I’ll admit it. I never did learn all of our company’s names. As the English novelist and poet Samuel Butler once wrote, “the truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.” Samuel was a perceptive guy. My vanity and pride kept me from just asking to be reintroduced. In fairness, even though they were under orders to get to know us, most of the company didn’t take great interest in following through with that dictate. Little by little, I was able to put names with some faces when I heard one of the company refer to another by name. For the rest, our little group of three started coming up with private nicknames. There was Dirty Brown, the orc with brown hair who always dressed in worn and stained clothing. Inside Voice was the orc who didn’t seem to possess one, always talking twice as loudly as anyone else. I wondered whether he was suffering from hearing loss of some sort. Daggers was the guy who festooned himself with long knives sheathed in several places around his body. I could go on but you get the idea.

The ones whose names I learned were the people we spent the most time with. Where did we spend time with them? I learned them at our nightly dice games where a rotating group of nine people attended. The sole six-fingered human in our company was named Gento. Then, there were the orc twins, fraternal not identical, Dregu and Pregu. And I thought I got the short end of the naming stick. Brokil, Dumbuk, Yam, Rilug, and Tog rounded out our little gaming group. By and large, I enjoyed being around them. They were rough sorts but that was fine. It’s not like me or my people were exactly polished gems either. We had a lot of fun.

But I said nine. That is only eight names, who was the ninth? Of course, it was Yahg. One night, he just showed up. It seemed like he could only behave himself for about a half an hour at a time. When the egg timer in his head expired, he would have to threaten someone or try to start some shit of some kind. When he was losing, which happened more than not, that half hour was closer to ten or fifteen minutes. Although he didn’t attend nightly, when he did the game was much less enjoyable. I wondered what dirt he had on Caider to even get an invitation to the company. Or maybe he was a good saver and the company needed money. In any event, I had to talk him down from the precipice of violence several times, until one time I couldn’t.

Aleyda remained seasick for a couple of days and then it suddenly cleared up as she got accustomed to the movements of the ship. Those two days were miserable for her, and taxed my patience as well as Bowen’s. Sleep deprivation is not a great recipe for emotional stability. Seeing how she was suffering, though, allowed us both to offer a measure of forgiveness, even though our nights were filled with the sound of retching and the smell of gastric juices. Once she recovered, though, she perked up rather quickly and became a regular participant at our nightly revel.

One night, Yahg decided to attend our gaming session and he was in his full glory. Have you ever been out on the basketball court with the spastic guy with no skills who just could not stop his shit talk? That was Yahg. He went on and on about how great he was at dice, how he was going to soundly beat everyone. And when his skills weren’t up to the task, his anger grew and his attention turned to a different type of beating. He started threatening violence whenever someone rolled better than he did, which, despite his much vaunted skill at dice, was often. Surprisingly, though, during one game he was doing pretty well. At the end of the match, it was down to him and Aleyda. With a satisfied smirk, he rolled a full house, fours over twos. He thought he had the game in the bag and frankly so did everyone else. That’s why it was a shock to everyone when Aleyda, on her first toss, rolled a straight, which was a higher scoring roll.

She graciously accepted everyone’s congratulations. Well, everyone’s congratulations but Yahg. He just sat there glowering at her, his face flushed with embarrassment and anger. We were setting up to play again when he spoke.

“You are a filthy cheat,” he spat out at Aleyda. “Nobody is that lucky.”

Now, I didn’t have the time to sit down and explain probability theory to the orc, and even if I did I doubted he was in any condition to understand it. On his best day he probably couldn’t comprehend it. I didn’t understand why he was so angry. Aleyda was not betting, so he had won his bets against the other orcs. I guess some people just couldn’t leave well enough alone. I glanced over at Aleyda and immediately saw that she was in no mood to take the large orc’s crap.

“What did you call me?” she responded, standing up. “You think I would tarnish my honor over a stupid game?”

