The fish and the hook

Regular Posts : 54 Join date : 2015-01-11 Location : UK

Part I

A gasp of air as if he were dying for it, as if it were some tangible sustaining thing that the Northman would have ripped to pieces with his calloused hands and thrust down his throat. Air, salty and tasting of life to his dry tongue that had had experience of nought but maggoty bread and weakened rum in that dank hovel his captors referred to as ‘below decks’. Below decks; the decks of what he had often wondered, as he refused to allow his mind enter the same state as his body, all bound up in shackles. Hel and her ferocity would have been a more welcome companion in that long and dismal voyage than the stifling heat that clung to the body like a sickening seductress in attempts to insidiously weave her way through the skin and spread her foul embrace in the innermost cages of bone and chambers of flesh.

As he lay upon those wooden slats of the docks, bleached by sun and sea to be as white as bone, the cargo was piled about him and eventually almost made him and his oxen bulk a part of the eclectic haul of rum, sugar and shot.

Nothing made sense. The world didn’t make sense. The people didn’t make sense. His own senses didn’t make sense. Everything swam together in violent torrents, any attempts at normalcy disappeared into nothing but sea spray as conflicting and nonsensical rivers of circumstance crashed into each other in self destructive waves.

He felt like a ship caught in a storm.

And he was about to capsize.

A thick boot upon his side and he was rolled over with some effort. Not kicked, the man still didn’t know what to make of their captive and didn’t want to, as they say, ‘provoke the bear’, but nonetheless he couldn’t keep a curiosity at bay. The man, an Englishmen by the name of Hart, wanted to see the brute they had swiped from the Spanish not two weeks hence, that had been inhabiting one of the darker corners of their brig, ‘The Harbinger’. The blonde on the slats reminded the pirate of one of the lions he had seen at the travelling circus back home in England, dirt and all, something mighty, a king, reduced to something starving, a peasant.

Perhaps if he had tried to prod that lion with his boot he may have thought twice about trying the same trick with the disgruntled Nordic.

Having swallowed enough air to feel able to focus on what was happening, when the blonde was rolled over to see a thin shadow swallowing the sunlight and registered that the unwelcome leather pressed about his ribs belonged to the caster, he began to seethe with a concealed rage that flooded his system with molten adrenaline; making muscles burn in furious fervour. His eyes hardened as he seemed to attempt to right himself with the speed at which he slid upwards measured by his acknowledgement of sustained injury.

By the time he was seemingly slumped back against a rum barrel, hands down by his sides and looking as though all the fight had remained out of his reach upon some far horizon, the Englishman was coloured with amusement. Amusement who fled him like his sardonic smirk as the foreigner struck out with a bestial wrath contorting those calloused paws to hooks and thick arms to coiled dock rope. Without so much as a yelp, Hart was forced to the floor with his back pressed uncomfortably down upon the crooked head of a nail by the weight of the larger male atop him, a male whose strength now came from superior positioning alone as that energetic burst of fury had drained him of any sort of energy and the dizziness was returning with a jealous vengeance.

It didn’t stop Hart from all but shitting himself.

“Where is here!” The Northman roared with the little fuel he had left to his dry and impotent rage; pressing down upon the smaller man’s shoulders as if intending to crush them down so bone dust and blood would filter through the gaps in the slats and feed the shellfish in the shallows.

Hart’s hazel eyes swam with a terror befitting his position. He was a deckhand, he scrubbed floors and cleaned cannon, the fights he had seen were far and few between but the illusionary bravado wasn’t something he could ever pass up on. Underneath the sallow complexion, the slight scars and the missing teeth in the maw made rotten with rum, was still a poxy youth with a backbone as strong as sugar crop. The harsh intonations of the blonde colossus, the foreign lilt to broken and deeply accented English gave him that queasy feeling in that cesspit of a stomach where he didn’t know whether to be more afraid or laugh and all that was being scrambled by his wits collecting themselves to try and survive this wretched encounter.

Hart stuttered. It was a detriment he thought he had outgrown. His semblances of words weren’t good enough for the Northman.

