As the day progressed, we left the coast far behind us. I think that the original plan had been to stay in sight of the shore the entire trip north to the inner sea, but our encounter with the guards from Shroud Hallow had changed that. I didn’t ask him, but I thought that Captain Serxio was afraid that the guards from Shroud Hallow might get the navy involved in the chase. If they did that, I assumed that he wanted more room to maneuver and evade. So, instead of following the coast we headed out farther into the deep ocean. The ocean is vast after all, and finding one small ship out on its seemingly endless expanse would be quite difficult.
I noticed that the crew must not have been idle while they were waiting for us. It looked like they had continued making repairs to the ship and while it didn’t move quite as quickly as it had when we first left Shroud Hallow, it seemed like we were making better time than we had on our voyage back to the continent. I wondered what repairs they could make in such a short time to generate such an obvious improvement, but I didn’t have to wonder for long. Looking at the sails billowing in the breeze above us, I could see that they were no longer the tattered things that had propelled us previously. Captain Serxio must have sold some of the gold that I had given him as a deposit and bought new sailcloth, which the crew had fashioned into new sails. I walked over to Captain Serxio.
“Nice new sails,” I said.
“I’m glad you noticed,” he replied. “I didn’t want you to think I wasted the deposit that you paid me. Do you have a destination in mind yet?”
“Not yet,” I replied. “It might be a couple of days before we can reach a consensus of some sort. Aleyda is back to puking her guts out since the water got rough and she is not the only one. It appears that I have several more people that are prone to seasickness. Until they inevitably recover in the next few days, I don’t really think we are prepared to have a serious conversation. How long until we reach the inner sea, anyway?”
“We will be clear of the waters controlled by the orcs within the next two or three days, depending on the wind,” he replied. “Reaching the mouth of the inner sea will take four or five more days after that. We still have to traverse the entire western coast of the Gremmans Confederation. Once we are clear of any possible pursuit, we will head back closer to shore. I am not certain it will smooth the ride out any but if we see a storm blowing up on us we can likely find a sheltered cove to ride it out in.”
“I thought you headed out deeper to avoid pursuit,” I said. “I am sorry to trouble you so much.”
“You have paid me well,” he replied. “I don’t mind adding another day to the journey if it keeps us all safe. If we are caught, I doubt the orcs would go easy on me or my crew.”
“Well, you obviously have my gratitude, and if I owe you more money, then all you have to do is let me know.”
“I thought there would be more of you,” he said.
“Well, some of my friends didn’t want to give up their lives to follow along,” I responded. “After listening to their reasons, I don’t blame them. I hope that they will visit in the future, though. I will go talk to my people and have a destination for you before we reach the inner sea.” Then, with a nod, I turned and went down into the hold.
Several of my people were, in fact, suffering. Patrick and Helvia had sailed before and both of them were fine. Marriam and Anxo had never sailed but the rolling of the ship didn’t seem to have any effect on them. Mero and Jahhaf both looked like they were feeling the effects of the sea, but in them seasickness manifested as malaise and grumpiness rather than projectile vomiting. The same couldn’t be said for Aleyda, Sathebeena, Xeng, or Werner. They were all miserable. Between bouts of upchucking, Werner kept talking about creating some sort of treatment for seasickness. He never got around to it, though. I tried to stick it out and sleep by Aleyda until she got accustomed to being on the water again, but eventually I gave up and moved to another part of the hold. Since Jahhaf was feeling under the weather, it was back to travel rations until he recovered. And I was just starting to get used to hot food again.
The days passed as they tend to do. Because Mero was feeling under the weather, care of Kadar became my responsibility. How that happened, I am really not sure. It turned out that he really was a good dog, although cleaning up his inevitable messes day after day was wearing on me. I couldn’t wait until Mero recovered enough to take responsibility for the care of his pet. One day, Kadar and I were both on deck and he started barking excitedly at a pod of dolphins that had decided to swim along beside our ship. The sailors thought that was pretty damn funny. I actually think that they enjoyed his presence and several of them made it a daily ritual to come by and pet him or play with him. Of course, none of them wanted anything to do with cleaning up after him.
Surprisingly, Aleyda recovered first. I guess she had more experience on the sea to fall back on. Within a couple of days, she was back in good spirits. After her, Jahhaf and Mero quickly followed, given that they weren’t as fully afflicted as some of the others. A day later, Werner’s stomach had settled and so had Sathebeena’s and they started enjoying the journey. Sathebeena did spend half an hour scathingly ripping me to shreds in a verbal diatribe. That wasn’t anything new, though. It was just her way. I felt bad for Xeng. His illness stretched into a third day and then a fourth. Just when I started to wonder if he would ever recover, he finally did. He was so dehydrated and famished that he ate enough for two men. Captain Serxio allowed Jahhaf to use the ship’s galley to prepare our meals. Before long, he had taken over meal preparation for the entire ship with the ship’s cook as his assistant. I had no doubt that he was the most popular member of our group among the sailors.
