Adrift

by Travis Smith

  “A’righ’, now wait!” the other pirate said, raising his sword and backing away slowly. “I’ll leave ye’ be. I’ms only ’ere on orders. Sure’s a nice place ya gots here. I’ll just be on me own way now.”

  John swung his left arm at the pirate’s raised sword, striking the blade and sending it effortlessly to the ground.

  The pirate raised both hands in front of his face, still pleading. “I won’t fight ye. I got no guff wiv ye!”

  John swung his right arm and almost removed the pirate’s hand at the wrist. He shrieked and turned to run, hollering incomprehensibly for his fellow crewmembers. John finally ended the man’s suffering and babbling as he plunged the sword into his side, below the ribs. He fell into a heap, sobbing and pleading for mercy, and John granted it, flicking the blade almost carelessly across the pirate’s throat.

  At last John turned in the direction the final four crewmembers had gone, and he steeled himself for pursuit when he heard a frenzied, deranged outburst echoing down from the cliffs.

  9

  Maria clung to Robert, his body slick with sweat due to anxiety from the previous night or to the beaming sun that seemed to be drawing closer by the minute. “Why would The Baron’s men have switched skiff like that?” she asked.

  “Y’ got me,” Robert replied distractedly, still watching the boat instead of taking to the sails.

  “Should we flee?”

  “Won’t be ’ard to outrun ’em in ’at thing,” he said in his thick southern Fordar accent.

  She took the scope from Robert and looked through it again. “They don’t appear to be of rank.”

  “Certainly not,” he said and paused, appearing to be thinking, “but there’s pirates on the ship last night. Sure the new Baron’s employed the likes o’ such to ’elp find renegades like us.”

  “Oh dear.” Maria dropped her arms and bowed her head, swaying on her feet and holding the edge of the boat for balance. “Robert, we should keep on.”

  He took the scope one last time and looked through it. “Something i’nt righ’,” he said. The skiff appeared to be docking in the sand. “I don’t think these scoundrels be with The Baron.” He watched as several men dove into the water and pulled the small craft toward the shore as others raced through the waves toward something on land that Robert couldn’t make out.

  Once all the men were off the boat and had disappeared into the jungle, he lowered the scope and turned all his attention back to Maria. “I’m sorry, love. We come so far.”

  Maria stepped into his arms and buried her face in his exposed chest. “They’re going to shoot us and stab us and burn us right here in the sea.”

  “If we’re lucky,” he muttered. While he hadn’t seen the large Barony vessel since they’d heard the gunshots last night, smaller bands of pirates and headhunters did not bode well for their safety.

  Just as he resigned to taking the wheel and carrying on eastward, Robert again saw movement on the shore of the island. He lifted the scope and watched as one of the pirates led a bleeding man into the water and began to drown him. With newfound inspiration to retreat, he let go of Maria and turned toward the wheel. “Come. We’ll away now.”

  But Maria picked up the scope to see what had incited this haste in her lover, and she saw the man not being drowned but being beaten and bullied and thrown again and again beneath the water.

  “Robert,” she said timidly, but she did not turn to face him. She could only stare in horror at the tiny, blurry sight in the distance. Who knew what crimes that stranger had committed to deserve this demise. Likely he didn’t deserve it at all. Likely this was a man who had, as had she and Robert, stood up for what was right, stood up against the greed and corruption that had spawned and swelled in Fordar and had thusly seized the throne in Reprise. Likely this was a man who had lit out in search of a better life away from the injustices occurring under the rule of the new monarch, a man who spent every day fearing for his life, fearing the capture and torture by men of The Baron or pirates such as these who were likely hired by The Baron himself. And if such refugees didn’t band together and stand against The Baron, how could any of them expect to succeed on their own? If no one could help this renegade in his time of need, on whom could Maria count to help her?

  “We must help him.”

  10

  John’s fury faltered momentarily, just enough for him to recall the sight that had drawn him down from the cliffs in the first place: the wounded man being tortured in the sea. Outraged shrieking and swearing echoed through the trees from the direction of that small beach at the bottom of the cliffs. John glanced back in the direction he knew the other pirates to be headed, but they weren’t in sight, and they could wait. He’d acquired his weapons and was plenty riled up to rescue the man he’d seen being bullied.

  He set off anew in the direction of the cliffs, not knowing or caring or even wondering whether these harriers were in the wrong or at all justified in their actions. He knew only that the old man had shown him kindness and mercy, and these men looked to be a threat to his island and his safety. The wounded stranger may very well be any sort of villain or knave, but he was mortally wounded and dramatically outnumbered. These facts alone made him an underdog and the fortunate recipient of John’s attention this day.

  He let go of the gory blade in his left hand, bent, and began sprinting full speed through the thick jungle leaves and underbrush toward the screams that had recently subsided. Spatters of blood from five men ran and dripped unnoticed from his skin and clothes. His sense of urgency and bloodlust left him unmindful of the drops of fresh, warm blood that mixed with his own sweat and ran precariously down the bridge of his nose and the curves of his orbits. Rays of blistering sunlight shone intensely through the trees above, and as John approached the point where thick, lush woodland turned abruptly to a steeply sloping grassy hill leading up to the cliffs, the world gradually became hotter and hotter.

