by Kai Meyer
“I understand that.”
Jolly was about to add something, but then she thought that d’Artois had certainly grasped what she meant. If he ever really did meet Griffin, he’d find the right words.
She cast a last look back. From the air the protective walls of the city were clearly recognizable. There were two—one at the foot of the coral mountain cone, at the beginnings of the points of the giant sea star from which the city of Aelenium rose. The second barricade wall lay a few hundred yards higher in the maze of narrow streets, only a short distance above the Poets’ Quarter. If that broke, the city was lost. Then the inhabitants could only defend themselves with house-to-house fighting, and it would only be a question of time before the kobalins, cannibals, and pirates overran the last positions.
With a heavy heart Jolly turned her eyes away and looked ahead. The rays were bearing them toward the fog wall that surrounded Aelenium on all sides. A moment later the animals plunged into the clouds and were flying through the uppermost layer of the fog wall. Up here it was as if they were floating over the clouds, a woolly white and gray that stretched below them as if it could catch anyone who fell out of the saddle without any difficulty. Misty tentacles stretched out toward the rays, which now and then touched them with their undersides or cut them to pieces with their wings.
Jolly cleared her throat. “May I ask you something, Captain d’Artois?”
“Ask away.”
“Is there someone…I mean, do you have someone down there waiting for you? For whom you’re doing all this?”
Suddenly d’Artois’s neck muscles grew clearly prominent, his back visibly tensed. “I’m fighting for…” He stopped. Perhaps he’d been going to say “for all the people of Aelenium,” but at the last moment he probably realized how empty those words would have sounded. “My wife is dead,” he said after a short pause. “She was killed when the kobalins attacked the north arm of the sea star. She was riding a hippocampus that was pulled under by the kobalins.”
Jolly’s throat became even drier. “I’m sorry.”
D’Artois seemed to be concentrating on guiding the ray again. But she saw that his knuckles were white as he gripped the reins. He was breathing deeply, as if he could free himself of the bad memories that way.
Soledad laid a hand on Jolly’s shoulder, very briefly, only to clutch the saddle again immediately. The flight made her uneasy.
“Each one here has made a sacrifice,” she whispered in Jolly’s ear. “Munk lost his parents; you, Captain Bannon; I, my father. The soldiers are no exception.”
Jolly knew that, but still it was good to have Soledad say it aloud. Absorbed with her own fear and uncertainty, she tended to forget that others had to live with loss and with sorrow. She was only one of many. She was nothing special, she’d always said that. Even if Forefather and the Ghost Trader had tried to talk her into something different.
Just a girl.
Somehow she found the thought more comforting than all the talk of polliwog powers and mussel magic. If they should ever succeed in defeating the Maelstrom, it would not be because they were different from others. If they conquered him, it would only be because they didn’t forget what they were. Who they were.
And that it was worth it to fight just for that.
“Can you see anything?”
The whale was drifting on the waves with his mouth open. Ebenezer stood between two teeth, holding fast with one hand and bending so far forward that he could look up past the animal’s gums. The sky was deep blue, like a concave gem. Swarms of gulls circled over the whale. They followed him along all his pathways through the seas of the world. When he came to the surface, they picked algae and small shelled animals from his back.
Griffin was high up on the whale’s head. It had been a difficult and frightening journey through the tunnel-like gullet up into the mouth. From there he’d jumped out into the water, and the whale had dived and then come up again right underneath him, thus lifting Griffin onto his back.
“Griffin!” called Ebenezer from the mouth down below. “Come on, tell, can you see the fog?”
Griffin was shading his eyes with both hands, but the brightness still blinded him. He squinted in all directions, searching for the fog wall behind which Aelenium was concealed. Jasconius might have a substantial intelligence for a sea monster, but his sense of direction left more than a little to be desired.
How would a whale know the points of the compass? Or degrees of longitude and latitude?
“I don’t see anything!” Griffin yelled back. “Everything is so bright.”
