Chapter 13: John Silver; His Life aboard the Ship Oeil de la Mer
The Etherium curled and rippled in blue misty, pneumatic clouds, resembling the vividly swirled interior of a tiny marble—or of a water droplet—where shades of azure illuminate and quiver in their delicate confinement. The skies in this vast stretch of indigo brume billowed high in eternal purview, arched above the carrack and before the finger of its visionless figurehead, leaving the ethereal valley of ceruleans and nebulas seeming as though the infinity of angels, only known to the utmost divine. The Etherium was a surge of empyrean lights—a florescent kaleidoscope of ivory stars and celestial majesties—balancing the Oeil de la Mer in the palm of its palatial hand.
The ship flew on immense white sails that glowed against the heavy beryl expanse. The wings spread unfurled, and the deck creaked and hummed as it roamed its rich province. The deck was thick with the color of the nebula, and rigging swung between the great masts of the ship's canopy, outlining the cries and songs of the sailors in their work, and of the devoted and familiar footfalls of the men on deck.
John Silver—who had effectively transformed himself into the pirate called Silver, as any fifteen year old youth could conceive, for the men only called him by his last name; and to this invention and appellation he remained loyal with allegiance, as we will also do henceforth—contributed to these gaits across the deck as his routine on the Oeil de la Mer commenced as early as five in the morning. He had to serve at mealtimes, and this was the fulcrum of his operations; Barak—who had maintained his avowal to Welling that he would remain ultimately civil toward his young accomplice—refused to eat without being served by his own boy. This, however degrading as it seemed, was eulogistic to Silver, for he had learned from the exiguous two years he had spent in space that to be desired was to have a companion, and that a companion was a lifeline, and that such a lifeline was vital. It did, however, doom Silver to emerging from sleep at a grievous hour of the dawn, but the Ursid had no objection to it, for, at five in the morning, his eyes were open early, and possessed the ability to count the white stars like the very coins of a fortune.
Barak took his meals regularly, harmoniously with the first officer whom the crew referred to as Ponton—for he had escaped a Procyon prison hulk as a captive, ponton the term for such a ship holding for captured pirates—and who was a young, stoic sailor of the Tuskrus race. Silver served Ponton conjointly, feeling Ponton a creature deserving of veneration, and he accepted his services with a quick nod of gratitude. In contrast, however, Barak bade Silver bring forth all he felt an impulse for (very often he desired rum), and during mealtimes Silver could be seen traversing the main deck with a variety of objects, having to run up and down the bright-autumn planks between the roundhouse where Barak and Ponton ate and the galley where most of his orders were located. The first year, when he had no sea legs for the business whatsoever, Silver fell numerously with what he was bringing Barak at even a tip of the bow, but the old brown pirate was composedly tolerant of his initial incompetency, until Silver adorned a firm balance on the Oeil de la Mer's movements while sailing.
Being the deliverer of whatever necessity from the galley Barak felt was absent during his meals, Silver also established a relationship with the galley cook, who was named Mercurius, and was of the Zirrelian race. The first instance when Silver met Mercurius he was undoubtedly of about fifty, and one of the finest examples of Zirrelian cultures one would ever likely meet. With a thick Zirrelian accent, the many tentacles as limbs, the easy sway of his gait, and his compact physique, he seemed like the conception of Mesopotamia, or the Vikings, recreated into substantiality. The inherent and more productive instigators of this impression, however, could be considered to be stored in the abstract reality of his primordial instincts, balanced by a vague and only somewhat necessary bearing of ethics; the latter, quite possibly, was the only thing preventing the cook from making his way on all-fours.
Mercurius's cabin boy—a creature of a species unknown to Silver at that time, and little younger than Mercurius himself—had been killed the year before when he was strapped in ropes behind the Oeil de la Mer and keel-hauled for and hour and a half, and had not been replaced since. His death was the reminder of how dangerous Silver's life was with the murderous and impulsive pirates, and that remaining Barak's pet servant meant staying alive the next day. The punishment was for the attempted murder of Barak—the motivation still remained a mystery among the crew the year after; however, it was the rumor that Barak was not at all surprised when his attacker approached him with a knife from the galley. The entire crew, save the helmsman and Ponton, crowded about on the stern to watch the cabin boy receive his punishment, and be tortured long by the nebula and smoke from the ship's motor and the speed of the vessel against the constraints of the rope before he fell limp in his imprisonment. The whole of the man's ordeal, the crew whistled and sang at him, and poured rum on his head, shouting insults and laughing at his pleads for mercy. Silver was witness to everything until the ropes were cut and the body fell free into space, and, afterwards when he and Barak were alone, he asked him why he had let the man die if the keel-hauling was only for punishment.