  At last the tree line broke, and John found himself a mere body-length away from a wounded stranger staring wide-eyed at him from the ground. He instinctively began to raise his remaining sword to stay the pirate’s suffering and continue up to the cliffs, but he noticed the striking difference in the man’s appearance. The Stranger had a subtle look of familiar royalty to him. John was struck by a painful memory of Reprise. Back before the monarch had collapsed and things started going bad, back when he was living happily with his wife and son, before he had abandoned them and sent them to their likely deaths.

  The Stranger had clearly been on his own for some time; his hair and face were haggard and unkempt, his clothes were filthy and tattered, his skin was burned and scratched, and he was apparently mortally wounded, but still he possessed features that set him apart from the oily bearded pirates who had recently met such unfortunate fates.

  “Where is the man who hurt you?” John asked, chest heaving and eyes darting around suspiciously.

  The Stranger eyeballed John with diminishing concern, dry-swallowed painfully hard, and finally managed to choke: “Dead.” A bubble of blood rose from The Stranger’s throat and burst inside his open mouth with the word. He fell flat upon his back and exhaled one last time as the blood trickled out of the side of his mouth and ran down his cheek.

  Chapter 3:

  The Boy

  1

  The hot midday sun shone down upon the small district of Onton in northern Fordar, warming the day and eliciting a sticky coat of sweat all over Patrick Oliphant’s thin body. Patrick lay concealed in the tall grass of a field behind a cluster of nearly identical cottages. His satchel containing only a pair of long-bladed, badly worn garden shears lay rolled up beneath his chest. The tall, dry grass remained as immobile as the adolescent’s mop of blond hair. The air was dry, still, and silent. The boy’s breathing was so slow and deliberate that not even the blades of grass touching his lips would sway. His eyes alone peered unnoticed from his hiding place into the dirt streets that intersected near the center of hi
s home town. The streets of the market center were surprisingly vacant on this clear day—vacant save for one soul that caused Patrick to pause on his way to the outlying cornfields and stealthily take cover in this lush field outside the market.

  Elena Mavery, a girl only slightly older than Patrick himself, roamed the empty streets with the general lack of enthusiasm that everyone seemed to possess these days. Patrick watched as she stared blankly at the stands of slightly decaying imported fruit and vegetables as though she had only the faintest memory of what the items were used for. She meandered slowly and deliberately in and out of the cool, dark huts and buildings. Patrick watched her disappear into the shade of each market building and then waited a few moments for her to reappear and meander on to the next, empty handed.

  Elena still held the queer attractiveness that had drawn him as a young child. By no means beautiful, she had something about her—a quirk of the lips, or a certain coyness in her eyes—that had hastened Patrick’s pulse with every encounter. While formal education and trade training came at home, most districts in Fordar and Reprise still valued play rather highly. While professional skills were passed from father to son and mother to daughter, regular playtime served to strengthen social connections, to relieve stress and make life more enjoyable, and even to, in rare instances, help develop a sense of inspiration upon which novel professional skills were built. In a town as small as Onton, the children were generally allowed to roam and run as free as they desired when the time came for their daily capers, and the district’s children typically banded together in one location. As is always the case with children, smaller groups and teams were formed that played more intimately with one another, but these groups all gathered near the market area—either in the fields where Patrick now lay or around the cluster of cottages closer to the cornfields. Often the groups would stick to their own devices and leave the others to theirs, but Patrick preferred when his group of close friends served as a team to play with or against the kids in another group. Games like Scout—where one or two would seek the hiding kids on the other team before his opponent could find the members of his own team—and Raiders—where duos from opposing teams were forced to work together to hide or find various items of arbitrary interest—allowed Patrick to get a little time with Elena, who had always been in a different group of friends.

  She had always seemed a tease if there ever was one, the best and most friendly teammate or opponent a playing kid could ask for, but she must have fancied herself more physically attractive than she truly was, for she always sought the company of much older, stronger boys than Patrick, boys who would never be able to look past the fact that more physically attractive girls existed, but few existed who were more all-around wholesome and good. She’d been a friend to Patrick from the first time he’d mustered the courage to speak to her. She’d always been a great friend, but nothing more, much to his discontent.

  Patrick’s throat clicked as he finally swallowed. Nostalgic longing was causing a rubbery sensation to spread out from his chest to his every limb, and his mouth and throat were dryer than the dying grass in which he lay. In his own head, the click of his throat was the loudest thing he’d heard in days, and it seemed to echo across the still plains infinitely, unimpeded by wind or weather or other sources of sound. But Elena didn’t turn to look.

