Dead Men Tell No Tales
Cold rain slices like dagger points and chips of ice through the atmosphere, pounding against the beach from above, while the sea water, warm and brackish, pounds from every angle below. The wind howls like the devil drawing a breath, while angels struggle through the sound to scream a fateful chorus, and above it all, the sky belches thunder.
A solitary figure, a thick-set man in a bedraggled brown tailcoat, crawls through the sludge that the beach has become... fingers like sausages, smeared with blood from a thousand tiny cuts, dig into the sand, drawing him towards the safety of the rocks and a lone opening in the cliff wall. The sheeting of rain obscures his features, but a grimace is clear with every hard fought inch - one strong leg pushes him towards the cave, while the other, mangled and useless, drags behind, leaving a crooked trail as his boot heel gouges the sand.
After minutes of battle that seem like hours, he manages a sort of sanctuary, drawing himself just inside the mouth of the cave and propping his shoulder against the rocks, turning towards the darkness within and away from the storm. That disfigured limb hangs just outside, still subject to the steady drumming of water, but with the swipe of a muddied lace cuff, he manages to clear the rain and sweat from his eyes.
Blinking the moisture away, he searches with clouded gaze for a spot on the inner rock wall - the moonlight has made its way in, at one particular patch just large enough to suit his purposes, and with the labored grunting of effort, he reaches to the folds of his coat and fumbles for some object from an inside pocket.
He withdraws what appears to be a small pebble, but as the stone is dashed against the wall with haphazard strokes, sparks flare up and jump to the moist sand below, revealing that the article so greedily clutched between stubby fingers is, in fact, a piece of flint.
Some moments later, his task completed, that arm slumps to his side, and the man, clearly exhausted, drops his head back against the wall with a heavy sigh, the groan of an old sea dog whose timbers are giving way under the strains of ocean swells. One could not expect anything less, given the leathery skin, the scars of days gone by... the blood just beginning to seep through the folds of his coat to steep the sand at his side...
Slowly, his other hand rises, to curl at his throat... or, rather, to close around a long copper tube hanging there at the end of a leather cord... With his shoulder turned thus, he resembles nothing so much as a man simply huddling to warm himself against the unexpected chill of the summer storm.
But slower still, the raindrops outside begin to soften, from pounding to a gentle patter, like a bird's thrashing wings. In equal time, his breathing begins to ease... His chest rises and falls in longer, more drawn out moments, and his eyes take on a glassy cast as he stares down the darkness that leads into the bowels of the cliff...
Some time later, when the rain has long since ceased falling, and the only remaining signs of the tempest are restless waves still rolling to shore, and a few more pieces of debris washed onto the beach, he huddles there still... his expression one of frozen peace... his eyes unblinking... his fingers still tucked into the collar of his shirt and clutching the copper tube...
A storm petrel darts across the sky and is momentarily silhouetted against the cave's inner wall, cutting through the patch of moon's glow and the words illuminated there...
GOOD FRIEND FOR JESUS' SAKE FORBEAR,
TO DIG THE DUST ENCLOSÉD HERE.
BLESSÉD BE THE MAN WHO SPARES THESE STONES,
AND CURSÉD BE HE WHO MOVES MY BONES.
KULA BRICUSSE
He had set out for the cape with the highest hopes and the lowest of all human causes – to seek revenge on the woman who left him humiliated in the hands of slave traders. But, wait… that's not entirely correct… Woman? Oh, no – she could only be called a creature, little more than a soulless denizen of the night whose rightful place was six feet under, as far as Rohaj was concerned.
The story proper starts with a fateful night in the waterfront bar, Natty Dred's… But, no, perhaps it starts even farther back on the timeline than that… Perhaps his fortune was sealed in the moment when he demanded Rose's gold in exchange for the trio of slave girls, all three of them sinking towards death even as they walked off the end of the pier and out of his questionable care.
That he had attempted to swindle her, he would never deny, but that didn't prevent him being rabid with anger over the eventual result. Since falling into the hands of Gorean traders, he had found himself transferred from cage to cage, a tenant in dozens of stale ships' holds when he wasn't obeying the beat of the galley drum, shackled and lined up in slave chains from Sardar to Timbuktu…
And everywhere he went, it was with the strained half-smile of a madman creeping slowly onto his bloated features, as the bitterness of vengeance bubbled up inside, kept in check just under the surface of his character by glazed eyes and a tight-lipped grin.
