All the Insanity Thereafter

The first child sprung from the skull of Robin Common
                       

Chapter the First: The Beginning, Which Concerns an Untimely End
         
Hearken, my love, and I’ll tell you a tale, once or never told before. It is a tale of great beauty and charm, of love lost, love won, love denied, bought, sold, rented, and leased; it is a tale of saints and sinners placed by merciless Fate into roles entirely unbefitting of their character, of people simply wandering about the plot wondering whatever on Earth is going on and what they are doing anywhere near it, of people who know nothing, of objects who know everything, and of staunch English patriots who go all their lives without knowing that they actually haven’t a drop of English blood in their veins at all but are actually an odd hybrid of French and Castilian royalty, of heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, trisexuals, pansexuals, transsexuals, men, women, and odd bits of both who haven’t the foggiest exactly what they are. All of which, incidentally, would never   have met one another or even have been aware of one another’s existence, had it not been for one day, one seemingly mundane and comparatively uneventful day in the life of one man.
This man was a man much like any other man, and, after the fashion of many men before him and countless more to this very day, he was not long for this world. This man was about to die. He was oblivious to this fact, as most men are, and was at this particular moment upon which our story begins, going about his business as usual. We enter upon him here as he jumps up, pistol cocked and at the ready, jaw set firm and unyielding as there he stands this day the fourteenth of July, in the Year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and ninety-seven- at exactly twenty minutes past one in the afternoon, to be surgically precise. His business to which he is attending, it may interest you to know, was in fact attempting, and, thus far, succeeding to hijack a westbound merchant vessel stuffed to bursting with tobacco intended for sale to American colonists. Unfortunately for the colonists, this particular shipment would never see American soil but rather the bottom of the ocean, which was the fate met, at least, by some less-than-fortunate crates which slipped through fingers far too delicate for this sort of thing, to a harsh look of disapproval from the doomed man- hardly someone who you would call ordinary.
This particular someone was known to the world during his thirty-odd years on Earth, not as ‘ordinary’- seeing as that is not only a frightfully odd name for a person but a word entirely inaccurate to the description of this man’s entire being- as James Cocklyn, who just so happened to be one of the most powerful men in the Caribbean at the time.
He was a ragged sort of scoundrel, quick of thought and a prodigious swordsman, talented as a robber, having learnt his art at an early age on the muddy streets of seventeenth-century London. He was a man of ridiculously good fortune, and the world, as it so often does, confused such luck with invulnerability.
This man had in fact bested Death on so many separate occasions, it was oft whispered he was something more than human, that he simply couldn’t be killed. Ironic, really, seeing as he was fated to bite it less than twenty-four hours hence, but even if to die so soon was not James’ destiny it would still be complete nonsense, of course- no man is immortal- but he enjoyed the idea immensely. And he did everything he could to uphold his reputation as a man with more lives than your average tomcat, living recklessly and without responsibility or care for consequence. He lived the years partaking of every mortal pleasure, filling his days and his nights with endless drink and all the beautiful women he could afford, being able to please any number of the fairer sex with ease; spending his life forever chasing after dreams of indestructibility, of eternal youth.
He was a skilled swindler, well versed in robbery, throbbery, muggery, buggery, skulduggery, and all manner of things that would make a saint blanch. His rugged charm and easy smile lured the majority of women (and, on occasion, men) in like moths to a flamethrower; to call him attractive would not be inaccurate in the least. In fact, certain admirers may construe such a statement as nearly insulting. Physically, he was a fine specimen of the male gender, who would most certainly do his father proud, had he any idea who he may have been. James was, putting it mildly, built like a mountain, strapped with muscles from forehead to foot and endowed with a height which allowed him to tower head and shoulders over most other men of his day. Every inch of his rough, weathered skin was filthy, the grit of decades of backbreaking labour ingrained into his skin past all possibility of being washed or even scalded away. Not that he tried, that is. His long auburn mane hung nearly past his shoulders, snarled carelessly; unkept and untamed. Had it not been for the civilised clothes on his back and the English he spoke, one might have taken him for a savage from his feral appearance. He often neglected, unsurprisingly, the finer habits of cleanliness practised by the higher classes of the time (which was astonishingly lacking to begin with, and even these he flouted with utter abandon), and a perpetual layer of coarse stubble clung to his chin and throat.
Any man could see, by the mad glint of greed in his fierce blue eye, by his calloused hands holding fast his drawn sword, his weathered flesh soaked to the bone with seawater, by the glint of his ferally bared teeth, he thirsted insatiably for the thrill of battle, the ring of swords and the smell of blood. He challenged each sailor silently in turn, mocking them with his eyes, a sardonic smirk playing about his lips as he dared them to challenge his power. Not a soul moved.
As he stood on the deck, the sailors started when they heard the cadence of boots, beating in steady rhythm as a strikingly beautiful boy appeared, with the face of an angel and the eyes of a demon aflame with hatred, with skin that looked as though it had never felt the sun’s warmth. The youth stalked up to James’ side, slowly drawing a short but wicked-looking dagger, with which he proceeded to boredly clean his fingernails.
He was dressed in impeccable finery, and was indeed better dressed than any of the English dukes or Spanish grandees, from his pristine lace jabot, carefully tied about his pale throat, to his silken French hose of snowy white. Over the young man’s left eye, which was false, extending from just above the shrewdly furrowed brow to the middle of the bone-white cheek, he bore a long and ruddy scar, the crudeness of which somewhat diminished his otherwise aristocratic appearance. His false eye, however, had been dreadfully expensive- made of the finest Venetian glass to be found- therefore to a degree compensating for his disfigured beauty.
He was Thomas Dickinson. He had known, lived with, and worked for James since he was a boy, and bore him such conflicting emotions it tore him apart from the inside out. Thomas disdained and resented the world and her people, men and women alike. That much was made clear in the way Thomas would sneer down his sculpted Roman nose at you as he cut your throat, or in a sharp, sudden glare from those malicious green eyes- or in the way he did battle- with a blind, white-hot fury that proved deadly from the instant his long, dexterous fingers closed around steel. One always seemed to sense something sad about him, a dark festering secret well hidden behind the boy’s deep, abysmal eyes- though one couldn’t quite put one’s finger on it just from looking.
Thomas stood at a fair height of five foot nine, which was, though by no means diminutive, a good bit shorter than James, which the boy utterly detested. Being a prideful creature, it drove him mad to have someone whom he considered of lower stature stand even a hair higher than he.
This near-crippling vanity was rather irksome trait indeed; that is, Thomas could never admit any weakness of his own, major, minor, or nonexistent. No matter how dire the circumstance or how terrible the price, the boy could never yield. It was a dreadful flaw, one that would one day cost him dearly.
But look away from James and Thomas a minute, and harken- could those be footfalls resonating from the bowels of the ship, drawing nearer to our heroes as they stand unawares?