The lad turned laughing, but without malice, and clapped him on the back. “Heave hearty!” he said. “It will come better when you come to learn the free way of the ocean; grow to love it and care nothing for landlouts. Here are the linens.” He opened the midmost of a set of drawers built into the wall. “The old man takes no napkins save when there are guests aboard—a real dog of the brine, with fish-blood in his veins, that one! I am called Krotz; what’s your name?” Rodvard’s telling, he hardly seemed to notice, but continued his flood of instructions. “In these racks are the silvers; he uses only the best, and be careful at dinner to set his silver bear on the table, it was given him by the syndics at the time of the Tritulaccan war for his seamanlike skill. The bed-bunk you must carefully fold in at the base, but he likes the top loose, so. Wine always with the early meals, it is here. If the weather’s fair he sometimes takes fired-wine in the evening. If he orders it so—” The lad Krotz halted, looked sidewise out of his eyes and leaned close. “Hark, Bergelin, I am not what you would call jealous. Have you ever—that is, when he has fired-wine, he may desire to treat you as his lover.” “I—” Rodvard recoiled, and retched again. “Ah, do not be so dainty. It is something that every true seaman must learn, and keeps us from being like the landlouts. You do not know how it can be, and he gives you silver spadas after. But if you will not, listen, all the better, when the old man calls for his fired-wine, set the bottle on the table, take away the silver bear, and call me.” Said Rodvard (no little astonished, that the emotion of which The Blue Star spoke was indeed jealousy); “No. I’ll have none of it, ever.” A smile of delight so pure that Rodvard wondered how he had thought the lad’s look sullen. “The cook will give you breakfast. I must go—to be a seaman.” Captain Betzensteg ate by himself. Rodvard was glad that he remembered the silver bear, but when he tried to hold forward the platter of meat as he remembered seeing Mathurin do it for Cleudi, he got things wrong, of course, and the one-eyed man growled; “Not there, you fool. The other side.” The meat itself was something with much grease, pork probably, which it sickened Rodvard even to look at as the captain chewed liquidly, pointing with his fork to a corner of the cabin and declaring he would barber someone of his ears unless it were kept cleaner. That night there was no call for fired-wine; Rodvard felt a surge of gratitude for preservation as he cleared up after the meal, and made his way forward to the crew quarters in what he now had learned to be the peak-jowl.