Travelling on The Mother's Delight
A fine, well founded vessel of some 95 feet long, deep drafted with a single square rigged mast, with a jib. The rudder is operated by a set of levers located in the forecastle. The captain, Dykstra Ullenheimer, is usually found atop the forecastle, and he shouts orders to the helmsman in the forecastle. There are shutters arranged around the forecastle, so he can see out too.
The ship is painted white, with black gunnels and black chequered fore and aft castles. The crew is 22 dwarves, one ship's cat, two ship's boys, and a Windmaster (Corwin). He scries the winds, offers advice to the Captain and stays alone quite a bit up in the rigging. He is a moody, salt and pepper bearded, foul mouthed, rude son of a bitch, and he doesn't like humans one bit. He is a darker skinned dwarf than the ones you have seen, and he cannot open his mouth without cursing. He also seems to be a disciplinarian too, because he carries a staff to encourage laggardly seadwarves. They all are a bit rough around the edges, actually, although a few days on the lake seems to improve their hangovers considerably.
The hold is far more commodious than the barge, and the party actually gets a larger room this trip, which is across the small hallway from the Bailiff and his two Huscarls.
The food is mainly variations on boiling, although the captain does have access to some interesting cheeses-soft, chewy, milky sweet cheese (dellenvar), hard, stringy, strong smoky cheese (hirkenvar), and fiery, salty, black-veined cheese (morkenvar). The beer continues excellent, and if you are lucky, occasionally fish can be caught and prepared by your selves before cook gets it, or maybe he should be called boil instead.
The passage is somewhat rough at times, and one stormy bit is "damn rough and twice the sailing" according to Dykstra. It is cold out on the lake, and there are few days spent out of sight of land, unless you are very keen-eyed indeed, and can catch the occasional wee mountaintop at dawn. The wind seems to easily cut through layers of clothing, leaving ruddy cheeks and chilblains in its wake.
Aside from being restless, ill-tempered, biting at anyone approaching him, and complaining loudly whenever anyone is around him, Armiger is as fine a shipmate as, say, the Windmaster.
You sail for eight days, with Dykstra heaving to on the 7th evening so as to sail into Schelteburgh with the dawn-no sense in getting onto a lee shore at night.
The Schelte river is here, and it is the color of grey milk. It colors and muddies the Deeping for several miles around. It is the runoff of several glaciers, which have been grinding rocks together for longer than swords have been being forged. It is also a damn fine place to sieve gold, which explains the amazing variety of buildings, hovels, shacks, floating houses, rafts and jetties which throng the river there, with a town that seems almost carelessly jumbled along the shore nearby. There are numerous columns of smoke snaking in the light breeze, and the largest building in sight seems to be a rather large beer hall/distillery halfway up the slope of the mountain there.
Oh and the smell is somewhat redolent of the rivergate at low tide when it hasn't rained in a bit. There is a visible set of middens near the shore, off to the right about a 1/4 mile.
There is one main pier there, and the Mother makes for it. A slew of dwarves are waiting impatiently behind a barricade at the end of the pier. There are some other dwarves wearing short red cloaks, armed with staff flails keeping them there.
As the ship eases into the dock, which groans slightly at the load, a small wagon is pulled from a stone shed at the pier's end. It is pulled by several dwarves, and it looks heavy, very heavy.
"Right," says Elmer, the Bailiffs Staff bearing Huscarl. He leaps down on the dock and begins examining the seals on the chest in the wagon.
The gangplank is being rigged still, but now a fair amount of the crew seem to be near the rail, with small evil razor-edged flails which are segmented to wooden handles. The total length is something like three feet. They are fighting irons, and they look very, very nasty.
There is a small surge near the barrier, and some cursing and shouting erupts as the redcloaks wade in and begin swinging their staff flails. The crowd there melts back, briefly revealing some unconcious, limp forms before it swells up to the barrier.
Some dwarvish is spoken down there, harsh, gutteral and potent. After a moment, the mob stops forming and turns back into a bunch of hungry-eyed dwarves.
Dykstra looses a gusty sigh, and mutters, almost to himself, "I wonder if the old bastard would do it?"
The gangplank is rigged, the wagon is laboriously turned towards the ship, and some block and tackles are rove to the little wheeled box there. Its custodians, pale and haggard-eyed dwarves in short dagged coats of studded leather, look on with relief as the ropes start to take up slack.
Some more grumbling and grousing happens down the quay, and then it happens. With a drawn-out shriek, the quay leans drunkenly to one side, pitching the little wagon and its custodians on their sides.
The Redcloaks fall, some into the icy grey water, and with a roar the crowd is over the barricade, fighting amongst themselves madly, punching, screaming, and crawling in a mass of chaos down the drunken pier.
After the gold.
And gold it is, for the wagon has burst its seams, and a red flood has dripped out and started gobbeting into the lake.
Elmer, holding on to the dock with one hand, and his staff with the other, looks to the Bailiff.
A stone bounces off his cheek there. Leaving a red welling behind.
There are easily sixty dwarves railing after the trove. The noise is amazing.