Charlie and the Ship V (Day 8)

Continued from Day 7.

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It was past noon when Charlie woke up.

After a few seconds of groping, his hands found the bulwark and he pulled himself upright. He'd been too tired to notice the hardness of the deck before, but was now discovering that sleeping on a hard wooden surface for two consecutive nights was a reliable way to ensure being sore as a broken promise in the morning.

The deck was looking just as deserted as it had when he first saw it. Maybe more deserted, now that he had seen it bustling with people. Or had he? Ghosts and pirates and sailing into the sky. It all seemed so gloriously absurd, so surreal, so very much like a dream.

Charlie saw the tiller spin one turn to the port. On some accounts, though, the dream hypothesis just did not fit in. He didn't think even the most magnificent of dreams would be physically capable of easing the sails. A topsail's tack retied itself as the ship turned to a run. Charlie silently accepted that he had either been rescued by a crew of ex-pirate ghosts who sailed around with a little girl, or gone stark raving insane.

He walked to the door of the captain's quarters, bidding a good morning to the autonomously rotating tiller as it vanished from his line of sight, sinking below the stern deck's railing.

"And a good morning to you, Charles Dobson. Although to say good afternoon would be more accurate," said the Captain's disembodied voice. Just as Charlie was about to knock on the door, it added, "The young lady is below the deck, presumably still engaged in a game of checkers with Cindy. You are free to enter the quarters. I recommend the philosophical works by the thirteenth abbot at Jinlin; they can be found on the third shelf down, in the bookcase to the right of the bed. There are maps of the Old Continent you may find worth familiarizing yourself with in the compartment under the bed."

"Thank you, Captain."

In the captain's quarters, the lanterns were unlit and the sun filtered in through the windows. The globe on the desk bathed in daylight. On its surface, the world as Charlie knew it had vanished, replaced by one huge continent, covering half of one hemisphere. The other hemisphere was almost completely blank. Charlie supposed even whatever magic hid within the carefully sanded shell of the globe didn't know all things.

According to Melissa, they were sailing north, and in the direction of the continent, so it was prudent to assume they were somewhere in the southern seas. He recognized the Bay of Folk from the maps, and Chamille, which Abraham had said to be the place of origin of the strange herbal tea Melissa had given him.

Charlie sought out the shelf the Captain had mentioned. Well, he thought, nothing to it other than to start digging. He expected to rummage through the books forever, but the first one he pulled out had, under the gilded impression of a forest in the spring, the words "The Snake and the Hare" and, in slightly smaller print, "Fa Men, thirteenth father of the Golden Forest" written on it.

He sat at the desk and began reading. The book began at the very first page, simply marked "one". It opened with what read like a beast fable. There were talking animals, like in the Uncle Remus stories he'd read as a child, only these animals didn't have houses or clothes. It went on for a few pages. A new one began.

Charlie leafed through a few pages, then through the entire book. There was page after page of animal stories, some only half a page long, some spanning dozens of them. Perhaps the abbot wrote stories for children in his spare time?

Charlie got up and exchanged the book for another. The bookcase supplied him with "The Blind Monkey", but a quick look inside showed it to be the same. He was then offered "The Beggar's Dog", "The Crocodile and the Mouse" and a handful of other books, until he came back to "The Snake and the Hare" again. Was the Captain playing some sort of joke on him? Heavens knew what he found amusing.

Nevertheless, feeling a bit guilty about just discarding the books, Charlie took "The Snake and the Hare" back to the table. He read all the way to "twenty-one", but found himself utterly unable to decipher any sort of deeper meaning from them, so he gave up and deposited it back into the bookshelf. He then left the captain's quarters.

The stairs leading to the crew's quarters were at the front of the forecastle. Charlie opened the door with a creak.

"Good morning, Mister Charlie! Didja just waked up?" Melissa was sitting on a bunk to the portside wall. It was one of three beds still left; the rest had presumably been thrown away with the need to sleep. There was a table in the middle of the room, with Cindy sitting behind it, fingers idly assembling and disassembling one of those puzzles where you tried to separate bits of metal or link them together again.

"No, I've been awake for a while. I was reading."

