Chương 21: Deckhand

A technique, Róise explained, was simply a recipe to achieve a particular result. They ranged from very basic ones, like lighting fires or moving objects, to complex and deadly ones, like the combat art Miriam had seen her employ against the red serpent. The more complex and flashy the technique was, the more likely it was to have a unique and flashy name, Róise had admitted - with a look that acknowledged the practice was ridiculous. No one bothered really to even call the simple ones techniques - but they were.

"The first one you need on a ship is probably 'Lash'," Róise explained.

"It just holds one thing to another. Maitiú, please demonstrate." Up on deck again, Róise was now engaging the rest of the crew in Miriam's lessons. The older man who had tried to scare her out of her hammock came forward and picked up a hand saw from the deck. Casually he threw the saw at the railing with one hand while flinging water at it with the other. The saw stuck fast to the railing, bound by a cross-tie of still flowing water. Róise glared at Maitiú.

"Next time don't risk one of our valuable tools out on the open sea on your good aim, sailor."

"Sorry, boss." The first mate shook her head.

"See? Just a simple lash. Water, Life, whatever your nature, it's capable of the same basic stuff. Unless you had one of the weird ones."

"Weird ones?"

"Never mind. There are two parts to this, but let's get the form down first." Róise picked up a canteen and held it up to the main mast.

"Try to lash this." Miriam put her hand on the canteen and summoned more vines. This one was easy - lashing things together is more or less what vines did. A copy of Maitiú's water lashing, a solid and tight X across the canteen and around the mast.

"Good," Róise said.

"Now this." She kicked Miriam in the shin. Miriam went down fast, clutching her leg. Róise's foot was petite, but it was like being slammed with an iron pipe!

"What the hell?" Róise bend down.

"Where's the canteen now?" Miriam looked back up at the mast balefully. The canteen was no longer there. Instead she found it had clattered to the deck and slid towards the railing. Róise helped her up.

"Sorry about that. I sometimes forget you all are Firsts. But the lesson is still valid. A lash can't rely on your concentration to maintain it. Look at Maitiú's lash." Maitiú had gone back to his duties, seemingly paying neither of them any mind, nor apparently even thinking about the saw that was now attached to the railing. Nevertheless, the saw was still stuck there, water still flowing.

"You have to set it to maintain itself, or this is what you get," Róise said, pointing at the empty mast.

"I feel like I could have gotten that lesson without you kicking me."

"I told you I was a terrible teacher. But I do think I have an idea about how you work best now. Try again, and now that you know the goal, figure out how to create a self-sustaining lash on your own." Róise skipped off to yell at another crew member, leaving Miriam with her canteen. Miriam rubbed her shin ruefully. It was easy to forget the power that lurked inside the diminutive pixie. She fetched the canteen and stumbled her way back to the mast.

Now that the ship was sailing at full speed again the deck didn't move around at the same alarming tilt it had at rest, but she still didn't really have her sea legs back. Luckily she wasn't nauseous - her first time on a ship had been severely unpleasant. She placed the canteen back on the mast and lashed it again. Then she deliberately stopped concentrating on it, and the canteen fell into her hand. There had to be some mechanism for keeping the fórsa active.

But that didn't make any sense - everything Eoin had told her, everything even that Róise had described in her story made it clear that fórsa was a function of the mind. Without the mind to drive it, how could the fórsa continue? Yet it clearly could. Maitiú's saw was still solidly lashed to the railing, and he was climbing up to the crow's nest - as far as she could tell completely separated from the fórsa working he had casually thrown out.

She tried pumping more fórsa into the lash, but it just made bigger and thicker vines that disintegrated when she turned her attention away. She tried pushing the fórsa in faster, thinking perhaps momentum would keep it running, but there was no difference. Miriam tried to recall everything Eoin and Solas had mentioned about enchanting objects.

She recalled one line from Solas's story about the creation of the Amethyst Reel: It was long assumed that Mind was not a fórsa that could enchant an external effect - it required an ongoing living creature to drive the desires which formed the basis of intellect. Which meant that it was a clearly well-known fact that other fórsa natures could enchant an external effect. That got her nowhere - she could see from the saw lashing that was true. This book is hosted on another platform.

Read the official version and support the author's work. Thinking about Solas's stories struck another chord:"The Reel needs connection. It's not enough to touch your fórsa - we must prime the pump to start the flow, much like the big gem on the cottage uses the ocean." The Amethyst Reel had used external fórsa from the world to get its enchantment working. But how would Miriam do that here? There was no enchanted object like the gem. Maybe she didn't need one.

The first time she had been a deckhand, almost sixty years ago, she had been placed on bilge duty often. Smaller than the other crew members and willing to do any unpleasant work to avoid undue notice, she found herself slipping into the nooks and crannies of the ship and pumping out trapped water with a little hand pump.

