by David Drake
The helmsman at the port steering oar looked seaward instead of keeping his eyes on the sailing master for orders the way he should’ve done. He suddenly screamed and lunged away from the railing, slamming into Cashel and bouncing back as though he’d run into the mainmast.
“Here we go!” warned Cashel, bringing his staff around in front of him despite tight space. He clipped the shoulder of the helmsman, now scrambling away on all fours. The fellow yelped, but the contact didn’t slow the staff’s motion—which was all that mattered to Cashel at the moment.
The creature came straight up from the water with its huge jaws open. The pointed head was two double-paces long, ten feet as city folks would put it. The teeth were longer than Cashel’s middle fingers. Those at the front of the jaw were pointed, while teeth farther back became broadly saw-edged.
“A seawolf!” Master Lobon cried, but Cashel had seen seawolves, great marine lizards, when they came ashore on Barca’s Hamlet to snatch his grazing sheep. This creature had a smooth hide instead of a reptile’s pebbled skin; and besides, this thing’s head was as long as a big seawolf’s whole body.
This was a whale, but not one of the sluggish, comb-toothed monsters which browsed on shrimp at the edge of the Ice Capes. This was a meateater like the seawolves, only much, much bigger.
Still rising, the whale twisted to angle its gaping jaws toward Garric. The railing splintered. Instead of striking as he’d have done with a smaller opponent, Cashel stuck his staff vertically into the beast’s maw.
He acted by instinct, but his instinct was correct—as it generally was in a fight. The whale’s jaws slammed down but not shut, because the thick hickory didn’t flex at the creature’s bite. Its bunched jaw muscles only drove the staff’s iron ferrules deeper into its own tongue and palate. From its throat came a hiss like a geyser preparing to vent.
The whale started to slip back into the sea, dragging Cashel with it. He wrapped his legs around the stanchion to which the steering oar was attached, continuing to grip the staff with both hands.
The quinquereme listed, dragged over by the weight of the whale. Blue fire rippled through Cashel’s muscles; he wasn’t sure whether human strength or the wizardry that sometimes filled him allowed him to keep his grip, but he knew that if he let go the monster would find another, better way to attack. Cashel would anchor the whale so long as his staff held and his strength held, and neither one had ever failed him yet.
Garric hacked twice, leaving bone-deep cuts in the whale’s jaw, but the creature’s head was so large that a sword couldn’t do it real damage. Instead of a third cut he stabbed, slanting his long blade through the underjaw and out through the black-veined tongue. Cashel saw the tip of pattern-welded steel glittering in a spray of blood, but even the blade’s full length was unable to reach the monster’s vitals.
A Blood Eagle hurled his spear into the whale’s skull, just behind the eye. It was a good cast, but the point stuck less than a finger’s length into dense bone; the spear fell into the sea. Three more spears drove uselessly into the whale’s shoulder.
The whale’s nostrils were on the top of its head, in front of the rear-set eyes. They voided a miasma of stale air and rotten flesh, then drew in a fresh breath with the roar of a windstorm.
Cashel was hanging over the sea as the oak stanchion creaked between his legs. Huge as the whale’s head seemed, it was small in comparison to the snake-slim body. Far in the depths, Cashel saw the creature’s flukes lashing in an attempt to pull itself away from the staff it couldn’t spit out.
Very soon the quarterstaff would break, or Cashel would lose his grip on it, or the post would tear loose from the ship’s hull. Whatever happened after that would no longer be the concern of Cashel or-Kenset.
***
Sharina let go of Tenoctris and rose to her feet. The old wizard still sat cross-legged, but she’d reached up to grip the bow railing to steady herself. Now that Sharina’s hands were free, she reached under her loose-fitting court robes and drew the Pewle knife she wore concealed under the silk.
The knife’s blade was heavy and the length of her forearm. The back was straight but the cutting edge had a deep belly. It was the knife carried by Pewle Island seal hunters, a weapon and every sort of tool all in one package. The knife and her memories were all Sharina had left of Nonnus, the man who’d guarded her through the fringes of Hell and who had died still guarding her.