What he thought of Rose may not signify now, now that *he* is the one whose bones rest on the seashore, his flesh bait for seagulls, his sinews snack food for the sand crabs crawling over useless limbs and making nests in his boot cuffs… but his passion for vengeance fueled the journey to her doorstep – and *what* a journey - so it is that matter to which we shall return…
The laws regarding slavery (or any commerce, for that matter) are muddy, at best, in Rhy'Din, but there is at least one place where slavery is not only condoned, but regulated by the state. Call it barbaric if you like, but the local government in Kula Bricusse does a brisk trade, and keeps the populace in its dominion happy with the low cost of labor – say what you like about slavery, but this territory at Rhy'Din's southernmost extremity is a prime example of an economy thriving because of it.
They say that Kula Bricusse was chartered by a displaced Gorean weaver who, upon finding himself a stranger in a strange land, and with no means of returning, planted his homestone in the center of tropical Rhy'Din.
The air is sweet and torrid there, and is always perfumed with plantains and wild hibiscus. Long stretches of beach, whitened with sand as fine as confectioner's sugar, outline the coast, interrupted by the occasional craggy outcropping where fingers of rock crook and dip into the sea.
Inland, where powder gives way to lush vegetation and climbs up into the foothills, rooftops and spires of villages poke through the trees – to peel back a palm frond here would be to get a glimpse of a civilization in apparent harmony with the jungle, where shops and homes and factories and temples all live side by side with nature, and the people are always smiling.
Paradise.
The homestone has long since gone the way of legend, but where it was always reputed to be, at the far end of the shore, is the first real sign of commerce – a series of docks and the mouths of trade roads disappearing into the mountains. Just beyond that, the beach is suddenly brushed aside by a sheer upsurge of rock, shooting out of the water and thrusting into a cliff wall so stark, so stern, that it appears like a warning hand to the world, its palm turned out to caution anyone foolish enough to dare too close.
Set into the side of this sheer wall is the hub of a bustling market, a honeycomb series of chambers carved out of the rock and developed over the years into the most notorious and prosperous slave housing one could hope to run across in these sun-dappled waters... This is the true heart of Kula Bricusse's prosperity, not the sunshine or the warmth.
Once an ordinary garrison, it housed the armies that brought order to the commonwealth in its infancy. Over the years, however, the barracks were fitted with locks, and the whole of the stronghold became a prison. As the slave trade stretched greedy fingers across the oceans from more developed regions of Rhy'Din, and from the home influences of its founder, Kula Bricusse was quick to learn the virtues of trafficking in human property.
Today, it is a holding place for any person subject to capture, from prisoners of war to any common man who can be pinned down and chained up on accusations of treason. Behind the stone face lies a society all its own, where staircases run up and down through the beehive cells, and hundreds of captives are kept in holding for the auction block.
The fortress does, in fact, have its own block. Potential buyers arrive at a small dock that juts from the front, and are offered armed escort inside, to a broad vaulted gallery on the lower level, where the auction platform stands in the center of the room. There, they enjoy the only luxuries the fortress has to offer, cushioned seats, genteel tea and pastries, reserved exclusively to seduce them into spending.
Its disguise is not deliberate, but rather fortunate. An approach from the front draws the eye up naturally, along the sheer wall and towards the heavens. The view is breathtaking, enough to inspire a new belief in the divine, and certainly enough to distract from the sight of eroded holes, like Swiss cheese, dotting the cliff face.
The fortress is accessible only by water. Well, perhaps a man with enough gumption (or folly) could trek the mountains behind it, drop over the edge of the cliff and lower himself down into danger's gullet. Some have guessed it a three week hike over those treacherous peaks, some hazard at least five, but no man has yet claimed to have done it.[drip]
The hollow click of a single droplet striking stone resonated throughout the chamber, the sound lingering into ripples of echoes and fading into weaker and weaker shades of nothing…And silence…
…
[drip]
The next drop was a thunderclap, rendering every other noise impotent that might barge in through the granite walls, and a pair of beefy shoulders twitched with irritation, jerking up from the cot and holding there, cringing, for a long moment.It always came, that next deafening drop, just as he was getting comfortable enough with his thoughts to remember what peace was like… and every time, the sound came like a whip crack to flay at his nerves, bringing *her* face flashing into view, and the haunting, seductive rhythm of *her* laughter to chime in his ears.
