The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  “What do you reckon she’s making?” Rol asked Prothero. They had given up on the log-line some time ago.

  “If it’s less than fourteen knots then I’m a Kassic bumboy.”

  “We’re setting a record, then.”

  “Yes. I’m so pleased. When we’ve sunk to the bottom I’ll write my mother a letter.” Prothero roared with laughter, and Rol smiled back. There was something splendid in it, after all, the valiant battle of their stout-hearted ship, the pitting of their frail bodies against the might of the gods, the rage of the waters. Had men never felt this, they would never have gone to sea. Looking down into the waist where the crew were rigging lifelines, Rol saw Elias Creed look up at him with that ruined, bone-lean face, and saw the same gladness within it.

  “Steady,” Riparian roared to the quartermasters at the wheel. The ship had slewed round, staggering under the onslaught of a crosscurrent from the Straits. This was the most perilous part. The wind might be going one way, but the sea beneath it was hacked and churned with several different currents here as the swells of two seas met and vied with each other.

  The Cormorant groaned like a sentient thing as the water hammered her hull timbers, corkscrewing round. The wheel spun wildly, sending the helmsmen flying, breaking ribs and snapping the deadman’s rig.

  “Rol, Prothero!” Riparian screamed, and the three threw themselves upon the spinning wheel. Prothero cried out as one of the spokes clapped his wrist and snapped the bone in two. Rol and the master strove together to bring the head of the brig round. Through the tiller ropes it was possible to feel the titanic forces working on the rudder; a judder of movement—the ropes were sliding on the drum beneath their feet.

  They hauled the wheel round and brought the brig before the wind again, Prothero helping them with his good arm. Elias Creed ran up the companionway and threw his weight into the struggle; he was immensely strong, and with his help they were able to ship fresh cables to the spokes. A roaring crash of spray came over the brig’s stern in a pummeling torrent that washed them off their feet and sent them sliding against the quarterdeck rail. Rol regained his feet first and grabbed Prothero before the master’s mate disappeared into the foaming chaos of the sea.

  “I’d get writing that letter if I were you.”

  Prothero’s mad humor seemed undimmed, though his hand hung useless as a rag from his wrist. “I think I’ll have to dictate it.”

  The Cormorant was under the looming sea cliffs of the Narrows now. Two hundred fathoms they soared up, and seabirds fought to keep aloft near their summits, white against the dark sky. At their foot the seas hammered and smashed in furious abandon, breakers splintering half a cable up the rock, so white in the gloom that they seemed to have a light of their own.

  The master wiped water out of his eyes and shouted at the quartermasters to get back to the wheel. Creed helped them, for two of their number had broken bones and bloody faces. The Cormorant swept on with a speed Rol had not seen or experienced before at sea, and in pursuit the following waves of the Caverric came thundering onward, lightning striking their crests. Five-fathom swells towering in line after line like attacking battalions, and as the Straits came together in the white-choked teeth of the Narrows so their assault became a frenzied battleground of broken water, waterspouts, whirlpools, and crosscurrents.

  Looking upon that field of devastated ocean even Prothero’s wit failed him. The ship’s company had tied themselves to the butts of the masts, lines of sodden cordage wrapped round their chests. Some sat head down and silent, others had their eyes open and were peering into the lightning-fractured sky. Beneath them the brave Cormorant powered on, her tortured hull groaning and creaking, the strain on the yards rising to a shriek.

  There was a rending crack, clear even over the tumult of the storm, and then a mass of timber and cordage came crashing down on deck. Three of the starboard watch died under that avalanche, and whips of severed rigging flew viciously in the wind. The maintopmast had gone by the board, and the mainstaysail with it. It was blown from its bolt-holes and disappeared ahead. The brig shuddered and yawed, and every man on the quarterdeck heaved on the wheel to keep her on course. Half a mile to the Narrows. A thousand batteries of artillery could not have produced a more fearsome barrage of explosive force than that which lay ahead.

