The Warrior's Tale (The Far Kingdoms, Book 2)

by Allan Cole, Chris Bunch

  “Stryker,” I ordered. “Signal Cholla Yi to stand off. They think we’re attacking.”

  “Not in this weather we ain’t,” he said, but shouted for the mate on watch.

  “We’ll try to stay within eyesight of them,” I decided. “When the storm’s over, we’ll approach them again with a single ship.”

  “Signal from Admiral Yi, sir,” the watch mate ordered. “All ships . . . proceed independently. Run SSE before wind. Will reassemble . . . that’s all I can make out, sir.”

  Now there was no time to worry about these foreign ships as the storm closed around us. The air was heavy with spume. The wind had grown into a steady scream. I counted one, two, only three of our ships visible through the murk, then lost them. The Konyans had already vanished into the storm.

  “How’s the glass,” Stryker asked.

  “Still dropping!”

  Stryker swore. He snapped a stream of orders, and working parties fought their way forward along the storming bridge, and put a double reef on the foresail, leaving only a scrap of canvas to steady us. The mainmast and yard were lowered, and I heard Stryker cursing Duban for not bringing it down an hour earlier. I had a moment to wonder whether Klisura’s murder might not punish us further, since it was evident from Stryker’s treatment of the new master he had nowhere near the regard for Duban as he’d had for Klisura.

  I ordered my Guard below. Polillo, who was looking distinctly pale, pulled me aside and swore she’d rather be washed overside than be stifled in her sickness below. I took pity, and ordered her to tie herself to the port rail, and stand by to help the steersman. Stryker had already detailed two men to the tiller, but even they were fighting to hold the ship on its course. I went below and told off Dica and two others to take care of Gamelan in his cabin, and also quietly gave them the harsh order that in the event of complete disaster their lives were less vital than the wizard’s, and they should act accordingly. They understood and took no offense.

  Back on deck, I tied a line around my waist and to the staff, with about ten feet of slack so I could move around the small quarterdeck. Stryker and Duban did the same.

  The winds grew louder still, rising to a howl. The rigging screeched like a cornered bear. Stryker ordered the lookouts in the forepeak below, and we began taking green water over the rails. We had barely gotten the mast down in time — now, anyone venturing down onto the weather deck wouldn’t stand a chance. It didn’t look as if we were on a ship at all, but rather on two square rafts, the foredeck and the quarterdeck, invisibly tied together, drifting through this tempest.

  The strangest thing, though, was something you would never hear from an old sailor’s dockside yarn about great storms — the weather was tropical, muddy. The waves that dashed over us were warm as blood.

  We were running due south, the wind behind us, unable to hold the south-southeast heading Cholla Yi had ordered. A cross-swell hit us from the east, and our ship was pitching, slamming from side to side. Polillo was now at the tiller, and I saw her muscles bulge as she and the tillermen fought to hold our course. The ocean was slate-gray, the shrieking wind blowing the tops off the waves, and streaking the sea itself. It was hard to tell where air stopped and the water began. The winds paused for a moment, and I saw, astern of us, another Orissan galley and then the typhoon closed in.

  The cross-swell was making our ship yaw, and Stryker shouted, close in my ear, we were in peril — we could broach. It was more than the wind, he thought. We were in the grip of an ocean current that drove us along as fast as if we were riding the spring flood down Orissa’s river. We needed to put out a sea anchor. Stryker told me what was needed. I knew where the bosun’s stores were, up forward, and worked my way to a hatchway, waited until there was a space between waves, jerked the hatch open and dropped down the companionway.

  If the deck was hellish, it was worse below. The world, lit only by the dim glow from a handful of small glass deadlights set in the deck above pitched and rolled. The air was as thick as a sauna, and reeked of fear-sweat, dirty bodies, stale bread, mold, vomit and shit. Not everything had been lashed down in time — a mess chest skittered across the deck, and a sailor barely rolled out of its way. Bronze dishes clattered their way from side to side as we rolled, and I felt the crunch of shattered pottery under my bootheels.

