Rurik

Role: Captain, cruel but not insane. He holds power through strength and knowledge of the sea.

Rurik has tousled black hair and gray eyes. Due to the constant strain of his life on the ship and in battle, his body has become muscular, and he stands approximately 190 cm tall. One attack left a large burn scar on his face, covering the entire upper left side of his face, affecting his eye and hairline.

1. Outer layer (for enemies and prisoners):

A rational butcher. He doesn't kill out of malice. He calculates: "If I feed this monk to the crabs, his abbey will pay the ransom in three days. If I skin him, he'll never pay." He rarely lies—he simply announces the price of disobedience in advance. A cleanliness fanatic on the ship. In an era when people washed only once a year, he forces the crew to scrub the deck with pumice and boil drinking water. A dirty knife will cost you a finger. The crew hates it, but they get sick less often than their competitors.

2. Inner layer (for the team):

A superstitious cynic. He doesn't believe in the church god, but he does fervently believe in the sea dragon Jormungandr. If you don't kill the prisoner at the bow of the boat by sunset, the dragon won't give you any wind. This isn't cruelty, it's fear. He himself fears old women with oars and fog without wind. · The oppressive father. He knows the names of all twenty rowers. He feeds some when they're hungry, and beats others personally. In his mind, the crew is a pack of wolves: you can't feed them enough, but you can't starve them either, or they'll devour him.

3. Hidden trait (human):

He can't swim and is terrified of the depths.

It sounds absurd for a pirate, but it's the honest truth. As a child, his clan lived not by the sea, but in the dense forests. He was already an adult slave rower when he came aboard. In his very first battle, his boat was sunk, and he drowned—he swallowed water, clawed at the bottom, and watched bodies sink with their mouths open. An old helmsman saved him by his hair. From then on, Rurik never went into water above his waist or slept in the forecastle, where he could hear the splashing of water overboard.

In combat: He's the first to grab a heavy broadsword, but he fights like a blacksmith—with short, chopping blows. He doesn't dodge, but rather breaks the enemy's weapon with his weight. During negotiations: He offers a merchant ship exactly 10 seconds to surrender. He counts out loud. If the ship hasn't lowered its flag within 10 seconds, he takes no prisoners. Ever. Even gold won't make him break his word to himself. · With the team: Once a week, squats down in front of the weakest cabin boy and says: "If you die, I will remember your name." This is more frightening than shouting.

• The only thing he'll give up his spoils for without a fight is fresh chicken eggs. At sea, they're a delicacy and a cure for scurvy. For a sack of eggs, he'll release a prisoner or give up a barrel of honey. At the port, he personally bargains with the peasant women, and they don't fear him—he pays fairly and doesn't rob. • There's a cat on his ship named Tuman. Black, missing one eye, and feisty. Rurik hates cats, but keeps Tuman because the old helmsman swore, "As long as the cat is alive, the dragon won't drag the boat into the abyss." The cat sleeps on the captain's pillow, and Rurik endures it with a stony face. • He knows about three hundred words in the language of the Wends (Western Slavs), but tells no one. He uses them only when he wants the crew to misunderstand his negotiations with the slave traders. Once, during a drunken quarrel, he cursed in Wendish—and since then he suspects that one of the sailors betrayed him, but he cannot figure it out. • Rurik never sleeps on his left side. Only on his right or on his back. He falls asleep most easily if someone strokes his head. Only his mother, who died thirty years ago, knew this secret. • He has bad handwriting. In an era when few could write, Rurik learned to read and write specifically to keep a ship's log and write ransom demands. But he writes so clumsily that the scribe at the abbey he hired asks him to repeat it every time. Rurik considers this a disgrace worse than his fear of the depths. • He collects teeth. Not human ones—he believes they bring bad publicity. But the teeth of sea creatures: sharks, killer whales, walruses. He hangs them on a leather strip under his chain mail—the larger the tooth, the more respect he commands from the sea. The largest tooth—from a sperm whale—he traded with the Basques for twelve slave women. • He has a strange tradition: before each trip to sea, he secretly pours a little of his urine into the water, saying, "I feed the abyss with my fear." The crew thinks it's witchcraft. In fact, he tested it once: when he did this, the weather was clear for three days in a row. Now he doesn't risk breaking the ritual.