The Ghostfaces

by John A. Flanagan

  “He’s out on his feet,” Thorn said.

  Stig nodded agreement. “I know. But he won’t rest. I’ve already offered to spell him but he just shakes his head and says he’s fine.”

  “Which he is obviously not,” Thorn replied. He took hold of Hal’s right hand and tried to lever it from the tiller. The young skirl’s grip tightened, locking his hand on to the smooth wood. Thorn released his own grip and leaned closer to his young friend.

  “You’ve got to take a break,” he said.

  Hal’s lips moved soundlessly.

  Thorn gestured at the waves surging past, lifting and lowering the ship in a regular rhythm. Heron was riding the storm comfortably. They had taken in the sea anchor some hours ago, letting the storm sail propel her. If they lost ground downwind now, it didn’t really matter. There was no dangerous shore to leeward—nothing but the endless sea itself. She was still heaving herself up each wave, then sliding down the far side, showering the decks with spray as she cut through the crest and then plunged deep into the trough. But the motion, violent as it was, was regular and predictable.

  “She’s under control now,” Thorn continued, his lips close to Hal’s ear. “Stig can take her. You should rest in case the weather gets worse.”

  The red-rimmed eyes looked at him. The boy was exhausted, Thorn thought. In fact, he was way past exhausted. Again, Thorn tried to pry one of Hal’s hands free from the tiller, and, this time, Hal reluctantly let him do so. Thorn’s words must have penetrated to his brain and he had realized the sense behind them. Thorn began to work on the other hand and glanced at Stig.

  “Take the helm,” he said and the first mate took over the tiller as Thorn pried Hal’s other hand free. With his arm around Hal, Thorn gently led him away from the steering platform and down to the leeward rowing benches.

  The others reached up to help him into the meager shelter.

  “Get a dry blanket,” Thorn told Edvin.

  The medic opened a hatch in the watertight center section of the ship and produced a more or less dry blanket. Then, he and Thorn stripped off Hal’s sheepskin vest and woolen shirt and began to rub him hard with the blanket, working away until his skin glowed red from the friction and the blood began to return to his flesh. His lips had been tinged with blue, but now the violent rubbing with the blanket had got his circulation going once more and the skin returned to its normal color. Wulf had delved into another locker to produce a dry shirt.

  When Hal was dressed again, Thorn draped the blanket around him and pulled him in close, wrapping his arms around the skirl. Edvin draped Thorn’s tarpaulin cloak over both of them. Hal shivered violently and then collapsed against Thorn’s comforting bulk.

  “Get some sleep,” the one-armed sea wolf told his young friend. His voice was surprisingly gentle and comforting, and Edvin glanced at him curiously. He was used to Thorn being noisy or sardonic. This was a caring side of him that he rarely let show. Thorn glanced up, realized Edvin was watching him, and guessed what the boy was thinking.

  “He’d keep going till he dropped if we let him,” he said, nodding his head toward the now-resting Hal.

  “We’d better keep an eye on Stig as well,” Edvin told him.

  Thorn nodded. “That’s true. He’s been up there in the wind and cold almost as long as Hal has been.” He swiveled on the bench to check Stig. The big youth seemed all right, he thought. Stig caught him looking and grinned reassuringly, then ducked his head as another cascade of spray broke over the bow and drenched him.

  Thorn let Stig stay on the tiller for another hour, then moved to spell him, carefully handing off the sleeping Hal to Ingvar. “Should be plenty of body heat there to keep him warm,” he said.

  Ingvar, big and amiable, smiled agreement.

  The storm continued to howl around them, setting the standing rigging humming with the force of the wind. They continued their endless sequence of climbing a wave face, then plunging down its back, only to begin another staggering climb, until the repetitive motion seemed to encompass their entire world. Their minds were numbed by it, as their bodies and hands were numbed by the bitter cold.

  Thorn stayed on the tiller for two hours, as the already-dim daylight faded into darkness. Occasionally, lightning would still crack through the black clouds, lighting up the lines of the ship for a brief second. Then the boom of thunder would deafen them, and Kloof would bark angrily in reply. But the lightning flashes were becoming less and less frequent.

  Thorn handed over the tiller to Stig again once night had fallen. They looked at Hal’s sleeping form.

  “We’ll let him sleep as long as he can,” Thorn said. “He needs the rest.”

  It was during Stig’s watch that they noticed the flickering blue light that shimmered at the top of the stumpy mast and spread along the rigging. The first mate called out a warning as he saw it, thinking that the mast had somehow caught fire in the storm. Thorn stood, swaying with the motion of the ship, and studied it. The rest of the crew muttered in alarm at the sight.

  “It’s Loki’s Fire,” Thorn called. “Liar’s Fire, they sometimes call it.”

  Loki was the god of lies, and well-known as a trickster. The blue flames were not fire at all, but merely a phenomenon that sometimes occurred in a thunderstorm at sea. Thorn had seen it several times before on voyages and he knew the blue, flickering flamelike light was harmless.

  Stefan eyed it uncertainly. “Looks like real fire to me.”

  Several others in the crew agreed, their voices nervous.

