by Roland Green
At dawn the next day they were clear of the Delta and heading north down the Bay of Istar. The southern stretch of it was hardly wider than the river, but it rapidly widened until by noon they were out of sight of land from the deck. Pirvan was willing to take the word of The Mariner’s Almanak about the features of the shore, rather than climb up the mainmast again with a spyglass to see them for himself.
Toward nightfall they took in sail, as the wind was rising and confused, and lumpy waves were making Golden Cup sway clumsily, rather like an owlbear trying to do a Plainsman fertility dance. Gusts seemed to be coming in from all directions, and Pirvan saw Kurulus frowning as he watched the sails alternately fill hard as a breastplate, then flap like empty sacks.
“Oh, it’s not as bad as it could be, and it’s not likely to get that bad at this time of year,” the mate said. “The most of the storms come up from the southwest, and if we have the searoom we can tack right out of the gulf into the open sea faster than we could without the storm.”
“What about storms from other directions?”
Pirvan had heard sailors describe “tacking” for many years, but understood it hardly better than he understood Tarothin’s magic. He knew that it allowed a properly equipped ship to sail without the wind blowing from directly astern, but how it was translated into the movements of the ship’s three tree-tall masts and six broad sails, Pirvan did not pretend to know.
“I’d just as soon you kept this to yourself,” Kurulus said. “If we’ve searoom and nothing carries away, we can beat about in the middle of the gulf until the blow passes. Otherwise, we might be needing to put in at Karthay, no good thing, or face even worse.”
Pirvan did not ask about the “even worse,” because he suspected he knew what it was. He had never been in a shipwreck but knew some who had; he preferred not to join their ranks.
As for Karthay, the mate’s expression was that of a man who can be persuaded to answer but would rather not. Again, Pirvan suspected the answer. In his profession, the affairs of the mighty were of only moderate interest, and he had little need to know where Istar’s rule was real and where it sat very lightly. Karthay and its outlying ports were among those where Istarians walked softly and in pairs-and because without Istar’s fleet, Karthay would command the larger city’s sea routes to the rest of Krynn, it was a matter of no small moment.
Pirvan walked to the railing and made a small rite to Habbakuk to avert really dangerous weather-one did not ask him for gentle breezes and smooth seas, thereby implying that one lacked both courage and sea legs. Then he looked forward and aft along the deck, and took some consolation from the view.
Golden Cup was a hundred and forty feet from prow to stern, with the bowsprit jutting out another forty feet beyond the prow. The ship carried one sail on the bowsprit, two square sails on the foremast, two on the mainmast, and a single large triangular sail on the mizzen. Forward and aft, one deck was piled on another, like miniature castles, and even amidships, where the hull was lower, the railings (“bulwarks” was the name he’d heard) were solid wood and higher than a man, the hatchways massive structures with covers bolted on and tarred canvas lashed down.
This construction, so he’d heard, was mostly intended to make the ship proof against pirates. They could hardly climb aboard at bow and stern, and if they came over the railings and amidships, the defenders could rain arrows on them until they were as dead as the deck planking. Also, the high bow and stern would stay above the waves, which could wash over and through the bulwarks amidships without harm unless the hatch covers gave way.
This would have consoled Pirvan more if he had not talked with men who’d swum away from a ship whose hatches had caved in from the battering of a storm. They’d barely made it to shore, and seen most of their shipmates drowned or taken by something in the water they did not care to describe.
* * * * *
At dawn the next day, the sun illuminated mountain ranges of clouds to the south and west. Higher up to the south rode more clouds, as dark as a flight of black dragons. The wind had risen further, but it seemed to have steadied to almost due south. Golden Cup was throwing up rainbows from its bow wave and a millrace from its wake as the sails caught the wind.
Pirvan was walking back from the bow, where he’d been talking with Grimsoar, when he encountered Haimya. She wore a mate’s garb with her own boots and an expression that defied anyone to comment on the greenish pallor of her face.
