Rafen (The Fledgling Account Book 1)

by Y. K. Willemse

  Rafen forced himself to eat the bread slowly, allowing the taste to spread through his mouth. After this, he was too full to finish the remainder of the “small” meal. While Etana stacked away the tray and the rest of the food to give to “the cabin boy who was always hungry”, Rafen found himself blurting out, “What about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” Etana repeated.

  “Food for tomorrow?”

  “Do you honestly think there will be no food tomorrow? Oh, I understand.” She paused, a troubled look coming into her eyes. “There’s a galley on this ship, and a cook with lots of food. You shall eat three times a day, most everything you want, and you may even eat between meals too. Only don’t take so long about it. You have a life to live now.”

  Leaving the jug of milk on Rafen’s table, she exited the room. Rafen gradually relaxed, his mind spinning at the impossible, dreamlike prospect of three meals a day.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The King

  and Queen of Siana

  It took three days before Rafen could leave his bed. After his conversation with Etana, he had eventually fallen asleep again, despite his fear that if he slept, he would surely wake in Tarhia. Though the wounds on his back were healing, he was more tired than he had ever been in Tarhia. Etana said it was because he now had a chance to rest.

  Every day, things got better. Etana continued sharing a cabin with him – something she said her mother thought extremely improper, but her father allowed. Rafen loved it, having had enough of solitude in Talmon’s palace. They conversed often, though never about Tarhia.

  Seasickness prevented him from recovering as fast as Etana had hoped. When the ship headed into more open waters and the rocking grew steadily, Rafen’s stomach started churning. Even when he received other trays of beautiful food – more salted pork, onion soup, milk, bread soaked in gravy, and other things such as soft sponges, garlic cloves to chew on, compotes of stewed fruits, and dried meat as well – Rafen only nibbled what he was brought. Besides being sick, he felt permanently full. When he couldn’t eat anymore, he would lie back in his bed and inhale slowly, savoring the sweet, good air of the cabin and the luxurious scents of the food until Etana took whatever was left to the cabin boy.

  So far, the only other person Rafen had met on the ship had been Arez the philosopher, who did kesmal. Arez was a gangly man with a crown of hair surrounding a shining bald circle on his long, thin head. His smile always caught Rafen off guard. Thoroughly unlike a leer, it crinkled the skin beneath the eyes and lit them with a gentle glow. Phil smiled like that.

  Rafen had never thanked Phil, never apologized. That, and the memory of Torius’ death and the massacre in the mine, would return to him in his lonely moments. Had he really deserved this?

  On the morning of the third day, Etana at last announced Rafen was well enough to get out of his bed.

  “I can take you to the galley,” she offered.

  “No, thank you,” Rafen said, as she’d taught him to say.

  He was still terrified of discovering a Tarhian guard or being forced to talk to strange people, so Etana went alone.

  However, after nibbling a little more bread and some salted pork, Rafen decided he would get up, if only for a little. He rose slowly from the bed so that he wouldn’t make Etana angry by exacerbating his wounds. For the twentieth time, he looked in wonder at the cabin, at Etana’s cushion-covered bed opposite his; the chest of drawers and little table behind him; and the round porthole above them, which let in the refreshing light and showed him the rolling, mountainous sea.

  Rafen stood there a few minutes, glancing down now and then at his tan breeches, which were met at the bottom by long gray socks. He faced the mahogany door, turning the knob with a shaking hand.

  The rocking of the ship was worse in the hall, and Rafen leaned heavily against the wooden walls while he headed to the left of his cabin. Each time he discovered a room, he peeked into it. Some were used for storage, and others were cabins like his and Etana’s. Some had people in them. At these, he would noiselessly shut the door and hurry on.

  Eventually, he reached the end of the hall. This door was unlike any of the others. It had a crystal handle, and curious shapes lined its frame. Though Rafen couldn’t read ordinary letters, words slipped into his head when he stared at these. He gasped.

  Zion, na mirah ki lai na urd ra morono merinahc. Lr. Nàye lai az hah.

  Instinctively, he understood the translation: “Zion, the king of all the world is my Master. Yes. Let all know it”. The use of the name Zion intrigued him. He remembered Talmon sneering it at him. How could anyone with a Master have such a door to themselves? Did slaves really live behind crystal handles?

