Chapter 23: Chapter 22: Chapter 22: A Twig And A Cup Shy of A Skeleton

Two months on a ship sailing north with no navigation save the occasional pointing of a priest had taught Seth a few things. One was how much he hated ships. Every sway and lurch churned his stomach and forced his eyes to tears. He found himself expelling the contents of his guts at least twice a day, spewing bile and regurgitated meals over the side of the ship. Sea sickness, the crew had called it. Apparently, people existed who could not handle life on a ship. But what they claimed they found surprising was how he could fall prey to sea sickness yet walk so steadily on deck.

His steady footing, he attributed to Jabari and his strange walking technique. Though he never told them.

During his time on the ship Jabari allowed him the sanity of association. He was allowed time with the crew, to watch, to observe, to communicate. At first it was tasking. Daunted by their many tasks carried out every morning and every night and on strange occasions when the captain called out one or two things regarding the tide, he’d done more of observations.

In his second week he found a path to communication; to acceptance. He started with the little things. He helped move a crate left to sit for the accomplishment of a more important task. He carried a pail here, returned a bucket there. He filled the drum for baths with water and did the little to scoop up the sea water that spilled on deck. He never touched the sails or did any task that could not have gone undone. But the little he did was noted. Soon the members of the crew were giving him tasks, minor and inconsequential.

It wasn’t long before he began helping around the kitchen. The tasks there were just as menial, things Derek would call beneath their station as sons of a Lord, though. Often he would fetch buckets of water for the cook, an aging man somewhere over sixty with arthritic hands and rheumy eyes and a bend to his stance that made him look as if humped. Benton, the old cook, never needed a net for his head. Seth attributed this to the fact that the man was practically hairless. However, when he’d asked if he needed one, considering how much hair he had, the response had been gravely unsanitary.

“Don’t bother yourself,” Benton had said. “Those men out there would swallow ten strands of hair and call it nutrition of some kind. Besides, hair nets are for sissies and women. We are neither.”

Cooking was a knowledge in patience. Seth had seen his mother cook a number of times but had never truly taken any interest in it. She was not a woman to be found in the kitchen very often, but she did give it her attention on the rare occasions when she was there.

Unlike his mother, however, Benton couldn’t have cared less for the meals he cooked. His kitchen was always a mess with dirty pots and pans, a trash bin with waste and rot from uncooked fish or the other he never really explained to Seth. So bad was it that Seth often found himself cleaning without request. He would turn a pot inside out, scrubbing with the fury of a one-armed grandmother, ridding it of what massive dirt clung to it. This had shown him that most of the black pots in the kitchen were not actually black, merely burnt horribly and never truly washed well.

Despite all this, Benton’s meals were always fitting for kings in taste.

Jabari never let up on Seth’s training. With his other arm still in a sling, Seth continued in the way of the draw. Every morning Jabari would rise him from sleep and put him to the task. However, where he had once used a tachi, he now used a simple long sword. The tachi, Jabari claimed, was not fit for the confinement of the small space they slept in.

So Seth would draw with the grace of someone skilled in the art and would smile to himself for it.

The simple long sword was an easier companion than the tachi. It did not disobey and it did not threaten to throw him with every draw. It came freely from its scabbard and returned with particular ease.

Seth continued to throw his arm out completely with each draw like a pitcher with each pitch as Jabari had once advised. The result was always impressive. Even his mind had come to a pleasure with each draw. The accomplishment, to say the least, was intoxicating. The touch of the hilt. The way his hand curled into a comfortable grip. The hiss of metal as sharpened blade escaped a beautiful scabbard. The swish of a sharp edge cutting through the air, arcing in the shadow of a kill. It amazed him as much as it pleased him.

Best of all was that his body didn’t tire as quickly as it once had.

If he hadn’t seen Jabari cut down a tree as wide as four vehicles in one slash once, he would’ve thought himself close to mastery of this technique. But he had, and it ensured pride in his accomplishment never became hubris.

