The captain finally decided to do something.
It wasn’t out of initiative.
It wasn’t out of duty either, because his contract with Norwin was very specific on that front.
It said he was to work WITH Buck V Henderson.
It didn’t say he had to run the ship, didn’t say he had to make decisions, didn’t say he had to do anything beyond getting the floating wood from one place to another.
For 3 months he’d leaned on that clause, and 72 people had watched him do it.
But the trees were getting close now.
Somebody had to steer.
“Bring her in!” he shouted from the helm.
“Both ships, same line, and don’t run her up the sand! I want her sitting in the shallows with her belly wet and her arse out. If we need to shove off, I want to shove, not dig!” (I fucking love pirate talk)
The crews moved.
The sails came down in stages, and both ships came in slow and shallow, griding up onto the soft slope of the seabed until the hulls settled with a long groan and the ramps could go down.
The captain nodded, satisfied with himself, and then turned to the thing that had actually been on his mind.
“Get the gifts out!” he barked.
“Standard practice. Wine and spirits, the good casks, the ones we been saving. When you walk into somebody’s house for the first time you bring them a drink. That’s how it’s done.”
Nobody moved.
“What?” he said.
One of the stewards cleared his throat and looked at his feet.
“Sir. About the wine.”
“About the wine what?”
“It’s gone, sir.”
“Gone.”
“The big one and the small one drank it,” the steward said.
“Both of them. They found the casks on the second night and they’ve been at it steady ever since. Bjorn finished the last of it last week. He had it in a bucket.”
The captain stared at him.
Then he turned his head, slowly, like his neck hurt, and looked across the deck at Bjorn the Glutton, who was currently sitting on a barrel with his shirt open and a 30 pound haunch of something in both hands, and at Pickem the Half Man, who was lying on his back on top of Bjorn’s head with his little boots crossed, looking at the sky.
“HE WHAT,” the captain said.
He put his face in his hand and stood there for a while with his fingers pressing into his eyes.
“Sir?”
“Flour,” the captain said, from behind his hand.
“Sir?”
“Flour. And raw goods. Sacks of it. Rice, beans, dried fish, salt, the whole hold. We’ve got 6 months of preserved food down there and it cost more than most of these men will make in their lives.” He lifted his face and pointed at the hold.
“Give it to them. All of it. Offer it up like it’s a gift from our own table and don’t you dare tell them we originally planned to bring booze.”
So they loaded up.
The locals didn’t move.
That was the first thing anybody noticed.
Ropes got thrown, planks got laid, and 72 men came down off two ships onto a beach, and the whole village just stood there and watched them do it.
The fishermen at the seawall still had their nets in their arms.
The women were gathered up by the houses with their hands on each other’s sleeves.
Older men stood apart in small groups with their arms crossed, and none of them said a word, and none of them came closer, and none of them ran.
They gossiped the whole time, of course.
Constantly.
It just wasn’t in any language the Fluvenmirans could follow.
“Why are their skins so light?” one woman said to another, behind her hand.
“I don’t know. Look at them. Pale as fish bellies.”
“Why such a big boat? What do they need that much room for? What are they carrying?”
“I heard they have a smaller one inside it.”
They kept at that for the better part of 2 hours while the Fluvenmirans unloaded.
Sacks got stacked on the sand, crates got counted, ropes got coiled, and a crewman fell off the ramp exactly once, which the locals discussed for 10 straight minutes with considerable interest.
Buck watched all of it from the rail with his hands gripping the wood.
He’d had 3 months to think about this moment.
3 months of vomiting into a bucket and telling himself he was a hero.
In his head, the landing went about 40 different ways, and about 35 of them ended with him dead on the sand.
The other 5 ended with him walking up the beach and shaking hands with whoever was in charge.
He’d rehearsed the speech.
Not out loud, but in his head, dozens of times.
Keep it short.
Smile with the teeth.
Speak slow.
Say your name like it means something.
It was time.
He came down the ramp with his shoulders back and his chin up.
The crowd of crewmen parted for him because he was Buck V Henderson and they’d been told since day one that he was the reason they’d survive this, and by the time his boots hit wet sand, every man on that beach had turned to watch.
He walked past the sacks of flour.
He stopped about 10 feet from the closest group of locals, which was a group of 5 women and 2 older men, and he held his hands out to his sides where they could all see them.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
The women looked at each other.
“Where I come from, I’m a hero. Biggest one in the kingdom, they call me the dragon killer, they write it in the songs and everything. And I’m telling you that right now so you know I’m not here to hurt anybody. That’s the whole point of me saying it. That, and the ships, and the fact that we’ve come off slow and put our weapons down.”
The older man on the left tilted his head slightly.
“So what I’m asking is simple. If you could point me toward your king, or your chief, or whoever it is that runs things on this island, I’d be grateful. I’d like to have a conversation with him. A friendly one. There’s a lot of us and there’s a lot of you and I’d really like to make sure this goes well for everybody involved.”
Silence.
He kept smiling.
His jaw was starting to ache with it.
One of the women leaned toward the woman beside her, very slightly, and said, from the corner of her mouth:
“Mmmm, yeso uu kyo civo ua tall?”
“Nuh.”
“Mmmm, ue yaso kyo.”
A pause.
Then the third woman, quietly: “Civo yeso me tall?”
They all looked at each other.
Nobody had an answer.
Buck stood there with his hands out and his smile going stiff, and watched 7 people look at him with absolutely nothing behind their eyes.
Not hostility.
Not fear.
Just blank, pleasant confusion, the exact expression of a man being spoken to in a language he has never heard in his life and knows he will never hear again.
The older man said something.
It was short.
It wasn’t in any language Buck had ever heard, and it had a lot of m and v sounds in it, and when he finished, the women nodded like he’d said something wise.
Buck lowered his hands.
“Huh,” he said.
He looked back at the ship.
He looked at Bjorn, who was now eating from a sack of dried fish that had technically been a gift about 20 seconds ago.
Then he looked back at the locals, at the 7 blank friendly faces and the 200 more behind them, and the truth landed on him all at once.
They couldn’t understand a word he’d said.
He’d just delivered the speech of his life to a beach of people who thought he was making animal noises at them.
Every plan he’d made, every script he’d rehearsed, all of it was worthless, because the two sides of this conversation were speaking completely different languages and there was no bridge between them.
“Shit,” Buck said.
“Why didn’t we bring a translator?”