Dedicated to IceArrows1200, my favorite person on the Internet. Enjoy!
A Man of Valor
By CTJ
"Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily."
-Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Chapter 1
It was, like so many before and yet to come, one of those nervous, briny days. The ocean had a stench to it that could only be described as absolutely putrid, its surface awash with muck and black as ink under the darkening sky. The smell of salt was on the wind, which had picked up considerably in the last hour.
"It'll storm, there's no doubt about that," Linebeck stated with the confidence of any man who'd spent years at sea, though his own history was debatable. "You'll have to wait until it passes to disembark, boy."
He peered down the deck of the ship to Link, who was gazing out over the prow of the anchored S.S. Linebeck with a sort of wistful expression, his thin lips pressed together in what Linebeck interpreted as disappointment. He knew that Link must have been thinking about his friend, the girl Tetra, whose fate lay in Link's ability to overcome new trials—trials that apparently lay within rowing distance, where a small island, thickly jungled, rose steeply above the horizon to await visitors.
Or victims, Linebeck thought nervously. Treacherous jungles aside, the weather seemed to have its own nefarious agenda. The air was static with the approaching lightning; the thought of being exposed to it was horrific, and he fought the urge to scramble below deck.
But Link's mind was somewhere else entirely. After a minute, the boy and said, "I'm going anyway."
"What—no!" a small voice interjected, and Ciela sprung out of her usual hiding place under Link's hat, wings fluttering frantically. "Don't say that, Link! You can't—it's dangerous to be out in this sort of storm!"
But Link was already halfway across the deck, loading provisions into the little rowboat that hung over the side of the ship. The determination in his eyes was steely and impassible, and Linebeck knew just from one look that there was no changing his mind.
"Oh, Link," Ciela sighed quietly.
"Aren't you supposed to be the Spirit of Courage or something?" the boy huffed. Ciela's light turned a rosy pink with shame.
Linebeck cleared his throat. "If I may impart—"
"—Oh, no need—"
"—thank you, Link, for the encouragement—ahem—if I may impart, which I shall, I think it would be prudent not to align courage with stupidity."
"I align stupidity with stupidity," Link answered easily. The wind picked up and Link clambered into the rowboat, where he paused to glance at Ciela. "Well? Are you coming or not?"
"Well of course I am," Ciela said, though her voice wavered. She landed softly on Link's shoulder and held fast to his collar, and then looked dully at Linebeck.
"I take it we can expect to see you after we've finished combing the island," she said.
"You are entirely correct—somebody has to stay and watch the ship, and if I have to face this task alone, then so be it—AAH!" he screeched as thunder clapped deafeningly overhead. Link remained stoic and unamused.
"Good luck with that," the boy said dryly, and began lowering the boat towards the ocean's surface. The wind was only getting stronger, and Linebeck noticed his stomach had begun to churn with the same ferocity as the ocean waters.
I'd better get to the cabin, he realized, and did so promptly, leaving Link and Ciela to their own devices.
The cabin was cool and drafty—the windows were still open from what had started out as a pleasant, sun-filled morning—and Linebeck sealed them shut with a sense of urgency, muffling the howling of the wind and then lighting an oil lamp. Its warm glow filled the room, though dark shadows still flickered in the corners. It reminded Linebeck of a childhood that had been spent largely indoors; when storms had come to his island as a boy, he would draw the shutters and cover his ears—and his mother would hold him, and coo softly, It's alright Becky my dear, there's no storm, although there was.
His father, a carpenter, had been largely absent from all of it. The memory of his father, who'd had little time for emotional expression and was more the stoic, sensible type, induced a slew of personal inadequacies. Linebeck had only lived with his father for the first ten years of his life, culminating in his shipment off to boarding school. All of it—the going away, the never seeing his father again—was the result of Linebeck Senior having disapproved of his wife's treatment of his son, Linebeck Junior, insisting that the daily coddling would spoil the boy and turn him into a coward.
Well? Had he been right?
The ship rattled with a sudden boom of thunder, and Linebeck's own shriek echoed back at him.
There's no storm, there's no storm, he told himself over and over. There's no storm…
…
In school, many years ago now, there had been a big bully named Elmo, whose main—if not sole—ambition in life was, Linebeck still suspected, to torture and ridicule each and every person he encountered.
It didn't help that Linebeck made for an easy target.
