The Bar at the Edge of the Sea

by Tom Abrahams

  Across the sea, through sun and shower

  There is a sword of heavenly power

  Its blade honed sharp, its grip is true,

  in the hand of the righteous, its strength glows blue

  Many shall seek, one shall find

  This gift and curse, this fruit and rind.

  Hunt with warning, all who dare

  The course is rough, the challenge unfair.

  Begin heading west and into the storm,

  Where the first of the feats shall quickly form.

  Be wary these beasts for they are not the last,

  To reach the next, you must hold fast.

  Lucius opened his eyes. Zeke and Uriel exchanged glances, though Zeke wasn’t quite sure what she was thinking. She twisted her puckered lips to one side. Zeke remained speechless.

  The hum of the twin engines and the wind filled the silence. Uriel shrugged. She spun in her seat to face the helm. With the heel of her palm, she rotated the wheel as hard to the left as she could. The boat leaned to its port side and changed course.

  “West it is!” she called out over her shoulder.

  Chapter Twelve

  Another bump thudded against the Saladin. Then another. It was a staccato of hits. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump.

  Branch leaned over the railing running along the ship’s starboard side. His eyes focused beneath the water. He started to speak, but his voice caught in his throat.

  The Saladin was above a shallow reef. The ship’s draft was barely thin enough to miss the juts of porous coral, which rose from the bed like colonies of stalagmites. However, it wasn’t the coral that had Branch white-knuckling the rail. It was what swam above it.

  A mass of brown and black flesh writhed and stretched in a serpentine motion. It appeared, at first, like a breathing mass undulating beneath the ocean’s surface. But the beast from Anaxi’s poem wasn’t a single mass. It wasn’t one animal. It was hundreds, and they were swarming.

  There was no other way to describe it. Swarming. In preparation for a hunt.

  In all his years at sea, Branch had never seen anything like this or even heard about it.

  He’d never liked challenges, rites of passage. They were useless, demeaning, and without merit. Nothing good came from them. That was his experience. This was further proof of that belief.

  The mass of what appeared to be giant eels now stretched from the starboard side of the ship, underneath it, and well past its port edge. Each of them was over three meters long and thick as a tree trunk. Their maws stretched and snapped, revealing dagger-sharp teeth. Their brown eyes, rimmed in bright blue, were absent anything other than predatory focus.

  Branch marched, steadying himself as he fought the shifting deck, to the helm. Le Grand eyed his approach. His shaky voice carried a question as much as a statement.

  “Eels?”

  Branch reached the helm and held onto the line that had cut into his palms during the storm. This time he curled his fingers around it in an iron grip.

  Le Grand repeated the obvious. “Giant moray eels? And they’re keeping pace with us. They’re swimming with the ship. I can’t shake them.”

  Branch clenched his jaw. His mind spun, the gears grinding against each other, trying to forge some answer to the problem. People, he could fight. A storm, he could survive. Hundreds of giant eels bent on destroying the ship?

  “I thought the storm was the first feat,” said Le Grand. “Was it? Or is this it? I’m not even sure where we are. The storm, it—”

  “What used to be called the Red Sea,” said Anaxi. “That’s where we are.”

  She sat behind them, cross-legged on a metal crate. The backs of her hands rested on her knees like she was meditating. Impossibly calm.

  Le Grand’s eyes darted from Branch to Anaxi. “Red Sea? It doesn’t look red.”

  She locked eyes with him. “It isn’t red. But blooms of algae would sometimes turn the water from blue to reddish brown.”

  Branch jutted his chin toward the water. “What about the eels? Are they eels?”

  Anaxi nodded. “Giant morays. They’re aggressive and deadly. Much larger than they were before the melt. They’re an alpha predator now. They hunt in packs and—”

  Branch stopped her. “Enough. I get it. How do we stop them?”

  Anaxi said nothing. Instead, she closed her eyes and mumbled to herself. It almost sounded to Branch as if she were humming.

  He clenched his teeth in frustration.

