by Glen Cook
Just as Thomas returned, flying fish began skipping across the sea. Tipsword judged their numbers and the length of their jumps, Shouted, "Ship the nets! Forget the fish! Bring them in!"
It wasn't necessary to tell the cleaners and salters to clear the decks. Every man able began pitching fish over the side. New signals rose to the main; hornmen stood by.
The sea began boiling two hundred meters off the port bow. "Cut it!" Tipsword thundered at the netmen. "Now! Move it!" Men shuddered. A good seine costs hundreds of manhours to make. But; if they were lucky, they could come about and recover it later. Bladders made of brunwhal stomachs would keep it afloat. Someone began wielding an ax. The trouble horns screamed across the water. Nearby ships became furious with activity.
"Hard right rudder!" Tipsword ordered. "Stand by to shift sail."
The rigging boys were already aloft.
Rifkin's Dream was the long-dead shipbuilder Rifkin's attempt to combine the best of two types of rigging in one of the fleet's largest vessels. She was square-rigged on her forward and top-main-masts, schooner-rigged on her main and mizzen. Sharp course changes could result in mass confusion.
There was little of that this time. Everyone was too frightened to make a mistake.
"Oh!" said Rickli. Nothing else would come.
"Jesus," said the Shipwrecked Earthman, softly. "What the hell is it?"
"Grossfenaja. The deepdarkdevil."
Rifkin's Dream slowly heeled over as her rudder took hold and she took the wind on her beam. Her stern slid sideways toward the thing rising from the deep. The nearest seining ship winded its own horns and cut its net lines too.
A shout from the masthead directed their attention forward. Half a kilometer ahead, another one was rising. Then another, off the port quarter.
"Never heard of anything dike this!" Rickli shouted, the nearest beast was still surfacing, more and more tentacles slapping water, some reaching for Rifkin's Dream. Dymon Tipsword shouted for the younger boys to get below.
"Must have been the earthquake," Hakim muttered. "Christ! Another one."
The main body of the nearest broke water. It was over sixty meters long and serpentine, like a fat Midgard serpent whose tail had turned into a kraken. The head was at the end opposite the main mass of tentacles, with just two five-meter Fenaja-type limbs nearby.
Regaining his composure, Rickli said, "Any of the other old monsters I would've believed, but this...."
The creature writhed in an effort to direct its head toward the ship, but it seemed Tipsword had acted in time and the vessel would slip away.
"Sandweg!" the forward lookout cried. A moment later he hurtled into the sea as the vessel plowed into a dense young stand, the tops of which hadn't yet broken water. The bows rose high, Rifkins Dream shuddered, then lurched forward as her momentum snapped or uprooted the plants.
But she hadn't enough way on to carry her through. Her stern and rudder hung up. In moments she was dead in the water.
"Battle stations!" Tipsword bellowed. "You boys below, see if she's sprung any leaks. Spearsong, get a boat over. Winchmen, stand by to kedge her. Thomas, get coals from the galley."
Hakim ran. Rickli, trying to stay out of the way, wondered how their puny weapons, even fire, could stave off the predator. He glanced at the rest of the fleet. No help there. Panic and confusion were the supreme admirals of the moment. And running for shallower water seemed no real solution. The creature that had surfaced immediately ahead was already dragging itself through water just four meters deep. Speed seemed the only escape.
He noted a racked harpoon with an ornate grip of brunwhal ivory. His own, that the crew had given him when he had been Left Hand Sea Terror, best chaser spritman in the fleet. He hobbled over and exchanged it for his cane. There was comfort in the familiar grip. He would die with his old companion in hand.
The decks and tops seemed utter chaos, yet the frenetic activity had its purposes. But for the thing bearing down, it might have been the last moment before an ordinary Fenaja fight. There had been more panic and confusion at LaFata. Rickli stayed out of the way, gradually drifted forward.
The sword, ax, and harpoon men all seemed so young, just boys. Where were the longbeards, the grizzled old men who had manned the rail at LaFata? Dead, of course. Still there, consigned to the deep. Not many had been as lucky as he. Half this crew had transferred aboard after that battle.
