more greensails

yeah it’s more of the self-indulgent more or less original fiction universe stuff that at least in this case is really just highly AU Green Lantern stuff. A few years after this post, two short moments with AU Not!John and Not!Guy and a longer scene with Not!Hal and Not!Carol.

…

Gui smiled and made a pulling motion with arms outstretched and elbows locked, and green flowed off his arms, leaving them bare. The strain and cords of his muscles were clear as bright green cables formed in his tightly clenched hands, pulling against these newly-formed vine-like ropes. Each rope stretched to either side of the riverbank, and at their ends the green fog was solidifying into mirror-match shapes. At first the summons seemed like giant, inconveniently placed topiaries tethering to the man on the river barge. Their forms were vaguely boar-like but longer-limbed and with a more defined neck and head as much akin to a deer as a pig, except for their strange and long down-curved snouts. At roughly the size of small elephants, no one watching from the riverbanks was foolish enough to approach. Then those heads lowered, shoulders bunching, and legs began to move, three-toed feet digging into the mud at the top of the embankment. Like canal mules the behemoths from the greensails began to tow the river barge, propelling the ship in absence of the wind. Gui grunted and braced his leg against a strut running width-wise across the deck near the prow, dragging the ship along with him in a display of terrifying brute strength.

…

Jan pulled out a leather tube from the rack in his personal quarters and opened the case to reveal a roll of yellowed vellum. Carefully he unrolled the chart and consulted the map of malleable river courses, noting how the loops of the banks had shifted over the years, silently pleased with himself at the familiar sensation of reading a detailed survey map. He had consulted maps like these when plotting tunnels and countermeasures for his sappers and engineers of sabotage in the army, had even once worked to divert a much smaller river. His men bitched about the danger of drowning. He had not lost any of them in that undertaking, and still had not lost any of his men these days to the Green River. Jan measured the distance between various locks, tapping his finger against the symbols for older locks and running a thumb over the meandering loops where the point bars formed. Satisfied that the records corroborated his memory, Jan re-rolled the map and shoved it back in its oiled leather case, then pulled out the map for the rivermouth of the Green River and a city map for {}. Tide markings still irritated him to read, moreso because whoever the scribe was for this set of maps had atrocious handwriting on the miniscule scale, and Jan needed a piece of curved glass to read the measurements for high and low tide and the times for the correct time of month. The map for the mouth of the Black River had an author in possession of logic and excellent penmanship who recorded all tidal information in a separate chart on the back of the vellum. The maps for the Pearl River, with Lutet only a few miles inland from its estuary, were of excellent quality. Jan lobbied for more shipping voyages from {} to Reevesend, the small city at the mouth of the Pearl River. Mercantile opportunities were secondary to the strength of accurate knowledge, at least deep in the heart of this meticulous veteran. Jan lost men during his years in the army, the first knight he served under topping the list of his dead, and knew overeager ambitions and poor planning as a root cause of those casualties as much as the enemy or all the various diseases that crawled behind an army.

Holding out an arm and whistling a short marching tune, the fabric of his left forearm disappeared and reappeared as a floating serpent with serrated fins and a pair of delicately spiraling antlers on a sword-beaked face. “Hello, Scout,” Jan said, scratching the summoned shape under the jaw like a pet cat. They weren’t alive, were not true summons in the strictest sense but images dreamt up by their holders, but Jan indulged himself by treating the greencloth creatures as if they were separate from him. “No more sieges.” Jan smiled.

…

Heral sidled up to his boss and whispered to Rothaide over her shoulder, wondering how obvious it would be from the other side of the warehouse that he was talking to her and not just inspecting the workmen loading the docked ship. “Master Jowell pestering you again to enter a more binding formal partnership?”

“If by that you mean a marriage proposal, then yes,” Rothaide said without turning to face Heral.

“Are they still pressing you on that?”

