“They’ll never let you, barbarians, through Thalassopolis. The mouth of the straits is sealed with a heavy chain. Might as well kill us now,” he said to me.
“As you wish,” I said, not believing his lies about chains in the water.
The men grabbed his elder son, and the blade hovered high above his kneeling body, ready to fall. At the sight of that, Agathon reconsidered.
“Wait, I beg you—I’ll do it,” said Baagh, translating Agathon’s words.
“I can always find another captain.”
“And I’d rather see my son drown in the sea of our fathers than die by your blade,” Agathon said.
We roamed the port until we found a merchant ship we could rent without having to pay too much. It was an easy negotiation, as we were the masters of the port of Antia and we had gold and blades. We sold the horses and loaded millet, balls of dried trakhana—a local cracked wheat and yogurt mix—salted meat and fish, oil, water, tallow for the oar holes, and anything that would be tradable at the ports. It was a large merchant ship, its tall stern ending in a wood-carved, white-painted swan. It had a narrow mast with a square sail and two smaller triangular sails above it, and a second square front sail hanging above the prow rigged to a smaller forward-bending mast. The sails were made of fire-yellow fabric, colored like the sunsets of the west. There were two large steering paddles, left and right of the stern. Agathon had insisted on a wide vessel that allowed for thirty men to row. There was ample storage space in the hold, most of which stayed empty, and there was still room on the deck for a few of us.
“It will carry a weight equal to a hundred and fifty men,” Agathon said.
I had forty men, a few slaves, and three women altogether onboard. Supplies, food, and water.
“We didn’t need such a big boat,” Baagh said to Agathon when we embarked.
“Priests, pagan witches, barbarians who have never taken a piss on saltwater. And my family! I say it is too small already. They’ll kill one another in a few nights,” Agathon replied. “A sailing boat is not good shelter for odd companions.”
“The captain says you have to name the ship,” Baagh told me just before we embarked.
“Kar,” I said, and I jumped onto the deck.
We had to push the Reghen in, and Noki dragged the frightened, cursing Ouna-Mas aboard. The Reghen screamed once more, wanting to go back and get Malan’s permission, and then he shouted at the Tribe’s men who were guarding the port to stop us from leaving. Noki pressed the tip of his blade on the Reghen’s ribs, and the frail man shut up. The captain and Baagh were now in charge of our fate, and that scared the Reghen and my men as much as the sea.
The coastline of the Southeastern Empire, a land of pain and bloodbath, disappeared forever at sunset, and the fire-yellow sea shawls swelled westward proudly. The rocking move and the mesmerizing rhythm gave me the feeling of riding a giant beast, a horse of the gods, as we cleared the harbor. The soft breeze was soon replaced by a penetrating wind, raising chilling water and slapping us hard. Staying on deck became unbearable, so the men hid in the hold. Half of them would puke themselves to exhaustion for three days, while the other half, including me, slept the first few days out.
On the fifth morning, at dawn, the wind died down as we approached the north shores of Arrowfinger Island, and we took to the oars. The ship had thirty oars, fifteen on each side. We had taken only six slaves, so all of us had to row in turns in the dry afternoon heat and the light evening breeze until we cut north through the Thousand Islands. Gray speckles appeared on the horizon. As we approached them, they became rocks and mountain lines, and the lines became islands, some large and green, others small and brown, the bald peaks of ancient lost empires, now submerged.
The first few days, the sea was calm, but our fear was great. It was the sounds of the night. The hull, the rigging, the masts—everything was screaming as if the boat were ready to break in half. But it never did, and we soon came to trust the captain and the vessel, even the sea that blended with the sun and the salt in a healing potion. I rowed every day, on one side in the morning and on the other in the afternoon, to strengthen my arms again. My broken arm had set well before we boarded, but it was still weak. By the end of our journey, it was as strong as iron again.
