Closed Where Ships of Purple Gently Toss

Minnie bids Charm farewell

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Center of scholarly knowledge and shipwrighting, Zeltiva is a port city unlike any other in Mizahar. [Lore]

Where Ships of Purple Gently Toss

Postby Philomena on March 3rd, 2013, 4:54 pm

Winter 75, 512
The Wharves of Zeltiva
--------------------------

The coming spring still stirred only fitfully in the sea air of Zeltiva - the air had enough warmth to melt the ends of icicles into it, and leave it damp, and paradoxically colder against exposed skin. The morning and the last of night made love against the horizon of the harbor, the violet luminousness of them glowing across the black-blue sky. In this light, in the early morning of late winter, even the mast of a glorified fishing scow could appear sanctified, the spar of it tied tightly to a worn wood hawser. This was the ship, the ship that would carry Charm Wright off to... an end, of some sort or another.

Today was the day in which it would happen, in fact, and a few sailors were, as a consequence, already up and about, not because, so early, there was any need, Minnie was sure. Charm Wright had pulled together far grander and more complex voyages than this, and the ship would be, already, carefully packed, no doubt, the sails aired and fresh, the wood freshly painted, the ropes newly tarred. It was nothing like that that drew these sailors out, it was, simply, that call of a coming voyage, that ringing cry of the sea. Some souls, perhaps, could make peace with this voice, some sailors heard it as philosophers hear the call of Dira - as a friend, but one that one must meet only when the time comes. Some sailors, as the cry grows louder and nearer, are drawn inexorably towards it. It was a matter of temperament, more than anything, as far as Minnie had seen, not experience. She had seen fresh, green sailors on their first voyage traipse idly over the scuppers at the lost possible moment, and then she had seen captains of great experience who spent days before hand, tied to the ship as to a lover being roused from sleep.

She did not know which type Charm was. She had never come to see one of her voyages off. It had been something of a superstition, to her. She read about the woman's partings in the broadsheets, in ship logs, in the accounts of other writers, but she had never seen one. Minnie, herself, felt a stranger to the sea - she was, with the sea, as with most aspects of Zeltiva, both powerfully attracted and inescapably foreign. She had written poems about it, when she worked on the libretto of her great, unfinished opera - she had written them sitting on the stones by the key wharf, her bare toes in the summer water - but she had, even then, felt as if she were a bird writing letters to a fish. And so... watching one of Charm's ships part, felt... as if she would be out of place. Superstitiously, even, a bad influence, a sort of shore-bound Jonah.

Even today, she came so early partly for this reason - because when the ship parted, she wished to be tucked inside her chambers. Praying, perhaps, for Charm, not for her safety so much as for her satisfaction. Charm, in a way, was the last compatriot Minnie felt she had in Zeltiva. Lanie was long past, Kena gone before she was born. Hannah had been dead for years now, and Stephy Brooks, whom she had known only peripherally, never feeling particularly emotionally close to the hardbitten brave sailor, was past to her as well. Even Mara, her old friend at the library, was dead now, taken by the plague. And then, Minnie realized with the calm acceptance of one for whom death has become a familiar companion, she had not so long anymore either. Perhaps another circle of the moon, for the Tears of Rak'kelli, while they had slowed the disease in her hand, had not stopped it, and the acceleration of Minnie's own death had returned. She could feel it racing through her veins.

That was another reason not to come later. She wished the parting to be a celebration for Charm, and the presence of a woman now known, at least among many of her colleagues at the Guild and University, to carry the plague, would bring a black wind to the place. And Minnie genuinely wished to keep her illness to herself, to keep the spread of thing as small as possible, her conscience stilled into a box, but not entirely dead over the subject.

Mostly, though, Minnie knew, she had business with Charm before she left, and she wished it be personal. Intimate. Individual. A professor mounting a ship just before it parts with one of the heroines of Zeltiva on a dangerous voyage -- in public, that would be a ceremony. Minnie did not wish that. She did not wish her little gifts to come from her office as a recorder of things. She wished them to come as a friend. And, some little part of her Qalayan tendencies relented to this - this voyage, increasingly, felt to her like Charm's funeral. Death, perhaps, was something one could let a soul have to itself, something one could record from a distance. If Charm's feelings as she unmoored from her life out onto the sea that would carry her to her end were to be the first entries in a book that, Minnie confessed to herself, no one, quite possibly, would ever see again? So be it. She would finish the biography of the woman, if it came to that, with second-hand accounts. She would let that last embrace between Charm and Dira occur behind the curtain of unrecordedness.

Minnie herself was bundled heavily, a quilt pulled underneath her Mackintosh, a scarf tied around her face to leave only her glasses exposed. Her boots stepped carefully among the icy cobbles of the quayside. Her good hand gripped hard at a blackthorn stick, its copper ferrule seeking corners to brace her frail steps against.

The ship extended, just slightly, over the land, the long forward spar just a few feet over Minnie's head. She could, when she extended her fingers, almost brush against it. Had she been a more normal height, she could have firmly gripped it, felt the smoothness of the new paint. She passed it. Under her bad arm, she carried a little camp stool, and arriving near the gangplank, she unfolded it. She had used it far more often to sit across from the elder Wright sister's empty, spectral manor. The manor, now, Minnie had entered, had walked its halls, had spoken with the servants, had sat, shivering and lucid on the very seat that Kena had perhaps sat in.