That leaking pipe in the corner of his cell, after all, was just the sort of deliberate torture *she* would devise…
For weeks he had lain just so, with the tattered chestnut coat balled up beneath his head, cushioning the back of his skull as he stared into space. He knew intimately every vein in the rough-hewn ceiling, and had kept careful count of the resounding drips as they layered onto his consciousness, each one a tick mark against the penance he would demand from Rose, each one like a hot poker stoking the flames of revenge…
His shirt was rotting away on his body – the moisture on the air saw to that. Over a period of weeks, the linen had begun to disintegrate. Like fine parchment, it was jaundiced with age, but smelled of mildew, an odor no doubt emanating from his skin. Ragged half-moons of a far deeper yellow, almost mustard, underscored his armpits, and chalky sanguine stains glanced through the rents at his shoulders, the dried remains of beatings too numerous to count.
Except to moisten his palms in the brackish water dripping into the corner, he had not been allowed to bathe in weeks – why should his captors spend a few precious drops of fresh water, when he would soon be passed on to a new set of hands?
HOPE
Rohaj cradled that hope in a section of narrow copper pipe, hung from a piece of leather cord and tucked beneath the folds of his shirt – or what remained of it, yet, to conceal the missive within. Inside was a piece of parchment, rolled into a tube so that it would not make a sound should one of the guards happen upon it. Should said guard grow curious enough to shake it, he would deem it merely an empty piece of jewelry, perhaps a sentimental item the old captain insisted on clinging to as a reminder of his long lost freedom.
Foolhardiness, sheer folly it was, to hang on to the message after he’d read it, rather than condemn the paper and ink to be forgotten in the ocean’s swells, or to waste down his own gullet. Should it be discovered, every ounce of effort it had taken to get the note so far would be for naught. Rohaj could only guess at the numbers of grimy hands it had passed through, the amount of coin that had passed along with it, and the men who had put themselves in jeopardy, all to assure that the simple piece of vellum reached him.
But the truth was, the old captain *did* cling to it as though it were a lifeline, a cable leading straight to the outside and back to his ship, wherever she might be. When he slept (when he could), it was always with one creased, massive hand curled protectively around it. Sometimes, he thought he might crush the pipe itself when rage overtook him and his fist closed on what he imagined to be Rose’s throat…The parchment was, in fact, a corner from one of his own navigational maps – he recognized the texture and grain of the pulp as being distinctively his own. And the message, scratched out in ink the color of human blood (which, perhaps, it might have been)? Merely a set of numbers. They might have been coordinates, they might have been calendar dates or accounting figures… they would have meant very little to the unschooled observer, but to Rohaj, they meant the sum of all deliverance…
At the appointed hour, Rohaj hefted his stout frame from the cot, exciting no small amount of creaking and groaning from the contraption. A soldier passing by happened to glance in as he clicked down the hall, turning an interested eye through the hatch carved into the dungeon door. The guards along that corridor had grown accustomed to a certain lethargic silence emanating from Rohaj’s cell, and any sound of movement, even if it was just the old scoundrel rising to relieve himself, was cause for curiosity.
As Rohaj lumbered upwards, the sense of being watched nipped at his consciousness, and he turned a scorn-filled glare over his shoulder to the door. His eyes, beady as they were, narrowed still further, and he reached as though to unbutton his breeches. The sentry gave a little laugh, muffled but audible through the banded oak door, then moved on… A jeer from Rohaj stabbed at his retreating back, followed by the blast of phlegm slapping wood just to one side of the view hole…
He listened for the report of boot heels disappearing down the hall, but until the sound had faded from brisk gun shots to a mere vague tapping, his hands remained fixed and at the ready, fingertips looped through the button closures at his groin.
For a brief moment, he entertained the idea of… well… perhaps… the passing fancy, the image of a guard with saffron stains streaming down the side of his finely-cut wool trousers should he choose to return, brought a grisly smile emerging from what remained of his sneer, and he promised himself that, on the way out of this abyss, he would mark at least one of the guards as his own – the humiliation would be worth far more than any torture he could invent.
