Odysseed

by AuroraDawn

Chapter 10

Just as she had expected, Applejack had woken before the sunrise, though not due to any amount of adequate rest. The ringing bells and that sharp, piercing whistle had helped bring her out of a light, furtive sleep. She wasn’t sure which was more frustrating; being woken up, or the attempt at sleep she had been trying to make most the night.

Despite the familiarity with hard ground the mattress had given her, the constant up and down motion of the ship had tricked her guts to thinking they were on a rollercoaster. She didn’t feel nauseous, but the constant shifting in her belly had annoyed and distracted her the entire night. Gentle splashes of waves and rhythmically creaking lumber had done nothing to soothe her against the movement, and by now she figured giving up would probably be for the best.

She lay down on the bed still though, attempting to give her body time to adjust to the feeling, and had taken to reading the letter Princess Luna had sent her and going over the constellation a couple more times.

She was in the middle of packing the letter back up in her bag and finding some sort of activity to occupy her time when there was a loud knock at the door.

“Oh! Uh, come in, I suppose.”

The door opened and it was the chef from the night before, carrying a tray wrapped around his withers with a couple dishes on it.

“Good morning, lass. Captain’s requested we bring this right to you. Breakfast, if one were to be bold enough to call it that.” He barked a laugh that shook the cabin. “Daisies on rye and coffee or tea.”

“Much thanks,” Applejack said, shifting over onto the chair. “I’ll have the coffee please.”

“You misunderstand,” the chef replied, setting the tray down on the desk. “It’s one of them, but nobody on the ship can seem to figure it out.” He chuckled and stepped out, pausing before closing the door. “As I understand it you’ll be confined here till we’re properly out to sea.”

As he spoke, as if in response, there was a sustained shout from up above and a large clattering noise, and the weight in Applejack’s stomach lurched as she felt the whole ship start to turn and move. With it came a slight increase in the amplitude of the waves, and she groaned.

“Now seeing as you’re probably gonna want something to keep your mind off how awful you feel,” he muttered, tapping his chin, “did ya bring anything along to spend your time on?”

“—urp. Uh, no, I wasn’t expecting quite this.”

“We warn’em all usually and none of them expect it. Anything I can bring yah? There’s no library on board, but I could probably find you an old navigational chart or summat…”

Applejack shifted back onto the bed and layed down on her belly, grimacing and bearing the brunt as every earth pony nerve in her body screamed at her to stop moving without moving. Figuring a distraction would be gratefully appreciated, she looked up to the gruff sailor and nodded.

“Got any knives?”

“A hundred of them in the galley. You need a plank too?”

She smiled. “Uh, aye?”

“Celestia’s flanks, just say yes,” he laughed, dropping the door closed. She could hear his laughter diminish down as he went further into the ship, and chuckled a small amount herself.

A few minutes later he had returned, dropping a plain kitchen knife and a small bundle of scrap lumber onto the desk. After taking a few deep breaths, Applejack turned from her bed and picked up the knife and a small cutting—what looked to be the end piece of a eight by four—and started whittling.

Metal scraped against wood, the blade sharp and the steel old and solid enough to keep its edge well. Little curls of wood started to pile up on the floor while she chipped away at the little piece. She focused on the movements, carefully manipulating the knife with her mouth and paying attention to how every swipe felt, if it had caught or the angle suddenly felt too deep. She didn’t actually think about what she was carving. If anything were to come out of the wood, it would have had to exist there in the first place for her to find. And if there was nothing that came to be, no worries. Dulling a blade against a block was doing wonders to distract her from the lurching ship, and she was grateful to the chef for the offer.

She hit a knot and the block lifted slightly in her hoof, prompting her to take a slow breath before changing her hold on the knife and continuing from a different angle. There was something she could work with there, based off how it curved in on itself, and she noted it subconsciously while continuing to gently move her head back and forth, slowly shaping the wood into something recognizable.

Some ponies relaxed by brushing their manes and tails. That wasn’t for Applejack; her hat would cover most of it and whatever was left was shoved into a bundle and tied with an elastic. Other ponies would read, flipping pages over and over, and while there were a few books at home she might take the time to go over, in general she just felt bored going over the words. Some she knew tended to gardens and flowers, not really as food supply but just as a hobby, pulling weeds one by one and watering back and forth.