  He turned it and glanced around the door into the picturesque room. To the left, a huge bed was draped with a milky blanket obscured by an abundance of pillows. A desk sat in the center of the room, a shining crystal ball resting on it, its stand nailed to the smooth wooden surface. Right of the desk, a shelf was screwed to the wall, and old leather-bound books were wedged together on it. On the back wall, huge arching windows looked out to the tumbling sea. There were no cobwebs.

  No one was there, and the sight of books fascinated Rafen. Even the guards in Tarhia had been unable to read, excepting Phil. He had only been brought to Talmon’s palace when he was seven and hence could speak Tongue and read and write among other things. Phil had stolen an old key to the palace library and archives. Once he had brought a book into Rafen’s cell and read him some beautiful words about an ancient ruler from it. However, someone had noticed it was missing. Phil had never read to Rafen again.

  Rafen found himself beside the shelf now, running his index finger down one of the book’s spines. The leather binding had a pungent smell, and it was smooth and shiny, reflecting the vague shape of his head. Taking a deep breath, he removed the book from the shelf with difficulty. Placing the spine in the middle of his hands, he let it fall open, revealing a myriad of mysterious characters and a brightly painted picture of seven women dressed in white, gathered against a background of endless light.

  “You are impudent, little boy.”

  Rafen jumped, his stomach jolting. Jamming the book back on the shelf, he whirled around.

  A tall, elegant woman stared at him from near the bed to his left. Her solemn, heart-shaped face was pale and powdered, and her white-blonde hair was pulled back in complex wreaths of braids. Beneath arched gray eyebrows, her eyes were cold blue, like a wintry sky. Rafen had never seen anyone so beautiful.

  “I am sorry,” he said almost inaudibly. His Tarhian accent sounded painfully thick today. “What is ‘impudent’?”

  “Impudent,” the woman said curtly, “is looking at what doesn’t belong to you.”

  “I am very sorry.” Rafen blushed. He leaned hard against the shelf as the sea rocked.

  “Hmm,” the woman said. “What ails you? Are you seasick? You must be the boy we went to Setarsia Harbor for. You’re abysmally pale and skinny.”

  Rafen stared at the floor. He should never have come here. What if this woman told him he couldn’t sleep in the bed anymore? Or – his stomach clenched – she might lock him up for exploring rooms that didn’t belong to him. He desperately wished Etana were here.

  “Well,” the woman said, “you might say something. Do you read?”

  “No,” Rafen said quietly.

  “Why ever not?”

  “I was not taught, Your Grace.” A sudden impulse came over him. Despite his pounding heart, he lurched over to her and fell to his knees, kissing the hem of her pale violet dress. “Your Grace, please forgive me.”

  “Get up,” the woman said coldly.

  Rafen rose and backed away, his insides churning.

  “I will not have any Tarhian etiquette on this ship,” she said.

  “I am sorry.”

  “Stop saying those words; you use them ill.”

  Rafen bit his lip, wondering what he had done.

  Some
one flung the door open and came in. It was a short man with shoulder-length fiery hair and a lopsided red moustache across his light upper lip. He was only mildly overweight, but to Rafen it was so unusual he couldn’t stop looking at the protruding belly beneath the dark red shirt. The man’s pale face reminded Rafen of someone. Without noticing Rafen, he waddled over to the woman, staring at her with concerned, watery blue eyes.

  “My dear.” He raised a large hand, and Rafen thought he was going to strike her. He realized seconds later the man was gesticulating. “Why don’t you come join us on the deck? We’re having a simply marvelous time. Besides which, Alexander says there is little chance of the Tarhians manning a ship in time, because they only had one decent warship in that harbor of theirs. The others are off pursuing Sirius Jones, in hope of vain retribution.”

  He seemed to think this enormously funny. His lips parted in a self-satisfied grin, and chuckles rumbled through his belly. He glanced around the room in a habitual way, as if to see if an audience was watching.

  Then he noticed Rafen.

  “Hello.” His tone gathered some tenderness. “Is this the invalid I’ve been waiting to see?”

