by As The Shore To The Tides, So Blood Calls To Blood (html)
“They know, brother.” He nodded at Santos, who drew a godsblood pendant out of his shirt and pressed it into my hand. The ruddy stone warmed against my palm.
“We are waiting for you to fulfill your promise. To open the way to the god’s embrace to us,” Ostred said, tossing his oiled cloak off his shoulder to open his shirt. When Santos pushed the grip of his blade into my other palm, I jerked back my hand as if burned.
I searched my brother’s face, not understanding until something he’d said came back to me. Then I’m a child again, the knife in my hand too heavy as I watch Mama and Papa anoint Ossie. All around us stood our family of cutthroats, drunkards, and thieves, all adopted from the back-alleys of Bloodport. All eyes watch me until with a shudder, the floating town is rammed by Jemmites.
“All this?” I gestured around us. “For a story told to children?”
Ostred’s response to my questions was a glance at his crew.
God’s black blood, how would he ever see the truth of things? I tried to say something, anything, but I couldn’t coax any words out of my mouth. I snapped it shut just as the lookout raised the alarm.
“Crowding sails!”
Far to stern, the enemy ship crested with all sails up and taut as they caught wind ahead of the storm. Gathering speed, it skimmed across the waves, prow cutting the dark waters into a froth. The sky rumbled a warning.
Ostred was already shouting orders over the thunder, and the crew of The Sea’s Promise turned the ship’s lateen sails ahead of the storm winds. They rippled a moment, then pulled tight, and the ship groaned like an ox led by its nose. We rolled as we turned away from our pursuers and headed farther out to sea.
Ostred broke from shouting orders to stand before me, baring his chest again. He drew his stiletto and dimpled the skin over his heart with its point. He took my free hand and placed it on the hilt, his eyes pleading until he barked, “Save us, brother!”
The enemy was gaining on us, and all eyes turned to me, expecting me to—what? Plunge a blade into the heart of the person who knew how best to sail the ship? I flinched as the wind swirled past me, but underneath its shriek was a low basso rumble that I felt shiver through my bones. I wanted to believe it was thunder, but it sounded like a voice the size of the world moaning in wordless pain, making the very air tremble around us.
“Chinto—” Ostred bellowed. He gesticulated at Santos. “Hold him!”
Santos’s whistle pierced the chaos. He was answered by two of the helmsmen. I took one look at their scowling faces and tried to run—only to be jerked short by my rope. They tackled me, pinning me to the deck no matter how much I kicked or thrashed.
“If you won’t do what’s needed, then another shall take your place.” Ostred’s expression was wild with fury. “Fate does not abide inaction, Chinto.”
Behind him, Santos drew his sword. I knew what came next.
“I’m your brother,” I said. The pendant, forgotten until now, blazed in my fist as I struggled against the many hands holding me down. “You’re choosing them over me?”
“The god requires blood,” Ostred said for all to hear and was answered by a ragged cheer of “the Fallen rise!” Then, he knelt by my side and bent to kiss me on both cheeks, speaking for my ears only. “Trying to escape it will only make someone else visit your fate upon you.” He shrugged. “Forgive me, brother.”
“No.” I choked as rain and seawater trickled into my nose, my open mouth. Too late. Ostred was already standing, bellowing orders to his crew. I ground my teeth, and the godsblood was a searing coal aflame in my fist. I twisted and thrashed, held under again and again by strong hands. Nothing to do but wait for the inevitable.
“No,” I growled, wanting to make my brother hear me. Santos loomed over me, blade raised, and the old anger stirred inside me, uncoiled.
A blinding flash of lightning lit up the sky. I squeezed my eyes shut against it, but burned against my eyelids was a glimpse of something enormous flying out of the air towards us.
It looked like a hand.
A hand that dwarfed The Sea’s Promise, huge the way the voice I’d heard on the wind sounded. As vast as Ostred and I used the imagine the god as children and hide because we thought he was angry at us for leaving him down there at the bottom of the sea.
Opening my eyes, I saw it for what it truly was. Engulfed in flames, the Jemmite ship smashed through the crest of the nearest wave, masts blazing like torches, and hurtled down the face of the swell, prow aimed at us. The lookout yelped a warning. By then, it was too late.
The blow landed amidships. The crack of our keel splintering was loud enough to rival the thunder. The Sea’s Promise listed, held afloat by the enemy ship driven into its hull. The sea washed over both vessels, sweeping their crews off the deck and out to sea. Their faint screams were snatched up and shredded by the wind. If not for the rope lashing me to the ship, I would have suffered the same fate.
My brother’s hand closed around my ankle. I thought about kicking it off with my free foot but noticed Santos’s sword in my brother’s gut. Instead, I reached down and pulled him into my lap, cursing myself all the while. I looped my rope under his arms to shift the load and held him.
“I’m not leaving you, brother,” I said. With everything that had happened I didn’t want to die alone, even if my only company was a monster like my brother, more the fool I. “How did it come to this?”
“They did this—” Ostred raised a trembling finger, pointing at the enemy’s ship, and gulped. “To us.”
Ostred’s blood washed across the deck, the waves lapping it up, and we passed into the eye of the storm. I stroked my brother’s cold brow as we drifted on calm seas under a darkling sky. He stirred, coughing up a dribble of blood, raising one limp hand to pluck at the pitted black iron of the blade.
“Your fate—” He wheezed, swallowing blood. “Brother.”
I don’t know how much time I held him like that, but he was carved from gray ice when I realized he’d left me behind again. Cursing him, I let him go, and he slid into the water without a ripple.
By and by, lashed to the wreckage of my brother’s ship, I drifted beyond the edges of the map. The pale bodies of the dead trailed in my wake as I came upon the god’s resting place.
From the edges of the great vortex, I gazed upon the body of the god, vast as a nation, impaled upon a spur of rock big as Mount Ajh at the bottom of the sea. Bodies without number squirmed over his, rendered insignificant. Around him, countless spires and scaffolds with ropes fanned out like intricate webs, some looped around his bulk. Vast numbers of people climbed the spur of rock protruding from the god’s torso, swinging hammers and chipping away at the stone. The vortex drew me into its maw, and the ships groaned around me.
Even before my blood began to sing, I knew what I would see.
The god turned his gaze, hollow as an old hurt, upon me, and a shock of recognition shuddered through me like a blow. I knew his face, had seen it reflected in the curve of every bottle and at the bottom of every cup. All those years spent running away, to escape this moment, all wasted, futile as trying to get away from my own reflection. When he stretched out his hand, beckoning, I knew I had to go with him. The slow tolling of his heart filled the ache I’d always known, an answer to something I’d long ago forgotten.
We were two parts of a whole, like father to son, brother to brother, shore to the tide. Across his vast expanse, a thousand thousand hands welcomed me and nestled me into the hollow kept for me. He and I joined like hands clasped in prayer, and I shed my everyday fears like an old skin.
I was come into the god’s embrace; we were one and I was pleased.
High, thin pleas reached my ears, cries of anger rippled through the multitudes joined together into my body, and I urged the fallen to at last rise. As I slid off the blunted spur of rock, a pang of regret fleeted through me. Visions of the drowned world returned, but our people had drunk deep of bitter waters long enough to be prepared. I stro
de across the sea, chasing the waters ahead of me to reclaim all the lands and wash them clean of their oppressors, for is it not just that blood calls for blood?
© Copyright 2020 Karlo Yeager Rodríguez