Over time the crew of the ship accepted him as almost one of their own. He was allowed to walk the deck whenever he pleased, save the evenings when darkness dawned on the world like a mother’s love. In the mornings, if ever Jabari called his training to an end on time, he would run up to the deck and help the little he could. By afternoon he would find himself sitting with one sailor or the other, listening to one tale of woe or the other.

He learned that Donovan, a flaxen haired man who did not look like one to mount a boat, was actually the son of a sailor and a whore. He’d been raised in a brothel and was not even thirty yet.

Benjamin, a scar-faced man with skin as dark as night, was the singer of the crew. His voice was beautiful and carried far and wide. He could pitch a note so high it put even the voice of ladies to shame. And when he put his hands on instruments of any kind—according to the stories, for Seth had only seen him with a guitar—he could make beauty the likes of which even Greek gods would envy.

Seth spent as little time as he could with Benjamin.

A reminder of his home was not a thing he ever sought.

He spent the most time with a crew mate called Dave, though. From Dave he learned the art of knots, as the man so aptly called it. With a single length of rope Dave could knot the oddest things. He’d once seen the man pull off enough knots to form the shape of a horse and release it in one tug. How, was a question he never got an answer to. In the two months spent on ship he learned the knots as best he could, learning the multiples as he could.

There was a knot for every purpose and every rope. Some ropes were too thin to bring out the potential of some knotting techniques, and some were too large. Some knots were best tied with a single rope while other needed more than one, some requiring as high as eight. He learned there were knots that required far more, but Dave said nothing of them.

At night, as the crew shooed him below deck and went to the processes of closing the day he never knew, Jabari would sit him fervently in their enclosed room and teach him the latest in a string of lessons. In his magnanimity, Jabari taught him how to breathe.

He had been confused on the first night as Jabari had sat him down, forcing him to cross legs incapable of flexibility beneath him.

“Your breathing is poor,” the priest had said. “It leads you to tire easily. With it you would die quickly as a priest.”

“So priests breathe differently?” Seth had asked.

“No.”

The answer was all he had gotten.

Jabari then placed a finger beneath Seth’s nose, waited a while, then said. “Breathe out.”

Seth complied, pushing out the air in his lungs until he was stopped. When he was asked to breathe in, it was till his lungs were full to bursting.

Then Jabari changed the pattern until Seth found himself breathing in short, quick bursts. It reminded him of how he breathed when he was tired, after exerting himself with some physical strain or the other. But that was where the similarities ended. This style of breathing was anything but labored. It was also quite surprisingly quiet despite how quickly it came and went.

In the beginning, it always left his heart pounding and made sleep another lesson of sorts, forcing him to focus before sleep claimed him. That he began coming awake at the slightest sound or motion, led him to believe it affected him even in his sleep.

Suffice to say, it spoiled sleep for him.

But in his time on the ship he grew accustomed to it so that it came naturally to him, in part.

………………………………………..

At the cusp of their second month on a particularly darkening evening, Jabari said his first words to the captain since boarding the ship.

“Soon,” he said, pointing a finger true north as he’d done once every week.

“And what lies soon?” Nathan asked.

Jabari dropped his hand, resting it on Seth’s shoulder as he answered. “Our destination.”

Seth peered into the horizon, fighting a mild thrum of headache at the back of his head. In the distance beyond, the cloud was darkening with a promise of a thunderstorm. Its dark volume was lined with streaks of white and reminded him of a mage’s painting hung on one of the walls of Natalie’s parents’ living room he’d seen on one of the few occasions he’d been to her house.

“Mind telling me where I’m headed now?” Nathan asked in a voice that did not hope for an answer. It was merely a routine question asked ever so often.

Jabari offered him no reply as was always the case before retreating below deck.

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“An odd fellow your uncle,” Nathan told Seth. “He is your uncle, is he not?”

Seth’s response was a shrug.

“Just curious, because he couldn’t possibly be your father.”

Again, Seth shrugged. They’d never spoken of what he was to tell people when asked of their relationship. But this was not the first time someone was asking. The first had been earlier on when the crew had accepted him. The lie he’d told them was the one he gave the captain even now.

“He’s more of a family friend,” he answered.

