There are quiet times in our lives when the only interesting thing happening, at least from an outsider's standpoint, is simply the passage of days and years. Personally, I can only handle my own excitement in small bursts that seems to punctuate infuriatingly long stretches of "not much going on". The writing of this story is indicative of such a process, and in my own life, I feel I have sat upon my haunches long enough and it is time for yet another push of happenings.
In the chronology of our story, about twenty years have passed since the events of the first book called Escape. It has been a long and relatively quiet time since Mullicynda and Daavor escaped from Firsthome and the clutches of the Convocation and specifically the Matron Symantha. For people whose natural proclivity is toward somewhat quiet and mundane living, breaking away from an expected home and hearth is a very jarring situation and seemingly must be met with a extended stretch of relative stillness. This is an honest-enough description of the span of nearly two decades for our intrepid duo since they left familiar shores.
Today certainly started like every other day. The skin boat was launched not long after Daavor had awakened before dawn and already the first few castings of the net have begun to draw up the bounty of the sea. The labor itself, though strenuous by nature, is so accustomed to the man that it needs little thought for him or mention from me. Daavor was never a large man but to see him now for the first time after so long a hiatus, he seems almost gaunt compared to the flush servant to an indulgent Convocation society where we last saw him. The years of harder labor, living away from the softness of civilization and society, have made him thinner and far more wiry, a creature of muscle and bone bent to this one purpose: mindlessly drawing fish from the water. Frankly, he looks quite different than I remember him and the change isn't wholly bad.
The sun is just breaking over the surface of the water and it is an uncustomarily clear morning. Daavor's mind is wondering from the monotony of the nets and relishing the cold, briny snap of the wind. He is looking again at the stone marker that stands on the beach not far off, the very monolith that served as a guide-stone for his earlier adventures. It stands out so clearly in the new morning light, the symbols clear even at this distance, almost glowing as some lit beacon that calls to the heart. The rare clarity of this morning sky has let the first rays of the sun illuminate it in a novel and quite exhilarating way for a man who usually avoids pondering much of anything.
As much as Daavor breaths in the sea air with relish, his dear wife Mullicynda is growing frantic with her own discontent. She broke away from a world of beauty contests and catty intrigues in what feels like a past life, seemingly by her own choice and actions. However, the swirl of happenings that the Convocation provided to its subjects has long tentacles and seems to extend even to the heart of a woman living now on this far shore. After such manufactured excitement on Firsthome, life on a beach, cleaning and processing mounds of fish, feels pretty mundane. Of course, Mulls had little interest in the hypocrisies of her former culture, but one can only escape so long from the comforting tempos and flavors of home. Escape from the confinement of an arranged life, such as Symantha the Matron had planned for her, is certainly a good thing and preferable, but the "free" life of a fish-wife is somewhat less appealing to a woman accustomed to a finer sort of living. When one dreams of release from an unpleasant circumstance, one often does not think much on how one will spend the days and months that follows that release. For Mullicynda, the goal was accomplished very long ago and her victorious days are now intrinsically boring and tedious to her.
The former Lady has been slipping into some interesting habits of late and they do not bode well for the continuation of life as it has gone for the past twenty years. Mulls used to rise with her men and see them off to their work of an early morning, but for over a year now, since her son has fled, she has chosen to lounge in her rough bed as her man ready himself without her. Once the day breaks, she has worked with reduced enthusiasm over the last of the fish processing that was left from the day before, sulking about and taking the sort of breaks that would have been unthinkable only five months ago. The work is getting done, I suppose, but only just and rather more sloppily than before. Like a child who tosses their possessions behind a wardrobe door or into the darkness under a bed to make a messy room look clean enough so they can do something more interesting, our Mulls is taking interesting shortcuts in her own work, but the sad part is that, instead of finding something interesting to do, the poor woman spends her stolen free time in a rough chair turned to the sea, staring at the distant shore of Firsthome. More and more in the past few weeks, she finds herself pining for aspects of a former life that she extricated herself from so long ago. It seems the virtues of breaking away and living life on her own terms have worn terribly thin over the years.