The way the breeze whipped her hair about her face did more in that cause, to Pirvan’s way of thinking. He knew that he could find it hard to remember that she was betrothed if he did not make the effort.
“Good day, Haimya,” he said.
“To you likewise, Pirvan. I expected to find you aloft, admiring the sea.”
Pirvan looked at the masthead, swaying through a moderate portion of a circle, and shuddered. “The sea will do well or ill, whether I am watching it or not.”
“You don’t think we are in danger?”
Asking that question was a large admission of being like other folk than he had expected to hear from the warrior-maid, this side of her deathbed. He tried to be both truthful and reassuring.
“I believe it takes much worse weather than this to affect a ship of this size.”
He thought the moan of the wind and the hiss of water alongside would conceal minor flaws in his speech. A moment later, he had cause to think again.
“And how many voyages have you made, Pirvan the Sailor?” She’d mustered from somewhere the will to quirk up one corner of her mouth.
“This is my first real one.”
She thrust out a hand. “Very well. Let us seal a bargain. Whichever one of us sees land first after the ship goes down, she guides the other to it.”
Pirvan was torn between smiling at her determination and his distaste for words of ill omen. He wondered if Tarothin had any weather spells, and if so, whether he could be persuaded to use them.
“You can swim?”
“It’s one of the few things I knew from girlhood. My father thought it doomed my hopes of marriage. My mother knew I was not much inclined that way, and said I should be good at as many things as I wished. ‘Man or woman who is good at nothing,’ she said, ‘is hapless, hopeless, and helpless.’ ”
Pirvan nodded, looking upward again. His eyes were not on the rigging, however. They were looking inward, at a picture of Haimya swimming-a pleasant picture even if she garbed herself, for wet clothes clung tightly.…
A faint laugh broke off suddenly in a choking sound. Pirvan looked about the deck to see Haimya thrusting her head and shoulders over the railing. Her torso heaved and twisted for a moment. When she drew herself back, water dripped from her face and her hair was plastered down her cheeks and forehead.
Silently, Pirvan hoped that the weather would grow no worse, or if it did, that Haimya would have no urgent duties until it quieted.
* * * * *
Pirvan’s hopes were disappointed.
Toward late afternoon, the high, dark clouds swept forward and turned black, then swelled and seemed to burst. A howling wind swept across the sea, churning up the waves into gray hillocks. Rain and spray swept across the deck, turning the planks as slick as the surface of a glacier.
The sail on the bowsprit and the triangular mizzensail had long since been taken in and the yards double-lashed. Now men struggled aloft to take in the topsails on the fore- and mainmasts. Pirvan watched from the aftercastle, though he had offered to go aloft.
“No place for even the best climber if he doesn’t know the way of a wet sail,” Kurulus told him firmly. “You’ve duties to Lady Eskaia, more, I wager, than you’ve told me. You splatter on the deck or go over the side, the lady’ll have my blood.”
Pirvan didn’t like the hint in those words, but he also knew that the mate would have been better spoken if he’d been less worried. Golden Cup was in no easy circumstances; the faces of the men going aloft said as much. The fair-skinned ones
were many of them as green as Haimya; the darker ones looked as if they were forcing themselves to climb the rigging rather than hang over the railings.
One man did go off the main topsail yard, and in this gale there was no hope of picking him up. But he struck the mainyard on the way down, and fell bonelessly limp and probably already dead into the sea, spared the ordeal of drowning alone as his ship sailed on.
The remaining sails kept the ship manageable until after nightfall. Pirvan had gone to his cabin and was beginning to drowse in spite of the motion of the ship and the uproar of the storm, when it happened.
A shout, then several, then a scream. Wood cracked thunderously. Another shout: “All hands on deck!” Then even more thunder, drowning out the gale and sounding like some great tree falling.
