. An ancient voice spoke from his own chest and Omar listened. The man would have a chance to redeem himself if he were rendered sightless. It was a nobler determination than a curse for his blood. For the time, though, he would have to heal and diplomacy would grant that time.
There were only two wags that good Omar had met. Surely they were greater than two men. The night was creeping slowly and the bow splashing through the gentle wells was hypnotizing. His leg ached and throbbed, and when the wind rolled the Echnaton he would cringe with searing pain as his weight suddenly shifted. He would appreciate more opium when he was relieved. The firmament was bright and the old characters and constellations, the planets and the streams of stellar milk kept his heavy eyes entertained. Polaris carried the course, and the nature of countless nights like this one steadied him. If he were to find the satisfaction of justice, to see vengeance and to lie comfortable in his body with the warmth of a woman, he knew that when god presented an opportunity he must recognize and make it.
The 罂粟 had failed in her mission to transport cargo of opium from Rangoon to Sydney. It was a small, unperishable, and profitable cargo. The colonials in the south paid handsomely for it. In the morning she was to set out a strange and forboding wind blew strong and fast against them. The clear sky and bright sun betrayed the weather, and so the 罂粟 was ordered by her captain, Shu, to standby at port for her loaded cargo and crew to voyage in delay one day. That call made sense, but hindsight taunted Omar. As a sailor, he was very aware that superstitions, ritual, and customary signs were a necessary and valuable gift from god. When the wind blew the 罂粟 back into port it was clear that the timing wasn't right. Men become defiant with pride, and Shu lost respect for the sea and became deaf to her whispers. She will look after her sons, he thought, "and all children of god," he whispered.
Now the opium was in the steerage of the Echnaton, a stolen ship of mediterranean craft. She was lithe and quiet though, and an admirable vessel. Whatever destiny held for Omar, he resolved that it was of divine orient. He gave in to his weakness and pain and slid a crate for crabbing up to the wheel and sat upon it. While the night slid by, he could rest his leg. At intervals much shorter than necessary, he rose to peer at the astrolabe and align the sprit with her stars. A timepiece would help, but he had none. For his adventures so far and wide he still sought a prosperity to properly conclude his peregrination, to know that he has found his destiny. Even though the bastard pirate captain called him "boy" he was a man. Shu's crew had addressed him "Sir" in a naivete of culture. Merchant and hire mariners tended to be much older or much younger than he was. After this divine lesson he would seek out his promise and maybe give himself to regular work and family. The rewards were simpler but in comparison to where he stood they were so generous and perfect.
Omar looked up at the big sky and smiled from ear to ear. He laughed a calm and self-mocking laugh with the ancient light arriving from the stars. The joke of life was in him and on him. A moment of hilarity, of absurdity settled upon him. He was brimming with a sense of getting the joke and being a conscious player in part. Doctors or philosophers would say that he was losing his mind, but in a world that makes no sense a well preserved mind does little to help. Omar swept his head around and spun a circle on his unbroken leg. With his hands out and up, he welcomed the architect of the ether, the conductor of the orchestra of matter and energy to step forward and come clean with him. There was no such reconciliation and Omar hadn't expected one. The ceremony was instinctive, and the madness felt ancient and familiar. The sun would soon begin to dissolve the black of the sky, and he could see a paling of the sky astern. His pain and psychic weary were nearing his threshold for tolerance. Everything in its time, he felt, would be provided and revealed.
Perhaps the opium was bending him. The bleeding had stopped and the wound turned hard and dry. He felt a throbbing deep in the bone. It did not smell as though it was going green and black. The salt and sea, his desperation and calibration of heart were all fortitude and served to heal him. In the end, he knew, he would be stronger for it. As the sun came across the horizon, the devil and Argento rose from the ship. Argento gave him a ration of crimson opium, a knot of clotted blood, dry and hard. Martis checked the bearings and gave no indication that anything was wrong or was right.
"We will have to settle, young Omar. I am heading to Portuguese Mozambique to off this lot of noddy. Before we get there, the lot of us will be needing a regular dose. You're already well on your way. What lays before me is your fate. Are you of the nature I can depend on; are you a man of our color, our black and bones?" The captain left the response to Omar. "Sir, I am a man, and so I will not lament the loss of my mates aboard the 罂粟. Still, you took sovereignty with brutality and gracelessness and I find in my guts a debt for you to pay." Martis looked fiercely through a sharp brow at Omar's insolence and only the honesty and humility with which Omar presented it gave Martis patience and reason not to kill him summarily. "And what debt has your foul belly got?" Martis challenged Omar. "Rightly, Sir, the balance of that which is fair."
Martis clapped, "HAHA! Argento! Have you heard such stupidity before aboard our Echnaton? Omar, you are a foolish boy, and if you were not you would be dead. If your chest still harbors contempt for being taken, maimed, and commanded then your heart will have to learn a very hard way. What any of us have is the same, a life to live. You have yours now, and those mates of the Orient you've lost are but memories. Should you wish to carry your debt along you'll learn to live and breathe the air you have without worrying about what has been exhaled. In our life, if you were to hold onto breath, you'd drown aboard your ship."
"Right then, Sir." Omar passed. Martis represented his query, "Are you going to give your life to the Echnaton or will she take it from you?" Omar replied after a short hesitation where he breathed two long breaths, "I shall give to the Echnaton that life that I have as I have it." "A very parsed reply, I should say, and one that makes me wisely wary." Martis took Omars words at face value, for he was not alive grey and old as a murderous pirate for his disregard for omens, threats, and meanings.
"We set for Mozambique, twenty degress Austral. When you see that you have the devil to pay it will be all too late, so keep your scope up for the land. If the Echnaton is poorly carried, then you will become a meal." Martis gave wide command, issuing only the objective and enough legitimate fear to crop the best results. Omar confirmed in respectful, "Aye, aye, Sir." and all was set.
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Argento took the wheel, latched it, and put in Omar's free hand a coffee. As Omar sipped it, he studied Argento. Argento didn't speak much more than was needed.
. Early in the morning, Omar made a strong coffee with a double-dose of opium. He then set to fishing , with rods. This was nearly a comical gesture, because these were waters where one would net the catch, not meddle about in a battle of wits and fates with a single mackerel. If one does not try, though, one does not succeed. So he rigged a sardine preserved in oil to the line and old rusty hook, making sure that there was a fiber twine lead to protect the bite of any fish worth catching. His leg allowed him to stand on it, though precariously, and partially because of the opium. The early hours where Martis was sleeping his rum off, surely with his one eye open, and Argento taking his own rest, gave Omar a time under dark night's stars to fish for food, a rather long, uneventful, and passive process, and reflect and appeal to his g-d for strength, meaning, the knowledge of his will and the power to carry it out. His mind began to unreel with the line that ran out into the waters baited Perhaps Martis was trying to win some loyalty or show his predatory affection, but a breakfast was ordered cooked |
