BANISH MISFORTUNE!

A Tale of Economic Rebellion on the High Seas

Chapter 1

"…What say you?"

Bristling branches of gnarled, black trees, bent and sturdy from years of obstinacy against the ocean wind and fierce storms, seemed to rail and rave at the illicit dealings transpiring in their shelter. Beyond their stubborn twists, the port town was visible only for its streetlights and yellow windows and the fans of light around open tavern doors. And beyond that, the sea!

"I have not prowled the seas, old friend, almost since last I saw you."

There was a pause as the inscrutable tone of those inscrutable words was allowed to seed the air with suspense. Then, a continuance: "It will be good to feel the ocean breathing beneath my feet."

The elf smiled. "I knew I could count on you, Beryl." The racing clouds quit the moon, letting its cold illumination fall upon the companions. Beryl's face was shadowed by that monstrous hat, but the elf's pale skin nearly glowed, and he was suddenly very visible, in all his wit and irony that hung about him as dark as his clothes and hair. "Beryllium Skye," he addressed her, almost reverently, almost mockingly, certainly familiarly, "captain of the BANISH MISFORTUNE! And of the Redbird Regiment before that…" The restless sea breeze caught his tresses and blew them about like so many long, black satin ribbons.

Beryl smiled back. But then, Beryl always smiled. Only sometimes did the smile come through in her words, and now it did, and so he knew it was a real smile, not her permanent one. "The past is dead, Lungwort; leave it buried with all heavy laments and regrets, which will only drag one down to the grave as history. I wish to live here, now."

"Beryl," he began, but she had other plans. A board, six feet long and nearly a foot across, rested in the crook of a split tree. Beryl loaded it behind her shoulders like a yoke, as if to pay penance.

"Let's be off to the collection site, then!" she announced, swinging around to face the path down to the port.

"To the—but you have no crew!" he insisted, his patient elven head reeling from her too-sudden action. "You have no ship!"

"Little matters that can be done in little time," she shrugged, nearly taking off his head with the plank as she stepped on her way.

"Don't be a fool," he followed her, having regained his confidence and reassumed his position of superiority. "Besides, I still have to transport the cargo to the docks. It'll take an hour—"

"Be off, then, on your swift elven feet, and fetch them." She countered his good sense with confidence of her own, "In a hour, I'll meet you at the docks with a crew, and we'll load the ship."

"What ship?" he faltered again, "What crew? Where are you going? Wait, Beryl, you madwoman!" Helpless, Lungwort watched her forgo the path for the rocky shelves of the cliff, knowing she had not his agility or eyes, but that he could not follow her, as he would fear landing on her if he jumped down! The old fool! Beryl was his friend, and once the most fearsome pirate in the Mouth—perhaps the whole Middle Ocean! But she was no young woman, now. Her human bones would be brittle, her muscles atrophying along with her wits! He drew one of his hand-length steel knives and loped off a few branches, one swipe each, in his frustration, before making his way to his own destination.

The town, which had looked quiet and peaceful from the cliffs above it, was hardly mistakable for sleepy when you were in its arms. Beryl breathed deeply of the vaporous town-air, and felt things shift inside of her thorny frame. This was a new place, and yet a familiar one. Like as like to so many other towns in similar inlets, with similar trades. The cobblestone streets could have been sand, or board-walk, or rushes, but they were similarly rank with fish entrails, bits of cast-off line, abandoned and broken sea shells, the dark grit of wet and soiled sand off of boots and crates. The buildings were not identical to those she'd seen in other towns, but they served the same purpose to people with the same hearts. Sailors' husbands or wives and their young children populated the cozy houses, whose board-walls would be silver-gray from the ocean and the salt air. People's faces weathered into that same burnished, washed-out nut shell character. Merchants stayed open late into the night, letting apprentices run their shops to sell sailors provisions and equipment. The shipyards stayed open, a half-mile away, at the dock in the north of the town, to finish that last order. And taverns stayed open perpetually, fuelled by working sailors' need to relax and enjoy the fruits of their labors, and out-of-work sailors' need to forget they were out of work.

