They struck the dock violently—it seemed they all pushed off at once. The boat slowly parted from the pier, and this time it was the pier that made the ominous creaking noise.
After they had gone a certain distance, the oars on either side of the boat rose up into the air, then lowered into the sea in perfect unison. The boat began to move vigorously and parted from the docks.
On deck, without any cargo to serve as a barrier, they were exposed to the full brunt of the snow and wind. Yet Col did not feel the least bit cold as he gazed toward Caeson, the brightly lit church in the distance.
What had he come here to do?
That dizzying question seized his chest, and he could not breathe.
“It’s all right to throw up on deck if you get seasick, by the way.”
As the boat suddenly began to rock back and forth, Yosef spoke with a smile.
“If you lean over the edge, you’ll get sucked into the water. There are beasts that hide in the sea at night.”
Col did not take that as superstition or assumption; he believed it was real.
The sea on a moonless night was as dark as any nightmare. The occasional white waves reminded him that this was reality. Like a shivering child, the boat wavered back and forth and rocked wildly on occasion. The thumping impacts from below may have been the waves or a monster trying to pull its prey underwater.
Before long, the light in the church was a distant glow.
“Did you manage to talk to him?” Yosef asked, relaxed, thinking that if they had come this far, then they were all right.
At some point, he had produced a small wine cask in his hands.
“Well, yes…”
Col gave a vague reply, but it was glossed over in the darkness on the water.
“Good. That means Master Stefan will save face, too.”
He smiled and handed Col the cask. He took a sip, and it was bitter distilled liquor.
“Once we pass through this and slip into the waterways that lie between islands, the wind and waves will die down like magic. We just need to be patient.”
Reicher had said the same thing.
“Thank you so much.”
Col was grateful, wishing they would reach that point quicker.
“Leave it to me,” Yosef replied, puffing out his chest.
With brief pauses every time the boat rocked, the captain slowly made his way to the stern. Col looked around and found Myuri sitting at the base of the sail yard, wrapped in a blanket with her eyes closed. He only needed to take a few steps for his voice to reach her, but it felt like an eternity away.
Like turning away from his own wounds, he looked away from Myuri and out to sea. However, that did nothing to calm him. The sea had grown more fearsome since they left the port and reached the open water.
He had no idea if the growing wind was due to the speed of the boat or a signal that the blizzard had drawn near. The breaking waves disappeared with raging force behind them, and it was almost like they were hurtling down a river. He could no longer tell the flickering of light in his eyes from the glow of the church. How very much like faith that is, he thought.
As though his core had been spirited away, he could no longer feel the cold. He simply stared out over the water.
The boat would continue south, reach Atiph, then he would report what he had seen to Hyland. That was all Col could imagine. He could not see what would come after that.
He could not return to Nyohhira. Myuri would hate that. But he felt that staying by Hyland’s side would be too much for him. Whatever had resided within him was now gone.
Because he could not even believe in himself.
His mind empty, he watched the shapes of the foam on the waves as they broke on the sea. They looked like white birds soaring through the darkness while snakes slithered along the surface of the water. He saw a particularly large wave and thought it looked like an angel. Its wings were spread out on either side, ready to take flight.
He was annoyed with himself at first—that he would think such a thing—but he noticed something odd about it. Though the shape of the wave itself wavered, it did not disappear. Rather, it instead looked like it was growing bigger and bigger.
No, it was getting bigger.
That was no wave.
It was a boat!
“Mr. Yosef!”
He shouted as loud as he could, but that was when he finally realized that they were sailing on rough, wild seas. His voice barely reached his own ears, and the drops of ice felt like stones as they hit his face.
The boat rocked back and forth, and it shook feverishly whenever a wave struck them from below.
Col made his way to the stern of the boat with the other sailors, firmly planting his feet as he went, where Yosef stood gripping the helm, and raised his voice again.
“Mr. Yosef! A ship!”
Yosef grimaced—either from the cold, or from snow in his eyes, or because he had heard his foolish report. But there was no mistake. Col turned around again, and the angelic white ship’s trail was growing bigger.
“A ship! It’s coming closer!”
The boat rocked again, and after a brief sensation of floating, Col smashed into the deck. He desperately pulled himself up, and though Yosef and the others had of course managed to stay standing, they stared in shock at where he had pointed.
“Pirates!” Yosef yelled and let go of the helm, then jumped down the stairs leading below deck.
The speed of the oars immediately grew faster, but there was no way to tell how much faster they were going in the featureless darkness. And the pirate ship was tapered like a spear, prioritizing mobility.
On the other hand, they were aboard a mercantile boat—wide and stout.
He recalled how it felt when Autumn led him onto that swordlike boat.
It was catching up.
He could almost see the face of the angel of death.
“Mr. Col!”
He turned around when he heard Yosef yell. He was at the base of the sail yard, gripping Myuri’s arm.
