The Messenger it-1

by Douglas Niles

  He brought his bedroll into the cockpit and tied off the sail to steady his course while he slept. With the tiller planted easily under his arm, he leaned back, let the green light of Zivilyn spill across his face, and went to sleep with a prayer on his lips.

  The hull smashed into something solid, and Kerrick was thrown forward. Cutter heeled crazily, and he heard the sound of a rough, solid surface scraping past the hull. Groggy and face down he tried to collect his thoughts-collision! With what?

  “Hey, slow down there!”

  The high-pitched voice was so childlike that the elf felt certain he was dreaming. Sometimes the solitude of sea gave him dazed visions.

  “Wait for me!”

  Now Kerrick forced himself to his knees, still hearing that awful grating against the hull. The boat had slowed, but was still moving. Gray light brightened the surroundings, and he knew that it was near dawn. He sat up, blinking, rubbing his forehead where he had banged it against the cabin bulkhead. Through blurred eyes he saw something fly through the air, then heard the sound of a body landing on deck.

  “Thanks for nothing,” sniffed his visitor. “You could have at least circled around or something. I almost landed in the water! Do you know how long it takes to dry out this topknot?”

  “Topknot?” Kerrick gaped at the diminutive person standing lightly on the cockpit bench. The elf’s head was still aching, and he couldn’t think-couldn’t even imagine-what he had collided with so far out to sea. Sure enough, though, a kender had somehow materialized aboard his sailboat.

  “Coraltop Netfisher, at your service,” said the fellow with a deep bow, embellished with a wide flourish of both hands. The kender hopped down from the bench and sauntered over to the elf. “Say, you’re bleeding,” he observed with a cluck of his tongue. “Have an accident or something?”

  Kerrick pulled his hand away and groaned at the slick redness he saw. “Who are you?” he demanded. “And what, by all the gods, did I hit?”

  “Well, that, of course.” The kender pointed off the stern. “I should have thought it was obvious, but then you did get a nasty bump on the head. You’re probably still confused.”

  The elf wasn’t listening any longer. Instead, he was staring at a great, barren mound rising from the placid ocean. The shape was much too broad to be the barnacle-encrusted hull of a capsized ship, which was the only possibility that entered the elf’s mind.

  He suddenly became aware of the sound of rushing water. “We’ve been holed!” he cried, and threw open the hatch to the cabin. In there it was dry. “Farther forward!” he said, sprinting along the narrow catwalk, leaning out over the gunwale.

  He quickly spotted the damage, several planks along the starboard side, scored with ugly cracks. Coraltop Netfisher had scrambled right behind him, stretching out far over the water for a good look.

  “Say, that doesn’t look too healthy,” the kender said. “Do you think this boat will sink? That happened to the last boat I was on. Purely accidental of course, and I’d just as soon not have it happen again.”

  “Here!” Kerrick threw open the small hatch in the prow. “Climb down there and have a look-if you see water coming in, take some of the canvas you find there and try to plug the hole.”

  “That sounds like fun!” agreed the kender cheerfully. In an instant he dropped below, feet first.

  Kerrick went back to the main hold and pulled open that hatch. Quickly the sound of gurgling water reached his ears, and he whispered a fervent prayer to Zivilyn Greentree, pleading with the god for enough time to patch the boat before it went under. He plunged into the darkness, reaching for the bucket of tar and a swath of spare canvas.

  “That was sure exciting!” Coraltop Netfisher told him an hour later. Cutter wallowed in the thankfully gentle swell. All of her sails were furled, and the kender and elf had managed to reduce the water pouring in through several holes to a trickle.

  Kerrick flopped on the deck, exhausted. “I’m not sure I could have done it without your help,” he admitted. “Now, we’ve got to pump for the rest of the day, and we might just find that we’re seaworthy again. Here, I’ll show you how to work the pump, while I make some caulk and try for a more permanent repair.”

  For the time being he had to admit he didn’t mind the kender’s company, though he was sure he would have cause to regret that feeling. Among all the peoples of Krynn, there was no more vexing and troublesome race than the small, fearless, and eternally curious kender.

  Kerrick finally had a moment to inspect “his kender,” who was smiling at him guilelessly. Coraltop’s long red hair was bundled into the typical knot in the middle of his scalp, with a glossy tail hanging loosely as far as his waist. He wore a green shirt of some kind of mesh, gathered in at the waist by a belt of the same material. His feet and legs were bare, and he bore no apparent possessions.

  After a minute of coaching, Coraltop was cranking the pump handle with a look of real delight. He squinted at the bellows mechanism, and the tip of his tongue protruded slightly from his lips as he set himself to the work with a look of real concentration.

  “Hey, look at the way the water comes shooting out this hose!” he cried in delight as, moments later, the contents of the bilge started spraying over the side. “But it’s all getting wasted into the ocean-here, we can use it for a shower.” Quickly he pulled the nozzle around so that cold water washed over the elf. “You can go first,” he said graciously.

  “This is no time for joking around,” snapped Kerrick. “Do you want to stay afloat or not?”

  “Stay afloat,” pouted the diminutive passenger, but he followed the elf’s instructions.

  Kerrick made his way forward again, and ducked into the main hold. The saturated canvas he had jammed into the cracks was leaking badly, and he wasted no time in plastering caulk over it. By the time he was done his muscles ached, and his hair was stuck to his face with a mixture of sweat and caulk. With a sigh he came back up on deck and sat on the bench next to Coraltop, who was still pumping. A short distance away, rising in a great dome above the surface of the water, he could spot the dark shape of the massive obstacle that had almost doomed his little boat. He was just about to ask the kender about it, when his passenger preempted his question with a query of his own.