  The eels bumping against the hull was almost a vibration now. It ran through his body, tingling like fingers or hands waking up from having fallen asleep.

  The ship began to rock from side to side. At first, Branch thought he’d lost his balance—that his own equilibrium was at fault—but as other men on the deck struggled to maintain their feet, he knew it was the ship.

  “Do something!” yelled Branch. “They’ll tip us.”

  The back and forth was violent enough now that the Saladin listed far to one side. Two crewmen went overboard, flipping over the railing and into the water. Their screams pierced the air before they gurgled to silence.

  The ship swung sharply back in the other direction. Another of Branch’s men went overboard, but he clung to the railing. Branch left the relative safety of his position beside the helm and hurried to the sailor.

  He couldn’t lose all his men. He needed them.

  Another sharp lean pulled his feet out from under him. He fell back and slid along the sharp angle of the sloppy deck. He tried bracing himself with his hands, but his injuries burned and involuntarily forced him to pull his hands off the planks.

  The soles of Branch’s boots slammed against the gunnel as the sailor he rushed to cried out that something had his leg. Then the man dropped from sight.

  The ship listed so far to the starboard side, Branch could see the roiling ocean almost beneath him. The swarm of eels writhed, the foam of blood dissolving into the blue water.

  Branch slipped, the gravity of the list almost lifting him off his back. But as he felt the beginnings of weightlessness, the swarm forced the ship in the opposite direction. Branch’s body slid headfirst toward the port side.

  Another body hurtled past him. Another sailor on his way to a horrible death.

  “They’re moving too fast!” yelled Le Grand. “I can’t—”

  Branch didn’t hear the rest of Le Grand’s proclamation. His head slammed into the base of the mast pole. The smack rang in his ears. His vision blurred. He felt his body sliding again, wrapping around the pole at first before he moved toward the port gunnel.

  He was going overboard. He knew it. He didn’t have the strength or wits to stop himself.

  More screams rang out. More thunks in the water. More men yelling for help. How many had he lost already? How many were victims of the beast?

  Even through the haze, he could see the ship’s low wall growing larger in his field of view. It raced toward him. And then it didn’t. The ship’s weight shifted underneath him, and he settled long enough to hold on to a large cleat.

  “Hoist now!” Le Grand barked. “It’s working. Hoist. Hoist.”

  Branch’s focus returned, and above him he saw the mainsail lifting skyward, unfurling and billowing taut. It snapped in the wind.

  “That’s it!” yelled Le Grand. “That’s it!”

  With the crook of his arm around the cleat, Branch struggled to his feet. He stumbled two steps toward the starboard side. The Saladin was running now. She was moving faster. The vibration was gone. The thumping against the hull was gone. The screams were gone.

  Branch stumbled toward the helm. Anaxi sat behind Le Grand. Her eyes were closed. Le Grand’s were wide and wild as he worked the wheel.

  “What happened?” Branch asked when he reached the spot next to Le Grand. “What did you do?”

  Le Grand shook his head. “It wasn’t me.”

  He swung around and looked beyond the stern. The roiling mass of deadly eels was a hundred meter
s behind them. Rubbing his eyes, Branch narrowed his focus to be sure. Yes. The mass was in their wake.

  A warm breeze felt good on his body. He plucked his damp shirt from his skin and turned toward Le Grand. He started to ask a question, but Le Grand answered it before he spoke.

  “It was the girl. She saw it before I did. I don’t know how.”

  Branch was confused. “Saw what?”

  “The sails. We’d lowered them for the storm. Then the eels, they happened so fast I didn’t think to raise them. The girl saw it. She told me what to do.”

  Branch watched Anaxi. She held the same position, unmoved. Legs crossed, hands on her knees…calm.

  “Why?” Branch asked, incredulous. “Why didn’t she let the beasts take us? It would have been easy.”

  Anaxi opened her eyes. Her expression was as flat as her voice.

  “I’m not ready to die,” she said. “When I am, you’ll be the first to know.”

