21 Seagulls

by ANGELOS KYPRIANOS

  Basco’s presence caused a commotion and lots of comments. It was obvious they’d suspected something the night before, and they now came to the right conclusions. There was fear in their eyes, and Mascardi noticed many of them doing the sign of warding off evil, even if he had never seen them praying or talking to the gods in the past.

  Dizan took a step forward, looking between Basco and the captain.

  “Captain… How did this happen? We were all there, we saw…”

  Mascardi grabbed an apple and snapped it in half with a powerful bite. “What you saw was a trick. A well-studied trick. Basco, as you can see, is here, in the flesh, more alive than ever.”

  He patted his back in demonstration, raising a cloud of dust; Basco hadn’t washed the dirt of his burial off of him.

  The others kept staring, suspicious and frightened. Mascardi hadn’t convinced them.

  “Nothing has changed,” he continued undeterred. “It’s just that, as of today, we will be calling him Ghost.”

  That really didn’t help things, and Mascardi was the only one who smiled at the irony.

  Then, the captain gave the final orders, to load the last provisions, untie the ropes and, finally, raise the Seagull banner up on the main mast, where it flapped in the wind like a bird made of fabric.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t raise the Trident, captain? It’s a better symbol,” Basco suggested again but Mascardi was stubborn.

  “I like seagulls,” he insisted.

  Mascardi felt more alive than ever that day. Finally, after all these years, his plan would be put into action. After countless battles, on land and at sea, he was now the master of himself and a skilled crew. The Seagull would follow a course into the unknown seas of the South, where rumors about the Monsters’ islands abounded. The Baron Criden’s orders had been imprinted in his head, drawing a map of his course, but Mascardi had learned to open his own roadways and create his own maps.

  His journey had just begun, and he was the captain.

  ***

  That afternoon had become tense after the reunion on the deck. When the sun hung low over the horizon and the Knight’s Coast looked like a distant black dot on it, Mascardi gathered the crew and they all sat on the deck for an update. He hoped his words would help them overcome any lingering awkwardness from last night’s events and focus on the future.

  The crew was standing around the captain in a disciplined circle. Yarduk, the cook, had served a few drinks and snacks, by order of the captain, and the men picked up little bites with their daggers and wetted their throats with rum.

  “There is a lot of water ahead of us, but, as you can guess, there is also a lot of land.”

  The murmuring died down. Mascardi slowly raised his eyes from the floor and looked at the men.

  “The places we are about to visit are vast, so we have to be in shape. We will act like a small army. I gave my word to the Baron Criden that we will rid these islands of the monsters that nest deep under the ground.”

  None seemed discouraged by that prospect.

  “What is the real plan?” Odet spoke up. The young man had a big mouth, and Mascardi had overlooked that fact plenty of times in the past. Odet had been his squire for a time, when Mascardi had served as a knight. The then sixteen-year-old had been as bad at being a squire as Mascardi had been at being a knight, but certain skills had earned him a place among his crew. Deftly handling a bow and arrows and knowing how to work leather were two of those.

  “The real plan is what I just said, Odet,” Mascardi replied, putting him in his place. “We will claim these islands in the name of the king and make sure to rid them of the monsters that plague them.”

  His eyes found Basco’s. Then, he turned to Dizan.

  “Now, as you can imagine, these islands aren’t solely the home of monsters.”

  “There are others there,” old Karil supplemented this time.

  Mascardi nodded at him to speak. The old man smoked his pipe and coughed out a cloud of smoke.

  “Deserters and pirates have built their nests on those shores like cockroaches, Mascardi. What do you plan to do about those?”

  Mascardi shrugged. “Peace, in the name of the king.”

  Karil snorted wryly. “You have enough gold for peace?”

  The word “gold” sparked a new round of murmuring.

  “No gold for them. We have something better.”

  To everyone’s puzzlement, Mascardi pointed at Dizan. The latter sat up, equally curious as the rest.

