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Title: The Farthing Bodkin
Wordcount: 82000
Genre: Fantasy
Language: British English
Synopsis: The Farthing Bodkin is a tale of piracy, so buckle your swash, shiver your timbers and lend me your buccaneers.

Text:

1. Oh Shit, Pirates!

Where does a tale of piracy begin? Amid the darkened peaks of high, angry seas or in the ruins of a broken childhood? Or perhaps with a moment of reflection upon the trapfall of a gallows? It may be that it begins on a cold and lonely night in a tavern ill-named and known to few, the uninviting lair of sea reavers, and there with a tall and crooked man, his back to the hearth, his face in shadow. In the struggling glow of a whale-oil lamp, those seated nearest might have told that he was marked by life with a socket-patch of leather to decently cover his eyehole, where his eye no longer rested, and that the wear of long use was plain upon his frock-coat. He would have been judged a man of mature age, given to a turn of heart more meagre than good, and yet he was possessed of a close acquaintance with the lore of the seas and such men as plied them.

His hands clasped behind his spare frame and his manner distant, he stood brooding, as though turning over memories too many years left fallow. When at last he seemed composed, he opened his address in a harsh and husky voice:

‘Arh, me lads, listen ‘ere!  I’m t’ tell ye be the true history o’ the fiercesomest lot o’ corsairs o’ all time. An’ was they masters o’ a mighty galleon or formidable man-o’-war? No sir! They was not. For they was the crew o’ a leakin’, creakin’, weed-encrusted floatin’ privy o’ a ship – the dreaded an’ infamous Farthin’ Bodkin – as deadly a ship as whatever sucked water at her bilges!

Aye! This be their true account lads, an’ that o’ their slaughterous, cut-throat Captin, Lance Viscera, as red-handed an’ debonair a rake as ever went laughin’ into the fires o’ Hell. Viscera, lads! Surely ye’ve ‘eard the name? For never another was like ‘im, suckled at daemon-teat and shepherd t’ murderers bound for the fiery pit o’ doom. The very captin ‘e was whom his Lordship Faresh Barela decried in parliament as “The most damnably venomous and unloved libertine ever to blunder from one shore to another, and I do mean blunder, gentlemen, not plunder.” Ye’ll take note though, lads, that the dandy squire sayed that t’ parliament, an’ not t’ the face o’ that grisly killer himself. But enough o’ that now! It comes t’ me that it were a grey an’ stormy day, ye see…’

On a day grey and stormy the sky cast a leaden tarnish on all below and the sea heaved with menace, showing no compassion to a ship of wood that sailed there as best she might. Her decks awash and stores lashed down, she bore the furled canvas, rigging and many useful articles common to vessels driven by wind. Further to that, she carried a mob of irresolute sailors typical of those drawn to enterprise of a less disciplined nature, who laboured against the chill and drizzle in their half-besotted efforts to perform seaman-like tasks. Close about the vessel’s mastheads winged a flock of scruffy pigeons, an alien and inappropriate presence which in all history had never afflicted a ship other than the Farthing Bodkin.

Alone in the miserable rain stood a grim figure – Lance Viscera, Captain of that benighted death ship. The Captain stewed in the grip of a damnable mood, his temper wracked by cramps of ill humour, his thoughts littered with prospective corpses. He believed himself justified in attributing his malign outlook of the moment to the action of the sea, which was as rude as a tuppence whore and slapped the vessel to and fro without mercy, thrashing it about like a leaf in a churn. Viscera stood at the very front of the ship, his weight braced against a taffrail or gunwale or something of the sort, possibly a bulwark. A timber wall along the side of the ship, at any rate.

That he lacked a good command of nautical terminology was a minor fault to him, and he had yet to decide the extent of his interest in a seafaring life. His captaincy of the Bodkin was an unexpected and unsought role, one he’d secured by killing the previous Captain, and although that victory had been of service at the time, it counted for nothing in his present need of maritime qualifications.

His situation had its roots in a voyage abruptly terminated a mere five months earlier. An attack had come while he was taking passage on a ship named the Conch, a fat little trader of generous stowage and minimal speed. His only concerns then had been to search out new cultures to enliven his spirit and to make use of the peaceful days at sea to savour written works he’d been meaning to read for some time. But forty-one days from port the blithe Conch had been captured with violence by the Farthing Bodkin, her crew and passengers either butchered or abandoned to their drifting wreck.

Silently and from nowhere in sight, the pirates had come upon the Conch in night’s darkest hour and made their attack, a savage, one-sided battle begun by the sea robbers hurling stone jugs of Greek fire to the trader’s weather deck, both to panic their victims and light the way. Viscera had been engrossed in a classic from the hand of a great saga poet when they struck, a trifling twenty-seven pages from the end, with a hot drink beside him made from the small packet of rare and outrageously expensive coffee he’d conserved for such occasions. At the onset of the pirates’ ill-mannered disturbance he’d pocketed his pistols, slammed aside the door to his cabin and strode angrily out on deck, his sabre and good strong dagger darting in twitches from throat to chest, from gizzard to groin, the unread passage and his cooling drink forsaken behind him.

Editor’s comment:

I think you’ve done rather too well on the pirate jargon here. I actually found it quite difficult to read, and that’s not an experience you want to give a prospective agent or publisher. I’m pretty sure they’d tell you to tone it all down and make it more … well … readable. Even worse, in your eagerness to write in a kind of cod-nautical cadence, I think you’ve actually gone grammatically wrong in a few places, like when you say “I’m t’ tell ye be the true history …”. Err… what? “What I’m to tell ye be the true history … ” maybe (or should that be mebbe?). Additionally there’s an intro passage that almost reads literally like the clichéd “‘Twas a dark and stormy night …” Agents would be rolling their eyes.
You might have had a lot of fun writing it but, like phonetically spelling dialect in a “normal” story, too much “Arr .. me hearties” text just gets exhausting to read. It needs translating into actual English, and most modern readers just aren’t going to invest the effort, I’m afraid. As for agents and publishers? Definitely not. A shame, but thar ye go.

Thanks for posting!

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