Lions and Lambs

Chapter 9

Azli

The first week was a new kind of hell that Azli had never experienced. The work he and Marius did was not by any means challenging, but it was more manual labor than he had ever done in his life. His hands were blistered and weeping by Ninn, the only day they had to rest, and his shoes pinched at his toes in the worst possible way. Azli was the son of a king and not at all meant for scrubbing decks and washing clothes that smelled worse than any creature should have been able to produce. And every day, every hour, every minute, Marius talked. He blabbered about useless shit that Azli didn't even understand half the time. He talked about his beautiful dead mother and his adoring handsome father and the three brothers and five sisters he'd left behind at home because he was sick of his little town and wanted a bit of adventure. He talked about his old religion which frankly sounded ridiculous to Azli's ears, and he gossiped more than Azli's old nurse maid had.

Most of the crewmembers left Marius and him alone, but every so often they were the brunt of a few poor-natured jokes and amused kicks, mainly from the ill-mannered blond man who'd threatened to scalp him on the first day. Neither the captain nor his Quartermaster had made an appearance throughout the week, though Marius often whispered about the pair as if they might have ears in the deck itself.

For the most part Marius talked about nothing important, and half the time Azli couldn't even understand him, but at night silence descended upon the verbose boy and Azli swore he heard the sound of weeping. Azli himself refused to cry, for it felt like he would be admitting defeat. His life was not over. Changed, yes, but not over like Eshmun and Nisma's. He forced himself to look at it as a new adventure, like the ones his nurse used to read to him when he was years younger. Of course, the pirates in those novels were kinder and smelled much better.

For a while Azli forgot what pirates did. He spent so much time scrubbing the deck, running mindless errands, and cleaning out various shitholes that he didn't have much time to think.

Azli lost track of how long he'd been there, and he struggled to count the days in his head as he wiped up a puddle of rum. Marius had been called off a while ago by one of the uglier beasts to do something or other and the pleasant buzz of conversation had ceased, leaving Azli to his thoughts. In all this time, he had yet to learn anything useful about sailing. If he was to spend the remainder of his life here, he could at least do something more than mindless errands while dodging meaty fists and drunken kicks.

Bitter thoughts clouded his mind and distracted him so that he barely noticed the sun sinking low in the sky, nor did he see the approaching sails on the horizon. It wasn't until he noticed the shouts of alarm and excitement that he looked up from the deck, shoving long black tangles away from his face to squint at the horizon. There, silhouetted against the bleeding sun, was a ship that looked larger than their own flying a triangular flag with a golden triangle pasted across a maroon background. He recognized it immediately as the Merchant's Guild of the Eastern Republic. Many of his lessons had been full of names and flags and geography, so he knew how unique this sight was. The Eastern Republic had no easy way to access the Fourth Ocean, not when the only safe route was through a confusing network of shallow rivers coursing through their border. Half of them had been built up years ago, otherwise no ship of any size could have made it through.

He didn't know much about the Eastern Republic, just that many looked down on them for their outlandish ideas of democracy. It was no wonder they were such a tiny country when war took them months to declare and was often protested violently soon thereafter. Despite such a pacifist nature, they had some of the most successful battle tactics in the whole Eastern continent.