The Hide had a new captain, new orders, and a new adventure waiting on the horizon. Naturally, some turn-of-the-season cleaning was in order, and that had kept deckswabs like Darragh Harper firmly planted snout-to-deck with scrubbing, mopping, polishing, and dusting. Since the stoat resembled a scruffy chimney-sweep himself with his small frame and sticky-out fur, Darragh had been assigned to clearing out, in the words of the officer of the watch, ‘as much of the hold as you can without risking your own life.’
Darragh had been given a broom, a big burlap sack for hauling whatever rubbish he found in the hold, and a cutlass. When he had asked why he needed a weapon to clean out the hold, the master-at-arms merely smiled, and reassured the young sailor with a pat on his back.
“You won’t need it!” He said. “..Probably. I mean. Best case scenario, you won’t need it. Just a precaution, m’boy!”
The hold was dark, even with the lantern gently swinging overhead with the roll of the ship in the harbour. The shadows moved with the unstable light, and it was eerily quiet, to the point that every thud or creak from the timbers above him set Darragh’s fur prickling. As he toiled his way through barrels, boxes and bulging sacks of the bric-a-brac of bygone battles, Darragh felt as though he was standing in the refuse pit of bad memories. There were bloodstained, rusty weapons captured from this or that foe, there was food that had somehow gone unaccounted for and turned to colonies of mould, and there was every sort of odd-and-end that had been claimed as ‘booty’ in the midst of a raid, only to be found utterly worthless.
Yet all their junk treasures still counted as property of the Imperium, and existed in a legal limbo where it had to be retained in case it could be used to negotiate an exchange with the Enemy, whoever they may be at any given time.
Since the Winter War of 1733 was long over (Though Darragh could not tell who had won, or what had been at stake), it seemed pointless to hold onto the Golden Hide’s store of captured Alkamarian wooden ducks. Into the Rubbish Sack they went, along with a set of voluminous bloomers that had been half-eaten by moths. The terms of the peace treaty, or whatever had brought the war to an end, clearly had released the ducks fully into Imperial Navy custody.
Darragh was prepared to answer to a court martial for his destruction of Seized Enemy Materiel Vital to the War Effort in this case. The ducks were ugly.
Something skittered, deep in the hold. Darragh straightened up, ears perked, whiskers quivering.
“Hello?” Darragh said, mainly to reassure himself with the sound of his own voice. A few seconds crept by, and he heard nothing but the groans of the Hide's hull. He waited a few seconds more, then went back to examining a crate. He was just starting to get elbow deep into cleaning out more motheaten uniforms, when he heard a swish, and a thump.
Cutlass in one paw, sack of ducks in the other, Darragh gulped nervously. There was something down here, and it wasn't a crewbeast. Slowly, tentatively, he tip-toed around the pile of crates, his own breath roaring in his head.
There was a severed stoat’s tail lying on the deck.
A terrible, distraught wail sounded from the hold, growing louder and louder to the beasts on deck, as Darragh tore up the stairs from below, fur frizzed and poofed from the top of his head to his own bottle-brushed black-tipped tail. The stoat burst out onto the deck, still clutching the weapon and the sack. In his mad rush, he hadn’t realised that the coils of rope on the deck had been moved around during the rigging inspection, and he neatly tripped over a thick pile of tarred hemp.
To Darragh’s credit, he did not lose the cutlass. A Navy beast ought never relinquish nor lose hold of his weapon once drawn in the face of the Enemy. It was the sack of antique wooden ducks he lost as he sprawled onto the freshly-cleaned deck. The sack tumbled in the air, distributing its contents with a tumultuous clattering and a sad quack.
Right in front of Amnesty.
Darragh looked up to see a white fox, a total stranger to him, holding a knife close to a thoroughly bonded Finny, who hung suspended and helpless from the rigging. A rational Darragh would have taken a moment not to make assumptions about this fox and her intentions. Rational Darragh had gone out to tea though, contemplating all possible implications of what he'd seen in the hold. Instead, it was Panicked Darragh at the helm.
“Villain!” Darragh bellowed, leaping to his footpaws. He flourished the cutlass expertly (well… decently enough) and adopted a fencer’s pose, in the middle of a wooden duck minefield of his own making, which diminished any appearance he had of being remotely a threat. “Big mistake thinkin' you could tangle with the crew of the Golden Hide!”
Darragh winced. Tangle?! He hadn’t meant to pun, but his powers of free association could be as much a hindrance to being taken seriously as a boon to his creativity.
“…Sorry, Finny,” Darragh added as an apologetic afterthought to his bravado. Come to think of it though, how had the foxkit gotten tied up like that?
Whoever she was, this fox was good.