When silence reigned once more (save for that accursed drip-drip-dripping), his fists began to unfold, and he reached for the rotting lace cuff at his left wrist. It occurred to him, then, that the moisture in the air, and the perspiration in his own clothing, might prove an obstacle. He began to curse, moving his lips beneath the fullness of his beard and emitting a sound not unlike the mad, squeaking babble that scuttles through the corridors of Bedlam like rodents in the night.
If only he had some guarantee, he fumed to himself as he tore at the decrepit lace. The seams hissed, the trim shredded away like so much tissue and fell into his palm… but there could be no guarantee. It could not be that easy… he could only have faith that his men would carry him out of this place and back to Rose’s doorstep, affording him his final revenge.
Now was the appointed hour – he knew the day by the crimson-flecked hash marks beside the head of his cot, where his own blood had served to count off the calendar, and he knew the time by the marigold glow seeping in through an upright sliver in the wall, a sliver that might have been named a window had it enough breadth for a man to press his cheek against it and look out with one eye. But it did not afford even that. Still, Rohaj could guess from the trajectory of the beam, the precise angle, and the hue that made the algae-slicked walls appear to run with the juice of tangerines, or like blown glass reflecting furnace embers, that dusk was just moments away…
THE APPOINTED HOUR
Turning his attention back to the ruined sleeve, he fished beneath the cuff, grimacing at the discomfort of a rash induced by the damp fabric laying next to his skin, until meaty fingers produced the crumbled remains of a piece of flint - the fragments were no more than pebbles in his rugged hands, but one spark, just one, was all he required. With a smirk and a satisfied grunt, he tossed the beads in his palm as he fell into a crouch.Finding a dry spot on the floor was difficult but feasible - finding a section of the lace scrap that was not soaked through was the greater challenge. He spread it carefully, and began cracking the flint shards one against the other, creating tiny showers of sparks, but as each ember fell, it flashed in midair, then sizzled to its doom on the surface of the soggy fabric.
Frustration seized in his throat, invoking a low, animal growl. Rohaj swallowed back his anger, but barely, and swiveled to one side, in his fervor nearly losing balance on the platform of worn boot heels. Incensed eyes roamed over the only other object in the room likely to flame - the cot, or more precisely, his bedding. It was filthy, to be sure, but far enough away from the moisture-slicked walls and too often protected by his lazy bulk to have absorbed much of the dampness in the air.
Irritation turned once more to triumph in his gruff expression, and half-loping, half-crawling, he dragged his knees towards the bed, the pebbles of flint carefully clutched at the ends of his fingertips…
Ducharme had always felt himself destined for better things. To be certain, his lineage was not that of one of the better families of Kula Bricusse, but neither was he the son of paupers or the backwater trash that built their shacks along the inland rivers. As a boy growing up, he had often dreamed of chasing the ocean horizon on a man of war, or perhaps building his fortune on a fruit plantation along the western shore, making the meteoric rise from field hand to foreman to owner, there to retire with cocktail sunsets on the veranda every night, and all the bronze-skinned company his money could buy. With his considerable height and angular frame, a build he considered imposing (and particularly noble in light of the patrician hook of his nose), he should at least have arrived at middle age wearing the stripes and chevrons of an officer…
But, no. Here he was, slumped listlessly against one of dozens of stone walls, in one of what seemed hundreds of desperate, dark corridors, just another minion charged with keeping watch over the thousands of lowlife tramps that wandered through this fortress year after year. One might suppose that he was glad, at least, to be on the other side of the dungeon door - he wasn’t. In many ways, he held a grudging envy towards those prisoners - they would leave, eventually. Whether it was by way of the auction block, or by death, they would all leave, to be replaced by new grizzled faces in the coming dawn… but Ducharme was approaching the end of his third year here, and looked forward to at least another three if he could not find a way to get himself out of this cursed man’s army.
He slouched against the wall, his rifle at his side, the stock resting in an overlooked puddle (how he could overlook so plentiful a sight was a mystery in and of itself - but perhaps he had become so accustomed to the constant layer of bilge water that ran through these halls as to be blinded to it). From time to time, the approach of footfalls would bring a certain tension to his shoulders, and he would snap the gun at least to his waist, ready to feign alertness should a pair of officer’s boots round the corner… but then the boot heels would turn, ringing their cadence down another of the long passages, the sound eventually fading and leaving him to his daydreams…
Girls in grass skirts and drinks with umbrellas, and money rolling in hand over fist… or better yet, a career on the high seas, as captain of his own ship, a ship valiantly engaged in a battle to protect the coast from freebooters and marauders… oh, yes, he could feel the cannons roaring and hear his own voice raised in command after hearty, testosterone-filled command… he could even smell the scorched acid stench of black powder smoke… smoke… Smoke?