Yahg stood as well. “You heard what I said,” he replied. He stepped forward and tried to poke her in the chest but she slapped his hand away. “You should be back at home having babies and tending your house. What do you know about fighting, you little nothing of a girl. And cheaters always protest their innocence. That’s how you know they are cheaters.”

Wow, holy circular logic Batman. I swear that my mind slipped gears a little bit trying to parse that statement. There was so much wrong with it I didn’t know where to begin.

Bowen started to stand up as well to come to Aleyda’s defense, but I grabbed his arm with a little shake of my head. I very much wanted to see how this was going to turn out. I didn’t think Yahg was going to get the result he was after.

“Just play the game, Yahg,” Rilug broke in. “She wasn’t cheating. She used the same damn dice everyone else did.”

“How do we know that?” Yahg responded. “Let’s search her. I bet we find another set of dice on her.” Then, he started to step forward to do just that.

“I haven’t given you permission to touch me,” Aleyda announced. “And if you continue to try, I am going to defend myself.”

“Hah, I’d like to see that,” Yahg responded, having at least understood the word defend. He started to move forward towards Aleyda, who was standing with her arms loosely at her side with her back to the iron bars of the cage. Then, he rushed her, trying to use his superior bulk to overwhelm her.

The funny thing about bullies is that they usually only have set of skills to solve problems, and that skill set is limited to threats and physical violence. When those don’t work like they have time after time in the bully’s life, the immediate response is to ratchet things up. After all, those skills have worked over and over again, so in the bully’s mind he just must not be applying enough force. A little more was all it was going to take. They really didn’t like when people stood up to them, especially when that someone was a short, relatively slight human female.

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It took Yahg about three steps to reach Aleyda and he was accelerating the whole time. He weighed at least twice what she did but she stood there unperturbed. When he was a step away, she finally moved, stepping forward with her right leg to meet him, widening her stance and lowering her center of gravity slightly. Then, she reached up and grabbed his tunic while simultaneously driving her hip into his front leg. Smoothly rotating her body and with the aid of Yahg’s own momentum, she executed a classic hip throw. Soon, Yahg’s feet were where his head should be as he loudly crashed into the bars of the cage upside down, bouncing off of them and sliding down to the floor in a heap.

Wow, I thought. That’s what you are supposed to do when someone charges you. I needed to have Aleyda teach me that. Knowing it would have saved me a lot of trouble in the past.

Aleyda wasn’t done, though. While Yahg was a little discombobulated, she approached him and grabbed one of his arms. Squatting slightly, she dug one foot into his armpit braced the other against the back of his elbow and started applying pressure against the joint. It didn’t look very comfortable to me and Yahg must have agreed because he immediately stopped struggling. After all, elbows aren’t supposed to bend backwards, at least not if you want to fully use that arm ever again. I hadn’t seen a plethora of orthopedic surgeons since I arrived in this world.

“Are we done?” Aleyda asked.

“Don’t break my arm,” Yahg pleaded.

“I asked if we were done.” I translated her question for Yahg.

“Yes.”

“If you get up and attack me again, next time I won’t show mercy,” Aleyda said, releasing his arm and moving backwards a couple of steps. I repeated that as well to drive home the point.

As Yahg slowly got to his feet, I glanced around at the other orcs. Not one of them looked like they were ready to intervene on his behalf and several were doing a poor job of concealing the smiles that threatened to break out on their faces. It seems that after years of being on the receiving end of threats, watching Yahg receive his comeuppance may have been more fun than the dice game.

After he got to his feet, Yahg stormed out into the hold. “I don’t want to game with a bunch of cheaters anyway,” he spat over his shoulder on his way out. That was the last time he attended. That didn’t make any of us sad.

“That was amazing,” I whispered to Aleyda when she sat down beside me again. Her only reply was a little smile.

After Yahg left, the other members of the company couldn’t contain their mirth. Yam started chuckling. He couldn’t help himself. Then, the others around him couldn’t hold out any longer and they started laughing, too. It took two or three minutes for the laughter to subside.