  He thought momentarily that he could take her right now. With the way things were changing at the White Kingdom in Reprise, the land—that land as well as this one, and likely all others—were backwards and lawless and unreal. A hint of darkness had settled over the earth, a haziness that gave everything an illusory, nightmare-like quality, and Patrick knew that he could walk to her in the middle of the market and be inside her before he could even profess his love. He could drag her into the tall grass and sell his soul to fulfill his inborn, animalistic desires, and he’d never hear a word against it. Yet still there would be consequences. This much he knew. There would be consequences, and while they likely would mean nothing in the grand scheme of this new world in which he was living, he was still young enough to push those desires out of his mind for the time being, despite how much doing so may hurt.

  Pain was a concept to which Patrick had recently grown numb, and while he could have completed his rushed, premature transition from boy to man by dragging the girl of his dreams into the grass and fucking her into oblivion, he merely tightened the grip on his knife and decided to slit her throat instead.

  2

  Patrick walked warily out of the market square with his knife, which he’d just wiped clean on the clothing of the recently deceased Elena, tucked into its rawhide sheath on his trousers and his satchel slung over his shoulder. He encountered no one else during his walk to the cornfields. At the first group of cottages he passed, he heard a rustling and a crash from inside one of the dwellings. His hand shot to his waistband when the clatter broke the day’s silence, but he saw no one outside, and no one seemed to notice him and come out. The day was simply too hot to welcome many people at this hour.

  He thought again of Elena and felt the tiniest twinge of remorse, but he easily pushed that out of his mind. With darkness ruling the nation, feeling nothing was the easiest way to make it through each day. To not even think would be ideal, but Patrick remotely thought that he was inching closer and closer to such a life with each sunset.

  The second cluster of houses was as still and silent as the windless skies. This was the second area around which the kids sometimes played. Those days seemed so far behind him at this point, ages behind him, but when he thought about it, it had been only a matter of days since he ran and played with the other children, as happy and carefree as kids think they’ll always be. It had been roughly ten days if he hadn’t lost too much track of time during his transition. Much had happened in those ten days, and he felt that he’d aged considerably in that short time. But that was just the way things were to be now.

  On the final stretch of road to the cornfield, Patrick caught a quick movement out of the corner of his eye, and he quickly snapped around to see what was there, but it was only a thin, sickly cat bounding out of the field to disappear behind one of the cottages. He wondered how such creatures were faring in this new world. Did anyone remain who would take the time to care for a pet? Did anyone exist who would feed the thin cat? Or was it simply fending for itself out in the wild where resources were dwindling in the drought? Cats didn’t have barter systems that included transportation and trading of foreign goods that could help sustain life when the weather was unfavorable … At last the cornfields were in sight, and the spark of hope broke Patrick’s muse.

  Corn was Onton’s major commodity; it was grown in abundance in the vast plains surrounding the town, and it could be used to make a wide variety of food items or traded in large quantities for other handy goods and foods that weren’t made or grown this far north of Mitten. Viable products were dwindling of late, and he had been coming home with fewer and fewer ears of edible corn, but Patrick was scavenging the fields on his own, and there was only so much ground that he could cover in one day. These were the sorts of chores that a great many would take part in at the same time, pooling their efforts for the good of the nation, but the dynamic of national relations had changed dramatically since The Baron seized power, and Patrick had begun getting used to doing things on his own during the past several days. Numbed to the physical pains of tiring labor as he was to the emotional pains the likes of which he’d suffered moments ago in the market, he’d gotten by quite well on his own until the fields started blackening and the food started dwindling.

  Such stoic adaptations had been a necessity in the past ten days since he’d killed his own parents.

  3

  The sun had reached its position halfway between midday and sunset before Patrick gave up and headed back toward the town. The sustained high heat was finally breaking and diminishing into the early evening, but Patrick wanted to be close to his own cottage before night fell.

>   He was returning home empty handed for the third day in a row. The fields that once had spawned such lush vegetation and tall stalks of thick, bloated ears of corn were dry and shriveled and blackened in the heat. It seemed the plants were as sick and decadent as the rest of the inhabitants of Onton and likely all of Fordar and Reprise as well. Even the very air in this place seemed sick since the monarch fell.

  His spark of hope had faded. The fire of ambition that had once burned inside him was long since extinguished, and he felt that, like a pair of dull, mossy stones, he’d never feel that spark again. He’d solitarily patrolled a large enough portion of the expansive fields to be convinced that not a single viable ear of corn still existed in the entire district, maybe the entire world. This dark curtain that had fallen upon the earth now fell upon his mind.

  Patrick came upon the outermost group of cottages to find that it remained as uneventful as he had left it. While the afternoon was still stiflingly hot, something about seeing not one individual outside at this hour felt odd. He had been prepared to crouch and slink from the backside of building to building and remain unseen, but now he didn’t even sense anyone looking out of any of the windows. Though impossible to tell, something in the still air told him that every house in this sector was vacant. He paused in the middle of the dirt street and held his breath, not daring to move even an eyeball as he waited to detect any sign of movement or any sound at all. But nothing happened. By the time his head swam and he was forced to slowly exhale and resume breathing normally, he still had a queer sense of utter isolation and quietude, as though the entire town of Onton had been frozen in time and only he remained able to move and interact with the environment. Of course, this wasn’t far from the truth.