"Jesus," he murmured, borrowing from the Shipwrecked Earthman. The thing's head was scarred with a mouth large enough to take a man or Fenaja at a gulp. Twenty meters from Dream, it plunged beneath the water, torpedoing into the sandweg wrack left by the ship's passage. Rickli shouted a warning to Spearsong, but too late. The head rose and destroyed the longboat with a single snap of huge jaws. The fore-tentacles snatched men from the water. The thing's rear smashed into the port side. The vessel jumped, shook, groaned in protest. Everyone went tumbling. Rigging boys rained from above, smashing into deck or sea with terrified screams. Rickli lost the harpoon. Tipsword thunderously ordered everyone back to the rail. Then a tentacle whipped over and snatched him away from the wheel. He went , over the side, into the sea, hacking with a rare metal sword.
Though they numbered only twenty and were no thicker than a man's arm, the monster's rear tentacles seemed to fall in a deadly rain. Against them harpoons were useless. The sword and ax men managed to damage a few, but the beast seemed oblivious to pain. Its head reared high to starboard and observed critically while its tail worked murder to port.
Dead men speckled the sea.
Tentacles began reaching through hatches and snaking out the boys below. Terrified, pathetic screams echoed below decks.
Rickli suddenly understood that they were fighting the wrong end. Its normal prey probably never realized that. He tried to tell someone, but with Dymon gone there was no one to make them listen. He glanced to starboard. The creature was casually nibbling on a boatman. He bent, picked up a harpoon, cast it.
His knee betrayed him. He collapsed on bloody sand, almost cried when the harpoon whispered past the thing's trunk, a meter below his target. He had to get closer.
It had to be out the bowsprit. From nowhere else could he be certain of being close enough to overcome his knee. He grabbed another harpoon and started.
There wasn't much thought in the journey, that seemed an endless pilgrimage to keep a rendezvous with death. There was pain such as he hadn't known since the Fenaja harpoon had struck. Tentacles whipped about with Rickli Manlove seemingly their special target. One seized him round the bad knee, pulled and squeezed, but fate placed a levelheaded ax-man nearby. He went on, crawling, dragging the reinjured leg. Something had gone in the knee. He had heard and felt it.
Three meters out the bowsprit, he collapsed, unable to go on.
Salt spray stung his eyes. Or was it tears? Failed again.... He wasn't sure where he was, on a chaser racing after the humping brown back of a brunwhal, or lying half-dead after LaFata.... His will returned. Then his strength. Just enough. He made it to the leadsman's platform, dragged himself upright, gripped his harpoon, threw.
And sagged in defeat. Low again. It buried itself deep, but a meter below the huge yellow eye for which he had aimed.
"Rickli! Rickli Manlove!" The Earthman's curious, harshly accented voice seemed to come from years and kilometers away. Slowly, he turned.
The Earthman stood at the foot of the bowsprit, harpoon in one hand, his talisman in the other. A tentacle had him round the waist.
Rickli reached a futile hand....
The Earthman put the harpoon in the air. It slapped his palm.
He felt familiar ivory, the old, comfortable grip of his high years.
He turned. He aimed. He cast.
He collapsed, but only after he had seen his old companion buried gripdeep in the yellow eye.
Rickli lay unconscious for days. He came round to find Rifkin's Dream, with help from other ships, trying to keep afloat during repairs to her hull
and rigging. Some vessels worked the beast's remains. Masts crowded the battle site. Through them he could see a similar cluster in the distance.
The Shipwrecked Earthman lay beside him, drugged, his waist a mass of ripped skin and ugly bruises. His guts must have been churned good. His talisman remained gripped in his left hand. "Good afternoon, Captain." "Ilyana Wildhaber. What're you doing here?"
"Keeping this tub off the bottom." She was captain of Replete, a repair and stores vessel, "It's a jinx."
"Have Weatherhead change our station."
"There'll be changes. This made LaFata look like a christening party." "Tell me."
"There were six of them. Several ships weren't as lucky as Dream. Three were dragged into the deep. Six more went down in the shallows. Two we'll re-float. Most everyone got involved."