On the very first day, his mother packed him onto a vessel headed toward Prospero Island, where the school was located, with a knapsack full of chocolates (Linebeck's favorite snack) and a twelve-page letter concerning the following: sailing safety; swimming safety; athletic safety (with a diagram of rather embarrassing stretches); eating safety (of all things!); a beginner's guide to sewing, should he need to patch up his uniform (a sewing kit, naturally, accompanied the letter, though the needles were separated into a prick-proof pouch); a pictograph of their family, many years old now and beginning to fade, with an entirely nude baby Linebeck front and center; and, finally, a long, long list of concerns and caveats, all of which spoke to the intense and all-consuming love that Mrs. Linebeck had for her precious son. A lengthy and audacious statement of this love constituted the final two pages of the letter.
Linebeck, who was taking the separation from his mother extremely poorly, read the letter again and again, from the very first time he stepped foot on the ship to—well—about ten minutes later, when Elmo discovered him crying in a corner.
"Aw," the massive boy said, kneeling down, "what's the matter? Miss your momma?"
Linebeck glanced up from the letter, which was already awash with tears, inky words swirling into their neighbors. The boy before him was spindly and freckled, with large ears and a strangely swampy complexion—swampy here meaning oily, greenish, and just generally unpleasant.
Having been treated too well this far in life to be a skeptical child, Linebeck replied, all too trustingly, "Yes—I—I miss her lots!"
Elmo, who couldn't have been much older than Linebeck, listened impatiently with cold amusement. Snatching the letter from Linebeck's hands, he read its contents aloud—
"'Be ever so careful, Becky, not to go out in the rain, for you may catch a cold! …Becky, dear, do mind that you don't drink your milk too quickly, for you may choke' …ha! HAHA!" Elmo guffawed, tossing all twelve pages into the air so that they caught on the wind and scattered in many directions. While the other boy clutched his gut with laughter, Linebeck jumped frantically to his feet, scrambling for the pages his mother had written—but it was too late, and the pages fluttered into the ocean waves like suicidal butterflies. A desperation gripped Linebeck's heart and held it there, all broken up but with nowhere to go…
He glanced hopelessly over the rail of the ship, his eyes lingering on the distant horizon. His home island, and his family, had over the edge of the world. His only company now were the boys and girls that he would call schoolmates, many of whom milled about the ship with him, all of them waiting to arrive at Prospero Island. If they were all like Elmo, Linebeck feared, then there was nothing but terror in store. He turned back to the bully, who laughed at him again—he shrunk away—
"Hey!" a voice cut through the cackling, sharp and clear, and an older girl came loping toward them from across the deck. She was twelve, maybe, but in a way that seemed a thousand years older than Linebeck's measly ten, as shrewd as she was bold. A current of black hair unfurled in the wind as she turned on Elmo. "Listen, kid, that's just not cool. Why don't you go mind your own business?"
Elmo, six inches shorter than this girl and very aware that he was in the wrong, hung his head and trudged away. The girl kneeled down in front of Linebeck, reaching out a leathery hand and patting him on the head. "Don't listen to him, alright?" she prompted. "He's just jealous 'cause your momma loves you so much, and he's scared he'll never find someone who loves him. What, don't believe me?" she chuckled when Linebeck emitted a series of staccato sniffles, all in a row like reverse-laughter, so as to draw an astronomical booger back into his left nostril.
"Look," she said, and dragged Linebeck to the edge of the ship. They peered over the railing together, where the remnants of Linebeck's mother's letter were drifting away, mere specks on a seemingly endless expanse of ocean. "If he'd had one of those, he wouldn't have thrown yours overboard. He just wanted to be equal to you is all."
But Linebeck wasn't so inspired. "It was mean," he protested.
"Yeah, well," she sighed, "people are cruel when they're frightened."
…
Those words, he never forgot. People are cruel when they're frightened.
Many, many years later, the girl he met that day would be a victim of the very phenomenon she'd described.
Jolene. When they met, that moment that Linebeck had his first brush with cruelty, would he ever have suspected the hurt that would eventually befall them both? For years after that initial interaction she became a beacon to him, the slightly older girl with a fierceness to rival the ocean itself who somehow—how?—had a soft spot for Linebeck. She interacted with him rarely, but always cheerily. In some manner, he felt cared for.
The boarding school where Linebeck was living out his teen years was a beautiful stone structure nestled among rich earth and verdant palms. A sturdy seawall protected it from the gnawing tides, though students tended to climb atop the wall anyway for a glimpse at the ceaseless waves. From a young age he would peek out at the ocean from his dormitory window, thinking about the island—and the mother and father—he had left behind.
Though his mother frequently wrote letters, he never heard from his father. He never stopped to wonder whether he was missed—perhaps he already knew the answer—and so it was that any connection between father and son fizzled out (little love was lost, Linebeck had to admit), and he came to forget about Linebeck Senior.