  Stryker’s sailors were in every posture imaginable. Some tried yarning with their shipmates, and I wondered if the stories made sense and, if so, who could tell. Some were praying. Some just waited, staring blankly, having tied themselves to a deck stanchion. Some pretended unconcern, and cast lots on a blanket, although I noted no one seemed quite sure of the stakes. But one sailor, an old graybearded man whose name I remembered as Bertulf, topped everyone. He’d slung his hammock from its beams, crawled in, and gone to sleep. He wasn’t shamming. I bent over and heard him snore, and his breath would’ve made a whale’s spout smell sweet.

  My Guardswomen were holding in as good an order as could be expected. Even though I’d never trained them for such a time, there was no signs of panic or disorder. Again, the truth of the old saw that to fight easy you must train hard came. I took Cliges and Ebbo, both nearly as strong as Polillo, and we worked our way forward.

  We were just to the mainmast step when I smelt something. Smoke! A wooden, tarred ship could explode in seconds if fire broke out, and I’d heard tales of ships that’d ironically been destroyed in storms by runaway fire, not water. I saw, or maybe thought I saw, a tiny wisp of smoke. It was near a chest mounted solidly to the deck, and I remembered it contained the cook’s pots.

  I rushed to it, jerked the catch away, and the door opened. Smoke billowed out. Someone shouted fire, and I heard a rush of feet, and a blow, and a shout of “Stop” as panic spread but I paid no attention. I looked about wildly for water, saw nothing, had a moment to realize the irony, then spotted a bucket lashed to a beam, and ripped it from its stays and cast its contents into the chest. Steam billowed, and I heard a hiss over the roar of the wind outside. I nearly vomited. But the jakes bucket did its work, and the smoke was gone, the fire out.

  I spun, looking for the culprit, and spotted him. The cook cowered against a bulkhead. I stepped toward him, and he moved away, holding his hands up as if to ward off a blow. “It was . . . just a bit of punk . . . I didn’t mean . . . I thought it was safe . . . it was so I could start the fire when the wind died . . .” and then both his hands jerked up in the air, as if he were praying, and he collapsed.

  The pillow-nosed sailor named Santh bent and wiped the wet blade of his dagger on the corpse’s smock. He straightened, sheathed his knife, and looked at me. “Someone’s intent on killin’ me, I think it’s on’y fair I do them first.” Santh laughed. “’Sides, th’ bastard couldn’ cook worth fish shit, anyway.”

  I didn’t say anything, but pushed past. We had an entire ship to worry about. Punishing him was Stryker or Ducan’s duty, anyway, since I tried to stay clear of disciplining the sailors, if he’d even committed a crime in their eyes.

  We found our way to the bosun’s storeroom, and, cumbered with the coil of heavy line, went back the way we came, and out on deck.

  I didn’t think it was possible for the storm to worsen, but it had. There was nothing in the universe except our ship, and the storm. I could barely make out the forepeak through the streaming rain. Following Stryker’s orders, we tied the great line in a bight, and lashed it securely to the sternpost. Then we let it stream astern. I could feel the difference almost immediately, as our ship slowed its wild yawing. It did, however, have a nasty snap as each wave rolled past under us, and the sea anchor came taut.

  A great wave loomed up from astern. I had time to grab Cliges, scrabble for a handhold, and saw Ebbo go flat, both hands clinging for life itself to the taffrail, and the wave came down on us. I felt that same swirl and water pulling as I’d known when the volcanoes’ sea-waves took us. But this lasted only for half an eternity, and then was gone. I stumbled to my feet, gave Cliges a h
and up, and then shuddered, as I saw four full feet of the taffrail had been ripped away by the wave. The taffrail . . . and Ebbo! I pulled my way to the side, and peered out. Perhaps, just for a moment, far astern, I saw the white flash of an arm flailing, or perhaps I imagined it. But then there was nothing.

  Duban was beside me. “Mebbe,” he growled, “that’ll give th’ tempest a sacrifice it wants.”

  I almost struck him, but what good would it do? Perhaps he was right. I said a short prayer for my spearwoman Ebbo to Maranonia, and resolved to make sacrifice for her when we returned to Orissa, as I must do for all too many of my women. But there wasn’t time for mourning, as the storm took us again in its grip, shaking us, shaking us, shaking us, as one of my brother’s warehouse terriers worries a rat.

