by Tanith Lee
Drokler got to his feet.
“Continue with your food, gentlemen.”
Simultaneously, Rom’s Daughter tilted on her side in a horrifying yet almost frivolous movement. There came from every quarter of the ship the sound of unsecured things rattling and cascading. One of the great candle wheels, flung sideways with enormous force, struck Drokler on the temple with a sick, dull clash. The ship lord collapsed across the board without a sound. The two junior officers, who had risen with him, gave vent to cursing. One ran for the surgeon and left the door flapping on the crow blackness outside.
Yannul and the remaining officer eased Drokler on to the floor. He was breathing thickly, but otherwise looked quite dead. The officer made a clumsy religious sign to one of the many rough and uncaring sea elementals of the Zakorians.
Yannul got up.
“Look for me later,” he muttered as he passed Raldnor, “I’m about to give our dinner to the sea.”
The water-rushing, intangible darkness of the deck enveloped him. Raldnor moved out into it and passed the surgeon in the doorway, a man with swimming eyes and a look of terror ill-concealed on his face. It was not good to lose a captain while at sea, for the Zakorians carried their own factions and wars with them on their ships. Lightning speared the deck. Raldnor saw the livid shapes scurrying about the sail, and the yellow spindrift cast up from the oars below.
The oars.
Jurl still had them row, then, even against this. And yet, what hope could there be now, other than to ride the tempest out? Besides which, the hatches would be taking in the sea with every lurch of the waves, and there would soon be broken ribs or worse among the rowers, administered by bucking oar poles.
Raldnor swung aside and through the narrow, low aperture leading to the below-decks rowers’ station.
The dismal, gloomy, stinking dark of the place was accentuated by the odor of fear and the flickering lanterns smoking from the damp. There came the hiss of the ocean— already the lower positions were awash—and the creak of the iron-bladed oars and of men’s cracking sinews. Jurl sat on the master’s platform, spume spurling at his feet, relentlessly drumming the oars’ beat, his face an ugly, carven, immovable mask. He had a look of Ryhgon. Certainly he was of Ryhgon’s breed. Raldnor took a breath of hate from the fetid air and shouted: “Lay in, oar’s master! She’s drinking the sea.”
Without turning or faltering in his beat, Jurl spat through his teeth: “Empty your damned guts somewhere else, Dortharian. We run to Saardos.”
Raldnor sensed men straining to hear him even as they strained at the oars.
“Lay in, Jurl, and close the hatches before you sink this ship or kill half your oarsmen.”
“I’ll take no orders from you, you mewling bitch-birth. Get out before I break your back.”
Rorn’s Daughter seemed suddenly to spin beneath them. There came a cacophony of impossible thunder, and gouts of white water burst through the hatches, splintering them like broken glass. Men, up to their necks in the water, screamed and dropped their oars, which veered and struck others from behind. The compelling rhythm fell apart.
Raldnor leaped to Jurl and hit him in the ribs, then seizing the beater’s hammer, struck him between neck and shoulder with a blow suited to his bulk. Across the confused cries and shouting, Raldnor roared for them to draw in the oars and secure the hatches. Presently he went down into the chaos and pulled with them. These rowers were paid men—only war fleets or pirates used slaves—and therefore had none of the hypnotized discipline of helpless chattels. He sensed them on the verge of panic-stricken mutiny and formed them into a baling chain before it took them. A man’s voice called from the back.
“The wind’ll blow us beyond Saardos into the sea of hell—we’ll fall into Aarl!”
“Stories for women and children,” Raldnor shouted back. “Do we have someone’s wench down here, passing for a man?”
There was some crude laughter and no further complaints after that. He had learned what Zakorians feared the most, and it was not death.
When they had cleared the galley levels of water, he left them to Elon’s orders, and took Jurl over his back to the oars master’s quarters near the stern.
