Their flesh barely contained. Always present, whispering its appetites.
But a prison nonetheless.
Therefore, in the few icy ports that our route touches, we leave but a meager guard on the Demeter, seeking stone houses where we can breathe the cold.
Our territory: boundary between flesh and world. Cold without, we men within our skin.
And even there, despite our memories of the broiling sun, we long for fire.
We seek, then, the heat of other flesh. The salt on other skin.
My crew invites me to partake of wine and beer at their side. Sometimes, they sacrifice part of their wages to buy me such women as they find comely.
I choose the youngest ones, small-bosomed, resembling more children than females. The whiter the better.
But such specimens are dear and I dare not buy them for myself.
For hours, I close my eyes and imagine that other lips produce those caresses. I ask them not to speak, to stop being themselves, so that my fantasy may more readily transmute their flesh and I can achieve a weak, trembling orgasm that seems to escape from me, spilling out like sand.
The harlots prowling for crews are not unaware that—during the still hours upon the water, when all that exists is the certain solitude of darkest night and the slow breathing of the other sailors—one will seek, sooner or later, the taste of salt between the thighs.
And so, those women also sell their sons.
Devastated boys, like their mothers, beautiful only to newly landed men, their vision scorched by the sun, clouded by drink.
Sailors purchase such ephebes. Why should they not? It is no secret.
On the islands, the boys are sold more cheaply. It is not uncommon to find them in the ports along our route.
Is Greece not renowned for the practice?
But I do not buy them. I remain with my men, pretending to regard women, sharing anecdotes that matter little to anyone.
I cannot buy them.
Not when I accompany my crew.
I am the Captain. I hold in my hands the lives of my men.
My men.
Along the route of salt, murder and intrigue are simpler. Muscles burn and seek to give that burning some meaning. To move, to smash against something; to act.
Against what? Against what, in the midst of such stillness?
There can be no favoritism upon my schooner.
That is why I shall not choose any man. I shall never keep watch with those whom I desire. I refuse to let them walk naked.
I dare not.
Thence the difficulty of gathering my crews: hairless men from icy countries.
I prefer that the heat make them drowsy, that it be a heavy blanket over their heads. I do not want men accustomed to heat, whose brown skin can bear the full brunt of the noonday sun.
I do not wish them to laugh at my command to clothe themselves.
I should be wholly unable to get away from such men. I should never stop looking for the hidden taste within their bodies.
The salt of their seed.
Crews come and go. On each journey a new man, another who leaves.
They do well. I am not a good captain. Many things distract me.
They are uncomfortable with me. On a schooner, there is not room enough to dissemble their exasperation.
In Varna, I thought I should lose all my crew. After serving for a long time among the Southern Sporades in the Aegean Sea, supplying the Dodecanese Islands, they must be weary of the heat, of me, of the old Demeter, docked so many useless days in the port of Rhodes.
The Black Sea must have reminded them that they were men of cold climes; connoisseurs more of ports like Odessa, Sevastopol, Sochi, Batumi than of islands with strange names: Schinoussa, Nisyros, Laconia, Kalymnos.
I know (how not to know?) that they ache for white-skinned women who speak their tongues, that they are plagued by memories of frigid lands, of ice creaking in storm winds.
What could the women of the Greek islands know of the howling Baba Yaga, her ramshackle home creeping through snowy forests on looming rooster legs? Naught. Swarthy women will smile at such an image, unable to protect sailors from the fear that their mothers’ whispers instilled in them during endless winter hours.
They should have left to seek those white bodies, those shared memories of ice. But they have remained, nigh-on to a man, at my side.
We have arrived in Bulgaria. They have gone ashore without asking for extra coin to sustain them while they find another ship.
They spend their hours in dark taverns, while the owners of the Demeter prepare contracts, organize another trip, trace another route for us.
When it is time to sail, the men will return to the schooner as if it were their home, the only familiar thing in the heart of such foreign lands.
They have not remained for me, for love of this old ship.
It is simply difficult to find other jobs. All are as bad as the previous one.
I should have preferred that they leave.
With every sailor who travels with me for the first time, there is a chance.
New blood is always necessary.
At dusk, a group of Tziganes arrived at the port.
Gypsies of coarse clothes and slow movements, hands full of cracks, eyes burned by the white glare of the snow.
Above the din of their mounts, they exchanged insults in a language that sounded harsh even amidst the cries and blasphemy of the men of the port.
They were not nomads. Their horses had but weapons tied to their saddles: sabers, knives, heavy muskets. There were no blankets, no tools for preparing hunted game.
They must return somewhere, after they deliver the cargo of the heavy carts they pull.
