The Storyteller: The Official Story

[annarti.livejournal.com]

Twelfth Birthday

When tax time came around the following year, Sen was ready with Kaiji and Nak to board the next ship to Ryas. The Exeter was a merchant trader carrying Raykinian steel, Kazinian furs and alcohol from both. The crew was stressed, worried that they wouldn’t sell their wares for as much as they needed. The ship was in a bad way, leaking such that two crew members were always running up and down from the hold with buckets, and they desperately needed a solid profit to buy the wood to fix their ship. Despite the stressful atmosphere of the ship, though, Sen was thrilled to finally be on the ocean.

In her two weeks at sea Sen saw a pod of dolphins leaping and playing ahead of the ship, just as Tu said they did; she saw a feeding frenzy of hundreds of marlin and reef sharks, gulls and pelicans diving on a frothing patch of sea that the captain called a bait ball, where hundreds of thousands of sardines tried to hide behind each other to avoid being eaten; she saw a storm away in the distance with three waterpipes whirling up into the sky, but it didn’t come close enough to give the Exeter anymore than a light shower. After just two weeks, with the coast glaring white off the starboard side, Sen knew she wanted this life. She wanted a ship of her own.

Sadly, the voyage had to come to an end, and the Exeter pulled into the capital city of Tsayth.

Hashi had said Ryas was big, but big didn’t cover it. The city had no beach; its entire coastline was long wooden fingers of docks, most of them occupied. Most were the normal Tsaythi ships Sen recognised, but there were heavily ornamented Llayan ships, simple but functional Raykinian ships and even a few from faraway Kazin, their brightly-coloured sails cheerily standing out amongst all the others. Sen could hardly see the city at all for the forest of masts that rocked in the bay, but one huge white building towered above even the ships. Nak said that was the castle, where the king and queen lived with their family, and also where they would find the taxation office.

Sen walked wide-eyed among the white domes of Ryas, holding tight to Kaiji’s hand so they didn’t get lost. Some of the domes had been built exclusively to sell things, others were just for eating in. It didn’t seem like anyone actually lived in them, but Nak told them people lived in a different part of the city from where they worked.

As they walked towards the massive white castle, she saw golden-skinned Raykinians, their long black hair tied back in elaborate braids; brightly-garbed and bright-haired Kazinians; and pale-skinned Llayans dressed so ornately and wearing so much lace and embroidery that Sen mistook the first one she saw for royalty. What a land Llayad must be, where even the commonfolk dressed like royalty.

There were more people around the castle, some sitting on benches, some waiting in on queue or another queue that emerged from a door into the palace, some selling snacks to those waiting, some standing on the benches and talking loudly to anyone who would listen. The castle itself was more than just the one big building Sen had seen from the shore, rather it was a collection of smaller ones, some walled off from the main complex. They were all straight-sided rather than the domes Sen was used to, but they still had the big sail cloths strung up over their roofs for shading.

‘This is the queue we have to wait in,’ Nak explained, taking his place at the end of one of the shorter ones. Sen had worried that they would end up on the longest one. ‘The queue for towns.’

‘It’s so long!’ Kaiji whined. ‘This is going to take forever!’

‘Can we go explore the city?’ Sen asked, but Nak shook his head.

‘This isn’t like Jita,’ he said. ‘We don’t know everyone here, and I don’t want you getting lost or kidnapped.’ He frowned in thought for a moment, then gestured around the plaza they were queued in. ‘You can go around the plaza, but stay where I can see you and don’t get separated. We can explore Ryas once we’re finished here.’

Sen wandered with Kaiji among the stalls and criers, wishing they had just a little bit of money to buy a snack, but Nak said everything had to be kept to pay the taxes first. She didn’t even know what any of the snacks were, only that everything smelled so tasty compared with the same fish and seaweed they always had at home.

Sen tried to content herself instead with listening to the criers lining the plaza. One sounded like she was trying to say that trade was bad and that Tsayth could fare well on its own without all the luxuries from other kingdoms, but there were only two people standing in front of her, and they seemed to be having a conversation of their own. One was saying something about the princes and princesses in line for the throne, and how the one most likely to take the current monarchs’ places was also the worst for the job. He had a lot of people listening to him. Someone was shouting about taxes being too high and the people saw no evidence they were being used.

‘Yes, they are!’ Sen yelled back at him. ‘Haven’t you ever met a monster hunter or a bounty hunter? Or talked to a trader about how much other kingdoms pay for wood?’

The crier rolled his eyes, but otherwise ignored the twelve-year-old at his feet.

‘What an idiot,’ Kaiji muttered, rolling her eyes right back at him. Then they both giggled and moved on.

Another was talking about the scourge of the seas. For a moment Sen thought she was talking about monsters, like leviathans and kraken, but she soon realised the crier was talking about pirates.

‘Freeloaders!’ the crier called them. ‘Wasting your taxes by not paying their own and yet expecting all the same services you get! Their ships are riddled with rats and disease that they carry from port to port. We must eliminate them! We must petition for the new king and queen, when they take the throne, to send not just a token fleet, but an armada! We need every bounty hunter, every monster hunter, every battle ship. We need every merchant trader, ambassador, cargo ship and passenger ship to hunt them down! We must find the Pirate Isles and eliminate them, once and for all!’

The crowd gathered around her, all salt-stained sailors, cheered at these last words.

Sen and Kaiji had already pushed their way to the front of the crowd so they could see.

‘Do you know where the Pirate Isles are?’ Sen shouted, hopeful.

