The Weight of Rubies

Timing: Between Week IV and Week VIII

The interior of the lighthouse still stank of blood and rot, even after they had spent hours cleaning out the limbs and gnawed flesh that the hag had tossed aside. So for the three days that passed between the departure of The Unfaithful Lady and the return of another ship, Strahan Brano spent as much time as he could on the beach, in the open air. He rowed back to the rock islet holding the lighthouse only at dusk, to light the beacon, and spent the hours of dark half-dozing on the open balcony at the top, water-proof cloak wrapped around him against the ocean spray. Sometimes, at night, he would half wake to see the lights of ships passing east to west, safely rounding the reef.

And sometimes during his half-sleep, he would dream the beacon had sputtered out, another sprung up on the beach, and ships foundering, screams …

He would jerk awake, to wipe sweat and spray off his forehead, standing to make sure the only light was the one behind him, in the fire-chamber. He would stand there, shivering, gripped again by that tight, sick feeling that had overcome him in the moment when he had come to understand why he had been hired to lead the group of Shal and their servants overland to the shore. When he had come to understand what they planned for the light-keeper, what they planned for the beacon and, ultimately, what they planned for him after.

There had been only so many he could disable – not noting the grass hummock writhing with vipers, failing to warn about the toxic berries. And that had been mostly useless, with the cleric leading them, even though Junpart had needed to use all his prayers that stay. If Brano had been able to find a way to call the alligators to the Shal priest …

Every time he woke from his half-dream, Brano would stand atop the balcony, eyes straining to make sure no ship was about to catch on the reef, and think of what he might have done, what he should have done.

---

Mid-day on the third-day, The Sea Petrel came east, at first just a small shape against the horizon, until it stopped beyond the reef to drop anchor. Brano waited on the beach, behind a sand berm, ready to slip behind the line of grass as the rowboat came towards shore. There were eight in all, but his eyes went immediately to the woman. She waved off the hand of one of the sailors, who offered to carry her through the last few feet of water the sands, and hopped down herself.

She raised one hand to shade her eyes, looking over the sweep of beach. “Strahan Brano!” she called out. “Athron Dolmen said you would be here!”

Only then did he relax, knowing the ship had some from Seawell, sending back a new attendant for the lighthouse. As he walked forward, he only half-noted her hair, pulled back in a braid. It was her eyes that captured him, blue-green and laughing. He couldn’t help but answer her smile.

---

He ended up staying longer than he had planned after the five sailors returned to the Petrel to continue their trip west to Helve. Not because Paelvi asked him to remain with her and her two cousins and help them with scrubbing the last of the blood from the lighthouse, but because … well, he could help with throwing all the windows open, or pulling out the unsalvageable rugs and burning them on the shore, or pouring out buckets of bloody-stained water and bringing in fresh ones. The three cousins talked easily, though somberly in the abattoir that the main living chamber had become, and it was enough to cover his initial silence. When they were done, two days later, Jarvi and Joosef placed pots of incense on every level and lit it, to fill the rooms with a light, sweet scent.

Only then, with the smell of it still on his clothes, did Brano begin to tell them – how the Shal had come to his inland village, and hired him to guide them south, towards the sea, how one member of their party traveled enclosed in a half-carriage pulled by servants, how there had always been a faint aroma of rot around it. His questions about it had been deflected, the mutters among the human servants silenced whenever he was near.

“Just stay away from it,” Erqua had told him, with a nervous half-smile. And he had, never seeing the hag until the bodies from the first ship had been pulled ashore, and she had come out to feed.

Joosef leaned over to hand him the wine-skin. “You can get drunk now if you want,” he told Brano. “And in the morning, you can let the ocean wash you clean.”

“I will accept the first invitation,” Brano answered, taking the wineskin. “But the rowboat ride out to the lighthouse is as close as this inlander will get to swimming in the sea.”

He was wrong, though. The next morning, hung-over and head pounding at the sunlight, he stripped down and walked out, ignoring how the sands shifted beneath his feet, until he could feel them no more, until he could not touch bottom. For a moment, he panicked, flailing to find ground. But that morning and every morning for the next week, Paelvi held him as he lay back on the slow rocking of the water, making sure he did not slip under, or slip out to the horizon and into the morning sun.

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Their uncle came 10 days later, in his small fishing trawler, the Whelk. Paelvi and Joosef were to go back to Seawell, leaving Jarvi to tend the lighthouse for three months, until one of the others came to relieve him. By then, Brano had thought perhaps it would not be so hard to climb aboard a ship – just for a short time, for the brief voyage to Seawell. It would be good to visit the port again, and a novelty to approach it from the waterside rather than overland. And part of himself admitted that he probably would not have gone, if Paelvi had been the one to take the first stint with the beacon.

Or perhaps he would not have gone if he had any inkling of how his stomach would rebel, or how much time he would spend with his head hanging over the railing. The sight of the shore taunted him every moment of the trip, and his relief when Paelvi told him they were turning towards Seawell was itself almost enough to make his knees buckle. “There,” she said softly, one arm around his waist and the other lifting to point to the shapes of the buildings.

But then she stopped, and as Brano lifted his eyes to gaze blearily at the land, he focused instead upon the shape of a very large ship, anchored far out into the bay. “League ship,” Joosef murmured, coming to stand on the other side of him. Brano’s eyes traced the curve of the planks, the line of the deck, until he saw the other anchored 200 yards past the first.

“But,” Brano almost stammered, “Seawell isn’t a League holding.” Paelvi’s arm tightened around his waist, and he could see Joosef’s white-knuckled grip on the railing.

On the docks, the banner of free Seawell had already been pulled down.

DM’s Note: This photograph and this photograph used under Creative Commons licenses.