To Build a Boat, Listen to Trees

By Eric Witchey

Award-winning writer Eric M. Witchey penned this novelette in which compassion, heart, and attention to the whispers of the natural world create love, thwart enemies, and save a kingdom.

Port Corwald, A peaceful maritime city state in the mists of the distant past, is threatened by warring nations on all sides. An old carpenter, a young mute, and a princess band together to save their home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imagination Fully Dilated Publishing
• Release date: Nov 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452456836

Eric Witchey

Eric M. Witchey has made a living as a freelance writer for over 25 years. His stories have appeared in ten genres on six continents, and he has received recognition from New Century Writers, Writers of the Future, Writer's Digest, The Eric Hoffer Prose Award program, the Irish Aeon Awards, Short Story America, and other organizations. His How-To articles have appeared in The Writer Magazine, Writer's Digest Magazine, and other print and online magazines. When not teaching or writing, he spends his time fly fishing or restoring antique, model locomotives.

Book preview

To Build a Boat, Listen to Trees

by

Eric M. Witchey

2011 edition published by IFD Publishing at Smashwords

Discover other titles from IFD at Smashwords.com.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

To Build a Boat, Listen to Trees Copyright 2011 by Eric M. Witchey

Cover Art Copyright 2011 by Alan M. Clark, www.alanmclark.com

IFD Publishing, P.O. Box 40776, Eugene, Oregon 97404 U.S.A. [phone] www.ifdpublishing.com

ISBN: 978-1-4524-5683-6

~~~

For Brother Driesch, a master carpenter who fought for the Keiser in WW I, for the U.S. in WW II, and for Port Corwald in my heart.

~~~

Chapter 1: To Save Your Home, Teach Your Enemy

Port Corwald's Master Shipwright, Venerré, opened his shop window and lifted his spyglass to one ancient eye.

Every morning, he scanned the bay, beginning in the south at his abandoned assembly barns where once hull, mast, sail, and rigging were joined together by a small army of his trained craftsmen. Built during the war, they squatted like giant sea turtles in the shadowy, winter-wind lee of Shashka Peak. Black piers, dry docks, a forest of scaffolds, and spider-web lines still covered the southern curve of the bay — all empty save for ravens and wind — a monument to drowned men.

No man dared disturb the spirits of that place.

He scanned northward along the long breakwater of fitted stones separating sea from bay, across the channel gap, to the opposite side of the bay where merchant shipyards built new cargo and fishing vessels. Following the curve of the bay inland along the northwest shore, his glass passed over busy trade docks, warehouses, and salting houses.

Every day, he took up quill to record the winds, the clouds, the temperature, the position of the sun, the state of the tide, surface conditions, and sail movements. He wrote notes about the people of Port Corwald who did business along the seawall causeway that linked merchant docks and trade houses to Venerré's shop and the darker shipyards beyond.

This morning, he returned his glass to the wave-lapped breakwater between ocean swells and the smooth bay. A mute named Sill fished there. Taller than most men in Corwald, his parents had blessed him with skin as golden as fallen oak leaves and with eyes as gray as misty horizons. His strength brought him work on the docks, but his silence kept him from deck and sea.

Sill's willow pole, the thick butt tucked into the rocks, pointed seaward. Sill stood, back to his pole, watching single-masted skitters race across the morning-glass surface of the bay.

The pole tip dipped nearly to the sea. Eyes on the rainbow sails, Sill casually lifted one bare foot and grasped the butt of the pole between toes. He pressed his heel into the pole to steady the thick end against a rock.

The pole jumped and swayed.

Sill's attention followed the sails in the bay.

A landward, northeast breeze filled triangular sails of all colors, bent the pole masts, and honed the strength and sea-cunning of boys and young men.

Fishing and cargo were the life of Port Corwald, and every boy older than five had his own boat — if they weren’t mute and doomed to solitude by sailors who believed a man who couldn't call out couldn't be useful.

Clearly, Sill loved sea and sail. Another year, and he would be eighteen, old enough to enter the annual regatta. Though Venerré no longer built ships, men came to him every year hoping to learn. Venerré wondered if Sill would come to him.

Venerré laughed at himself. He had promised himself to leave off watching human hearts the way he watched water, wind, and sky.

He put his spyglass away and finished his notes. Then, he settled himself at his stool and bench to work on Mrs. Andrell’s rocker, a simple chair for a simple woman who would soon