  Rol tied Prothero to the quarterdeck rail. The master’s mate was white-faced with pain. A fall had brought the bone out through the bruised skin of his wrist and it was jetting blood. When Rol tried to tie some whipcord about the wound he was shoved away roughly. “Don’t mind me—see to the blasted ship, will you, you great oaf!”

  The stern of the brig was catapulted into the air a hundred feet as the huge mass of water she rode upon was hurled at the rock of the Narrows. The Cormorant twisted in midair and for a few seconds was actually falling free of the water. Rol’s feet left the deck but he managed to seize a backstay and swing there. A sickening impact and the tearing shriek of rent timbers. The foremast came down across the bows, slewed round, and laid waste to the fo’c’sle. The brig hit the water again and was buried in water. It foamed up round the waist and up the quarterdeck ladders. She wallowed there as all about her the white water turned and spun in a weltering mass. Still spinning, the sea spat her out again, on her beam-ends this time. The brig’s starboard side was underwater and the stumps of her masts were at ninety degrees. Men slid free of their lifelines and disappeared into the foam.

  Slowly, slowly, she began to right herself. Had she been a man-of-war her gun-ports would have been stove in and she would be on her way to the bottom by now. But she was a light ship with no heavy cargo to move around, her ballast not the usual mass of rock and gravel, but pig-iron bars bolted to her bottom ribs to make her stiffer under sail. So she began to right herself where any other vessel would have continued the roll and capsized.

  All that remained in the way of yards was the bottom part of the mainmast and a ten-foot stump of the foremast; everything else had gone by the board. There was not a scrap of sail on the brig now and so she was flung forward through that awesome sea like a twig lost in a millrace, still turning widdershins as the water below her keel whirled in confused fury. Rol looked along what remained of her decks. Prothero was unconscious, still tied to the rail. Creed and two others were tangled in the cordage that secured the ship’s wheel, and there were a dozen more in the waist, but many of the crew had been washed overboard.

  “Riparian!” he yelled out. “Captain!” But there was no answer under all that lightning-cut sky. The master was gone.

  Rain came at last, a vicious hissing downpour that leaped up from the beaten deck. The Cormorant’s crazed motion began to ease as it beat down on the white water, flattening the worst excesses of the broken waves. Rol raised his head, not quite believing that they were still afloat, and saw that the Narrows were astern; they were through. The sea began to assume some rationality again, and the wind veered round to east-southeast; it was now striking his left ear instead of his right. The waves were still huge, however, and if they were not going to be pooped he would have to get some sail on her, get her to run before the wind. The gods only knew how much water was in the hold. The Cormorant’s side was only a few feet from the surface of the sea—she must have taken on untold tons.

  “Creed, Arkin, untie yourselves. We have to get a jury-rig up or she’ll founder.”

  Arkin was a quartermaster, a mariner these twenty years, but he simply turned his face away and did not move. He had given up. Creed alone staggered to Rol’s side. “The stump of the foremast?”

  “Yes. If we splice it to the main it’ll press down her stern, which is the last thing we want. We’ll have to—” He stopped and looked out along the length of the ship. Masses of broken timber and mounds of cordage littered the decks, but out on the bow the bowsprit was in one piece. Someone would have to crawl out on that slender yard as it dipped into the waves, and make fast one end of the jury-rig.

  “I’ll go out
on the sprit. You make fast the other end to what’s left of the foremast.”

  “No, let me—”

  “That’s an order, Elias. Now come on.”

  They prevailed upon another stunned member of the crew to go below and rouse out a staysail from the sail locker whilst Rol clambered out on the bowsprit. Every so often he would have to grit his teeth and bow his head as the tremendous rush of water went past him and over him and strove to tear him from the yard. Then he would emerge gasping again, the line still tied about his wrist. It was slow work, but in the end he had a two-inch cable made fast two-thirds of the way out along the bowsprit. When he had finally returned to the fo’c’sle he felt more exhausted than he had ever been in his life before and the seawater was streaming out of his ears. He bent and threw up a pint of the stuff on deck.

  They got up the scrap of staysail, and it was enough to bring the brig’s head round and put her before the wind. Her mad roll began to ease and her pitch became more pronounced. The Cormorant was moving like a ship again, not like some toy set adrift in a rapid.