We made stops at some of the islands to get fresh water and any other supplies we needed. We avoided all major ports and big islands. Every time we moored at a harbor, the men went mad, demanding to get off the boat even for a while. I couldn’t risk it. Only the captain and one of his sons would leave the ship, and they carried everything back, while we kept his wife and other son to make sure they would return. I couldn’t trust the slaves.
The first storm came early in the journey, and we all huddled under the deck as every wave rose and foamed like the tongue of a roaring beast.
“Have no fear,” said Agathon. “The sea will not swallow you.”
It had already swallowed us days ago.
“They’re already melting away in Darhul’s stomach,” I joked. But he didn’t know of Darhul.
“Your men are not that brave without their horses,” he said.
Down in the hold, the older Ouna-Ma was on her knees next to the Reghen. He was repeating the Legend of Khun-Amar, stripping the last hope off my men and reminding them in his own devious way how wrong I had been to bring them all to sea. The younger bald girl had coiled into her sister’s lap, her dark eyes wide open but looking nowhere. The men begged me to turn back.
“The tempests are all behind us, so if we turn back for Antia it will be much worse. I don’t want to go through them again. The calm water is forward,” I said. Lies feeding on lies.
“We are trapped here between these planks at the mercy of the winds,” a pale and yellow-faced Leke said, just after he had emptied his guts one more time.
“Trapped but free, Leke. Away from all of them. No one can stop us or reach us. Neither Rods nor othertribers.”
On the thirteenth day, I saw Hieros Island for the first time—just an arid rock, the color of a pale man’s skin, naked of trees, jutting out of the sea. The hidden harbor was hard to spot, unlike the towering Castle at the top of the cliff. We didn’t stop. Baagh walked over as I was sitting next to the rudder, alone in the middle of the night.
“Up there is the Castlemonastery. This is where I’ll come when I’m free again. Where the wise men seek the kingdom of eternal life.”
It wasn’t life that attracted my interest, but its opposite.
“Have they defeated death?”
He shook his head with a sour grimace. “That’s not what eternal life is. Up there, in that monastery, the pious are waiting for the end of days, when our Savior will defeat Death. In the East, where I had been for many moons before taking the faith of the Cross, the monks had already found the secret.”
“How can they find eternal life if they can’t stop fire and iron?”
It was still a mystery to me how Baagh had learned to speak our tongue. But he was in the mood for talking later that night and volunteered to answer my questions.
“When I was even younger than you, I lived at the foot of a great mountain of the East, where the rowan tree and the rhododendron grow. It is a land so far away and so different that I can’t begin to describe it, yet those men speak a tongue very close to yours. Knowing your myths now, I’d say that many generations ago the Sorcerers and the men you cast out journeyed there. Southeast, instead of west as your grandfathers did.”
The mention of the rowan and the secrets of eternal life fired the interest of the Reghen, and he pulled closer to grab every word.
“How does one defeat death, Baagh? Can you teach me?”
“You don’t know what you ask, Da-Ren.”
“I want to learn.”
“This is no spell to master with herb and root concoctions. Such a feat demands the ultimate sacrifice. Only he who forsakes his old life will find life anew—reborn. The secret of eternal life is not only elusive but al
so impossible to explain. Leave it buried in the Castlemonastery where it belongs. It takes years of practicing and repenting up there.”
“If I don’t find her, if I have lost her forever, I’ll go there,” I said, talking to myself. I counted the days until we would reach the Blackvein. Half of the sea voyage was completed, and I hoped to shut my eyes and dream of Zeria. I munched on the salty fish at a corner of the hold and went to sleep. The waves were weak but enough to toss me all night against the sacks, the sick men, and the hull.