"Aye, the Duke, he's got a wealth in lit'rature, true enough," said a wiry, short man, sitting on the bunk opposite to Melissa. "What'd you read?"

"I, uh. It was Fa Men. The Captain suggested it to me. But it looked like just animal tales." The man chortled. Charlie'd known it. It was just a prank, then.

"I, well, I s'pect the Captain overestimated you just a mite there. Y'see - you're not from the Old Continent so I s'pose it stands to reason you don't know - but the thirteenth abbot of the Golden Forest was one of the wisest men to ever live.

He was born the son of a fisherman, y'see. That was twelve or thirteen hundred years ago. Her mother was ill and died giving birth to him, her fourth child. Her sickness had left him weak. He was always brittle as a twig, he was, so he wasn't much good for fishing, now was he? It was 'orrid for him hisself, too, to watch his already badly-off family need tend to him as well as themselves.

So one day - he was eight years old - he left, to live his life with the monks of the Order; that's the Order of Jinlin, the Order of the Golden Forest. The monks took him in, and he practiced their teachings and spent his days meditating.

Now, Fa Men's Heart was an oak, at the edge of a glade in the Forest. Means it was as much a part of him as an arm or a leg. For a monk of the Order, you are your Heart and your Heart is you. (Y'know what they say about the eighth abbot? They say no one never got to find out what his Heart was. You asked him, 'Abbot, what is your Heart?' and he would say he didn't understand the question.) When Fa Men first came to the Golden Forest he started his meditations under that tree. He would sit there in the shade of the oak for days without food or water. And though he didn't eat, he got stronger than he had ever been. Y'see, he was truly becoming one with the tree; his body was weak and he despised it, so it was easier for him to let go, and the tree had such vitality to lend to him, it was easy for him to merge with it.

When Fa Men had been in the Golden Forest for sixty-seven years, the then-abbot died. Fa Men succeeded him. Now he was spending months at a time in deep contemplation below the branches of the oak, without eating or drinking or sleeping. He didn't need to eat or drink or sleep. The tree drew on the water in the soil for sustenance, and it shared it with him, and Fa Men partook in its deep slumber.

Between his meditations, Fa Men wrote. One of the monks who lived in the Forest at that time said that every few months, he would get up from below the tree, take a quill and a piece of paper and write, without pause or uncertainty, for several pages. He'd never once return to read what he'd written; he'd just gone back to his meditation. He wrote one full 'story', as you called them, every time he left the oak, and when he thought there were enough, he told a monk to get the pages bound and published as a book.

To this day, he is the oldest man to ever live. At the age of three hundred and twenty-seven, Fa Men wrote his last story. It was one page long. He then gave it, with the other pages of his last book, to a monk that was passing by.

'Would you be so kind as to bind these pages into a book?' Those were the words Fa Men had used for all the other books, so they were what the monk expected to hear this time.

But Fa Men only said, 'Goodbye.'

And the monk said, 'Where are you going?'

And Fa Men said, smiling, 'To sit down for a while.'

And he sat down by the oak, and he never rose from that place again. He had died together with the tree, with the fit body of a healthy young man.

His books were the ones you saw in the Captain's library. They are the most revered spiritual and philosophical works of any man or woman who ever lived on the Old Continent. Fa Men wrapped his thoughts in parables and fables, but they are not puzzles; you don't try to figure them out. After you study the teachings of the order for long enough, they just become apparent to you. When you understand them, it comes from inside you."

"Do you understand them?" Charlie asked.

"All of them? Hell, no. I've read them all, many times. I can damn near recites them to you. But that don't mean I understand."

"And the Captain?"

"Why don't you ask him?" the man said. "Nobody knows for sure what the Duke understands. 's 'cause he don't tell. But I'm pretty he gets the two first books, and I think he's starting to understand The Beggar's Dog, too."

"How much do you understand?"

"After two years of studying Fa Men's texts, I'm beginning understand some of the fables in The Snake and the Hare." The man sighed. "Y'know what it's like? It's like leaving the darkness to go stand inside the sun."

"Are you from the Order?"

"Me? No." The man chuckled. "I'm a talespinner."

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Nowhere near as good as I wanted it to be, but I'm not going to do any more editing at this point. Deal with it. :/