The Drunkard

There are things without names. There are stirrings in the inky darkness of night that have no beginning or end. There are creatures waiting beyond the warm light of the tavern windows, watching a stream of drunken sailors spill from the inn’s grinning mouth. He sees them with closed eyes. He remembers. 

***

Everyone was young for a time, even him. In those days when he looked at the ocean he saw his future sparkling within it, and he sailed it without wondering what lay in its depths. He was as skilled as any pirate at the helm, and it was not long before a captain came knocking on the young sailor’s door. This captain was a large man, and he had to stoop in the doorway when he asked the lad to join his ship and sail out beyond the furthest maps. By this time that captain was known throughout the isles of Odd as the most intrepid and foolhardy of men, and the name Blackbeard rumbled like thunder across the ocean’s face. The name also struck a chord in the heart of the young sailor, and  rightly he asked, “but where will we go without a map?”

And Blackbeard roared in response, “A story! I bought a story from a smelly old witch and I am going to go and get my hands on the damn thing!”

“The story?” asked the young man, mouth agape. “I didn’t know you could get your hands around a thing like that.”

 “Sure you can!” Blackbeard guffawed, “I keep this one here tucked away in this little bottle, and when I want to hear it I just pop off this cork and out it comes!” 

With that, the gargantuan pirate pulled off the stopper with a sea-battered paw, and a sapphire cloud drifted up from the bottle’s depths. Its words spilled over themselves, overlapping in eddies of promise and rushing towards rapids thick with imagined riches. The cloud spoke with the winds’ tongue, and the young man felt a deep chill as he listened to its melody. It said that the world had an end, like all things, and that beyond the furthest ocean lay the lost treasures of the sea that had piled there after an eon of flotsam, waiting in the silent void. He could not help but imagine galleons with golden sails, islands hewn from emeralds, the crowns of a thousand kings long ago swept into the sea. Blackbeard watched these reveries idle on the boy’s face for a while before popping the cork back onto the bottle with a bellowing chuckle. 

“It’s a pretty yarn,” he declared, “But it’s one thing to hear a story and another to grab it in my own two paws. I’m going to wrestle it to the deck, pack it up and stuff it in my boot, haul it home to port and sell it for a pretty penny. And you’re coming with! I could use a navigator.”

The young sailor knew he was as fast a sailor as any who roamed the Isles, but to hear it from Blackbeard himself sent his heart soaring. Still, he could not shake the restless feeling that any story worth its salt would buck a man off with hardly a second glance. His stomach murmured a word of caution, and he ventured to ask “What if the story is bigger than your boot?” 

For a moment Blackbeard peered down at the smaller man with a strange expression before his face opened in a lopsided grin. “These boots! They could fit the trunks of trees and the knees of elephants, they’ll hold a silly little story with room for a second!” 

And that was that. The boy packed a cloth bag with everything he owned and they set sail as night crept over the ocean. After all, surely he could outrun the dread that fell upon him.  

***

The sky was mournful in the rising night, and the air hummed as only a summer’s evening can. The boy mistook the electricity he felt as his future come to greet him, but it was only the weeping wind. Still, even a weeping wind can fill a sail, and at the captain’s command the young man turned the great boat away from home. It was midnight when they passed the last island he recognized. 

 Like the man himself, Blackbeard’s frigate was of monstrous proportions, and it sailed with the magic of the four great oaks that had been hewn to make its timbers. Though the young man had no way of proving it, he swore that the ship moved of its own accord, that it seemed to leap through the water like a hungry gull. But hardly twenty days had passed before the waves began to fall still, and a great darkness swallowed the horizon.

When Blackbeard removed the precious story from his coat pocket the bottle had turned a murky green, and he hesitated a moment before unstopping it. When he did, a noxious gas billowed out of the bottle, creeping across the whole of the deck and spreading a smell of rotting wood. Strangely the cloud’s words were the same, crying out a tale of untold riches stashed beyond the sea, but the words carried a heaviness to them now that weighed upon the souls of those who listened. The crewmates all clambered below deck or scurried up the rigging to avoid the cloud, all except for Blackbeard and the young man. Blackbeard scowled deeply, spit a disbelieving lump of cabbage onto the deck and said to no one in particular, “I do believe my story has gone bad.” 

The young man stood stock still, and as the blood drained from his face he thought he heard the distant sounds of water dripping slowly into nothingness. He turned to Blackbeard, hoping to appeal to the terrible man, to beg him to toss the story into the sea and sail far far away from the cursed edge. When his eyes met the captain’s he saw a gleaming fire there, and all he murmured was “Two knots to the edge of the world.” 

***

Three years passed in piracy and general scallywagging. A king was elected on the Isles of Odd, but no one paid him much attention so he left to fish for crabs on a quiet sandbar. New islands were discovered and legends made, the harbors rang out with the usual clank and clatter of ships being built. There were always new ships being built. 