Then he lost all sound again.
Following Yosef’s gestures, he turned back to the sea.
There it was—like a monster suddenly appearing out of the mist.
Like the long fish they had in the dining hall in Caeson, a pointed end closed in on them.
He recalled his leisurely conversation with Myuri:
“What we’ll do is crash into our bounty from the side; then, with our swords in our mouths, we’ll raise a battle cry and leap onto the other boat, right?”
He vaguely remembered his response as being “How would you be able to raise a war cry with a sword in your mouth?”
The tip of the pirate ship pierced the left side of their boat from below.
“”
He did not know if someone had yelled something to someone else or if it was his own cry.
When he realized it, he was in the darkness.
He could not tell up from down, and he had the sensation of struggling with his arms and legs, but it may have been his imagination. The smell of the oil she put in her hair gave him the sense that Myuri was nearby. Perhaps it was his own desires that made him hear, “Brother!”
Myuri.
The moment he thought that, he was greeted with an intense shock and could no longer breathe.
He had only realized he fell into the water when his body floated to the surface.
“Geugh, agh! Goch…”
He coughed, only for a wave to envelop his entire body with water again.
He found himself brimming with fear of not being able to breathe more than being afraid of the freezing cold.
His body was heavy, like he had fallen in mud, as the clothes that were meant to keep him warm soaked up water.
Desperately he moved his body and pulled his face from the water, inhaling deeply. Then he opened his eyes to see the side of the boat. It had not capsized, but some oars were missing. It was possible they had been thrown into the wa
ter on impact.
He looked up to the railing on deck, and he could not help but smile.
No matter how far up he stretched, he would never reach it.
And pushed by the waves, the boat was heartlessly drifting away. There was nothing around him; he would be left behind in the black seas.
That was when Col realized he would die here.
The cold began to drain the strength from his body. He had been taught what to do when someone fell into the river while hunting during the winters back in Nyohhira. It was simple: Warm the body by any means. Otherwise, they would lose feeling in their arms and legs within a hundred breaths, lose consciousness before the next hundred, and reach death without finishing the last one hundred. If he found someone in the river…He did not finish the thought because he understood there was no need for the rest.
That was because the sea was colder than any of the rivers in Nyohhira, and there was no way to pull himself up out of the water.
Not waiting for the next one hundred breaths, Col sank into the water. All the choices he had in life began to disappear.
As they vanished, he finally realized that there was only one thing left.
It was a short sentence, something akin to regret.
“I’m sorry.”
He should have said that to Myuri, even if she ignored or rejected him.
There must have been some air trapped in his heavy clothes, as even though he barely moved his arms and legs, he bobbed up to the surface at every wave like some sort of sick joke.
He only wanted to drown.
A sleepy surrender began to eat away at his body, and he closed his eyes.
He once heard that people dreamed as they died.
It seemed his was just beginning.
“Brother!”
From the stern of the boat that grew distant in his vision, Myuri jumped into the water.
He watched her and vacantly thought, Your clothes will get wet.
She hit the water with a splash.
It was only when he saw her head emerge above water and she began swimming desperately toward him that he understood he was seeing reality.
“Brother!”
“…Myu…Wh…why…?”
He could no longer speak. As though his back teeth had melded together, his jaw was stiff. His teeth were clenched together, and he could not move them.
Myuri was swimming in such thin clothes that he almost sighed; perhaps she had removed her bulky outer garments before jumping in.
He wanted to say, You’ll get sick.
“Brother, Brother!”
Her hands reached his face, and a particularly large wave washed over them.
He only reached the surface because Myuri held him as she swam.
“Wh-why…?”
Why had she jumped in? He questioned her with his eyes, and as though she had jumped into a lake in summer, she shook her head, water spraying from it.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
She clung to him, and she was so warm it almost made him sleepy.
“I would absolutely jump in after you if you fell into the cold, dark ocean. I would never leave you alone, and I would be fine at the bottom of the ocean as long as I’m with you.”
He looked at her, and her expression was twisted as though she was about to cry in happiness.
He thought absently about how much she loved him. Myuri truly believed in her feelings, and she would give her life for them. Even though he had done something so terrible to her.
He mustered all the strength he could in his stiffened body to return her embrace.
Though he could not murmur words of prayer to God, his mouth breathed his last words.
“Myu…ri…”
“Yeah?”
Her reddish eyes looked at him happily.
“I’m sorry…I was so terrible to you…”
Or perhaps, he dreamed he got the chance to say that.
The world went quiet, and his body no longer bobbed with the waves.
Just as he understood that he was sinking, he thought—
Where was the Black-Mother?
He was not speaking cynically of others’ faith but rather wishing for her to see him off.
He could not feel the cold of the sea.
His consciousness, too, quietly sank.