  Thorn smiled at them. “If it were fire, the mast would have been burnt up by now,” he pointed out.

  The crew subsided, their fears calmed but not entirely dismissed. The blue light had been flickering on the mast and tarred ropes for several minutes now, with no sign of any deterioration in the material.

  “I’ve seen that in the forest a few times,” Lydia said, “although I never knew what it was called. Thorn’s right. It can’t hurt us.”

  That seemed to settle the rest of the crew. If Lydia wasn’t worried by the strange light, they weren’t going to let it rattle them. But, mollified as they were, they still continued to cast doubtful looks at the strange light until it abruptly disappeared, as quickly as it had come.

  “I kind of miss it now,” Jesper said after the deep blackness of night settled around them again. “It was pretty.”

  Then a rogue wave, sliding unseen at an angle to the normal swell, smashed into their starboard bow, laying Heron over and dumping spray and solid water on her decks. The ship shuddered, then righted herself. Hal was instantly awake, alerted by the changed motion of the ship. He cast aside the tarpaulin cloak that covered him and looked round in the darkness.

  Stig had the ship back on course, and she was climbing yet another mountain of water as it bore down on them. But there were tons of water in the rowing wells now, more than the scuppers could cope with. The ship felt sluggish and heavy as she labored up the wave. Hal sprang lightly up onto the deck and moved to take the tiller from Stig. The first mate gratefully relinquished it to him. He had taken the full force of the wave. It had winded him and drenched him at the same time.

  “Didn’t see that coming,” he complained.

  “Get yourself dried off,” Hal told him. “I’ll take her for a while.”

  He was obviously reinvigorated after his long rest. Stig headed for the rowing wells, in search of a dry blanket.

  Thorn sighed and gestured to the rest of the crew.

  “Grab a bucket each,” he said. “We’re going to have to bail her out.”

  chapter four

  They sailed on through the dark hours of the night, alternately climbing and sliding down the massive swells, with the wind howling at them like a wild, living creature.

  Their lives took on an inevitable sequence—climb up, smash through, swoop down, bury the bow in th
e sea, then begin the next laborious climb.

  It was uncomfortable and unpleasant, but the early venom of the storm had abated a little and now they were confident that, barring the unexpected, the ship would handle the conditions safely.

  The wind was still too strong for Hal to risk hoisting the slender, curved yardarms or setting more sail. The tiny storm sail stretched drum-taut against the wind and gave them steerageway in the plunging seas. But, even though the little ship was pointing northwest, they all knew that their real course was southwest, as the wind and waves drove the ship before them.

  It was an unnerving feeling for the crew. They were being driven farther and farther into the vast expanse of the Endless Ocean, a place where none of them had ever sailed before. But, as Lydia had stated, there was little they could do about it, so worrying over the matter would achieve nothing. In fact, it was her calm acceptance of the situation that allowed a lot of them to retain their equanimity. In such situations, panic and fear can become contagious. But this time, it was calmness and stoicism that spread among them.

  They were in a routine now. The steering position, exposed to the wind and spray on the upper part of the rear deck, was potentially the most exhausting—with the exception of those times, thankfully infrequent, when they had to bail. Hal, realizing that he couldn’t possibly take on the task of steering on his own, organized a roster between himself, Stig, Thorn and Edvin.

  Edvin, of course, had trained early on in the Heron’s first cruise as a relief helmsman. He didn’t have the physical strength of Hal, and certainly not Stig or Thorn. But he had a deft touch on the tiller and sense of the ship’s rhythm that helped him keep her on course with a minimum of movement of the rudder. He anticipated the ship’s movements as the sea swirled around her. And, by anticipating, he needed to expend less effort to correct her.

  Lydia watched him, admiration in her eyes. She had moved up close to the steering platform to keep him company, realizing that steering could be a lonely task.

  “You’re good at this, aren’t you?” she said.

  Edvin flushed, and smiled at her, pleased that she recognized his skill in handling the ship. “It’s easier to keep her going where you want if you don’t let her go where she wants.”

  Lydia thought about that and nodded seriously. “That’s a good way of looking at it.” On previous cruises, she’d taken her turn at the helm. Hal believed every crew member should be able to steer a course, no matter what their individual skills might be. He and Stig had been at pains to get her to develop the anticipation that Edvin grasped so easily. The tiller required constant small adjustments as the water flowed around it, she had learned. If you let the wind or the waves push the ship off course, it took twice the effort to get it back on course again.

  Of course, knowing it and being able to do it were two completely different matters.

  “Would you like a drink?” she asked.

  Edvin nodded eagerly. Steering was thirsty work, in spite of the cold and damp conditions. “What’s on offer?” he asked. He grinned and the dried salt on his cracked lips stung.

  “There’s water. Or water,” Lydia told him.

  He made as if he were considering the choice. “Better make it water,” he said finally.

  Of course, there was nothing hot to drink, much as they would all have loved to have something. With the deck rearing and plunging the way it was, it would be madness to light a fire on board, even the small gimballed oil burner that Edvin had in his cooking kit.