Now, staring across the narrow plank at this humble ship, the parallels between the two sisters struck Minnie terribly, and the parallels between her own work - the work of sitting quietly outside the lives of beautiful souls, and watching - struck with a bittersweet sorrow. How sweet it was to watch the great do great and terrible things! And yet, how sad, to know that greatness always devours the great.

She waited. She would not interrupt, would not nose onto the ship where she did not belong, would not ask around to see if Charm was there. She had her quilt and coat. She had patience. She would wait. Charm would come when she came, or find her when she was ready. She rested her good hand, now, on her satchel, and softly sang to herself, pitchy and weak and hoarse, an aria from an opera she had not heard sung in Zeltiva for many years.

"Grown old am I,
A spirit born of fire.
Grown old am I,
Too old now to be the flame that once I was.
But while I live,
I'll burn, a restive, fierce, and rosy-hearted coal,
Refusing to extinguish in the sea."
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Where Ships of Purple Gently Toss

Postby Liminal on March 10th, 2013, 5:40 pm

There was a sound of bootsteps behind Minnie, deliberate and firm. When she turned, she would see Captain Charm Wright approaching her. Charm had on a blue tunic, and an oilskin cloak that helped take the edge off the biting gusts of wind. Her white hair, tied in a ponytail, shivered like spider silk in the breeze.

"There you are, Minnie! I'd hoped to find you before all the fuss begins."

The old sailor reached out to embrace Minnie, a gesture that really didn't take no for an answer. Then she opened a leather bag that hung from one shoulder, and retrieved a notebook, one that Minnie would recognize as the same one she had given Charm not long ago.

"I put the last entry in this morning," Charm said with a smile, "just like you said. I figure it's best to follow the instructions of the person responsible for shaping public opinion of me, no?"

It was a joke, the self-effacing type of which Charm was fond, but her delivery of it seemed more faraway, less engaged than usual. If Minnie thought of this expedition as Charm's funeral, perhaps there was a parallel to be drawn between the Captain's demeanor, and the last weeks or days of a dying person's life, when they begin to separate themselves from the world of the living, becoming more sensitive to the frisson of the unseen.

"If anyone comes back from this escapade, I'll be sure to send the final final notebook with them. Or maybe I'll just give it to you myself when I return, you never know."

This last statement, again, was unconvincing. Charm had already said, in an unguarded moment, that she anticipated never seeing Zeltiva's shores again. Here, "see you later" meant something more akin to "goodbye."

"You're a good friend, Minnie Lefting," the Captain added at length. "And I thank you, especially for agreeing to guard my sister's work."
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Where Ships of Purple Gently Toss

Postby Philomena on March 10th, 2013, 6:30 pm

Minnie climbed up to her feet as she turned to see Charm. Her face smiled. It was an unusual sensation for her these days - it had been a very difficult winter. But then, sadness makes our smiles more sweet, and on Minnie small, tired face, it glowed, now, in a quiet, melancholy way, pleasantly sad.

"Hello, Charm."

It still stumbled from her tongue, a little bit, this familiarity, this address of equals. But it came more easily, and more sincerely, now. Her voice was quiet, though, almost a murmur, with the creak and stomp and whistle of the slowly awakening morning wharves. And when she took the old woman's embrace, it was with a willingness, and a far degree less of the defensive fear she would have to... well, nearly anyone else. Anyone but her son, who would likely never again offer it.

She took the book, ached, for a moment to open it - she didn't. It would be generous to say that this was because it would be rude, but it likely had more to do with the clumsiness of her heavy gloves on the delicate pages. She slid it into her bag.

She dropped her voice more, and stood slightly closer when talking about the books, eyes moving subtly about to make sure noone was listening, "Thanking me for guarding you *and* your sister's work," she emphasized the 'and' gently, with just the hint of reproach in her smile, "Is summat like thanking a Nykan merchant for hoarding gold. But more so, because your papers are more than gold to me. I'm making copies now, just... in case the university gets wind of them. Then, we'll put them up somewhere. Have to find a good copyist I can trust..."

She started, and her hand went to her bag. Her feet were spread wide, to maintain her balance.

"I nearly forgot..."

The close eye and the keen observer will see that Minnie has not improved since last the two women spoke. She totters on her feet without the support of the walking stick, and the skin on her face is slightly sallow. Her cheeks are red, only partly with the cold - there is the hint, and the smell of fever to them still. And some of her spare flesh is gone now, leaving her a bit more transparent, a bit more bony underneath her liver-spotted skin.

She draws out a blank book. It's simple: brown leather with good, laid-paper pages inside of a stout unadorned binding. Only one decoration marks it: on the front cover, clasped in an inexpensive iron prong-setting, is a single, somewhat scratched and battered copper-edge miza, burnished to a shine.

She extended it to Charm, "For good luck. I've kept my little Charm-miza long enough, I thought, perhaps, it was time to return it. And I..." she blushed hard, and stared at her feet. "Well, its nothing, really. I wrote you a poem in the front. You... the other day. You made me wish to write again."
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