CHAPTER FIVE
After a sudden attack of breathlessness, he coughed.
But what came from his throat was not a cough but water. He heaved violently, and once he was able to breathe again, he bent over, gasping.
“Guh…Geugh…Ack…”
Col kept coughing, as it was painful to breathe in and out. Once his breathing calmed, his throat felt like it was burning.
He did not understand.
Was the afterlife supposed to be this vivid? Was it because he had been unable to enter the kingdom of heaven and had fallen into the underworld?
With this in mind, he looked around. He was in a small and simple stone room that resembled a prison cell with a small fire burning. Apocalyptic winds raged outside, and snow blew in from the windows, open squares cut in the walls. When he took that all in, he shivered.
This was the monastery. Col was in Autumn’s monastery.
A sudden chill ran down his spine that was not due to the cold. Had everything that just happened been a dream? Had he simply been sleeping in the monastery? When he jumped onto the dock from the boat, had he slipped and fallen into the sea?
That was the only explanation that made sense. Because he had fallen into the water, and then…
“Myuri!”
He finally understood what he saw before him.
There, Myuri lay on her side. There was no sign of life in her pale face, and her entire body was soaked.
“Myuri! Myuri!”
He screamed her name and shook her, but she did not open her eyes. Rather, when her head limply rolled to the side, water spilled from her lips.
With a nauseous feeling of despair, he pried open her lips with his fingers and turned her over. Water emptied from her mouth, but her breath did not return.
Before calling for God’s help, what crossed his mind was the war story he heard from the mercenary company that inherited Myuri’s name. Not all those whose hearts stopped were fated to die. If she did not move, then he would move her himself.
He smacked Myuri’s back as hard as he could. It was like he was trying to wake her. He hit her back many, many times, and when water finally stopped coming out of her mouth, her body shivered and she began to cough.
“Myuri!”
He called her name, but she did not open her eyes. He lowered his ear to her mouth, and he could hear the faint sound of her breath. But her body was growing cold like ice. He had to warm her.
He stared at the fire as though begging it for help. The faint flame danced upon only a few skinny pieces of driftwood.
“Hmm, you are lucky.”
He almost jumped around in shock when he heard the sudden voice.
It was Autumn, looking out from the next room.
“Y-you’re…Why…?”
“This is my monastery.”
Autumn spoke quietly and tossed him a tattered blanket.
“This is all I have here.”
Then he turned his back to Col and withdrew.
The blanket smelled moldy and was wet from the seawater, but it was better than nothing. Myuri had inhaled quite a lot of water; he removed the sash around her waist, wrung the water out of her hair, removed her shirt, and wrapped her in the blanket.
Her lips were beyond blue and were so pale he could not see the difference between that and her skin.
He desperately rubbed her with the blanket she was wrapped in, but there was no visible effect.
“Please hold on,” he said to her and stood up.
But as Col rose, violent dizziness immediately assaulted him. He crashed into the wall and threw up on the spot. What came out was salty seawater. As it left his body, he wondered wh
ere all this water was being stored inside of him. That was the moment he finally realized that they had indeed fallen from the boat into the water and nearly drowned.
But he had no memory of how they managed to get here, nor could he imagine why such a thing had happened.
When he was finished, not waiting for his breathing to recover, he crawled into the next room, and Autumn was there, fiddling with a figure of the Black-Mother.
“Do you have something—something I can burn?” he pleaded.
With the tip of his chisel, Autumn whittled a design on the figure of the Holy Mother and scrutinized the light burning on the candle.
“This is a house of faith. You may burn your faith.”
Col stood, his anger certainly ablaze, when Autumn finally looked at him.
“Everyone dies. Why not celebrate the moments that extend the deadline? Had you not escaped from the treasure repository in the chapel, you may very well have lived out the rest of your life in peace.”
His second bout of dizziness came from fury.
But not a single emotion stirred in Autumn’s expression.
“When I returned from the banquet, you had washed up on my shore. It must be the Black-Mother’s providence.”
His quiet eyes only looked as though they were simply relaying the facts.
“What you were trying would have rendered my decision worthless.”
It sounded like he was demanding thanks for simply giving them a blanket.
No—Col told himself that was only his own assumption. Because, as he could see for himself, there was nothing here. Autumn himself only wore tattered rags. The only other things present were the Black-Mother figures, raw jet for material to make more, a few candles, and some food sitting exposed on the floor. There was no doubt that even the burning driftwood was the very most he could do for them.
That faint flame was the monastery itself.
“The Holy Mother, the savior of this island, will indiscriminately show miracles to those who interfere with me, the one who protects this island. What is your faith compared to that?”
Col had no argument.
“There is nothing more that can be done to aid your companion. These islands are filled with things that cannot be helped. I can only pray to God and thank the Holy Mother for the luck that I was able to save you.”
Wolf & Parchment, Volume 2 Page 21