Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  “What d’ye say?” The look added: Who are you to order us, a man who threw hysterics on Yinstey beach?

  “It blew like this,” Therkon said precisely, “outside Riversend.”

  Rathi opened and shut his mouth. Then the stare became a glower. Under his breath he growled, “And what good did shortenin’ do ye then?”

  “If you were meant to wreck, it could have happened already. A dozen times. That time, the aim is still uncertain. This time—”

  “This time?” Rathi snapped.

  Therkon’s mouth corner rose in a blade-edge of a smile. “This time, I think, Sthassamaer is also wanting haste.”

  Rathi recoiled, and half the men in earshot shrank with him. Then he snapped his head around and bawled at the ropemen, “Reef!”

  * * * *

  By the time Therkon came back Two had shamed me into silence, at least. Her own conclusions, finally heard, let me speak almost steadily as he sank down.

  “You really think this time we won’t—won’t—”

  He gave me a quick glance. Then he turned right round and took my hands. The light was dwindling momently, but I could still read his face.

  “We have no weapons except logic, Chaeris. How this—thing—works, thinks—if it thinks—may not be logical. But logic says, if it wanted us destroyed . . .”

  It had only to leave us on Skall. The steps we had already traced in Gildair. Two almost snorted impatience. “But what if it miscalculates?”

  Another man might have said, What? Therkon only sucked in his breath and took a moment’s recovery. Then he glanced mastward, where they were tying down reef-points on a bare half of the sail, and said, “This is a better ship.”

  I felt the strakes and bottom shift in yet another of the countless adjustments Anfluga made with every touch of the sea. I remembered the rigid timbers of Aspis. I glanced round the

  seasoned, Isle men’s faces, and Two agreed. However it might gall Therkon to admit, Aspis had not half these vantages. Even if the gale went right out of hand, Anfluga was likelier to survive.

  I made a noise to signal Two’s, Yes, and saw Therkon’s jaw set. Before he added bleakly, “If it does misjudge the wind . . . at the worst, we could be better so.”

  The logic of that froze me where I sat: that drowning, in real black water, might be a better end than whatever awaited us alive.

  * * * *

  The light failed more quickly after that. By the time my

  undaunted stomach signaled, Midday, we could hardly see each other’s faces. Along Hamair we had lain to at night, when the helmsman finally admitted guessing a course by wind and wave was too risky. But we could not lie to here.

  When Segil came crouching down to the ship supplies for the tiny night lanterns, cursing well over his breath as he tried to get them alight, I nerved myself to ask, “Will we, can we lie to, in this?”

  “Nay.” He answered briefly but not curtly, intent on his task. “We’ll use the glass to count watches, an’ steer by the wind. T’is steady enough, for all its fuss. Unless it veers.”

  “If it veers?”

  “Set a sea-anchor an’ wait.” A flint-flare showed the visible side of his mouth, curved in Segil’s usual sardonic grin. “If this ‘bogle’s’ so resty for ye, it’ll haul its wind, fast enough.”

  Haul wind, far too literally. I clamped down images of the sea-anchor cable parting on Aspis. Memories of Therkon, and ancient Amberlight Heads’ caution warned not to erode ignorant courage by telling Segil just what strength that wind could reach.

  The lantern caught. He sat back on his heels and Two blurted, “What if we arrive like this?”

  “Make landfall? We’ll no’ run up a cape-snout, lass. The wind flaws, well back. Ye can feel it, aye? An’ the sea’ll shift. T’will be a lee-shore, surely. But there’s ways, with a sixer, even round that.”

  In this wind? In this night? I bit those queries down as well. He handed me a lantern and said, “Break out y’r stores. Dark or no dark, ye’ve to eat, or ye’ll both be legless as in Gildair.”

  Rising, agile and easy on the ship-shifts, he added over his shoulder. “Just ask the Mither no’ to send a whale.”

  “A—!”

  “Why d’ye think t’is called Whalewatch? They come through every spring.” The lantern occluded behind his bulk. “An’ that’s the one thing we’ll no’ see. Or hear.”

  Whalewatch. Hvalwrast. The whale’s road. Two had reclaimed it for that woman, dying in a Sea fort bed. That was what she had recognized: not poetry, but a landmark in her own lost world.

