Triumph Over Tragedy: an anthology for the victims of Hurricane Sandy

by R. T. Kaelin

  “Not very good at obeying orders, is she?” Kor grumbled.

  Ali gazed down at the girl. “We’ve found nothing,” he said. “The island is deserted. We’re merely returning to our previous course.”

  “Thank the gods,” she said, very much relieved. She didn’t notice as Ali fixed his eyes on Doran and gave a slight nod.

  The healer immediately went over to Makachiko. “Princess,” he said, “allow me to show you back to your cabin.” He bowed deferentially and gave her a very winning smile. “After all the excitement earlier, you should try to rest. Physician’s orders.”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “I am feeling rather fatigued.”

  “Perhaps a draught to calm your nerves, then.”

  “Yes,” she replied. “Perhaps.” The two of them returned to her cabin in the forecastle.

  Rina and Lia snickered.

  “Enough of that,” the captain said. Then, addressing the rest of the crew, he added, “All of you stay on your toes. Something strange is going on here, and I don’t want anyone relaxing until we reach the Isles of Sunrii.”

  “But, Captain,” an older seaman protested, “that’s two weeks sail away!”

  “The captain knows that!” Kor barked.

  Ali put a steady hand on the half-ogre’s elbow. “Aye, it’s a long sail,” the captain said, “and we’ve just finished a difficult mission and battle as well. However, our fatigue is the very reason we need to keep sharp watch.”

  “I will devise suitable shift rotations,” Sarifa told the crew.

  Ali nodded to her. “If we all keep our heads and stay wary,” he said, “we’ll get through this situation—whatever it turns out to be. Now, back to your tasks, all of you.”

  “And remember,” Kor boomed, “keep your eyes peeled!” He used his huge fingers to pry his poison green eyes wide open.

  The crew nodded and left the rail to go back to their regular duties.

  Riana and Lilani Coralshell paused long enough to grin at the Starcutter’s first mate. “Could you repeat that, Kor?” Lia asked playfully. “Yes,” Rina added, “I’m not sure the princess and Doran could hear you in her cabin.”

  They laughed and turned away. The half-ogre reddened and his eyes turned a dangerous shade of yellow as he watched them go. The Coralshell sisters took no notice.

  “One day,” Kor muttered, “I’m gonna murder those girls.”

  “Not on my ship,” Ali said.

  Kor look startled. “Did I say that aloud?” he asked.

  Ali laughed and even Sarifa cracked a smile.

  Just then, the ship sailed around the point and into view of the far side of the island. Standing next to Ali on the bridge, Sarifa froze.

  “What is it?” Ali asked quietly. He followed her keen gaze through the gathering gloom toward the isle’s rocky shore.

  “Wreckage,” the siren announced, “scattered amid the rocks. I hadn’t noticed it when I flew past before.”

  Kor strained his eyes. “I can hardly see it now.”

  “She’s right,” Ali said. “And look there…sharks!” He pointed toward a half-dozen red-tipped fins darting among the bobbing bits of wreckage.

  “And there as well,” Sarifa said, pointing further out to the darkening sea.

  “Captain!” Toshi called down from the mast top. “Bodies! Bodies floating among the waves!”

  She pointed in the same direction that Sarifa and Ali were looking.

  The commotion brought most of the crew back to the rail. They murmured nervously as the ship sailed through the corpses.

  Kor watched as a well-dressed carcass drifted past the stern. “Well, I’ll be harpooned,” he said. “That one looks more like a groom than a sailor!”

  “He is a groom,” Sarifa said. “See? The wedding kerchief is still knotted around his dead wrist.”

  “That don’t make sense,” Kor said.

  “Unless he died before the ceremony was finished,” Sarifa suggested. Her voice was soft and cold.

  Kor shook his head. “It’s powerful bad magic that can drag a man from his new bride before the wedding night! Captain, we should…”

  He looked at Ali, but the Starcutter’s master had gone suddenly pale.

  “Powerful magic,” Ali said, “or a powerful wave.”

  “What do you mean, Captain?” Kor asked.

  Ali cast his eyes over the darkening, wreckage-strewn sea, watching the sharks as they sliced purposefully among the breakers. “It was that same wave that shook the Starcutter,” the captain said. “A very long time ago, someone told me such a tale, on an island I visited during my youth. The people there spoke of a legendary wave that rose from the deep and washed over their entire island. Only the fishers who were at sea in their boats survived.”

