The Sacred Band

by David Anthony Durham

  “Acts just like a girl, doesn’t she? You’d think she was sixteen and had never seen an obstacle she couldn’t leap. She’s always been like that, all thirtysome years I’ve known her. Giver bless her.” The brigand set somber eyes on Melio. “It’s not true, though. She’s seen hard times, especially when she was a girl. She likes you, but don’t get the wrong idea. She’d not roll with you. It’s the dance she likes; not the wrestling.”

  “I … I never thought—”

  “You know why? In your case, it’s because of Mena. For a certain type of woman, the princess is … well, a person to aspire to. Like a hero if she were a man. You understand me?”

  Melio thought a moment and then said, “Yes, I do. I know the feeling. About Geena, though, I wouldn’t have tried anything.”

  “Good,” Clytus said. “She’d go off you in a minute if she thought you would. You’re a fine lad, but if you slighted Mena she’d likely introduce your stiffy to a blood eel’s teeth. She’s done it before.” Before Melio could configure his face in response to this, Clytus slapped his shoulder. “Now, to chores. This ship runs clean in many ways I’ve not figured out yet, but there’s still work to do.”

  As he always did, Melio went to his chores without complaint. Since leaving Tivol he had learned more than he had ever wished to about nautical matters. Four was not nearly enough to crew a vessel like the Slipfin, but Clytus and Geena had enough brigand tricks up their sleeves to make hard things easier, to finesse the impossible into only improbable. He had to respect them for it, and do his part.

  If these were to be his last days, Melio could not complain that they were being spent poorly. He had seen wonders at sea before. In the time before he found Mena on the docks of Ruinat, he had worked for a feeble living among the Floating Merchants. The Inner Sea was beautiful, but its teeming life had not prepared him for the things he saw riding the Gray Slopes.

  One afternoon, a week from land, Geena had shouted from high in the rigging. He did not catch what she said, except that it was an alarm. Melio turned. He saw the movement low on the horizon. He could not make sense of it at first. Low clouds? A storm brewing? Neither. It came on fast, with a speed and swarming quality that set it apart from some phenomenon of the weather. But it did not ride the water like a fleet of boats, nor was it in the water, as aquatic life should be. It was above the surface, skimming the crests of the waves.

  Geena slid down the rope at a speed akin to just plain falling. She hit the deck and sprang up with purpose.

  “What is that?” Melio shouted.

  “Dinner or death,” she said as she passed him. She flipped open one of the wooden deck crates and hit him in the chest with a wad of netting. She bolted away, climbed the stairs to the bridge, and disappeared inside.

  “Or make it both.” Kartholomé slid up to them with an uncanny grace on the skin, looking like a performer skating on ice. “Dinner and death.” He grabbed one of the nets and careened away.

  Standing where Geena instructed him to, netting loose in his fingers, Melio stared at the rocking view of a seething sea atop which a great mass of something approached. Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. They were innumerable. Large enough to see at a distance. They flew, but something told him they were not birds. There were no birds out here. Not so far from land. Not low-flying birds like that.

  Geena, back again, grabbed him by the elbow. “Don’t get skewered, love. Stay near the cabin door.”

  It was not until they were upon them that Melio understood what they were: a massive flock of flying fish, with flipper wings so wide and nimble that individuals wheeled like starlings within a vast, unstoppable torrent of momentum. The front wall of them broke over the ship. Motion engulfed them: that of the sailing ship and of the fish flying across it. Sound that textured the air with scales. A sea-deep stench of salt and life and moisture splattered Melio’s face. The air became liquid enough to swim in.

  Of course! Melio thought. That’s how they fly. They swim the air!

  The fish careened over the deck. They slipped between the sails. Most flew with amazing precision, even snapping their wings against their sides to cut through narrow gaps. Their bodies were slim splinters, thick around as a man’s leg and, fins included, a little longer. They were as dangerous in flight as javelins, striped down the side with one slash of violet. One sliced Kartholomé’s shoulder through his shirt, several smashed so hard against structures on the boat that they skidded across the deck, broken. A hundred, it seemed, tried to cut strands of Melio’s curly hair as they passed.

