The carp slapped me across the face as I shoved my finger down it’s gills. It wrestled in the grip, jumped and slipped out of my crossed arms. Plop. Back into the sea.

I called them carps, on account of their red scales and the quick and blurry swimming they maintained in the low tide but colloquially they were known as Lalos. Big salmon-sized things with oval blue eyes and a bright skin you couldn’t miss against the murk of tepid ocean water on the eastern harbors on this morning shore. One of them swam past my feet, my leg jumped. I think I saw it wink at me before swimming off. I could have appreciated them, maybe would have if it weren’t for the sucking tide of a nearby blue hole and if I weren’t trying so hard to clench the sloped stones leading down to the ocean. The ocean here dropped quick and you couldn’t tell safe water from killing water save for the fact that some waters were a little blue and darker and others were a little clearer. The color blind died quickly here. One wrong step could have you sucked into a hole and dragged, pitched, straight through the core of the planet and out the other end. At least you'd be outside.

“You don’t fish you don’t eat!” Behind me the guard said, walking down an artificial pier of giant stone rocks adjacent to where the skiff’s were lined up and deployed to wander and observe our efficacy in the matters of fishing to the great wardens of the fifth circle of Shriekers Veil. They were bullies who screamed when we failed. That was it. We fished or we starved. We hurried or we were beaten. We swam or we sank.

Most of us worked on the safe end, where the sand was firm and tawny. The chain around my waist clanged and tightened as I drew out, attached somewhere to a spike on the pier. The water drew me in. My knees buckled, I slipped and looked for balance with awkward wide steps. The fish scattered.

“Found you.” Someone said to my rear. I stood straight.

I shook my head and threw out my net. It struck something hard and tangled itself and tugged my arms so hard I stepped forward. I picked it up to my chest. Seashells, seaweed, lodged in the rope. Fuck.

“It’s cold, ain’t it?” Again, to my rear.

I turned away, line drawn out.

“It’s colder than a tundra.”

I drew the line back.

“Colder than a yeti’s ass.” He said.

I detangled the fauna from the lattices.

“Colder than a nun’s cunt.” He said. “During mass.”

My cheeks and lips moved on their own, I turned my face away from his.

“Oh. That one got you, didn’t it?”

I took a deep breath, exhaling the humors from me.

“You got me beaten yesterday, Chaucer.” I said. “I fought your fight.”

I threw the net at him. He moved to the side and it plopped into water.

“And I appreciate it.” He said. “You lasted longer than I thought. I mean, it was against big bear.”

“What kind of name is Big Bear anyway?”

“I didn’t give it to him. But he sure was massive, wasn’t he?”

“Looked bigger on account of how mad he was. Thanks by the way.”

“I’ll have you know I bet on you, " he said. "You owe me ten silver when we get out.”

“You ain’t seeing a cent. Or the mainland, I promise you both of those things.”

He drew up closer with the bucket to his side and the dull, serrated blade held with a brown sash that sagged a little below his bony waist. He looked like a vase. Fat top, fat bottoms, thin centerline.

“I’d expect a bit more optimism from you. Aren’t you friends with Prince Ritcher? He’s the Azali Prince, you know that right?”

“I know he’s full of shit. Same as you.”

“Oh? What’d he say?”

I stopped pulling my net midway, looked up to the sea-line where the sun rose and cast it’s evil orange glare across the water surface, like a litter of a thousand pieces of broken glass with how shattered and fragmented the light was. I closed my eyes and brought back the net. One fish. Into ths bucket.

“What are you getting at, Chaucer?” I asked. “I know when people are trying to buy and I know when they’re trying to sell and you’re the only person I’ve ever seen try to do both at the same time.”

Chaucer was just that kind of guy. A man who lingered when no one wanted him, who forced his way in and spread disease. Its what made everyone wary, his rat-face and rat-nature. The guy squirmed around clique to clique gathering as much as he could just to retreat back into his hole in the wall. Calling him a scrounger would do the vultures disservice; he was scum in habit and in nature. Take this anecdote,, I once overheard an anecdote of a past friendship of his. A merchant of some sort, who managed to smuggle five barrel’s of heavenberry wine across the ocean to Shrieker’s Veil. He was stopped half way. The ship burned, most of the heavenberry wine destroyed and Chaucer’s face, somewhere along the coast, smiling.

No one could ever find proof that he sold out the smuggler. But people sure as hell saw Chaucer drunk for the next two weeks. That was the type of guy he was. You couldn’t talk to him for five minutes before realizing you were giving him years of information in a place where information is that which is most expensive, and most brokered. So it was like getting cheated every time you had a talk because you wouldn’t know what’d end up in the whispers or false-veneers behind your back.

Cheating Chaucer.

“I just want to know if you can throw in a good word for me.”

“Then I’m happy to inform you that I can’t. I told him to fuck right off.” I said.

“You’re lying.” His face dropped. “He spent a good hour with you. You were exported like a damn king with the way they dragged you from the dinner hall.” He rubbed his chin. “You’re telling me the prince came all the way down here and you told him off? You hold to that?”