When Sharina knew him, Nonnus had been a hermit dedicated the Lady; earlier as a mercenary soldier he’d done things he never spoke of, but which Sharina had heard others whisper of him. She kept the Pewle knife for his memory; but in times like this, it was also a weapon that the bravest enemy would think twice before facing.
Garric’s platoon of black-armored bodyguards had rushed to put themselves between their prince and the monster which had leaped toward him from the sea. Small chance of that: Garric stood firm-footed on the sloping deck, using both hands on his sword hilt to hack at the huge head.
The soldiers’ weight made the ship list even more; water was gurgling through the lowest oarports, and the commotion below decks meant some of the rowers were about to abandon their benches. The sailing master was screaming at the sailors on deck to run out on the starboard wale to balance the load before the ship foundered.
Sharina had been hearing the click of ratchets against pawls from the fighting tower behind her, but it wasn’t until the captain of the balista crew shouted, “She’s ready! Swing her round!” that she realized the sound was capstans drawing back the balista’s arms. She looked up.
The crewmen were rotating their weapon to point back over the Shepherd’s deck. Even with the sail furled the mast and cordage would interfere with their aim, but some part of the monster rising like a gleaming black crag beside the vessel should be clear.
The captain stooped to aim, disappearing from Sharina’s viewpoint on the main deck. The bolt’s bronze head, cross-shaped to smash instead of stabbing cleanly, winked as the captain adjusted the weapon’s bearing. Instead of shooting, he rose with a troubled look while his crewmen waited expectantly.
“Shoot!” Sharina screamed. “Shoot or it’ll pull us under!”
Over the shouts and clash of metal, Sharina heard the deep groan of the ship’s timbers working. The monster’s weight was twisting the hull like a bad storm.
“Mistress, I can’t!” the soldier cried in agony. “Mistress, I might hit the prince!”
The fighting tower’s notched crenellations were eight feet above the deck, higher than Sharina could reach but well within reach if she jumped. She sprang up without thinking further, catching the lip in her left hand and swinging her legs over the upper railing. Her robes got in the way, but that didn’t stop her.
There wouldn’t have been room for her on the narrow platform if her muscular body hadn’t slammed one of the crewmen aside. The Pewle knife was still in her right hand.
“Is it aimed?” she shouted to the captain, his face only inches from hers. He stood with the release cord in his right hand. “Will it hit the thing?”
“Yes, but mistress—” the man said.
Sharina jerked the cord out of his hand. She started to whisper a prayer to the Lady, but the Lady brought peace and good harvests; she had no place here. Instead Sharina murmured, “Nonnus, help me and help my brother....”
She didn’t bother bending so that her eyes could follow the line of the bolt; she didn’t have the skill to second guess the captain, nor the time either. She pulled the release cord.
When the trigger claws released the thumb-thick bowcord, the balista’s arms slammed forward against the leather-padded stops on the frame. The double Bang! shocked a cry from Sharina; she’d seen balistas and catapults in use before, but she’d never been so close to one when it loosed.
A crash like that of a wedge splitting oak rang on top of the balista’s release. Sharina looked toward the stern. The bolt was buried to its wooden vanes in the monster’s head where
the left eye had been. The impact had distorted the whole long skull like the hull of a rammed warship.
Garric staggered backward, unharmed. None of the thronging soldiers had been touched. Nonnus, may the Lady show you the peace you did not find in life.
As her eyes took in the scene, the patrol vessel with Ilna aboard drove into the monster’s body alongside the Shepherd. The bronze ram bit deep with a sound like an axe chopping into a hog’s carcase, but so much louder that it overwhelmed all other noise.
The creature’s nostrils spurted a mist of blood high in the air. The patrol vessel’s mast cracked and tilted forward, breaking some of the decking ahead of the mast step. The Shepherd shook violently; Sharina might’ve stumbled over the wooden battlements if a balista crewman hadn’t steadied her.
The patrol vessel continued to slide forward, pulling the monster along with it. Timbers crashed and the Shepherd rolled upright with a shudder. The great jaws spasmed open as the carcase rolled onto its back.
