The Boy From the Sea

*Hello! and welcome to my new series, The boy from the Sea.

All characters are 18+

One of my pet peeves is annoying exposition, so to avoid confusion, this series takes place in a world similar, but not equal, to Victorian Great Britain. I do this because I am not historically accurate, and that is my other pet peeve.

Please Enjoy!*

The township of Haven was small, and only had one noble family. It was a small fertile valley at the end of a rich delta that fed into the Ocean. If you were born in Haven, you would most likely become a tobacco farmer, an oat farmer, or a fisherman, or you would marry someone in those professions.

There were advantages to such a small township. The royal tax collectors came only one year in five, and the youth were allowed more freedom then the youth in the cities. Young women rarely wore corsets or stockings, especially in the summer. Young men only bothered with their stockings on formal occasions. Wigs were laughable, not status symbols. And a man could take his shirt off in the field, and a woman could take off her shoes to wade in the surf without breaching etiquette.

Not to mention, the parties were Fantastic!

---

Christopher Angler was on fire. The band, a collection of young men; one with a fiddle, one with a hand-drum, two with mouth-harps, and one with an accordion, played faster and faster, trying to keep up with the frantically clapping hands.

The young men and women of the town had formed a ring on the wooden dance floor, clapping their hands and whistling for the young man in the middle. The dance floor was set in the patch of scrubby land that the sheep had eaten bare behind the only tavern. During the day it was a dusty wooden floor in the middle of a patch of dirt, but at night it was magical. Lanterns covered with brightly colored shades hung from poles, the beer flowed freely and the air was filled with laughter and music.

And in the center of it all, sweating and laughing and gasping for air as sixty-two people and the band cheered him on, was Christopher Angler.

He had stripped down to only his open-throated white linen shirt and his calf-length breeches. His leather shoes were kicked aside and his bare feet thumped on the wooden floor. His chest was half-bared to his audience and the sweat-slickened expanse of muscular skin and hair had the girls in the crowd gasping for breath. His brown hair flopped around as he twirled faster and faster, his bare feet a blur.

His hands were on his hips and he was the last contestant in the contest. He had been dancing crazy-fast for nearly twenty minutes and was only now starting to flag.

With a theatrical cry he lifted his arms in a V and shouted, "Oh my good friends, if I dance anymore you will have to tear up some of these boards for my grave-box!"

They screamed with laughter and enfolded him into the fray. The band gave a flourish and started a fast foxtrot. Laughter and music floated up into the night and dissipated like smoke.

---

"May I have the honor of this dance Dear Fellow?"

Max Tailor looked up, startled into the solemn, twinkling eyes of his adopted brother. Chris was doing his 'snooty gentry' voice, with his nose in the air and his mouth in a slight sneer, but he couldn't stop himself from breaking out into gales of laughter.

Max snorted and broke into a snobby falsetto. "Oh my, is that entirely proper?"

Chris snorted with laughter, "Who gives a shit, come away my love!"

Max coughed on his mouthful of beer as Chris grabbed his arms and forced him to do a clumsy dance with him, both trying to lead and laughing like jackals. Anna, Max's wife clapped her hands on the bench, giggling so hard that she had to clutch her swollen stomach.

Her scream of pain and surprise cut through the laughter like a cold knife. The music died with a wheezy cough from the accordion and a screech from the fiddle. Anna was clutching her pregnant stomach and crying out with pain and surprise, gasping for air.

Max was there in a moment, the light gleaming in golden lines on his mussed sweaty hair, his blue eyes wide with panic and excitement.

"It's here Precious! Oh Lord in Heaven it's here! Come quickly, and we'll get you to the Spaewife right away!"

He looked up, deliriously happy and scared at the same time.

"I'm going to be a Father!"

Everyone cheered and Max led his gasping smiling young wife along to go to the Spaewife. For a moment, Chris stood there, looking strangely lost, like a puppet with the strings cut. Then he forced his face back into a smile and followed along, bending his shoulder for Anna to lean on and murmuring encouragement into her ear.

