On Stranger Shores
Day Five, Year Unknown
That night you turn the doctor's words over in your mind and find them good. One stone seemed much like the other and you had no reason to distrust the man. Your neck and face barely twinge thanks to his ministrations, the skin only a little red under the bandages from what you can see in the polished bronze of your mirror. There is always that niggling fear in the back of every knight's mind that they should die not in battle but in the sickbed burning from the inside, too weak to even open your eyes or raise your head, but you were hale and had gotten good care and so you would live to face the morrow whatever it may bring.
***
Day Six, Year Unknown
As it happened the morrow did not bring any news good or ill, only swift cold rain of the sort that put one of a mind to winter, though it had bee summer when you set off from Alexandria. The remaining crew crumble, but they do so softly, the fate of their mutinous kin still very much on their minds. Antonio peers up at the sky day and night, trying to take such measurements as eye and instrument can, and as for Doctor Zaia the man seems to find the strange stone more fascinating study than Ripper. Not that you can really blame him for it, the stone after all hadn't ripped into his hand. Still, you find yourself very much at odds ends. One might almost regret that dignity and blood do not allow a knight to take up the oar of a common sailor. Not that there it takes much rowing to follow the path of the stone. A strong wind from the northwest bearing rain also pushes the
Marcella along on its chosen course.
You spend time sparring, keeping your men from making trouble and once you even try to write a letter to your mother, more to set your thoughts in order about these strange happenings then because you have any hope of her receiving it. You crumple the parchment in your fist long before you reach any mention of the strange storm, unable to say what you mean about the disaster in Egypt, unwilling to scribble down pious nothings.
If it were not for Ripper's company you might have fallen wholly into some black mood, thoughts and memories coiling around themselves like serpents, but between the healthy respect for a beast that, however friendly he might be, could tear a man's throat out, and genuine enjoyment at seeing him at play in some fresh game you do not have much time to brood.
***
Day Nine, Year Unknown
So it is that on the ninth day since the bale-fire storm you start hearing first the calls of seabirds in the distance, white winged gulls on the horizon, then you hear the lookout upon the newly repaired mainmast call out loudly: "Dark wing, dark wing!"
At first it seems to you a strange call indeed, but seeing your confusion the old quartermaster explains. "He's seen a land bird, my lord, an eagle or a hawk or something else that does not fly so far in search of fish as the gulls do."
And indeed his words prove prophetic for by afternoon the lookout calls that he sees land on the horizon and with the wind in your favor soon that land can be seen with the naked eye. Yet the relief at seeing anything but more water on the horizon comes with a shiver down one's spine, for this is not the sort of shore you had expected to witness, not the spare rocky coast of some Greek island and certainly not Sicily where sparse thorny underbrush stretches under the sun save for tended groves of olives or ceder. The shore before you is tall and jagged, a mountain draped in a mantle of dark woods. The trees you see are rather more familiar to Norman and Englishman than to the sons of Genoa or Greece. You spy oak and ash, rowan bearing berries bright as blood and just as much a mark of death, and wytch elm towering over an underbrush of dogswood, heather, and ivy.
Everywhere you look the land seems empty of the hand of man, the only sounds the cries of seabirds, which had before seemed so welcome, now foreign and hostile.
"Well, we are going to need wood to fix the mast sooner rather than later and a bit of meat would go a long way to stilling the complaints of my stomach," Antonio proclaims cheerfully. "What say you, how many of your men aught we to set ashore for that?"
Hidden behind the smile is the other question: 'How many do you think we should leave on the ship for protection from outside threat or further mutiny?'
What do you reply?
[] Lead your men ashore
-[] Write in how many
[] Send your men ashore
-[] Write in how many
[] Write in
OOC: Well you made it to land, with some days to spare in supplies yet, now the question is who goes ashore and for what. 
