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Mevekia's Hook - Also known as Luma Li's Gulf Shores
Julis 36th, 1125 Dom.“You’re shooting out your elbows too much.” Sylas said. “Don’t telegraph. Be unpredictable.”
He slapped me down onto the floor with the palm of his hand. I fell face first into sand, the sweat so heavy on me that when my face rose, I could feel clumped sand fall in bits. It was a whole layer of it, caked on me. On my hair, in my nose, in my ears. I spat; more sand.
“How the hell am I supposed to swing without using my elbows?” I asked.
Sylas grabbed me by the elbows. He moved them around like a mechanical toy.
“It’s not about not using your elbows, it’s about being quick about it. About not over exaggerating. Tucking in.” He said. “You fight like a bull, always going in a straight line a cities distance away off from target.”
A cities distance?
He jumped back. I ran for him, knife pulled back and shoulder forward. Sylas stepped to the side and put his foot in the way. Down again. The knife spun in the air as I fell. It came down, I closed my eyes. Then plopped onto the floor adjacent to me, my hair split and cut on the spot where it almost impaled me.
“See?” He asked. “You’re a walking exaggeration, Virgil. Everything from your words to your body language to your fighting speaks of some kind of outrage. Be patient in your opportunity to strike, and quick in your strikes.”
“I’m a passionate guy!” My arms shook as I stood up, but I fell again. My black hair bundled all over me like a curtain fall. The sand in my mouth grainy between my teeth.
He rolled his eyes and went over to a palm tree placing a hand against the trunk and slowly laying himself against it. I knelt and looked for my own spot in the sand, among the trash and wood and shavings of fruit. My hand sunk in, and I tripped and plopped down. I think I landed on animal droppings.
My elbow sunk deeper, I think half my body was in sand. Sylas plucked some hairy fruit above, red and white streaked of which he cracked to the side of the tree and threw at me. It rolled, broken, on the floor with liquid pooled and spilling underneath. I grabbed it quick. Puckered my lips and tipped it over.
It wasn’t a coconut. It was too oval and bright to be one. And it didn’t taste like coconut. But it tasted good, like mango and raspberry and a thick texture with spongy pulp that was fun to chew. Not quite disgusting, not slippery. Just pleasant in this weather that’d dried my body into human jerky. All shriveled and tanned.
“I gatta say. I’m amazed you managed to do this much on the first day youngblood.”
“Of course I did. You know I went to Harvard, right?” I said.
He rolled his eyes.
“That’s one of your few good qualities; tenacity. Not many noble sons are tenacious, I must say.” Sylas said.
I smacked the fruit against the tree until it opened to reveal its purple flesh and scraped along the inner walls for more of the actual fruit. More pulp.
“Your legs buckled an hour ago. You’ve managed to fight this long though.”
“I don’t feel impressive.” I said. “I feel tired.”
“I didn’t say you were impressive. I said you had an impressive quality. You’re too clumsy. Too weak. Too slow.”
“Oh. Thank you.” My smirk fell to a quick neutral face and I rolled my eyes. Leaning back, into the bed of sand belly up. To my rear, a little ways off towards the ocean, old camp embers drifted into the wind. The waves rolled down the shore. I laid here, suckling this fruit, pressing my fingers into the hole and eating away at the interior flesh. Above me, giant blue leaves webbed with light green stems with the shade wide and cool underneath.
Sylas was still on his first fruit, he cracked another and rolled it over and I scrambled to pick it up. The husks were starting to pile around me. Little fruit corpses on my little battlefield, where the graves were marked by my sweat and blood and stumbling steps.
“Where did you learn how to fight?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“How long have you been with the flock?” I asked.
“Years.”
“Why? You don’t seem to like the company and you don’t seem to like money. Most of the time you’re just sleeping, drinking or eating.” I said.
“Sleeping, drinking and eating need money.”
“Not that much. Why’d you need my silver?”
“I didn’t know you tracked my expenses.” He tossed a half of mangonut That’s what I called it. Sue me.
“I’m just curious.”
“Don’t be. Don’t worry what I do with my money and what I do with the flock.”
“You really know how to carry a conversation, don’t you?” I turned over with the sun hot against my belly, with my tongue out as I drank from another fruit and as most of it ran down the side of my face.
“Alright. How about this then. Why’d you take me up to become your student now. Why now?”
He sighed and set his hands on his thighs.
