But the question had brought forth memories of broken promises. For the last year, Mati had been religiously abstaining from temptations of the flesh. But when the Ocean Goddess conspired, there was little one could do. First the doldrums, then the shortfall in rum rations. And finally, the Lamb’s beauty. Wisely, she found the only way she could triumph over temptation was by yielding to it. It was good to have an attitude like Mati’s, for circumstances eventually found a way to justify what she really wanted.

And the Lamb was quite the find. Naive certainly, but equipped, dedicated, and best of all, unblemished in the art of love. The fact that he had resisted her initial attempts had only made her want him more. He had been a block of clay to be moulded as she deemed fit. And Mati was too charitable to let him go without turning him into a giver. It was her gift to the Reshts, for surely their women deserved at least this much happiness.

The Lamb was her last adventure, she reminded herself. Now all she looked forward to was getting off this cursed ship to meet her beloved betrothed. After all, her wedding was just a winter away.

I

Most ballads say that Luck is a Lady, naked and shapely, reserving her blessings for the most valiant and dashing of heroes. Perhaps this was so as the bards were usually Namins. If Karna had been asked to give his luck a shape, it would have been a female praying mantis, the creature that made love to its mate, then decapitated him and devoured his body for dinner.

He was a Resht. If he’d taught children to read or steal cutting implements or even hoarded grain, the world might have sympathized with him. But what Karna had wanted as a child had been unheard of. Treasonous, even. For his yearning to be a warrior, he’d been banished from his village. His mother was now dead and his brother had joined the rebels. Karna was left to care for his five-year-old nephew. If this did not qualify as tragic enough, Karna had, in his short life, managed what generations of men passed their lives without. He’d been cursed by Shraps.

One did not need to be well-read to know what a Shrap was. A Shrap burned up the atmans – soul-energy that flowed in the nadis of one’s body, the same way blood flowed in the arteries, and dirt in the veins. So, if you had a mind to curse your landlord with gout, you were required to have a bounty of atmans flowing through your body to utter a valid Shrap, and use it effectively. A bounty that came after decades of sacrifices, hard diet, severe penance, and starving meditations. Amongst Men, only the ascetics frozen up in the mountains were known to have used a Shrap and lived to tell the tale.