The Saan are a race of rulers. When the gods made the Saan, they made them with lots of veins and arteries and not nearly enough blood.

My remarks about Saan dying when they pop their cherries are completely unfounded in truth. It turns out they actually don't have cherries, so they don't risk dying when they lose their virginity.

Which means that the things I swore I'd do to all my admiral's daughters is only slightly more anatomically impossible than the things I told him to do under his breath. I'm pissed.

Then again, I'm pretty sure that you could devirginize a Saan to death if you did it hard enough. And there's always buggery.

They do have asses like we do, right?

What You See

I've never had a man or woman lust after me when we were sober. Oh, I've had my share, sure, it's part of the sealover's life, even in the Saan Imperial Navy - more, actually, because I was in the Southwestern Fleet and we were away from Armada Harbor ten months out of the year. The Saan would be mortified, but then again they're Saan and seriously risk bleeding to death when they pop their cherries. They have excuses for being joylessly conservative. Humans don't. But I'm rambling.

I've known my ladies' pleasures, as the song goes. Sometimes I paid for them in cash, and sometimes in board, and sometimes in witty banter. But I've never known them for free. I've known rakes who can pick any pretty thing out of a crowd and seduce them. They've never picked me. One of these days, my family's going to arrange to marry me off to somebody if I come home. I don't mind, because odds are nobody's going to propose to me out of the blue.

At home they'd probably say I'm hideous. And let's be honest: I'm never going to look right in a courtier's outfit. Too much salt on my skin, too tanned, a limp from a bullet that's still in my thigh - you can feel it if you press down at the right point. Hair is too stringy and not smooth, because that's what happens when it gets washed in brine, or sometimes piss because it's cleaner than the salt water. And my eyebrows are still there, not plucked out and painted halfway up my forehead, because there's the scar there too from when I cut down the rigging on a ship and a stray rope burned a black stripe on me that never healed quite right.

The last time I was with my family, Rerko came in decked out in silk and nightingale feces and brought out the most delicate porcelain cup of some faintly-scented ocha. And so I slammed my fist down on the table, made the cup bounce fully a foot into the air and drew a terrified squeal from her as she scrabbled to not have a full steel koku's worth of porcelain cup shatter and spill the ocha all over the sweets.

That's my idea of humor. Maybe that's why I was sent to the Saan Imperial Navy (Southwestern Fleet) and she was married off to some first-generation notable noble nobody who'd just moved down to Armada Prefecture. Last I heard she was pregnant again. Hope it's a boy this time.

I'm rough around the edges. It's what makes me a bad candidate for marriage but a good candidate for the Navy. It was also a point of pride, somewhat, that I won every position I'd ever held by honest work and exceptional service and not by buying a post or "exceptional service." (Although I was reprimanded once for taking it too hard on one woman who had become third mate by fucking the captain. I have no regrets. I'm in charge of leading boarding assaults; my subordinates should have their best muscles on their arms, not between their legs.)

And I'd like to think I'm attractive by my own standards. Not pretty, sure, but attractive. Strong, experienced, and I have the scars to show for it.

I have several changes of clothing in my trunk. Most of them are oilcloth and sharkskin, and one is a material that I swear up and down is magical. The tailor said that it wasn't, it was made from cobwebs and tree sap, but I'm not buying that: it's made by alchemists somehow. Dark colors all of them; dark colors absorb sunlight more and dry faster.

Over that I wear my armor: the do and the kote. They bulk me up a bit; the Yabanjin say that I look better in armor for some reason. The do displays the Charkozu mon: a lacqured, wine-red hammerhead shark motif.

The kote match the color, but they display something that identifies me a different way: finger-wide razorblades worked into the material. They aren't ornamental. They're weapons; you can slash tendons, sever ropes, slice through the seams of armor. With practice, you can cut a throat with them.

I don't practice. I mastered them long ago; they are an extension of my body the way my fingers are. I can almost feel with them. Combined with a naginata, they mark me as a student of the Kumate Chorjish Iron Lion Legacy, whose teachers can trace their origin to the Monastery of the Iron Heart where Reshar himself once studied.

And unless the circumstances demand it, I always carry my naginata. It's a trademark. I have other weapons, too: a pair of kunai, a tamo stick that I got from sources I'd really rather not discuss here, and so forth. Hair pins when I absolutely must, but diving into the ocean for boarding assaults makes my coiffure an exercise in futility.

But my favorite weapon is the naginata. It's a very feminine weapon; historic, I know, but even though there's a historic reason for it being associated with women I still think it's a feminine weapon, the way that, say, an ono isn't. It's ironic, maybe, that the most feminine thing about me is something I use to kill people and occasionally cut seabiscuit with.

But enough about me.

Introducing myself

Originally, the Mi Barco Maldito was captained by Capt. Shogo. Lithene, with a tridentine set of blades screwed into the stump where one of his hands used to be. I imagine you were familiar with him, yes?

It isn't any more. It's a long story.

Ever since then, the ship has had no formal captain. (It also has no formal name, although Mi Barco Maldito - Lithene for "My Damn Ship" - has stuck, in part because our budgets have been running too tight to pay for a full rechristening ceremony to appease the little gods.)

For various reasons, we the idlers sorted the matters out amongst ourselves. Not surprisingly, Tekeli is the acting Master of the ship. Rum, formerly the official first mate, is still technically so (I think.) The theoretical second mate, and acting first mate, would be me.

My name is Charkozu Narko, or at least that's how we say it in Armada Prefecture. (Armada Sarn doesn't have long vowels; instead it adds an /-r/. Thus it's Armada Sarn, not Aamada Saan, and Charkozu Narko, not Chaakozu Naako.) Outside of the Saan Empire, everybody assumes that Charkozu is my given name; inside the Saan Empire - not that I've been there of late - nobody uses their given names.

You will refer to me as Charkozu.

Introducing the Charkozu family

There are two kinds of people in Armada Prefecture: the citizens and the elites. The citizens came here, and still do, because they think it's better than staying up north. The elites come here because they know that staying up north would be even worse.

My great-grandparents came here because they tried their hand playing a round of politics in Cloudbirth. In the game of politics, they got the worst hand: good enough to look like serious contenders to power. By the time the cards got reshuffled, they had been assigned to a prestigious military post in Armada Harbor, from which the Charkozu family has never recovered.

In Cloudbirth politics, you see, prestigious assignments in the Frontier Prefectures is immurement in a brick wall. Only more polite, you see. Courtiers use it as a way to simultaneously reinforce the house and rid it of unwanted members.

Their children's children's children are still working on breaking out of the wall.