The port both disgusts and attracts them. They look upon the boats that sway in the foul waters much the way I look upon my crew.
These represent passage to some unfamiliar place, unknown in its possibilities, and therefore both frightening and full of promise.
They leave their horses nearby (without setting a watch, for who would dare take something from them? Who would challenge their steel?) and stare at the black sea from the pier.
In their eyes, distrust of the anchored wood of this place.
They are people of earth. They challenge it astride their mounts; they trace their paths like the skin of their lovers, skin as rough and dark as their own.
A traveling race, they love distances as I do the path of salt.
Yet, these few have remained for reasons I do not understand.
They treat the cargo with a care at odds with their nature, handling the boxes as if the wood might appreciate the delicacy they demand of themselves.
It is nearly a caress, with the fearful gesture of the blind near the fire.
How close to approach without danger; how close before pleasure becomes a fierce attack of heat?
A man oversees those who work. He does not protect them; each one, even amidst the grueling work of stowage, keeps a long saber at his side, always prepared for violence.
The man’s duty instead is to glare at strangers, conveying a message to any who observe: Do not dare call us servants.
The way they seize the hilts of their swords implies that these are not mere blades in their hands, but extensions of their fury. They can split the air with them the way sailors clench their fists or hurl insults: without effort, as naturally and easily as breathing.
They have killed.
They have died killing.
One look at them suffices to reveal it.
They unload heavy boxes onto my ship, cursing in an ancient language known only to them, alien and dense as a threat.
And despite it all, they are servants.
Wild servants of some noble boyar.
Noble ....
/> A lord as wild as they. More so, as he has made them his vassals.
What might he have offered such men, who rip from the earth what they need? This proud race that fears not to die?
Something more than death.
Mayhap a different death. Perchance he has seduced them by offering something wilder than their own lives.
Upon the Wallachian Plain, are there still warrior lords who burn castles, advancing with their hordes through the dark snow?
What do these men have to do with the Demeter? With the orders neatly signed by the owners of my ship? A noble boyar who owns an army of Tziganes, with S. F. Billington, a solicitor from England?
It is not my duty to discover the truth.
Only to transport the crates piling up in the hold.
I watch them work, saying naught. I do not grasp why they must unload the merchandise solely at night. We should look like smugglers were it not for the fact that the people of Varna examine each box and scrutinize the paperwork thoroughly, looking for irregularities. It makes no matter that there is naught out of place; they will find some trivial error and ask for the small bribe they consider their just dessert after rifling through the merchandise, shuddering against the cold, while the fog approaches at low tide as if it has secreted something away in its wispy skirts.
I wonder how they intend to make the Tziganes pay for some trifling detail.
Will they dare?
But all that happens on land.
Meanwhile, I wait on my ship, silent.
Mayhap they assume that my silence has some meaning.
Mayhap it does.
They look at me, they pass me by, but they never try to threaten me with their presence.
They know that I am the noble boyar of my ship; the absolute lord of the demesne delimited by the schooner’s wooden hull.
They respect me for that.
Lord of a movable demesne.
They are within my borders. They were ordered to enter. They know not where my warriors be, whether they wait in some hiding place only I can descry. This land is mine and mine its secrets.
I could order their deaths and they would not argue the justice of the act.
Their world does not work thus.
They are gypsy slaves, though no one says they are. They have offered their fates, the fates of their families, to some puissant Lord.
I watch them work and wonder what commands they would obey or cease to obey.
How completely does their Master own their lives?
If he asked them, would they kill their own children ... would they fall on their swords, would they open their veins for him?
Would they stay still if he arrived with a gun, with his member ready to penetrate them?
They see me watching them.
Do they believe I can do the same with my sailors? That I tread my lands with no more rein than my desires, free to play with life and death?
How enslaved are they?
They must deliver the cargo .... at what cost?
Inexplicably, unable to avoid the impulse, I approach them.
I have to touch them.
If I am a boyar, they should be instruments. I watch them as if they were things.
They are not. They are living flesh, movement, warm sweat ….
But their decisions are no longer theirs. Puppets of firm faces, of naked necks that tense while they work, highlighting their skin, which invites me ....
I approach one of them and touch his neck because he wears no expression; rough, wiry, tense, all he communicates is strength.
It is akin to touching greasy wood, the damp heat of work under my palm.
I stroke him, running my fingers gently over that skin.
Now is precisely when the Tzigane should pull my hand away, unsheathing his steel and slicing my neck.
This should be the moment I begin to fear.
And I do. I fear the desperation with which my hand touches that skin, the hunger of my fingers, the erection this contact awakens.
The skin under my palm also shudders, tenses and pulls away as if I were transmitting cold, as if a living statue had reached out to touch the man.
