aliantha wrote:The harpoon one is golden. Good going, WF!
It's a Jack Shaftoe thing. The story, in case Cags needs to know, is as follows:
In [i]Quicksilver[/i], Neal Stephenson wrote:"I am offering you safety, happiness, wealth-and my respect," Eliza said.
"You would not respect me for long. Let me take this one voyage, and get my money back, then-"
"One voyage for you. Eternal wretchedness for the Africans you'll buy, and their descendants."
"Either way I've lost my Eliza," Jack said with a shrug. "So that makes me something of an authority
when it comes to eternal wretchedness."
"Do you want your life?"
"This life? Not especially."
"Get off the boat, if you want to have a life at all."
Eliza had noticed what Jack hadn't, which was that God's Wounds had finished being loaded. The hatch-
covers were back in place, the herring was paid for (in silver coins, not cowrie-shells), and the sailors were
casting off lines. Only Mr. Vliet, and Yevgeny, remained on the quay-the former haggling with an
apothecary over a medicine-chest, and the latter being blessed by an outlandish Raskolnik priest in a
towering hat. This scene was so curious that it diverted Jack's attention completely, until all of the sailors
began to holler. Then he looked at them. But they were all looking at some apparently horrid spectacle on
the quay, putting Jack suddenly in fear that ruffians, or something, were assaulting Eliza.
Jack turned around just in time to discover that Eliza had seized the harpoon, which Yevgeny had left
leaning against a stack of crates, and was just in the act of launching it toward Jack. She was not, of
course, a professional harpooneer, but she had the womanly knack of aiming for the heart, and so the
weapon came at him straight as Truth. Jack, recalling a dim bit of sword-fighting lore from his Regimental
days, twisted sideways to present a narrower target, but lost his balance and fell toward the mainmast and
threw out his left arm to break his fall. The broad flukes of the harpoon made a slashing attack across the
breadth of his chest and glanced off a rib, or something, so that its point struck his forearm and passed
sideways through the narrow space between the two bones and buried itself in the mast-pinning him. He
felt all of this before he saw it because he was looking for Eliza. But she'd already turned her back on him
and was walking away, not even caring whether she had hit him or not.
.