  The storm roared on. The sea anchor helped, but it still wasn’t enough. The ship shuddered as wave after wave cascaded over the main deck, and I wondered how long the hull could take the punishment. I asked Stryker, and he shrugged — who knew?

  We needed something to flatten the seas. I wished yet again Gamelan hadn’t lost his powers — perhaps he could’ve cast a spell to help, maybe surrounding the ship with calm, a placid moon pool. I knew it would take a sorcerer of mighty powers to produce a conjuration that’d stand against this hurricane. I thought, and then it came. Oil. Stryker said we only had a few containers of cooking oil below, and one or two jugs of mineral oil to keep the weaponry from rusting.

  I grinned — this might be easy. One container could easily become many. Just then, in the height of the storm, it came together, if only for a moment. I had a flashing memory from my childhood, of puzzling over strange squiggles that meant something to others but were meaningless ciphers to me, until one day there was a snap, and I could read. Now I had a vision of what Gamelan had been saying about Janos Graycloak’s “single natural force.” If that was true, and I knew it so, there must be many many ways to the same end, as many as the mind of man or demon could produce. Now, as to what I needed . . .

  It was as if there was some bearded pedant in my mind, perhaps one of my brother’s boyhood tutors, except one with real knowledge, saying, “Oil, harrumph, yes. Oil is a liquid, and all liquids share common qualities, do they not? The trick then must be . . . ”

  The trick was easy, and I didn’t need to go below. I grabbed the pannikin that hung next to the scuttlebutt for the steersman, and held it out. In an instant the pouring rain filled it to overflowing. I opened the door to the storage cabinet under the binnacle, and found the small vial that held oil to replenish the compass needle’s bath. Holding myself steady against the ship’s pitching, I uncorked the vial and let a single drop fall into the pannikin.

  The words came swiftly:

  Water listen

  Water hear

  Feel your cousin

  Hold her close

  Let her body be yours

  Breathe together

  You are one

  You are her.

  . . . and the pannikin was full of oil.

  It was equally simple to dump the sand out of the fire buckets, let them fill with water, drop a bit of the oil from the pannikin into the bucket, and then heave the full bucket of oil over the stern. Polillo exerted all of her great strength and held the tiller steady, and the other four of us emptied bucket after bucket overside.

  Emboldened by success, I chanced another spell, telling the men to touch each bucket against the sternpost before dumping it. Again, I chanted:

  From the ship you were born

  Follow your mother

  Follow her close

  Follow her near

  Let none come between.

  I couldn’t tell if this incantation worked. The oil did seem to hang close to the ship’s stern, and follow us as if we were leaking from a great tank, but maybe our suction was just drawing it along. I didn’t think the spell was a complete success, certainly — it wasn’t what I’d envisioned, intending to produce that huge moon pool with us sitting in the middle.

  The second spell’s partial success didn’t matter much. The oil held the seas down, and not nearly as many came crashing aboard, especially from astern. Not that we’d suddenly entered some kind of magical safe harbor. The winds still screeched and the ship snapped back and forth, back and forth.

  There was another problem — when we rolled the ship hesitated for long moments before coming back to normal. Maybe we were taking water in the bilges, maybe we were rolling farther than the craftsman who first carved a model of this galley to build from could dream of. On one such roll I found myself hanging from the port rail, looking almost straight down at Polillo at the tiller. We stayed like that nearly forever, then, reluctantly, the ship groaned and started back. Even with the sea anchor and the oil, we were hard-pressed.

  Time passed. It must’ve been only hours, because I don’t remember darkness. I remember water, and wind, and being slammed back and forth, bruise growing upon bruise. I remember only two things clearly from those long hours: I relieved Polillo at the tiller, as two other sailors took over for the steersmen. Her face was bright red. I thought at first it was merely flushed, but then realized she was bleeding. The wind was strong enough to cut skin like a knife. I ordered her below. She peered blearily, then nodded and made no protest. The other was when a wave lifted us, almost broaching us to and rolling us under, and I thanked Te-Date for the sea anchor. We rolled almost on our beams, and I looked out and nearly screamed. In the trough below was that monstrous Konyan galley, its sail ripped to shreds, mast broken halfway up, and no sign of life on its decks, its tiller lashed hard and unmanned. For a moment, I thought we were going to be cast down on top of it, shattering both ships, but then it was away, invisible in the gale.

