Coming of the Warlord, Chapter 2

Chapter Two: The Voyage

Garen groaned as he pulled himself out of the hammock, stumbling to his feet as it swung to the side and nearly dumped him off of it. He caught himself on the doorframe after stumbling forward, barely avoiding cracking his head at the ship’s rolling movement along the waves.

“Hammocks have nothing on a good bed, do they?”

Looking up through sleep blurred eyes, he noticed Sellas leaning against the doorframe across the narrow hallway. Arms crossed, he smirked a bit and offered his hand. “Don’t have your sea legs yet, I see. I’m guessing that you didn’t get much sleep, considering the shadows that your eyes are casting,” he said, pointing at his face.

“Let’s say that there wasn’t much chance to sleep when the hammock goes this way and that all the time,” Garen muttered, pulling himself upright with Sellas’s help. “I don’t suppose you know how long this trip is going to take? I’m not sure I can take more than a few more nights like that, even with the rewards waiting on Reman Isle.”

“Well, you better find a way to deal with it, swordsmith,” Sellas said with a laugh. “We’re going to be at sea for another week, at least, if not longer. It depends on the wind and the currents, and a million other things that nobody can predict.” He smiled, but it disappeared as soon as he looked over Garen’s shoulder.

Garen looked over his shoulder as well, curious as to what could have ruined his acquaintance’s mood, but saw nothing but the sea through his porthole. He stared out it for a few moments, sure that he had missed something, but nothing leaped out at him. There was nothing outside, nothing but the ocean. Confused, he turned back to Sellas. “Something wrong? You look like you just lost a reason to be happy.”

Sellas shook his head. “It’s nothing,” he said. Stepping out of the doorframe, he turned down the hall, and walked towards the stairs that led up to the deck. Garen followed him, intrigued by his silence and his insistence about his discomfort being nothing.

Sellas pushed the trapdoor up and open, letting in the sunlight from the dawn into the hold. Garen blinked his eyes a few times, the brighter light from the open air above causing his eyes to sting until they adjusted. He followed Sellas up and out of the hold, and immediately had to dodge one of the crewmen, dragging a length of rope from one side of the ship to the other.

Dancing out of the way of the scowling sailor, he walked over to the railing, where Sellas stood. The red haired man was staring at the deck of the ship, obviously taking great care to keep his gaze away from the sea.

Garen shook his head in confusion, and leaned on the railing himself. He looked out to sea, wondering what there was to be avoided.

The rolling ocean shimmered, an endless blue mass that shifted and rolled with the currents beneath the waves and the wind that rolled above them. It almost seemed to glow, this far out from land, and Garen couldn’t help thinking back to the churches back in Helles, how they called the oceans the great works of Pontooth, the God of Water. Now that he was out here, away from the land that could distract him from the sheer beauty of the sea, he could understand why they said such things.

Head in his hands, elbows supporting himself, Garen almost lost himself to the hypnotic swells of the sea, the rising and falling of the ship. He had to shake his head to clear it of the beauties of the ocean and remember what he had come up here for.

He turned to look at Sellas again. “So, why does the ocean bother you?” he asked. He gestured out to the sea. “It’s beautiful. What’s there to dislike about-“

“It’s not land.”

Garen blinked. The interruption had been as unclear as it had been sudden. “Um, could you explain that? I don’t think that I understand what you mean.”

Sellas grunted a bit, shaking his head. “You are a simple one, aren’t you, swordsmith?” he said with a mocking chuckle. “That’s water. I prefer land. It’s more solid, less shifting…and it has people. Out there?” He gestured out to the sea, waving his hand in a familiar dismissive gesture. “No people. I’m a creature of comforts. Oceans and ships have just as little comfort as a village. Give me a city, preferably as far inland as possible, and I’ll be happy.”

Garen shook his head, looking back out to the sea. He didn’t know where Sellas had come from, but he was starting to get a pretty good idea of why he had left. A raging mob, likely enough, tired of his mocking, sarcastic behavior, and ready to do just about anything to get him to leave.