"Them that die from keel-hauling die b'cause they ain't got life 'nough to preserve 'em," Barak answered somberly, "I've seen many o' time a man o' fortune survive from keel-haulin', boy; I meself bein' one o' them—and I'll tell ye now: keel-haulin' is on'y a test o' yer will t' live!"
Forever after that scene and after many other times he witnessed it reenacted, Silver remembered Barak's statement.
In regard to the rest of the crew, Silver had no correspondence. He merely represented the captain and their authority's boy—an operative that was identical to nothing they owned themselves, or was likely familiar with, but who was obviously not as important as Barak, and who was no better than the cabin boy, either. Thus, they paid him little heed, unless they spied him retrieving a dram for Barak, in which instance they would require some rum as well. Silver would bring it to them, additionally, feeling their neutral attitude relative to his existence was more propitious than falling into bad opinions.
Sporadically, however, they would lean very close to him and whisper worldly advice in his nervous ear; or, perhaps, when the decks were clear of most of the hands, and only the mates in a drunken slur lay about on the kegs of the inebriant, they would become superlatively articulate, and recite stories to each other and to Silver.
"Ye 'member ol' Nick?" one of them would rasp in his throat to the others. Yes, they all would usually remember Nick.
"Nick were a saint, 'e were."
"Nick were a scurvy-brute an' a bilge water rat!" One of them would cry with fury, and throw something across the deck—which could be heard as a sort of splash on the darkening ship—but settle back down and suck on his alcohol.
"Who was Nick?" Silver would inquire politely, emerging from a former silence that seemed to have only been absorbed in his work.
The first would smile affectionately, through the intoxication he suffered, at the thought of the now obscure Nick. "Nick," he would say, with glorified devotion, "Nick were a mate, 'e were. He were a true mate, that Nick."
Silver would then smile dimly to himself, envisioning a hairy beast, with a horrible mangled hand and a patch eye, embodying Nick, snarling at him so terribly it was humorous.
Another would cry piteously, "I 'member 'im! Nick should a' ne'er done what he done! He were a good boy, that Nick—but stupider n' me own hand. He could ne'er think straight, not he, but—oh!—he were a precious sea-calf!"
Silver would then lift his young head into the darkness, and watch the pirates murmur in agreement, and he would chuckle, for he had not known Nick, and he, upon his own fancy, widened the tremendous snarl on the vision he had created of the man, and applied what the pirate had said about him to this picture, and he chuckled.
"Nick would a' live for'ver, he would've. He had a Bible ev'rywhere 'e went, and I 'spects he had a good thin' goin' with th' Lord."
"We certainly don't," another, more bitter and blindly drunk, would return, spitting upon the deck with a hollow pulse. This would incite a new ripple of solemn agreement.
"But," the first would continue, lifting a brown finger, "that man Nick must've lived 'bout two hunnerd years, leastways, and he tol' me once that he'd seen some things wickeder 'n th' devil 'imself!"
This would bring an excited murmur that billowed from the crowd, and they would begin to talk about the story with great zeal. "He sailed along side o' Jay Fitz th' Flyer, did 'e not?" One would entreaty, leaning forward into the lamplight, eyes wide.
"That 'e did, to be sure!" another would respond, and they all would rattle with pleasure. "Fitz th' Flyer was the worst o' v'em in th'erium after Flint!"—At such a statement, Silver's ears would prick with sudden vigilance—"He sailed 'round th' tips o' the Red Dwarf Star when it was a-spittin' fire, an' he plundered the Procyon Royal Tomb—with ghosts oohin' an' ahhhin' at all points 'round 'im!—and he were the man what drove the Densadron Galleass into the Comet of Dolor."
"Four-hundred-thirty-thousand coins spilled from their hold that day, an' he took all o' v'it."
"Aye, that he did, an' that's where 'e got his name, too—the Flyer."
"So says many, an' ye may lay to it!"
"An' no wonder! When he sent th' Galleass over, his men n' crew were flyin' from their ship to th' other in one jump!"