  Melio would never forget the mad way he and Kartholomé and Geena dashed around on deck, fishing. They tossed nets up over their heads, and then fell to the deck, clutching the ropes as the fish’s force pulled them. He would never forget that, try as he might, he could not say he saw even one of them jump from the water or fall into it. They just flew. Nor would he forget the taste of them afterward, when the crew gathered snug in the cabin, getting stupid on ale. Roasted over an open flame, the fish needed nothing but salt to flavor them. “Like tuna,” he declared, and Geena had added, “If tunas could fly and were a white fish that tasted like sea air after a storm on an island of lemon trees.”

  She had it right, he had to admit.

  And then there was the morning two weeks from land, nothing around them but endless ocean, when the sails suddenly appeared. Twenty or thirty of them, diaphanous white triangles blown by the same steady wind the Slipfin hitched. They came over the horizon behind them midmorning, and by the midafternoon they cruised right by the league clipper. But the sails were nothing human made. They trailed beneath them long tendrils of aquatic life, ribbons of yellow and blue, splattered with sparkles along the entire long length of them. Melio could not shake the feeling that each shimmer was an individual creature attached to the tendrils, passengers that watched him as they flapped in the current, as casual as so many Agnates passing them in their pleasure crafts.

  There was the doubled sky at night. Above, the constellations he knew. Below, beneath the undulations of the waves, another universe of glowing orbs. They were not reflections from the sky, as he thought at first, but shone with their light from somewhere far below. He knew that the stars below were living creatures, which made him wonder if the stars in the sky might be likewise. Creatures of some vast ocean he could not comprehend.

  And there were the deep whales. He had heard tales of them, but seeing them was another thing. They appeared in a pod off a way to starboard. They looked, from the middle distance, like a series of rounded granite boulders, save that they bobbed with the seas. One broke off from the rest, dipped below the surface a moment, and then rose and came toward them. The enormous wedge of its head pushed a billow of water before it. Just before its nose would have hit the Slipfin, the whale dove. Its tailfins stretched wider than the Slipfin was long. When it submerged, the surge of water it pulled down tilted the boat with it. The upsurge of water from the fin sent a wave over the boat, drenching all on board. Melio clutched a safety rope, laughing uncontrollably at the bizarre beauty of it. He was starting to understand the way Geena lived.

  The way Dariel must have lived when he grew to adulthood among these people.

  The trials to come should have daunted him, but for some reason they did not. It was not that he thought they would pass through the Range, survive a run-in with the sea wolves, or possibly find one young prince in a foreign land that he knew nothing of. Just the opposite. It was the fact these things seemed so out of the reach for four small people in a relatively small boat that heartened him. They should fail. They would fail. There was no way they could not fail. With that established, he could go forward without struggling with expectations.

  Dead calm. The third week in. Just as far from land as was possible. Near where the Range might well have begun. Instead of that roaring tumult—stillness. It just came upon them while nobody was paying attention. Melio did not feel the boat’s constant rocking stop; he just realized t
hat it had when he awoke that morning. It was not even the lack of movement that woke him. It was the silence. No creaking of boards, no murmuring off somewhere in the ship’s innards, no whistle of wind or slop of water against the hull, no tinkling from the bells high up on the mainmast.

  They all gathered on deck and stared at the breezeless sky and the mirror-flat surface of the water and the ghosts of limp cloths where the sails should have been. The Slipfin sat as if stuck in a sea of glass.

  “When did this happen?” Clytus asked.

  “Didn’t you notice?” Geena responded.

  “Nah. I was deciphering what I could from league manuals in the bridge back room. I set the course and stepped away from the wheel, stuck my nose in the books. Don’t know how long for, but when I looked up this calm was on us. Couldn’t have been more than a few minutes,” he said, but none of the confidence of the statement was in the voice making it.

