SALT AND IRON : The Tale Of Alexios

Part Two: The Word That Arrived on a Ship That Was Not His

Part One Remaining Scene:

It was, Alexios would realize much later, the closest thing to a farewell his father ever gave him — not a farewell in the sense of goodbye, which implies knowledge of ending, but a farewell in the sense of a blessing, a man putting into words something he perhaps sensed, on some level too quiet to name, that he might not have many more chances to say. At the time, Alexios simply felt pleased, and a little embarrassed, in the particular way seventeen-year-old boys are embarrassed by sincere affection from their fathers, and he said something dismissive in response, something like "you're only gone three months, not dying," a joke that would return to him afterward with a cruelty he could never have anticipated when he made it.

Theron laughed at the joke, because that was the kind of man he was, quick to laugh even at jokes made at his own expense, and then he shouldered his sea-chest and walked down to the harbor in the grey early light, and Alexios stood at the window where he had once been lifted as a boy of seven, watching his father's shape grow smaller against the forest of masts, until it was indistinguishable from all the other shapes, and then gone entirely.

It was the last time he ever saw him alive.

Part Two:

Four months came and went, and then a fifth began, and Ismene stopped mentioning the delay out loud, though Alexios noticed the way she stood at the window some evenings, in the exact place his father used to stand, looking out at a harbor that gave away nothing, same as it ever had.

"Ships are late," she said, when Alexios finally asked. "Ships are late all the time. The Iron Coast is further than he's ever traded. It means nothing."

She did not believe it, even as she said it, and Alexios did not believe her not believing it, and Elara, at fourteen, old enough now to read the silences in a house as fluently as the words, stopped asking when their father would be home, which was somehow worse than if she had asked constantly, because it meant she, too, had begun to understand.

The ship that finally brought word was not his father's ship. It was a merchant vessel out of the Salt Islands, the Cormorant's Pride, arriving in Myrrhos harbor on an afternoon in early autumn when the light had that particular gold, slanting quality that Alexios would never again be able to see without his chest tightening. He was down at the docks that day, as he often was, half-heartedly helping an old fisherman named Petros mend a net in exchange for a few coins, when he saw the captain of the Cormorant's Pride come down the gangplank and speak briefly to the harbor master, and saw the harbor master's face change, and saw the harbor master's eyes find him — Alexios — across the length of the dock, and hold there, with an expression that Alexios had never seen directed at himself before and understood, immediately, in his stomach before his mind had caught up, that it meant something had gone terribly wrong.

He does not remember walking home. He remembers, later, being asked about it — by his mother, by well-meaning neighbors, by his own memory turning the day over obsessively in the months that followed — and finding that the walk itself had simply vanished, an entire quarter-mile of his life erased by the shock, so that his memory jumped directly from the harbor master's face to standing in his own doorway, where his mother was already crying before he had said a single word, because the harbor master had sent a boy running ahead of him, and the boy had already told her.

"Pirates," the harbor master said, when he arrived a few minutes later, twisting his cap in his hands with the awkward misery of a decent man forced to deliver the worst news of his professional life. "Off the Iron Coast. The Cormorant's Pride picked up survivors from a nearby vessel — traders, like your father, caught in the same waters. They said a fleet flying black-and-red sails came on them near dusk, three ships against one, no warning given and none asked for. Your father's ship was smaller. Slower." He stopped, visibly hating what came next. "There is no chance anyone survived. The survivors saw it happen from a distance, hiding in the fog. They said the ship burned to the waterline before it went under."

"Whose fleet?" Alexios heard himself ask, in a voice that did not sound like his own voice, flat and strange, as though someone else were operating his mouth from a great distance.

The harbor master hesitated. "The survivors gave a name. Salazar."

The name meant nothing to Alexios, that day. It was simply a sound, four syllables that would come, in time, to mean more to him than almost any other word in any language he would ever learn — but on that first afternoon, standing in his own doorway with his mother sobbing behind him and his sister's face white as bone in the hallway shadow, the name Salazar was just a name, a stranger's name, attached to an act so large and so final that Alexios's mind simply refused, for the first several minutes, to process it at all.

He did not cry that day. This was, perhaps, the strangest part of it, the part he would be most ashamed of in the weeks that followed — that when the news finally landed, fully landed, in the part of him capable of feeling it, what he felt was not grief but a kind of enormous, ringing silence, as though someone had struck a great bell somewhere inside his chest and the sound had not yet finished traveling outward to reach the rest of him. He held his mother while she wept. He held his sister, who did not weep so much as shake, a fine constant tremor that did not stop for hours. He answered the harbor master's questions in that same flat, distant voice, and thanked him for coming, because someone in the house needed to remember their manners and it was clearly not going to be anyone else, and it was only much later that night, alone in his room, the room he had once shared his sister's nightmares in, that the bell's sound finally reached him, and he wept in a manner he had never wept before and would, in truth, never quite weep again — not the clean, cleansing grief his mother had once described to him over a dead dog, but something jagged and enormous and entirely without shape, a grief too large for the room it was breaking inside of.