“Wait for a minute,” replied Ebenezer, making an effort to be heard over the crashing of the waves against the mighty columns of teeth in the open whale mouth. The monster’s gums stretched over him like a black dome. “You’ll get used to the brightness pretty quickly.”
It wasn’t easy to find enough hold on the skin of the whale’s upper surface. Griffin had taken off his boots so as not to injure the animal. Barefoot, he crouched on the highest point of the mighty body, which stretched away under him like the hull of an overturned boat, as black as tar, with patches of thousands of tiny crabs and mussels.
Only now could Griffin comprehend how mighty the whale actually was. He estimated that the body measured more than double the size of a four-master—even without including the gigantic tail.
Griffin peered at the horizon through the whirling flocks of gulls. The more his eyes got used to the daylight, the bluer and more brilliant the sky seemed to him, as if azure dye were being unendingly pumped into it.
But still he couldn’t see the fog anywhere. Hadn’t Ebenezer explained to him that Jasconius chose his routes randomly? The monk could steer the whale in a general direction, and during the past night Griffin had checked the course by the stars—this was the first time that Ebenezer led him through the throat into the mouth. After that they’d dived again and begun the journey. To be certain, however, Griffin had insisted that they look for their destination once more by daylight. They might be closer to Aelenium than they thought, and he didn’t want to risk missing the sea star city.
But except for the gulls, the glittering brightness, and the black monstrosity beneath him, he couldn’t make out anything. No fog, nothing. Maybe he was still too close to the surface. That was the reason for the lookout being on the highest mast of a ship. Yes, if he could have flown like the gulls, then maybe—
A hellish noise startled him. About ten paces away, a towering column of water shot up from an opening in Jasconius’s back, with a rushing and rattling that hurt his ears. Seconds later Griffin’s clothes, which had just dried in the sun, were soaked through again. The masses of water had nearly rinsed him off the whale’s back.
He lay on his stomach, cursing, and tried to hold on while the last fountains from the monster’s interior poured down on him. He closed his eyes to protect them from the salt water and pressed his cheek firmly against the whale’s skin.
“Griffin?” said Ebenezer from below. “Everything all right?”
Griffin struggled to his feet with a groan. “Why didn’t you tell me he does that?”
“I thought you knew about whales.”
Sighing, Griffin shook his head, rubbed the water off his face, and looked over to the opening in Jasconius’s back. The fountain of water had been at least ten fathoms high. The pressure to expel such masses must be enormous.
“Griffin?”
“Wait. Just a minute.” A crazy idea was taking shape in his head. Really quite crazy.
“Ebenezer,” he called finally, “how often does Jasconius do that?”
“Oh, I can ask him to wait a while to do it.”
“No, no…the other way around!”
“Is it too hot for you?” Ebenezer sounded concerned. Perhaps he thought Griffin had gotten sunstroke on the shadeless back of the whale.
“I only want to try something out.”
“Try what out?”
“Can you tell
him to do that once more? Blow out all that water, I mean.”
“Certainly.”
“On demand?”
Down in the mouth, Ebenezer was silent for a moment. Griffin was very happy not to have to see his face at this moment.
“Yes, very likely,” replied the monk after a while. He sounded skeptical.
Griffin shooed away a gull that was taking him for an overgrown hermit crab and made his way over to the opening. From up close he could see that the edges had closed.
He took a deep breath. If he wanted to get up higher to search for Aelenium, he had to try it.
And if the water pressure was too strong and broke all his bones?
He hesitated again, then he climbed onto the opening. It looked like a gigantic, pursed-up mouth that could open beneath him at any moment. Griffin took a moment trying to find the best position, and finally he knelt, legs and knees pressed together and hands crossed in his lap.
“Ebenezer? Now!”
“What the devil are you doing up there?”
“Just tell him.”
The monk hesitated. “Be glad I can’t come up there to knock the nonsense out of you, boy.”
Griffin grinned. “Just try it, old man.”