A hanging sign creaked and whined and waved at Beryl, jousting in the breeze for her attention. The Yellow Lantern. The smell of alcohol and sweat and hearty food and sour vomit rolled out of the invitingly open door along with some very comfortable yellow light, and a wave of even more seductive heat. Beryl, alone for the moment, negotiated the plank around her shoulders so that it lay, lengthwise, on one—the weight of it behind her, like a fishing pole, balanced by only one of her gloved hands—and entered the pub.

She stood for a moment in the doorway, both to scope out the living landscape, and to let them notice her.

To her left was the bar, a dark booth where bottles and spilled liquid glistened like treasures in a cave. Small round tables crowded the floor about eight feet from the bar outward, with larger tables for larger parties lining the walls. She observed the inhabitants. The bartender was a man in his forties, once a sailor, she guessed, but now weakened, still stingy and tough and stringy, but no longer battle-ready, no longer completely firm. He had a tired, harried look, and the lines in his face looked bitter, mean. He regarded the drunk toughs around him with dislike, rather than camaraderie. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but people will drink wine provided by the sourest dispenser.

At the bar, various loners loomed over their drinks, eyeing each other suspiciously, darkly, or not at all. One particularly large one had a cookpot under his stool, and a very expensive-looking bottle of fine Brandiberry wine before him. Beside him sat a fellow with legs so long, they didn't fit under the bar at all, forcing him to sit a few feet away from it, though his arms were sufficient to reach his glass even from that distance.

A few faceless huddles behind them, nearly in the shadows of the corner, a bearded fellow leaned up against the bar as if tipping forward. Beryl saw that he was actually leaning over a boy, a toothsome morsel with a practiced stone face who did not flinch when the man fondled his smooth cheek. Behind them, a table of fresh young sailors laughed and hugged their town-girlfriends and -boyfriends around the waist, talking about the good times they'd all be having on land now.

Nearly drowned out by the other noise, a musician with masses of burnished copper curls was strumming a fast and sinuous tune on the mandolin, amusing nearby patrons with her quick fingers and with the pet rat that she had walking across her arms and over her head while she played. A luxuriously fat girl in magnificently vaginal pink satin with two sailors competing for her attention clapped madly for her, which made her bosom quiver and distracted her suitors.

Beryl swept her gaze past the two identical sandy-blond girls arm-wrestling to the sound of clinking bets, past the elf in rags and a monocle who was tipping in his chair to look up at the bottom of a bottle, past a young man armed to the teeth, who had swords at the table where companions should have been, past an ostentatiously dressed man whose riches were obviously a sham since he was drinking the cheapest beer in the house…

Down the back wall of the hall was a particularly crowded, loud, and bustling table where a host of men and women of large and thugly appearance seemed to be celebrating. At their head sat a singularly scarred and rough-looking man, whom the others paid deference to by laughing loudest at his worst jokes, and only accepting a pitcher of beer or crate of wine if he'd had his fill first.

The corner of her mouth that still moved easily slid upwards, though her bushy eyebrows and sagging eye remained unchanged by emotion. She stepped inside, dipping the plank backwards so it fit through the door. Time to go fishing…

THUMP THUMP THUMP!!!

A roomful of eyes were torn away from their glasses and companions at the most loud, insistent sound that exploded near the door.

They were met with a figure in a long dark coat and voluminous feathered hat, standing on a table. The source of the distracting noise was what seemed to be a piece of a ship, which she held poised to drop on the table again. She did, and after this THUMP THUMP THUMP!!!, she called out, "Hear ye, here, ye!" thinking herself quite clever in her punctuation.

Some patrons, older, jaded patrons, bored with humanity's seemingly insatiable desire for attention, in antithesis for their rather cool and mellow wish to be left alone, rolled their eyes and turned back to their imbibing. Others who deigned to 'hear here,' noticed that the plank she was beating the table with had the words 'Banish Misfortune!' burned into it in dark, broad, square letters. Once the interested had been weeded from the dis-, Beryl continued.

