Since they expected soon to run aground, A’Nu-Ahki had posted a watch in the forward shack. T’Qinna summoned him up to the con after surveying the roiling sectors of sea. The ship did not appear to be heading directly into boils, but they passed by at an uncomfortably close six to eight hundred cubits to port. She had no idea how much insulation the hull would provide from the heat should they drift into one.
“Check out the seas to port,” T’Qinna said, when she heard her father-in-law’s labored breath behind her.
“Mountains grow beneath us,” A’Nu-Ahki said, as he nudged gently past her to poke his head out the window. “Soon we come to rest.”
T’Qinna leaned on the console. “Amid volcanoes—isn’t that like coming back to where we started? Remember N’Zar?”
“Perhaps, but at least we know it’s land beneath us—and the water will cool the fires quickly. We’ll see what develops for a few hours. Maybe the tides will draw us out from the boils, and we can commit to an anchorage. Although we dare not let them take us too far. The tides seem to come in and out at six hour intervals, with every fourth tide being a giant—that’s one every day now. The longer we wait to drop the stones, the more we risk being drawn out over an ocean basin during a big tide.”
T’Qinna giggled at the irony. “So it all boils down to the same old World-end question: Do we risk fire on the mountains, or waters in the sea?”
A’Nu-Ahki put a hand on her shoulder, and quietly laughed.
Sutara felt the ship toss again as she drifted off to sleep. The angry creaking seemed to follow her into her dreams to become voices.
Her father stood over her, holding one of his scrolls from Erdu over her head. “Don’t be weak-minded! There’s more to life than what this back-woods hovel can offer! But you won’t even look at it!”
“I read it, Pahpa. It just seems wrong somehow.”
Satori launched into a tirade. “Right and wrong are just words we ascribe to ideas and behaviors we either favor or despise! Think for yourself, girl! You decide what’s right, and you decide what’s wrong!”
Suta wanted to say she thought the scroll was wrong and her heart right, but she didn’t want to spend a week scrubbing pots with the servants.
Satori’s face twisted, his voice blasting her with a level of ridicule she somehow knew her father had never really used on that day long ago—though on other occasions he had come close. “You simple-minded milk-wench! You let T’Qinna and A’Nu-Ahki think for you, and lead you around like a braying ass! That’s all you are, a stupid braying ass who can’t think for herself! You didn’t even try to stand up for yourself!”
Sutara sat up in bed, and almost tumbled out onto the deck in a wave swell. “I’m not stupid like everybody thinks!”
“Yes, you are!” her father’s voice continued. “You can’t use the water closet without asking Iyapeti how it works! No wonder he fantasizes over T’Qinna! You’re nothing but a simple-minded Lit girl with cow eyes and a brain to match! You let them kill me, and you went right along! You didn’t even see it coming, when it was as predictable as the dawn!”
“You’re not my father. He might have warned me not to be weak-minded, but he never actually called me stupid.”
“Yes, he did—in ways you were too stupid to pick up on!”
Sutara was too emotionally exhausted to be provoked any more. “You said, ‘Yes he did’—not ‘Yes I did’—that means you’re not him.”
“So what? It’s what he would have said!”
Sutara laid back. “Maybe, but he’s gone. A’Nu-Ahki never mocked me, even when I turned on him. I wasn’t fully sure I had made the right choice in coming back—until now.” She turned over and went back to sleep.
The jolt sent U’Sumi face down into his plate of cold spice pudding. “Just when the day’s calm had brought my appetite back!” he muttered.
The others were too tired to laugh.
The lookout’s voice blared through the galley oracle. “Drop the stones, quick! The current’s white, and it’s pulling us from high ground!”
The voice was Iyapeti’s. U’Sumi did not even wipe his face, but scurried up to the mezzanine with Khumi. A’Nu-Ahki joined them in the pool loft. U’Sumi, first to reach the main capstan, sent the big drogue to the bottom, while Iyapeti and Khumi released the secondaries and tertiaries. The lines went slack at more than a thousand cubits—much deeper than before. The ship lurched with the added drag of each stone that hit the seabed.