“I pitied you, maybe.” He looked down, finger scraping into the fruit though nothing particularly eaten. “You chased after boats for so long and when you finally found one it they left you stranded here on Xyra. I found it very sad.”
“Don’t lie to me.” I said. “Why are you teaching me?”
He chuckled.
“Back there in the cliffs. You running, barrel in your hands - I saw someone who would not quit, who could not quit. I saw an extreme stubbornness in you.”
“That right?”
“Yes. It looked noble.”
“Like Vincent.” My eyes looked up to him.
He tipped his head.
“Except Vicentius knows how to fight. Very well. You on the other would die if we let you out for more than an hour unwatched. You’re an infant.” He kicked another fruit. I caught it. “A baby bird who needs to be fed.”
“That’s not funny.”
“But it’s true. You’ve managed on the sensibilities of others. But now you’ll learn how to fend yourself. You have a lot to catch up on too. Most of the men in the flock were children when they joined.”
“It’s not like I’ve ever needed to fight.” I said. “You think I wanna get chased around having my ass nipped by fish and bulls and birds and shit? There are no choices in life, you know that? People are reared a certain way under certain conditions with potentials and capacities imbued into their blood, long before they have any say in it. Environment. Genetic heritage, those things define man. And what say does a man have in all of it? What say does he have to even be born?”
“For someone so stubborn, you sure have a nasty way to view the world?”
“Outrage and stubbornness is how I cope.” I laughed.
“So you’ve never had choices? And you’ve always followed your nature? Then what does your nature say about you, Virgil? You decided to isolate yourself in a yacht around noblemen who cared little for you. You disobeyed your father and his advice. You fought against your abductors and were killed, at least as you describe it.” Sylas said. “And now you train. I’m starting to think you like the suffering. That you’re a masochist.”
Quietude filled the space like heavy leaded water, pushing me into the suffocation of deep dark truth. Sinking. Drowning.
I rubbed the crack of a fruit husk to my rear, digging my fingers underneath the hairs on its surface.
“I’m just a passenger trying to get hold of the voyage. That’s it.” I mumbled.
“Is that how far your ambition goes?” Sylas slunk, his body sinking deeper into the soft bark of the palm tree.
“I don’t even know what to want.” I said. Sylas smiled.
“Maybe you’re not too stupid after all.” He said. “At least some of the education sunk into you. Circumstance certainly makes the man, doesn’t it? What kind of man are you then? What do you want to be?”
“Circumstance is the man. Man is circumstance.” I said. “So great circumstances create great men. And great men affect everyone around them. And that’s how it is.”
The ocean waves crashed and dragged sand and shells and rubble down. Lines of water fauna like elongated arms fighting to stand hold on the darkened shores lifted off from their grip and disappeared into the foam of ocean.
“I used to think I was a great man.” I rolled and rolled in the sand. “But that was the illusion of wealth and status. Remove them and look at me now. I’m just a regular nobody, with nothing to my life and no goal anymore. Looking for a home that probably doesn’t exist. Looking for a home I probably never had, honestly.”
“Do you think you’re worthless?” He asked.
I stopped and breathed and had my back turned to him, with my face staring at the tree and their slow moving scalps. The sky above draining of blood and settling to that lifeless dark, heading towards the deeper dark and the deeper death.
“Yes. I mean. Aren’t I? What have I done to make me somebody? Is that bad?”
“You were a great man for that little girl, weren’t you?” The knife spun in his hand. “And you were a great man for the Burrows, weren’t you?” He said.
“I was just…I just wanted to help.”
“That’s good. That might be the start of your ambition, then.” Sylas said. “As it was for Vicentius.”
“Was?”
Sylas looked with a sidelong stare to the deeper jungle to our rear. To deeper lands and the dark angled shadows the trees hid terrors above mans reckoning. To groans and shrilled shouts and the flutter of trees that dispersed strange creatures into the air. Things so far and yet so near. He went closer, to one of the trees, half his body in the darkness. I lifted off, the aches returning. Or perhaps having never left, and only having been forgotten for a moment. As all pain is.
“We’ve talked enough. Pick up your knife.” He said.
Underneath my feet a crustacean worked his way through the dirt. His head, digging in and out of his shell in cautious curiosity. I stomped forward and pushed the hermit down the mound of dirt made.
“I’ll get you this time.” I said and ran for Sylas.
