The Highest Tide

by Marian Perera

  She felt as though she’d taken that single breath an hour ago, but before she could swim back to the surface she made out flailing struggles nearby. Hoping desperately that it wasn’t a sailor off Pelican, she lunged down, grabbed a limb and scissor-kicked, towing the man to the surface.

  Her head broke water—air, thank the Unity—and a moment later the man came up as well, gasping. Jason. She might have thanked the Unity for that too, if she hadn’t done the work of rescuing him herself.

  He didn’t look hurt, and the barrelhead was near enough for her to grab. She shoved it at him and he caught the opposite side. He was still panting too hard to speak, but the relief in his face was clear.

  Lera shouted to Nemesis for someone to toss a line to them, but in the chaos no one seemed to hear her and the ship was farther than she had expected. Surely she hadn’t swum that distance from it. Or was it moving away?

  Yes. She shouted again, more hoarsely, but if they heard her, there was no sign. It was clear why the ship was retreating—the crew needed to regroup before they went back for Princeps—but that didn’t help her. She could have tried to swim after the warship—if she managed to take her boots off—but Jason certainly couldn’t. Waving her arm over her head didn’t seem to accomplish anything either.

  Shoving wet hair out of her eyes, she looked around for Kovir’s shark, which was nowhere to be seen. Something else was near enough, though—half of a boat bobbing in the water. She guessed it had come off Pelican, and it was better than nothing.

  “Come on,” she said to Jason, and pushed off the barrelhead, swimming in strong arm-over-arm strokes for the remains of the boat. Since half of it had been smashed away, water sloshed over the broken planks of the hull as she pulled herself up, but a few thwarts were still in place and they would stay afloat. She sat on one and stretched out an arm to Jason as he struggled closer.

  His gaze shifted to something behind her, and his eyes widened. Lera didn’t think. She only acted, pulling her saber in a reflex and twisting around so sharply that muscles twinged in her back. Her right arm thrust out. The blade went straight into the mouth of the man who’d been holding on to the boat’s stern.

  A knife fell from his hand with a splash as his body convulsed. Lera grabbed a fistful of his hair with her left hand to hold his head steady. She wrenched the saber back. It came away, but behind her, she heard a sharp, choked-off sound.

  She turned and froze. Jason still held on to the boat, but another man had risen from the sea behind him, snaking a thick arm around his throat. The smell of burned flesh and hair clung to the man, and the side of his face was roasted from the ear to the bone beneath.

  The agony seemed only to spur him on, though, and his arm tightened. The whites of Jason’s eyes showed. Lera opened her mouth to speak, though she had no idea how to stop the man. She couldn’t attack with Jason between the two of them.

  The fin rose silently, but she caught the movement in her peripheral vision. The shark’s body was nearly invisible beneath the murky water, but the boat rocked as the fin made a swift graceful circuit of it. The burned man had seen it too. His eyes followed the fin as it came back around from behind the boat, a knife carving a circle into the ocean.

  He turned his head to keep the shark in sight, and in the moment he was distracted, his grip loosened. Jason’s head went down, and he sank his teeth into the man’s arm.

  With a stifled cry the man jerked away. Lera had been waiting for that. The saber clanged into the bottom of the boat as her hands shot out, and Jason caught them. She hauled with all her might, just as the shark closed in from the opposite direction. The massive body rose half out of the sea. Jaws closed on the burned man from head to waist, and the shark slammed back into the water, taking the man down and splashing Lera.

  She grabbed the saber again. “You hurt?”

  Jason scrambled as far back from the broken half of the boat as he could and shook his head, panting. Lera kept watching, braced for anyone else to approach, as she waited for the shark to return so it could tow them to Nemesis.

  It didn’t surface. Jason leaned over and picked up something floating in the water—a flat spar of wood, splintered at one end. She supposed he felt better with a weapon of sorts.