Finally, after everyone had recovered enough, it was time for our important discussion. By this time, we had cleared the waters controlled by the orcs with no sign of pursuit, so Captain Serxio had taken the vessel back towards the continent so we could sail in view of the coast. After we had eaten one night, I called a meeting. I know it was a little hypocritical of me, given how much I bitched every time Caider had made us meet, but we had an important decision to make and I thought everyone deserved input.
“Alright,” I said when everyone had gathered. “I hate meetings likely more than any of you but we have an important decision to make. That decision is where we choose to settle. As I see it, we have two ready made options. Option one is we debark from the ship at Restru and head upriver to Kollavik. There are several advantages to that plan as well as a significant disadvantage, although we’ll get to that. The advantages are that we would have some governmental protection and we probably wouldn’t have to buy a place to live. That would save more of our money for our business schemes. Our plan is to rely on Werner to develop some products that will upend their respective markets. Frankly, given the level of technology in this world, it probably won’t take much to do that. Of course, threatening others’ livelihoods is likely to generate quite a bit of enmity and we will have to invest on protection for all of us. Maybe we could contact the people we rescued from the island and ask them to come work for us. That would give us at least the base of a loyal workforce. The primary disadvantage is we would be beholden to a man who runs the operations division of a spy service. The fighters among us would be called, from time to time, to carry out missions. Those missions would likely be dangerous. We might lose some people.”
“Our second option,” I continued, “is to take the ship back to its home port. The voyage would be much longer. We would be starting entirely from scratch. We would have to find and purchase a place to live, which would give us less money to start our business. We would not enjoy any protection, so if we grow too fast or disrupt too many markets, and our finances haven’t grown large enough to secure our security, we end up facing a different type of risk. That risk wouldn’t be confined only to the fighters among us. It could apply to any of us. Once again, if we don’t manage things correctly, we might lose people. We will have to recruit our labor force from a group of strangers. Not all of them will be loyal. If given the right inducement, most of them probably won’t be. So, the question is this. Is it better to be free to do whatever we all want, to chart our own destinies, or are we better off being beholden to others? There is a risk to either choice but this is not a choice I can make for the rest of you.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“It seems the second choice would distribute the risk more evenly,” Sathebeena said. “The problem is that there would be a lot more of them. And some of the risk would come from the government. Who do you think the government would support? A bunch of interlopers or people who have been pillars of the community for years? Think about the distrust you experienced when you came to Greynard, but multiply it. People in power, people who are wealthy, they do not give in without a fight. And if they already have power, they are wont to use that power against anyone who threatens them. And no, I am not just saying this because I know there is a clan of dwarves that work the mines around Kollavik.” She finished with a little laugh.
“My fighting days are well behind me,” Mariam said, “if they existed at all. If someone came for me, or for us, I doubt that I would be able to protect myself much less others. If that’s the decision everyone else makes, though, I am behind it. I trust in all of you to do what’s best for us as a group. When I found myself back on that island, I thought my life was over. But now you have given me others to care about. I still worry about what I left behind but I also care about all of you. Very deeply at this point.”
“I’ve never been one for others telling me what to do,” said Anxo. “That’s why the life of a hunter was so good for me. It was me against the forces of nature. As I got older, though, I got more complacent. I don’t feel that way anymore. If I have to fight, I’ll fight. If I fall, at least I will have fallen making a difference for my friends.”
“Fighting is all I know,” Aleyda said. “The thought of giving that up feels like a betrayal of what I am. I wouldn’t make a good factory foreman. My heart is not in it.”
“I have no doubt we can revolutionize any number of industries,” Werner chipped in. “With what we know, all of us together, we should easily be able to get rich and stay that way. If we manage things correctly, either of the two scenarios would work. In one, though, we just need to move more slowly, more carefully, to reach our ultimate goal of security. Either plan works for me.”
“I agree,” Helvia said. “Anywhere without slavery is a good place as far as I am concerned. We don’t have to be rich. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it when I was rich and powerful. It was an easier way to live. Looking back on that person, though, I don’t like that version of me very much. I was too entitled. I had never known suffering or privation. Now that I have experienced both, I don’t want to go back to being her. Whatever we do, we can’t stop fighting for our people. I don’t know what form that fight will take but we have an obligation to make things better for us and by extension all of them.”