“Ugh, I’ll be happy when we get to Reman Isle,” Sellas said with a sigh. “More happy when I get to Dorlyn, but happier than I am now when we get to Reman,” he hedged with a grunt. He pushed himself away from the railing, and patted his vest. Smoothing it carefully, he turned around. He kept his eyes to the deck, but he was obviously looking at Garen.

“If you need a bit of help when we get to Reman Isle, let me know. I’ll take any chance I can get for some shore time, and you’re better company than most. Least you got something of a mind, unlike these fellows,” he said, gesturing at the various crewmen that were wandering from one task to another. Sellas glared at them, and shook his head. “Brutish, efficient with the muscular tasks, but not a single good mind among them. I’m surprised that the captain keeps them around.”

Pulling back from the railing, Garen watched the crewmen for a while himself.

It didn’t take long to prove that Sellas’s observation was correct. The crewmen lumbered this way and that along the deck, barely taking the time to talk to one another, and never working to get orders accomplished in a more efficient manner. More often than not, two crewmen would fall into a fight about who needed to do what, and it would stall the entire thing for over ten minutes. Then the injured winner would get up, and do it slower than he might have done in the first place.

Sellas was right. They were all idiots.

Garen looked up at the sun, just barely over the horizon and climbing up for its daily trip across the sky. Finding the eastern direction, he looked to his left. He hoped to see some sign of an island, some sign of Reman Isle out in the distance, but he didn’t see so much as a rock. It made sense, if they were still more than a week out from the northern island, but he still had hoped that Sellas had been wrong.

Slumping against the rail again, he watched the ocean rush around the ship. It rushed by fast enough that it was whipped to whiteness, but without anything in sight to give him a point of reference, it was impossible to tell just how fast they were going, or where the heck they were, for that matter.

Out of boredom, Garen pushed himself back from the railing. “Might as well learn a bit more about this ship,” he muttered to himself. After all, he had a week, perhaps more, without a thing to do, so he might as well do something.

#

The idea to explore the ship had been a good one. Garen never doubted that, and he never let himself believe that it was a waste of time. After all, no matter how sturdy this craft was, he was out in the middle of the ocean, and the holds could always become suddenly unstable, unsafe. If he didn’t know more about the ship, then how could he expect himself to be able to get out if things went badly?

That was what he kept telling himself, but it didn’t help when the crew and captain kept him away from every part of the ship but his quarters in the hold and the main deck. Every day, over the course of a week, he tried to explore the crew’s quarters, the galley, or even the captain’s quarters. Each time he tried, he was firmly pushed back towards the main deck. If he persisted, he was locked into his quarters for the rest of the day. During his last three attempts, that had been his fate, locked in his quarters with a member of the crew stationed by the trap door leading into the hold to keep him from getting out again.

At least each time he was locked away, Sellas was waiting for him. The shorter, red haired man never seemed busy, and he was always open for a bit of conversation, considering there was little more that a man that disliked the seas could do.

Well, that was not technically true, Garen knew. The first few times he had been escorted down into his quarters again, Sellas had been reading through something. He’d stuffed it into the chest in his little cabin when he’d seen him coming, though, so there hadn’t been a chance to see it, and Garen was a little too polite to raise it in conversation if Sellas hadn’t brought it up first.

Still, that wasn’t to say that they didn’t have interesting things to talk about. Sellas had been to many different places, and Garen was eager to hear what he had to say about Reman Isle. Even though it was part of the Trade Isle alliance, he didn’t know all that much about it.

“So, what’s Reman Isle like?” Garen asked from where he sat on his hammock, looking down at Sellas across the hall. “I mean, I hear a lot about it back home in Helles, but the buildings can’t really be covered in gold, can they?”