  Geena jumped up onto the port railing. She stood there, balanced above the water. For a moment, she looked like she was going to leap down onto the hard surface of the once-was-water and go running across it, playing. A few seconds standing there, however, took the jauntiness out of her posture. “Passing strange,” she whispered as she climbed back down to the deck.

  Kartholomé had heard of a league fleet becalmed for nearly a month during an early crossing, but that had happened so long ago the tale had the feel of legend. He seemed more disbelieving than any of them. “I’ve never seen a stillness like this,” he said. “It isn’t possible. We’re supposed to be in the Range now. The Range of the Gray Slopes, for the love of light. This isn’t possible!”

  “Shhhh,” Geena said, and Melio was glad she did. A voice should not, he felt, speak loudly into such stillness.

  For two days the impossible continued. No wind stirred. No ripples moved on the surface. No fish darted in the water, or flew above it, or sailed across it. No motions or sounds in all the world other than the ones they themselves made. The silence in particular grew in intensity. Melio had never experienced a silence like this one before. The lack of noise made them all shy of making any sounds. Each scuffing of a foot on the deck or the thrumming of fingers on the railing, a cough at night or a clearing of a throat: they all seemed like an affront to the emptiness that was the world. A sign that would betray their existence to something that should not know of their existence. They spoke only when they had to, and then only in whispers. Melio always felt ill at ease afterward.

  On the third morning a fin broke the surface—the dorsal of a gap-mouthed shark. It moved with an eerie slowness, as if it worked at a different pace from the rest of the world. It seemed to carve not through water but through the thick syrup the water had congealed into. Watching the shark for the better part of an afternoon, Melio felt the Slipfin to be akin to whatever tiny creatures that behemoth sucked into its gaping maw. Just as vulnerable. Just as still in the water, waiting for the mouth that would engulf them, boat and all.

  By the third night they had had enough of it. Gathered together in the captain’s cabin, they ate their fill from the rich stores. More to the point, they got drunk. They filled the small room with more noise than they had heard in days. Awkward, forced humor. Boisterousness with a slightly mad edge. Kartholomé drank his warm ale from a languid stretch of glass that no doubt was intended for finer things. Geena raided the league’s stores. She shared around a flask of something with an aniseed tang. None of them could name the liquor in it, but it went down.

  “If it keeps on like this,” Clytus said, “we’re not going to get to die fighting sea wolves.”

  “It’ll be boredom that takes us,” Kartholomé quipped.

  Geena drank from the flask, closed her eyes as she processed the taste and potency of it. Still doing so, she said, “I’ll not abide that. I made a pact a long time ago with the afterdeath. I’m not going to it quietly. A howling death I’ll have. None other.” She slapped a hand on the polished wood of the table.

  Kartholomé rose abruptly and went outside. They could hear him shouting out across the water, damning the calm and insulting the wind for cowardice, calling the waves craven. He returned and commenced to drink more.

  Melio’s gaze drifted up from the ring of familiar faces and moved across the walls. Leagueman walls, decorated with their sparse sense of nautical gentility. He could not see it well from where he sat, but there was a mural at the far end of the room, painted right onto the smooth wood panels. He had studied it before. A league brig plied a sea filled with carnage, the bodies of leviathans thick in water stained crimson. Sea wolves, Kartholomé had confirmed. The painting brimmed with details. Individual leaguemen and Ishtat on the deck of the brig. Harpoons caught in midair. A sea wolf pierced through a grasping tentacle, just one of many. Seabirds circling in the air above. Melio knew that detail to be true. The biggest brigs had their own contingents of birds that made the ocean crossing with them.

  Despite the details, Melio could not quite believe the scene. The sea wolves themselves had no shape that he could credit. They looked like whales and squids and sharks all cut into pieces and floating in a wave-heavy stew together.

  “What do they want anyway?” Melio asked. “The sea wolves, I mean. Why attack ships? Nothing else does that. Not even deep whales.”

