Chapter 9. The Middle Sea

A day or so after leaving Port Carl, while life on the ship was much the same, the weather and the scenery changed pretty dramatically.

Firstly, it got not just warm, but downright hot, to the point where, if there wasn't a breeze, I think standing on deck would have been unbearable.  Of course, my perception was a bit off, having spent my life in Fail, where even the summers are brisk and the winters  are months and months of frigid cold, ice and snow.  But even though the Alcatians claimed to love the warm weather, I noticed they stripped off their shirts whenever they were out in the sun.  I'll confess I wasn't bothered in the least by men's bare chests, although I could do without the sudden increase in sweat and body odor.

The scenery changed as well.  Granted, water was water on one side, and the shore was still a lot of trees and rocks, but the further south and closer we got to Alcatia, there were more towns and even cities, along with a lot of other ship's passing us.  Already bored with being cooped up on the ship, I started spending as much time as I could watching it.  Wooden and brick buildings seemed to be everywhere, and we even passed some seaside castles that amazed me.  

There were people too.  On the ships that passed and on the shore, and when we stopped at our next port, I walked out onto the street and thought I was in a fairy tale.  Most of them were short, and of course I didn't see anyone as tall as I was, but there was an amazing variety of folk.

 And they came in all kinds of colors, pale like my people, dark and swarthy, brown like bears, and even people with yellowish skin that kind of freaked me out when I first saw it, thinking it was a sickness or something.

Evidently Jona's schedule got lighter or something, because it was about that time our mornings on deck stretched out to afternoons as well.  It seemed like the little guy was always under one of my arms or the other while watched the scenery and he was great about explaining what the things I saw were.

One of the things that truly made me feel like I was in a different world was that on the calmer waters, an amazing amount of cargo was shipped on flat barges.  And it wasn't just bundles and barrels of stuff either.  In addition to wagons and stuff, there were machines being moved around, things I'd never dreamed existed, like ladders, scaffolds and fancy plows big enough to be pulled by a whole team of horses.

The traffic got denser and denser, and the ship moved slower and slower, or at least seemed to, until we finally stopped at this magnificent looking place with an enormous castle overlooking it on a cliff.  Jona hadn't said much about my drinking with the men at Port Carl, which kind of surprised me, but I was even more surprised when he told me he'd arranged something special for me when we got to Point Calas.