“You’d better believe they are, Garen,” Sellas said, flashing him a grin. “Each person living on Reman Isle has to have enough money, enough income, to keep his house sheathed in gold year round. If it peels, or if it comes loose, then he has to pay to do it again. If the owner of the building runs out of money to do that, he’s deported within the month,” he explained.

Garen stared. “You can’t be serious, Sellas. You’re mocking me again, aren’t you?” he asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “There’s no way they can afford to do that. There’s just no way!”

“Oh, they can afford it, swordsmith. They can afford it, because they sail all over the world, they trade everything for more money than anyone else can get, and they get their goods from all of the people in the Trade Isles for less money than anyone else can get it for anywhere else,” Sellas said with a shrug of his shoulders. “They’ve also got the best ships of anyone on the ocean, so they can get from place to place quicker than anyone else. Even those lumbering galleons of theirs are faster than most other trade ships or navies that I have seen in the west.” Sellas leaned back, crossing one leg over the other. He chuckled a bit to himself. “They can make war like you can’t believe on Civon, but they can’t make a ship capable of crossing the waves like they can in the islands.”

It seemed almost too incredible to believe, but Garen felt himself believing Sellas’s answer. He had the tone of a person that knew about what they talked about, the same way his father sounded when talking about making weapons, or his mother about making jewelry. It was just a tone that said that it was experience talking, and one shouldn’t really question it. Considering that the one time he had questioned his father he had gotten a bit of a sore backside for his trouble, he’d learned not to question experience since.

Still, there were other questions that he had, things that he felt that he should know before he got to the island. “So, who’s in charge on Reman Isle? Do they have a king, or a queen, like in the history stories of kingdoms?” Garen asked.

“No, nothing of the sort,” Sellas answered. “You see, the island is ruled by the rich, and nobody on Reman Isle is richer than the Trader families. They saved the island at the beginning of its existence, you see. Without the Traders, and their skills, and the ships that they traveled the world with, there would never have been a chance of the island surviving. As a result, the Traders have become the most skilled merchants in the world, and they rule the island in a way that a king rules his kingdom.”

“The merchants don’t really rule the little island like the lords do elsewhere, though,” Sellas said, holding up a finger with a small grin. “Oh ho, no they don’t. That would be too difficult, considering their sheer number. And greed. Can’t forget the greed, not on that island,” he added, chuckling. “No, they just set up a council of their richest and most successful merchants to rule them.”

Garen blinked. “Um, aren’t successful and rich things that go hand in hand?”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you, swordsmith? Show’s what you know, doesn’t it?” Sellas leaned back against his hammock yet further, so far back that Garen was amazed that he didn’t just fall over. “Nope. Successful and rich don’t mean the same thing on that island at all, and you can certainly be one without being the other. Successful merchants on Reman Isle can be the ones that have the most ships, or the most land, or have the most shops. It doesn’t mean that they’re richer than anyone else, just that they have the most property. Or they could have the most contacts, which would mean that the others on the island would have to come to them to find the right people to sell their goods to. It all comes down to what you have and what others on the island are willing to offer for it,” the red haired man said with a shrug of his shoulders.

“Oh, and you can’t forget about the bribes, either,” he said, closing his eyes. He finally fell back into his hammock, his body weight making it sway lightly back and forth. Had he been a bigger man, the sudden shifting and falling back in the hammock might have upset it enough to dump him to the wooden floor, but as small as he was, it was just enough to send him shifting from side to side.

“Bribes?” Garen asked, feeling his heart sink further and further with each explanation that the mocking little man offered. The entire island was looking like it was just a trap for those that wanted to get a quick fix of money. “What part do bribes have with their government?”

“Oh, everything, I’d have to say,” Sellas said with a wave of his hand, meant to encompass the concept of ‘everything’. “Lesser merchants pay the council to pay attention to their affairs, greater merchants pay the council to ignore them. The Trademaster-that’s the leader of the council, by the by-pays them to listen to him, and the council pays the Trademaster to listen to them. Bribes make their world go ‘round. Definitely is a more civil kind of government than most of the ones I’ve seen, I’m obliged to say.”