  When she looked around again, she went cold. Princeps hadn’t moved, but it had let boats down. They rowed towards Pelican, which was halfway beneath the water. The sails still burned so brightly she thought she could feel their warmth, not that she could have been paid to go any closer. Nemesis was half a mile away and seemed to be intent on putting even more distance between her crew and the battle, so the boats from Princeps would reach them first.

  “Kovir!” she shouted, but there was no response. Maybe the shark hadn’t seen them—or even if it had, Kovir might have other priorities. If Nemesis had lost any men overboard and they were close to drowning, the shark might go after them first. She turned to Jason and held out her hand for the wood. It was the closest thing they had to an oar.

  He gave it to her, but when she started rowing he put a hand on her arm. “Wait. Where are you going?”

  Lera didn’t stop. “We can’t catch up.” She wouldn’t risk taking half-a-boat out into the open water either. “But that island is closer.”

  “I think that’s where the explosives are.”

  She almost dropped the oar. “What?”

  “Take a look at those cliffs. I think the explosives are buried there in such a way that when they’re detonated, they’ll split off part of the island itself. That’s what will cause the tidal wave.”

  “But—but then—” She couldn’t quite get her thoughts to work, let alone her mouth. “Any ship in the way will be capsized.”

  Jason nodded. “We might get a little damp as well.”

  Somehow the typical attempt at a joke helped steady her nerves. She glanced one last time in the direction of Princeps—though her own vessel rode so low in the waves that she could barely see the boats, so they might be closer than she expected—and started rowing again, steadily, towards the island. She didn’t look back.

  “If that’s where he’s hidden the explosives,” she said, “we’ll be safe as long as we stay off the cliffs.”

  “Which you won’t do.”

  “I don’t plan on sitting on my hands until someone finds us, if that’s what you mean.” The oar dipped in and out of the water, but the tide had them too and carried them slowly on. Even if anyone in the boats had spotted them, they’d reach the island first and they’d stand more of a chance on land—a chance to hide, fight back and maybe even find the explosives.

  She decided not to think of what would happen if Alth detonated those first.

  “It’s my turn,” Jason said. It felt wrong to be simply resting while a woman rowed, even if the woman claimed she was better at it and that he was actually performing a valuable service by keeping watch.

  Lera looked reluctant, but relinquished the makeshift oar. Jason shrugged out of his jacket, which was ruined anyway from the seawater, and took a look behind them. Pelican’s prow had slipped beneath the waves completely, the stern rising at an angle, and he heard a long low hiss as a burning sail sank below the waves. A cloud of steam billowed, but through that he saw a man leap from the stern into the sea. He shuddered involuntarily, remembering the shark.

  “They’d die either way.” Lera had clearly followed his line of sight. “When a ship goes down, it’s got air trapped inside, so the water rushes in—and down, and pulls anyone nearby with it. The bigger the ship and the faster it sinks…”

  She didn’t need to finish. Jason rowed faster, though they were nowhere near the doomed ship. Far closer to an island which might go sky-high at any moment, though they’d probably still be safer there than as Richard Alth’s prisoners. The broken wood dipped and splashed in and out of the water until his arms ached.

  The island lo
omed up, but he kept rowing until the tide did the rest of the work of carrying them to shore. Thankfully there was no longer any danger of being intercepted by either Princeps or by men in the water. Princeps hadn’t moved from the spot and her sails hung slackly, but the tip of Pelican’s stern was all he could see above the waves.

  A sharp crack made him glance down. More water gurgled up through the bottom of the boat where there was a fresh break in the wood. Lera pushed off and landed with a splash in the waves, though they only came to her shoulders. Jason followed suit as they struggled up on to the shore, water lapping around their knees.

  “Should we save the boat?” he said. “What’s left of it.”

  Lera shook her head. “We couldn’t have traveled any farther on it, and it’s not like we need firewood. The wood’s too damp for that anyway.”

  Jason kept walking until he was on dry ground, which felt reassuring. Lera went to her knees on the sand, which he hoped was the signal to flop on a dune and rest, but he realized at once that she’d only done so to be as inconspicuous as possible while still looking around, so he did the same.

