VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, [6], 7, 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 12:30:26 02/03/09 Tue
Author: celtgirl
Subject: His Lordship- well sort of>>>
In reply to: celtgirl 's message, "The Tipping Point Approaches..." on 11:39:20 02/03/09 Tue

copyright 2009 Cindy Brandner

On the rim of the world’s edge, a messenger stood weary and caked in snow like a shroud. He had been sent to fetch a man, and the description of his target was such to make him less than enthusiastic about entering the premises, where he was meant to find him.

“You won’t be able to miss him, hair like guinea gold, a bastard’s grin on his face, he’s likely to be the centre of a circle of admirers whom he’s leading merrily toward a night of debauchery, such as they won’t recover from soon, if ever. Oh,” the man instructing him had paused and grinned, revealing a scar in the pocket of his right cheek and a gold tooth, “he’s likely to have a girl on his knee as well. A beautiful one.”

The messenger had voiced his doubts on the likelihood of a beautiful girl being found under the fur wraps and knee high boots of the natives in this godforsaken country. The other man, gold tooth winking obscenely, said, “If there’s one within a thousand square miles, she’ll be on his knee, trust me.”

“You know him yourself?” he had asked the man, a notorious seadog with a reputation for ruthless behaviour and a peerless record for smuggling black market goods past the Iron Curtain.

“Yes,” the Captain said with bit of a wince. “He left me with these souvenirs last time we met,” his tobacco-stained fingers split into a ‘v’, pointing to both scar and golden tooth.

The messenger quailed a little inside at the thought of the man who had the nerve, or idiocy to knock the Captain’s teeth out and leave him with a scar the width of a kopek, and wondered, not for the first time, what he had done to deserve this task? It was rumoured that the man who had been assigned to fetch ‘the package’ last year, woke up on a fur rug, naked, in the home of a toothless Laplander widow, with no memory of the previous three days. Such things did not go down well with the Soviet command to whom he was indentured. Even if he was already assigned to the ass-end of the Empire’s postings, he was painfully aware of how much worse his own situation could get, should he fail in his assignment.

Nevertheless, however monstrous ‘the package’ was, it was preferable to facing the wrath of Comrade Andrei Alexseyovich Valueve- a more icy, controlled and nasty bastard may he never meet.

He sighed, breathed in a small dancing vortex of snow and strode with as much courage and Russian stiff-spinedness as he could muster, buried as he was inside a wool greatcoat and stiff Army issue boots that came to his knees. He was aware of looking rather Yeti-like, though the fashion demands of a tavern located in one of the outer circles of a frozen Hell, weren’t terribly high.

Vasily, which was the messenger's name, stamped his feet and shook snow from his fine dark hair, and looked around the tavern. A more disreputable group of thieves, pirates and scoundrels, it would have been hard to find, even given unlimited travel and time. A frozen hole at the end of the world, the wee village had one thing going in its favour, a narrow glut of water feeding into the stony cliffs, that did not freeze in the winters, due to the Atlantic current that washed across the headlands in this area, and on over to the edges of Russia. Hence this collection of shacks, a church and a tavern was the way station for a group of international travelers of a very distinct class.

Vasily swallowed nervously, as accustomed as he was to vagabonds and crooks and all the other riff-raff that tried to consistently cross borders without papers, this crew looked more frightening than most.

The tavern reeked of wet herring-scaled wool, and he saw in a blur, the red-furred jaws of Norwegians, always among the world’s toughest and most practical of seamen, the high flat-planed faces of the Laplander, the milk-skin of the Finn and heard the dipping vowels and harsh-cut consonants of Slavic speakers. To a man they eyed him with open hostility. This did not phase him, outside the borders of his own country, he was aware the image of the Soviet soldier was not a flattering one.

He went to the bar and asked politely for vodka. He needed the warmth of it, and also the clarity it induced for anyone with Russian blood. When the taciturn barman, a squat specimen who eyed him as though he were measuring him for a rug, put a bottle of Kossu on the bar, Vasily took it and sat on a rickety chair as far away from the main body of drinkers as he could manage.

He eyed each man in turn, no easy task for the lighting was one bare bulb, hanging, fly-caked from the ceiling, and supplemented only by a fire in the hearth, and a couple of oil lamps flickering behind the bar. Still, there was no man answering to the description the Captain had given him. He sighed and took the cap off the Kossu.

His eye was drawn to a group off in the far corner, tucked away behind a filthy creosoted post. It was a small group, but one man had a flamboyantly green and red parrot on one shoulder, that kept repeating something over and over, in what Vasily thought was Spanish. The shoulder the parrot sat upon was broad with muscle and covered in wellworn oilskin- a fisherman from the set of him, and hair a pale gold above the ratty collar. Vasily perked up- could this be the man?

With him sat three other men, a Laplander with his furs puddled around his hips, and a look of furrowed confusion on his big face, that said he had been drinking for some time, a short grizzled Finn, with the spatulate hands of a long-liner and a dark, greasy looking man, with a wool cap squashed down over his head and a winter’s worth of dirt worked into every line and crevice of him. There seemed to be some sort of disagreement brewing at the table. The man in the wool cap had tipped the bottle of vodka that stood in the middle of the table over, in a brutish gesture of hostility toward the big blonde man. The blonde giant stood and slapped the table hard enough, that the sound reported like a gunshot. It was a mark of the toughness of the tavern’s clientele that they barely flicked an eye in the direction of brewing trouble.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.