Pirvan had been out of his bunk at the cry of “All hands on deck!” As he flung open his cabin door, he felt the deck under his bare feet taking up a new motion. Then it tilted, farther than it ever had, sending him slamming backward against the wall. For a terrible moment he thought the ship would never come back, and that he and everyone belowdecks faced gurgling out their lives as the ship sank.
Then the deck began to level out, with more shouts from above, cracking and creaking of wood, and screams from the cabins. The deck tilted as far the other way as it had the first way, and this time flung Pirvan forward. He would have slammed into the opposite wall if something both soft and solid hadn’t broken his fall.
He struggled clear of his companion and discovered that it was Haimya, clad in a loinguard that covered no more than his did, with a sword in her hand. He noted that she offered no unpleasant surprises unclad, then gripped the nearest handhold as the ship began another roll.
“Haimya, I think it’s something in the ship, not pirates. If you go out on deck, you’ll need both hands.”
She looked at her sword, then at herself. “Perhaps more than that,” she said, and in the dimness he could have sworn that she was blushing. Then she vanished toward her cabin as Pirvan lunged out on to the deck, lurching back and forth as the ship did the same under his feet.
He kept his balance and his sea legs alike until he reached the deck. Then two steps outside, and a foaming wall of water reached his chest and swept him off his feet. Something told him not to trust the bulwarks to catch him, and as his head went under, he spread arms and legs wide.
A foot caught on something solid enough to hold him until the wave receded. Then he found a rope almost hitting him in the face and clutched it with both hands. He didn’t know whether it was a shroud, a stay, a line, or a dragon’s tail; sailors’ fancy terms didn’t matter as long as it kept him aboard and alive.
He survived three waves before he saw the problem. The foremast had snapped off a man’s height above the deck. In falling, it hadn’t quite cleared the ship, but flattened a long stretch of the bulwarks to starboard. Now every time the ship rolled, waves boiled in through the gap.
Already sailors were hacking at the wreckage, some holding on with one hand and working with the other, others tied to the ship and trusting to their safety lines. Other less lucky ones were struggling on the deck, or, knocked senselsss, washing back and forth in the surge of incoming waves and the rolling of the ship.
Pirvan saw one of the unconscious men wash overboard before his eyes. He also saw that the rope he held would let him reach most of the deck. He tied it around his waist and began methodically following the senseless men. He had little knowledge of even nonmagical healing, but a man who didn’t slide overboard and drown might live to be healed by someone more skilled.
One by one he overtook them. He lost count of how many, and he cursed gods and men alike when a wave snatched one of them out of his hands and overboard. Other waves slammed him against protrusions from the deck, or wreckage against him, or him and the man he was trying to save together. He knew he was bruised all over and bleeding in at least one place, but ignored that until he heard a wild cry from above.
Even then, he kept crawling about the deck in search of more men to snatch from the sea, until someone shouted in his ear.
“The mast’s free. Get back below and be tended to, you fool!”
It was Grimsoar One-Eye. Pirvan looked up. His friend recognized him and shrugged, then said, “So be it. You’re not a fool. You still look as if you’d been wrestling sea trolls.”
By now, Pirvan’s exalted mood had worn off and he’d begun to feel the same way. He gripped Grimsoar’s arm, and with his help rose uncertainly to his feet.
“You said the mast’s cut away?”
“Gone, and a man with it. It won’t pound any holes in the hull now. We’re safe until we fetch up on the Gallows Reefs. This ship’s too stout to founder, but she can’t survive the rocks.”
“What else can we do?”
“Besides pray, you mean? I’ve heard a mate say we’ve a chance to make the Flower Rocks, but how much I don’t know.”
Pirvan had never heard of the Flower Rocks, but they sounded like a place where you had to work hard to be saved. This meant more wrestling with the sea in a few hours or a few days.
And that meant doing what Grimsoar suggested.
* * * * *
Prayers must have reached at least some well-disposed gods; they were still afloat and off the Flower Rocks at dawn. Or so Pirvan heard someone say.
