Character portrait: Martin Riverbend
Nov. 26th, 2006 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aithneThis is a character background of my character for the next campaign. Things are going to change, of course, but this is basically the guy who walked into my head, say down, and made himself comfy a little while ago.
Physically, he's about 5'8", heavily muscled from a lifetime of work, about 43 years old. His once-dark hair is about fifty percent grey, and his face is lined and weatherbeaten from a life spent outdoors. He looked like a thousand other bargemen on the river, and he likes it that way.
I was born for water.
The midwife terrified my parents when I was born by telling them that. Her exact words were, "This one's marked for water, make no mistake. Don't hold onto him too hard." I have to believe she meant well; she was a blood-witch, after all, and she was toothless and kind in her own way. But her words to my parents, faithful to Agni the god of fire, were cruel beyond imagining.
They thought that she meant I was going to die by water. So like princesses and spindles, they kept me from any body of water larger than a basin until I was five. That was when they sent me to school--and out from under their watchful eyes. And that was when I discovered the river.
The Fen runs from the mountains to the sea, and when it runs through the city it is placid and slow. It is fouled by the effluvia of the city, and by the things that are thrown into it. Rotten food, bodies, failed potions from the witches and the mages--all of it ends in the river, and flows away towards the sea.
I was following some friends of mine, brave boys all, and when I first spied the river my heart swelled in my chest like it was going to burst. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. The ripples on its surface, the way it flowed past the shore, the way it smelled--I fell in love instantly. I babbled about it to my mother when I returned home that night, and her only response was to hold me close, draping her long hair over me, and in the morning go and have a word with the schoolmaster.
The damage had been done. Though the restrictions on my life grew stern once again, I was forever escaping them to go to the river. When I was old enough, I took a job as a bargeman over my parents' wails and moans. I had two brothers and four sisters at this point, but I was the oldest boy, the heir. I had responsibilities that I could not bring myself to care for.
I did find something to care for besides the river when I was seventeen, a man grown, on the verge of being disowned by my parents for my refusal to settle down. The river brought her to me, of course. I saw her for the first time on a barge being poled by some acquaintances. She was tucked up in her blankets, for the day was bitter cold, and her cheeks were ruddy with the wind. Her hair was a gold brighter than the winter sun, and her eyes were black as the river depths.
I saw her, and thought her beautiful, and thought no more of it. But chance brought her aboard my barge not a month later, and we spoke to each other as I poled and she sat, looking at the city. I learned her name was Luciana, Luce to her friends, and her father was a merchant new to town. She learned about me that I was the eldest son of one of the more prominent families of the city. I was shirtless, even in the cold, and I thought I could feel her eyes roving me.
We were married six months later, much to my parents' delight. She was my chance to make my family happy, and I thought I would be happy with her. I bought a proper house rather than sleeping aboard whichever barge I was working on that week, took a job working for her father and learning the trade of the merchants. I gave up the river for my love, and thought myself content.
But the river is a jealous master, and a patient one. It let me have seven good years before it reclaimed me.
It started in small ways. I started detouring a bit out of my way to see the river whenever I had a spare moment. I grew very interested in the movements of goods on the barges, looking for ways to speed up the traditionally very slow progress of goods through the system. I bought a few barges and staffed them with regular bargemen, to test my ideas.
Luce knew I was slipping away. She was heavier through the hips now, from birthing three children, but she was still beautiful, and she still loved me immensely. She tried every trick she knew to keep me. She sent the children on errands to bring things to me, to fetch me home for supper. She gossiped with her friends and brought home new things to try in the bedchamber. She went to the blood-witches, and bought potions and brews that would keep a man faithful.
She was up against something larger than she was. The river meant to have me again, and against the will of the river there is no recourse. The children had grown used to coming to visit me on the barges, when they were in dock, and Inge, the eldest girl, was especially keen on the workings of the boat. Unfortunately, she was not graceful, forever tripping over her own feet, and she was only five and not watchful of her surroundings.
She came on board silently one day, as we were hauling in rope. She appeared beside me as I hefted a coil of rope over the rail. "What are you doing, Papa?" she asked in her sweet voice.
I jerked straight, startled, and the rope slipped out of my control. She gave a single startled cry as she was tangled, and then, impossibly, the ropes tightened. She went over the rail, rope wrapped around her.
I dove in after her. The heavy rope took her straight to the bottom.