There was always a rhythm to these things, she thought. Something monotonous but enjoyable all the same, which helped settle the mind and leave it neutral, devoid of ambitions and anxieties all the same. It was the act of just doing something, doing it over and over again, which shut the noisy part of a pony’s brain off and let them get some rest for once.

For Applejack, hers was crafting. It wasn’t always whittling, and she knew when she was done that what she had—if she would have anything at all—would be alright at best. It always involved manual work, though. Not strenuous work, like plowing fields and bucking trees, but small, repetitive tasks that ended up with something more than what you put into it. She’d fix fences that didn’t really need it, maintain little systems about the farm and house, chip away at wood with a knife until she decided it looked sorta like something; she would take apart and replace and remove and rebuild, and she would be at peace.

When the midday bell rang, Applejack was surrounded by a fine layer of wood cuttings and a single, tiny object on the desk. She was surprised to find that she had actually managed to produce a carving that was recognizable, though with a low laugh she realized it was of an apple.

“I suppose I can be a little predictable,” she muttered, glancing out the window. There still wasn’t much she could see through it, but the sky was clear and blue, and the rolling motion of the ship seemed to have subsided a bit.

Her door rattled with a knock, and a sailor stuck her head in and smiled at her.

“‘Ello dearie. I’s lunch time, eh? Cap’n says you’re free to walk about the decks for the time being, get your legs an’ all.”

“Ah, thank you,” Applejack said to the mare who had already left. She stood up, arched her back in a stretch and, getting a good couple pops out of it, sighed and stepped out onto the gun deck.

Everything looked pretty much the same as it had when she had retired, though the light flooding in from the portholes had made the place seem a lot less suffocating than the night before. Ponies were filing in and out of the mess at a regular pace, and Applejack figured she should probably eat now before it was all put away or she was locked in her cabin again.

Being a much smaller meal—her choice of an apple and an oat bar or a dandelion sandwich, delivered by that same squinting stallion who she had come to learn was named Stewaway—lunch had gone far quicker than supper, and before long she was climbing the stairs up onto the main deck. She reached the top and then stumbled to a standstill, before quickly apologizing and shuffling off to the hoofrail to make way for the busy sailors.

She was completely and entirely at sea. Every direction she looked was devoid of land. She didn’t even see any other ships, and with the sky beautifully clear, it was blue from every edge of her vision to the other. Water shifted and sparkled no matter where she turned her head. She was stranded on this little floating block of wood and rope, bobbing in the middle of a universe of nothing but sea. It reminded her somewhat of when Luna would project a starscape around them, but with how utterly featureless the rest of the world was around her, it had none of the captivation her lessons had entailed.

The horizon spun around her, that fine line somehow warping about her vision without moving at all. Dizziness from the waves came roaring back, along with new, overwhelming feelings; homesickness, fear, confusion, unfamiliarity. All of it mixed together in her mind and her legs started to quake.

All of this coalesced within her stomach and she leaned over the railing and instantly vomited. She heard laughter come from somewhere on the ship but ignored it as she retched again, bringing up bits of dandelion that hadn’t even had time to settle. Embarrassment could come later. Right now she needed to get these feelings out. She needed to get rid of the sense of true distance and separation she had from Equestria and her friends. She needed to void the constant shifting of her insides. More than anything, she wanted to clear that damned, ever present feeling that she wasn’t moving fast enough or doing the right thing.

A hoof patted her hard on the back, striking her withers in time with one final heave of her stomach, and then slowed to smooth, circular movements, massaging her while she hiccoughed over the railing. After a minute of this, she spit one final time and then slid back to see who it was.

“You’ll be the butt of all the jokes for a week now, you understand,” Captain Square Sails said, handing her a small cloth. She accepted it and cleaned her muzzle, nodding.

“Figures. I’ll survive. So long as I don’t have to live through much more of that nonsense, anyways.”

He chuckled, turning to face the sea with Applejack. “I shan’t lie to you and tell you you’ll be over it now. Grab one of the buckets in the galley before you next return to your cabin, you’ll want it. But it won’t last for too much longer, not unless you’re truly allergic to the ocean.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“We have all been hanging over a hoofrail at one point in our lives. Don’t take their jesting to heart.”