The crier spread her hands. ‘Nobody knows where the Pirate Isles lie, save for those loyal to their existence.’ She turned back to the crowd. ‘But this is why we must raise the whole nation of Tsayth against them! The fleets that have sailed for the Pirate Isles in the past have been too small. No matter which direction they went, the pirates always sank them. Tsayth, we need an armada!’

Kaiji tugged on Sen’s hand. ‘Papa’s nearly at the front of the queue,’ she pointed out. ‘Let’s go.’

Sen hadn’t forgotten her original reason for coming to Ryas. She ran with Kaiji back across the plaza, dodging groups of people and meandering individuals.

‘Find anything worth listening to?’ Nak asked.

‘Not really,’ Kaiji answered, ‘but that woman over there was talking about pirates.’

‘She says they’re going to raise a whole armada to hunt them down,’ Sen added.

Nak shook his head with a smile and a shrug. ‘There’s always someone,’ he said. ‘Come on, we’re next.’

The tax office was one long bench with about twenty people behind it. Behind them, row upon row of shelves reached way up to the ceiling and way, way back down to the other end of the massive office. The shelves held thousands of cylinders, some only as thick as Sen’s finger, others as big as her arm. It smelt musty in here, old and stale. Sen didn’t like it.

Nak fronted up to the free clerk at the counter. ‘Village of Jita,’ he said, setting the sack on the bench and handing over a rolled up sheet of paper.

The clerk glanced at the sheet of paper, looked up at the shelves and disappeared down one aisle.

Nak waved a hand to the towering walls of scrolls. ‘These are all the tax records for every town and ship in Tsayth that has ever existed,’ he explained. ‘Even foreign ships have to pay taxes when they come here, and their records are kept here, too.’

‘Wow,’ Kaiji breathed.

The clerk returned carrying one of the smaller cylinders. He took the lid off and pulled out a roll of papers like the one Nak had handed over, then flattened them all out and started running his finger over the numbers, meticulously checking every one. Sen could understand now why the queue outside was so long.

‘Do you have anything here about the Horizons?’ Sen blurted.

The clerk glanced up, lips pursed.

‘It’s a ship. A bounty hun—’

‘I’m familiar with the Horizons,’ the clerk interrupted, then looked back down at Jita’s papers. ‘I can’t give out tax records not pertaining to you.’

Sen didn’t know what ‘pertaining’ meant, but she thought she had a fair idea. ‘But they do,’ she said. ‘My parents, Jin and Uti, were on its crew.’

The clerk looked up again, still sour but maybe just a little more attentive. Sen’s skin prickled with anticipation. ‘Were?’ the clerk repeated.

Sen nodded. ‘They died in a pirate attack when I was born.’

The clerk raised his eyebrows. ‘Then the records no longer pertain to you.’

‘Please,’ Nak pleaded. ‘The captain, Captain Tu, is important to my family. To the whole town of Jita.’ He pointed to one of the numbers on the sheets of paper. ‘She’s the one who paid for our jetty.’

The clerk shuffled through the papers for a moment, comparing older numbers from before Tu had come to Jita. ‘Yes, I see,’ he murmured. ‘Things have stagnated somewhat the last five years.’

‘That’s when she stopped coming,’ Sen piped up. ‘So her records do pertain to us, because not as many ships come to Jita now she’s gone. We just want to know where she is so we can bring her back and she can bring more ships back.’

‘No, they don’t,’ the clerk replied. He gave a heavy sigh, then stood back and folded his arms. ‘I can tell you the Horizons is officially a black spot. I can tell you it hasn’t been sighted in five years, which means one of two things: either it’s been wrecked, or it’s gone so deep into piracy that every ship that has so much as glimpsed it on the horizon in the past five years has been sunk by the Horizons and its crew.’ He raised his eyebrows again at the absurdity of his statement. ‘I can also tell you that the last ship to see it afloat was the Emprades.’

Sen’s eyes lit up. ‘Where does the Emprades sail out of?’

‘Netsu, down the coast. You would have passed it on your way up here.’

She swapped grins with Kaiji, then smiled back up at the clerk. ‘Thank you!’ she said.

The clerk shrugged and went back to Jita’s paperwork.

Kaiji slung an arm around Sen’s shoulders in a rough hug. ‘Maybe we can stop in Netsu on the way home!’

‘Yeah!’ Sen agreed. ‘And while we’re here we can ask after the Emprades, too. If it was the last ship to see Horizons afloat, the story might have already gotten around.’

STUFF

o I have no excuses for this not going up last night. I watched two Game Grumps streams while kidding myself I could write the chapter at the same time. I managed 300 words throughout the two streams.

o The Exeter is a dodgy, seedy pub in Adelaide where I have fond uni-days memories. I'm aware it's also a city in the UK but that's not the Exeter this ship is named after. Emprades is a café/antiques shop in Clarendon and it's adorable.

o Was kinda hoping the Emprades' story would make it into this chapter, but alas, scene-setting had to happen. Sen's leaving Jita for the first time should probably be a bigger deal but whatever.

Comments

[drazzi.livejournal.com]

Like you gotta REALLY want to be on a boat to be excited to be on a boat like that :3

Ryas sounds so wonderfully wooden and magically boaty

(Just randomly love hearing the descriptions of Raykinians, Kazinians and Llayans :3 I love all these races and they must be truly amazing to see to a girl who's not left her home before)

Nak you are a good daddy wanting your girls entertained and also not lost <3

I love Sen and Kaiji being all "Lol adults have no idea how the world works, dur."

The tax records must be like the library of Alexandria was man.

Well Horizons was important enough for this random clerk to know all of that off the top of his head. Has to be fucking important.