“I’ve been wanting to see that for years,” Dregu finally gasped out. “Let’s play.” So we did.

For the next couple of days, Yahg tried to avoid us, which was completely impossible on our tiny ship. Soon, though, he was back to his old tricks, liberally spewing vitriol and threatening violence. For some reason, though, the other members of the company didn’t seem as cowed by his antics as they had been. Humiliating Yahg, that was a real boost to morale.

Caider eventually stopped by after hearing some rumors and asked what had happened, so I told him. Hearing the story, he looked like he wanted to laugh as well.

“I guess you weren’t lying about your group’s combat ability,” he said. “That’s a good thing. The bad thing, though, is that Yahg can hold a grudge until his dying day. You probably shouldn’t trust him.”

“If he comes after any of us again, you are likely to be down one crew member,” I replied. “We won’t provoke him but we are also not going to live in fear of him.”

“That’s fair,” Caider replied. “You can certainly defend yourselves.”

“How did he end up on this trip anyway?” I asked.

“He’s my wife’s cousin,” Caider said. “You know how family things work. If I hadn’t brought him along, I’d never hear the end of it.”

Ah, good old nepotism.

The days onboard were fairly boring. There really wasn’t enough room on the deck to do any sort of training, so we kept up our fitness by doing exercises in our part of the hold. After a couple of days of working on our gear, everything was in as good of shape as it would likely ever be. I spent quite a bit of time meditating. I didn’t want to try to access my magic where others could see, so I spent the time reflecting on my relationship to light. My attempts to gain insight into my light affinity were largely futile, though. I just couldn’t seem to find the connection, the thing that made everything make sense. Did I have some sensual fascination with light or was it more a matter of character? Maybe these things just existed inherently, assigned and developed with little rhyme or reason. I dearly wished that I had been in Westfield long enough to receive a few more lessons. Maybe Mage Climmep would have had some ideas.

I spent a lot of time on deck staring at the sea or spotting hints of the life in the ocean below us. From time to time, I would gaze at the larger ships of the convoy around us, wondering how much better the quality of life was onboard them. I even offered to pitch in with chores around the ship, although sailing seemed fairly technical so the jobs that I was offered were fairly menial -- stowing lines that had been mended, scrubbing the deck, things like that. I was glad for the work, though, because it helped the time pass more quickly and it kept me from spending all day fretting about what we would do once we reached the island.

One late afternoon, I was on my hands and knees busily scrubbing a section of the deck. By my reckoning, our course had mostly been set a little west of northwest. On that day, the sea was heavy, large waves sending spray onto the deck and largely undoing my work. I happened to glance up towards the sun, which was low in the sky, and noticed it was about to be obscured by a stacked shelf of dark and angry looking storm clouds. That certainly got my attention.

I looked around at the ship’s crew. They were scurrying around the ship busily. Some of them were running lines along the deck to serve as handholds. Others seemed to be fashioning a sea anchor of some sort. Glancing at the other ships in the fleet, I realized that they had spread out a bit more from one another. On the decks that I could see, similar preparations were under way.

“Hey,” I called out to one of the sailors walking past. “Are we going to be sailing into that?”

Apparently my volunteer scut work had engendered a small amount of goodwill with the crew because he stopped for a moment to respond.

“We won’t be sailing into it. We’ll drop the sails and try to ride it out. It’s really the only option. Don’t worry, though. This isn’t our first storm and we have a stout ship.” Then, he quickly headed off.

I wish I had as much confidence as he seemed to have. Maybe telling yourself everything was going to be alright was the only option when you are out on a pitiless expanse of deep ocean. One thing I did know, however, was that we were in for a long night. For some reason, once again I couldn’t get the Gilligan’s Island theme song out of my head.

“If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost. The Minnow would be lost.” Damn you, syndicated television.