Silver's head would turn. It would be very dark. One of the men would move in the sphere of red light from the lantern in the middle of the crowd. The group would shatter to silence, and for a long time, they would sit very still as their faces moved and flickered in the small fire light.
Then another would speak again. "Tip us a stave, Bill."
"Th' old one."
So they would sing the sailing song—the old one—and Silver would be carried back to the forecastle on their odd note, and dream about flying over the rock shards of the Comet of Dolor and the splinters from the heavy Densadron Galleass, looking down upon four-hundred-thirty-thousand goldspecies.
Such occurrences passed on rare instances. No one else of the hands spoke regularly to Silver aside of Barak. Only Timeus paid him such application. Timeus proved to be a friend almost upon the instant of Silver's arrival. The young Terran was the only person with whom Silver engaged in genuine and affectionate mannerism, although the friendship with Timeus was not at all as valuable as his with Barak. In fact, Silver fancied that his friendship with Timeus was more advantageous to the other, for Timeus was a very cowardly and unassertive rigger—who continually complained of horrible bouts of illness and fever—and was treated worse by the other pirates than Silver was. The only deckhand who communicated with him kindly was Silver, who seemed to be the only one of Barak's hands to understand the exercise of sympathy and compassion.
Timeus was the only person to whom Silver confided that his father had died when he was twelve, and how great the sorrow of it still weighed upon him time after time. Timeus then, after Silver had disclosed this information, empathized tremulously with the admittance of a young wife he had not seen in four years, for soon after they had married, a very jealous suitor hired men to abandon him in space.
"I'm sure I were skin n' bones when this 'ere ship found me at last. They fished me out, and I've been workin' 'ere, now, and I 'aven't seen 'er since," Timeus sighed, the darkness very thick and heavy in the forecastle when the events of their sorrows were exchanged.
John pitied the man, however foolish it made him feel, and inquired in a low voice: "What was her name?"
"Isabella," he whispered, and John could feel the tears in Timeus's sad and sickly eyes through the blinding black.
Barak laughed aloud when Silver asked him if there was a possibility in turning the ship toward Timeus's home planet the morning after he had heard his story. "Barak attends t' Barak's own business," the captain stated with a cordiality that exasperated Silver, "it just so happens that th' ship has t' go with me when I do!"
So Silver repudiated the idea of Timeus and Isabella, and decided John Silver attended to John Silver's own business as well. He thusly would retreat into the shrouds when Barak did not require his benefit, and watch the pirates administer their labor, instead of searching for a conversation with a hand. He understood he was considered a part of the subjugated on the ship, and understood Timeus accompanied him in their dogmatism, and he silently promised Timeus an interminable alliance.
On one such withdrawal, Silver's feet slipped into the brown shrouds as the Oeil de la Mer neared the elegant blossom of a star's light that threw coral and gold onto the unfolding nebula. It was late morning; Barak had eaten his breakfast, and had given Silver the rest of it—which was a piece of hard bread and salt junk, the staple diet Mercurius furnished in the galley, except every twice a week when there was duff and mantabird egg white—and Silver chewed inattentively at the meal as he examined the crew spirit about the deck and the masts like flies, and surveyed the infinite field of roses behind them beyond the bulwarks.
The fuchsia blazed on their faces, but, as Silver watched, it flared on Barak's face the brightest, and, with his great coat in its mighty crimson, he seemed as though caught aflame. Preoccupied suddenly by this visionary phenomenon, Silver's eyes focused on the man as he crossed the deck and demanded genially to be handed a telescope, and Silver bit down on the bread that was in his mouth, but instead of pulling off a bite of the fare, he painfully penetrated his tongue. Recoiling with a small outcry, he tossed the bread into this left hand and thrust his right into his mouth to massage the injury. When he removed his finger, it was stained with gleaming blood, and the rust-earth taste of it rippled in his mouth.
This was not a matter of concern for long, however, for Barak, having received his spyglass, shouted to all hands on deck with delectation. "Make due t' go about port, gentleman! I spies with me little eyes a fair game, what promises a fair share for everyone who participates, too!"
Silver wondered at this, and, wiping his finger of the blood on his pant leg, he crossed the deck to the port side, where he saw, with amazement, a galleon in the distance flying an Aquanog flag on the mainmast through the heave of the red nebula.