He thought, absurdly, of his own joke — you're only gone three months, not dying — and the memory of it felt like a blade turning slowly in his chest, because it had been the last thing he had said to his father that mattered, a stupid boy's joke made at the one moment in his whole life when sincerity would have cost him nothing and given him everything, and he had spent it on a joke instead, and now there would never be another chance to spend it better.

The weeks that followed blurred together in the manner grief blurs things, each day nearly indistinguishable from the last, marked mostly by small, brutal reminders: his father's chair at the table, empty; his father's boots by the door, never to be filled again; a half-repaired fishing net in the shed that Theron had promised to finish "next time I'm home," a promise now permanently, horribly broken. Ismene moved through those weeks like a woman carved from the same grey wood as the boats in the harbor, functional and hollow, doing what needed doing — there was no body to bury, which somehow made the grief worse rather than better, a wound with no clean edge to close around — and it fell to Alexios, in ways no one discussed but everyone understood, to become the head of the household in fact if not yet in name.

He did not tell his mother, in those early weeks, what had begun to grow inside him, because he did not yet have words for it himself, and because he sensed, correctly, that she would try to talk him out of it before it had even fully formed. It began as something small and cold, a single hard point of clarity in the middle of all that formless grief: someone had done this. Someone had a name — Salazar — and a face, presumably, and a body that could be found and made to answer for what it had taken. The world was chaos and loss and a mother crying quietly into bread dough she no longer had the heart to properly knead, but somewhere in that chaos was one solid, findable fact, and Alexios began, without entirely meaning to, to hold onto that fact the way a drowning man holds onto driftwood.

It was Elara who said it first, three weeks after the news arrived, in the flat voice of a girl who has had entirely too much taken from her entirely too young. They were sitting together on the boathouse roof, the same roof she had once scaled with a fearlessness that made his stomach drop, though neither of them climbed there for fun any longer — it had simply become the place they went when the house felt too full of their father's absence to breathe in.

"You're going to go after him," she said. Not a question.

"After who?"

"Don't." Her voice cracked, just slightly, the first c***k Alexios had heard in her since the day the news arrived, when she had shaken instead of wept and had not properly cried since. "Don't pretend with me. I've watched you for three weeks. You go quiet every time someone says his name. Salazar's name, I mean. Not Father's." She looked at him then, her eyes too old for fourteen, too old for any age really, eyes that had learned things about the world no child should have to learn. "You're going to go after him."

Alexios did not answer immediately. Below them, the harbor moved through its ordinary evening business, boats coming in, lanterns being lit, a world entirely indifferent to the fact that it had broken something inside their house that might never fully mend. "I don't know what I'm going to do," he said finally, which was, in that moment, almost true.

"Liar." Elara said it without heat, simply stating a fact. "I know you, Alexios. I've known you my whole life. You're not going to sit in this house and get old and let it just — sit there. The not knowing. The name with no face on it." She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them, suddenly looking very young again, the fourteen she actually was instead of the ancient thing grief had briefly made of her. "I just don't want you to go."

"I haven't decided anything."

"You have. You just haven't told yourself yet." She rested her head against his shoulder, the way she used to when she was small and frightened of six-legged monsters with sideways mouths, and Alexios put his arm around her, and neither of them said anything further for a long while, and in the silence, something in Alexios did, in fact, decide — not with words, not yet, but with the same cold, growing certainty that had been building in him since the harbor master first twisted his cap in his hands and said the word pirates.

He would go. He did not yet know when, or how, or what a boy of seventeen with no training beyond driftwood on a beach could possibly hope to accomplish against a fleet of pirate ships and a name that made grown sailors go quiet at the mention of it. But he would go, because the alternative — staying, growing old in Myrrhos, letting the name Salazar remain forever a stranger's name attached to a wound that never closed — was no longer a life he could imagine wanting.

He did not know, that evening on the boathouse roof, that his father had once made almost the exact same decision, at almost the exact same age, for reasons that had nothing to do with revenge and everything to do with a code that would eventually cost him everything. He did not know, because his father had kept that whole life buried so deep and so completely that not even his own son, who had loved him more than anything else in the world, had ever glimpsed the shape of it.

He would learn it soon enough. But first, there is a story that must be told out of order — not because Alexios knew it then, but because the reader deserves to understand what kind of man Theron truly was, long before his son ever did.