The blonde snarled and his ancestral heritage for violence became all too believable as he seemed to make to crush the shoulder joints inwards on the young adult, to break the collarbones beneath the scarred pads of his thumbs as though they were brittle branches.

“Here! Where am I here!”

“N-N-Na-“ Hart’s lungs convulsed, his heart flipped and blocked his throat as his fingers found something cold and dangerous by his hip with frenzied fingers. In his head he begged to the God he had forsaken, the mother he had abandoned, and the merciless reliability of a particular weapon he know found himself placing the most faith in.

Another yelp as he felt something break, another wave of sweat broke out of pores like salt bullets.

“W-what’s th-tha-that?”

A metal muzzle was a stark contrast the heat of his sun baked flesh, yet still the Icelander looked down and saw the slender instrument of such cowardly death was pressed insistently against the charcoal lines of a tattoo from his homeland – primitive it may have seemed but the primitive magicks with which they had been carved to imbue were often the most sacred.

The sight of the pistol sobered an increasingly irate beast and with a lungful of air that he exhaled with a stallion’s snort, the Northman locked onto those dark frightened pits that dared call themselves eyes.

“A gun.”

Hart nodded nervously with a small snicker that spoke of hollowness and the uncertain precipice of victory and proceeded to cock the weapon; the click syncing with a spasm of the Icelander’s abdomen.

“I d-d-d-don’t want t-to have t-t-t-to kill you,” he warned through a frightened warble in his voice and became bolder whenever his staccato stutter would allow him to; “bu-bu-but I wu-wu-will!”

The threat didn’t seem to do anything but cause the Nordic to ice over; like the swift advance of frost on the glacier, but with a deathly silence and the threat of having his stomach torn through with a piece of lead at close enough range that he could almost hear its anticipation in the barrel, the Northman let go of the pirate’s shoulders and instead braced his own hands as far apart as they could go with the chain link between the shackles clanging taut before the Englishman’s palpitating throat.

Hart pulled the trigger out of gut reaction from the bone jarring noise.

Nought but a dull click.

Wet powder.

A small whimper trapped behind chapped lips. The Northman had known; surely, how else would he have shown such fearlessness at the prospect of an agonisingly slow death.

The pirate saw those glacial blue eyes and it was as though they were weapons in their own right with the sensation of frostbite taking a hold of his galloping heart in a bruising hold.

“Take off the locks.”

Far above a gull cried and down on earth a particular Englishman had run out of options.

Regular Posts : 54 Join date : 2015-01-11 Location : UK

Part II

Hart hadn’t stayed around for long. He didn’t want to run the risk of what the Northman would do to him once the iron cuffs had been broken by the smithy.

The blonde had watched him leave with stern eye caught and half blinded by the fierce sun. It hadn’t escaped his notice that the awkward lollop of a gait with which the Englishman had fled barely concealed the fact that his bowels had turned to water. But that and all other unpleasantness was hopefully soon to be over, even if he hadn’t been spared the look of jaded mistrust the shock-haired blacksmith had given him. Breaking shackles was never anything new around these parts, a den of runaways, scoundrels and murderous cads that it was, but upon a white man of such stature it seemed remarkably odd.

Maybe, the smithy wondered as he readied the tools of his trade, maybe it was safer to keep such a pale brute in irons.

Yet then he remembered their cause in this pit of fools and demons and thought perhaps the more monsters they had here, the less civilisation had to use against them.

A grunt and he slid in beside the anvil; movement accompanied by the metallic protest of the other hanging tools.
“Hands here son.”

Iron met iron with a jarring sound which didn’t so much fade but end with a sudden abruptness so that any other noise rushed to fill that vacuum of noise; the faint melody from the tavern, the footfalls of ragged men and shouts from the harbour all mixed into beggar’s harmony. So this is what the ‘new world’ sounded like? Like slumbering chaos languid under the gaze of a devilish sun.

The Northman watched the older blacksmith work at detecting the points of weakness in his bonds and striking at them with surgical precision. It wasn’t as though he was a stranger to the trade, but breaking shackles was something he wanted to commit to memory lest his run of bad luck continued its treacherous course.