Today, she has even gone so far as to put on the fine dress that she wore at her Investment party years ago. It was something of a pleasant surprise that she could still fit into it in her thirties, but it was depressing because the years of hard work had made her just as gaunt as her husband Daavor and the dress fits her like an empty flower sack. She was blandly grateful that she didn't have a mirror to hand to accentuate her horror. She sits at her beach-side chair once again, her head cocked to one side, and wonders what might be happening right now in the old places she used to frequent as a girl. I can see her utterly mopey look at this moment and it brings as much sadness to my heart as I can see reflected in her vacant eyes. Mulls really doesn't want to be here anymore and at some point quite soon, she is going to notice this fact and do something about it.
Of course, this is how rekindled adventures begin.
On this particular morning, the fishing has turned quite skimpy on the skin boat and as much as Mulls is lolling on the shore, Daavor is also lolling and daydreaming at sea, which quickly takes a hard downward turn as he thinks about the couple's absent son.
"Come on," the man is saying repeatedly under his breath as he strains to take up the slack of pulling up the net that the absent boy Weslyn should have been there to help with. "I could use you today," he grunted under his breath, addressing the phantom young man Daavor still missed as much today as he had when the boy had disappeared. Finally, the net and its anemic catch are aboard, the best effort one man could do alone.
The man shook his head, looking up to see something that frankly made him forget what he was doing. A great ship was moving into their same stretch of sea, moving toward the sandy beach close to the marker of the path leading to Waykeep, inscribed with the Mariner's Log. Daavor had seen that particular ship once before, but had never really talked about it. "The Mariner comes," he mentioned to himself simply.
If there was a being most like the Christ, it would have been the Mariner. In point of fact, past generations had supplanted God's chosen son with the Captain of the Salvation, replacing the Master with his slightly more present servant.
Daavor went back to work preparing to recast the net into the sea, as if the coming of the great sailing ship Salvation was just another in a long line of uninteresting happenings.
The great multi-masted caravel had now taken up its own sails through the efforts of a seeming swarm of men and dropped anchor in the deeper waters some hundreds of yards from the beach. Currents and small waves pitched the skin boat, made infinitesimally tiny by the great ship, pulling Daavor closer to affairs as a longboat was swung out over the side of the larger vessel and lowered to the water. It was likely the most maritime activity Daavor had ever seen in years, but the man seemed almost bored at the spectacle that disturbed is traditional fishing day.
On the shore, Mullicynda found her view of Firsthome and her dejected reminiscence of younger days also disturbed by the lumbering hulk of the Salvation. It blocked out the scene of the sun building up its courage to face another day and the woman was putting up little struggle to her own indifference. Nevertheless, what served as her morning constitutional had been disturbed and it seemed that something had to be done about it, so Mulls pulled herself up out of her rough chair, hiked up her elegant skirts, and began trudging through the sand toward the point that the embarking longboat was surely making for: the "Mariner's Log" stone marker. By her crude calculations, she would reach the place at about the same time as the men who were just now unshipping the longboat oars, and perhaps a bit after her own husband navigated his own way to the beach.
Of what will come from this conjunction, you fine readers may already know, but I, as your omniscient writer, cannot begin to guess.
Everyone, at one time or another, gets themselves into situations that they don't expect. In some cases, these times serve to remind us how unthinking and silly we can be. For instance, many rock concert tour buses travel through my town, just by the simple fact that we service a major interstate freeway with the only motel rooms for miles. If I were to knock on the door of one of those tour buses, it is somewhat likely I will have some contact with whatever rock concert star is on that bus, likely enough to entertain a restraining order. I don't care to know any rock concert stars, so my personal likelihood of something like this happening is rather small, but I can imagine other people, enamored of meeting some popular person, might give it a try and find some success. Of course, having entered into such a circumstance, the star-crossed fan might not really know what to do at the crucial moment and look pretty foolish.
"What... Hello... Hello, Mister Mariner." Daavor was the person silly enough to open his mouth first. "What brings you here?"
