Erricos Gephuras's page

Eastern Time

Errico is rangy and thin, with long arms and legs and a small body. He seems ideally suited to swimming and climbing. His head is long and narrow, and he brushes his black hair back in a pompadour. His skin is darker than most Chelish, and beginning to become craggy. He smiles most of the time, but it is a thin, cocksure smile, topped with a beaky nose and sharp black eyes under heavy lids. Errico disdains traditional colonist attire altogether. It sets him apart from most of Sargava’s people, and it isn’t useful at all. He much prefers the clothing of the other sailors and dockers.

Life at sea isn’t all grand adventure. It’s isolating, the living conditions are miserable, and even the best captains wield autocratic power. What redeems it is the talk among the crew, and with sailors at foreign ports. The profession’s international. Sailors and captains are recognizable as such all over the world, and almost all of them take it for granted that they’re opposed to one another. What is good, and unique, about life on the water is the clarity of this relationship, and the corresponding bond it forges between sailors. The most important word in Errico’s vocabulary is “solidarity”.

Erricos Gephuras was born in Eleder on Erastus 28, 4692. It was a difficult birth that his mother described as being pulled in two directions. She died not long after, naming Erricos after her brother. Erricos’ father demanded respectability, and his real estate business demanded his time, so he sent Erricos to boarding school from a very young age. They barely saw one another again until after Erricos turned thirteen. He got into a fight with another boy at the school, and during the fight burned his face with acid. The school expelled him, and Erricos went to work for his father. He began to teach Erricos the real estate business, sending the boy out to collect rents. Many of the families, especially the Kenj, were poor; many were unable to pay. Erricos hated it; no person with any sensitivity to suffering, he felt, could do it and not have his opinions colored by the task.

During his schooling, Erricos’ uncle had visited him more often than his father, and the two remained close. The man had been a sailor and an adventurer. Erricos’ father called him a pirate. He lived in the Lower Harbor, and whenever he could stressed the need for cooperation and solidarity between the native and colonial fishers that put in there. Whenever he had a chance, Erricos rushed to the docks where he could talk with these and foreign sailors, and watch the boats slip in and out of the harbor. He craved adventure, the chance to know other lands. Finally, at sixteen, he demanded his father let him go to sea. His uncle backed him up, saying there was something about him to which the water called, that he would surely prove a success.

His father didn’t buy it, and wanted Erricos to stay and eventually take over the real estate business. So he arranged a test. He hatched a plot with an old Chelish skipper who ran a ketch between Eleder and Senghor. The boat was very small, although seaworthy, and making a stormy crossing in it was guaranteed to test the stoutest heart. During the passage, with Erricos aboard, a storm arose. That was on the homeward trip, and the boat was blown more than one hundred miles out of its course. Erricos was delighted and refused to leave the deck. The skipper expected him to be washed overboard with every wave. After that there was no stopping Erricos from going to sea. Not even being shipwrecked could stop him. He went overboard with another sailor’s mandolin and kept afloat on it until he was picked up. The Velvet Rose is simply the latest job.

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I haven't spent any gold yet, but I'm pretty sure that's the only thing I still need to do.