He was on the main deck, too low to see anything more than a ship’s length away through the spray and the murk. All he saw was the length of anchor chain in his hands, and the sailors of the hauling party ahead of and behind him.
The Flower Rocks, he had learned, were a series of rocky mounts with deep water close inshore on all sides, enough for the largest ship men could conceive. Prudent seafarers some centuries before had sunk stout iron and stone mooring posts (“bollards” or some such word) into the rocks on all four sides. A ship that could moor to a set of bollards could ride out most gales in the lee of the rocks. Sometimes the lee of the rocks alone cut the wind enough to let a ship anchor safely.
Anchoring was the plan for Golden Cup, as its captain seemed not to wish the ship too close to the rocks themselves. The main bow anchor was ready to let go, but the light chain on the stern anchor would never survive this blow.
The Mate of the Hold and her gang had broken out a heavier chain from below. Now all available hands had turned to, for hauling the chain aft and securing it to the anchor.
“We’ll be letting both go together,” Kurulus had told Pirvan. “Riding on one anchor in this sea, we lose chain, anchor, and most chance of staying off the rocks even if it holds for a bit.”
What would happen if the anchor didn’t hold, needed no explanation. The ship’s motion had thrown Pirvan out of his bunk three times, until between the lingering pain from his half-healing, fresh bruises, and the heaving deck, he gave up trying to sleep.
Tarothin slept through everything, strapped into his bunk and with most of his possessions wedging him in even more tightly, with more straps around the bags and boxes. Pirvan had suggested that it might not be easy to leave his bunk quickly if it became necessary; he had not forgotten the wizard’s reply.
“If we strike or founder, it’s hardly going to matter how fast I go anywhere. I can’t swim a stroke, and I don’t command any spell that will let me breathe underwater long enough to walk to shore.”
Pirvan held his tongue after that.
Now he held his tongue because he needed every breath in his body for hauling on the anchor chain. Even if he had not, the sight of the waves would have left him speechless.
The ship no longer seemed to be taking solid water over the main deck. But on either side the waves leaped up, white crested, like an endless pack of wolves howling around a great stag. The stag still stood tall, but how long could this last before the wolves dragged it down?
Pirvan shivered from more than the cold, then saw that the hauler ahead of him was now Haimya.
“Haimya!” he shouted, above the moan of the
wind. “Are you a shapechanger now?”
“Eh?”
“Never mind. How fares your lady?”
“She said that one of us ought to join this work.”
“You say-”
“I insisted on going instead of her.”
“Your lady has more courage than sense, and more sense than strength.”
He did not add that the same could be said of Haimya. Her face was no longer greenish, but it was still pale and set. It was as though a long and wasting fever had just broken, leaving her well but weak.
How long they hauled before the stern anchor was ready to lower, Pirvan never knew. He remembered only a moment when he realized that the wind had dropped, and even spray no longer blew over the deck. Then came a second moment, when he realized that Haimya had turned to Grimsoar One-Eye.
The big man was hauling with a will, but his single eye seemed aimed at the sky.
“Now what’s wrong?”
Pirvan knew he sounded petulant, but he was tired. He found distasteful, to say the least, the possibility of safety being snatched from them at the last moment.
“I don’t like this lull,” Grimsoar said. The wind was so mild now that he could make Pirvan hear him without raising his voice much above a whisper.
“It could be the end of the storm,” Pirvan said.
“Maybe. Maybe also just the eye, or even a sign the wind’s about to shift.”
Pirvan did not need to ask for the details of that last danger, or wish to contemplate them. With the wind from any direction but the south, they had rocky lee shores far too close to give them much hope of surviving if the storm lasted beyond a few more hours.
At some time while Pirvan was considering this, the trumpets blew for the anchoring party and someone led Pirvan aside. Another someone pushed a cup of hot tarberry tea laced with brandy into his hands.
It was only after the third swallow that he realized that the hands holding the tray were white, clean, and lavishly ringed.