The Long Road Back: A Jarthen-centric Interquel (pt. 3)

When I came to again, someone was slapping my cheeks. “Come on, Shakhar, come on,” someone said. And then I felt a great wall of water come crashing down on me. I sat up with a start and found myself face to face with some annoyed looking Felin fella who was holding up a lamp and peering at me. There was an empty bucket next to him.

Once I got over the shock of it, two things jumped out at me. First, it was dark – well after sunset, which meant that that little elf bugger had done a right good job of knocking me out. I’d been under fer hours. Second, I was on a boat and if the twinkling lights a bit far off were what I thought they were, that boat had already pushed off with me in it. “I’m not s’posed to be here,” I said to the man looming over me.

He smirked. “You don’t end up places like this because you are supposed to, Shakhar.” He set the lamp down and took my wrist with one hand and groped around in his robe with the other. “But after tonight, you’ll belong here.”

I tried to snatch my wrist back, but felintarks, you know, they run big. I mean, I was tall as him but I’m a reedy, skinny sort and he weren’t. He was all big slabs of muscle. “I belong with the rebels!”

“Not anymore you don’t. No you belong to the Sinn. You’re bought and paid for.” I jerked back again and succeeded in doing nothing more than smashing my already throbbing head into a mast. He kept a good, steady hold on my wrist and pulled me towards him again. “Stop struggling, boy, or you’ll annoy me even more.”

Summat told me I should do my best to keep him from getting annoyed with me. Or rather, more annoyed. So, I sat there fer a spell, wide-eyed and terrified but quiet and obedient until I saw him pull a box out of his robe and pull a long sharp-looking thing out of the box. “What the hell is that? What the hell are you going to do to me?”

The tark sighed and jerked me forward again, damn near pulling my arm out of socket. “I’m going to mark you.”

“Mark me?”

“Yes, mark you. Stop moving!”

“What do you mean ‘mark me’?”

He shook his head and said something in Felin. Looking back, and knowing him like I do now, I can make a fair guess as to what he was saying and I doubt it was anything nice. “Tattoos. Like these,” he said, pointing to the dark lines winding around his throat. “Except yours are going on your wrist.”

I’d seen tattoos like that before, on Na-Fra. Naki told me once that they marked him out as a pirate and I’d developed a bad habit of staring at them when he was around, trying to figure out what they meant and what they had to do with piracy. Until then, I’d always sort of suspected the pirates had them to make them look fiercer. Not that Na-Fra needed much help on that front, I was half-convinced he could kill me just by looking at me sideways. He might have been half-convinced of that, too, given the way he was always looking at me sideways and trying his damnedest to scare the living daylights out of me. In any case, as soon as I saw those lines on his neck, I knew what sort of boat I’d landed on. “Oh, damn it to hell.”

“Damn what to hell?” he asked, dipping the needle into a small vial of ink.

“Damn those two elvish bastards to hell. Damn this damn boat to hell.”

He laughed. “Well, as long as you’re not damning me to hell. Don’t flinch.”

“What?”

“Just don’t flinch.” He jabbed me with that needle and I flinched. Don’t rightly see how I could have kept from doing it, frankly. I mean, a body don’t care fer that sort of thing. He frowned at me. “I told you not to flinch, Shakhar.”

“I didn’t mean to. But you stabbed me! And don’t call me that.”

“That’s what you are,” he said, stabbing me again and holding me fast when I flinched again.

“Ah! Stop it, you big brute! And I got a damn name, you know.”

He didn’t stop it. By now he’d wrapped himself around my arm and had it pinned in place while the rest of me sort of jumped and twitched and flailed out to the side of him. He was really going at it, pricking me and poking me all rapid-fire, only stopping now and again to dip the needle back in the ink. “I’ll stop when I’m done. I’ve got three more letters to go.”

“What are you writing on me? That thing you keep calling me, is that it?” I asked, craning my neck and trying to read it. But, you know, I’m just barely able to read Common and that tark writing just looks like a bunch of flourishes and designs to me.