I got her out, nearly drowning myself in the process, but she had been dead for five minutes by then, and no amount of thumping on her chest could revive her. I paid a heavy price as well; the water in my lungs caused a flux. My escape from death was narrow, and I emerged from the illness a man changed.
I did not appreciate at the time just how much I had changed, or how much the death of our daughter had damaged my already tenuous relationship with my wife. At first, we fought. She blamed me for Inge's death. Fair enough; I blamed myself. She blamed the river, which I did not; it was like keeping a wolf as a pet. Some day, you knew it was going to bite you. So she and I fought, and then a terrible silence fell, and then I woke one day to find her and our two remaining children gone. A note said she had gone to live with her mother.
I set the note down, an ashen taste in my mouth, and bowed my head. Then I rose, and began walking.
On the way, I shed my coat, my shirt, my shoes. My pouchful of money, I left in the hands of a beggar. My dagger, I gave to a bard who was playing in one of the public squares. My wedding ring, I gave to a small girl playing in the gutter, who looked a little like Inge.
I arrived at the temple of the river god wearing only a pair of ragged trousers, and told them I meant to become one of them. They stripped me naked, shaved my head and my beard, flogged me with flails made of water-reeds until my back was bloody. Then they dunked me in the river. The river accepted my blood, and then I was a River Brother, living in silence with my brethren. They gave me the name Martin Riverbend, and my old self was dead, drowned.
We purified the river as much as it can be purified; it is made up largely of substances that are not water, so that is an ongoing and losing battle. We pulled out what is rotten and make it whole again. We pulled the bodies out and kept them for their families, and sold the unclaimed ones. We filtered river water and made it into a rich fertilizer for the farmers outside the city. The river provided all, for us.
My next oldest brother became the family heir. About half a year after I became a River Brother, there were papers given to me, papers that I started at and could not comprehend. They were papers written by a man of law, telling me that Luce was no longer my wife, and our children were officially no longer any get of mine. Her new husband was adopting them.
The fine house, the beautiful wife, the loving and bright children, all of them were gone. In truth, they had been gone since the river took my daughter. I stared at the paper and wondered if I was supposed to grieve.
The rules of the Brethren are strict, with a long list of prohibitions. We may not take lovers of either sex. We may not eat meat or milk of cloven-hooved creatures. We must always keep ourselves shaved, head and beard. And so it goes on, and on.
For fifteen years, I had no other life. Then I woke one day and realized that I was forty years old that day. My pet ray, Poi, a nearly five-pounder who I'd rescued as a pup from the river, was snoring on the pillow by my head. I lay awake, looking at the low stone ceiling.
I was forty years old. I hadn't touched a woman in fifteen years. I lived off of garbage floating in the river. My only real friend was a rat that was nearly spherical from the meals I shared with him. And I hadn't had a bath in non-river water for almost a year.
I sat up abruptly, and Poi woke and yawned disapprovingly. "Right, then," I said, coming to a conclusion that I probably ought to have come to a number of years before. I threw back the covers and went to look for Eldest Brother, to tell him I was leaving.
I was done with this life. I had some coin set by despite the Brotherhood's prohibitions on personal possessions, and I spent most of it on a bath, a bed that had a real mattress on it, and food that had not been rotted and then made whole again by magic. Then I went and talked to a barge captain that I knew, and hired on with him as a poleman with the possibility of a few river driving trips upstream later on in the year. So I am here now, and have regrown my hair and my beard--both now liberally salted with white--and I make my way as a bargeman.
In a way, I am the happiest I have ever been. I have no ties, nobody telling me how to live, no expectations on me other that I show up to the barge relatively sober when it's time to work. I have coin in my pocket, enough for bed, board, and the occasional whore. I still see some of the people I saw as a River Brother, especially the necromancers who come to buy bodies from them. One of them's about sixteen, about the age of my youngest daughter. Kids these days. Turn your back and they're off raising the dead and making them do their bidding.
Then again, all of the bargemen I work and drink with are unimaginably young, as well. They call me the old man, and I oblige them and pull stern faces at them, making my brows bristle. Good boys, all of them.
I can still call on the river; I haven't lost my faith, just my need to abase myself in front of the river. The River Brothers miss me and occasionally send a Brother to look in on me, but they're not working very hard at getting me back. It's the way of the Brotherhood--you walk in one day, and then when you're done, you walk out again.
I still call myself Martin Riverbend, but it's a happier name than when I first acquired it. I haven't heard anything from my former life for years, and I prefer it that way. I'm saving up to buy my own barge, and when I have it I'll hire men less than half my age to shove it around the river while I sit on the deck and tell them what to do.