  Lydia dropped into the rowing well and poured him a beaker of cold water from a water skin, leaning over to shield the beaker from the salt spray that cascaded along the deck with monotonous regularity. She climbed back to the main deck and handed the drink to Edvin. He sipped deeply. It was cold, of course, and very refreshing because of it. But with the second sip, he frowned slightly. There was a distinct salt taste to the water now, courtesy of the spray that had fallen into it. Lydia saw his expression of slight distaste.

  “Sorry,” she said, guessing the reason. “Hard to keep that salt water out of everything.”

  “Can’t be helped,” he replied, draining the beaker quickly to prevent any further contamination.

  He studied the sky, taking in the unbroken dark gray of the clouds and the way the wind kept the telltale at the masthead whipping out in a virtually straight line.

  “Can’t say the weather’s improving,” he muttered.

  But it was, albeit in increments so gradual that it was hard for them to notice the change.

  By the fourth day, the wind had dropped from the howling, unpredictable force of the first two days to a steadier pattern, without the sudden, terrifying and potentially lethal gusts and lunges that had threatened to overwhelm the ship if the crew let their attention wander.

  There was still plenty of danger in that wind, and plenty of brute force. But it no longer seemed to be trying to catch them unawares. It was simply there, as a backdrop to their day.

  And so they sailed on. Four days. Then five. Then six. And with every hour and every day that passed, they were driven deeper and deeper into the unexplored vastness of the Endless Ocean.

  On the sixth day, the sun actually appeared. Hal watched it travel through an arc above them. He had never seen the sun as high as that before. He took several measurements, using his hinged sighting stick. Even without an accurate determination of the time of day, he knew that they had come farther south than he had ever been before.

  Maybe farther south than anyone had ever been.

  He was sitting in the rowing well, slapping his arms back and forth against his body to restore a little warmth to them, when Stig approached him, a worried look on his face.

  “What’s the problem?” Hal asked.

  Stig glanced round, making sure that none of the other crew members was in earshot. “We’re running low on water,” he said in a subdued tone.

  Hal frowned, not understanding. “How can that be? We’re still on the first cask. We’ve a full second cask to go after that.”

  The Heron carried their drinking water in two large casks below deck in the watertight center section. Each day, Stig would fill a large water skin and keep it handy on deck for crew members to drink from. As a matter of course, they had refilled both casks before they left Hibernia. One would have been enough to see them home, but Hal preferred to err on the side of caution. You never knew what might happen, after all—as their current situation showed only too well.

  “The second cask has sprung a leak. The water’s been seeping away.” Stig shook his head angrily. “Don’t know how it happened. Maybe all the lurching and banging loosened a stave.”

  As first mate, it was Stig’s task to attend to such matters as supplies and equipment. Hal could tell that he blamed himself for the leaking cask.

  “How much have we lost?” he asked. That was the vital matter.

  Stig considered the question. “We’ve maybe a third of a cask left,” he said. “And a little less than that in the first cask.”

  “First thing to do is stop the leak,” Hal said.

  Stig made a dismissive gesture. “I’ve taken care of that. It was hard to see where the leak was actually coming from, so I transferred the remaining water to the first cask.”

  “There’s no problem with that, is there?” Hal asked anxiously. If one cask was damaged, it was all too possible that the other might be as well. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. And Hal had been at sea long enough to know that if something was possible, it might well happen—and all too often, it did. But Stig reassured him.

  “No. It’s sound. I’ve checked it three times. Point is, two-thirds of a cask would be enough to get us back home in normal conditions.”

  He paused meaningfully. Hal got the point. He eyed the gray, racing waves overside.

  “But these aren’t normal conditions
,” he said.

  “No indeed,” Stig agreed heavily. “We have no idea where we are, and no idea how long it’ll take us to get home.”

  “Which makes it hard to figure out how much water we’ll need,” Hal finished for him. They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Hal came to a decision. “We’ll cut the normal daily ration by half,” he said.

  Stig looked doubtful, although he was glad the decision wasn’t his. “Will that be enough?”

  Hal shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. We’ve been blown a long way west and south. And we’re continuing to be so. We’ll have to see how long these conditions keep up and how long it’ll be before we can begin to head northeast again.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “We’ll go to half rations for a while and see what develops. Let the others know,” he added. He didn’t want them finding out when it came time for their daily water ration to be doled out. Better to let them get their grumbling and complaining over in advance.

  Stig pursed his lips. Hal could see he was still chafing over the fact that he had allowed this to happen. He patted his friend’s arm.

  “Don’t beat yourself up over this,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Stig shook his head disgustedly. “I’m your first mate. I should have checked sooner.”

  Hal shrugged philosophically. He wasn’t going to argue the point too much. Technically, it was Stig’s job to keep track of details like this, and the fact that he blamed himself was, in a way, a good thing. He would never let a similar situation arise in the future.

  If we have a future, a niggling little voice said in Hal’s mind. He shook his head to clear it.

  “Tell the others,” he repeated, and Stig made his way for’ard to where the rest of the crew were sitting, huddled together for warmth.

  Predictably, it was Jesper who was first to complain about the news.

  “How did that happen?” he demanded in an injured tone when Stig told them of the leaking cask. The big first mate fixed him with a steely glare.