  Well before actual night it was too dark for a view, too dark to move around, far too dark to work out. In any case, the seas had become huge, big as mountains to my appalled eyes. Even with half the sail reefed Anfluga hurtled over them, flying up, up, up to the crest, crashing over and plunging down like a runaway boulder till I was convinced she would shatter her prow at every chasm’s foot.

  But we were in almost open sea: however enormous, the waves were regular, and they were widely spaced. The only other danger, Rathi said when he came off watch, was if we had to reef so much sail we lost momentum below the crests. “An’ if she won’t steer, an’ we broach to, down one o’ those waterslides?” He made a brief, graphic gesture, read my face by the lantern and shook his head. “Nay, lass.” His own half-smile twisted. “Trust y’r brither, then. If it wants ye, this bogle has to get ye there. In one piece.”

  The entire crew seemed buoyed by the same irrational belief. If they had made horn signs at Therkon when he first mentioned Sthassamaer, they had turned the idea to a mascot since.

  * * * *

  One day’s passage, the ship’s glass counted. One night I counted, sleepless as the watch. The dark had closed in, black, I heard someone mutter, “as mid-winter.” Sleet flew, the wind howled and ropes shrieked, the sea roared and spouted gouts of phosphoric white, but Anfluga charged on, undeterred as the great ocean

  albatross, hurdling waves until my very terror numbed from

  repetition. And sometimes, in the dark where there was nothing to do but hone weapons and count time, and eat to order, and dare the limits of sense to relieve ourselves, I could not help falling into snatches of sleep.

  Two days’ passage. Two days and a night, Rathi informed us, coming off watch. He and Segil were hollow-eyed and stiff as

  puppets, but when I tried delicately to gauge their endurance, Segil merely shrugged. “T’is dark, aye, but a gale’s a gale, an’ ye learn to wait it out. A week of it, times, ye learn. Or,” with Segil’s flinty candour, “ye die.”

  With a fair wind, I heard Rathi telling Therkon when I woke once, Anfluga might cross Hvalwrast Reach in six full days and nights. “Wi’ this winterblast? Who knows?” Seeing my opened eyes shine, perhaps, he bestowed a quick pat on my boot. “One thing ye can be sure. This’ll no’ take near so long.”

  And on the fourth morning, by the glass, I woke from a doze into light.

  A bare and grudging illumination, diffusing palely over the tempest-heaped sea. Only the wind and the steersmen’s conviction to say which way remained east. But light it was, coming so slowly that even my darkness-honed eyes could bear its growth.

  Seas materialized, a spectrum-range of rolling, foam-flecked greys, but already, my storm-sharpened senses judged, lower than before. The dourly pressing belly of cloud-cover still hung over us, its unbroken murk shedding pale flecks of sleet, but gunwales showed, ropes, the mast’s straight whipping length, the sail, battered more than a little but unbroken. Benches, rowlocks, human shapes. Hummocks of crumpled weather canvas, slowly acquiring heads. Identifiable, bristle-blurred faces, hollow, seeing eyes. Segil, upright once more at the steering oar, Rathi, a heap of blankets and canvas by us on the planks. Therkon at my side, his fur hood turning. Lifting his face, pushing the hood back. Raising eyes, sunken like the rest but watchful
and warded in composure, toward the bow.

  Before he asked Segil, “Can you see anything?”

  From his minor vantage as the one man on his feet, Segil merely shook his head.

  “Wind’s no’ breakin’,” he answered after a moment, tilting his cheek. “Sea’s droppin’, but we’re no’ that close.”

  And if the sea were dropping, and the light returned, the

  conclusion was obvious to us all. We had crossed Hvalwrast.

  However long it took now, the unnatural voyage was near its end.

  Before noon by the glass, Kaastria hove in sight.

  * * * *

  At first it was the merest horizon smudge, but by early

  afternoon Segil and Rathi were postulating landmarks and had begun, however dourly, to plume themselves. “Aye,” Rathi

  conceded after half an hour’s staring, “there’s no mistakin’ it. That’s Haugar cape.”

  The easternmost point, I learned, of Kaastria’s relatively short north shore. After four days in the dark we had made landfall at the optimal point to run either west to land’s end, or south-east down the once more-populous eastern coast.