  “That sounds more myth than reality,” Sarifa said.

  “I thought so, too,” Ali agreed. “Yet, the whole island insisted on the truth of the tale. They swore it on the watery graves of their ancestors. And they had proof as well…the wreckage of an ancient galley, lodged halfway up a mountainside.”

  “Gods of Wrath and Mercy!” Kor gasped.

  “That’s what the islanders thought, too,” Ali said. “They said their land shook with the fury of the gods before the wave came.”

  Sarifa watched stoically as a redfin shark circled a body floating nearby. “What could simple fishers like these have done to arouse the wrath of a god?” she asked.

  “The gods are gods!” Kor said. “They don’t need any reason to be roused!”

  “Not everything in the wide World Sea is caused by gods,” Ali said. “Some evils are done by people, and others just happen. That’s the way of things. Sometimes a wave is just a wave.”

  Sarifa set her deep blue eyes on the captain. “And yet,” she said, “something about this wave continues to worry you—even though it’s passed us by and left us unharmed.”

  “Yes,” Ali said, taking a deep breath. “I’m wondering how far a wave like that might travel.”

  “I pray to the gods that we never find out!” Kor blurted.

  As night fell, they sailed cautiously through the wreckage, but they saw no sign of life among the flotsam and jetsam. The crew remained taciturn and largely silent. Even the former pirates among them had no wish to loot from the bodies of the floating dead. As the first rings of the moon peeked above the starry horizon, the scoured island and its grizzly sights disappeared from view—though not from memory.

  “I’m glad the princess was spared that sight,” Kor confided to Ali.

  “I thought you didn’t like her,” the captain replied jovially.

  “Well, I don’t,” Kor shot back. “But no one should have to look on such a thing—not even me.”

  Polishing the Starcutter’s rail nearby, the Coralshell sisters chuckled. Kor glared at the girls, which only made them laugh more.

  As night deepened, the crew kept careful watch and worked on chores, to dull the worry of the watching.

  After the moon climbed from her watery bed, Princess Makachiko ventured from her berth to see the stars. Whispers of the floating corpses still circulated among the crew, but the princess either didn’t hear the gossip or chose to ignore it. Doran appeared at the same time, and stood beside the princess at the rail for a while.

  The physician spoke quietly to Ali about the progress of the ship’s wounded. Then he flirted briefly with the Coralshell sisters before returning to his duties below deck.

  Sarifa flew patrols by moonlight, but found no sign of life on the previously inhabited rocky islets nearby. “The war god himself could hardly have depopulated those isles more effectively,” she told the captain.

  Ali nodded grimly and ordered her below deck to rest. Exhausted from the day’s trials, the siren warrior didn’t object.

  The captain set watches according to the order Sarifa had determined. The Starcutter’s most reliable crewmembers were assigned to head the shifts, which meant separating the Coralshell
sisters. Neither Rina nor Lia seemed to mind.

  Kor would be piloting the ship during the night’s last watch, so he was among the first assigned to sleep. Ali tended the wheel as the moon arced overhead. The Princess Makachiko stayed close to him while she remained on deck. She made polite conversation, but Ali sensed uneasiness beneath her careful words. Clearly as hard as this day had been on the crew, it had—in some ways—been even harder on the princess. After a few hours, she bade the captain good night and retired to her cabin.

  Just before midnight, Ali turned the wheel over to Riana Coralshell.

  The Starcutter’s captain returned to his cabin below the bridge and settled into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed of pirates, and monster waves, and the dark eyes of an Acacian princess he’d once met.

  Raucous shouts and the clang of weapons woke Ali from his slumber.

  Cursing, he grabbed his sword and dashed onto the deck.

  “Captain, watch out!” Lilani called as he came through the cabin door.

  Ali ducked aside, allowing a thrown dagger to sail over his head and imbed itself in the door, near his left ear.

  Fighting swirled on the deck of the ship, as Ali’s crew clashed with a band of ragged-looking pirates. Lia stood in her night skirt, bare-breasted, defending the ship’s central hatch from the intruders. Clearly the attack had roused her from a sound sleep, just as it had woken Ali.

