[SO Sylira][Flashback] The Sebakem Ocean (Open)

[Quint Caravel]

Summer, 5 years ago, ~508AV

Quint stood on the deck of his casinor, pondering the waves. It had been clear skies and smooth sailing earlier, but now there was a chill in the air and an electric undercurrent to the normally salty tang in the air. Kwaq, his duck Tavan had long since gone and found shelter and his sister Xiva clutched tightly at the wheel. She stood barefoot on the deck, carefully braced with her legs bowed, and while she had been wearing little but beads earlier she now had a fur from Avanthal wrapped around her shoulders to ward against the chill in the air. She'd been sailing since before Quint could remember and she was the better pilot (and navigator) of the two of them.

Xiva murmured a quick prayer to Laviku. She had piercing blue eyes and a pierced nose and several earrings, and even a garish one on her belly that her brother did not like. It reminded him that she had been marked with a gnosis and he had not. If not for his close ties to his family and pod, he would have moved inland long ago.

Below decks Vankita rested, as it was now eight months and her belly was swollen. Quint was worried about her, but he was more worried about his friend Darlo. Darlo had been one of Xiva's most recent lovers and he had a prowess with a cutless unmatched in their pod. He had saved Quint's life during a recent bar room brawl. Quint was used to having to pay first for his drinks in certain places before he would be served-- and it annoyed him both because of the lack of barter and because of the lack of trust-- but this last port had been so rude that he felt it was just a season away from getting a Nal'lyeo.

Darlo was of the same opinion, and had gone off to force an apology or some other concessions before things came to a head. That had been three days ago and none had seen him since. Xiva had volunteered them to go looking for him, but the search had proven fruitless and now they were on the edge of uncharted waters-- or at least it was an area their pods and the pods closest to them knew nothing about.

[Quint Caravel]

They were sailing in circles and not getting anywhere. It reminded Quint of his Uncle Pondar trying to teach him stuff...

Autumn, 492

Standing on the beach in the noon sun, Quint's Uncle Pondar shook his bald and very tanned head so that his dagger-shaped earrings glinted. One hand was always on his cutlass but the other raised up quickly. "No, boy, not like that. I'm trying to show you how to move differently. Walk on your heels, not your toes."

This caused Quint to shrug and to shake his dirty-blond head in confusion. "What's the difference?"

Uncle Pondar was one for showing, not telling, so he instructed the boy to sit for a moment and to watch him. He came close enough so the rum was noticeable on his breath. He gripped Quint with a calloused hand. "Look. Notice how some women walk when they wear heels all the time? Even if they are barefoot and pregnant and wearing a masquerade ballroom mask they have a certain way of stepping. And some peasant women who only wear boots walk a different way. Just watch."

Quint shook his head. "I understand all that. It's like you taught me about how some guys walk with their arms out when they are striding down the street and other guys shuffle along with their heads down and hands in their pocket."

For once, Pondar looked pleased, and he smiled enough to show his missing tooth. "Exactly!"

Quint gestured with his left hand, lazily waving it around. "Yeah, but what I mean is, who cares? What difference does it make?"

His uncle's face returned to its usual expression. "Have you been listening to anything I've said all summer?"

Quint looked off to the side. "Maaaybe. I heard the part about the Xith body you found on the road. And that story about lady flying a giant eagle was pretty cool. And that time you taught Kennabelle Wright how to sail was good, though I thought she lived like a century before you."

Pondar shook his head sadly. "No boy, I'm not talking about any stuff like that, true though all of it is, or I'm not an Honored Knight of Syliras."

Some sort of seabird-- gull maybe?-- Quint didn't yet know their names-- went flying overhead calling out to another member of its flock but there was no response.

"Knight of where?"

Uncle and nephew looked at each other across an unbridgeable divide of youth and experience. Once the bird flew away then there was a silence that was all right but then it stretched out and got akward and then Quint wondered if he was going to get bashed around a bit. "Okay, so what are you trying to say, Uncle Pondar?"

Another pause, but not so long. Pondar looked down, pretending to be interested in the vest strings he was fingering. "I don't know that you can hear me, son."

That stung. Quint felt the heat going to his cheeks and he fought to keep his eyes from watering. "Why would you say that?"

