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Old 02-13-2007, 12:12 PM   #3
The Squatter of Amon Rûdh
Spectre of Decay
 
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Quote:
Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate,
Misread his maps and so arrived too late,
Forlorn on Illiúmë’s gilded shore.
Daebolic the Loremaster

Many are the legends told of the heroes of Muddled Mirth. They speak in hushed tones of Halfullion Gormlessar, of Gravlox the Redeemed, even of Earnur the Confused, Bucket-Helm of Dun Sóbrin; but there are countless heroes who, but for a capricious twist of fate, could have joined those illustrious names. These are the might-have-beens; the almost-legends, who missed their moment by the narrowest of margins and fell straight into obscurity. Mëanderin the Indirect was one such man, and his crew weren’t the first to be condemned by association.

To give Fate its due, it was a particularly careless mistake. Inaccurate maps with enormous blank patches are one thing, but such a map held upside-down for the best part of three-hundred nautical miles does very little to shorten one’s journey. So it was that Mëanderin and his crew had missed their chance to be involved in the greatest armament in the history of Muddled Mirth, to share in looted treasure beyond the dreams of avarice and to write their names large in the annals of legend. By the time of the Entish Bow’s re-unification they had missed the opening skirmishes, the important tactical set-pieces, the drawn-out siege warfare, the miraculous midwinter truce and a disputed contest involving an inflated sheep’s bladder. In short, they had missed the entire war and were presumed dead by most of the combatants.

And yet their voyage continued; day after day, day after day, with only the suggestion of breath or motion. Once there had been dreams of glory, but now there was only the grinding monotony of weeks at sea punctuated by brief landfalls, each of which had left them with new horrors to haunt their dreams: the crazed harridan who had dressed their pigs as sailors; the one-eyed shepherd with a million holiday snaps to discuss; a trench filled with congealed blood and dairy produce, where former celebrities wallowed in a vain quest for lost youth. Somewhere was either home or their destination, but they had lost their bearings long ago. Who could tell how long they had wandered? Who could say how far they had travelled, or how many miles remained? There was only the unforgiving sky, the cruel sea, the dreadful boredom and the grim, mirthless mummery that was the International Date Line ceremony - of late a weekly event. It says much of Mëanderin’s leadership that at this stage he announced what a good idea it would have been to have brought a navigator.

***

‘Land ho!’

A hundred pairs of hollow eyes turned, more out of habit than hope, to follow the lookout’s outstretched arm. A question burned on a hundred pairs of cracked lips and a hundred swollen tongues, but while it remained unasked the answer all the crew dreaded would remain unspoken.

After an eternity of seconds, an unimposing figure left the steersman’s side and called up to ask the inevitable.

‘Is it…?’

‘No, Cap’n’. Small island. Three points off the larboard quarter.’

Mëanderin turned to cast his world-weary gaze in entirely the wrong direction. His voice was irritable and tense.

‘I smell land, but I see no land. Is it that blasted whale again? I told you lot not to feed it.’

The first mate was used to such minor lapses of seamanship. He moved quietly to his captain’s side and gently translated the lookout’s report: ‘Over there, sir’.

‘Well, why doesn’t he say so? It’s all port this and starboard that; what’s wrong with good old-fashioned left and right? That’s what I’d like to know. Anyway, does it look familiar?’

With enthusiastic relief, the entire crew answered: ‘No, sir’.

This was better than he’d expected: they weren’t sailing around in circles any more. Now if only they were pointed in roughly the right direction this voyage might actually end one day. Only one pertinent question remained.

‘Does it look safe?’

‘Yes, cap’n’

‘I mean really safe. There aren’t any mysterious banquets laid out for us, or some suspiciously fat sheep? No bevies of beautiful mezzo-sopranos?’

‘No blatant traps, Cap’n’`

‘Well, best be sure anyway. I’ll take all the senior officers ashore with one dispensable subaltern for support, while the ship remains dangerously close inshore to wait for us. Laetninrod! Put on this red tunic!’

By now, all hands were accustomed to their captain’s unique tactical style, so no attempt was made to argue. Once the third mate had made the satirical suggestion that the landing party should take the fresh water ashore too; they had gone a whole week without drinking, but the man-eating plants had flourished.

Accordingly, three hours later Mëanderin, along with his first and second mates, Starstruc and Redwine, Asperin the ship’s surgeon and the aforementioned Laetninrod, put ashore upon an apparently uninhabited island to see if it was safe for their less mission-critical subordinates. They were also, not to put too fine a point on it, on the scrounge. Several years at sea amid inclement weather conditions, hostile mythical entities and, on more than one occasion, aggressive geology, tend to take it out of a ship’s company, and the time was long overdue to bring the vessel ashore, patch the larger holes and fit some new rigging. For some reason, cyclopean subaqueous behemoths have a keen taste for yardarms.

The island was more welcoming than they’d hoped: nobody tried to kill or enchant them as they rowed ashore, and the sand was neither burning hot, made from powdered human bones nor inhabited by giant carnivorous worms - everyone has a good day once in a while. No mysteriously abandoned suits of armour lounged beside innocent pools; no suspicious wisps of smoke curled from yawning caverns and nobody seemed to have left any large herds of sleek farm animals wandering around unattended. The companions were beginning to relax and enjoy a quiet stroll along the beach when they found the ship.

Wrecked ships were no novelty to the crew of the Hyperbolic. Waters don’t normally remain uncharted if people can spend a quiet summer sailing around them taking notes; and in fact it was only the scavenging of various ill-fated expeditions that had kept them boldly going where they’d quite often been before. All that differed in this case was that the ship, far from looking as though it had been wracked by mighty seas, appeared to have lost an argument with gravity. That a ship had come to fall from the sky should have given such hardened wanderers pause for thought, especially since they had managed not one uneventful landfall in all their protracted peregrinations; but one doesn’t have adventures like theirs by seeing trouble coming.

‘I say, what luck,’ announced Mëanderin with ominous enthusiasm. ‘Laetninrod: go back and fetch the others. I’ll go aboard and see what I can… salvage.’

Five minutes later there was a scuffle in the trees just inland from the beach, which ended in an abbreviated scream. Redwine sighed and walked back towards his ship, studiously keeping to the shoreline a safe distance from the waves. Meanwhile Mëanderin swarmed aboard the newly re-christened Pile of Free Stuff (it’s not easy for one person to swarm, but years at sea had perfected the skill) and checked the soundness of the mast by giving it a good shake.

By the time they dug him out at the end of a night’s intensive labour, his men had removed everything useful from the heap of wreckage, with the result that it could now more accurately be described as ‘three rotten planks covered in barnacles, and a commemorative egg-timer'. They had only delved so deep in search of a valuable cargo that didn’t exist, which goes to show where greed will get you. A collective groan greeted his cheerful thanks; they had been discussing the matter of his replacement even as they worked.

Last edited by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh; 02-13-2007 at 01:09 PM.
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