  “Though whether we did it or the bogle did,” Segil added

  saturninely, “t’is the Mither’s own guess.”

  Another hour or so produced a coastline, almost as low and rolling as Phaerea’s, though nearly colorless in the brooding light. Its single height was the cape itself, which earned its name of Mound.

  Eyeing that rounded crest, Rathi glanced once, automatically, behind him. Then he laid Anfluga a point or two off the wind, and said, “Well, lass? Where now?”

  “‘Where’?” All my thoughts, fears, even Two’s projections had held nothing but Kaastria. “But—we’re here?”

  “We’re in sight o’ Haugar, aye. But Kaastria’s no’ Skall. T’is big as Terrace, an’ there’s—there was—half a score o’ ports, westaway,” his hand waved, “clear t’the Fingerpoint. Or,” another wave, “sou’east. Where d’ye, where does y’r brither, an y’r ‘companion’: which d’ye want?”

  For once Two was as flabbergasted as I. I glanced wildly at Therkon, whose face told me he was floundering too. If I had not thought beyond reaching Kaastria, it was, I realized, partly in the tacit expectation that our way would be destined. “I thought it would—”

  Rathi’s expression retorted, Well, “it” hasn’t, so is it not time you did?

  The name came from nowhere. My own memory, perhaps, but not from Two.

  “Hondeland.” Veenn’s words. “Someone said Hondeland was, was, inundated.” Surely, if Kaaastria’s name was insufficient guide, full ruin would fit this rendezvous?

  Therkon’s mouth was clipped shut, but his eye demanded, Where is it? Rathi answered, clearly including him even when he addressed me.

  “Hondeland’s down coast from here. Biggest east-side port, once. Like Jurrick on Phaerea, aye. Lost in a—lost, a year an’ more ago.” A little shiver went over him. I could almost see the other half-visible faces record the sensation of hair lifted on the neck. “Aye. That would be—”

  He glanced ahead and laid Anfluga off again. And let all of us finish: for something that had blown us clear across Hvalwrast in the dark, surely, that would be signal enough?

  The wind had eased, the seas were falling, we were still clear of what was no longer a lee shore. Segil handed the steering oar off to one of the ropemen, and he and Rathi sank down by the ship’s stores with silent grunts of relief. A lull, I realized. One peril over, the next conveniently distanced ahead. The oarsmen had begun to arrange food, tend themselves or the ship, simply ease cramped muscles. My own eyelids drooped. Another precious little hiatus where the future need not be confronted, yet.

  A blast of air and water slapped my bow-side cheek.

  I yelped and shot half upright and sea-strung instinct spoke before I moved. Bow-side, an abrupt, unexpectedly rough blow of wind and sea. Bone and blood had no need for vision. The wind had changed.

  Rathi lunged clean across to the steering oar and Segil shot after him. Therkon was on his feet. Oarsmen flung themselves benchward, biscuit, canteens, water dippers went everywhere. Sheer terror thrust my head above the gunwale to find what they had seen.

  Darkness was my first thought: a blotch of near-true dark between cloud and sea rim, separate and conspicuous as a rising boil. Truly a boil, wind and water coalescing, thunderous black and deadly above, with an underbelly that touched the wave-backs with dense lethal white. A sudden, unpredicted squall.

  On our starboard bow. Coming up out of the south-east, clean against the wind’s way. Unexpected, unpredicted. Unnatural.

  My tongue dried. My backbone froze. The din of preparation died around me like an extinguished lamp. There was nothing but the wind’s scream, the squall’s rising note. The onset of black water, rising, freezingly inevitable, in a leaking hold.

  Around us, the wind died in a breath.

  Anfluga died with it, steering way lost. An albatross unwinged. I heard Rathi swear like a madman and then bawl at the top of his lungs, “Out oars!”

  Men grunted, oar-blades splashed. Anfluga heaved, shivered, picked up way. Rathi shouted again. The ropemen were already locked with the thrashing sail, Segil sprang to help. Rathi bellowed, “Put y’r backs in it!” Full in my face the stroke oar heaved, baring teeth. With a whistling hiss a volley of sleet and spray swept over us and the squall struck.