Years passed. Linebeck grew slower than the rest of the students on Prospero Island, it seemed, like a sapling in the shade of many oaks. Perhaps it was his slouch that made him seem so small, or his thin, seemingly weightless limbs. His instructors at the academy reckoned that if they didn't keep a close watch on him, a strong enough wind might blow him away, so they kept him more or less within eyeshot—which was really fairly easy, as he had no desire to venture beyond the back garden.
And he grew into young adulthood like that. His years at school were spent avoiding Elmo and (bizarrely) pining after Jolene, who paid him some attention here or there but spent most of her time venturing off academy grounds with a group of rascal boys who all adored her. Why Linebeck ever took a shine to her, he couldn't say; maybe it was the occasional kindness she showed him, or maybe it concerned something else, something beyond Linebeck's immediate experience. Gradually, the idea that an adventurous, outside something was manifested in Jolene became a fixation of Linebeck's as he transitioned from a wide-eyed boy to a generally unfortunate, pimple-covered teen, and it shaped his daily experience.
Was it self-hatred that turned him to this new desperation? Long days and nights were spent in his dormitory compensating for a generally lackluster existence. He rushed through assignments to pore over adventure novels, taking note of the romantic heroes' suave dialogue, overlooking the clear fiction behind their faultless delivery. Captains of vessels were always princely and seductive, displaying no signs of cowardice but instead a keen sense of objective, where passion and priority were tightly intertwined.
In front of his looking glass the next morning Linebeck would shave and contemplate these men of valor, an angry line of reddish bumps emerging in the razor's wake. Puberty was not treating him well: his facial hair was patchy and impossible to groom without irritating his skin; he had grown up, but not out, and was really quite gangly; and on top of all of this, he couldn't talk to a single girl without experiencing a colorful spectrum of deeply mortifying discomfitures.
And of course it didn't help that Jolene was transforming into somebody beautiful and wild and warm, a young woman whose heat enticed every man who encountered her—like moths, Linebeck would think, and wondered, privately, whether he were still a simple caterpillar.
…
Naturally, Elmo was one of those moths. That Jolene so preferred his presence to Linebeck's was a reflection of herself, not of Linebeck—but of course the awkward boy was too young to realize this, and so he took it to heart as a grave insult and reversal of what had started out, so many years ago, as a promising friendship.
Wounded and discouraged, though not altogether confused, Linebeck forfeited his struggle for Jolene's attention and gradually turned his mind to other things: mainly, mechanics—he rose to the top of his class soon after he applied himself, demonstrating an exceptional understanding of steamships.
And yet he never quite made it aboard one.
A fear of the untamed sea held him back. It seemed he would never turn into a man of valor at this point, just as his father had always feared. Perhaps this early submission was a form of cowardice in its own way—but Linebeck found little cause to care, and shoved it to the back of his mind, where, quite comfortably, it remained.
…
Sometimes—rarely—we are given the opportunity to change. And that opportunity is so strange, so unexpected, that we don't see it for what it is:
"Linebeck, I need your help."
He glanced up from his book to find Jolene seated across from him in the academy library. Her eyes were level with his, the irises so dark he could see his reflection staring back.
"With?" he asked, struggling to suppress the awkward mannerisms that were second nature.
"I can only tell you if you promise to keep it secret," she insisted.
Linebeck's mind was racing too quickly for him to keep up, and he knew if he didn't stop to think, he'd stumble over his words. The sea captains in his novels were always cool and uncaring—if I can just be like them…
Jolene was still staring at him, waiting for an answer. He tried not to look at her eyes, or at her lips, or even her forehead, which was lovely in its own way—he soon found himself overwhelmed in every manner, and his good-for-nothing (except steamships) brain sputtered to a halt, and it took a great deal of mental strain to get it started again.
Cool and uncaring.
"Why should I?" he heard himself say, hoping his nerves weren't shining through.
Jolene smirked. "Just trust me," she insisted, which was the most dangerous possible response. He knew without having to ask that what she was about to suggest was against the rules, probably way off beyond academy grounds—or even ground, for that matter, and with a shiver he pictured the ocean waters…
The cautious instincts that had guided Linebeck is whole life beseeched him to refuse her, and yet here she was, the girl he'd admired for so long, holding his gaze from under those black, black lashes…
"Okay," said Linebeck. Cool and uncaring. Cool and uncaring. "But this had better be worth it."
"Oh, I can promise you that," said Jolene, reaching across the table and closing Linebeck's book for him.
He stared at her, stupefied.
She smirked.
"So then, Linebeck. What do you know about steamships?"
The next chapter will tie things up-I think. :)
Thanks, IceArrows, for many years of friendship! This one's for you, congrats on all the milestones you've hit recently. Next chapter will be dedicated to the milestones to come.