"I am Captain Beryllium Skye of the Banish Misfortune!" she waited a second, allowing time for the connection to be made. Then, in her chimerical half-drawling, half-cultured voice that sounded like wine and song and bad poetry, she announced, "I'm looking for as many brave souls as will bind themselves to me for a Just and Righteous cause of Liberation from Oppression—"

"So, you're a pirate?" someone called out, setting off a predictable volley of laughs.

"In deed, if not in motive," Beryl bowed, letting the curling white ostrich feather in her hat sweep the table before straightening. She got a few laughs, for that.

"So," the same someone, or perhaps a friend of his, upped the ante, "just who are you liberating, 'Captain'?"

"Why," Beryl thumped a hand on the flat of her chest above her breasts, making a startling noise against her leather jerkin and the seeming hollowness, "the whole world suffers so! The untold gratitude and well-being of the general populace is my motive. And, of course, there with be suitable compensation dealt to the world's saviors…"

There was some half-drunken murmuring, "'Compensation'?" "She means the B's, man!" "Is she crazy?" "Why doesn't ole Lunea throw her out?"

Then the big fish bit. Beryl had already noticed the stirring at the head of that back table. Now the man who'd been receiving such deferential treatment spoke up. "I've heard enough," he said with the air that if he had, so had everyone else. "You've come to the wrong place to push your scam, 'Captain.' All the brave souls here are MY souls—the Gorestrip Gallon."

The table erupted cheers and a good impression of a jungle during mating season. Beryl noted this Leader had a helmet from a war that was older than he was.

"Your fancy speech don't move them, right guys?"

Another roar. The leader was wearing a sailor's striped shirt and baggy pants, but with a film of chain-mail hanging over his six-pack.

"And if I thought for a second that it moved anyone else in the room, I'd have to set the Gallon on 'em to remind them who owns their asses—right, guys?"

Now they pounded on the table, a roll of thunder to compete with her previous strikes. The red markings on his face were half scars, half paint. His nose had been broken, perhaps twice.

"So," he continued, oozing confidence bred of beer and the even stronger liquor of power, "take yer plank and yer promises and find somewhere else to recruit. Like a monastery. We Gorestrip Gallon run this end of town, and we're not easily impressed. Right, guys?"

They laughed as the stranger slid off the table, down to ground level, and turned away. They laughed as she began to slink away, defeated and silent. They were still laughing when she looked over her shoulder back at them, her one visible eye at half-mast and drowsy, that same drunken smile, that hank of reddish hair covering the left side of her face…

They stopped laughing to watch that plank suddenly airborne, shooting through the air like an un-whittled javelin, fly like a true-shot arrow—to hit the Leader square in the face.

There was a sound of breaking bone, of wood clattering, of dishes scattered. Then silence, but for the whirring of a rolling bowl. It stopped against a table leg, near the leader's unconscious face.

"Anybody feel their brave soul stirring now?" she wondered, casually. Their reaction was anything but casual. There was a great clamber for weapons around that back table. "Or should I further prove my mettle—with metal?"

With her left hand she drew her sword, a graceless weapon that resembled, if anything, the board she'd just hefted, save cast out of metal and a little pointy at one end. If this threw anyone, it was not enough to fully deter them. Two loyal henchmen, a woman with a long pony-tail that looked vicious as a whip and a seedy man with a star painted over one eye, met her first. Using her weapon as a shield, Beryl fended off both the high attack from his club, and the low from the woman's daggers. In the same motion, she forced them both backward, revealing the sword's capacity as a battering-ram. This sent them flying back into the assembling mob behind them.

"Any brave souls?" she wondered again, already hoisting the sword into attack position. "Or just these cowards? Who'll join me?"

The wild elf stood up, revealing his nearly seven feet of lanky height. "Ooh!" he cried, grinning and raising his hand like a schoolboy hoping to be picked for the team, "Me! Me!" He threw three of the bottles he'd recently drained in to the crowd of Gorestrip Galloners.

A hollow metallic sound preceded a deep, "I shall!" It was the man with the Brandibery wine, slapping the bottom of the cooking pot that had previously resided beneath his stool. Now he held it like a weapon, a club of some sort.