On a weary day in the heart of winter a hurricane arrived in Odd. Its screaming winds clawed at the windows of the towns, and a cascade of sleet lanced across the harbors’ sleeping ships. Nestled in the shadow of the awful storm, a wretched ship staggered to port. 

There were only two men on the ship. Neither spoke a word as they shambled off of the tattered boat and slumped into the nearest tavern. Neither spoke as the terrified innkeeper cried out in horror at the apparitions that had descended upon his bar, before somebody piped up from the corner. “That’s Blackbeard ain’t it! Why he looks shrunk in half nearly. And who’s the old man with him?” Blackbeard mustered up whatever courage was left within his aching chest, and let out a long and defiant guffaw. “It’s a rare adventure that leaves a man smaller than he started. You’re lucky you didn’t see what I saw out there, or else you’d be sailing on a thimble!” 

His words roused the whole of the tavern, and the pirates clamored close to hear the legendary storyteller spin his yarn. Once he felt every eye upon him, Blackbeard opened his mouth to tell the tale, but only silence spilled forth. He gulped and tried again, gasping for words like a fish caught in the beating sun, but there was nothing to say. Finally with a defeated harumph the large man stood up in the crowd and waded to the door. He opened it onto the still raging storm, before turning back to toss a small bottle to the haggard man cowering in the corner. The crowd realized that they had forgotten all about the second survivor.

After ridding himself of his bottle Blackbeard strode off into the night, and by the next morning he had begun building a sleek new ship in the harbor and word had it that he was recruiting a crew. As for the old man, he remained wordless as the tavern regulars begged for a story, alternatingly offering him drinks and threats. When dawn broke on the next day he rose shakily to his feet and hobbled onwards towards the port, eyes squeezed shut. He shuddered as he heard the waves smacking against the quays and repressed the sudden urge to cry. 

Knowing nothing else but the solid weight of a ship’s wheel in his hands, the old man begged the captains of the port to let him steer their vessels, but each of them scoffed at the ragged old man who stood before them clutching a bottle with his eyes clenched shut. Some goaded him on, offering gold if he would open his eyes only for a second, but when he tried to look he found that he could not convince his wary eyelids to relinquish their hold. He was laughed off of a hundred boats, each time gripping his bottle tighter to his chest and murmuring “I am a sailor, a sailor, a sailor…” . The locals took to calling him the Drunkard, and each morning like clockwork he returned to his wanderings, bottle newly filled with a strange green liquid. No one ever saw him take a swig of the thing, but it was said that the Drunkard would speak to the bottle, plead with it to lift an unspoken curse.

As the Drunkard walked his silent circular path across the docks, for a month and then a year, he could not shake a darkness that had latched itself onto his heart, whispering that he had not really come back from the edge. The voice slithered into his mind and he realized he had no words to fight it, to drown out its leering coils. “Nothing escapes the edge” it spat, “the edge always takes a piece, there is always something swept off the world. What is left of you? Why keep your body if the rest is gone? Why live when all the rest died?”

***

One day a very foolish man came to port. He was known across Odd as a reckless and fearless man, and as soon as his ship dropped anchor he began wandering the town and proclaiming that he had just sailed the whole of the waking sea in a mere four days. Most of the locals paid him no mind, but when he got to the Drunkard and boasted his feat the old man coughed up a bemused harumph.

“Excuse me??” cried the speedster, “I promise you your old bones would turn to dust if you were lucky enough to ride a boat like mine!” 

The old man waggled his caterpillared brows, and there was a hint of a smile tucked behind his closed eyes. “I’ve done it.” He said in a small voice. “Thrice”. 

The speedster looked aghast for a moment before a derisive smile crept over his pristine teeth. “Please old man, show me.” He practically pushed the Drunkard onto his boat, shoved him into his polished steering wheel, and threw himself haughty into a very nice chair nearby. The Drunkard felt the wheel’s spokes with calloused fingers, tried once more in vain to open his eyes, then shrugged and pulled the ship away from port. The ride that followed left the young man vomiting off the side and the old man chuckling contentedly when they finally stopped at a distant island.

“Why, you must have traveled three days time in the last hour you lunatic!!” the speedster cried. “You have broken every law of the sea, boats, and have very nearly killed me! And you did it all without the slightest clue where you were going!”

The Drunkard paid him no mind, and shuffled away across the deck, humming to himself. He was still a sailor after all, the sea’s edge had not taken that away from him. He slipped the small bottle out from his ratty cloak and whispered furtively into it, “still a sailor”. 

“Oh for god’s sake,” the young man groaned, “lay off the damn bottle.” Even so, he had no choice but to give the Drunkard a job, for he truly had sailed faster than any pirate before or since. The Drunkard accepted, on the one condition that they sail wherever the winds would take them, content to let the ocean itself set their course. He never managed to open his eyes, still terrified that if he did he might relive the horrors that lay beyond the world’s edge, but he trusted more with each passing day that the sea would still be there if ever he looked down.