I have the river. What more could a man want?
Physically, he's about 5'8", heavily muscled from a lifetime of work, about 43 years old. His once-dark hair is about fifty percent grey, and his face is lined and weatherbeaten from a life spent outdoors. He looked like a thousand other bargemen on the river, and he likes it that way.
I was born for water.
The midwife terrified my parents when I was born by telling them that. Her exact words were, "This one's marked for water, make no mistake. Don't hold onto him too hard." I have to believe she meant well; she was a blood-witch, after all, and she was toothless and kind in her own way. But her words to my parents, faithful to Agni the god of fire, were cruel beyond imagining.
They thought that she meant I was going to die by water. So like princesses and spindles, they kept me from any body of water larger than a basin until I was five. That was when they sent me to school--and out from under their watchful eyes. And that was when I discovered the river.
The Fen runs from the mountains to the sea, and when it runs through the city it is placid and slow. It is fouled by the effluvia of the city, and by the things that are thrown into it. Rotten food, bodies, failed potions from the witches and the mages--all of it ends in the river, and flows away towards the sea.
I was following some friends of mine, brave boys all, and when I first spied the river my heart swelled in my chest like it was going to burst. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. The ripples on its surface, the way it flowed past the shore, the way it smelled--I fell in love instantly. I babbled about it to my mother when I returned home that night, and her only response was to hold me close, draping her long hair over me, and in the morning go and have a word with the schoolmaster.
The damage had been done. Though the restrictions on my life grew stern once again, I was forever escaping them to go to the river. When I was old enough, I took a job as a bargeman over my parents' wails and moans. I had two brothers and four sisters at this point, but I was the oldest boy, the heir. I had responsibilities that I could not bring myself to care for.
I did find something to care for besides the river when I was seventeen, a man grown, on the verge of being disowned by my parents for my refusal to settle down. The river brought her to me, of course. I saw her for the first time on a barge being poled by some acquaintances. She was tucked up in her blankets, for the day was bitter cold, and her cheeks were ruddy with the wind. Her hair was a gold brighter than the winter sun, and her eyes were black as the river depths.
I saw her, and thought her beautiful, and thought no more of it. But chance brought her aboard my barge not a month later, and we spoke to each other as I poled and she sat, looking at the city. I learned her name was Luciana, Luce to her friends, and her father was a merchant new to town. She learned about me that I was the eldest son of one of the more prominent families of the city. I was shirtless, even in the cold, and I thought I could feel her eyes roving me.
We were married six months later, much to my parents' delight. She was my chance to make my family happy, and I thought I would be happy with her. I bought a proper house rather than sleeping aboard whichever barge I was working on that week, took a job working for her father and learning the trade of the merchants. I gave up the river for my love, and thought myself content.
But the river is a jealous master, and a patient one. It let me have seven good years before it reclaimed me.
It started in small ways. I started detouring a bit out of my way to see the river whenever I had a spare moment. I grew very interested in the movements of goods on the barges, looking for ways to speed up the traditionally very slow progress of goods through the system. I bought a few barges and staffed them with regular bargemen, to test my ideas.
Luce knew I was slipping away. She was heavier through the hips now, from birthing three children, but she was still beautiful, and she still loved me immensely. She tried every trick she knew to keep me. She sent the children on errands to bring things to me, to fetch me home for supper. She gossiped with her friends and brought home new things to try in the bedchamber. She went to the blood-witches, and bought potions and brews that would keep a man faithful.
She was up against something larger than she was. The river meant to have me again, and against the will of the river there is no recourse. The children had grown used to coming to visit me on the barges, when they were in dock, and Inge, the eldest girl, was especially keen on the workings of the boat. Unfortunately, she was not graceful, forever tripping over her own feet, and she was only five and not watchful of her surroundings.
She came on board silently one day, as we were hauling in rope. She appeared beside me as I hefted a coil of rope over the rail. "What are you doing, Papa?" she asked in her sweet voice.
I jerked straight, startled, and the rope slipped out of my control. She gave a single startled cry as she was tangled, and then, impossibly, the ropes tightened. She went over the rail, rope wrapped around her.
I dove in after her. The heavy rope took her straight to the bottom.
I got her out, nearly drowning myself in the process, but she had been dead for five minutes by then, and no amount of thumping on her chest could revive her. I paid a heavy price as well; the water in my lungs caused a flux. My escape from death was narrow, and I emerged from the illness a man changed.
