Salt o' the Mighty
i.
i.
At the end of all healing is rage. Frothy backwash at the bottom of a tankard, curdled foam and rancid spit that any who’ve dared to heal, to say they have healed, know the taste all too bitterly. Know that it is a waste to not have drunk it, to have finished what you started. Staring back at you is the emptiness of it, how a life dealt to you has been guided by the dysfunction of others. The clay of your life is shaped by people who would leave their drinks half-drunk. This is the way of things, Vieri told himself. That life is measured by the depth at which you heal, and the rage you felt thereafter. That the worth of a man and a woman can only be known by these two things. These sobering facts, he discovered, only came when he sat upon the River District overlooking the river Alandor – hammered beyond all belief. After he had wretched bile into the grey waters his feet dangled over, when the mind was frayed enough to speak the things a man would only speak into a lopsidedly grasped bottle. He would cradle an empty bottle too in his hands, willing it to refill itself. Not that he could merely drink again, to see another day pass by like a wave hard against the wharf, but to know that all of what his poisoned mind conjured that day was not just a receding tide of rage bereft of reason. To come to the same answer, again and again, in some vain hope that the shape of it would be different.
He would watch them, the wistful maidens, romantics and hopefuls toss their silver and gold pieces into the Alandor and utter a prayer into the wind. He would stand, hateful and enraged, and would hurtle the cradled bottle as far as he could throw it, screaming out against them and their wasted silver and gold. He watched their unabashed wistfulness, the naivety of it all. But there truly was no difference in what messenger you sent to carry forth your prayers and wishes; an empty bottle, two coppers and a piece of fluff, your mother’s prized sewing needle, a lease to a brand new home on the bay. Vieri knew then that at the end of all these things when they were found, lost, given away, drunk till they were empty, taken for all that it had to offer – you are always left with the same sobering truth found at the end of healing: that you are not in control. Bound always by the whims, dreams and feelings of others and things that want to guide you to that riverside spot where you so naively believed you found a reason for it all.
Vieri wished that when he came home that there would not be a strange man in his mother’s bed. He wished that she would cook a fine meal, that she would find an honest job, that she would not look upon his young face as if he were the stopper on the bottle she so desperately wanted to see the end of. Long hazy days passed in Athkatla on that river, watching the boats come and go, friends pass on and come anew. Memories of fleeting loves and lusts, men and women whose names now stand long forgotten but the feeling still fresh and raw. Stealing and thriving off of short-lived riches, bountiful and life-giving in the single moments he held a swollen coin purse in his grotty hands. Spending frivolously, feeling a day free of the boiling rage that tempers starvation and desperation. No one day was ever the same in Athkatla. But survival was the through-line, the crux at which healing teetered. When the same nights began to blur, Vieri knew that the sum of all his decisions there were only mechanisms to cope. To better thrive in the chaos that belched out days and nights that grew hazier in their unfolding. The Alcantara docked on one such day. Weather-worn, riddled in barnacles, decks fresh with the wood-darkening sheen of salt spray and the last traces of powder fired from a canon. Vieri would tell stories for years of his entrance into the crew of the Alcantara; bold and tall tales of how he stole, mercifully saved by the hands of Captain Vico Acolti, spared the noose and thrust into the crew’s hearts. How he’d saved Vico from an assassin, Hells bent on righting a wrong done so many years ago. How he’d known a man, who knew a man, who knew his father whose name changed in every retelling, and was thus given a spot rightly deserved by his father’s reputation alone.
The simple truth: where sailors went, bottles of booze came aplenty.