Air swept into the slivers of free space now available as the crude metal clasps were foiled in their purposes and how that same air which had been so cherished a mere half an hour ago, was now tending to bruised and broken flesh with spiteful kisses; kisses that stung and bit with hidden teeth. Thick fingers with blunt and blackened nails broke the rest of the shackles away from the Icelander’s wrists and said foreigner drew back instinctively in response to the pain which had ignited all about his wrists in cruel circles. The iron had rubbed the skin raw and it wept angry tears of blood from particular points and through the marring the northerner could only just recognise the tattoo that had lay stark against his right wrist once, and not amidst an bloodied myriad of irritated flesh.

The blacksmith noticed the tattoo as well, although he took it more as a prisoner’s marking rather than anything else. After a huff and throwing the shackles onto a heap on other such scrap to be smelted he asked;

“What’s that then?”

The Icelander looked away from his injuries and rather offered the man his right hand in a gesture of grateful camaraderie, a handshake with an appreciative smile as if any anger had been discarded along with the chains.

“Lásabrjótur,” he affirmed as the blacksmith accepted the handshake, still a little suspicious and especially so considering the man was a seldom seen breed of foreigner. A Scandinavian he thought, perhaps a slav, the language was unfamiliar to him. The smith kept their hands locked a little longer than the instigator intended and, like an animal in unfamiliar territory, the Northman was put on the defensive; concealing his eyes’ search for something with which to defend himself within arm’s reach. It was a tenuous show of appreciation, the smile he had worn gradually diminishing so it was nought but a confused line when the blacksmith with his shock of ginger hair suddenly let go and slapped his leather gloves down onto the flat of the anvil.

“Now, it ain’t my business to ask another man his own, but I suppose you ain’t got any coin to pay me for my service aye?”
A cold stone lodged itself in the bottom of the Icelander’s belly, he would rather not resort to violence again but he didn’t know what to expect of a man who affiliated with liars and murderers when such a man wasn’t paid with anything he could show to a barkeep or a whore.

“No,” his spine was steel and his liver far from yellow and the smithy saw a look of dogged determination in those blue eyes that were akin to the north sea herself; playfully light on most occasion until her wrath was kindled but a little by the fearsome Ægir and his occasionally stormy temperament.

Those blue eyes locked with brown and the blacksmith, a man of substance himself from the smog and scum of Liverpool, knew what character of man with whom he was dealing.

“Your name then, price enough considerin’ you’re as strange as you are – men’ll start to gossip like women ‘round these parts,” the smithy folded his arms, strong with dark shirt rolled to rough elbows, “word travels fast ‘ere in Nassau, folks might ‘ave space for someone of your…’build’.”

The Icelander gave a grunt of acknowledgement, piecing together the words he understood and weaving them so he had a chance at comprehension. He still maintained a wariness about him that was only briefly overcome when the other man offered him some water to clean his broken skin.

“What I’m sayin’ is son, a name’ll travel and that’s how work’s got,” he continued as the blonde across from him tentatively attended his wounds with the flagon of water, “without work, you’ll end up like the men by the wrecks.”

The blonde affixed him with an oddly inquisitive look as bloodied water dripped from his flesh to the floor of compacted earth, to which the smith gestured outside with his head as he idly picked a scab on his forearm.

“Poor bastards, men with no money, them that thought themselves too good to use a condom, the dead, the dying and the mad.”

Their eyes fixed each other’s again; tempestuous blue and strong brown.

“So, what was your name again lad?”

“Agnar,” came the gruff reply, “Agnar Heimirsson.”

Regular Posts : 54 Join date : 2015-01-11 Location : UK

Part III

'Where away?'

'Two points on the weather bow!'

'How far off?'

'A mile and a half!'

'Keep your eye on her!'

'Sing out when we head right!'

The whale was going leisurely to windward, blowing every now and again two or three times, then turning tail, up flukes, and sinking. The boats headed after him, keeping a distance of nearly one quarter of a mile from each other, to scatter their chances. The captain was in one of these smaller crafts but was not heading the hunt, that was a trade he left to one on his crew who knew how to secure such a prize, a peculiar Northman he had picked up in Nassau who went by the name of Agnar. The Icelander was in the head boat, helping row before the time came for him to use the harpoons nestled snug and glinting in the bowed centre of their small craft. There was six each to a boat and the knowledge was scattering therein.