Cashel was flying through the air, still holding his quarterstaff and gripping a broken post with his legs. Sharina didn’t have time to cry out before he landed in the sea thirty feet from the quinquereme’s stern.
Chapter 3
Cashel couldn’t feel anything, not even the water when he bellyflopped with a splash that would’ve been immense under most circumstances. Since the sea still roiled with the creature’s death throes, he guessed nobody’d notice even that.
He plunged beneath the surface. The cold shock of the sea hadn’t revived him, but not being able to breathe did. He tried to flail his arms and realized he was still holding his quarterstaff. He let go with one hand and paddled. Though he still couldn’t feel anything and he knew he was very weak, his face lifted into the air again and he was able to gasp in a breath.
Like the whale, Cashel thought and might’ve laughed, but his nose dropped underwater. Breathing salt water seared his lungs worse than near suffocation had moments before. He kicked to the surface again, knowing that he’d shortly drown.
The water was red with the whale’s blood and blotched with crimson froth. The monster lay on its back between Cashel and the Shepherd, floating low. Rhythmic spasms rippled down the creature’s belly muscles; its underside was a pale contrast to the blotched gray-black of the upper surfaces.
A huge flipper Cashel lifted, then slammed back into the sea only inches from Cashel’s face. He grabbed it instantly. He could feel bones beneath the slick, gristly surface.
The whale would probably sink also; Duzi, he could see that it was already sinking! But it didn’t sink quite as fast as Cashel alone—all bone and muscle, with no fat to buoy him up in the water—so he clung to it and waited.
He might be rescued after all, though he didn’t care much. Struggling with a monster the size of a ship had burned all emotion out of him. How long had the fight gone on, anyway?
Because Cashel lay so close to the whale’s carcase, all he could see of The Shepherd was its mast top. The ship had continued on ahead after Cashel and the whale tore loose, swinging in a wide circle to port. It was so big that it kept going for a long time, even after the oars’d stopped.
Cashel could see and hear fine, and his muscles did what he told them—though not nearly as well as he expected. The numbness in his body was passing too, though of course all he could really feel now was pain.
Something was going on to Cashel’s other side also. He’d have to turn his head to see what it was. With a real effort of will—it meant ducking his face underwater again—he did.
The Flying Fish was nosing back toward the whale, its prow smeared with blood and its ram skewed upward. Cashel had a vague recollection of the little ship hitting the whale at the moment everything let go in his mind and the world around him. Now its oars were backing to bring it to a halt in the crimson water.
Ilna stood in the bow with a coil of rope in her hand. “Can you catch if I throw this to you, brother?” she called. Her voice would’ve sounded unemotional to somebody who didn’t know her as well as Cashel did.
“I can catch,” he croaked, the first words he’d spoken since he shouted a warning as the whale arrowed up from the depths. Ilna tossed the coil underhanded, landing it in the water so close that Cashel could’ve grabbed it with his teeth if he’d needed to.
He used his right hand instead, letting go of the whale’s flipper. Just then Ilna’s man Chalcus dived off the bow, stripped naked and holding the end of another coil of rope.
“I’m all right!” Cashel said, but Chalcus cut the water cleanly and didn’t reappear for the long moments. Ilna didn’t look worried so Cashel figured things must be all right, but where was the fellow? A sailor on deck continued to pay out rope; a second coil was spliced onto the first.
The Flying Fish halted, drifting slowly toward Cashel. Ilna’d tied her rope to a stanchion, but Cashel wasn’t quite ready to clamber up the ship’s sheer side. The fight with the whale had taken a lot out of him; almost more than there’d been. He tried to remember exactly what’d happened after he thrust the staff into the monster’s jaws, but it wasn’t so much a blur as tiny broken pieces of a scene painted on glass.
Sailors at the stern of the Flying Fish were dragging a fellow dressed like an officer from the sea at the patrol vessel’s stern. Had he fallen from the Shepherd the way Cashel had? There might’ve been more things going on than just the whale, too.
“Hoy!” somebody shouted. Cashel turned his head. Chalcus stood on the whale’s twitching body, spinning the end of his rope overhead; it must have been lead line, loaded to sink quickly to check the depth. He’d gathered a triple loop in his left hand. “Ready?”