  The sea washed against the Saladin, which creaked in protest to the damage she’d suffered in the pair of attacks on her integrity. But the main sails were full, all but the jibs carrying the ship west.

  “What’s next?” Branch asked the girl. “What’s the second feat?”

  “Twenty-nine,” she said, as if that meant something.

  “Twenty-nine what?”

  “Men. You lost a ton of men between the storm and the beast.”

  Branch exchanged a grim look with Le Grand. He considered asking the girl how she knew, but thought better of it. Instead, he asked her where they should head now.

  Anaxi looked to her right. “South.”

  Branch followed her line of sight. “South?”

  She unfolded her legs and stood. “Go south.” Saying nothing else, Anaxi left the helm and disappeared below deck.

  Branch studied the sky. The sun was low on the horizon now, swollen and deep orange. The water reflected the light as much as it absorbed it. The sea was almost glassy now, with the Saladin cutting through the surface like a sword through soft flesh.

  Without arguing, Le Grand eased the Saladin from west to south. Branch lifted his eyes skyward toward the storm clouds behind them. His head hurt. His palms were on fire. The muscles in his sides throbbed.

  Yet, he smiled. He was one step closer. Soon the Kalevanmiekka would be his, as would all the power in the world.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “The melt happened a generation before I was born,” Lucius explained. Uriel had asked him for details about his world. It was strange. As if they’d never been here before.

  “I only know what the elders told me,” he went on. “All our history is oral, you see. I’m sure some of what I know is a warped version of the truth.”

  “The telephone game,” said Uriel. “One person says something. Another passes it along. And so on and so forth. By the time you get to the end of the line, the whole story is different than it was at the beginning.”

  “What’s a telephone?” Lucius asked.

  Uriel’s features corkscrewed. “Really?”

  Lucius studied the woman. She was a walking contradiction. The soft pink bow on her braid contrasted with the shaved sides of her head and pompadour atop. The leather and the tattoos told the story of a hardened woman, yet she appeared as empathetic as the man called Zeke. Still, there was something striking about her, a vulnerability underneath the rough veneer.

  Lucius glanced at Zeke. He was steering the boat, the brim of his cowboy hat waffling in the wind. He could tell Zeke was listening to the conversation even if he was looking forward, guiding the boat west.

  Lucius considered that Zeke and Uriel were a couple. An undeniable chemistry existed between them. Or maybe they were an ex-couple. One wrong move from exploding at each other.

  His attention shifted back to Uriel. “I don’t know what a telephone is,” he said. “We don’t have, whatever that is, I guess.”

  “It’s a communication device,” said Uriel. “Handheld. Can transmit voice over long distances.”

  Lucius rubbed his chin and absently put his hand on his chest. There was the faint memory of pain, as if he expected the spot in his chest below the sternum to ache when touched. He pressed harder. Nothing. No ache. No tenderness. No evidence of a scratch let alone a mortal wound.

  Mortal. He rolled the word around in his head. What was mortality? Was it one phase in a soul’s evolution? Was it one of many tests? Was there no such thing as mortality? Was everyone immortal, destined to live forever in one set of circumstances, one branch of reality or another?

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. It drew him back to the present, to this version of his reality. It was Zeke. The hat was tipped back on his head. His brow knitted.

  “You okay?” asked Zeke. “I mean, all things considered?”

  Lucius wanted to laugh. Or cry. His voice was shaky. “Our fathers and mothers—” Choking on the words, he cleared his throat, sat up straight, and began again. “Our fathers and mothers say the world was once very different. There were billions of people living on wide stretches of land. Some land reached kilometers into the sky. Mountains, they called them. Some land was blanketed in rolling dunes of sand. People called them deserts. No water anywhere. And there were places where the trees and plants were so thick the sun was blocked from the ground. These places were called jungles.”

  Lucius paused and took a deep breath. It was comforting. The salty air smelled and tasted like home.

  “Have you ever heard of mountains?” he asked Zeke. “Deserts? Jungles? Do you know of these places? Did they once exist?”