The neat thing about that pump had been that all you had to do was push down the plunger a few times, keep the hose constantly in water and the water would move through on its own - before fórsa, she had thought it was magic itself. Perhaps that's all she had to do here. Miriam recreated her lashing, but this time she concentrated on not finishing it. There was a tiny, almost imperceptible space between the manifestation being the idea of a vine, and then actually becoming one.

She could feel the unfinished vine pulling at her fórsa the same way the pump had pulled at the water. The lack of a finishing touch on the vine had created a sort of void, and as she pulled away the vine sucked at the ambient fórsa like a baby to its mother's breast. Finding the original source gone, the vine now pulled in fórsa from the world itself. Miriam stepped back, looking at her handiwork. Then she closed her eyes and tried to make her mind a blank. Eoin's face popped in. Miriam growled to herself.

Surely she wasn't that lonely was she? She was no teenage girl so that a quick smile and a charming personality could put blinders on her to who he really was. But she supposed… she had gotten used to having him around. Well, either way, his face had certainly distracted her from the lashing, which was the point. She opened her eyes again. The canteen stayed neatly lashed to the mast. Miriam grinned. That hadn't been so hard! One lash shuddered, then the canteen clattered to the deck.

"Damn it." Over the next hour Miriam patched the holes in her technique. She had left the void in her lashes too big - it had sucked in too much of the ambient fórsa and quickly broken the manifestation. Too small, and it just faded from lack of enough fórsa to sustain it. She was briefly overwhelmed by how precise she needed to be for each individual fórsa manifestation, but it was clearly not too much for common deckhands like Maitiú, who she got the feeling wasn't particularly powerful for a First Ring.

It was going to be simply a matter of practice and repetition - not unlike when she'd had to get a crash course in knots her first time out at sea. By the time the lunch bell rang Miriam felt as if she had mastered it - it wasn't falling off anymore, at least. She resolved to leave it up until she was done eating. If it was still there by then, she would consider it done. Lunch was just bread, a hardtack softened only with copious amounts of water. Róise sat down on the deck next to Miriam.

"Looks like you've got it?" Miriam shrugged.

"I think so. I was waiting to see if it fell down during lunch."

"It will eventually. No fórsa working lasts forever. The act of running fórsa through it tears at the construct little by little. The stronger you are, the tougher they get. A lot of what the crew does here day by day is refreshing and maintaining fórsa manifestations to make sure something vital doesn't dissolve at just the wrong time." Róise nodded towards the mast.

"Also, the nature of this ship sucks up fórsa like a sponge."

"What's the nature of the ship? It's not just a regular ship?"

"Hmmm? Ahh. We'll discuss that later. Not important right now, and you should focus on the basics." Róise gestured for Miriam to put her plate away and follow her back to the deck. Miriam did as the first mate ordered, but she wouldn't let that "nature of this ship" comment go. Was there something more to the ship than wood and a cage? It immediately put her on high alert - attempting to free Iohannes without knowing everything she could about his prison could reveal hidden dangers.

Róise walked back up to the canteen still tethered to the mast. She grabbed it and gave it a quick tug. She seemed surprised that the vines held firm.

"You've added power to this nicely. You probably used more than you need to, but unless someone more powerful pulls it off, you could expect this to last a solid month. Good work." Miriam had honestly found it difficult to add less power. Even reduced to a third, her fórsa was a raging whitewater she had to work diligently to weaken. Her pride in her spell was instantly melted as Róise took a more intentional pull and yanked the vines apart. Miriam supposed that showed again the power of those from the Third Ring.

"You'll need to practice different kinds of lashings - sometimes you want to be able to move one part of a lashing, allow anyone to undo a lashing, lock it down to just you… but this will do for now." Róise drained the rest of the canteen.

"Now, I need you to do this." She touched one finger to the canteen and then pulled it away. A thin stream of blue light followed. It hung heavy, like a rope. Róise coiled it loop over loop, until she held a gathered lasso with a canteen on the end. She then twirled the end of the rope with the canteen and tossed it up over a yardarm. She stopped the rope such that the canteen was hanging down in the air six feet below the yardarm.

"This is just making a rope. It's a bit harder than a lashing for a few reasons, but it's honestly one of the main skills you'll use on deck. Mostly everyone doesn't bother to pump light into their manifestations or even make them visible - it's less efficient - but this is just so you can see what I'm doing for yourself." Róise dissolved her rope and deftly caught the canteen on the way down. Miriam looked at the canteen with a sinking feeling. She had just started to be proud of herself for her lashing too!

"This is the sort of thing children are already good at, isn't it?" Róise laughed.

"We all start as children, Miriam! No matter what age."