The fury of the storm seemed to be lessening. Rifts had appeared in the cloud mass, though the sea tossed them up and down like a ball. It had gulped men and supplies from the deck and left them, in barter, a host of flopping sea creatures.
He found Yannul with a paper face in the tower.
“Perhaps my sacrifice did us good,” he muttered. “Oh, to be in Lan, where the hills are blue and, above all, motionless.”
Overhead the sea had shattered the window, and glass and broken plates floated on the inch or so of water on the tower’s floor.
Elon came in from the deck and said: “Is the surgeon still here? I’ve some men with smashed bones.”
The surgeon came quickly and went out. Drokler had no further need of him, being dead.
• • •
The sea lay down and seemed to smoke. The smoke formed a gray twilight that crept coiling on the deck. They baled and slung off the water, and cooked the dead fish on damp fires to replace the provisions the sea had taken.
“Sir, it was good of you to help us,” Elon said to Raldnor. “With Drokler dead, it will be a serious business getting her to Saardos.”
“Jurl will cause you trouble, then?”
“Oh, indeed, yes. And he doesn’t like to fall asleep across his oars. I warn you to be on your guard, sir, while you continue to ride Rorn’s Daughter.”
“My thanks for the warning. But we’re only a day out, aren’t we?”
“No longer,” Elon said. “The storm blew us off our course, and how widely this fog holds, only the gods know.”
Later, the gray thickened and became a swathe of black velvet wrapped about the ship. No moon, no star pierced the velour curtain.
A woman came with fish and a flagon of wine. Yannul, now much recovered, kept her through the night.
All next day they drifted through the fog. It was a silent ghost world. Shapes emerged from it resembling galleys, mountains, or great birds, all melting before impact, folding in on themselves in charcoal subsidences.
In the polished metal that served as mirror, Raldnor saw how the gray tinge had invaded his hair. For a while it would mimic the hair of any of the crew, that pale black common to the sailor. It was the salt in the winds. Soon the salt would scour out the last of the black dye, and there would be no replacing it from the broken bottle he had found among his things after the storm. He would be then naked among his enemies, a yellow-haired man, a Lowlander: Plains scum. Yet curiously, in the regions of the fog, none of this seemed greatly to matter. He, like the ship, was adrift without compass or sight of land. There being no remedy, there seemed also no great distress.
Men lowered the body of Drokler into the iron water. The short, harsh Zakorian prayer was spoken. He sank like lead, for weights had been put in his boots to make his going hasty.
About an hour after this makeshift burial, the insubstantial prison around them began to break up. Inside an hour the waves were empty of anything but themselves and the night.
Not a trace of land in any direction could be seen. Such instruments as the ship had owned to divine her position, had been lost. The night had provided neither stars nor any moon.
A slight wind moved Rom’s Daughter.
Toward midnight the watch horn sounded. Ahead and to larboard there was a red flickering on the horizon.
“By Zarduk, the beacons of Saardos!” one of the officers cried out. A cheer went up. They had all feared some kind of disaster, adrift in the ghost world.
The wind was against them, blowing for the west, so they set down where they were to wait for morning. There were beer casks breached and emptied. Raldnor saw Jurl drinking in the shadow of the kin
g mast—that peculiar and specific drinking which showed neither pleasure nor intoxication. His rowers would take them into Saardos tomorrow, and no doubt he would drive them hard.
Saardos. And after Saardos, the Plains. Raldnor thought of it in the dark of his cabin. And somewhere in the dark there came to him a sense of incompleteness—this ending was altogether too provident. It was an intimation of destiny which he neither knew nor answered.
• • •
Dawn woke him, a dawn like the cinders of a rose. Also a sound that had no place in a man’s dreams.
Yannul still slept, without a girl for once. Above, the levels of the ship creaked and settled. The sound pierced through wood and flesh and bone and exacerbated his ears.