Pondar squatted down and dug with a stick in the sand. He drew a little square, as if making a moat for a small castle. "It's just the truth, boy. Your ears spent too long in Cyphrus. This is stuff that's supposed to come naturally to you and it's supposed to be far easier to explain, both why it's useful and why it's needed. If you had fully grown up Svefra in the Suvan Sea there'd be this entire initial set of correct assumptions about the world that you'd already have that you don't; instead you have been fed a diet of balderdash and poppycock."

He snapped the stick so violently that Quint was sure the crack could be heard up and down the beach.

Uncle Pondar looked down at the sand. "How do I explain anything to you? You grew up in a city where people knew you and accepted you."

Quint stood up and shook his head violently. "That's not true! I've never been liked or accepted. The other children were always beating up on me, taunting me or mocking me."
His uncle also stood up, put both hands on his hips and jutted out his chest. "Oh really? You got beat up every day? Thrown out of a store? Thrown out of a town? Had to fight over an orange because there was no other food?"

"Well, no it wasn't that horrible. I guess. But it was still pretty crappy. I was smarter than the other children. They were more athletic. More popular."

Uncle Pondar laughed. "A tragedy all around, I'm sure. Don't get me wrong; I'm sorry your life wasn't all milk and honey, but the stuff that happened to you only occured because of who you personally were. Not because of what you were."

"W-what? What do you mean?"

His uncle held out one hand then stretched out the fingers on it, then started tapping his fingers one by one as he spoke, slowly curling his hand into a ball. "You've never been kicked out of a port tavern by a bartender sure you were about to steal from him. You've never had a slattern or doxy look down her nose at you because you wanted to barter her services instead of pay for them outright. You've never had a clerk insist you pay first because he was worried you were simply going to walk off with anything not nailed down."

Quint nodded. "Well yeah, I'm not some kind of gypsy thief. I'm just a kid from a small town."

Uncle Pondar clenched and unclenched his hands for a moment and then slapped Quint across the face, and then his fist again curled into a ball and he turned away and punched his own palm instead of the boy. Now his breath smelled like a brewery gone sour. "You don't know what you are saying. You are Svefra, and will always be seen as such, no matter what foolish airs your father put into your head. Your life will be spent on a casinor floating the waves with our pod, and you will never truly be welcome anywhere on land."

[Quint Caravel]

Quint glanced over to where Xiva stood at the wheel of the casinor. "Hey big sis, where are we?"

Xiva giggled. "You have no idea? It's not like we're in completely uncharted waters. You didn't see that lighthouse we just past or that oddly discolored group of rocks on our starboard side?"

Quint admitted that he had not. He hung his head in shame. "No, sorry. While you spent your youth getting a proper Svefra education, I was being trundled around from city to city all over the place. Never even set foot on a casinor until I was a teenager."

Xiva shook her head sadly. "That is very sad. Well, at least you know how to swim, right? Because I can show you that. It would be easy to do so once we reach port. The waters there are calm and shallow and if you have any troubles you can just stand up."

Quint waved a hand dismissively. "I don't need to know how to swim. We're hundreds of thousands of miles at sea. If the casinor sinks, I'd rather go down with it than to waste a few precious moments swimming in circles while I realize I'm never going to make it to shore."

"That's terrible," Xiva said with some foreshadowing. "What if one day you get thrown off the bow just off the shore of Sunberth, and your entire survival depends on figuring out how to swim?"

"Yeah, well, then I'll be happy I have a family that worships Laviku. And that will be the end of that."

Xiva stomped down on the deck with a tanned foot. "Quinton Jonah Caravel! That is a terrible attitude to have. You can't just consign your existence to the gods and fate. That's now how it works. You have to work at improving yourself."

He folded his arms across his chest, did Quinton J. Caravel. "There is nothing I want to accomplish and nothing I want to learn. I am happy spending my days drinking and my nights chasing wine, women and song."

Xiva pouted. "There is nothing you want to learn? Nothing you want to know?"

Quint thought about it for a moment and shrugged. "Well, I would like to know where we are."

Xiva smiled. "Well, finally! I can work with that!"