  Her lack of attire didn’t slow Lilani down, though. She parried and slashed with all the force of her Sisterhood training. Rina battled on the aft deck above her sister, trying to protect the wheel from a pirate intent on seizing it. These brigands, like the ones they’d fought when rescuing the princess, wore the devices of the Purple Tern. Only a handful of the Starcutter’s crew was on deck, helping to fight the violet-clad buccaneers.

  Ali picked the nearest intruder and lunged. The pirate, who had been trying to sneak up on another crew member, sensed the attack at the last moment. He turned, and the captain’s sword passed harmlessly under his arm.

  Ali had expected that and, with his left hand, he clouted the brigand on the jaw. The pirate fell like a sack of dead fish. Ali stepped over him to engage the next brigand.

  That one spun and faced the captain with a double-bladed boat hook. The weapon was rusty and ill-kept, clearly not from the Starcutter. The pirate stabbed the hook’s point at Ali’s midsection. Ali whirled inside the thrust and ran his sword through the man’s belly. The pirate collapsed and Ali moved on.

  Just then, the midship hatch opened and Kor and Sarifa emerged. It took the half-ogre and the siren only a moment to assess the situation.

  “About time you two woke up!” Lia quipped.

  The siren and the half-ogre smiled and waded into the battle.

  Inside of two minutes all but four of the remaining pirates lay dead; the survivors threw down their weapons and surrendered.

  “Please!” one of them, a ratty one-eyed sailor shouted. “We beg quarter!”

  Lilani kicked the man to his knees. Kor did the same for the pirate’s three comrades. “Pray our captain feels more generous than I do,” Lia said. She wiped the blood from a long, shallow cut on her left arm. The kneeling brigands gazed around the ship nervously, pleading with their eyes.

  Ali took a moment to evaluate the situation. Lia wasn’t the only crew member bleeding, but no one seemed seriously injured; twelve pirate bodies littered his freshly-swabbed deck. Ali frowned and wondered why the brigands had tried to take his ship with such a small band of men.

  “Go aloft,” he ordered Sarifa. “Make sure there are no more of these cutthroats roaming nearby.”

  The siren nodded and took to the air.

  Ali turned angrily to Rina. “It was your watch,” he said. “How did this happen?”

  The elder Coralshell sister stood straight and tall, ignoring the gore covering her lithe form; clearly, none of the blood belonged to her. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she replied. “Chaka went to the head. When he didn’t report back after a few minutes, I ordered Sallah to look for him. As I did, the pirates swarmed aboard.”

  Ali looked around but saw no sign of Chaka. He seized the one-eyed man by the shirt and shook him. “What did you do to my man?” he bellowed.

  “M-mercy, Captain!” the pirate cried. “We didn’t have no choice! Our ship was hit broadside by a monstrous wave! It floundered and we didn’t have nowhere to go! We had to try and take your ship!”

  “We had to kill him!” blurted another. He was quickly punched in the gut by his comrades before he could say more.

  Ali’s eyes blazed in the darkness. He clenched his bloody sword tightly in his fist. Murder blazed in his hazel eyes.

  At that moment, Sarifa touched down beside him. “There’s a ship about a half league away,” she said. “It’s a Purple Tern pirate vessel, indigo painted and rigged. Her masts are broken and she’s heeled over to one side. Only her bridge and aftercastle remain above water. I’m not surprised our lookouts didn’t spot her.”

  “There’s a longboat roped to our port bow,” Lia reported, returning from that quarter of the ship. “They must have rowed up silently and pulled Chaka overboard. He didn’t stand a chance, Captain.” She looked as though she’d be happy to slay the captured pirates herself.

  “The night-camouflaged pirate ship doesn’t excuse my error, Captain,” Rina put in. “This ambush happened on my watch. I will accept your judgment.”

  Ali looked angrily from the blood-caked sailor to the desperate handful of pirates kneeling on his deck. When he turned back to Rina once more, his demeanor softened. “Chaka should have seen them,” the captain said, “even if he was using the head. That was his quarter of the ship. Too bad his carelessness cost his life.”

  As the captain turned to the pirates once more, Doran appeared on deck to tend the Starcutter’s wounded. Makachiko’s face poked cautiously out of the door to her cabin. Ali noticed the princess, but said nothing.