  Rafen wished they would stop using words he didn’t understand. He supposed they were insulting him.

  “Rafen, is it?” The man laid great emphasis on the name.

  “I came in to see him pawing my books,” the woman said loftily.

  “Ah, a scholar, is he? Good boy, Rafen! I loved books myself when I was a child. Still do, in fact. I used to read Perils of the Mortal. Quite poetic.”

  The woman’s eyebrows rose in a calculated manner, as if the man had missed the point of her remark precisely as she had expected him to. She moved over to the window to look at the sea.

  “I suppose you don’t know how to read, Rafen,” the man said. “No matter, I’ll have someone teach you.”

  “I will teach him, Robert. He needs a firm hand,” the woman said from the window.

  “There you are. Arlene’ll teach you. You’ll be perfectly family. How about it, Rafen?”

  Rafen recoiled against the shelf again.

  “Well, Rafen? How do you like the idea?”

  “Your Grace, I—”

  “Ah. Please don’t call me that, no one calls me that in Siana. It’s a horrible Tarhian tradition to call people above you ‘Your Grace’, as if they had any grace at all! Call me ‘Sire’. Now, try after me.” The man waddled up to Rafen and bowed deeply. “Sire. That’s how it’s done. And I do hope I’ll be doing it to you someday. Zion knows you’d make a better king than I.”

  “Robert,” the lady said disapprovingly from the window.

  Nervously, Rafen walked a little closer to the stout man and bowed low. “Sire.”

  “My dear boy! Well done!” King Robert clapped his hands. “As for Arlene, who is really Queen Arlene – because unfortunately we are married…”

  He made a brave attempt at a laugh. Queen Arlene turned and gave him a frosty stare. King Robert cleared his throat.

  “You are to call Queen Arlene ‘Highness’, like everybody else does,” he said. “And all the others call Etana ‘Little Highness’ or ‘my lady’, but I don’t think she expects you to call her either of those things. You may call her ‘Etana’.”

  “Yes, Sire.” Rafen tried to visualize King Robert alongside King Talmon. This man was too friendly to be a king.

  “Now, you and I, my dear boy, are going to go out onto the deck,” King Robert announced. “I believe you haven’t seen the sun much. Her Highness will start teaching you your letters tomorrow, I believe.”

  He waited for Queen Arlene to confirm this. She remained steadfastly staring out the window. Rafen liked the idea of her teaching him less and less.

  “Ahem. Therefore, you have leisure time for today. Come with me, Rafen, and I’ll tell you the parts of the ship.”

  Rafen stepped back involuntarily, seeing his gloomy cell, dark tunnels, and damp rooms in which the guards had played with him. He didn’t want to ‘come with’ anyone, and he opened his mouth to say so. Yet when he looked into King Robert’s watery blue eyes, so sincere, so childish, he felt tongue-tied.

  While leading Rafen out of the queen’s cabin, King Robert talked nonstop, telling him the names of all the places they passed through.

  “Right now we are astern, which means the back of the ship. All the biggest and best cabins of ships are always at the stern, where the great windows are. Except, as everyone knows, the Pirate King Sirius Jones’ cabin, which is at the bow of his ship, behind the prow. It used to be a galley – a ship’s kitchen – but he renovated it into cabin, mainly because he likes the element of surprise. Not that it’s a surprise, because everyone knows by now that’s where he has his cabin.” He chuckled again. “He thinks that if enemies board his ship they will go running astern to destroy the captain and find the booty, and he can come out from his galley cabin and run them through from behind. Running through is a horrible business, my boy. We are passing the storage rooms, the last rooms at the front of the quarterdeck. And now…”

  King Robert paused before a wooden door. He turned the handle slowly, either as if it was stiff, or as if some wonderland lay behind it and he wanted to surprise Rafen.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Lessons

  with the Queen

  He swung the door open, and the sunshine exploded in Rafen’s face, his eyes smarting in the now familiar way. He clapped his hands over them.

  “Ah, sorry, my boy. I quite forgot about that,” King Robert said. “You haven’t seen much sunlight, have you? Come on.”