---

The Spaewife was a woman healer. She was a midwife and a surgeon and an apocrathy all in one, and far from calling her witch, the town of Haven loved and respected her. Anna was gasping and panting on the one bed, and the only people allowed in her one-room hut were Anna's mother and Max.

Christopher sat on a worn white rock near the surf, scowling at the waves. Under the angry look, he fought against the overwhelming frustration and confusion and sadness.

Christopher had never lusted after women. He liked women, he had several friends who were women, but he had never felt anything for them other then a platonic light.

Who he had dreamed of, masturbated to, cried into his pillow for, was Max.

Chris had been born about four months after his fisherman father had died in a storm. When he was four years old, his mother had died of a wasting disease that had grown a tumor in her womb the size of a man's head. The Tailors had taken him in, and he had grown up with Max as brothers and best friends.

He had never done anything with his adopted brother but jerk off together, and then he had married Anna and knocked her up.

Christopher rubbed his eyelids with his fingers and spoke softly to himself.

"Don't get angry at them you dumb pile of pigshit. Let them be happy, and wish them well on their child, and their life. I bet you're just angry because you lost a net today."

He frowned sourly. Not only was that a lie, but it just reminded him that he had lost a net and made him even grumpier.

He sighed, slapped himself lightly and got back to the entrance of the Spaewife's hut with the other friends and well-wishers.

---

It was a short healthy birth. Shortly after moonrise, the waiting friends outside the hut heard the loud wailing of a healthy infant. The Spaewife, a petite curvy woman with tired eyes and a triumphant smile opened the door.

"Come in one and all, but be quiet. The mother is resting."

Chris crowded in with the others and saw Anna resting exhausted on the bed, cradling a tiny swaddled infant next to her breast. The infant was suckling.

"It's a beautiful baby girl." The Spaewife cooed.

Max looked anxious and exhausted but tremendously happy. His golden hair was ruffled from nervously running his hands through it, and his smile was so huge it barely fit his face. Christopher nearly felt like crying.

He slipped out quietly. No need to ruin the mood with his presence. He walked along the surf to his dead parent's home near the sea. He had lived there since Max got married. He slipped inside the wooden one-room home and collapsed naked on his bed.

It was a long time before he could sleep though.

---

He was at the dock, preparing his one-man fishing boat for the sea when Max found him.

He was dressed finely, in knee-length wool pants and silk stockings and shiny black shoes with a buckle on top. He wore fine linen shirtsleeves and a vest and a bit of lace at the throat, his fine coat was over his shoulder. The reason for his finery was clear, they were going to baptize the baby and name her.

"I'm sorry I can't come Max." Chris explained. "I already skipped four days earlier this week to fix up the house, and I'll get home in time for the naming ceremony."

Max smiled wryly. "Well, you've got me figured out. I was just coming over to guilt you into it, and you already have your excuse. Listen, I know what's going on, and I know why you don't want to come."

Chris froze with his hands on the rope. Max sighed and shuffled his feet.

"Anna says that you knew she had a thing for you. Maybe you had similar feelings towards her, and if that's true I am surely sorry, but that's no reason to leave us alone with our baby girl."

Chris felt his shoulders relax. "Listen Max, I really do have to fish today, and I really mean it when I say that I will be able to make it to the little one's christening. Just trust me. And I know that Anna held a torch for me for a few months, but I never harbored any feeling towards her."

He grinned at his best friend. "She's all yours brother, and your little girl is just as cute as a button. I'm an uncle now, and I wouldn't miss it for the world."

---

His craft was a handmade deal. Most fishing boats took two or three men to handle, but Christopher's boat was the envy of all fishermen. It was a light canoe-like craft with a single narrow sail, a rudder and an oar for him to steer manually. The craft was made of a rare kind of imported wood that floated on the water like a leaf. When his craft was laden with fish it still moved quickly, and when he was unburdened it skimmed like a seagull coming in for a landing.