  “I have something for you,” he started saying before Vario Darani appeared, having just come up from the cabins. With heavy footsteps, he entered the circle. No one felt comfortable in his presence. He was twice as big as anyone there and his neck was as thick as a thigh. The commotion, though, was mainly caused by the sight of a young girl accompanying him. Mascardi’s expression revealed he had no idea who she was.

  The girl –barely eighteen years old– wore tattered clothes and sported a swollen eye and bruises everywhere, along with blood on her elbows and thighs. Her blonde hair and the angles on her face bespoke of a noble birth, and Mascardi’s temper instantly flared.

  Vario’s smug expression was the only proof Mascardi needed to know what he’d been doing with the girl.

  “Who is that?” he managed incredulously.

  Vario snatched a piece of meat and ate it ravenously. Then he spilled ale on his beard as he drank.

  “She’s with me,” he declared with a loud belch, while the girl stared at the floor, embarrassed and exhausted.

  “I didn’t bring you here to amuse yourself with girls!” the captain snapped, but Vario’s expression didn’t change.

  “No, captain, you brought me here to kill monsters,” he said, chewing.

  He took two steps into the circle – a way to show his power. Even his shadow was intimidating. From all the killers Mascardi had met in his life so far, Vario was the most capable one, but like a bull in a china shop, the damage he could cause was unfathomable.

  Mascardi didn’t know how to respond to that obvious challenge. The air between them was already charged. He decided to ignore it for now.

  “Our first stop is Loriax.”

  “The island of thunder,” Dizan added.

  Mascardi nodded, standing up. “They call it the Island of Thunder because that’s exactly what it is. Lightning never ceases there. Day or night.”

  “It is the wrath of the gods,” Alaoso interrupted. “The Great Sentinel relentlessly batters this island, I think.”

  The murmuring started intensifying again.

  “The knights of Lothen couldn’t even travel up Loriax’s cape. Lightning bolts struck their metal armors, drawn by them the way foot soldiers attract arrows,” he said, causing a round of laughter.

  “But we won’t have armors,” Vario said in his deep voice.

  “No. No, we won’t,” Mascardi agreed with a smile. “When we arrive there, we will split into two groups. The larger one will come with me, and the smaller one will stay at the camp and follow the instructions.”

  He looked at Dizan then, and the young man realized that was what the captain had been talking about before Vario showed up. He still didn’t know what this was about but was confident he’d receive all the necessary information in private when the time came.

  They went on with planning their course of action, as well as with an update about equipment, provisions, and the route they’d take. Every stop would be a chance to restock the ship with supplies, and the plan was optimistic but realistic enough. Mascardi explained what it meant acting like a small army without formally being one – if they followed the plan faithfully, the result would be the same.

  As the light dimmed over the open seas of the south, the men dispersed. Vario returned to his cabin with the trophy girl, and Mascardi summoned Dizan, Karil and Basco to his quarters.

  ***

  The cabin had filled with old Karil’s smoke. The elderly man smoked his pipe and
drank without stop, and his face was scrunched up from the negative thoughts and the clouds inside his head. The four men sat in a tight circle as the ship glided over the dark waters. Through the cracks of the wooden walls, they could hear the girl’s cries. Mascardi had closed his eyes, visibly mad.

  “She can’t come with us,” he said in a low tone.

  “You go and take her from him,” Karil challenged, coughing. Mascardi glared at him.

  “What do we care what woman Vario has in his bed?” Dizan asked.

  “Vario is trouble, Dizan,” the captain informed him.

  “Yes, but he’s the best monster hunter we could have, and once we get to the islands and fight the monsters, he will prove that.”

  His voice rose, heated towards the end. Mascardi rubbed his throbbing temples. Dizan was still confused, waiting for an adequate explanation.

  “We can’t be hunting monsters and having Vario being distracted by the thought of a girl waiting in his room.”