That evening when they were docked, Xiva summoned her brother to her cabin. She sat upright in her hammock, using it like a swing, and indicated that Quint should take a seat opposite the table bolted to the floor. (Most of their furniture was positioned so that it would not all go flying around in a storm.)

"Sure thing, big sister. But why am I here? And what's with this paper on your desk?"

"That my brother is called a map. And today is your lucky day because today I am going to teach you a little cartography."

[Quint Caravel]

Xiva handed Quint a quill and some cheap parchment. The ink stand was of course fastened to her desk in a deep well so that ink would not go splashing out of it unless they were completely overturned. She had gotten the ink from a Kelvic friend of hers who could claimed he could become a squid. Xiva admitted that she had never seen him transform herself so she had no idea if he was yanking her leg or not. The quills, however, definitely came from a friend of hers who was Inarta.

Xiva pointed at the quill. "Make sure you use that. I want you to take notes on this stuff. It can get fairly complicated pretty quickly, and you are not always going to have me around."

Quint looked shocked. "Don't ever speak like that! You'll live for decades! Centuries! And you can always come back as a ghost or a Nuit after that."

Xiva scowled at her brother. "That is creepy on two levels. But anyway, that is not what I meant. I just meant I might be off with a man or out drinking with the girls, and you might find yourself in a situation where knowing how to get around would have come in handy."

Quint folded his arms across his chest and then crossed his legs. "I don't see how this is useful."

Xiva swung back and forth in the hammock a few times until she had gained enough momentum to kick her brother. "You don't see how this is useful? Do you think Kennabelle Wright would have been able to sail around the Suvan Sea without knowing cartography?"

He raised both palms up to the ceiling. "I have no idea who that is or where you are talking about, but I guess not. Anyway, I know you. You're going to tell me about this stuff whether I want to hear it or not, so I might as well pay attention the first time."

"You've already tuned me out, haven't you?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

Xiva made a fist and shook it at him. "You are absolutely infuriating."

Quint stood up. "Can I go now?"

Xiva burst into tears. "Oh, you are impossible. How am I supposed to look out for you when you wont even look out for yourself."

"All right, all right. I'll sit down and listen to you babble for a few minutes."

"Ha! I knew you couldn't resist a few tears."

"Sure I can. I saw you squeezing the onion that you just palmed. But if this means so much to you that you'd resort to pulling your con artist tricks on your own brother, then I guess this must be pretty important to you."

"Good. Now the first thing you need to understand about any map is the legend.... this little box here in the corner...." And she was off and running. Quint knew there would no stopping her for a good hour or so.

Resigned to his fate, he took the quill, dipped it in ink, and started doodling. Knowing that his sister was a better reader of books than he was, he also made sure to write down a few random phrases that she was saying. He wasn't a very good writer and his handwriting was atrocious, but he did know how to print in all block capital letters so long as they were fairly big. He made sure to write down the word 'Legend' as he knew Xiva would eventually glance over at his handiwork.

[Quint Caravel]

Xiva continued with her discourse, completely unaware as to how boring Quint found the current topic of conversation. "Quint, the important thing that you have to understand about maps is that they are not real. They are never to scale, and they never are able to include all the features of the actual place that they represent. Sometimes they don't get the actual names correct because a map written in Pavi is going to have different words on it than a map written in Common."

Quint snorted. "Well, that all makes a map sound rather useless. If not downright dangerous. I mean, what you're saying doesn't even make sense. I know this map right here is real. I can feel it with my fingers."

Xiva shook her head. "No. No, the paper is real. The parchment is real. Any ink and pain and stains and all that are real. But the map itself is really such a rudimentary representation of such a complex idea-- the world around us-- that the more you learn about cartography the more you will see how truly little we are equipped to understand the world around us, let alone try to capture it on paper in a way that is possible for someone who didn't originally make the map to follow."

This all went completely over Quint's head so he simply nodded and kept his mouth shut, hoping Xiva would quit editorializing and would instead focus on teaching him the nuts and bolts of how maps worked.

Quint paused and rubbed his head, unable to stifle a deep yawn. "I'm so sorry, Xiva. I really am trying to pay attention, but very little of this makes any sense to me." He pointed at the map on the desk. "I don't know much about how maps work, but I know Svefra use them all the time. We just have to draw a big red 'x' on here and claim that there is pirate treasure at that spot, and a bunch of sailors will head off and look for it exactly where we claim that it is."