SMOKE!
The thin plumes of haze tickling at his nostrils and wafting past his eyes jerked him back to consciousness, and reality broke on him like a jet of blood through the spasm of a cough… The hallway in which he pretended to stand guard was rapidly filling with the noxious grey stuff, and poorly ventilated as the passage was, it would likely soon spread into the cells along this block, causing no end of mayhem and rousing complaints, and certainly raising an alarm.
Ducharme sprang away from the wall, knocking his rifle aside with a clatter and a splash, and leaving it abandoned on the floor behind him as he stumbled along the corridor, seeking with rapidly watering eyes to follow the annoyance to its source…
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE
Under a hail of outraged cries from the other guards, accompanied by hooting and catcalls from the cells along that row, Ducharme adopted a thick-lipped grimace and fished the keys from a ring on his belt. Certain that he would be exposed for a loafer, or at least chastised for allowing such a debacle on his watch, he was determined to make the scoundrel Rohaj pay, and pay dearly.
A moment’s fumbling, with a lock he could barely see through the plumes of white smoke billowing out through the hatch, and he thrust his boot against the door, forcing it open and stepping in with his shoulders squared in determination…
…only to be met by an upsurge of smoke much stronger - so robust, in fact, that it sent him wheezing and coughing backwards. Stumbling blindly, he blundered into the few men who had already collected behind him; a few of them went down like dominoes, joining him in a heap on the floor, while the rest scrambled over, wedging their boot heels into groins and smashing limbs to get into the blazing room.
With the door opened, a good deal of the smoke began to drift out, and it became clear that the entire bounty of originated with a single pillar of flame in the center of the cot - harmless enough, but highly annoying, particularly in light of the uproar it seemed to be stirring among the other prisoners.
Rohaj was curled in a corner of the room, as far as possible from the bed, with the remains of a lace cuff wrapped over his nose and mouth. Queasiness shown in the way one eye squinted tight and the other remained half-open.. the roar of boots and shouting was just an echo in the distant recesses of his mind, and he was powerless against his arms being tugged, yanked nearly from their sockets. As he was lifted to his feet, the rag fell away, and he, in that moment, took an untimely gulp of the raw, polluted air that sent him reeling against his captors.
"Have done with it!!"
The instant those words were bellowed, the pandemonium from the other cells began to quiet. Uproar faded to mere restlessness in a wave sweeping down the corridor, as though the sound of the voice alone was enough to dampen the unrest. Soon the din had died enough (with the exception of the soldiers shouting their own panic) that a set of rapid footfalls could be heard, growing ever louder, and with a perfect cadence that identified the gait as belonging to Captain Harville.
Ducharme recognized the gruff voice at once, and an involuntary shock pulsed through his shoulders and stung at his heart as he lurched to his feet. Like a maze-trained rat, he had been conditioned always to leap to attention at the sound of that voice. His folly, however, was that he never seemed to be as alert *before* the Captain arrived, and so he was forever ill-prepared, and his shortcomings were forever being exposed.
When he realized, with no small mount of discomfort, that he had left his firearm somewhere on the floor outside, his shoulders slumped, and he attempted to slink back through the company of soldiers that had begun to crowd into the cell - hoping, perhaps, to recover his weapon before the melee ended and *this* embarrassment was discovered.
Enough luck was with him that he managed to brush just past the Captain on his way out, only bumping his shoulder in the process. Harville didn’t even deign to notice, just parted the sea of soldiers and pushed his way to the fore.
The Captain was not a large man - his salt and pepper hair was thinning, even balding on top, and he sported a sparsely cut mustache, goatee, and even reasonably trimmed mutton chops. In conjunction with his slight build (most of his conscripts towered over him, but he never looked up), he was well-groomed almost to the point of being prissy - his boots were always maintained with a mirror polish, and none of his acquaintance could ever claim to have seen him in breeches with a rip or a stain.
