They stood there for 30 minutes.
It was mutual, at least.
Neither side knew what to do, so both sides did nothing, and the beach filled up with the particular silence of 2 groups of people who had run out of options.
Buck kept his hands out where everyone could see them.
The fishermen kept their nets in their arms.
Somewhere behind the crowd a chicken got loose and had to be caught, which was the most action that happened for a solid 10 minutes.
Then one of the older men stepped forward.
He pointed at his own chest with 2 fingers, the way you’d point at a thing you were naming, and he said something slow and deliberate.
“Mmmm, ue gi Kava xi Hriwa.”
Buck blinked at him.
The man next to him did the same thing, one hand on his own sternum.
“Rewa al Mai.”
Then a third, a younger man with a rope scar across his forearm.
“Mmmm, ue gi Isea ry Keshra.”
They all looked at Buck and waited.
It took him a second.
Then it clicked, and the relief that went through him was almost embarrassing.
“Oh! You’re introducing yourselves. That’s what that is.” He nodded hard, twice, like a man who had just solved a riddle.
“Okay. Okay, yeah. Hi!”
He pointed both thumbs at his own chest and said his name louder than he needed to, which did not help.
“Buck. Buck V Henderson.”
They nodded back at him.
Nobody understood anything, but the nodding was going well, so Buck decided to push his luck.
“Hey, listen.” He brought his hand up to his mouth and tipped it back, elbow high, throat working, the universal sign of a man who wanted a drink.
He did it twice, then pointed at the huts and raised his eyebrows.
The older man, Kava xi Hriwa, watched the gesture with real concentration.
Then his whole face opened up and he said something to the crowd, and 4 of them peeled off and walked up the beach and disappeared behind a house.
They came back dragging a barrel.
It was no cask and no keg, it was a barrel the size of a rowboat, made of dark staves bound with rope, rolling up the sand with 4 grown men leaning into it and 2 more pushing from behind.
When they tipped it upright it stood taller than Pickem, and when the cork came out the smell hit the whole beach at once, heavy and sharp and sweet underneath, a brew that announced itself before you got near it.
Somebody in the Fluvenmire crowd laughed and shouted, and then 72 men started cheering at the same time.
“LET’S GET THE PARTY STARTED!”
Nobody on the Fawn side understood the words either, but they understood the cheering, and beer got going around, and that was that.
By nightfall the beach had turned into something nobody on either ship had expected.
The Fawn cooks had brought out their own pots and set them up on the sand next to the Fluvenmire grates, and the 2 cooking traditions had stared at each other across the fire for about 5 minutes before deciding to just combine.
Whole fish went onto the coals and came back off with char on the skin and steam in the flesh.
Butter got melted with sea salt and herbs nobody from Fluvenmire could name, and that got ladled over shellfish, and that got dropped into rich broths with root vegetables and green things, and the broths got poured over rice, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, somebody decided to dump an entire pot of the seafood soup into a hollowed-out half of a giant crab shell and serve it like that.
It was the best thing anybody had eaten in their lives.
It was the fantasy version of a seafood bowl, and the Fluvenmire men were going back for seconds before they’d finished their firsts.
A young crewmate was holding court near the middle of the fire, maybe 24 years old, thin as a rope and drunk enough that his balance had opinions of its own.
He was on his feet with a cup in one hand, and he’d been talking for 10 minutes.
“Right, and I’m telling you, the hole was this big!” He held his hands apart, then changed his mind and moved them further apart.
“Bigger! It was below the waterline, right, and if I hadn’t gone in there we were all going down, every single one of us, all 30 men, and I wouldn’t be standing here telling you this!”
The Fawn women had gathered in a loose crescent around him because he was loud and animated and the fire was warm.
They weren’t following a word of it.
They watched his hands, mostly, and his face, and when he paused for breath they gave him a soft “ooooh.”
“So I ripped my shirt off and I stuffed it in the crack and I held it there with both hands while the water came in around me, and I’m screaming up at them to keep bailing, and my fingers are going numb, and I stayed down there for, what, 40 minutes? An hour? And then the carpenter came and we got it plugged proper.”
“Ahhhh,” the women said.
The truth was that the crewmate had spent that particular storm in the galley holding a bucket for a man who was throwing up, and the hole in the hull had been fixed by 2 carpenters with oakum and pitch in 20 minutes.
But nobody in Fawn could check his facts and nobody in Fluvenmire was going to correct him while the women were looking at him like that.
He was laughing within 20 seconds.
So were they.
He didn’t have jokes.
It was the dialect.
Every time he said something fast, the words came out with their hard flat Fluvenmire vowels and their swallowed endings, and to ears raised on the soft m’s and long u’s of Fawn, it sounded like a man doing an impression of a duck on purpose.
They kept bursting out laughing at sentences that were about nothing, and the crewmate kept thinking his stories were landing, and everyone was having a wonderful time at cross purposes.
Then Bjorn got up.
He’d been sitting through all of it with a bowl of crab broth in one hand and a haunch in the other, and when he finished both he stood up and shrugged off his shirt, and the noise around the fire dropped by half as 400 pounds of man came into view.
“Alright!” he bellowed.
“Who wants to see something?”