"Guess there'll be work for a crippled sailmaker, then." Rickli's greatest fear was that the crew would vote him supernumerary, a fear that had begun while the Fenaja harpoon still quivered in his knee. No such vote had been taken in living memory, even against incorrigibles, but Rickli felt he was a child of fate. A malevolent fate. "Didn't you hear? You're captain now."
"No."
"Yes. They voted. You'll replace Dymon. If you live." Rickli at last found the nerve to look down. "A one-legged man?"
She shrugged. "Got to go. You lie still, don't get it infected. They'd take it off at the neck next time." Rickli stared at the battered masts and rigging, pondering the odd course of fate. A harpoon man in good condition grew old in his job, usually perishing when age tricked him into fatal error. But as a sailmaker who could fight, he had with one cast of a harpoon won the hearts of a crew. Such as it might be. His elevation might be a mockery. Losses had been heavy when he had made his throw.
Rifkin's Dream did not weigh anchor for six weeks and then moved only a kilometer. Rickli and the Earthman were both off their backs but not in good health. Hakim couldn't handle solid food, Rickli drilled his crew mercilessly, trying to meld a scattering of veterans and dozens of transfers into a new ship's company. "What do you think?" he asked the Earthman one day. 'They'll cope. They always do.
Why worry?"
"I want them to look sharp. We're going on pilgrimage."
"Landing?" The Shipwrecked Earthman had never visited the site of Man's first touchdown on Quiet Sea. During his tenure individual ships or squadrons had felt the need and made the hadj, but Rifkin's Dream had sailed on, remaining with the fleet as it crawled from bank to bank. It had been twenty-five years since the vessel had gone. "The whole fleet. We need the luck. Two disasters in one year.... It's time."
Landing's special significance hadn't attained religious standing, but some superstition had attached itself, encouraged by the augurs. To maintain their birthluck, all Children of the Sky were encouraged to visit the Ship every few years.
The reason, the Earthman had suggested, was so the augurs at the Ship could gather information from scattered sources, collate it, and disseminate it again.
The Earthman, Rickli reflected, had a lot of strange ideas about the Children of the Sky. He supposed that was the alien viewpoint. Whatever, Thomas was eager to reach Landing.
If anything, the encounter with Grossfenaja had ripened and mellowed their relationship. The Earthman now shared more of his alien thoughts.
While crossing the Finneran Bank, the traditional boundary between seas well-known and the frontier waters the fleet generally cruised, just a week's fast sail from Landing, Rickli said, "Thomas, you've never told us why you're here. Something must've brought you."
The sun had set an hour before. The bright jewels of the galaxy winked down as they began their migration toward dawn. Rifkin's Dream had settled into the long, lonely silence of night, whispering and creaking to herself, but telling few stories to listening ears. The passage of ships excited bioluminescent plankton in the shallows, scrawling pale stripes across the quiet sea. Hakim stared at the stars, at the constellation the sea people called the Spiderfish, for a long time.
"I don't know, Rickli," he said at last. "Why does a man leave home? I thought I knew then. Somehow, from here, it doesn't seem all that important."
"Was it so wicked a thing?" Rickli knew he had touched a nerve with the initial question. When Thomas stayed awake to watch the Spiderfish, he was feeling homesick. That much Rickli knew for sure about the Earthman.
Hakim frowned to him, his expression barely visible in the starlight. Afraid he had overstepped, Rickli turned to survey the running lights of nearby ships. Night sailing could be tricky.
"Some thought so. You wouldn't comprehend. The survival imperatives are different. Here, you all live in the same environment and culture." He pointed upward. "There's a fleet, the greatest of them all. Every ship is as far from its neighbor as we are from any of them. Some are big, some small, some strong, some weak. Like the fishes of the sea. Here, there're warm shallows where the living is easy and the fish get along, then the cold deeps, and in them things that get hungry, that sometimes surface, like Grossfenaja...."
Rickli wasn't sure he followed, unless the Earthman meant that some of his people preyed on others. "You mean like the pirate ship in the Saga of Wilga Stonecipher?"