  Dizan certainly couldn’t imagine why this would be a problem. His face twitched. “Captain, if you believe Vario is the type of person that falls in love, then you are overestimating him.”

  Mascardi rose to his feet. “I haven’t overestimated any of you, believe me!” he said with true anger on his face. “He will grow softer with time, Dizan. A beautiful, highborn girl will crawl under his skin, and soon, she’ll make him careless. I won’t put up with a man like Vario being careless!”

  The room grew quiet. Karil surrendered to a prolonged fit of dry cough.

  “We have to get her out of there,” Mascardi concluded.

  The men looked at each other.

  “I’ll bring her to you, Mascardi,” Basco offered, and Dizan smiled at him.

  “You will sneak into his room like a ghost, eh? Slip under the covers maybe? Vario will enjoy killing you again, Basco. He could do it every day, given the chance.”

  Basco rose to his feet, unfazed. He looked at Mascardi, who nodded. “Bring her to the deck, Basco, as soon as they fall asleep, but be careful. Vario may have drunk a lot but he used to be a hunter for years; he’ll be a light sleeper.”

  Basco nodded and turned to leave.

  “One moment!” Dizan stopped him. “He has put that kid outside his room as a guard, you won’t be able to get in.”

  “Odet? I can handle Odet,” Basco insisted and Dizan simply shrugged.

  The Ghost took a few steps, opened the door, and got out.

  As soon as the door closed behind him, Karil stood up. He opened a cabinet and drew out a small, wooden box. Opening it, he found a few soft pieces that looked like mushrooms, and started chopping them on the table with the aid of a switchblade.

  “You will have to kill that daughter, lad,” he grunted, his voice so low it sounded like a rumble. Mascardi felt the tension but didn’t answer. “She will only bring trouble. Kill her.”

  Mascardi opened his mouth to say something but no words came out.

  “If I can do it, then you certainly can too,” the old man went on.

  Dizan was in the dark again.

  “What are you planning to see with those?” he asked the old man, pointing at the mushrooms in his hands. Karil picked up a few with his fingers and stuffed them in his mouth.

  “Whatever the gods wish me to see,” he replied. “And now go, I don’t need your noise. I have to be able to hear their voices clearly.”

  Mascardi rose, nudging Dizan’s shoulder for him to do the same.

  “I will wait for you to tell me what you saw, Karil,” he told him. The old man waved him away.

  “Kill the daughter,” he muttered through his teeth. The men left the room.

  ROUGH WAVES

  “I still don’t know what you want me to do once we get there,” Dizan complained.

  The two of them sat on the deck as the ship glided over calm and dark waters. The summer night had grown more peaceful, and the night birds flew in circles under the moonlight.

  “It isn’t just monsters that live on the island where we’re going, Dizan.”

  “But also pirates,” the musician added hastily.

  “Not all of them are pirates. Those are just rumors the Barons spread, in the name of the king, to make the islands sound like awful places and make it clear that whoever doesn’t stand with Lothen, stands against it.”

  Dizan gulped.

  “What I’m saying is,” Mascardi went on, his voice growing more serious, “we’ll treat some of them by the book and others not, but we definitely need to win them over.”

  Dizan seemed at a loss again. “How hard can that be, captain? We’ll sneak in during the night and…”

  Mascardi interrupted him. “No, you got it wrong. There won’t be any battle. We have to win them over to our side.” He leaned closer, even though there were only a few people on the deck at the time and they were unable to hear their whispers. “Why do you think there are only twenty-one men in this crew, Dizan?”

  “Because Lord Criden couldn’t give us more soldiers?” It was obvious that the question hadn’t been filtered through enough consideration.

  “Wrong. He offered me an entire company. An additional ship would be needed to carry them all, and he was gladly offering that as well.”

  Dizan couldn’t believe it. “Then why?”

  “Because these men wouldn’t be my men, Dizan. Do you understand? I need people who’ll enter the mouth of the wolf with me, without having anyone else over their heads, you understand?”