When Selene rose to soften our night, I fell asleep and I dreamed of her. There was no opion. I had left the brown dust of ill dreams behind me forever. Baagh had cured my arm and my thirst for the sweet poison of the mind. She came in my dream by her own will. I saw her shadow climbing swiftly up the oars and the hull’s side like a cat, her naked feet landing softly on the deck in absolute silence. She avoided all the other half-sleeping, snoring men and came to find me, to wake me up. I opened my eyes and let out a brief scream at close sight. This was not her face but a different one, a long-gone face of the Sieve. After so many summers, she came back in the middle of the pelago, the oldest of my nightmares. Elbia. “Ask him, Da-Ren,” she nagged me with the cold frail fingers of a child. “Ask the Sorcerer.” She had the green and the dark blue of the deep sea and of the dead in her hair and her skin. “Come up. He is up by the stern. Ask him!” I saw her disappearing up the deck, and I followed, fully awake now.
Agathon was steering the paddles. Baagh and the Reghen were next to him on the deck. They hadn’t seen her; she was not their nightmare.
She had climbed up at the stern, her hands embracing the neck of the carved swan. Her face rotted slowly away as the night wind carried it back to the dead. The skin escaped along with her words. “Ask him, Da-Ren. What is the sacrifice that earns eternal life? What is the sacrifice their Savior demands for rebirth? Go to Hieros, Da-Ren. Find the secret. For me.”
But this is not our faith, Elbia. We don’t believe.
My thought was silent, yet she answered me, “The dead have no faith. Only a craving.”
Her cheeks a green shade over dead skin, her brown eyes, her once long brown hair, her face and her skull disintegrated into grains of sand, swept away in the waves.
Only when the last grains of her disappeared did I ask Baagh, as if I were afraid she would listen.
“Ask him, the captain. If you can’t tell me, maybe he will.”
“What?”
“What is the ultimate sacrifice? The magic of Hieros?” I asked.
He shook his head in denial, but then he sighed heavily and asked Agathon. The captain was so eager to talk about all that he knew, and Baagh reluctantly translated his words.
“What do you want to know, young man? Do you search for the dark tales of the sea? Those who came close to the truths are long dead. I fear the monks and their powers and never moor on that island. Hieros means Holy in the ancient tongue, but I tell you, they named it so on purpose to lure the fools.”
Baagh would stop his words to grimace his disagreement to my questions and Agathon’s answers.
“What do you know, Agathon?”
“These are evil waters around the island. The sea nymphs—the scaled temptresses—dwell here. They take the form of your loved ones and come and ask you to join them. Pirates and merchants rarely approach Hieros because they know of this. The nymphs steal the sailors’ minds and crush the ships onto the rocky cliffs. They are flesh eaters, serpents of the sea, and they crave the marrow of young men. Those monks up in the Castle, their magic is simple. They are men who never fell in love. That’s all. They are blind to a woman’s temptations, even a nymph’s. I can’t tell you how they do this. I don’t understand. I am on this boat because of love, to redeem the lives of my wife and my sons. You. You are on this boat because of love.”
“Am I?”
“I don’t know you, but I see how you look at the star fires of the night sky. You see that star that always shines there, marking the North? That is Ersa. It guides us, and all others move around it. Yet Ersa stays at the same point, always head on to the North.”
“I know the North Star,” I answered.
“But you see, here is what you don’t know because you barbarians have no books: Ersa was not there in the old days.”
Baagh nodded. “This is the one true thing from all the nonsense of this drunk.”
Agathon continued.
“Even in my grandfather’s youth, it was barely visible, and in even older times, no one had seen it. It has come now, and they say it marks a new age for men. A sign of God, says the High Priest of Noria. Pagans talk of the eye of the drakon who has built his lair up there. They say that’s why Ersa never dips below the horizon. It was prophesied that the annihilation would come from the North, and so it happened. Your tribe’s descent, the deathbringers. Everyone has a story.”
“Which one do you believe?” I asked.
“I say the stars guide us back to the loved ones. But you know that already.”
I didn’t. I thought it was the sandstorm. Or the scorpions. Wasn’t that the reason I had taken to the sea? But he said it was the North Star. I liked his story.
“Keep talking,” I said.
“Wait, I need some wine,” he said. He lifted the wineskin and started gulping. “Ah, a drink of the gods.”
