Another Raw Start

The men wore nothing but boxers on deck and were caught in the misery of salt spray on their backs, necks, arms, and legs, all the color of crabs left too long to boil in the pot. Better the sunburn than the alternative, though, which was wearing clothes — a day's steam south of Kestrel Harbor brought them to ocean temperatures in the nineties and the humidity would steam them alive.

The wood lattices bolted to the deck and gunwales spared the deckhands from touching the exposed steel beneath, which was why the Provident Reaping could take her men beneath latitudes which planted nightmares in other skippers' sleeps.

Karal stilted to the water pumps for a drink — the sea gushed from one with the press of a pedal, fresh water trickled from the other. His skin begged him for a splash of the pure and received a salt rebuke. Meric wasn't the kind of skipper to charge wages for fresh water, but the man who squandered it on his burns paid a steep price. Piss in his dinner glass instead of beer, night soil rubbed into his sheets...

Karal ducked his head under the sea spigot and let the hot rush through his hair. He stepped back and shook it out — ah, there it was. A moment's cool clarity.

"Sometimes," he said, "I wonder what the others miss out on."

"Well said, shbykhand," said Haust, rumbling by.

"I never would have guessed I was cut out for this," said the novice. "It's got to be a hundred and twenty, at least."

Haust said nothing. He rubbed the ocean over his cracked skin without wincing.

"We're all boiling right now. The captain's in his little wheelhouse oven, the fish are stewing in the ocean and float to the top—"

"Bait the nets, shbykhand."

"Yes, sir!"

When Karal was done, the vile-smelling chunks of liquified fish and cheese on his hands gave him another excuse to return to the pumps. It was the only shade out there on deck, designed for two mens' simultaneous occupation.

The five veterans of the Provident Reaping glared at the shbykhand from beneath that tiny shelter.

Karal spread his arms in supplication. "Gentlemen, if you would be so kind as to budge a little, so these guts don't end up smeared on yours?"

Raucous laughter and a couple of hands whacking the sea stream at him, reaching his chest as nothing more than stinging spray.

"I suppose a wash is out of the question, then?"

"Lanmas," cried one of the five, "how far up God's ass did you crawl to find this poet?" He held his girth in both arms like it might rip from him in his fits.

"Oh, Dac, you flatter me," said Rakal, "but I was the one who crawled out, looking for you."

More laughter as the veterans shifted aside. Camaraderie was a flesh-walled path to a seawater pump. Rakal washed his hands. It would be a while until the nets filled again, until the deckhands had to go out to blister beneath the sky.