  Ahead of them, the dunes disappeared under swaths of grass, which in turn gave way to a spread of trees, though bare hills rose out of the green. The rocks grew taller towards the west, turning into the miles of lichen-speckled cliffs which he’d looked at from the window of Nemesis.

  The warship had vanished completely by then, without so much as a smudge of grey in the sky to show where she had been—though with clouds massing overhead, it would have been easy to miss a trail of smoke. He told himself the flag of the fleet could not have been defeated, let alone sunk so fast. Once Garser’s crew regrouped, they would come back.

  “All right.” Lera sank down to sit on her heels, though her back was straight as ever. “We’re marooned.”

  Yes, that would be the nautical word for it. Before that day, he might have thought of being stranded on a deserted island with a lovely woman as a delightful experience, but somehow reality wasn’t quite living up to that.

  She glanced up. The sky was overcast, but a faint glow hid behind the clouds. “It’s almost afternoon. I’m guessing if we make for those cliffs, we’d reach them by evening at best, and I’d rather not risk poking around in the dark looking for fuses. Unless we had torches, maybe.”

  “What if we dropped one and set the explosives off?”

  She grimaced. “Good point. All right, we’ll find a place to stay the night, and some food and water would help too. Then tomorrow we’ll go to the cliffs.”

  Jason nodded. Lera was studying the beach for some reason, her eyes narrowed, but he couldn’t see anything interesting except for broken shells, bits of seaweed and other debris. He looked at the cliffs instead, wondering how extensively the explosives might be hidden.

  Something moved out from behind a tree so distant it looked like a sapling, a shape that walked over the top of the cliff. Jason was startled enough that it took him a moment to realize it was a man. The prospect of it being one of Richard’s men silenced him, and he caught Lera’s arm instead.

  She jolted, and the man moved out of view as she turned to look. “What?” She sounded more confused than surprised.

  “There was someone on the cliff.” Jason willed the man to reappear. “I don’t think he saw us.”

  “One of the crew off those ships?”

  “Too far away. I couldn’t see his clothes.”

  Lera frowned. “You sure it wasn’t a tree?”

  “Maybe it was a butterfly. So easy to mistake those for people. Yes, I’m sure it wasn’t a tree.”

  She rolled her eyes, but scrambled to her feet. “We weren’t planning to stay here much longer anyway. Let’s go.”

  Jason felt better once they were under the shelter of the trees, though at first every rustle of leaf and crack of twig made him tense. Lera seemed to feel the same way, because she drew her saber, but no one intercepted them as they went on. They came across a moss-choked stream, but as they stopped for a drink the deep grind of thunder sounded in the distance.

  She drew the back of her free hand across her mouth. “We really need a safe place to spend the night.”

  Jason silently agreed. He’d already taken off his boots and poured out what looked like quarts of seawater, but his sodden clothes clung to him, and where they were drying, they itched with a crust of salt. Though his hopes lifted when Lera followed the stream over the steadily rising ground. Maybe it would lead to a rushing cataract of cold clean water.

  Naturally, after they’d climbed through the hills, the source of the stream turned out to be a thin spill that trickled out from a crevice in a cliff face and splashed into a flat bowl eroded from the rock. But they wouldn’t go thirsty, and Lera said if the worst came to the worst, they could shelter under some of the rocks jutting out overhead.

  Only a short distance away, though, they found a hole in the cliff. Impossible to see anything inside, but she tossed a pebble in and the resulting click sounded hollow. “Might be a cave,” she said. “That’s provincial.”

  “Providential?”

  “Sure, why not? Stay behind me.”

  The entrance was low and narrow. She ducked her head, turned sideways to put her back to rock, and went in, the drawn blade before her. Jason picked up a loose stone that fit in his hand and followed.