“The hand of the blessed is led by God’s will, don’t forget that. Even when it takes the hide off the backside of a braggart.”
“Who says so?”
“One of the blessed.”
“Go on, Ebenezer! We have to hurry.”
Griffin expected new arguments, but instead he felt movement in the whale muscles under his knees and feet.
He braced himself, tensed his whole body, and feared at any moment to be hit by a hammer of water so fast that he might not even feel his crash landing on the sea at all.
“Easy does—” he was beginning when suddenly he was raised as if by a giant hand, as gently as if Jasconius were trying to balance a breakable piece of china.
In his surprise, Griffin let out a jubilant sound, which Ebenezer, down in the mouth, misinterpreted.
“Are you dying?” came through the rushing of water.
“After you, Ebenezer.”
Now Griffin concentrated on controlling his balance on the growing column of water. He stretched his arms out to the sides and relaxed himself a bit to offer the pressure more surface. It went better than he’d feared. Wavering, swaying, and with an intense discomfort in his stomach, he was lifted up high by the stream of salt water with a gentleness that he wouldn’t have dreamed possible in a monster like Jasconius.
“This is fantastic!” he shouted, laughing.
Five feet, then ten, he now floated over the whale’s back—all told, certainly some dozen fathoms over the surface of the sea. Gulls flew away, screaming, upset over this intrusion into their domain. Water sprayed up around Griffin, and yet he succeeded in looking in all four directions.
He discovered the fog. A gray stripe like lead that someone had sprinkled over the horizon. Far away, but certainly reachable within a day, perhaps faster if Jasconius hurried.
Scarcely had he seen the fog when the pressure decreased, and the water stream gradually subsided beneath him. Griffin floated down as if on a magic carpet and was set back on top of the blowhole almost tenderly.
A little dizzy, but relieved, he let himself slide down the curve of the whale’s body on the seat of his pants and splashed into the water. With a few strokes he glided alongside Jasconius’s gigantic eye, which regarded him curiously. At first Griffin was going to swim on, but then he stopped and trod water and turned toward the mighty black eye, at least twice as large as he was himself.
It was the first time he’d been able to look directly at the whale’s eye. Its curving surface was like a mirror—it looked as if Griffin’s image was imprisoned in a dark glass ball. But there was more than curiosity in the animal’s eye. A trace of melancholy?
Griffin lingered so long in front of Jasconius’s eye that Ebenezer called to him in concern. Even then he wasn’t able to detach himself from that gaze right away. He had never seen anything more beautiful, and yet it filled him with inexpressible sorrow. Perhaps the monster’s centuries-long loneliness was rubbing off onto him. What was going on in the whale’s head? What was he thinking about the tiny beings in his interior? Was he pleased to have a little company after so long a time?
A deep booming sounded, almost a trumpeting—the voice of the whale. It was a warm, friendly sound, and suddenly Griffin could do nothing else but smile at the whale eye and wave to him with one hand. It was a wonderful, confusing moment. Only then did he shed his heavyheartedness. He felt as if the whale wanted to share something with him, thousands of stories from thousands of years.
Ebenezer reached both hands out to Griffin and helped him climb into the whale’s mouth.
Griffin pointed. “That direction,” he said, and then he and the monk fell into each other’s arms with relief.
Swiftly they made their way back into the whale’s stomach and to the door on the rubble heap.
Jasconius shut his mouth and waited until they had reached the magic room. Then he dove and swam with mighty flipper strokes toward the sea star city.
Into the Maelstrom
Jolly didn’t know how long they’d been under way when Captain d’Artois turned his head toward them and pointed wordlessly ahead. She sat up and squinted her eyes into tiny slits to discern anything in the glaring light of the sun. But the spectacle in the distance was impossible to take in at one look. She had to turn her head in order to see it from one end to the other.
“It’s so big,” she whispered.