She nodded, resting her forehooves on the rain and looking out, examining what she could see with a bit more focus. The Croupiere smashed into a large wave then, and the spray of water on her cheeks felt a little restorative. She locked her eyes on the horizon while trying to adjust against the bobbing, and Square Sails shook his head.

“Just keep your body still. Don’t overcorrect so much, that’s what’s making you upset.”

“Mmm,” Applejack replied, not trusting herself to open her mouth as her belly twirled again. She followed his advice, taking long deep breaths in and exhaling slowly. The tang of salt tickled her nose but she welcomed the distraction. It was not an unpleasant scent, now they were away from the rotting lumber and barrels of fish of the docks. On its own it actually felt quite easy to breathe.

She risked scanning the sea again to find anything, and saw nothing.

“How do you find where you’re going?”

“Navigation officer,” Square Sails barked. Applejack looked at him sardonically, wondering what sort of answer that was, when a teal unicorn mare quickly showed up behind the two.

“Aye, Captain!”

“Our guest has questions. When you are free, please find me at the helm.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Square Sails walked away and she quickly replaced his spot, leaning against the rails while glancing curiously at the earth pony. “I’m Due North. How may I assist?”

“Er, well, I had just asked the captain how you know where you’re going. There’s nothing out there,” she said, waving a hoof wide. “Best I could tell you is where East and West are around.”

“On the contrary, miss!” The mare straightened up, her eyes beaming wide in excitement. “There’s so much out there! We’ve got the horizon and the sun, and that’s more than enough to find where we are and how we’re facing, and then we’ve got a chip log to tell us our speed, and finally in the quarterdeck we have a chronometer.” She was almost bouncing, and Applejack leaned back slightly to check her flank.

It was a map and protractor, and she smiled with a grunt.

“Okay, so, couple things there I guess. Let’s start with the chip log.”

“It’s a log with a rope tied to it. We’ve got knots in the rope at set distances apart, and we throw that astern and count how many knots go by in a small amount of time to determine our speed. You see, it’s a simple calculation, where you take the number—”

“You remind me of a pony back home,” Applejack interrupted, grinning. “A chronomono?”

“Chronometre. It’s kind of like a fancy clock, lets us know what our longitude is using the difference in time between here and Canterlot. We find what true time it is using the sun, of course, as well as, you know, a watch, and then we have another tool called a sextant which gives us the angle between the sun and the horizon, letting us know how far south we are, or north I suppose, but we’re in the Southern Hemisphere so really it’s just south that I’ve ever used it for.”

“That’s—”

“Anyways so with our longitude and latitude, not only can I tell you where we are, but where we’re facing, and combining that with how fast we’re going gives us our dead reckoning which is a fancy term for like, how we’re moving, which then I just sort of chart on a map!”

“Very in—”

“Though of course the apparent wind and actual wind changes things, so we have to do these measurements quite often throughout the day. Oh! Oh! I didn’t tell you about night time! So we have these maps called star charts, and they—”

“List constellations and their related homes in the sky.”

The mare stumbled, caught off guard. “Oh, you know about astronomy?”

“A little. I’ve been learning. I uh, take it nopony ever really asks you about this stuff?”

Due North shirked back, blushing. “Is it that obvious?” she whispered with a squeak.

“A bit, sugarcube. Don’t worry none about gushing about what you’re excited about. It’s all a bit much for me all at once, but I don’t mind.”

She smiled back at Applejack and then looked out against the rippling waves. “You’re awfully kind. The company on a ship aren’t always the most appreciative or, uh, polite bunch. You learn to just do your job and hush up about anything that isn’t bits, booze, or banter. I like having passengers aboard, myself.”

Applejack slid back down from the railing, trying out all four hooves on the deck. She splayed her legs out a little further, which seemed to help, and then patted the sailor on the back.

“I think I need to go lie down a bit more myself, but maybe at supper tonight you can tell me more about it, how’s that?”

“Oh, that would be wonderful!” Due North almost jumped in place in glee before catching a glance from a fellow sailor and stiffening up. “Right, okay, Royal Navy and all. Professionalism.” She cleared her throat and took on a deeper, sarcastically authoritative voice. “Now that’s all the time I have for silliness. You scoot along now, harumph harumph, out the way, no more games…” she carried on, all the way up to the quarterdeck, leaving Applejack to lean against the railing and chuckle loudly.