  The entrance widened out and he could stand up straight. “Go that way,” Lera said, and they moved apart. Jason kept a palm flat to the rough wall, feeling his way around the cave, but once or twice he raised his hand to the roof. No bats or spiders, thank the Benevolent Ones.

  “No smoke hole,” Lera said when they reached each other in the darkness. “We can’t light a fire. But at least it’s dry.”

  She went to the cave’s entrance, where there was enough light for Jason to see her. “I’m going to the beach for clams. I’ll call out when I come back.”

  “All right.” Jason watched her climb back down the rocks. Without her coat on, she looked—well, about as vulnerable as she might ever be, and he thought of going with her. But digging up clams was hardly work for two people, and she didn’t need him to protect her.

  Still, maybe there was something he could do while she was gone. The storm was drawing close, but it hadn’t reached them yet and there was enough late-afternoon light to search for fruit. He wasn’t a Denalait trained for survival, but he could be useful under those circumstances.

  As he climbed down carefully, though, he promised himself that if he lived through the night—and whatever came after it—he would go back home. Not to Crusaid and the Department of Public Health, assuming he had any future there, but to a farm like the one where he’d grown up. Except he wasn’t sure how to make that happen. He liked the work, but he didn’t want to toil all day in someone else’s fields and yet he didn’t have enough money to afford his own.

  A senior health inspector was paid relatively well, and anything beyond his living expenses and an occasional indulgence like the now-lost jacket had been carefully saved. Unfortunately, good land tended to be passed down through families, which meant it was prohibitively expensive. As he stepped over the twisted roots of a low tree, he thought the only solution was to buy less valuable land and establish a foothold on that, improving it and perhaps saving enough to expand his farm decades into the future.

  Castles in the sky, he thought. Just what his father would have said, but as dreams went it wasn’t a bad one, and it gave him something to think about other than their predicament, Richard Alth, explosives and Lera. Not necessarily in that order. Lera was probably uppermost. She hadn’t seemed to notice the way her soaked clothes clung to the curves of her hips and backside as she’d picked her way down the rocks. Good thing she hadn’t looked behind at that point.

  He found a sourapple tree and wrenched the hard green ovals off their stems. The work helped distrac
t him, until a long high whistle rang out in the distance. He froze, his breathing suspended. Was that some bird, or could it be a signal?

  Had the man on the cliff seen Lera? He wouldn’t have needed to sound a signal unless there were others on his side. For the first time Jason thought of the possibility that he and Lera were not only trapped on a mined island, but greatly outnumbered by men Richard would have left behind to make sure those explosives were safe.

  He stayed motionless, ears straining for any sounds, any distant screams. Nothing. He thought about going after her anyway. No, he could imagine how she would react to the idea that the slightest sound made him bolt after her.

  All he could do was send up a silent prayer to the Benevolent Ones for her safety. Not to Arvane, who had done more than enough already, thank you, but to Katash and Sorlia. Two halves of the same coin, the goddess of the storm and of all warriors, and the mistress of the hearth, defender of the home. Though he knew Lera would never share even a castle in the sky with him.

  Lera’s boots sank a little as earth gave way to sand, and it was an effort not to let her spirits sink too.

  She was more worried than she had let on earlier, because it was possible no one on Nemesis knew she and Jason had survived. Kovir’s shark might only have seen the man it had attacked, rather than the two of them. But that didn’t make a difference. Unless the matter of Princeps and the tidal wave was settled very soon, Nemesis would have greater priorities than to pick up two stranded survivors, so she and Jason had best find another way off the island.

  If they were very fortunate, the wreckage of Pelican might wash up on the shore, but if it didn’t, the island had plenty of trees. She and Jason could build a raft, and they weren’t likely to starve while doing so. Feeling a little better, she made her way to the beach.

  No broken planks in sight, but she spotted several little holes in the sand and dug down to find clams. Her hat had fallen off, but it hung from its string around her neck. She took it off and filled it with clams, then searched for tide pools where fish might have been stranded. All she found was an urchin, a sea hedgehog as those were called.