About an Expedition
This tale occurred approximately during a famine and a war in the south.
"Sir, we are out of food!" said the deckhand, his eyes welling up in tears while he wrapped his arms around his emaciated waist. He was a wretched creature, his skin pale and gray and stretched against the bone -- unsightly and appalling, yet pitiful in a sad way.
He refrained from giving words of comfort, for he knew words were empty and could not do anything for the deckhand. Instead he put his hand on the boy's shoulder, so that he could at least give warmth to the suffering soul.
The boy looked up, and then looked back down at the floor again. He was just one of the many victims of the terrible famine that fell upon the fledgling state. Chaos followed calamity and soon several of the old city-states revolted, death-cults were on the warpath, and brigands and looting became the norm of the countryside. It was nothing short of a miracle that most of the armies obeyed the words of law, those which has been set by the great King himself, which kept an unsteady and very bloody peace.
Captain Etteos was one of the government-hired merchant-captains who was sent South, far South, in a trade mission for cheap grain for relief efforts -- it had little other choice, for even the aristocrats within the oligarchy felt the pangs of hunger every now and then. However, they were out of luck for the famine was not isolated and had struck so far is that what little food the ships carried was quickly being replaced by a rat's hides, boots and other leather apparel, and mutinous temperaments.
By the second week of the expedition, one of the ships accompanying the fleet -- for it was a fleet that was sent -- had reneged and strayed off course; it could have been that I either its cruel or its captain lost faith in the expedition, or a deadly hunger killed all the men aboard to leave the ship to float aimlessly. Captain Etteos was unsure she would have preferred any of the cases.
In their journey South, they had not forgotten the gods despite all the adversity piled upon them. Each ship had fashioned their own brand of sacrificial altars -- some had tables of stone, others had mud "pits" for burning. For a few of the captains and their crews, these religious centers in their ships were just as important, if not more important, than the large clay pots that were to hold the life-saving grain in the fleet was supposed to buy.
As they made through the neutral shores as they heard of the most terrible and horrifying of things. Great wars that shaped the even greater empires of the southern deserts were on their way, and several docks were closed in fear of refugees and, in the case of the warring empires, spies. Thus, they were forced to traveling even further for even longer in search of friendly shores without even the assurance of finding what they were looking for.
Suddenly, one of the crewmen shouted, "Land, port-side!" The pathetic thing in front of Captain Etteos was shivering in fear, hunger, and cold, but he had to go back to his captaining duties so he took his hand off the boy's shoulder and left to shout orders at the remaining able-bodied men on the ship.
To be continued.
This is my first story written entirely through voice recognition! ...Took me a good 2 hours, which is an hour more than if I typed it the old-fashioned way. Spoiler: They failed at getting food for the relief efforts, but their tale wasn't to remain untold.