💾 Archived View for malinfreeborn.com › gen › waitress.gmi captured on 2022-04-28 at 19:00:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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In a port in Liverpool there was a barmaid who worked most of the day. After work (and sometimes during shift) she would listen and chat with the Sailors who had just come back from a new land across the ocean. This strange New World was full of amazing and wondrous things. Then there were those who sailed around Africa, and told of great monsters who lived there. Some spoke of New World civilizations which had perfect cities where nobody was ever hungry and everyone got a warm house to live in. Others spoke of savage people who would eat others all day long. Some civilizations they described had golden swords everywhere while others rode upon great dragons. Many spoke of people who would wander around with their bare asses on display, or of people decorated with bird feathers.
After a while the barmaid noticed discrepancies between the tales, for she always asked whereabouts the sailor was when he saw these marvellous things. Different sailors came back with different stories about exactly the same places, and she couldn't figure out how none of the sailors came back with any gold if so many civilizations in that place were so full of the stuff. However, her friends just said 'Yes, each sailor has their own version of events'.
'But which one's the right one?', she would ask.
'Each sailor has their own truth', they would say. But it didn't look like that. Her tavern was by the dock - that was a fact. If anyone had said she worked in a tavern in the town's centre they would be wrong, plain and simple. Why should such a fundamental idea be any different in Africa or the New World? How could two different people go to these places and talk to different cities? Were these places completely mad?
There was only one solution - she obtained a book, and in her free time she chronicled all the sailors' stories. Some of the Liverpool sailors would return to the port, time after time, and she recorded everything they had to say. Some were almost always corroborated by others, while others were rarely corroborated by anyone. If someone told her a particularly unbelievable tale she would hunt down as many sailors as she could who were going to just that place and make sure that they would write her a letter about what it was like when they got back. Sometimes she would sneak them a drink or two for the service, but those whose stories disagreed with the others were never given free drinks again.
As time went on she made a rather large collection of notebooks. While waitressing at a bar a wealthy man came in, ordered the most expensive Spanish wine and boasted that he would be filthy rich by the end of the year, as he was going to the New World, to a city of gold, where he would take back all he could. She laughed and told him that the stories of Utopia, the city which has gold and doesn't want it, weren't true. He laughed too at the idea of a waitress telling him what to do. However, when he returned six months later he decided to go back to that bar.
When the rich man returned he brought with him a local Jesuit who was gathering other Jesuits to sail over to the New World in order to preach the Gospels to the people who live there. They asked the waitress a lot of questions and requested her journals. She refused to give or sell the journals but did (for a small fee) copy out all the notes they wanted on what the locals wore, how they spoke and everything else which might come in useful. The Jesuits thanked her and six months later they returned to confirm that nearly everything she said was true. They added a substantial amount to what she had written with all manner of details on the local venomous snakes, giant spiders and Coyotl-dogs.
Within three years she had enough resources to write a book and even several people to study things for her. Occasionally she would still talk with sailors, and correct them on their tales or mistakes. They would say to her that she hadn't been there, and hadn't seen the place, so they should listen when they told her of the cities made of gold or the cyclopes. But she never did.
Then one day, a strange new story came to her attention. The dragons had returned. Different people had claimed to have found the footsteps of great dragons. Many claimed to have seen them flying in the distance. Some even claimed to have spoken with the dragons in perfect English (though those sailors were always a little bit off-in-the-head). The stories were largely consistent, but the troubling thing was - any time she sent out one of her own people to check up on the story they would come back empty-handed. The sailors who would talk of dragons fobbed off the complained quickly, saying 'They just don't know how to see dragon-tracks', or 'Their eyes are damaged'. They would sometimes even bring back slabs of clay with misshapen footprints in them, claiming that it could only be the foot of a dragon. Still, she was unconvinced.
Soon after, the Jesuits too began to look for the dragons. Funding shifted - she was no longer getting paid by all of the gospel preachers, as many went to those who spoke of the exciting dragons. Tensions mounted between the two groups, and soon people started to die on foolish errands to the tops of mountains from where reports came of great dragons with golden eggs.
In the end, the people abandoned her books. The missionaries and curious book-buyers all found dragons far better than her stories of snakes or the strange languages of the dark-skinned peoples of the New World. And finally she returned to waitressing, though after that she never enjoyed speaking with sailors about the things they had seen across the ocean.