  “Nah, they just come and take a look, near to sinking in the process,” Clytus said. “You know how much we’d have made if we were whalers? If we’d taken that big bastard and dragged him back to Tivol?”

  “The four of us? Not possible.”

  Clytus guffawed. There was a comment to go with it, Melio could see, but Clytus kept it in. “So, do they have a taste for man flesh or what?” Melio asked.

  Kartholomé warmed to the question. “Leagueman flesh, I’d say. The league and they are enemies. Always have been. Just like in the painting you’ve been eyeing. Before they had the skin, the league lost a lot of ships to them. Even a brig went down once. Disappeared. None lived, but everyone believes it was sea wolves that took her. Long time ago, this is, but the leaguemen know how to hold a grudge. Once they came up with the skin they—”

  “What is the skin? Do you know how it’s made?” Melio accepted the flask from Geena. He drank with the help of her finger, which tilted the flask up to lengthen his measure.

  “If I knew, I’d not be here,” Kartholomé said. “I’d be sipping lemon liqueur from a cliffside estate in Manil, with two redheaded whores named Benda and Fenda.”

  “He’s partial to redheaded whores,” Geena explained. “An experience he had as a lad, see. Give him enough drink and you’ll hear more about it than you want to know.”

  “Anyway,” Kartholomé continued, “what I’m saying is that I’d be rich, is what. Nobody knows how they make it. Could be a process the Lothan Aklun clued them to. Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s the only thing that made the mist trade possible.”

  The mist trade? Melio mused. He never calls it the quota trade.

  “So,” Melio asked, “should we ever get moving again and come up against these sea wolves, will the skin protect us or won’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Kartholomé said.

  “Which?”

  “It will and won’t. You were there when we bought and loaded the harpoons. You didn’t think we were going whaling, did you?” He held up a hand to stop Melio’s response. “Let me finish. You asked a question. Let me answer it. Once the league had the skin, their big ships were safe. Little ones not so much, but the big ones could sail as they pleased. The sea wolves just can’t grasp the stuff. They slip off it. Tentacles and beak and teeth and everything. So the brigs just slid on by. That’s all right if you’re two hundred feet above the water. But when you’re down low like we are … that’s a different story. They’ll jump clear out of the water and smash down on the deck. They’ve got these tentacles with grippers all up and down them. They get one of those around your leg and you’re heading for their mouth. Beaklike, the mouth is. Ugly thing so sharp it
serrates the flesh like two curved knives angled just so. You maybe should have asked more about them before you signed on for this trip.”

  Melio, remembering that he did not always like this man, met his gaze without humor. “You knew all that and you still came.”

  “There’s more,” he said, after a long draft of ale. “The league wasn’t satisfied with just being able to get across untroubled. Spiteful bunch, they are. They took to slaughtering the beasts whenever they could. Harpoons. Those big crossbow bolts of theirs. They even threw out barrels of pitch and set seas full of the wolves alight.”

  “They still do that?”

  “On occasion, I suppose. Did it for generations. Never did any good, though.”

  Kartholomé dabbed at the moisture at the edges of his lips. For some reason this prompted him to flash a sly smile at Geena. She responded with a finger gesture threatening his manhood with an unfortunate break. They did that every now and then. A game, Melio assumed.

  “I haven’t made a scientific study of it,” the pilot continued, “but I don’t think so. What I heard is, it never changed things in the slightest. The league got tired of the effort. Now they just sail through them.”

  “As we’ll do as well,” Clytus said. “Might have to tack a bit, but—”

  “ ‘Tack a bit’?”

  The brigand, thickly muscled, masculine-featured in a blocky, weathered way, tried to shape his large hands into a demonstration of the maneuvering he had planned. He looked like a bear trying to explain the use of a pottery wheel.

  Kartholomé chuckled. He started to say something but found it too amusing to put into words. Geena flicked a spoon at him. He found that hilarious as well. He got up, coughing out an overflow of humor as he headed back on deck.