On the deck the ashy crimson light that had squeezed in at the cabin slit below the tower was one great indissoluble wash across the sky and sea. Everything else was black in silhouette—the huge king mast with its slightly bloated sail, the bulk of the tower, the sweeping prow, the groups and huddles of men and women, all quite still, standing gazing out across the water to the scarlet flickering of the horizon, listening. It was a low, unhuman droning note, like some enormous pipe sounding far down in the crust of the world. But it had no definite location—rather it was all around them, ambient as the morning.
One of the women began to wail abruptly, crying of devils in the sea. A big man came hulking from the rail and struck her hard across the face as he passed her.
“Shut your mouth, trull.”
It was Jurl. He made for the galley hatch without a look to either side, his grim, sneering face devoid of any feeling. Somewhere on the deck, Elon’s voice rang out. Men jumped to their work, the women scuttled to ropes. The anchor was drawn up, the sail set. Abruptly the ship lurched into life as the oars below struck water. She began to move, straining, before the slight warm wind, with every semblance of life. Yet she only seemed living. The dawn was stopped still. No sun rose and no darkness fell; only the rosy grayness persisted. And with it the demon’s piping that seemed its vocal expression.
Raldnor stood at the rail.
There came a sudden crack of thunder beneath the sea, which did not surprise him, though his guts turned cold with an automatic fear. The piping ceased. A great roiling turmoil of movement below the ship pitched him down across her deck, as a lightning erupted from the sea. The light grew big, swelling from crimson into savage white. A rain fell on his face and hands and neck, a black burning rain. Men screamed. There came a wind over the ship like the rustling wings of a great bird composed of fire.
He pulled himself up against the rail and stared over the plunging sea.
The ocean was tumultuous with the pangs of birth, but it was a monstrous, a terrifying child: smoldering ebony, the cone stretched up to spit into the sky. Breakers burst in white steam against its molten buttresses. From the gaping mouth spewed lightning and a blazing vomit.
“Mountain of Fire!”
The frenzied cry racked across the deck. It was the legend of Aarl, the burning stacks that rose from the sea—dragons’ mouths belching up pyrotechnic blasts. The Zakorians yelled their horror. They were in hell, and the eternal agony had begun.
Raldnor stumbled back along the deck and pulled wide the doorway in the tower. He tried to shout to them to seek sanctuary inside, but men turned their blanched faces and their blind wide eyes on him and away, their mouths extending cries. A glittering needle hail of embers fell abruptly into their midst. There was a rush for the hatches, and now some came for the tower. They collided, fought and cursed each other at the entry. Beyond their struggling, Raldnor saw the sky split over the sea cone’s maw, and white explosions burst in the water. Rom’s Daughter bucked the length of her body. Men rolled shrieking down the deck, over the rail, into the boiling waves. A plume of fire appeared like a miracle on the sail.
Beneath them all, he felt the motion of the oars stagger to a halt.
The picture came to him, disastrously clear, the panic that had seized them once again in the dark and personal hell of the rowers’ deck. He thrust through the press at the door and at the hatchway and somehow got down into that reeking place. They were in uproar, and there was no beater on the platform. Where Jurl had taken himself was beyond questioning at this time. Raldnor seated himself at the oars master’s station and took up the hammer, as once before. With thunderous strokes he began the rhythm. A half lull came; they were slaves in their own way to that inexorable beat.
“Row!” he shouted at them.
“The ship’s on fire!” a man yelled. Others cried out in unison.
He brought the hammer smashing down.
“Do I use this on the block or on your heads? Put your backs into it, you sniveling fools!”
They cringed and held to their places. He had assumed Jurl’s voice and manner. Almost as one, they snatched back their oars.
A crash came from above, dim screams, the bald flare of fire.
He increased the strokes of the hammer. It was the speed of war he used, for ramming or for flight. He left them no room for their terror.
When the first breath of safety came, he knew by instinct only. Beyond the hatches the ocean was like blood and ink, yet the judderings had left the ship. He slowed their speed, then ceased beating. They sank on their oars like dead men.