“How can you say that?!” Garen yelled as he lurched to his feet. He stomped across the hall, grabbing Sellas by the neck and yanking him off of the hammock. Only through a massive effort of self control did he keep himself from throwing his fellow passenger against the wall. “You’re saying that a wealthy person should be able to buy whatever he wants? That they can just do whatever they want to a city, just because they have the money to buy it into existence?!”

Sellas stared up at him, his eyes turning cold and frosty. “Garen, I’m going to ask you this, just once. Take your hands away from my throat, and let me get back on my hammock. Now.”

“Or what, you’re going to bribe someone to do something to me when we get to Reman Isle? You’re going to keep insisting that money is the answer to every problem? What, what are you going to-“

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting Sellas to do, but he hadn’t expected to wind up on the floor with a cut to his head and a bruise forming under his eye. He stared up at his fellow passenger. He shook his head, and stopped immediately at the pain that it caused, reminiscent of the pain of the one hangover he’d had in his life but twice as bad.

The red haired man looked down at him, and shook his head. “I don’t take kindly to threats, Garen. I don’t particularly like being grabbed, either. Unless you’re a woman, and then you’re free to grab whatever you want, outside of my purse, but you’re not, and you weren’t, so we’ll leave that little exception behind, shall we?”

Sellas sat down again, crossing one leg over the other. He waited until Garen was able to sit up again before continuing. “I said that Reman Isle’s government was more civilized than most, Garen. I didn’t say that I particularly agreed with it. I personally find it better to see a government operating by the principles of monetary exchange than by the means of bloody coups and regicide. I’m not entirely certain what you were thinking, but unless you’re a great deal more bloodthirsty than I take you to be, than you’d feel about the same.”

He sighed, and fell back into his hammock, leaving one leg hanging out from the swaying bed. “You don’t have to like it, but you’re deluding yourself if you don’t find it a less reprehensible means of keeping a civilization afloat.”

Garen rubbed his head lightly as he slowly stood up, and walked to the stairs at the end of the hall. He wobbled as he pushed open the trap door, and had to stop at the main mast in the center of the ship, dizzy from whatever Sellas had done to knock him to the ground. Whatever that little guy had done, he’d done it so fast that he’d not had the slightest chance to realize what had happened, or how to counter it. “I’ll have to remember he’s that fast, if I ever get angry with him again,” he muttered to himself.

In his heart, Garen didn’t want to admit that Sellas had anything right. There was so much wrong with a place that lived by money, that decided everything by money. If one could bribe someone to do whatever they wanted, where was the freedom? Where was the justice to take care of things when people went too far? Could people actually live any kind of good life when they were under such a government?

As much as his heart rebelled against that idea, Garen made himself look at it with his head. He needed to see it in a more logical manner. Sellas hadn’t been heated at all when he made his explanation, so maybe that was his problem.

The more that he looked at it, the more that he realized that it was a good solution to most problems in society. The government frequently never had the funds or motivation to get something done in the real world. Bribes covered both problems, giving the officials the money to do what needed doing, and it gave them a reason to do it.

As for a society run entirely by money, by bribes, what society wasn’t? Garen wanted to say that his own village wasn’t ruled by that, but if he did, he’d be lying. Calling it commerce wasn’t any excuse. The village laws and lives centered on their trade, and if they weren’t paid, or ‘bribed’, by the other islands to make their weapons and metalwork, then would they still do it?

Some of them might, but definitely not all of them.

He slumped against the mast. “I hate it when he makes a point like that and turns out to be right.”

Sliding down the mast until he was squatting on the deck, Garen directed his eyes upwards. The sky was empty of clouds above them, but to the east, there were a great deal of storm clouds brewing. They were far enough off that he didn’t think that they would bother the Caronal, but still, they were large enough to make him worry for any ships that might be caught when they broke.