“Yep.” I slammed a fish down against the water over and over, until its spastic tail fell to stillness. My breathing was harsh, deep after take. Cold wind stabbing out of my chest cavity like pins against the innards of a balloon. I dropped it over the top of the bucket. “Not my fault the guy can't read...”

It was like his eyes sharpened. The lazy bags tightened, he pushed his long, curly red hair aside and looked me in the face with a narrowed glare. His neck jutted out and his veins protruded as he moved it left and right like a snake with a raised head.

“Read? Read what?” He asked.

“Nothing I know. Nothing I care about.” I said.

“You didn’t bother to ask anything about the book he spent all this money and all this time bringing to you?” He asked. “Maybe it’s a tome. For spells! I’ve heard of magics like those, pages that summon forth lightning from the sky. That split the soil…that!”

“Catch your fish, you mongrels.” A guard screamed. “No catch, no food!”

We both looked back at the guard and smiled.

The guard walked past us with their layered sabatoms stomping oval indents into the sand and stone. The can he walked on tumbling small gravel towards us. A cane, or beater as we knew it as. as they were to tap along every nail and chain.

“So you didn’t ask about the book?” Chaucer asked.

“Nope."

"You're holding out. Cone on Virgil, give me something."

"What for? All you do is get me into trouble."

"Maybe I'll stop if you'd tell me. Just a bit."

I sighed, my body leaned over into the water.

"He just kept saying the book was about me getting my memories back.”

The bucket went down and Chaucer’s arms went up.

“And you declined him? Did you lose your mind too? Why won’t you take him up on his offer?”

“Cause I don’t trust him as much as I don’t trust you.”

“Virgil. Virgil…Virgil. Friend, you’ve got to learn how the world operates.” He made shapes in the air with his fast-moving hands, but I couldn’t quite figure what they were.

“Success in life is about leverage, see?” He said. “It’s about leveraging what you have against what you don’t. Of leveraging strength or wealth or information, because they’re all the same thing. Now, see here, you’ve finally just come to a wonderful opportunity with one of the strongest men in this coun-”

“I don’t care.”

“You have a wonderful opportunity to make some of yourself but you refuse it. You’ve already capitulated to the Shrieker's Veil, without even a protest of fists or words.”

" I don't even know what capitulated means."

"You gave up."

I nodded up and down.

“Yup. I did. You wanna know why, Chaucer?” I turned, eyes equally sharp to his. “Because I know where I stand. And I stand here, in this fucking dirt-”

“Sand.”

“In this fucking sand catching these fucking fish. I am a man cognizant of his limits and my limits begin and end on these shores.”

“And what I'm saying is, are you even sure they’re your limits? You just assume that and let it bring you down.” He said. “Friend. Don’t you want more out of life? Don’t you want to leave this place?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“But you don’t act like it. Out of everyone in this fortress, you’re the only one I’ve seen who came in without even a lick of defiance. Were your balls broken with your head? It’s like you never had a spirit at all.”

“I'm not too bright right now, Chaucer. But I’m smart enough to know how it’d all end. We wouldn’t make it two meters out into the ocean before the arrows would come down on our heads.” I said. “I know this. I know the prince is full of shit. I know Gunther and Hannibal run everything with obscene vigilance. One day you’re going to have to wake up to that knowledge too, Chaucer and realize that skirting around is just a waste of energy. You, and everyone else, you'll all come to some day.”

He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back some.

“Virgil. I will not die here.”

It was the first time I’d seen his face get stricken and tight and statue-like with a scowl. He made no expressions, no movements. I don’t believe he was even breathing.

“You’ve conceded. And that’s fine, I don’t need you to be hopeful. I just need you to believe I have hope.”

“I do believe that. 'Bout the only thing I believe about you." I peeled his hand off. "But so what?"

His eyes slid side to side. A guard went past us, then away.

“I’ve withheld this for a while, but I think I have a plan Virgil. I’m going to let you in on it in a bit, alright? You consider it, alright?”

“Consider me having considered. I’m not here to be anyones lackey. I’ll tell you that as much as I’ll tell Ritcher.” I said. “I live and die for myself, not for you, not for another man’s dream. The life I live is the life I choose and I choose to do nothing.”

“You haven't chosen a thing.”

I pulled away from him and drifted into deeper water, working the net and the rope and the bucket with aching and waterlogged fingers.

“Haven't you ever dreamed before?”

The sand shifted below my feet, my shoulders all huddled and shadow set across the ocean where the water was so thin and clear I could see the carp swim around my feet. They were next to me, rubbing against me. I couldn’t move.

“No.” I said.

“And that’s the difference between you and I.” He said. “You’re too quick to cut and dry.”

He reached down in his bucket and plopped two fish into my own, smiled, and scurried off chain-less with his knife barren and open for all the guards to see. He skipped down the line past other men who looked up with the same wet and wooden faces all across. Craggy, broken, dirty. A guard came around, next to me, his stick held tight by his side and seeped dry blood into the ocean waters. A lalo took a sniff, reared its head and ran from the waves of blood. A sanguine scene. He leaned down into my bucket.

“Seven. Barely made the cut.” He looked up to me. “You eat.”

I grit my teeth, but I didn’t show him that. I just looked down with the sun beating hard against my neck.

“Thank you.” I said.