  There wasn’t anything then, except the wind and the water and the fear.

  Then we broke into clear, sunny skies.

  “We’re in th’ eye of it now,” I heard Duban shout.

  It should’ve been a calm summer sea, fit for dabbling with a lover in a canoe from the blue sky and bright sun. But it was a maelstrom, as waves battered us from all directions, and the wind whipped through all points of the compass. A flock of gulls were hurled past by the wind and then were gone.

  I saw the Konyan galley once more, rolling and pitching in the seas. Just ahead was the rearing reefs and rocks I knew to be the Giant’s Dice. The current was pulling both of us down to doom. Huge rocks, reefs and stacks jutted from the tossing ocean. Nowhere was there a bit of green or even brown earth to be seen, nothing but bare stone.

  Duban and Stryker shouted for all hands, and the oars were manned, the oarsmen lashed to their benches. Gamelan wanted to come on deck, but I refused to let him, and told Dica to make sure he stayed below. Even with eyes it was all too easy to let your attention slip and the sea take you. Gamelan grumbled, but obeyed.

  Somehow, the mainmast and yard were hoisted, and a small amount of canvas unfurled. It was enough to give us way against the current, and slowly we beat our way out of harm’s way.

  But there was no salvation for the Konyan ship. It was carried relentlessly toward its fate. Of all the islets and reefs that made up the Giants’ Dice, the ones the galley was being drawn to must’ve been the deadliest. Sheer pillars stuck straight up, curved across the ocean like a cupped hand, or better, fangs set in open jaws. There were spaces between these rocks, but certainly not wide enough for even the most skilled captain to pilot a ship through in calm seas. We saw no sign of the three escort vessels, either then or ever, and I guess they must’ve been driven down in the storm.

  Even through the spume-thick air, I could see Konyan sailors on the decks of the galley, trying to jury-rig some sort of storm sail on the mast-stub. Brown canvas showed, and I felt a bit of hope, but seconds later the wind ripped it away. The galley’s oars were manned, but it looked as if the oarsmen were panicked, each oar sweeping to its own rhythm. The ship pitched sideways, nearly broaching, nearly smashing against a rock as large as it
was, but it cleared, brushing past but smashing all of the oars on that side like toothpicks. Now the Konyan ship was completely out of control.

  Polillo, her seasickness forgotten, was beside me. “What can we do?”

  I didn’t know.

  “We can’t just . . . let them die,” she said.

  I looked to Stryker.

  “Captain?”

  He shook his head. “If that bastard was smaller, and the seas calmer, and this gods-cursed current weren’t runnin’ at full ebb, maybe we could work closer, pass them a line and try to tow them out. But . . . hell! There’s nothing!” His eyes moved past me, onto the ship. Now it was very close to the rocks. “Anchor it, you stupid bastards! Get some iron down!”

  It was as if they heard, because I saw tiny figures fighting to derrick out the only anchor I could see that was still on the ship. It dropped, and line ran out, and I had a few seconds to pray for these unknowns before it came taut. The current paid no mind to man’s thread, sending the galley closer to destruction, and I saw the ship give a jerk as the anchor line snapped and whipped across the ship’s deck.

  Then the galley struck. A wave lifted it, and sent it slamming toward that semicircle of rocky teeth. But there were other rocks before them, and the Konyan ship smashed down. They must’ve been just below the waterline, because when the wave receded the ship sat stranded, almost completely out of water, and I could see its bottom planking and ram up forward, carved like some fabulous beast. Then the seas swirled up and over its maindeck.

  “She won’t hang there long,” Stryker said. “That blasted ram’ll break her back in a few minutes.”

  I looked at him, and he stared at me. He began to say something once, then again, then shook his head from side to side.

  On the galley, someone saw us, and then I saw faces turning, and arms waving frantically, pleading for something, anything.