  “Please, Captain,” the one-eyed pirate repeated. “We had no choice!”

  “You could have asked for mercy before attacking,” Ali said coldly. “Though you are pirates, I might even have granted it.”

  Rina and Lia nodded sternly and the rest of the Starcutter crew rumbled agreement.

  “Put them off the ship,” Ali commanded. “And sink their boat—so they can’t ambush any other passing ship.”

  “With pleasure,” Kor said.

  “You can’t, Captain!” cried the youngest pirate, a ratty looking girl barely in her majority. “It’s inhuman! Our ship is all but sunk! We’ll die!”

  “You should have thought of that before you killed my man,” Ali replied.

  He turned his back on the captives and walked over to the princess. As he went, Kor seized the prisoners one by one and cast them far over the side. The pirates pleaded for mercy as they splashed in the night-dark waters. None aboard the Starcutter heeded them. Lia and Rina quickly sank the pirates’ longboat.

  “Seen enough, Princess?” Ali asked grimly.

  Though she seemed frightened, Makachiko’s eyes remained cold. “More than enough,” she replied and then returned to her cabin.

  Ali took the wheel once more and steered them away from the wreck of the Purple Tern ship. The cries of the pirates grew ever more faint and distant. The Starcutter crew ignored the pleas, but no one slept again that night.

  * *** *

  Morning dawned hot and brazen over the placid sea. The wind blew barely enough to keep Ali’s sleek caravel moving. No sign remained of either the pirates or the ship they’d left behind. The captain conducted a brief funeral service for their lost shipmate. Crew members who had known Chaka spoke kindly of him and cursed the shipwrecked pirates who had cut short his life.

  The princess said nothing. Chaka had been the first sailor to lose his life during the mission to rescue her; she kept her head bowed respectfully throughout the eulogy.

  More islands appeared as the Starcutter sailed toward the core of the Blue
Kingdoms. Every one of the small isles had been scoured clean by the great wave, just like the unfortunate island they’d passed the previous evening. No island they spotted that morning showed any signs of remaining human habitation.

  The continuing devastation began to wear on the crew. They went about their duties carefully, but their eyes often wandered to the blasted keys nearby.

  “Could we be the only people left in this part of the isles?” Toshi wondered aloud.

  “What are you worried about?” Kor asked her. “You H’Leng-Ru can’t drown.”

  The captain shot his first mate a stern look. “Toshi’s people could still be battered to death or crushed by such a wave,” Ali said, “and their shoreline villages would suffer in any case.”

  “I meant no disrespect,” Kor replied, half to the captain and half to the young lookout. “It’s just that the H’Leng-Ru people make their homes a long way from these parts. That plague of a wave couldn’t have run that far. There’s other lands, other folks, as aren’t so lucky.” He cast his baleful gaze across the rest of the crew, working nervously on deck.

  “The wave has to diminish as it goes,” Toshi said. “Doesn’t it, Captain?”

  Ali nodded grimly. “I pray to Allah it does, my little flying fish.”

  As they continued sailing, the effects of the wave did seem to lessen. The islands ahead of the Starcutter became merely battered and crushed, not scoured clean. Still, the power of the monstrous surge remained so great that no human life survived on the islets the ship passed.

  On mid-morning of the third day, they came in sight of larger islands—spits of land that were more than just a few snapped trees clinging to the remnants of rock or reef.

  “Captain!” Toshi called down from the mast top. “The island off the starboard bow! I see people!”

  Ali set the heading and gave the wheel to Kor. The captain fetched his spyglass from its case nearby, and went to the rail. Those of the crew who were otherwise unoccupied followed, as did Princess Makachiko, who had been pacing the deck at the time. As one, the crew of the Starcutter peered across the ocean.

  A mountainous island, steep-sided and rocky, loomed up before them. Once, green jungles had covered the landscape from the mountaintop to the pink sand beach at the island’s base. Now, the bottom half off the mountain had been wiped nearly clean. Giant trees lay snapped and toppled like matchsticks across the mountainside. Shattered logs tumbled in the breakers at the isle’s shoreline. Further down the shore, a ruined breakwater protected what must have once been a fine, small harbor with a fishing town at the mountain’s base. Now only the ruined stumps of homes and the broken teeth of a stout wharf lined the bay shore.