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The stone bench bit into my ass, sitting here in the dinner hall with my broken arm laying flat on the corrugated table top. On my leaf sitting in slop, dinner. It was fish - surprise! And it was flayed, and I was working out the bones with my good hand, or spitting them out or trying to peel them from in between my teeth. The leaf plate was a cruciferous vegetable that grows naturally on the coastline, something of a lilypad looking thing called Surapina roundleaf, or Surapika as it was known amongst all of us. And this plate of a leaf was fibrous, green with a giant red stalk that ran center. Most people crushed it and rolled it into a wrap and sandwiched the fish guts and bones and slimy flesh inside. Delicious.
I ate amongst the prisoners, something of a pariah as I was the only one with exclusive access to royalty, and someone who’s name was beginning to make the rounds of conversation. So naturally they looked at me with odd glares and faulty smiling veneers, teeth like daggers.
On this rectangular table, everyone parted. Immediately. They all nodded at once and stood and the table rattled, my slop shifting in place. They faced the doorway, two propped open doors with guards on the sides and went through. I grabbed my Surapika and lifted it as I too felt the need the move. Turning, I saw him. The catlike gait, the wary high strung shoulders of a cautious man. It was the intense and clever and wry walk one man does when he enters another man’s domain. Chaucer. He plopped down and pushed his food onto the table.
“How’s it going Virgil?” He asked.
I grabbed the edges of my leaf and folded it to scarf it in my mouth, then stood.
“Wait. Wait. Wait. Hold on.” He said.
“What do you want, Chaucer?” I asked.
“I just wanted to see how you were doing. You came at me with your hand situation…and this whole Ritcher conversation…” He said. “I just want to know how things are coming along.”
“With?”
“Seducing your new friend.” He smiled.
And now I really wanted to leave. There were a dozen tables, some alcoves in the stone walls, and about half the amount of guards as usual. Their swords hung from their sides low and near the ground. But considering the size of the room - a room that could only fit fifty men that now fit over a hundred - there really wasn’t any worry for a riot. There wouldn’t be any space to operate it from. Someone bumped shoulders with me, another burped in my face, Chaucer was somewhere behind me breathing (as if he needed to do anything more). Grump, old, fat, disgusting men all imposed themselves in my space and I just couldn’t. The sharp pain like pins entering my hand began again, I massaged it and started on my way out.
“Hey, I hope you still don’t think I had anything to do with what happened to you.” He said.
“I don’t know. And I don’t trust anyone.”
“Let me tell you, you can live with that philosophy in mind but you won’t live long.” He said.
I tried to squeeze through. He followed. I made it to the far side of the room where the small food chutes were, little channels that led to labyrinth-like sequences where the excrements of the prison were shot out into the ocean. Food. Shit. Piss. Very conservative.
“I won’t live long trusting you either.”
“Aye, don’t be so cruel.” He said. “You’re a good friend of mine. I’d never want any badness to happen to you.”
“We’re not friends. You were never in want of a friend.” I said. I stopped. He’d cut in front of me. “You were just looking after an investment.”
“You’re half-wrong, friend.” He said. “I can invest in strangers as much as I can invest in friends.”
“Alright.” I sighed. “I’ll listen. Not like I have a choice.”
“We always have a choice,” He said and grabbed my arm and led me to one of the dents in the walls where the men slept or lazed against the smooth concrete pouches with slouched backs, a bit away from the guards. The candles were set about them like some kind of idolatry, inebriated messiahs without spoken wisdom but glazed eyes like crystals balls whose experience held the secrets of the world.
These fools looked up. And smiled.
Ritcher pulled me from them, into some corner of the room. A man ate with a stupid face, the gruel came off the corner of his mouth.
“We all choose. You chose to speak to Ritcher, you chose to speak with me. Now you have another choice, and it’s right in front of you.”
“What is it?” I pulled my arm. He sat, I stood.
“How would you like to break out.”
“Not this shit again.” I turned around immediately.
“Oh come on!” He pulled on my arm, again.
“I’ve known you long enough to know when you’re bullshitting. And you’re bullshitting right now.” I said.
“I mean it Virgil. Do you want to live the rest of your life in this dump?” He asked. “Don’t you want to see what the world turned into? I’ve spent five years in here, Virgil. Five long years. Most of my youth wasted, with only six more years before middle age claims me on my thirtieth.”
“You were slave trading since you were nineteen?”
“No. I got caught at nineteen.” He smiled.
I looked at him, the small frame of his, wondering where all that cleverness and evilness hid.
“Just great then.” I stretched my forehead with my hands. “The man who got caught wants me to hatch a plan with him, that’ll probably get us caught.”
“We won’t get caught. I’ve got it all planned.”
“Chaucer, this isn’t a joke. I have assassins after me.”
“They’re not assassins. They were just there to scare you.” He said.
“They said they’d do worse if I kept talking to Ritcher.”
“Then that’s your own stupid fault for still talking to Ritcher.” He said. “As far as I can tell, you should have more of a reason to escape now.”
“You’re the one who-” I clenched my fist. It shot pain through me and I winced again. “Nevermind. I’m listening, I’m here. What do you need from me and say it quick so I can blow you off already.”
“You can stop pretending you’re not interested now.” He leaned into me. “I’ve got a plan, Virgil. And I’m going to need that Ritcher buddy of yours.”
“He isn’t my friend.”
“That’s not what everyone’s saying. They’re saying you two talk all night. Tell each other stories and what not.” He said.
“I tried to kill his king, what do you think he thinks of me?” I asked.
“Ask him.” Chaucer said. “And while you’re at it, tell him about me too. Tell him to lend us one his big boat. That’s the final piece, Virgil. The getting out is easy, the boat part is a little hard, but with his help-”
“No.” My head started to hurt again, the cacophony rattling around. The mastications, the feet stomping, the guards rattling in their armor and shouting from across Hey you. Don’t talk. Hey you, eyes on the food. So on and so on.
And here was Chaucer, adding to that noise, the thought like a screw tightening into the side of my skull.
“No. No. No.” I said.
“Virgil.” He grabbed my by the shoulder “You have to trust me. Do you really want it all to end like this? In this dump?”
“Beats drowning.” I took a few steps back, men filled in the space between us like the parsed sea was collapsing back again. But within this sea of people, I felt the sudden grab. It was of my broken hand and it made me stop and pull back. I opened my grip and saw something, the corner of a page in my hand.
“I have a map.” He didn’t say the words. He just made the letters in his mouth.
A map. I looked down on the parchment in my hand, no different the pages in my diary. On it were the few stray letters and cursive writings and lines and nautical pathways. A map to sail home. A map to the mainland.