"Eh? Oh. Yes, I suppose so. In any case, men Outside sometimes go after other men the way chasers pursue brunwhal."
He went silent, continued staring at the Spiderfish.
Rickli knew he had pushed as far as he dared, yet couldn't resist asking, "Would you go back now? If you had the chance?"
Hakim studied him a moment, looked back to the sky, said nothing. Rickli shrugged, surveyed the fleet again.
Thomas had been thinking about it, he knew. The man couldn't help it, no more than he could help thinking about serving in chasers, despite LaFata. The Earthman man was crippled too. It just wasn't anything as obvious as a missing kg. Perhaps it could be called a broken heartline home.
Landing, for those who had never seen it, appeared on the horizon as the most outstanding anomaly of the sea, a great hump rising from the water like the back of some mythologically huge brunwhal
"That's the Ship," Rickli told the Shipwrecked Earthman, when the thing finally became visible from helm level. Excited crewmen had been scampering up and down the rigging for hours. But not Hakim. He had a positive terror of heights.
"Strange, for a man who flew between the stars.”
"Jesus, how'd they bring her down in one piece?"
"They didn't, really." Rickli scanned the fleet. By now, every vessel had hoisted at least one black sail. Some looked like the dark birds of death Hakim had called them. The chaser crews were getting impatient, waiting for Weatherhead's permission to begin their race to the ancient wreck. "That's why we're still here."
The Vessel had been built at the close of Old Earth's Twenty-second Century, equipped with crude hyper generators, to take out certain political favorites before an anticipated collapse of civilization. Almost two kilometers long, she had never been meant to enter atmosphere. Rickli was unsure of the circumstances that had brought her to, and had forced her landing upon, Quiet Sea. Only the augurs knew. He cared only that it had been managed and that his ancestors had survived.
Thomas cared, mostly from curiosity, but could get no more from Rickli.
"Ask the augurs when we get there," Manlove kept telling him. "They'll spend a month talking to anyone willing to listen."
He thought he understood Thomas's interest. The Ship was the nearest a connection Outside as existed on Quiet Sea. A hopeless, centuries-out-of-date connection, but certainly something more concrete than shared species-hood.
Outsiders, judging by Hakim, set great store by artifacts and possessions. The Earthman still, at times, mourned some small item lost when his ship had been looted. Rickli had spread the word among the captains, but little had turned up. Everything convertible had long since been made into something useful.
Weatherhead released the chasers. With a strong following breeze they were s
oon dwindling in their race to the hump.
"You really miss it that much?”, the Earthman asked.
Rickli smiled. "It shows? I think it's just not being able, It was my life, you know."
"I understand." Thomas glanced at the sky. "Those old-timers had guts. People out there nowadays, in their shoes, would just give up."
"It was a chosen crew. They knew they couldn't go back before they started.".
"A definite advantage. None of us can, but few of us realize it." After a pause: "You know, I think what I miss most, more than land, is birds. They were always a symbol of freedom." His expression became faraway. Rickli reached out and, for an instant, let his hand rest lightly on the Earthman's shoulder.
Thomas had told him a dozen times that his fellows would not be coming to rescue him. They had had no idea where to look.
It was almost dark when Rifkin’s Dream dropped her stone anchors. In the morning she would move to one of the stone quays whiskering the dry land the Children of the Sky had built around their Ship.
"Seems to me," said the Earthman, gazing at the island that had taken centuries to create, "that it would've been easier to poulder. More land for less fill."
Rickli had to have it explained. Thomas told him about dikes and sub-sealevel land recovery.
"Suggest it to the augurs. They might be interested."
"I'm not sure I want to go anymore." Hakim nervously caressed his talisman. Since his narrow escape, he had kept it with him always.
Rickli smiled. Of course he would go, just as he himself would visit a chaser if invited. Every man tried to mend his heartlines.
"They've made a lot of headway since I was here last," Rickli said the following morning, as Rifkin's Dream warped in to a low stone pier. "They've doubled the land area. They didn't used to work that hard at it."