Rothaide snorted. “They never stopped, Harry. Everyone in the guild desires I marry them, or their son, or some impoverished cousin. They can swallow a wife or widow as one of their members, but that I won’t run my business through intermediaries of their choosing and that they have been unsuccessful in suborning my lawyer and his clerks still infuriates them. I raised Ionn’s salary again, by the way.”

Heral laughed. “So what did you tell Jowell to threaten him off this time?”

“The same speech I always give,” Rothaide said nonchalantly. “I won’t hand over the titles to any of my ships, even the rowboats, or lessen any of my day-to-day duties in maintaining my fleet. I still decide which partners join my convoys and where they sail, I hold the finances, and last of all they must graciously accept that any heirs I deliver of my body will likely your bastard.”

That last stipulant forced Heral to stumble against Rothaide, and he wheezed against her shoulder, coughing and sputtering against the thin linen draped over her neck.  “Your what?”

“Oh, we are honest with each other, Harry. A blood test in priest’s registry book would prove the paternity, but families pretend or overlook otherwise for legal inheritances, and you’d be surprised at the suitors who accept the concept of a name-only marriage or heir for adequate wealth, or offer me pretty words that say they will.”

“Child, Ro? You never said-”

“Oh, seriously, Harry! Compose yourself; I am neither with child nor plan to be any time soon. Even if I am in my second decade to be considering it. But if I ever bear someone’s child, for all our fights and inconsistent history, you are my most frequent lover and the one I feel the greatest depth of emotions.”

“To be fair, that emotion is sometimes hatred, and the blame for that is on me.”

“Whereas the kindest emotion my formal suitors inspire in my breast is indifference.”

Heral ran his fingers over the damp patch he had left on Rothaide’s wimple, gently tugging the edge of her head-veil to hide it. “We never discussed children. Should we, Ro?”

“Is this the first time I’ve heard Heral, greensail of the Judoc, sound afraid in his life?” Rothaide said, her tone bright and cheerful, artificially so. “Stop fretting, Harry. I refuse to raise a child alone – I’m too busy for it and don’t have a maid and enough servants I’d trust to raise one right, and I know why you wouldn’t be able to claim me and a child if we had one, unless you left the greensails. Which you won’t, you can’t, and I won’t ask you do.”

“My brother and his family have a nice house in {} as the mayor’s legal clerk, and my younger and his wife have good standing with their guild. Either could afford to take in another child, especially after my nieces and nephews. Stars know Jack has been expecting me to dump a bastard off with his family for years.”

“Because your brothers are decent men with lovely wives and don’t deserve to have you as their brother.”

“And yet when I tell them that, they don’t believe me.”

“Harry, does anyone who knows and yet still loves you actually trust you?”

“You trust me every time your ships leave port.”

“I trust me with my property and fortunes. Somehow, I still trust you with my heart. What I don’t you with is to keep yourself safe and make sensible mature decisions.”  

“That’s why I wear this stylish green cloak. And what we have Jan for.”

“Sun-in-Glory bless Jan for three lifetimes,” Rothaide prayed. Then pausing and smiling, she added, “And why your superiors assigned Gui to our fleet. He’s more obnoxious and foolhardy than you, a feat I thought impossible, and I’m still not sure what Rim hellhole they found him.”

“Ballytown.”

“That charter-city is nothing but a den of pirates, I should have known.”

“One of their night-watchmen, if you believe it. Captain of their local scrummage team, which is why he still has leather balls and those armguards in his personal quarters back in the guildhouse and teaches new recruits how to play.”

“Well, I wish he’d stop picking fights with every half-drunk stevedore and osberficating tax agent’s bullyboy he comes across, but he has to protective instincts of a flock dog, and I know he gets into fights so he’s the only getting punched instead of the people he cares about. So I won’t lodge a complaint with the Grandmasters about him.”

“The saints enshrine him for loyalty. He’ll be reborn as a star-wolf for sure.”