“Oh, the fight is not over,” I said. “But if we don’t amass a decent amount of wealth then it will be difficult for us to help anyone else. It’s hard to give others opportunity when you are fighting for your own survival.”
“I’ll fight for all of us if I have to,” Patrick said. “In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to fight to survive, but this world is far from perfect. There are too many unknowns, too many variables for me to be able to decide which option is best.”
“I go where you go,” Xeng said. “If we have to spill some blood or risk our lives for our best chance, then so be it.”
“The challenge of starting from scratch appeals to me,” Bowen said. “If someone want to bring a fight to our doorstep, I welcome the challenge. They wouldn’t be the first enemies I saw buried.”
Throughout this conversation, I noticed that Jahhaf and Mero had been silent, both evidencing a strong reluctance to get involved, to add their opinions. I wanted to hear from everyone before the discussion was done. I turned to Jahhaf.
“Jahhaf, you haven’t said anything yet,” I said. “What do you think we should do.”
“No matter what we choose to do,” he said, his voice thick with emotion, “there will be things that go wrong. That’s life. Sometimes things fail in small ways and other times quite spectacularly. Like Mariam, I’m too old to fight. I don’t have the experience or the training. If I have a role in this group, it is to help pick up the pieces when things do go wrong and to support all our efforts by making certain you all feel cared for every day. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. I hope I have helped at least a little bit.”
Many voices spoke at once, each assuring Jahhaf that they appreciated his efforts. Tears welled in his eyes and tumbled down the side of his cheeks. “I am glad I have had a little success,” he sobbed out.
I needed to spend more time with him, I decided. He spent so much time quietly taking on other people’s burdens that he probably didn’t have an outlet for his own. He was clearly unsure, and suffering inside, and I needed to make certain I was there for him like he had been for all of us.
Finally, I turned to Mero. “Mero, do you have an opinion?” I asked.
“Can Kadar come with us either place?” he said.
I couldn’t stop myself. The tension was so thick and his statement was not at all what I was expecting. It took me a couple of seconds to parse it. Once I did, I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing and I wasn’t the only one. The hold erupted with gales of laughter from most of the people present. Mero looked embarrassed, blushing all the way to the tips of his ears, which was somewhat hard to see given his somewhat dusky coloration. Eventually, the laughter subsided.
“Where you go, Kadar goes,” I answered quite seriously. “That is not negotiable. You are the youngest among us, though. What do you want from your life?”
“I want to go home,” he said. “More than anything, I want to see my family again. But if that is not possible, I want to get stronger. You all won’t be young forever and will need someone to look out for you someday. Yes, I want to learn to fight, but I also want to learn so many other things. I want to be involved in our business. I want to meet someone I deeply care about. I want to have children of my own. I want to have a family of my own. There is a hole in my heart that I need to fill somehow.”
From the mouths of children, I thought. In a few sentences, he had precisely summarized exactly why we were doing what we were doing. We all wanted to belong somewhere. We all needed support, for someone to have our backs. We all had dreams and aspirations. We all wanted a degree of security. Until we had those things, nothing else mattered.
“I will work as hard as I can so that you can have those things,” I said. “After the rest of us are gone, you are our hope. If we do nothing else in this world to make a lasting change, then I want to be successful giving you your heart’s desires. You are right. None of us can go back to the worlds we left behind. We can only move forward. Mero, although we are not the family you wanted we are the family you have. And I am certain I speak for every one of us when I say that we will try our very best to make your dreams come true.”
“Can we all agree we will all support the majority decision, whatever it is?” I asked. After receiving a wave of assent, I continued. “We will now vote. The tradition of my country that votes take place privately. We will set aside a place to vote and have two ballots. When it is your turn to vote, make your mark on the choice that you favor.”
After getting some parchment from Werner’s supplies, as well as a quill and ink, we set up an impromptu voting booth deeper in the hold. We took turns one by one to visit it and make our decisions. I decided to vote last.
After the others had cast their votes, I approached the voting station. I looked down at the two options and considered them. As I was pondering my choice, though, I realized that my vote didn’t really matter. My single vote was not enough to change the results of the election. My people had spoken, and although there were certainly others with differing opinions, the choice had been made. To avoid further dissent, I made my mark on the winning ballot.
Then, I picked both papers up and walked in to the area everyone else had gathered. I handed both ballots to Patrick, relying on him to announce the results to the others. Then, without stopping, I continued out of the hold up onto the deck. Captain Serxio looked like he was about to retire for the evening, but I walked up to him and interrupted him anyway.
“We’ll be leaving the ship at Restru,” I said.