  Dizan shook his head.

  “We need a lot of soldiers to take back the islands, that’s for sure, but I’m not planning to give them back freely. If soldiers of the king or some baron had come with us, they would have planted the Lion banner on the first rock they would’ve found, and that place would have belonged to Lothen forever.”

  “If that’s the case, what exactly are we doing?”

  “Did you prepare the song as I told you?”

  Dizan grimaced. “Yes, I wrote it. Simple and easy, just like you asked. If it’s good, only Theanivar knows.”

  Mascardi laughed. “It doesn’t matter if it’s good.”

  Dizan looked troubled again. “But that title, Mascardi… I don’t know. 21 Seagulls? Really?”

  He could see the captain’s annoyance despite the dark.

  “It is a fine title,” he declared firmly. “Listen now. When we arrive at the island, you’ll stay behind with the group at the camp while we are gone.”

  Dizan liked that. He wouldn’t be joining the hunt. Whatever they’d encounter at the campsite, it would certainly be better than what the others would find in the woods and the mountains.

  “You will be playing that song to whoever wants to listen. Every tavern and corner of that place. You will keep singing the lyrics until they become the truth in everyone’s head, you understand?”

  Dizan nodded, reluctantly.

  “You will have to be masterful, Dizan. You will have to be outstanding.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” the bard complained.

  “It means I didn’t take you with me on this journey due to your nonexistent battle techniques,” Mascardi teased him and Dizan smiled, a bit offended. “And you have to remember, they have to love this song and sing it even if they are… prejudiced towards us.”

  Dizan didn’t understand. “Why would they be prejudiced?”

  Mascardi turned and looked him in the eye. “I told you, Dizan. We won’t treat everyone by the book.”

  ***

  The Ghost slipped inside Vario Darani’s room. Young Odet protested for this intrusion, scared for his life, but Basco explained these were the captain’s orders, and that if he didn’t get out of the way, he would haunt him in his sleep after he died. After that, the kid moved away, not knowing what he was afraid of the most.

  The small cabin smelled of liquor, flesh, smoke, and all other scents one could find in an Enis brothel, in western Lothen. The girl slept next to the savage giant
that had raped her repeatedly. Basco, calm, woke her up, putting his hand over her mouth. The girl opened her eyes wide but didn’t make a sound. Basco gestured lazily at her to get up and follow him.

  She rose, blood running on her thighs. Embarrassed, she could barely walk. Basco helped her. She clung to his arm so tightly, her fingernails nearly dug into his flesh. She followed him out of the room, more than willingly.

  ***

  When they climbed on the deck, they saw Mascardi’s and Dizan’s silhouettes in the night. Their whispering was drowned out by the Ghost’s footsteps – the girl walked soundlessly, stumbling. The captain looked reluctant. Dizan, disturbed by the sight, hurried away without a word.

  “A ship like this is no place for a girl like you, my dear.”

  The captain’s voice was calm and soothing. The girl felt safe in his presence. Her eyes watered at once.

  “I didn’t want to come here, my lord. Please, have mercy.”

  She burst into tears, falling at Mascardi’s feet. He stroked her hair and looked the expressionless Basco straight in the eye. Then he gestured at her to stand up, and she did, coming face to face with the captain.

  “I am sorry you got involved in this business. Unfortunately, Vario isn’t a man who asks for anyone’s permission. He always gets what he wants.”

  The girl didn’t answer. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she wiped at them with the back of her hand.

  “What is your name?”

  He raised her chin with his finger. Two brilliant eyes met his.

  “Elia,” she answered, and the captain was relieved she didn’t offer her last name.

  “My lord, I can’t go on like this,” she sobbed.

  “No, you can’t,” Mascardi agreed.

  His gaze scanned the dark horizon. Basco’s eyes never left him, as stern as a judge’s gavel. Reluctantly, Mascardi looked at him again and inwardly cursed the gods.