“We’re still moving with the water!” said a new voice from the oracle. T’Qinna had taken the watch.
“Prepare to drop a second main stone, free-line!”
U’Sumi almost paused to ask if he had heard correctly. Free-line meant they would cable the stone to a simple bollard, and allow it to drop with no control. Bronze bollards lined either side of the pool loft, each with matching cleats on the port and starboard rims of the pool bulkhead, to guide a cable. The bollards anchored into the deck by plating above and below the planks. They would hold, if the cables were long enough to reach bottom.
If not, the sudden stop of the stone could easily rip up the bollard over the pool bulkhead, deck planks, and all. Unless, of course, the cable in the drogue stone’s hole broke free from the whiplash, which was how things were designed to work. By now, U’Sumi knew that things did not always work according to design.
“We’re dragging at twelve hundred cubits and deepening!” shouted Khumi, from the sounding winch.
U’Sumi had been clamping the hoist tackle to one of the primary drogues inside its stowage notch without even knowing it. Somehow, he had blanked out, and was functioning in a sleep walk. When he realized what he had done, he double-checked his couplings. Finding them good, he signaled to Iyapeti to secure the bollard line through its cleat and to hoist the stone. The cable whined and sparked in the cleat’s eye, as the drogue plunged for the bottom. Seconds later, the great ship lurched again.
“It’s not enough! We’re still moving!” T’Qinna reported by oracle.
“Drop another one!” A’Nu-Ahki commanded.
Khumi said, “We only have four left!”
“Are all the secondaries and tertiaries out?”
“Every last one!”
A’Nu-Ahki paused, as the vessel seemed to shake apart around them. “Very well, son, you’re right. We’ll need to save those four to make a resting anchorage. At least we’ve slowed our motion. We’ll just pray it’s enough for the incoming tide to bring us back all the way up again to a good mooring.”
Q’Enukki watched the last sheet currents over the new continents funnel into smaller, more intense, cutting erosions as the outgoing tides rushed toward the deepening sea basins. These dredged up sedimentary layers in narrow, violent streams, only to re-deposit them closer to the new continental margins, which began to create future landscape reliefs. No mountains poked above water yet near the ship, but it was only a matter of time before tide, plate collision, and up-thrust buckling changed that.
The resonant tidal forces played havoc with the waters. The atmosphere, being far less dense, suffered the greatest high-low pressure differentials it would ever see.
The drogue stones snapped their cable holes one by one, as Barque of Aeons continued its ride with the retreating tide. All of the tertiaries and half the secondaries left a trail along the bottom before the waters slackened. A’Nu-Ahki had returned to the bow shack with U’Sumi to keep watch alongside T’Qinna. They had left the pool area with another main drogue stone on the hoist, stabilized by port and starboard guy lines and slack-wire fairleads fore and aft. The afternoon skies had darkened again, and the winds redoubled their force. Thunder and lightning made agonized fire spiders across the heavens that engulfed the world in deadly brilliant webs.
Almost as fast as it had begun, the tide reached its lowest ebb. The ship fell into a strange circular movement, driven by the shifting currents around the dual anchor lines of the “free-lined” main drogues.
&n
bsp; “Better get aft and cut the cables,” A’Nu-Ahki said. “Maybe we can salvage some of the secondary stones if we can winch them high enough.”
“Perhaps we should only lower the new stone to half normal cruising depth,” U’Sumi said, pulling some black curls back from his eyes.
His father nodded, and called for the others by oracle.
Khumi and Iyapeti met them back at the hull pool. ‘Peti continued toward the stern to handle the secondary winches, while Nu, U‘Sumi, and Khumi cut the two primary stone lines, and lowered the new drogue from the hoist into the drop braces. There it received a cable loop coupling from the now half-used spool of steel line on the main capstan.
The waters grew rougher, while Khumi made his pre-drop sounding. “Seven hundred cubits and rising!”
A’Nu-Ahki had U’Sumi man the capstan motor controls. “Make your depth one hundred and sixty-five cubits.”