I did not appreciate at the time just how much I had changed, or how much the death of our daughter had damaged my already tenuous relationship with my wife. At first, we fought. She blamed me for Inge's death. Fair enough; I blamed myself. She blamed the river, which I did not; it was like keeping a wolf as a pet. Some day, you knew it was going to bite you. So she and I fought, and then a terrible silence fell, and then I woke one day to find her and our two remaining children gone. A note said she had gone to live with her mother.
I set the note down, an ashen taste in my mouth, and bowed my head. Then I rose, and began walking.
On the way, I shed my coat, my shirt, my shoes. My pouchful of money, I left in the hands of a beggar. My dagger, I gave to a bard who was playing in one of the public squares. My wedding ring, I gave to a small girl playing in the gutter, who looked a little like Inge.
I arrived at the temple of the river god wearing only a pair of ragged trousers, and told them I meant to become one of them. They stripped me naked, shaved my head and my beard, flogged me with flails made of water-reeds until my back was bloody. Then they dunked me in the river. The river accepted my blood, and then I was a River Brother, living in silence with my brethren. They gave me the name Martin Riverbend, and my old self was dead, drowned.
We purified the river as much as it can be purified; it is made up largely of substances that are not water, so that is an ongoing and losing battle. We pulled out what is rotten and make it whole again. We pulled the bodies out and kept them for their families, and sold the unclaimed ones. We filtered river water and made it into a rich fertilizer for the farmers outside the city. The river provided all, for us.
My next oldest brother became the family heir. About half a year after I became a River Brother, there were papers given to me, papers that I started at and could not comprehend. They were papers written by a man of law, telling me that Luce was no longer my wife, and our children were officially no longer any get of mine. Her new husband was adopting them.
The fine house, the beautiful wife, the loving and bright children, all of them were gone. In truth, they had been gone since the river took my daughter. I stared at the paper and wondered if I was supposed to grieve.
The rules of the Brethren are strict, with a long list of prohibitions. We may not take lovers of either sex. We may not eat meat or milk of cloven-hooved creatures. We must always keep ourselves shaved, head and beard. And so it goes on, and on.
For fifteen years, I had no other life. Then I woke one day and realized that I was forty years old that day. My pet ray, Poi, a nearly five-pounder who I'd rescued as a pup from the river, was snoring on the pillow by my head. I lay awake, looking at the low stone ceiling.
I was forty years old. I hadn't touched a woman in fifteen years. I lived off of garbage floating in the river. My only real friend was a rat that was nearly spherical from the meals I shared with him. And I hadn't had a bath in non-river water for almost a year.
I sat up abruptly, and Poi woke and yawned disapprovingly. "Right, then," I said, coming to a conclusion that I probably ought to have come to a number of years before. I threw back the covers and went to look for Eldest Brother, to tell him I was leaving.
I was done with this life. I had some coin set by despite the Brotherhood's prohibitions on personal possessions, and I spent most of it on a bath, a bed that had a real mattress on it, and food that had not been rotted and then made whole again by magic. Then I went and talked to a barge captain that I knew, and hired on with him as a poleman with the possibility of a few river driving trips upstream later on in the year. So I am here now, and have regrown my hair and my beard--both now liberally salted with white--and I make my way as a bargeman.
In a way, I am the happiest I have ever been. I have no ties, nobody telling me how to live, no expectations on me other that I show up to the barge relatively sober when it's time to work. I have coin in my pocket, enough for bed, board, and the occasional whore. I still see some of the people I saw as a River Brother, especially the necromancers who come to buy bodies from them. One of them's about sixteen, about the age of my youngest daughter. Kids these days. Turn your back and they're off raising the dead and making them do their bidding.
Then again, all of the bargemen I work and drink with are unimaginably young, as well. They call me the old man, and I oblige them and pull stern faces at them, making my brows bristle. Good boys, all of them.
I can still call on the river; I haven't lost my faith, just my need to abase myself in front of the river. The River Brothers miss me and occasionally send a Brother to look in on me, but they're not working very hard at getting me back. It's the way of the Brotherhood--you walk in one day, and then when you're done, you walk out again.
I still call myself Martin Riverbend, but it's a happier name than when I first acquired it. I haven't heard anything from my former life for years, and I prefer it that way. I'm saving up to buy my own barge, and when I have it I'll hire men less than half my age to shove it around the river while I sit on the deck and tell them what to do.
I have the river. What more could a man want?