  “It’s getting light,” Creed said, and looking up Rol found that it was true. Heartbreaking to look up and see nothing there above his head, no complex beautiful weaving of masts and yards and rigging. The Cormorant was a poor crippled thing now. More than that, she was dying under their feet. But at least the storm-dark was receding along with the lightning. It was day again. Only the wind was unchanged, still malign and shrill in their ears, whipping them forward relentlessly. And the rain—Rol opened his mouth and it filled up in seconds, washing away the salt. Huge drops that stung the skin like hail.

  He collected himself. A knot of sailors had gathered about him now that the odds seemed better.

  “Man the pumps,” he said. “We’re not going to let her die on us.”

  The wind slackened, but it did not back or veer a single point for five days. During that period no member of the Cormorant’s remaining crew slept for more than a few minutes at a time. West-nor’west was their course, the only one they could manage to keep with the wind behind them. They got a yard up on the mainmast but any sail hoisted upon it pressed the stern of the ship lower in the water until the waves began to break over the taffrail. So they manned the pumps night and day, trying to lighten the Cormorant’s load. Men fell asleep with the rain hissing on their steaming backs and had to be roused with kicks and blows and set to work again.

  Prothero’s hand turned black and dead on the end of his arm, so Rol lopped it off with Fleam’s hungry edge and sealed the stump with boiling pitch. That was the only time they could spare the effort to get a fire going in the galley, for the place was knee-deep. The men drank brackish rainwater from barrels lashed on the quarterdeck and chewed gristly salt pork raw. All the provisions had been drowned by seven feet of water in the hold.

  Slowly, agonizingly, they began to win the battle with the pumps and the jets of water spurting out to larboard and starboard grew thinner and choppier. On the fifth evening, when first one and then the other of the pumps began to suck, Rol called all hands—there were barely a score of them left alive—and served out an issue of the master’s rum. Then he sent them all below to their soaking hammocks while he and Prothero and Creed manned the helm. Prothero’s dark face had become a white-sculpted exercise in ivory, but his stump was clean, and under the pitch Creed had sewn flaps of flesh about the bone. His eyes were clear as he stood by the binnacle and peered forward.

  “Dead reckoning?” he asked.

  “What do you think?” Rol retorted.

  “Eight knots.”

  “As much as that?”

  “For the first two days, I’d agree,” Creed said. “But lately it’s been slackening a little. I’d say six now.”

  “Very well,” Rol mused. “Eight knots is sixty-four leagues a day for two days, then six knots is forty-eight leagues a day for three days. That’s—”

  “Two hundred and seventy-two leagues,” Creed told him.

  “And from the Narrows to the coast of Bionar on this course is two hundred and seventy-five. Gentlemen, we’ve crossed the Inner Reach. I believe we are about to hit land.”

  “Or it’s about to hit us,” Prothero retorted. “If the cloud lifted we could see it by now. In any case, we’ll make landfall in a couple of hours, blind as bats on an unknown coast. We must heave-to and send a cutter ashore, find an anchorage. If we don’t we’ll have a wreck on our hands.”

  “Agreed,” Rol said. He wiped his scarred palm across his face. “Though heaving-to when we’ve naught but a scrap of staysail on her may not be the easiest task in the world.”

  “Drop anchor, then,” Creed suggested. “Even if it’s too deep, it’ll slow us down, and when we hit the shallows there’s a good chance it’ll catch and halt us.”

  Rol looked at Prothero. The dark man shrugged. “You’re senior now. Final say is yours.”

  “Splendid.” Rol smiled sourly. “Very well, lads, we’ll drop anchor, and pray to that bastard Ran we find good ground for it.”

  They dropped anchors from both bow and stern and then the entire ship’s company remained motionless on deck, watching to see if their pace slowed. At last Rol nodded.

  “It’s taken a good three knots off us. Prothero, get a leadsman in the chains and let us see what’s below our keel. The rest of you, get to work on the ship’s boat.”