“One-sixty-five cubits, aye!” U’Sumi threw the lever that released the stone to its controlled plunge. He applied braking pressure when the cord depth gauge read one-hundred and twenty cubits. Easing the motor through a series of lower gears, he halted the drogue at the prescribed depth, and secured the locking clamp.
“We are now cruising at a little more than one-half standard drogue effect. It might be a rougher ride.”
“Yes,” said his father, “but it is certain to be our last.”
“What do you mean?” Khumi asked, as the ship began to buck again.
A’Nu-Ahki narrowed his sea-blue eyes, “I intend to drop all anchors when we reach the region of the boils. It is there that we shall come to rest, inside the reefs, to find shelter from the giant tides.”
Khumi slapped his own forehead. “By the bloody boils!”
Their father stood calm against Khumi’s insubordinate tone.
“The boils are hardening into reefs that will become mountaintops,” A’Nu-Ahki said. “Was it not you who complained that we would have no shelter against the four-hundred-cubit swells—yes, I overheard.”
Khumi brushed a hand through his curly dark hair, and lowered his voice. “Look, ah, no disrespect intended, but did E’Yahavah tell you in a clear audible voice, like when you heard El-N’Lil, or did he appear to you as Word-speaker with instructions, as when he told you to build this ship?”
“No, he did not. I simply asked for wisdom until he gave me peace on the matter. Then I discussed it with your mother, who had also been asking.”
“Pahp, we’re all tired—as I’m sure you realize. How do you know this ‘peace’ isn’t just exhaustion?”
“I know.”
Khumi ran his hand over his head again, but this time he blew up. “Well, you might know! But maybe the rest of us aren’t willing to risk getting steamed alive like a bunch of lentils in a clay pot!”
The words shot through U’Sumi’s lips before he could stop them. “Khumi, that’s enough!”
His younger brother turned on him, and roared, “You stay outa this! I’ve been shot up and down this deck for five months, and nearly killed by shipboard disasters from holes in the hull, to near capsizing waves, to crushing tides, and finally to almost getting sucked through that hull pool over there! Every stinking day it’s ‘Khumi fix this! Khumi fix that!’ like nobody else knows what to do when a piece of equipment goes wrong! Now it’s either ‘stay by the volcanoes and cook,’ or ‘get drawn out to sea and starve!’ What kind of protection is this? So far, the only help we’ve had has come from our working ourselves to exhaustion! It seems to me E’Yahavah’s forgotten all about us a long time ago!”
U’Sumi grabbed his brother, and slammed him against the bulkhead. “You know nothing! Look around you!”
Khumi laughed wearily. “I am looking. I seem to be the only one who sees things as they really are!”
“I’m going forward,” A’Nu-Ahki said. “Try not to kill each other, or leave any permanent wounds. I’d like to keep it one wife to a man, if possible. Whoever dies forfeits his wife to the other—got to have lots of babies when this is over, you know.”
Both men released each other as their father turned and shuffled off.
Night had fallen hours ago, but the sky outside the bow shack did not seem any darker than it had before dusk, when the tide began to come in again. A’Nu-Ahki gripped the windowsill, as if steering his now-speeding ship through the water-jet currents by sheer will power.
T’Qinna watched his rugged face flare in the lightning flashes, a storm-tossed wraith-captain on a ghost ship sliding over a drowned world. His wild eyes pierced the raging gloom while wind gusts whipped his silvery beard and hair in defiance of his vessel’s supposedly leeward advance. The ship veered fiercely from the drogue’s shallower grip and the wind foil’s reduced efficiency since gravity took control of the water currents.
She quietly prayed for him.
U’Sumi had mentioned something to her about a fight with Khumi over a proper anchorage, though A’Nu-Ahki had said nothing. He just stood and gazed at the upheaval outside, his age-pitted face a stone mask.
T’Qinna watched the tumult in the Old Man’s eyes. It seemed to come in equal portions from his hidden depths as from the storm. During her entire watch, he spoke not a word, but just stared out into the thundering darkness as though searching a world of watery primeval chaos.