“Stand by and lower!”

The thrill in Agnar’s blood was a familiar one, that primal place within men where the blood was thick and dark with a lust for the hunt. The feeling was shared in primitive tangibility with his other hunters, men of all shape, size and colour united for one common cause.

That of the hunt of the great whale, those ancient sea colossus’ which lurked in the depths of one of Mother Nature’s most beautiful creations; haunting those crystalline depths with its undulating tones. A beast truly worth the hunt, and respected in the manner of its titanic body being fully utilised in blessed capacity; bones, oil, meat, skin and fat all providing luxurious lifeblood for all folk, seafaring or otherwise.

A hand in the water.

The other men on the boat stilled their whispers for now, but knew that during the night shift aboard ship they would make elaborate assumptions of how their Icelandic whaler could feel the heartbeat of creatures beneath the waves.

It was all nonsense of course. No man held such power.

Although he did seem to react with a suspiciously keen swiftness.

“BRACE!”

The huge creature rose hard by Agnar’s boat yet the Nordic was upon the bow, harpoon in hand and able to plunge his two keen cold irons, which are always secured to one tow-line, into the monster's blubber-sides. It’s cry drown out the shouting voices of men with a deep and mournful melody as it came to realize how desperate its situation was.

The boat spun after him with almost the swiftness of a top, now diving through the seas and tossing the spray, and then lying still while the whale sounded; anon in swift motion again when the game rose, for the space of an hour. During this time another boat 'got fast' to him with its harpoons, and the Icelander's cruel lance had several times struck his vitals. He was killed, as whalers call it, that is, mortally wounded, an hour before he went into 'his flurry’ and was really dead or turned up on his back.

The barbs bit deep into, through the skin, the fat and tasting the red nectar of the most precious of organs, and the scent of blood which sent such aggressive creatures as men savage with primal bloodlust had the whale lose its final fight against such ferocity with the grace and dignity of such a monolithic martyr.

The loose boat then came to the ship for a hawser to fasten round his flukes; which being done, Agnar left his irons in the carcass and pulled for the ship, in order to beat to windward, and, after getting alongside, to cut him in. The mammoth carcass secured to the ship by a chain round the bitts, the crew proceeded to reeve the huge blocks that are always made fast for the purpose to the fore and main mast head, and to fasten the cutting-in tackle. The captain and two mates, including a sodden and already partially bloodied Nordic, then went over the sides on steps well secured, and having each a breast-rope to steady them and lean upon. The cooper, a squat man who many believed half mad with the sun and lead, passed them the long-handled spades, which he was all the time grinding and whetting so they could fall lustily to such grisly work of chopping off the blubber and quartering the beast.

Soon after all had finished cutting in, about eight o'clock in the evening, the wind increased almost to a gale, making it impossible to try out that night. But the morrow, while the ship was lying to, the business has begun in good earnest; the blubber-men cutting up in the blubber room; others pitching it on deck; others forking it over to the side of the try-works; two men standing by a horse with a mincing knife to cleave the pieces into many parts for the more easy trying out, as the rind of a joint of pork is cut by the cook for roasting: a collection of the mates pitched it into the kettles, feeding the fires with the scraps, and bailing the boiling fluid into copper tanks, from which it is the duty of another to dip into casks.

The whale taken proved to be a cow whale, forty-five feet long and twenty-five round, and it will yield between seventy and eighty barrels of right whale oil.

The captain was pleased and watching over his busy crew as they set their heads to such a momentous task. It was something to which they were new but not something they would not be giving up lightly now that they knew the prices for such a yielding.

And all thanks to the Northman scrubbing his hair and beard free of dried blood o’er portside near the rigging.

He didn’t stay with them past a year, a mutiny had left him quite displaced in Port Royal and there he nursed an infant addiction against the stationed British. That of gambling.