“Stop yelling or I’ll have to gag you.”

I believed him. I shut my mouth tight and didn’t make another peep, even though that tattoo stung like you wouldn’t believe.

“Good. You keep rolling over quick like that and you’ll be fine. You’re cargo now, do you know what that means?” I shook my head, watching that needle pricking me, horrified and oddly fascinated at once. “It means you do whatever anyone with marks on their neck tells you and you keep your questions to yourself. It means that you’d better stay useful to us if you want to keep your place on the ship.”

I was tempted to say that he could take my place on his ship and stick in any number of unsavory places, but I didn’t. He asked me if I spoke Felin and I shook my head. He asked if I spoke Semadran and I shook my head again. He asked me if I’d ever been on a ship before and decided that no, of course I hadn’t before I even got the chance to shake my head. And then, when he was finally through with jabbing me with that blasted needle, he wrapped a rag around my wrist and tossed me into a closet in the hold. There was a tinker in there and a scrawny little fella with a mop of gold hair and big yellow eyes. He looked sort of elvish, but not elvish like I’d ever seen before. The tinker looked over and asked me summat, but I had no idea what he said. I shrugged and banged my shoulder against the door, hoping I’d hit a weak spot and go tumbling out onto the deck again. The tinker asked me summat else, but I still didn’t understand it, so I just ignored him. I heard the other one say summat back and the two of them murmured to each other fer a bit while I tried to pry the door back open with a broken plank lying nearby. The plank shattered and gave me splinters rather than doing anything useful. “Bleeding hell. Damn it to hell,” I said, giving that unbudging door a good, swift kick.

Summat hit me in the back of the head and I turned round to find that little fella with the yellow eyes pelting me with bits of shell and such. “Hey! Cut it out!”

“Finally. Show to Rofi.”

“What? Why?”

“He heals.” He frowned and shook his head. “Mark you now, yes?”

“Yeah. Who the hell are you?”

He held up his hand and there was a jagged looking tattoo on his wrist, just like mine. “Cargo. So’s Rofi.” He frowned a little more and babbled summat to the tinker. They went back and forth fer a minute, each peeking up at me in turn. The little pale fella shrugged and shook his head. “Show Rofi,” he said, waving me towards the tinker.

“Yeah, a’right,” I said, sitting down next to the silver one and unwrapping my wrist. “Hey, you speak whatever they speak, too?” The yellow one nodded. “That big bastard kept calling me Shakhar, what’s that mean?”

“Means yellow. Uh, yellow hair,” he said, tugging at a lock of his wild, curly mane.

“Like blonde? Like mine?”

“Yes. Like yours.”

“Well, what do they call you?”

“Mifsah.” He stuck out his tongue and pointed to it. “Mifsah.”

“They call you Tongue?” That seemed odd as all hell to me, even considering the circumstances. “What the hell for?”

“Can talk, speak, whatever, yes?” he said, pointing at himself and me a few times. “Like this.”

“Well, your Common needs work,” said I.

He sighed and frowned. The tinker rewrapping the bandage said summat to him that made him more irritable. He waved at him and drew his knees up to his chest, muttering under his breath.

“Hey, what’s your name? Your real one, I mean. I’m Jarthen.”

“Tawiri. Why?”

The tinker finished bandaging me up, and whatever he’d done made it sting a little less. I gave him a grateful nod and he shrugged and sat next to the other elf. “You’re cargo, I’m cargo, whatever the hell that means. Seems to me like we ought to stick together.”

Tawiri pointed at Rofi. “I stick with him.”

“Stick with me, too.”

He cocked an eyebrow and whispered something to Rofi, and the tinker glanced over and laughed.

“What? What’s he laughing at?”

“At you. Can’t stick with you,” Tawiri said, laughing a little himself.

“Why not?”

“Won’t last long enough.”