The recently beached crew of the longboat looked bemused and glanced at their obvious leader. They had their work to do and continued at it. The leader, for the moment, seemed to be ignoring the uninvited on-lookers and concentrating instead on the nervous couple that was the actual point of the visit to the marker. Daavor took a few respectful steps back while Mulls was still trudging toward the place, wrestling a bit with the dress she was wearing.
The leader of the Salvation party was smiling and talking in a familiar way with the disembarking couple, giving them encouragement as he pointed out the trail-head and mentioned that the people of Waykeep would be happy to see them. The couple seemed a bit shy about the whole thing, having, as the holy book that Mullicynda revealed, been plucked from some distant and unpleasant place and brought here as a reward for good behavior. The sailor went so far as to take them by the hands and walk a little way up the trail with them, pointing further on, and being even more encouraging with his talk. The couple looked at each other, clasped hands for some sort of mutual strengthening, and made their way on-ward. Once this was done, the Salvation man turned back toward the on-lookers with the sort of look uninvited guests tend to get.
I suppose he could have just re-boarded the longboat, returned to the Salvation, and gotten straight on his way, but this man seemed quite a magnanimous sort and decided to grudgingly answer Daavor's previously unanswered and rather pointless question. "I am here to do the Mariner's work."
Mulls had finally reached her man and was trying in vain to straighten out her dress and appear a bit presentable before the sailors about who she had read so much. She was still huffing a bit from her effort in moving across the sand in insensible Convocation heels, and she was poking at her hair, hoping it didn't look too poorly.
Daavor managed yet another utterance, remembering stories his wife had told the man and his son from the holy book. "Are you really the Mariner? The one that brought Alaedeus and Cassandra to Firsthome?"
The bearded older man before them shook his head. "I am Ishmael. I am the first mate of the Salvation. I am a mere servant of the Mariner." He made a signal to his men that put them into action to leave the beach.
"What would the Mariner have us do?" This was from Mullicynda. She turned suddenly sheepish. "Well, we have the book and all, and it says in there what we should be doing..."
Ishmael continued to face them, a pleasant enough smile on his face. It was becoming obvious that he was going to simply move off, his original purpose now accomplished.
Daavor's jaw was moving, as if he wanted to find something proper to say. Words were failing him as I would guess would happen to anyone in the same predicament. Personally, I think speechless is probably the most respectful way to be in these situations, as the few words uttered so far have come out as patently silly. Mulls' eyes were sparkling as the Mariner's first mate turned and made his way back to the longboat. Before very long at all, the smaller craft was back aboard the Salvation and the sails were unfurled again. Daavor finally managed to stammer a bit, but it wasn't useful, of course.
One doesn't know what justifies these sorts of happenings, if there is any justification at all. Some seem to believe that God, his Mariner, and the ship Salvation appear only to those who are the most worthy and as a sort of reward for some particular act of piety, but I don't know if that is so. I imagine that "holy" ones can do whatever they want and they can be seen as often as someone crosses their path, as in this case. I don't think Daavor and Mullicynda were doing anything particularly pious; they were just going about the business of living from day to day. Perhaps, it is then that God will come to us, most often in unbidden feelings of gratitude and inspiration in our hearts. I believe that, if experiences with Deity are wanted, we must keep our hearts open to such things and gratefully accept them in whatever form they come.
For the fishy man and the overdressed woman, it was just a happenstance and now that it was over, it was time to get back to work. The Daavor re-boarded the skin-boat and moved back to the fishing grounds. Mullicynda trudged back across the sands, changed out of her dress and back into appropriate fish-stained work clothes. Encouragingly, she got all of her work done that day instead of leaving some for another time. The man hauled in a fine catch of fish, more than lately. At the end of the day, all the work done, one simply looked at the other over the sparse evening meal and smiled for the first time since their son Weslyn ran away.
Their souls appear to have been rejuvenated and perhaps was all that was needed to justify the sighting of the Salvation for them. In matters of fishing and living and the composition of stories, it takes just a bit of a jolt to refresh life and get things going again.