Karadra's Shipwreck

The Island - Chapter 10

Once more, he woke up. Once more, he was in pain. His head felt like an anvil, battered a thousand times, ill-formed and warm. He lay on his bed, in his cell, but he thought he could still hear the crowd’s roar in his mind, and the sword whistling past him.

He didn’t want to see the injury on his face. He didn’t have to – he sensed its depth, felt the pain. What he really wanted was to board the first ship sailing for Ayaton and go to his mother, lie down in the garden, under the rain, and wait for his wounds to heal without having to think of anything.

The door opened again. His head turned right, and with it tilted the ceiling and floor as well – his injuries were far worse than he’d imagined. Acute pain pierced his neck and back and sent quivers to his limbs.

He struggled to sit up. The same guard, his only visitor before and after death, crossed into the room with an ungenuine smile. Arsik narrowed his eyes, trying to focus on the blurry silhouette.

“Is he dead?” he croaked with effort.

The guard came closer, his face expressionless, blank. “Yes, yes… The knight kicked the bucket back on that beach,” he said absently, causing Arsik a pang of anxiety.

“Who would have thought?”

“Not us, for sure.”

“Me neither,” Arsik admitted honestly and made to touch the scar on his face. His hand froze midmotion and he looked the guard straight in the eye. “How bad is it?”

The guard seemed awkward. “It’s… I mean, I don’t know… Anyway, it doesn’t… Come with me, can you move or…”

“I can move,” Arsik said around thoughts of debatable coherency.

He rose to his feet and stepped forward tentatively, one foot in front of the other, in a line as straight as he could possibly manage. Slowly, patiently, the guard followed as they exited the cell and entered the tunnel.

“I hope your boss goes easy on me, kid, at least at first. Afterwards, he may ask whatever he wants, but for now, at least, I hope he doesn’t expect any impressive stunts.”

His words failed to elicit an appropriate response. The guard walked with him without his usual commentary, only supplying vague replies here and there. “Yes… Maybe… We’ll see…”

They continued to Golderim’s chamber. When they arrived, before them lay the same scene as earlier. Nothing had changed, apart from a dead knight and a more severely wounded Arsik.

Golderim, however, seemed to have lost some of his luster.

Arsik approached him, eyeing the fruit and drinks on the table. “Your knight is dead, I heard,” he said, reaching out and plucking some grapes from their stem.

Golderim gazed at him forlornly. “It is so, yes. You killed him. A beast of a man and yet you succeeded, it can’t be denied.”

There was something in the archpirate’s voice that Arsik didn’t like – but then again, he rarely liked anything these days, so he paid that wariness no heed.

“You look disappointed.”

“I am,” the archpirate admitted.

“I imagine you had high hopes about the knight and his noble House? You expected ransom or some great service? Then you shouldn’t have submitted him to a duel.”

His words were laced with carelessness. He realized it the moment they escaped his mouth and regretted it instantly.

“You’re not wrong, Arsik Iceberg.”

Remembering the story with the wolves, Arsik glanced at the guard, who had saved a scowl for him.

“But everyone has their flaws,” Golderim went on. “I am a gambling man, unfortunately. It is my downfall, my mortal sin, what ruins my plans and disturbs my peace, but I succumb to its temptation every time. There is no cure for that.”

Arsik casually helped himself to the rum. “No argument here… boss.”

He saluted him with his cup. Golderim bared his teeth. “Yes… About that now.”

Arsik started shaking. He tried to hide it, clumsily keeping his cup from falling.

“I’m afraid we cannot work together. As you can understand, whoever we are, the law is the law. We can’t act however we please.”

Arsik felt lightheaded. He couldn’t comprehend what he heard. Everything spun around him; his knees wobbled.

“Hold on… What are you talking about? The knight is dead, isn’t he?” he stammered.

The question seemed to puzzle Golderim. “Arsik… Yes, he is, but it doesn’t matter. You didn’t win.”

Utter silence reigned in the chamber. Arsik heard ringing in his ears: nerve-racking high frequencies that manifested in the absolute void.

“But…” he insisted, at a loss. “If he’s dead, and I’m here… One position, one man…”

Golderim peered into his eyes and raised his brows. “Your memory deceives you, my friend,” he said, sitting up. “Whoever won the duel would work for me… Whoever won, Arsik… But we had a tie, didn’t we?”

The cup dropped from his hands. His knees buckled and he grabbed at the table to support himself, upturning it. Glasses shattered on the floor, drinks were spilled, and foods rolled in front of him. He watched it all scatter haphazardly with a dull, infuriating noise.

“What the f**k are you talking about?” His voice came out weak and broken, more whine than speech. Through blurry eyes, he could make out the archpirate’s real expression. He was clearly enjoying this. He lived for moments such as this. All of it was a performance, and this was his supreme self-indulgence.