Far, far away the line of the sea dissolved into a gray fog, not unlike the fog wall around Aelenium, and yet much higher and inconceivably wide. The water below them was churning, but it had nothing about it of the unrest of an approaching storm, and anyway the air was almost windless. The farther ahead Jolly looked, the more clearly she could see that they were already over the outermost currents of a titanic whirlpool: The sea moved in broad, sweeping orbits from west to east, like the annual rings on a severed tree trunk. And it inclined very gradually downward, which was really impossible according to all known rules.
Over and over, towers of foam sprayed into the air, for no apparent reason, for there were no reefs or sandbanks to break the waves. The surface boomed and raged, and here and there the waves seemed to possess wills of their own, for they also turned against each other, as if there were something beneath them resisting the terrible suction. Foam lay in streaks on the water like scraps of skin on boiled milk, and not even the blue of the heavens was mirrored here anymore, the sea was so stirred up, so scarred. Instead the endless expanse beneath them had turned a purplish black, as if the disturbance of the waters had washed up the darkness from the depths like the camouflage color of ten thousand octopuses.
“It would be much worse if we flew closer,” said d’Artois. His voice sounded hoarse and thick.
“Do you intend to?” asked Soledad. “To fly over the Maelstrom?”
Jolly shuddered at the thought.
“Of course not. That would be much too dangerous. But I thought it would be good if we all finally saw what we’re dealing with. Maelstrom is only a word. But that down there, that’s…” He shook his head when no suitable expression occurred to him. “A chasm between the worlds, the one-eyed one says. But it looks to me more like the end of the world.”
He was right. If Jolly hadn’t known better, she’d have been convinced they’d reached the end of the ocean, that place where, people had once believed, the water poured over the edge of the flat earth. Jolly’s foster father, Bannon, had explained to her that the world was round and that there was nothing like an end of it. But the sight of the Maelstrom could convince a person that the opposite was true.
Jolly felt horribly small, much too tiny to cope with such a force of nature. Mile after mile of roaring sea stretched out down there, and that was certainly nothing compared to what awaited her in
the center of all this chaos. In the Crustal Breach, in the heart of the Maelstrom.
D’Artois gave a wave to the soldier flying the second ray, and the two animals simultaneously turned in a wide curve.
“We’re now flying back to a place where the sea isn’t so churned up,” he explained over his shoulder. “It’s important for you two to be able to dive vertically so as not to get caught in the suction.”
“But we have to get closer in any case,” Jolly countered. “Sooner or later we’re going to feel the suction anyway.”
“Not necessarily. A maelstrom is shaped like a funnel. Up here it might be fifty miles wide, but it decreases on the ocean floor. You’ll be able to walk on the ground unharmed, straight underneath its outer edges.” He paused for a moment. “The one-eyed one says that in the center, where it rises from a gigantic mussel on the floor of the Crustal Breach, the Maelstrom isn’t much wider than a tower.”
Jolly looked over at the Ghost Trader, the one-eyed one, as d’Artois called him. The Trader was talking urgently to Munk, but at this distance she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Perhaps he was giving instructions similar to the captain’s.
“How many miles do we have to go?” Jolly asked.
“If we set you down at the edge of the Maelstrom…well, about twenty or thirty. It’s not possible to say exactly, because it’s getting bigger every day and we’ve given up measuring it.”
Thirty miles, thought Jolly, shaken. The Crustal Breach itself supposedly lay at a depth of thirty thousand feet, Forefather said. And they were supposed to cover all that without any help? They couldn’t even take a compass with them because the water pressure would immediately destroy the glass.
“Don’t forget that you mustn’t get too far from the ocean bottom,” d’Artois continued, repeating an instruction that the Ghost Trader and Forefather had already hammered into them. “The Maelstrom will be looking for enemies approaching him. The one-eyed one says as long as you keep to the bottom, he won’t discover you. It would be best if you actually walk, and only swim in emergencies.” He shook his head as if he were sorry to be parroting rules that he didn’t understand himself. “You should be careful of strong currents, of changing pressure, and so forth. These all could be signs that the Maelstrom is reaching straight at you.”