He dropped onto his palms and toes, and Pickem, who had been drinking out of the barrel’s spigot with a straw he’d made out of a hollow reed, hopped up onto Bjorn’s back without being asked.
He took 4 knives off his belt, flipped them once, and started juggling.
Bjorn started pushing.
The crowd went up like a fuse.
Men on both sides started counting at once, and the Fawn side got there first because they knew their own numbers, and the counting came out in shouts that built on each other.
“Ven!
Vi!
Dri!
Sat!
Ena!
Ki!
Ka!
Ko!
Io!
Venna!”
Bjorn hit 10 like it was nothing and just kept going, slow and steady, his breath even, his shoulders rolling.
Pickem’s knives spun over his head in a bright blur, and the little man had the nerve to be looking at the crowd the whole time instead of his hands.
“Venven!
Venvi!
Vendri!
Vensat!
Venaven!
Venki!
Venka!
Venko!
Venio!
Vinna!”
The 20s came and went.
Somebody had gotten Bjorn a jug and he was drinking out of it between reps, which got a laugh out of everyone within 50 feet.
Two of the younger Fawn men had been watching from the edge with their arms crossed, and they’d been watching a while, and they’d been talking to each other the whole time in the low way men talk when they’re deciding something.
“Look at him,” the first one said.
“Look at his back. He’s not even breathing hard.”
“He’s doing it in time with the drum,” the second one said.
“He’s showing off.”
“He’s showing off in front of our women.”
There was a pause.
Then the first one set his cup down on the sand.
“Not on my island.”
They walked out together, dropped to the ground 10 feet from Bjorn, and started pushing.
Then, on the count of “ki,” they both came up off their palms, clapped their hands together once in front of their chests, and went back down.
Up, clap, down.
In perfect unison, at a cadence set by the drum they’d got someone to start.
The crowd lost its mind.
Bjorn glanced over, saw what they were doing, and let out a roar of laughter that could’ve been heard from the ships.
Then he started clapping too, which meant Pickem had to widen his juggling arc to keep clear of Bjorn’s hands, which meant Pickem was now juggling 4 knives above a man doing clapping pushups, which pushed the crowd into open screaming.
The counting climbed.
“Vinna!
Viven!
Vivi!
Vidri!
Visat!
Viena!
Viki!
Vika!
Viko!
Viio!”
Then the 30s, and that was when the first of the young men started to flag.
“Drina! Driven! Drivi!” His arms were shaking on every clap and his face had gone the color of cooked crab, and the second one lasted 3 more reps before he flopped face first into the sand and just lay there while everyone laughed and shouted and poured broth on him for good luck.
Bjorn did not stop until 60.
He counted the last 10 himself, slow and loud, grinning the whole way, and when he finally came up onto his knees the whole beach was chanting his name, or a version of his name, or at least the noise of his name.
Pickem hopped off his back, collected all 4 knives out of the air one at a time, and bowed.
Off to the side, in a quiet corner near the water where the firelight only reached the edges of things, Buck V Henderson was working a small crowd of his own.
He had 6 women and 2 older men standing around him, and he’d been at it for a while, and he had the timing down to a science by now.
He had told this story maybe 900 times in his life.
“It was a crisp morning on Dragons Mountain,” he said, and he let his voice drop into the register he used for the good part.
“I was doing my daily 20 kilometer hike. Because a man who rests is a man who loses his edge.”
He flexed his bicep.
The women made a soft “ooooh.”
“And as I came around the eastern ridge, I saw it. Not a dragon. An ELDER dragon. A beast that had been terrorizing that mountain for centuries.”
He stretched his arms out wide to show them how big.
They gasped on cue, and one of them clapped.
“It demanded I ask permission to cross its territory. ME! Buck V Henderson! Asking permission! From a LIZARD!” He laughed, big and theatrical.
“I tried to reason with it! I said, listen, I’m just trying to get my cardio in, and you’re blocking my path! But the dragon wouldn’t listen. It said I had to bring it a maiden. A fine maiden, for it to defile.”
The women’s hands flew to their mouths.
“And I said NO! I said, I will not let you defile an innocent woman!” He mimed drawing something off his hip, both hands together, the great black blade that did not exist.
“And I swung! One swing! One clean, perfect swing!”
He brought his arm down through the air fast enough that the nearest woman flinched, and then he held the pose, frozen, arm extended.
“And the dragon’s head came clean off.”
They clapped.
They clapped for a long time, all 8 of them, and Buck straightened up and gave them his best modest shrug.
One of the younger women leaned over to her friend and said something quick and quiet, and her friend giggled into her cup.
“Mmmm, ua gi uuas boat clown? Ua gi jarr mykalla.”
The other one nodded and drank.
Buck couldn’t understand a word of it, so he just kept going, and when he got to the part about the maiden he lifted one arm and hit a double bicep flex, slow, holding it while he turned his head to look at each of them in turn.
The reaction was immediate.
Two of them dropped their cups.
One of them actually grabbed her friend’s arm and shook it.
“Mmmm! Fafa! Myee gi hontrif a map of flesh!”
“Grova,” another one whispered, which meant beautiful, and then said it again, louder, and then all 6 of them were saying it.
Buck held the flex for another 3 seconds, then let his arms down and picked up his cup off the sand and took a sip.
“Works every time,” he said.