  Two records that I did not cower under the gunwale with ears covered and eyes squeezed shut, but of the maelstrom I retain little enough. Spray, wave, water, patches of wood or weather-canvas amid cascades of streaming white. The frantic plunge of timber round me, the bruises on elbow, shoulder, hip, icy drenches swamping us. Too familiar sea and wind-thrash, the sound of

  tortured wood and rope, the broken human shouts. All too

  reminiscent of Aspis, that single ferocious over-riding crack.

  I did hide my head then. Under the weather canvas, one arm still locked hopelessly in a belaying-pin tie. Anything not to see the lost sea anchor, the shattered side, the broken oars. The

  broken men.

  It took a good minute to realize Anfluga was still bucking and plunging and rearing onward over the swells like an indignant horse, that men were yelling, cursing vitriolically, but with outrage, not in panic or fear. And nobody had begun to scream.

  I let one eye out of the hood.

  Canvas slapped me instantly over the head. Wood groaned and Segil swore as ferociously as Rathi had, before he roared, “Gone at t’hance!” And a voice I recognized as Rathi’s roared back, “Cut the shicker loose!”

  Every hidden oarsman cursed. Feet thumped, voices shouted, something thrashed and banged like a canvas beast in a trap. Over it came the vibrating thunks of an axe.

  Abruptly the canvas beast fell quiet. The sea buffeted us,

  water beat round and over me, but Anfluga was plunging onward, unslowed, undeterred. Somebody stumbled over me and Therkon’s voice rapped, “Give me that!” Belated troublecrew instinct yanked me from the hood in time to see him grab a bailer from somebody’s hand.

  Sea water, biscuits, dippers, loose dunnage sloshed in the

  bottom’s deep innermost curve, but Anfluga’s sides were intact. The oarsmen were riding each onslaught of wave and wind as cannily and independently as Rathi with the steering oar. The dragon figurehead leapt upward, downward, hither and yon, but now it was limned against open if sunless sky.

  And amidships the ropemen and Segil heaved at a tangle of wood and canvas that had once been the sail.

  “Parted t’whore at the hances, easy as breakin’ sticks.” Rathi was near panting, with outrage, it seemed, as much as effort. “Even with a full half reef!”

  Therkon’s face beyond him answered, No surprise. I eyed the crushed heap of canvas as Two translated, Hances, parts of the yard n
earest the mast. The yard is broken. We cannot use the sail.

  “An’ no’ a chance o’ fishin’ it this side o’—” Rathi cut that short. Over the canvas-heap, he and Segil exchanged one long speaking glance.

  Therkon put the bailer down and said, “We turn back.”

  * * * *

  “If you cannot read that signal,” he said, when the yelling dropped enough for them to hear his normal, if grim voice, “I can.”

  “Signal, what signal?” Segil shouted. “Read what?” But Rathi out-topped him. “Ye can’t turn back!”

  Therkon gave him one chilling stare. “The wind brought us to Kaastria. To the north of Kaastria. When we tried to sail further, the wind changed.” He still sounded as blank as if he were reading out some disastrous imperial dispatch. “So we are not to go further south.”

  Rathi and Segil both stopped yelling at once. The faces of the oarsmen echoed the sag of their jaws.

  “Gentlemen, think.” He did not emphasise the noun, but the ice-voice held cut enough. “We have been signaled. Halted. Warned. We are not to go to Hondeland, but we were brought to Kaastria. So there must be some other destination. What ports are, were near here?”

  The wind skreeled and Anfluga pitched, astray in the squall’s wake, bereft of way from oar or sail. Therkon looked at Rathi as I had seen him look at Deoren. And Rathi’s eyes seemed to hollow in his head as he looked back.

  Then he sucked his lips in and tore a hand through his beard and said, “Hringstenn. Hringstenn’s near to under our lee.”

  “And Hringstenn is?”

  “A port, aye, t’is—was—t’chief northern port. Whalers’ town. Port o’ landing for the Reach. Boiling-down plant. Bone-strippers. We’d call at season’s end, for t’ whalebone, the oil.”

  “So the town is still there?”

  “Nay.

  “T’plague came.” Rathi went on, at last. Too loud, in the sea’s hush. “Two winters past. Bad curin’, maybe, of a carcass. They’d share the meat out. Or somethin’ in the water. The air. Hringstenn, Hringstenn was empty, before Hondeland.”