Looking Down on Happiness
I stood at the bow of the ship and moped. I should have been happy. I always was happy when I stood at the bow, looking over the waves. I was tremendously excited about this trip, and I loved looking out over the waves, watching where we were going. But one week into our trip, I was moping.
I looked back again at the boys, the other boys, swimming alongside the ship.
All the other races, even those traditionally very modest, were swimming right now as I stood on the bow staring at the water. But we Dwarf boys had to be on deck when it was going on-- our Mothers and Sisters, when they had first found out what was going to happen down below, had herded us up. We weren’t allowed to swim, though.
I stared down at the water. Everyone was there.
Fisherboys were there, of course, although you rarely saw them. They were always busy diving, catching fish, and giving them to their Sisters. Oh how my Mother had been appalled at that!
The Marshmen didn’t dive much. Their webbed feet did make them pretty good swimmers though, and they had learned that they could almost ‘walk on water’; lifting themselves high out of the water by waving their feet back and forth. It was cool to watch.
Elf boys splashed about. Although they had really quick reactions they were not good swimmers, and had been extremely embarrassed to first get in the water. Some of them had taken several days to get used to stripping off in front of everyone, and had swum apart for a while. Their parents had insisted, however, and they all ended up enjoying themselves.
The Troll boys were fun to watch. They weren’t good swimmers either and their fur looked funny when sopping wet. They hadn’t cared a tupence about stripping off, of course. Going naked meant less than nothing to a Troll boy (most of them didn’t wear anything anyway). Watching them turn ‘invisible’ in the water, which they did whenever anyone asked them to was really fun.
You know how a Troll boy turns invisible, of course. Troll fur turns the color of the ground under them, even imitating the texture. In the ocean this produced a fascinating effect--like a wet, blue towel floating on the waves. Standing on deck I could see where each of them was, of course. But from any distance, and if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you could never have spotted them.
There were a whole passel of Farmer boys. They always enjoyed swimming, even if they weren’t all that good at it. It was funny how ‘naked’ they looked compared to the others. I suppose that is because they, (like us and Horseboys), have what I consider ‘normal’ pink skin. Even Horseboy skin is more of a brown, so it was really only the Farmer boys that looked ‘naked’ to me. Not that they had cared; they had stripped down almost as fast as the Fisherboys and Trolls. They did it all the time in the rivers at home; the boys anyway. I suppose it had been harder for the girls, not that I got to see them.
Anyway, there they all were, all of them except us. The only people on deck were the captain, the first mate, the Dwarf men, the other Dwarf boys, and myself. I was moping.
It wasn’t fair. I wanted to swim. And I was going to!
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Von