T’Qinna left him that way when relieved by Iyapeti, and so she found him again the following morning, just after dawn.
The seas had again becalmed, and the mists had taken on an eerie rose-colored sheen. On the horizons in the three visible directions stretched a ring of boil patches or shallow reefs, a thousand or more cubits farther off than those she had seen before, but more continuously connected.
“They encircle the ship,” A’Nu-Ahki said quietly, acknowledging her presence. “I checked the aft window just a few minutes ago. Soundings show a fairly level bottom.”
T’Qinna said, “Shall I call the others?”
“I suppose.”
“You don’t think Khumi will make trouble, do you?”
“What Khumi does or does not do is irrelevant, since the decision to make anchorage is now out of my hands.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned and faced her. “When the tide reached its high water mark, it took the ship over the reefs. I felt the drogue stone drag up a long slope and then drop again once we were inside. It has now touched bottom, and we are already standing at rest. When the tides go out, we won’t be able to clear the reefs unless we sacrifice the main stone. We only have three more. Without the combined weight of all four stones, we risk an insecure anchorage, given this vessel’s high displacement, and the violence of the currents. Like it or not, this is where we come to rest.”
The winds outside slowly began to howl again. Only this time the skies they brought grew brighter. Exactly one hundred and fifty days—five months—had passed since E’Yahavah had sealed them inside the ship.
Ararat is an extinct volcano, and research has established beyond doubt the fact that it was formed under water. Lava formed under water is marked by peculiar concentric circles, and these are found on Ararat right up to the line of the ice-cap at 4,000 metres (13,000 feet).
—David C.C. Watson
Myths and Miracles
13
Shroud
Tiva’s shift ended early, with her work caught up almost an hour ahead of schedule. Things had let up some, now that Barque of Aeons rested at anchor. Feeding and cleaning jobs, once slowed by a pitching deck, took on an ease in the reef’s shelter that made them almost trivial. After work, she could now enjoy a look outside the bow shack window. A’Nu-Ahki had decided to leave the shutters unlocked again. Though the winds howled continually, the breakers now rested just below the surface at low tide. They kept most of the waves from penetrating to the anchorage.
Each day, Tiva combed the horizons, looking for the first reef to poke above the surf. Every day so far, she had ended her search with a sigh of disappoint
ment. The water frothed over the rocks at low tide, but it seemed as though the sharp walls of submerged hardened lava protecting the lonely ship broke off and eroded at every ebb and flow. Still, the erosion never went far enough to expose the anchorage, just enough to frustrate Tiva’s desire to see the first land—even if it was only a slippery rock above the foam. She heaved her daily sigh, and closed the shutter.
Tiva turned to go aft, and bumped into someone who had apparently been standing behind her for quite some time without her knowing it. A startled yelp escaped her lips, with a sudden chill.
Sutara took a diplomatic step backward, until she bumped into the compass console. She averted her face, as if as frightened as Tiva was. Was she going to push me out or try to apologize?
The two women had not spoken since the night Sutara had drugged the sphinxes, months ago. Tiva suspected that Iyapeti’s wife had tried on several occasions to approach her since returning to the family. However, each attempt had produced only a clumsy, hesitant sound in Sutara’s throat.
Tiva wanted to believe that Suta regretted tormenting her, and for that felt grateful. Just how deep the regret ran, or how long it would last, was uncertain. Now neither woman could exit the shack without squeezing past the other. It seemed they could no longer avoid communication.
Tiva almost panicked. I can’t deal with this! What can I say to her?
Iyapeti’s wife dropped her eyes to the deck, and twirled her light brown hair. “I… I’m sorry.”
A warm power seemed to wrap invisible arms around Tiva, as she reached out her burn-scarred hand, and guided the finger Sutara twirled her hair with into a double-handed clasp near her own heart.
“I know,” Tiva said, scarcely able to fathom where the words came from. “It was not really you who said those things.”
Sutara looked up and met her eyes. “How can you say that? How could you have suffered it, and not told the others?”
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 28