The Life and Times of the Ace of Knaves2

When I woke up, I had one thought: “Where’s the Fox?”
Now, most people, if they woke up half-naked on a small sailboat in the middle of an ocean with two dead men and a sharkbite the size of a small child on their chest, would think something along the lines of “Where is the shark?”, “What happened to these men?”, “Why can’t I remember how I got here?”, or maybe just “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!”, but not me. I was concerned about the bloody Fox, though whatever that was I had no idea.
I sat up, shook my head, and looked around for 1. The Fox, 2. The shark, and 3. Something to use as a weapon in case the nasty critter decided to come back. I reached, out of instinct, for a knife that I realized was strapped horizontally across the back of my waist. I drew it- it was a sturdy, single bladed knife, with a rather heavy, rounded blade that could be used for anything from chopping firewood to carving a spear to silently relieving a man of his kidney. Or both of his kidneys. Anyway, I put this knife back in it’s sheath, mentally noting that it was there.
I stood up, surprisingly already orienting myself with the boat’s gentle rocking motion. I gazed out on the horizon, toward the sun rising in the east, and swept my eyes across the water toward the north, and saw what I was searching for- the hint of a coastline, just visible under a layer of fog. I reached up to the boom-line with an assurance and a knowledge that I felt more than thought and adjusted it ever so slightly. The breeze caught it, and turned it sharply, so that the boat’s wandering motion now had a purpose. I was going north, to whatever lay in wait for me there.
As I tried to remember what land that was, it finally hit me- I had no idea. About the land, or myself, or my less-than-active companions on the boat. ‘Who am I?’, I wondered. I looked down at myself, the black leather boots under black cloth pants, both in rather good condition- and the dog tag hanging from my neck. I took it from around my neck and peered at the faded writing:
RA K: L n jack
AME: “Shadow”.
‘Well thanks be to the gods’, I thought sarcastically, ‘I know who I am now.’ I suddenly felt the need to rid myself of the tag, thinking (for one worrying second) that They need to believe I am dead. Whoever “They” were, I was determined to lose them, for whatever reason my nonsensical brain was keeping from me. I looked at my ever-patient companions, and though they were both roughly my size and build, one was so marred by the shark that his face and even his shape were blurred beyond recall. I hung the chain with the tag around his neck, but the motion awoke a fire in my left shoulder, the shoulder that the bite crossed as it traveled from my left ribs to the base of my neck. With a shudder of revulsion, I realized that my entire left arm had been INSIDE a shark. Gross. I breathed deeply and looked at my shoulder. With an involuntary intake of breath, I found that the wound was at least a day old and starting to smell.
I climbed up onto the railing of the boat and lowered myself over the side. I closed my eyes, clenched my jaw- and lowered my shoulder into the cold salt water of the indeterminable ocean. A muted yell tore from my throat, rebounded off my teeth and down into my stomach, where it sat and plotted to return as vomit, a plot that it revealed to me all to well as a wave of pain-induced nausea washed over me. After soaking for a few minutes in the cleansing water, I clambered clumsily and painfully back into the boat, where I lay and let the morning sun partially dry me.
I realized that whenever I got to where I was going, I would be seen as weak because of my shoulder, and possibly attacked by the bandits I assumed were present at my unknown destination. They were everywhere in this hellhole of a world. I had no idea where that thought came from, but intuition told me it was the truth. I needed to hide the wound.
I stooped down to the man that was not now labeled as the Shadow, with my bad arm cradled to my side. I pulled his shirt off- it was a sleeveless shirt, with a hood and some sort of loose cloth at the front of the neck. With a little difficulty and more than a little pain, I pulled the shirt over my head, stifling a grunt with gritted teeth. I sat back down, onto the small, pew-like seat of the boat and prayed to whatever gods may be that I would remember, um, everything. And as I stared toward the indomitable coastline to the north and the inevitable path that I would soon have to tread, I had no idea that my prayers would still be unanswered four years later.