Nathan scratched his beard thoughtfully. “So… not an uncle then.”

Seth shook his head. “Still an uncle. He’s just not blood related.”

Nathan spared him a brief glance as his hand played with the swaying wheel that steered the ship absently. “I reckon he’s not a very good one.”

That got Seth’s attention. “Why’s that?” he asked.

Nathan barked a short laugh. “Did you see yourself when you boarded my ship? You were a twig and a cup shy of a skeleton,” he said. “I swear I feared the wind would carry you away when you climbed the plank.”

Seth thought back to that day and remembered it was sunny and without wind. There wasn’t even enough breeze to ruffle his hair in anyway. The thought made him touch his hair. It remained unruly, and had grown out even more, threatening to fall even lower than his shoulder. Perhaps I’ll get to cut it in the seminary.

To Nathan, he said, “There was no wind that day.”

The captain only chuckled. “My point exactly.” He spared Seth another glance and smiled softly, genuinely. “But I’m glad Benson was able to put some flesh and muscle on those bones of yours.”

Seth smiled at this. The cook had done so quite significantly. His single shirt and trouser, dying though they were, were filled out now. He was more aptly built than he’d been before the ship. His shoulders were filling out and he was seeing his biceps now where he had seen just an upper arm before. He was more grounded and felt his weight. However, Benson’s feeding had done nothing for his height.

He was still shorter than he would’ve liked.

His disappointment must’ve shown on his face because Nathan added: “You’re still young. You still have enough time before your growth spurt.”

It was a kind thing of him to say, but Seth knew better than to believe it.

Later that night as he sat, breathing the proper way in short bursts that forced his heart to race, Jabari did something he’d never done during these lessons: he asked him questions.

He asked about the layer of the ship, for which Seth had no response.

“Picture it,” he said, adding when Seth closed his eyes: “Do you see the main deck?”

Seth nodded.

“Good. Now trail the path. Follow it through everywhere you’ve been.”

Seth obeyed.

He trailed a path, first wandering the deck as much as he could, surprised at how easily it came to him. There were some fuzzy parts, unfilled information. There were parts of the deck he couldn’t remember with certainty. He didn’t know if it was wood or metal that filled the space and he walked on without paying it much attention. They were details Jabari wasn’t asking for so he found no reason to complicate the lesson.

He walked the deck’s length, weaving between the masts and workers who moved about in his imaginary world. When he was done, he took the stairs down. Down the groaning ladder used as stairs he ignored the working men, some carrying pans of coal no doubt for the engine located somewhere he’d never been. It made him wonder how exactly the ship was powered.

He did not wander his thoughts alone, though. The accuracy of his map was not attributed to himself, rather it was giving to his minds, each fragment to its own. Each piece cautioned and corrected as they saw fit, making a fun game of the task while he remained confused by it.

It’s to the left, a mind cautioned as he turned right in his mind.

The kitchen’s actually to the right, another thought.

Only if you’re coming from below deck.

Often he was forced to silence them, though they did not listen, ranting and raving in complete dissonance of what they felt was wrong or right. Ignoring them was proving a skill needed to be learned and he had no doubt he would learn it. He, after all, was forced to practice frequently enough.

“We only have a few days left on this ship,” Jabari said thoughtfully when they were done. “Not enough time to learn its entire lay out.”

But Seth was forced to keep learning the little he could.

…………………………..

Three days later, at the genesis of a darkened night, their time on the ship came to a tragic end.

“STORM AHEAD!!!” Someone bellowed, loud enough to pierce the night air riddled with the sound of waves slapping against the ship.

The sound that followed was a stampeding of feet as every crew member fell into action. Behind the comfort of their door, Seth was distracted from his conversation with Jabari.

“Stay,” Jabari told him, rising to his feet. “And continue to breathe.”

As he left, Seth heard him sigh, his last words echoing in his mind moments after the door had been closed.

“…I guess we are out of time,” he heard the priest say.

The words themselves were ominous enough in how they were said. But there was a greater dread buried in Seth’s heart beyond just the words.

Today, for the first time since boarding the ship, Jabari was wearing his cassock.

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