Pleasure and fear sometimes resemble each other greatly.
He raises his eyes to meet mine.
I read them without understanding.
Continue, stop.
He has not turned away, he has done nothing, nor does he stir at all as I slowly lean toward him.
A muscle jumps in his face, only one, which then sinks into his flesh as if trying to flee from me.
Boyar.
Voivode.
Master ….
I bring my lips to his neck and touch his salt.
My tongue a blade, a short finger that digs into his skin. Rough, earthy, bitter. And at that moment, mine. I surround it with my mouth, savoring that flesh intimately before slowly pulling away, letting my lips caress it, spiraling upon those muscles in smaller and smaller circles, until I withdraw, leaving a small trace of saliva.
I am still there. The saliva on the neck of that man insists that I am still there.
Yet, only my hand remains upon him, gripping his neck.
I notice how the Tzigane leans against the box that moments before he had been pushing into place. His legs tremble.
Not from humiliation. These men know what to do with one who humiliates them. Their steel has learned to act.
The others regard us and, in their eyes, there is no message, nothing. As if they were watching the snow fall upon them, an avalanche that they cannot halt and that, in some way, is part of their lives: the immovable fact.
Unjudgeable.
What has happened between that Tzigane and me has joined us in their eyes. We partake of a rite from which they are excluded.
A rite beyond my ken, though I have commenced it.
I cannot understand. I have on my tongue the taste of an unknown skin, bitter and sweet at the same time. I slowly pet the man’s neck as if stroking the muzzle of a horse. Then I release him, stepping back.
The Tzigane mutters something and continues his work. All of them do. No one draws away from him when he approaches.
I have not stained him with my caress. The man has come away clean from my lips.
Can your Master’s command free you men from guilt?
Or is what happened here infinitely less than what ye expected?
Would ye show the same indifference had I cut his throat?
Once, only once, they turn to regard me.
The noble boyar of the Demeter.
I should like to believe it ….
When the wind bites the sails and the wood slips steady through the water, free of the waves that pound the harbor—at that moment, I know we have begun our journey.
I note July 6 in the log, but that date says nothing. Twelve o’clock on the hour, with a cold east wind. Data only.
Not a gray sky, not the steel-colored sea surrounded by a persistent fog that should not remain at noon. Not the shouts of my sailors while they work the sails.
Facts scrawled in ink, without real meaning.
The crew consists of five men, two deck officers, the cook, and me.
Men from Russia, Vojvodina, Slovenia, Dalmatia, and Romania.
We leave the port of Varna, entering the Black Sea, on a route that will lead us from the East to cross the Aegean Sea, the Mediterranean, hugging the European coast before at last coming to port in England.
The route of ice and salt.
The gypsies, on their mounts, watched our movements and the actions of those who remained on land. Their dark hands gripped drawn weapons, at the ready, as if expecting that someone might attempt to stop us, prepared to repel any attack, willing to offer their blood in exchange for our safe depa
rture.
An honor guard: excessive protection for a few boxes of clay and dirt.
What orders did they receive, precisely?
My second officer, Muresh, heard that the gypsies had arrived in Varna at noon yesterday, that they had stood at the entrance of the port, under the sun, for hours, indifferent to the slow passing of men and animals that brushed by them without ceasing.
Those men of the steppes, of the frozen horizon, hate the touch of strangers and - nevertheless - they remained there, waiting until nightfall to deliver their cargo.
Why?
The man who commanded them looked me in the eye a second before we set sail.
That I had touched one of his men was an affront. That he could not take revenge was a greater stigma still.
I had declared them slaves, servants.
And my blood had escaped them.
They looked upon me with infinite hatred, in which I could descry the free land they had lost, the lives without shadows they offered in exchange for something much more valuable than their pride, the one quality that has always sustained them in so many lands that were never theirs.
The chief Tzigane uncovered his neck with a slight gesture of defiance.
Mayhap he wished to convey that had his master not told them that those boxes must set sail, I should be dead for touching one of his men.
Or mayhap the message was another. Perchance he signaled that the taste of their skins was the right of another.
Not their own. Never their own.
Yet, until their master claimed that right, their flesh still belonged to them, completely.
As soon as we left the port, once the moorings were coiled and stowed, when it became clear that his mission was over, the Tzigane shouted something, a phrase.
His voice reached me weak, void of nuance. Mayhap a message, an explanation, an insult, a terrible truth.
“Denn die Todten reiten schnell!”
Then he spurred the horses, and he and his men galloped away.
The ominous words echoed in my heart:
“For the dead travel fast.”
The world has shrunk by becoming immense.
The Route of Ice and Salt Page 2