Out of curiosity, he looked over to the east, wondering if there were any ships coming from that direction.

He couldn’t see far over the railing, but he could see some ships sailing together on the horizon. Pulling himself to his feet, he walked over to the railing and tried to guess what ships they might be.

The sheer size of the ships, coupled with how low in the water they were and the size of their sails, told him that they were of the same batch of Reman galleons that he had seen when they had set sail from Helles. It surprised him to see them, particularly numbering in twenty ships in total. The entire trading fleet of Reman Isle was supposed to be kept down to one hundred fifty light trading vessels, thirty medium cargo ships, and forty five galleons. If there were twenty here, and there were twenty at Gallas, it meant that the Traders had a lot of faith in finding something worth a lot of money around here, or were shipping it back home as fast as they could.

Of course, they could have simply just built more, but if they had, Ethetania and the Trade Isle government would have sanctioned them. That was what everyone back home said, when the smiths started worrying about the Traders gathering blades to sell from other places.

Garen counted the fleet of galleons again, sure that he had simply counted some of them more than once, and was overestimating how many there were.

After counting the fleet three times, he conceded that there were twenty different galleons out there. “I wonder what the hell they found out there that they needed so many ships to haul,” Garen muttered to himself. “And where are they going with it?”

He looked towards the bow of the ship, wondering, for the eighth time, whether they were getting anywhere near Reman Isle.

His eyes went wide at what he saw ahead of them, and his mouth opened wide in a grin. “Finally!” he muttered to himself as he looked along the side of the ship. “Reman Isle, at last,” he hissed.

The capital city of Reman Isle was in full view, even though they were still a few leagues off from the harbor. Coming in from the west as they were, the Caronal wouldn’t meet up with the galleons, but at least they wouldn’t have to deal with merging with that fleet, and fighting for docking space to the east.

Garen put that out of his mind, and let himself just take in the city that was waiting for them up ahead.

The first thing that hit him was its sheer size. Garen had visited the capital city on Gallas Island before, and was shocked at how large Gelles has been in comparison to Helles. Seeing the capital city of Reman Isle, Veleran, was just as much of a shock. There had to be twenty thousand people living in that city, at least.

The fact that each one of them could afford to sheath their house in gold was verified by the sheen of yellow that surrounded the city, making it shine like a beacon in the sunlight. Glittering and glimmering with the promise of wealth, with the assurance of riches, Veleran built upon itself, each layer from the harbor inwards becoming more opulent, shinier, more tempting to the people that would visit. The sheer signs of wealth in the city called to people to come to it and shop as much as they could, to purchase all that they could, no matter how much it might cost.

In the very center of the city, visible for leagues away, was a great tower. It stood out the way a lighthouse stood out on an abandoned coast. Despite the opulence of the city, the tower, or perhaps more accurately termed, the spire, caught the attention of everyone, even if it weren’t covered in gold like the rest of the city.

The tower had obviously been designed by a master architect, considering the sheet beauty of its form. It stood out due to the beauty of its construction, rather than any wealth attached to it. Still, the sheer size of the thing, towering at least a hundred fifty meters above anything else near it, definitely added to the imposing nature of the structure. Garen could have more easily thrown himself out into the sea as stopped staring at the majesty of the tower.

Of course, as the ship turned, and the bow was brought between his eyes and the structure, he snapped out of it. Chuckling to himself, he pulled himself back from the railing and walked back under the deck to the hold.

Sellas looked up at him as he passed by and stepped into his quarters. Grabbing his bag and his sword, he started packing his stuff together. “Come on, Sellas. If you’re going to get a little bit of shore time, then you might as well get your stuff together. Won’t do to dock and have to spend an hour getting ready to disembark, would it?” Garen said with a chuckle.

Sellas chuckled a bit at him, probably because he was so eager to get off of the ship, but Garen didn’t care. This boring journey by ship was finally over, and he could start his new life.