He went up the ladder, but the hatch was hard to lift. When he got it open, he found the dead lying across it.
The dead also lay about the deck. The planks were thick with them and with a fluttering violet ash. Little fires trickled here and there; a few men were creeping from cover to deal with them. The sail flamed. Cinders swirled like moths. The air was thick and turgid with smoke.
Behind them now, the volcano was fading in the murk, still a blare of red or white. The distant rumbling filled the sea.
For miles the water was full of burned things. They cast their own human corpses down to join them. This time, there were no prayers.
16.
THE WIND HUMMED IN THE PATCHED SAIL.
“We no longer hold a course,” Elon said. “Our instruments are smashed. The stars indicate we’re far from Alisaar, but their configurations are strange and altogether untrustworthy. Tullut tells me he thinks the dust from the fire mountain distorts the size and pattern of things in the sky. Who can doubt it? Last night the moon was huge, the color of a blue plum. No, we can’t judge our way by star charts.”
“Turn back,” Jurl growled, facing him across Drokler’s table.
“And pass again through the Gates of Fire? We lost half our crew to the storm and the burning mountain, and ten oarsmen. There’d be mutiny if I told them to risk that way again.”
“You’re too soft, too gentle altogether, Elon. They’d mutiny because they know you’d let them. Resign your position to me. We’ll see things settled then.”
“It would seem you resigned your own position to the volcano,” Raldnor said.
Jurl swung about.
“Why does this landsdog sit at council with us?”
“Because, Jurl, he has twice proved himself a better oars master than you,” Elon said.
“Where were you, Jurl, when we passed the fire?” Tullut, the younger of the two officers, cried out.
“Below, about my own business.”
“Saving your worthless, diseased and filthy skin!”
Elon banged on the table top to silence the altercation.
“The wind blows us southeasterly,” he said in a sober and dispassionate voice. “The watch have seen flocks of birds, which should mean land of some sort.”
“There’s no land in these seas.”
“Probably an island, too small to have been charted. Nevertheless, we may hope for fresh water, and perhaps meat. We’ll rest the men there. After that we can decide on what to do with ourselves and our ship.”
• • •
They cut a notch in the door lintel of the tower at each sunset. The sea was exceptionally, searingly blue; sometimes patches like blue fire moved over it. The skies were strange colors by day; at night men made superstitious signs against the amethyst moon, the vitriolic lemon of the stars.
The food, rationed since the storm, began to bear hard on them. No longer were there dinners at Drokler’s table—only the fish stews and dried biscuit common to all.
The burned men lay under awning on the deck, groaning, muttering, weeping; howling for water, the dull-eyed women tending them as best they could. In the predawn gray of the fifth day past the volcano, Raldnor woke from a deadly sleep and, going up on deck, became aware of a peculiar and ominous silence. Not a man cried out, not even a whisper sounded.
Yannul, coming after him, stopped still and said: “Can they all have died?”
“Indeed they can,” a man’s voice said sneeringly, almost with amusement. “With a little help.”
Jurl stepped out from under the awning. He carried his knife flamboyantly, letting them see the blood. A couple of sailors slunk out after him, making less of it.
“You’ve butchered them,” Yannul said. His hand went to his own knife, then fell away uselessly.
“Why let them go on eating our share of rations?” one of Jurl’s men blurted. “They’d’ve died tomorrow—the day after. Better off dead they were.”
“Shut your mouth,” Jurl rapped. “Do we need make apologies to land scum?”
He swung past, his acolytes hurrying after.
Dawn tinged the sea.
Yannul swore in a virulent undertone.
“Will you refuse an extra share of the food?” Raldnor said softly, gazing out at the rim of the sun. “As Jurl’s friend told us, they’d have died anyway, and in great pain. Now they rest, and we eat.”
Yannul turned to stare at him, but in the expanding light a new surprise usurped the first.