"We will!" shouted a young voice, almost shrill compared to the man's throaty baritone. The fellow with swords instead of companions had already re-armed himself, and was looking very determined.

Surprisingly, the last voice to speak up came from behind Beryl, at the door. "So shall I!" It was the musician, who'd quietly slipped away in the confusion. She looked like a rack from a music store with instruments strapped all over her body. Her rat was nowhere to be seen.

Not waiting for any stragglers, Beryl, who'd already got her right hand around the very end of the thrown plank, drew it out of the crowd, causing another distraction to them, and called, "How about a race to separate the brave from the cowardly?"

Before anyone could agree or dissent, she had pivoted on the travel-smoothed heel of her leather boot, and sped off to where the musician had cleared the doorway, followed hotly by her small group of followers, the incensed Gallon, and anyone else who wanted to see what would happen!

While not necessarily faster than any individual member of the mob, the smaller group had the advantage of surprise, proximity to the door, and not stepping on each others' feet. This head-start put a few yards of distance between them instantly.

"This way!" Beryl directed them.

However, while the elf—who had hair like a burned broom and a scarf wrapped around his neck that flowed like a banner in the breeze of his speed—and musician were remarkably fast runners, the bulky Brandiberry enthusiast with his pot, the well-armed boy, and Beryl herself were not quite so speedy, and the crowd was gaining on them.

"'…An' I'll keep on run-nin', keep on run-nin', keep on run-nin' till I diiiiiie!'" the elf burst out singing, which would have been just like an elf, if not for his surprisingly goofy voice.

"'Well at Shanty Town all by the sea,'" the musician joined in,

"'Those coppers they caught up with me!

'An' now it's off to hell I gooooo!'"

"'An I'll do no more runnin', no more runnin', no more runnin', now I die!'" they enthusiastically warbled.

Beryl was weighing the pros and cons of making a stand when suddenly, the whole vengeful mob seemed to give violent birth to a pile of wood.

A cart full of crates had hurtled into them from behind, knocking them into each other and onto the cobblestone street, throwing a large, splintery monkey wrench into the machinations of their pursuit.

The perpetrator of this seemingly divine intervention manifested running silently but determined beside Beryl.

"The start of an intrepid career!" Beryl congratulated him. "Welcome to the ranks of the brave!"

In a thin, flat voice interrupted by gasps for breath, he replied, "Brave people don't strike from behind. Or run."

The funny elf had fallen back, barely jogging on his long legs, interested in the new developments. Recognition dawned on his absurd features. "What luck! You're that cute whore!" he welcomed the new-comer.

Their savior did not change his stone, set expression, or reply to the elf's unusual words, but just continued to stare straight ahead at their destination.

"Brave people," the musician tossed back, "don't toady for thugs, either."

Before further discussion could arise, they found their feet hitting the boardwalk of the docks. White moonlight and yellow town-light made glimmering, changing mosaics on the black ocean beyond the ships, which no one but Beryl was in any shape to enjoy.

Lungwort had not known what to think when he saw the mob surging down the dark streets, straight at the place where he had crates of contraband ready for Beryl's miracle. When he saw that Beryl was involved, he had only grown worried. Now they were upon him, and he was still flabbergasted by the chaos. "What the fuck—Beryl! What's the meaning of—"

"No time for explanations!" Beryl observed, taking into account the incipient regrouping of their pursuers. She dropped her plank, grabbed the nearest crate and cried, "Brave souls! Grab a crate and hop onboard the ship!"

"Which ship?" the newcomer asked, acidly.

"This one looks nice!" Beryl kicked the BANISH MISFORTUNE plank from its lean against the crate pile, creating a gain-way up to the sizeable pleasure craft behind them identified as the Honey Nest.

By the time the Gallon made it to the dock, the ropes had been cut, the boat's watchman dumped into the drink, and the Honey Nest was pulling away manned by their quarry. The boat had already slipped into the shadows beyond the townlight's reach. By the time the watchman was conscious enough to tell them anything, the boat would already have sailed too far away to be tracked.