  A hand touched Rafen’s shoulder, and in a flash all the memories of guards grabbing him, shaking him, hitting him, snatching him, stroking him flew through Rafen’s mind, and Rafen jumped back and stumbled.

  “Rafen? I haven’t bitten you, my boy. What is it?”

  “Nothing, Sire,” Rafen mumbled, removing his hands from his watering eyes.

  King Robert held the door leading onto the deck open for him. Rafen remembered the way guards had always let Rafen go first so they could hit him or grab him on the way through. He surrendered to his impulses and darted through the door so quickly that King Robert hung back for a second, wondering where he had gone.

  “Ah, well.” He waddled through the door and closed it behind him. “I’m glad you’re eager for some sunshine.”

  Rafen wasn’t eager for some sunshine. His eyes had grown accustomed to the light in his cabin eventually. However, the deck was open – no walls, no portholes, no nothing. Rafen reeled around, squinting fiercely, wondering what exactly King Robert had planned to do on the deck anyway. Fuzzy silhouetted shapes moved around him, perhaps sailors performing their duties.

  “This way, my boy. Let’s go to the railing, shall we? I do so love the sea.”

  King Robert was careful not to touch Rafen this time. He simply gestured vaguely to him and wandered over to the left side of the ship. Rafen staggered after him. He became aware King Robert was still talking, except it was harder to hear because of the roaring of the wind and the boom of the waves. The rocking of the ship was worse out here, and something warm rose up in Rafen’s throat. He hastily swallowed.

  “This is the port side of the ship, my boy. An important thing to know. You see, now and then someone in the crow’s nest will holler out ‘ship to port’. Then you’ll know that a ship is to your left, and you can blow it up with a cannon. Now a crow’s nest,” King Robert went on, “is a sort of basket at the top of a mast, Rafen. A sailor sits in it and keeps watch from there.”

  Rafen had reached the ship’s railing. Suddenly all the sound died down, and the sunlight didn’t hurt his eyes so much. A limitless, swelling, seething mass of water stretched ahead of him, right up to the horizon. Suppose he could see over the horizon until he came to another horizon and then over that one! And still there would be water, water, water, spitting and hissing, leaping and sliding into different shapes, and all the while
the sky would stretch above it, of a much lighter blue, and seeming to be a different sort of water, water that stayed still and quiet and kept watch over the sea below.

  “Charming, isn’t it?” King Robert hollered, and the sea started to boom again.

  “Yes,” Rafen said.

  Something constricted his throat, and it wasn’t seasickness. The world was so painfully beautiful.

  *

  The next few days were occupied by learning in the morning and leisure in the afternoons. When King Robert had first mentioned ‘leisure’, Rafen hadn’t fully grasped his meaning. As time crept by, he understood. It was doing what he wanted. He’d never done what he wanted. He didn’t know what he wanted to do.

  Rafen couldn’t decide whether he enjoyed lessons or leisure more. Queen Arlene, though severe, was a good teacher, and Rafen began to like her. She was giving him a great gift – knowledge, which Queen Arlene named ‘the weapon of the powerful’. Rafen believed it. None of the slaves or guards of Tarhia could read, Phil being an illegal exception. The general and King Talmon were educated though. They knew about the world outside. The slaves didn’t and wouldn’t miss what they’d never believed in, unless they were like Torius. If more people had known the beauty of freedom, King Talmon would have had many more rebellions on his hands.

  First Queen Arlene taught Rafen about the Phoenix Zion, whom she said had ‘laid the egg from which the world hatched’. Queen Arlene called the Phoenix the ‘Ruler of All’. Next he learned letters, numbers, simple words, and simple equations.

  “It is simple,” Queen Arlene said austerely, “because you are simple.”

  Rafen loved the study of the world around him even more than reading. Queen Arlene called it ‘geography’ and ‘philosophy’. Rafen discovered the world was huge and Tarhia was only a small part of it. For a start, the world, called the ‘Mio Pilamùr’, was a disc with lots of countries dotted on the top face and endless waters on the bottom face. When Rafen asked Queen Arlene if any ships sailed there, she had looked at him disdainfully. Siana was the country they were headed for, and it was in what Queen Arlene called the ‘Camana’, the West. Tarhia was in the East.