Xiva got up to take a bottle of rum from the cabinet. "That's actually a brilliant idea. We should try that the next time we are in a port town." She came up with some suggestions on how to embellish the plan and actually make it profitable, and she instructed Quint to write down everything that they were saying so they could ponder more on the matter in the morning.

Xiva offered her brother some of the rum. "But let's leave off on that idea for the moment. I want to be sure you have at least some rudimentary understanding of cartography before we get completely sidetracked. Where were we?"

Quint muttered to himself, annoyed that his plan to completely sidetrack his sister had failed. He glanced down at his notes. "Hmm... let me see.... you were saying something about how a map is only useful if you know the language it's written in. But I don't understand that: maps are like paintings. They are mostly drawn. Who cares if an Inarta makes it or a Human or a Xith?"

Xiva nodded. "Let us say you are trying to get from Syliras to Sunberth by foot, and your map indicates that you are walking along the Chabbrinni Road. Which is how someone might spell the name of the Kabrin Road in their language. If you don't know what you are looking at on the map or the legend, you might get hopelessly lost in real life."

[Quint Caravel]

Quint continued to scribble down everything his sister was saying. At least this part was interesting. It occurred to him that the more he knew about how the various races and nationalities spelled the names of cities and provinces, the more useful his attempts at forgery and counterfeiting would be.

And so he expressed some zest and zeal for the first time that evening.

Unaware how or why she had suddenly gotten through to her brother, Xiva assumed there was simply something interesting about map-making that fascinated Quint. After all, she enjoyed studying them herself; her goal was to become a Pod Navigator someday, an entire flotilla or armada dependent on her knowledge of land and sea.

And so Xiva also spoke about map size and shape, and how each cartographer was forced to pick a small subset of the objects that actually exist in reality to be portrayed on the map. This was further hindered by the fact that most maps were two-dimensional and square while most people knew that the world was actually a hexagon being driven around the sky on a giant ship powered by Pycons. Well, that is what Xiva had been taught, and she now repeated her knowledge to Quint.

To be fair to Xiva, Quint had gone from having no knowledge of maps to having the barest inkling of them; he thought he could recognize one now by the squiggles and things and the legend box at the bottom, even if fathoming what the box meant or what the symbols in it symbolized was all completely over his head and beyond him.

On the positive side, he had done a great deal of writing and had figured out a few tricks about how to hold the quill in his hand that he had never noticed before; he was able to write with a few less smudges and ink stains than before the long study session had started.

On the negative side, his wrist hurt and he begged off for the evening, insisting that he was at the upper limit of his ability to pay attention and also his ability to take notes.

[Quint Caravel]

Xiva shook her head. "No, we're almost finished and we don't have much more to go. Just a little bit more, and then we're done."

Quint protested. "But I am really tired. I'm not used to doing this much work." He pointed at the map. "I mean, look at this. You've got me acting like a wizard, taking notes and looking a parchment. We've done enough for now."

Xiva shook her head again. "Look, Quint, you're my brother and I love you, but you're always taking the easy way out. You're always quitting. At the first sign of trouble you run away, and at the first hint of responsibility you vanish over the horizon. We've barely been here ... well, I don't know how long, but we've barely gotten started. And you want to quit already?"

Quint realized that words wouldn't do the trick with his sister. She could see through his lies and she would dismiss the truth. But there were other ways to persuade someone than with just words. Sometimes you needed brute force.

Deciding that she would only let him go if he proved to be totally annoying, he went over and sat down on the hammock next to her. Without warning her grabbed her from behind and started tickling her as fast as he could, up and down her ribs.

Xiva immediately burst out laughing, then insisted he stop. "Cut that out! I hate that! All right, all right. I can see you're going to be impossible. We'll call it an evening and resume tomorrow. Get out of here!"

Not wanting to push his luck, he vanished before she changed her mind. He realized that she meant well and had his best interests at heart, but he just didn't see the point or profit in buckling down and putting his nose to the grindstone. He was happy just to enjoy his life.

For now, the lesson was over, and he went on his way.