Chapter 12
357 Words
9
To make a face… Well, what can you make a face from? From an apple, a pear, grass, fat, glue, dye, horse hair, Lego, breeze blocks, marble, bronze… But the most beautiful human faces, male or female, are not made of apples, fat, or dye or the like.
One such face was the carved female face which adorned the nose of the barque the Crystal Key. The vessel was indeed a barque, not a schooner or a barquentine, with a square rigged foremast and main mast, and fore-and-aft rigged mizzen mast. The heavyset bosun Dirk Slothem would punish the sailors not only for referring disrespectfully to their old ship, but even if he caught one of them insulting the wooden figurehead, calling it ugly or, even worse, Medusa. You mustn’t give the ship’s protectress obscene nicknames! They would never dare on a Spanish vessel, for fear of their maritime backsides; they don’t spare the rod there! And it just so happened that the Crystal Key was indeed passing by the Spanish coast not far from the Cape of Finisterre.
The captain had not yet shown himself to anyone; orders were given by his first mate, van der Weide. More than once the tipsy sailors clapped the bosun on the back, hoping to make him confess that there was no captain but van der Weide on that ship. But Dirk Slothem was a sailor with decades of experience who had even sailed on Portuguese and English vessels, and such familiarity didn’t raise a smile; he twirled and twirled his long red whiskers and, in his measured Frisian way, would let them talk their fill, then reply: we have a captain on this ship, and his name is Captain Falkenberg. He’s simply indisposed and is lying in his cabin.
But one of the sailors who’d had too much rum, not convinced by the bosun’s explanations, was about to lay into him, fists flailing. Slothem only hit him once, a short, lightning blow from his hand the size of a bull’s thigh. Coming back to his senses that evening, the sailor joked that Medusa herself must have struck him with her full force.
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