“Read—” called the sailor on deck. Chalcus loosed the line in an arrow-straight cast that took it into the hands of the waiting sailor. As soon as the fellow caught it, Chalcus jumped feet-first into the sea and bobbed up beside Cashel.
Cashel had begun to shiver. Not from the water, he thought; the sea wasn’t nearly as cold as nights he’d watched his sheep through storms of early winter with no shelter but his sodden cloak. He’d strained even his own great strength; it’d be good to get some food in him, if he could keep it down. Or at least a mug of ale to sluice the foul dryness out his mouth. Right now it tasted like an ancient chicken coop.
Conversationally Chalcus said, “We’ll be towing our prize in with us; the harbor’s not so far, after all, and I’ve never seen or heard of a creature like this one. Have you, friend Cashel?”
“I never saw anything like it,” Cashel muttered. “It’s a whale, but it’s nothing like the ones that pass in spring by Barca’s Hamlet.”
Talking helped; he suddenly understood why Chalcus paddled beside him in the bloody water, chatting like they were relaxing on a sunlit hillside. The sailor’s tone was cheerfully mild, but his eyes missed nothing. If Cashel suddenly lost consciousness, Chalcus would grab him before he sank and keep him up till he could be hauled on deck like a netful of cargo.
“Neither have I seen its like,” agreed Chalcus. “Nor heard of such, more to the point, for my dealings have been more in southern waters and the east than in these western wastes.”
He grinned wickedly. His arms floated motionless on the surface, but his legs must be windmilling to keep him so high in the water. Chalcus’ nude body looked like a deer skinned at the end of a hard winter. There was no fat on his scarred frame, none at all. His muscles stood out like the individual yarns of a hawser.
“Though perhaps I shouldn’t say that, you being a western lad yourself,” he added.
Cashel shook his head. “I’m from Barca’s Hamlet,” he muttered. “I don’t know anything about oceans. As for Carcosa, if we get there—”
“Indeed, we’ll get there, lad,” the sailor said, bobbing like a child’s toy in a puddle.
“—all I could say about it is, I’ve passed through the city and I was glad to get to the other side.”
The mild banter was bringing Cashel back from the aby
ss his struggles had taken him to the edge of. He was aware of himself as a person again. Raising his head, he tried to find Sharina; the huge carcase was still a quivering wall between him and the Shepherd.
“Come on, you lazy buggers!” Chalcus bellowed at the crew of the Flying Fish as they tugged on the rope he’d tossed them. They were using the light line as a messenger to draw an anchor cable around the whale just behind the flippers. “The sun’ll have set before we’ve got this brute to land, and where’s the honor if folk can’t see our trophy?”
“Can you really carry this on the Flying Fish?” Cashel asked, pitching his voice low so that no one on the deck above would hear the question. “It looks to me like it’s as heavy as the whole ship.”
“Aye, as heavy and more,” Chalcus agreed. “But we’ll be all right towing the toothy devil, so long as he doesn’t sink; which may happen yet, if they don’t make that hawser fast some time soon. I think perhaps I....”
He looked sidelong at Cashel, judging how far he’d recovered.
Cashel laughed, snorted salt water from his nostrils, and laughed again. “I think I’m ready to go aboard, Master Chalcus,” he said. “I may not have all my strength back, but I think what remains will prove an aid to hauling that rope.”
He looked at his sister on the deck above. “Ilna?” he said. “See to it that this line is snubbed off, will you? I’m coming aboard, and I don’t look forward to spilling myself in the water again because something slipped!”
Cashel tugged to test the line himself, then walked up the side of the vessel using his left hand on the rope to steady him. Oh, yes; he was ready for work again!
***
Sharina swung down from the fighting tower’s battlements with a great deal more care than she’d displayed climbing it. She’d sheathed the Pewle knife; it hadn’t been required as a weapon but its smooth steel weight had settled her mind at a time she needed that. Now that she had leisure and both hands, she worried that her billowing robes would catch a projection and she’d break her neck as she fell.
