Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 341
claustrophobic darkness, I watched the crude wooden door shut
with mingled despair and bemusement at my suddenly fallen
state. I dithered over whether to reveal myself as a woman and
claim my frailty required kinder treatment, but abstained as I
discovered I had a companion in this prison.
He was an old man, as eccentric as myself, whom the
others had gotten tired of and disposed of here. His first words
to me, and I shall never forget them, were, "Do you like the
forks with the long tines, or the forks with the short tines?"
I considered that question carefully before I answered.
After all, our friendship might rest on my answer. At length I
said, "I do prefer a fork with long tines, as one can be more
delicate with it."
He was delighted. He pumped my hand and introduced
himself, then in uninterrupted monologue spent the rest of the
day describing himself, this place, and his situation. I had no
need to interrupt him, as he anticipated all my questions or
spoke in such encyclopedic detail that I had no need to speak.
This place was indeed a settlement of abandoned pirates.
This crowd had no shipbuilding skills--in fact, no skills at all
aside from scavenging. They had a few women and after
nearly thirty years here were making themselves a community.
When they arrived they had found the island already
inhabited, by a very small group who it seemed were
descended from a previous lot of castaways. This first group
was dying out, apparently because they were persecuted by a
Wind.
This astonished me. There was in fact a desal on the
island. I was later to learn there were even desals on the ocean
floor and it seems under the perpetual glaciers in the northern
and southern poles. Their actions are always mysterious. This
one had taken it upon itself to kill people at random since