Guards rushed forward to clean up the mess. Before Arsik had the time to see them, arms seized him and pulled him back.

“I am very sorry, Arsik Iceberg, but not even we can survive without laws. I am sure you understand. Regardless if the knight died, the battle ended in a tie. There was no winner, therefore no new employee for me, and because I have not lost my wits yet, I cannot allow a stray dog that knows so much about me run loose around Saraport. Get him out of here.”

Arsik screamed as they dragged him away. His strength abandoned him – they lifted him up like a sack and carried him outside. Scraping his throat raw with his cries accomplished nothing. He wept and wailed as the sight of Golderim moved further and further away in the distance.

A blow to the head silenced him.

***

They dragged him through the sand; he had regained consciousness. Seagulls flew in circles over their heads under the burning sun. Their cries would soon give way to the caws of the crows that would come to feed on Arsik’s flesh.

He opened his eyes. Hands still held him up. Ahead, he saw a towering cross planted in the sand. It was all there, the elements of a nightmare: the cross, the deserted beach, the end, the horrible, solitary death and the injustice soaking his flesh. He hardly reacted, deprived of the strength and ability to move the tiniest muscle. All he could do was watch as they lifted him up to the old, seaworn wood. Salt and blood dwelled in its crevices – salt, blood and the wordless confessions of all the souls that’d spent their last moments there.

How many of them had truly deserved this? A lot, perhaps. Perhaps Arsik deserved it as well, for his past, the murders, the shady dealings. Sins were a heavy coin – it took your entire life to pay their debt, maybe even more than that. Someone had told him this once, but he couldn’t remember who anymore.

They tied him up, mercilessly tight. The thin ropes bit into his wrists. Blood dribbled from his hands as they grew numb in what would be their last-assumed position in this world. The two guards chatted casually all through the process as if this was just a routine for them, an ugly task they carried out for their boss. If Golderim had kept his word and taken him into his employ, maybe this would have been the kind of tasks Arsik himself would have to perform.

Perhaps it was better this way, he thought. What else was there, after all? Years and years of dishonest and demeaning work? Yes, perhaps it was better this way.

At least I didn’t die at sea, he told himself, but the thought failed to provide any comfort since he was dying literally a few feet from it.

A nail pierced through his hand. Arsik screamed before he fainted. It was a redundant, vicious pain in a fight already lost.

The last thing he felt was the anger on his forehead.

***

Hours upon hours he remained trapped on that cross. Its base was buried deep in the sand, infused with the blood and sweat of the souls that’d passed from there before. The wood was soaked with the lives that had once been tied to it, burdening the world with their final thoughts.

These thoughts came to Arsik now too; through short, shallow breaths, through sobs and weeping, through tear-stained, swollen eyes as crimson as the blood that flowed from his hands, trying to quench the thirst of the insatiable beach.

But, above all, there was the Rage.

Arsik couldn’t feel the triangle of anger on his forehead anymore – the spirit of Rage had taken over him completely. It had wrapped itself around his insides like a serpent, had seized his heart in its teeth and squeezed. It squeezed so hard it sent waves through his body: muscle contractions in his extremities, tears from his eyes and blood from his nose and ears, incoherent cries from his throat, like the voice of hell, speaking its first words in the mortal world.

He surrendered himself to the serpent of anger.

At that moment, Arsik wished them all dead. He wished it from the bottom of his soul, with the full power of his heart, with faith and genuine hope, like a sailor yearning to see his home again after a storm. He started seeing it materialize in front of him like a mirage: a tidal wave of fire burning the flesh off of them all, pirates, residents, sailors, innocents, women and children, friends and foes. They all added their names to the inferno and Arsik truly wanted this; there was nothing in his life he’d ever wanted more. He watched it unfold in his mind, and the images were more tangible than a dream’s, like a vision.

The place looked different from Saraport, the people, their clothes and features too, but it didn’t matter. They all burned and screamed, and Arsik stood in the center of the square, singing a melody, so happy he was with the sense of righteousness inside him. The tongues of fire swallowed everything, even the most secret nooks and crannies. They consumed men, women, elders and children, lovers in their beds and farmers on their lands, slaves and knights, lords and dukes and barons, even kings; and in the end, Arsik was left alone on a mountain of ash, amidst grey, sulfurous winds and otherworldly cries from their journey to the underworld… but there was justice in these winds, and Arsik could feel it in his bones.

This anger was special. Nailed on the cross, at the mercy of the sun, as the crows tasted the first bits of his parched and salty flesh, he savored the Rage and engraved it on his soul. A bullet he forged from it, sealed and stored it deep within, where no one could ever look, where no hand could ever rummage.

In the depths of his soul, at the end of the road, where everything is exposed, naked, as a person sheds all layers of existence –body, mind, spirit and heart– and is left with his essence alone; that’s where he saved that image.