  Zeke rolled his lips inside his mouth, appearing to consider the question. He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen deserts. And mountains. No jungles though. Where I come from, they’re—”

  “Tell me more about the melt. How did that happen?” Uriel interrupted. She’d moved to the helm and slowed the boat to a putter.

  “It happened when my grandparents were children,” said Lucius. “They didn’t talk much about what happened. Most of those who survived talk about what it was like before the melt, but not the actual melt.”

  Uriel spun in her chair and shot Lucius a dubious side eye. The boat idled. “So you don’t know what happened?”

  Lucius shook his head. “I didn’t say that. I said they didn’t talk much about it. I think it was horrible. The lands sank into the seas. Walls of water flooded everything. The earth shook. Fire came from the sky.”

  “Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes? That’s what you’re talking about?”

  She crossed the short distance to the bench in front of the engine compartment. Plopping down next to Lucius, Uriel leaned into him and tucked her feet up underneath her. She leaned an elbow on the back of the bench and rested her cheek against a closed fist.

  Lucius looked to both sides. He drew his legs together and put his hands in his lap. The world around him constricted. He didn’t enjoy being in the middle. Why were they stopped? Shouldn’t they be moving?

  “Shouldn’t we be moving?” he asked. “Time is critical, isn’t it? We need to find my daughter before it’s too late.” He hoped the impatience in his tone hid the anxiety swelling in his gut, tingling in his fingers and toes, dampening his forehead and neck with sudden blooms of perspiration.

  He stood and turned around to face his guides. Beyond the stern of the Fittipaldi was the larger cruiser crewed by their allies. Unlike them, it moved at a good clip and zipped past them.

  “We’ll catch up to them in a minute,” said Uriel. “Before we get into the middle of this, we need to understand what kind of world this is. How it got this way. What the obstacles are.”

  Lucius glanced at both of them. Behind him, the rumble of the eighty-four-foot Riva Cantata softened. Then Uriel untucked her feet, planted them on the deck, and stepped to Lucius. She was close enough to him that a hint of citrus perfume wafted across him. It was sweet smelling. Her penetrating eyes, almost hypnotic, locked onto his as she spoke.

&
nbsp; “That poem of yours spooked me,” she said. “I don’t like it. Sounds like voodoo stuff. Witchcraft. Whatever. I half expected you to start talking about eye of newt and toe of frog.”

  “Eye of—?”

  Uriel wiggled her fingers like she was sprinkling something into a broth and then waved him off. She shook her head.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Suffice it to say, we’re dealing with legend here. Feats of strength. Odysseys. And I’m not sure why we’re here or what your mission is.”

  Lucius shrugged. He didn’t understand what exactly she meant. Though, she was right that legend was involved. The poems he’d memorized and passed onto his daughter were the map to a magic sword he was never sure even existed. Perhaps only entertainment passed down from elders.

  What did exist were the beliefs and persistence of evil men who sought it. Whether or not the sword existed and could do what legend claimed it could, the threat was real. How could Uriel question that?

  “The mission is to find my daughter,” Lucius said. “I’ve said this. She knows where the Kalevanmiekka is hidden. She knows the challenges any seeker must survive. She’s in danger.”

  “Your daughter knows the poem?” Zeke asked, moving closer.

  A lump caught in Lucius’s throat. He opened his mouth to speak but said nothing. What was there to say?

  There it was. His flaw. His sin.

  He’d left his daughter behind. Rather than give in to Desmond Branch, he’d taken the easy way out. He’d chosen death, and his daughter was left behind to face the pirate on her own. For all he knew, she’d followed his example and was dead already. But then, why was he here? He had to believe she was alive and his return to this world from Pedro’s bar had a reason. Lucius convinced himself he had purpose. Otherwise this was an exercise in futility. It was hell. He refused to accept hell was his eternal destiny.

  Uriel shrugged. “There we have it. Now we know why you washed up at our gin joint. You’ve got issues.”

  The words and the tone jabbed at Lucius, deepening the wound. She sounded like a disappointed parent.