He handled his craft with a light efficiency. She was named Windward, and she was the fastest watercraft he had ever seen. Sometimes, riding in her was like flying.

He skimmed out to his bay, a secret little alcove in the rough white cliffs that was a resting place for the shoals of fish he followed.

He thought he was imagining it at first, but then he grinned with his luck.

Losing the actual net was a nuisance, but no real problem, nets were cheap enough to make or mend or buy. The pain of the loss had been the large green blown-glass floats woven in.

Christopher squinted past the splinters of light thrown by the lapping waves and saw the sun glitter green off at least one of his floats.

Chris ignored his secondary nets with their cheap inferior floats of carved wood and sped across the bay towards the green glitter. At first he had only dared to hope for a single unbroken float, but as he got closer he saw all five of the head-sized floats bobbing in the water.

Then he got even closer and the cheerful, lucky smile on his face faded. Something was caught in his net. Something white. Too small to be a porpoise, too large to be some strange fish. It looked dead.

He pulled on the rope and twisted the rudder minutely, teasing Windward for every degree of speed she could muster. He only started to panic when he was close enough to see the limp arms tangled in rough hemp cords. When he could see hair floating like kelp.

A young boy was tangled in his net.

The boy's face was towards the sky, burned and swollen and cracked by the sun. His body was feebly twitching, badly tangled in the net. The green floats were the only things keeping this poor creature alive.

Christopher threw out the sea anchor and the boat skidded to a halt by the tangled nets. Chris peeled out of his shirt and pants and dived naked into the ocean. The water was cold and salty and refreshing and his eyes burned like hellfire as he swam strongly to the boy in his nets.

He threw one arm around the trapped boy's waist and swam him and the net back to Windward. He could feel the boy feebly kicking and moving his arms, trying to help him swim.

Chris slid into the boat like a wet tanned fish. Sometimes on the open sea he had stripped naked and while his arms and shoulders were darker he had a protective tan over his entire body. He heaved the heavy nets and their entwined cargo out, the muscles in his shoulders and back writhing under the skin.

The boy slumped, badly tangled in the center of Windward, jammed between the two cross-supports, gasping feebly for air. It was only then after the red fog of adrenaline faded that Chris saw exactly what he had caught in his nets.

The boy jammed in the bottom of his boat was tiny, small and fragile of limb and figure. His skin was as white as the belly of a fish, and so was his hair. His hair was a bright silvery color with not even a minute trace of yellow or gray to define it as either. His face and shoulders were badly burned by the sun, and if Christopher's ears were not deceiving him, the young boy had just started to cry.

There was something eerie, and alien about the boy in his boat, and a million questions filled his mind and his mouth, crowding on the tip of his tongue. But then the boy lifted his head. The silver hair fell to the middle of his back and partially obscured his face as he looked around, utterly bewildered. The look in those deep indigo eyes was utterly lost.

Chris bit back his questions, compassion came first. He yanked his discarded shirt down over the boy's skinny burnt shoulders and pulled on his breeches before taking flight over the ocean. The shirt covered the boy down to his knees, and before he hopped up to take hold of the sail rope, he saw something that chilled him.

The boy's genitals were big, despite his fragility and size he was older then he looked. But his genitals were completely hairless. Other then the thick head of silky silvery hair, the boy had not one hair on his body. Not even on his legs or chest or groin, not even eyebrows.

The boy looked at him with those lost helpless eyes before vomiting seawater on the bottom of his boat.

Christopher leapt up to the sail and pulled in the anchor. He stroked the mast lovingly.

"You're the only woman I ever loved Windward, and if you've ever loved me back you will get me to the Spaewife in haste."

It was almost as if she had listened, and they skimmed across the waves so quickly it seemed as if they barely touched the water.

*That was just a teaser, but more is on the way!*