Captain Harville carried his power in his eyes - small, mean eyes, black as onyx and twice as hard - and his smile so like a rodent’s, also small, but vicious in its implication of a monster laying in wait just beneath the surface of his gentility.
When he stormed into the room, the Captain’s neck cloth was partially undone (a particularly bad sign in light of his uncompromising habits) and he held a fine linen napkin in one hand, fanning it before the prisoner’s unfocused eyes with a torero’s challenge. Unlike the troops gathered around him, he wasn’t red in the face - didn’t even appear to be winded, in fact (yet another bad sign). His features remained stubbornly deadpan as he studied Rohaj, summing him up in a glance and determining his fate with no more than a second’s consideration.
"He’s disturbed my evening meal," the Captain announced, in a tone seductively akin to a silken whisper. Turning absently to the private nearest his elbow, he continued in the same dry manner, "Have this half-wit removed to the courtyard, to the stocks in the center. Transfer whomever is there now, if you must, and see that he is not touched otherwise until I arrive to administer his penalty myself. I shall be there at the top of the hour."
Not a man in the room doubted that he would be there either a moment sooner or later than what he had declared - including Rohaj, who watched through the haze of irritated, milky lenses as Harville turned on his heel and strode through the gathered crowd. When he reached the door, the Captain turned, glancing with barely concealed distaste, first at the cot (which was, incidentally, still burning, but had waned from fury to a lazy smoldering), and then to his men, reminding them with a pluck of his brow that they had forgotten something rather important.
By the time his first step landed on the other side of the threshold, no less than six men had converged on the cot, beating at it with pillows, hats, even their coat sleeves…
Rohaj lurched into blackness after that; his next memory was the screech of a gull, shrill in his ear and then fading towards the sunset. The sound shocked him out of his stupor so suddenly that he took a great gulp of breath, and the sea salt burned his lungs, which were raw after so long having been provided only a stale facsimile of air…
It pained him to peel his eyelids back – not so much on account of the salt in the air as the fluorescence of the tropical sunset - and he did so slowly, lifting one after the other in lazy, agonized progression.
With his arms and neck slung through the stocks, he looked little better than a carcass hanging on a meat hook, left there to rot – but no carcass ever suffered the indignity of being watched over by a column of soldiers with bayonets at the ready. The grenadiers stood like a row of automatons as they awaited the Captain’s arrival; one might have thought them statues, had not the stray breeze come by, catching at the tails of their coats, sending them flapping against the backs of thighs like flags slapping at a mast.
This terrace high atop the fort was where every public punishment was doled out. It offered a perfect vantage point – the sky before him was like a Maxfield Parrish masterpiece, with billowing clouds cast in shades of unnaturally lucid cotton candy and robin’s egg, and beyond that, a sea that stretched endlessly into freedom. But it also offered perfect despair, as though the stocks had been placed just so to further torture every captive with a view of the ocean and liberty that he would likely not see again.
A counterpoint to this despair was private hope, which Rohaj nursed as the sole rationale for having placed himself so deliberately in this position. Lost below, in the honeycomb of prison cells, his men would stand no chance of finding him among the wreckage of other human lives - but the terrace afforded a view, however slight, of the inlet before the docks, and the stocks, however humiliating, lifted Rohaj into plain sight, high atop the cliff wall.
He wrenched his neck inside the rough-hewn wooden collar that held it captive, straining to either side of him for a glimpse of what might lay there, but all he could see was stone, stone, and more stone - the pock-marked field of the terrace floor, and the knee-high ledge that ran around the perimeter of the platform. Far to the end, at his left, was another set of the miserable stocks, but though he could not lift his gaze beyond the base of the contemptible contraption, he could see that it was vacant.
In that moment, he silently cursed every man whose boots did not scuff the ground there, the bitterness rising like bile in his throat for every cur who did not share his fate.
Hissing under his breath, his lips curling back over his teeth like a dog ready to bite, he snapped his gaze to the forward once more - and was rewarded by a sight that promptly wrested the jealousies from his mind.
Out on the sea of tangerine, where the last rays of twilight burned over frothing waves, a pinprick of black had appeared. At first, Rohaj blinked, fearing that the salt in his eyes and pain hammering at his brain had conspired to play a trick on him. But as the seconds stretched into monotonous minutes, it grew into the tiny silhouette of an ocean vessel that flooded his senses with relief…