“And the demons.”
“So, as I said, those monks, the first ones came to Hieros when it was a deserted rock. They were devoid of the lust for the pleasures of the flesh, whether woman or man. So instead of falling prey to the sea nymphs, they tricked them and captured them in silver-threaded nets. Once out of the water, a nymph loses all her magic, and her real form is revealed.”
“And what is that?”
More wine.
“You know, the evil serpent, the sea drakon, Ketos the abominable.”
“Right, a sea drakon…” I said.
“You don’t believe me, but this has been scribed and recorded. You can see this at their church temples, the paintings of their haloed saints, the riding drakonslayers.”
Baagh was laughing on his own translation as he spoke Agathon’s words.
“But what does this tale have to do with eternal life?”
“That’s the secret. The saints gained immortality by killing the sea drakons. They emptied the blood veins of the beasts. And they immersed themselves in the black poison and became invincible.”
Agathon emptied his wineskin and threw it away.
“Bring me some more!” he shouted to a surprised Reghen.
That man was as drunk as a Guide on the Great Feast of Spring.
“It sounds too easy,” I said, mocking him now. “Kill a woman-serpent, become immortal.”
“Oh, but it’s not. You see, it requires the ultimate sacrifice. Not to love. To rip out your own heart. Who can rip out his own heart?”
I am still not certain if those last words were Agathon’s or if Baagh had given me his own version. But many summers later, as I set out for the Castlemonastery to beg the Cross Sorcerers for their magic, I wished that the drunk sailor’s tales of nymphs, drakons, and immortal blood were real. Even such outrageous nonsense becomes believable when it is the last untorn sail of the sinking boat of your life.
“Why do you waste your time with false othertriber tales, Da-Ren? It is what we have known and what we have taught the young,” the Reghen added. “The sea is the crypt of the Ninehead.” The Reghen finally left me alone with those words, all too happy in his own wisdom. There was no new knowledge here for him, nothing of interest to bring to his ninety-nine brothers.
Baagh was still laughing at Agathon’s tales. “Ho, ho! The blood of the sea nymphs!”
I asked him for his own truth, but he didn’t want to tell me more about Hieros Island. He said it was a waste of time and that an infidel could never learn the secrets of the True Faith, unless he chooses it. I even asked the two Ouna-Mas, but they didn’t say anything either. T
hey sat in an embrace at a corner of the deck next to the cabin, a beautiful black monster with two red-veiled heads dying slowly when the seawater licked their skin and coming back to life when the sun shone, and the wind lifted their robes.
The next night brought the first full moon, and for the first time in our journey, the Ouna-Mas were free to sleep with one of us. Raven, the younger girl, chose Noki. She started timidly, and then not so timidly, separating herself from the arms of the older one and disappeared with Noki below deck for the entire night. Ironskull, the older one, didn’t choose anyone and stayed still like a solemn black swan. A gray mist enveloped the hull and the sails that night. The gentle waves whispered many times. The young Ouna-Ma moaned even more, and then I heard a scream. As the first light broke the dawn’s fog, we searched for Ironskull, but she was nowhere to be found. There was not much of a boat to search. My men swore, one by one, in front of Raven, Enaka, and the Reghen that no one had laid a hand on her. Each of them had a different tale to say:
“Enaka sent Pelor and her chariot in the night and carried her up to the Sky.”
“She tripped and fell overboard.”
“One of Darhul’s heads jumped out through the fog and took her. Didn’t you hear her scream?” He was the only one other than myself who had heard the scream.
“She drowned her sorrows in the black water when her sister abandoned her for Noki.”
Each one came up with his own tale of what happened that night.
Her sister sobbed almost silently and sat with her head between her knees for three days, without food. When she opened her eyes again, she started to bloom like a poppy flower in the sun. She chose Noki every night, even without a full moon, even when Enaka forbade it. The Reghen went to say something, but he had no power on my boat.
Drakon Omnibus Page 76
