No Silver, No Rum

Clugston
Clugston
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

‘No silver, no rum.’ The Whaleman announced tersely.

The tailor, a visitor to the parish, noticed the deep bruising around the knuckle of the Whaleman’s hands. Raw marks left from the canvas wraps. Wraps the tailor was instructed to mend.

The left hand of the Whaleman was clenched evenly around a pole made entirely of what appeared to be brass, whose knurling looked sharp and menacing to the touch. Chalk and dried blood stained the areas of the metal, a clue as to where it was wielded with both hands.

Extending to the Whaleman’s shoulder height, the brass pole was forged as a single piece of metal. It must have weighed forty or fifty pounds and it’s potency as a tool for violence was base and appalling.

A crude ballistic weapon, the advantage of the brass was in the indiscriminate brute force it could generate. Breastbones, the links of chain-mail, even oak shields and broadswords were simply shattered or smashed. The necks of men and horses could be shattered in one terrible motion.

The tailor had been told a story, that at the time sounded farcical, of a small crew of whale men who, outnumbered, had drowned a boatload of one hundred or so marauders by leaping aboard and savagely wrecking the timbers of the very vessel they arrived in.

Only the whalemen could survive the sub-zero saltwater. The weapons and enemies simply sank.

Looking at the weighted mass of the brass before him such a tale seemed entirely plausible.

Two winters had passed since the parish had renegaded on their peacetime virtues and turned to the Whalemen. The parishioners were peaceful people. Soft people. People who knew how to die for a cause, but could not kill for their own one.

And die they did.

A well organised, literate society, one of the few in the North, the parishioners were mostly artisans and scholars who knew nothing of existential menace.

Above all, they were prey.

Whilst the Whalemen were still under sail, navigating frothy waves and heaving green seas on their journey home, the marauders became illimitable in their appetite for ragged bloodletting.

Confronted only with vague appeals to unity and tolerance, the escalation from sporadic murderousness to open slaughter was inevitable.

At first, small vigils were held. Candles were lit and songs softly sung. Then platitudinous sermons were said. Later, when the violence was too commonplace to turn away from, sincere bribes were offered.

The last pathetic pleas only cultivated new degrees of gleeful barbarism.

Finely woven felt tunics and nubile limbs were torn apart all the same. Scholars were dragged whimpering into pits filled with burning books. Ancestral statues cracked and tumbled down all around.

Alone, the few proud, courageous men were hunted. Then broken on wheels.

All the while, the Whalemen journeyed ever more landward. In fair weather it took a month of seafaring to make land. One more month after six months of daily hunting and killing. Six months of spiting mother nature.

Hunting whales breed a remorseless and fanatical creed. Extinguishing mammalian life on God’s scale was the end of a man. He became something else. Some aberrant creature, no longer in thrall to life-fulness and the will of all things to go on living.

Where the pod were elusive, the Whaleman simply gaffed sharks and albatrosses. The sharkskins were valuable. The birds died for sport. For the mens thirst for momentum.

Even the restless deep ocean currents could not diminish the lethality of the men, only focusing their attention elsewhere.

In two weeks of restocking on the polar ice-shelf close to six hundred seals and a few King penguins were clubbed out of existence as if it were nothing.

From the coast it was a further six days overland travel to reach the parish boundary; a mountain pass full of scree and yawning glacial ice. By this point food would run out and they’d turn to hunting the bears for meat, even killing the cubs if they had to.

“But we don’t have any weapons!” said the priest when the Whalemen finally returned.

“Burn the church, as we burnt our ships.”

Thousands of brass nails, ancient as the wood they had held fast, were picked by hand from the white sand and heaps of black seaweed in the hours before the tide came swashing in.

Teams of ten men at a time even dragged the massive metal grill of the ice-breaker onto a cart usually loaded with casks of whale oil.

Everything was melted at the forge, the parish blacksmith deftly pouring the molten metal into rudimentary, hastily made moulds. Two cylindrical lengths; four foot for the men, two foot for the boys and women. Two hundred and twenty in all. It was thirty hours of continuous work. The knurling was added weeks later, only after daggers were made.

At the same time piles of reeking sharkskins were quickly cut into geometric shapes and then soaked in rum. Overlaid these formed interlocking, tessellated plates more resistant than even the most expensive Mercian combat leather.

Lastly, a gracile boy of 12 or 13 years old was sent away out of the parish, before dawn.

He carried two messages. One a seal promising payment of barrow-loads of silver, both in coinage and wares. The other, a single sentence requesting assistance from every highland mercenary, of any age.

The mercenaries were mountain men. The youngest was only 15 the oldest was 55. All seasoned and organised. Toughened in the way that only comes from surviving in an immense, uncaring landscape.

Assembled in the burnt out flint perimeter of what used to be the church the parishioners noticed wild glints in their small dark pupils. Their glistening eyes of leaping fish or diving peregrines. High contrast against weathered saffron faces.

Like the Whalemen, the mountain men were experts in cutting. They carried large and also very small blades that seemed to whisper when they were drawn. They also bought with them studded helmets with grotesque face masks cast in a dense pitted black ore and dark leather belts holding rows of cruel spikes honed from the long, thick femurs of their native yaks.

One morning, one of the mercenaries, a silent wiry fellow, mixed up ash from the burnt parish buildings to smear over the edges of his knives. When he had finished he presented the parish treasurer with a muslin bag wrapped tightly inside a roll of hemp cloth.

Inside were seeds.

Many years later, laughter rang out amidst row upon row of apple trees.

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Clugston

Written by

Clugston

Auto-didactic Geographer.