perpetual calendar

The captain climbed atop deck from his candlelit desk to the makeshift helm attuned to wind, current, lodestar. Both sky and sea limitless and unexplainable. His crew sleeping in concave quarters, a quorum of young and ambitious sailors paid handsomely but told not a word of their destination or what will happen there. A band of runaways and criminals sworn to nothing but the next meal and warm bed. The ship’s presumed fate is known only to the captain: A prevarication in the south Pacific, meandering without end and losing rations but gaining invaluable time and distance from his pursuers. Not fully enfeebled but peg-legged and castrated from torture and thus amenable to the remoteness of the sea, its unpredictable whims and scant violent miscreants. In other words: his equals. 

He laments his few hours until mutiny or otherwise chased down by the king’s armed frigates to capture and chain him back in the island cage, a fate far worse than execution, which will undoubtedly fall upon the adolescents he’s recruited aboard. He’s vowed to die over further subjugation, madness, with his deeds or accused acts against the crown already forgotten to him after more than one month at sea, forty days and nights that obliterated time and its concepts apart from the perpetual calendar above.