  While the crew were patching up the only cutter that had survived, Rol went below to the master’s cabin to try to make some sense of their position. Riparian’s cross-staff, along with most of his charts, had been broken or washed away during the storm. There was nothing left detailed enough for inshore work, just one large-scale chart of the Inner Reach and its surrounding coasts. Rol took the dividers and plotted their course as best he could on the crinkled paper, and what he found made his lips purse in a silent whistle. The unseen coast off their bow was none other than that of the Goliad.

  He sat back in the master’s favorite chair, wishing old Riparian were here to shoulder the problems, to give orders. The Goliad was a desert, so men said, an amphitheater for the staging of the endless battles between Bionar and Oronthir and their allies, a cockpit of Umer’s many wars. But it was less than three hundred miles up the coast from Ordos, their destination. Somehow on the barren coast of the Goliad they must find the wherewithal to refit the ship.

  Rol studied the odd scar on his palm. The Mark of Ran, Riparian had called it, and considered it lucky, a talisman against drowning. Rol thought of it as a curse. The storm-god liked to play with those he marked, and this was one of his games.

  A hammering on the cabin door and Creed stepped inside without invitation, eyes alight. “Land ho.” And then he added: “Captain.”

  “Where away?”

  “Fine on the port bow, a league maybe.”

  Rol ran up on deck. The clouds had lifted and a hot, dry sun had come out from behind them. It was as welcome as a blessing to Rol’s saturated clothing and wet skin. Looking forward he saw a sere mustard-pale coastline ahead, devoid of any hint of life.

  “What’s the lead say?” he called forward.

  The leadsman in the forechains was coiling up his rope. “Four fathoms, sir, and shallowing. Sand and gravel.”

  The wind dropped, and Rol, looking to larboard, saw a long promontory there extending miles out to sea in a hooked curve. They were in its lee now, becalmed. Prothero nodded at it. “Ussa smiled on us today. Half a league to the sou’west and we’d be broken wood on the tip of yonder headland.”

  The ship came to a halt, making them all stagger slightly. The anchors had finally bitten in the seabed and were holding fore and aft. The Cormorant was still a mile offshore.

  “Three fathoms!” the leadsman shouted. Eighteen feet of depth. Looking over the ship’s rail, Rol could see clear to the bottom in the pellucid water, the shadow of the brig’s hull dark in the blue-green of the shallows. Tiny fish winked silver in swarming schools and as he watched a turtle flapped it
s slow course through them.

  Sixteen

  THE SHORE PARTY

  “THERE’S A WICKED REEF ABOUT TWO CABLES OFFSHORE all the way round the bay,” Creed said. “High surf all about it; we barely pulled clear. There is a gap, though, to the northeast.”

  “Did you get through it?” Rol demanded.

  “Yes. The beach is new-moon-shaped, five leagues long or so, but at the back of it there’s high cliffs, thirty fathoms high at the least. Only on the southern edge do they crumble somewhat. Men could make a passage there; everywhere else it’s not even a place for mountain goats.”

  “And sculling out again?”

  “Nip and tuck. The cutter’s a handy craft, but even so, we scored the bottom off her. Laden, it would be a whole different pot of fish.”

  There was a silence in the cabin until Rol said, “Well done, Elias. Have some rum.”

  The convict smiled. “An able seaman drinking in the master’s cabin?”

  “Consider yourself a master’s mate like Prothero here, and drink something, for the love of God.”

  “Me, I think I’ll crawl into the neck of the bottle and stay there awhile,” Prothero said, cradling his stump. “We’re in a cleft stick.”

  “Wind still picking up?” Rol asked him.

  “Were it not for the headland she’d be back-broken on those reefs of Elias’s as we speak. It’s picking up into a gale again beyond the bay. What is it they say? An onshore wind is the wrecker’s friend.”

  “Ran is not done with us yet, it seems,” Rol said. He looked sightlessly at the chart that their glasses held uncurled upon the table. They had been at anchor in the bay for three days now, hard at work twenty hours of every day. But the weather was changing again, and not for the better.