  “What happened to your ear?”

  The elf froze. His hand went to his scar, feeling the scab, the strangely rounded flap which once been a long, slender, elegantly tapered ear.

  “I had an accident,” he said curtly.

  “I’ve had lots of accidents,” Coraltop replied proudly, before frowning. “I never got half my ear cut off, though. That must have really been some accident! Tell me what happened. Don’t leave out any good parts.”

  “No.” Kerrick slumped. He thought about raising the sail, but it seemed like far too much work. Instead, he leaned his head back against the gunwale and remembered Silvanesti. Closing his eyes, he imagined that he could smell the blossoms of the royal gardens, hear the songs of the flautists in their towers and the lyres of the wandering minstrels as they sang their way down the city’s winding streets. It seemed unthinkable that he was exiled from the center of his world. He missed Silvanesti with such inexpressible pain that, for a few moments, he actually toyed with the thought of throwing himself over the side, of ending his suffering right here. He knew he had had to fight the wave of self-pity that was washing over him.

  “So, where are we going?” asked Coraltop. “Wouldn’t we get there faster if we put up the sail?”

  Kerrick groaned inwardly and cracked open one eye. Again he saw that great, floating mass off to the side, already black against the growing darkness.

  “How’d you end up on that thing, anyway?” he finally asked. “And what is it exactly?”

  “Well, my last ship sank, and I would have sunk too, if I wasn’t a pretty darned good swimmer. ‘You swim like a whale,’ my Grandmother Annatree used to say. But of course whales swim better, probably because they have more
practice. I wouldn’t mind being a whale, except for all the drawbacks. Of course, like my grandmother used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair-unless you’re lucky.’ Do you think I’m lucky?”

  “I think … well, you must be, yes.” The elf chuckled dryly in spite of himself. Kender might be utterly fearless to the point of stupidity, but they were amusing. Well, he could use some laughs in his situation.

  “What kind of ship were you on?” he persisted.

  “It was a Tarsian trading galley,” the kender replied. He seemed almost sorrowful. “The captain was really nice. I met him just two days out of Tarsis, when I woke up from my nap and went on deck to say hello. He said he going to tie a stone to my foot and throw me in the water to see how well I could swim.” Coraltop sighed. “His wife was there, and she was even nicer. She pointed out that I couldn’t very well swim with a stone tied to my foot-although I can surprisingly well-she made me her cabin boy, and as long as I stayed out of the captain’s ‘dang-blasted way’ I got to roam all over the ship and see how things worked.”

  Kerrick knew the kind of ship Coraltop was talking about. Indeed, the sturdy trading vessels were probably the most common large craft along the coast of southern Ansalon. Occasionally one would stop and visit Silvanesti, though the royal tariffs were exorbitant and insured that only elven captains made much profit bringing goods to or from the great port of Silvanost.

  “What happened to the galley? How did it sink?” He knew that the trading galleys were famously seaworthy and offered a brief prayer to Zivilyn in memory of the doomed sailors.

  “We got smashed up by a dragon turtle,” Coraltop replied cheerfully. “Boy, was that exciting! It had fins the size of your sails, and a mouth as big as a castle gate! Why, it bit that galley right in two. Some of the sailors got eaten up, I’m sorry to say. The rest of them tumbled into the water, but they didn’t swim as well as I did. Fortunately I was holding onto a barrel-it turned out to be a barrel half full of water, which is a good thing because you can’t imagine how thirsty a person gets-”

  The kender prattled on, but Kerrick wasn’t listening any more. Instead, he was staring at the vast, domed shape wallowing in the waves, looking at it with a sense of dull horror.

  Dragon turtle! He had never before seen one-nor had he ever spoke to a sailor who had encountered one of the legendary ocean monsters. They were the stuff of nautical folklore, horrors of the deep that could reputedly crush a ship with one bite, scattering its crewmen into the sea, allowing the monster to leisurely gulp down the hapless adrift sailors.

  That, he suddenly realized, was what the Cutter had rammed. With new wariness, he looked out at the floating blob, noting the knobs on its rough surface, gaping at its huge size. Yes, dragon turtle it was-and if he was lucky, it was stunned or sound asleep.

  “Get to the mast!” hissed the elf. “We’re going to raise the sail!”

  Was it his imagination or had the great shape twitched? He looked for a sign of a scaly head or a vicious, lashing tail, claws like iron battering rams.

  A wave splashed against the hull, breaking to either side. Now the head was rising, a visage of ugly leather, crusty with barnacles except for a sharp, beaklike snout, impossibly, monstrously huge. Water spilled from the flat skull, a sheet of brine pouring like a waterfall. The monster craned its neck and yawned, revealing a slick, pink maw surrounded by a pair of serrated jaws wide enough, it seemed, to swallow the Cutter.

  “The mast is that big pole, right?” Coraltop asked, standing up. “I’m becoming quite the expert sailor. What do you want me to-”

  “Quiet!” whispered Kerrick, seizing the kender and yanking him down into the cockpit. His eyes just barely above the level of the gunwale, the elf watched the great dragon turtle, trying unsuccessfully to suppress the trembling that seized his limbs. The creature’s face was primitive, saurian. The one eye turned lazily toward the sailboat was black, cold, and easily as big as the elf’s armspan.

  “Oh, we’re hiding?” Coraltop guessed, with an exaggerated whisper. “I like this game!”

  Kerrick’s full attention was focused on the dragon turtle. The legends had spoken of a shell as long as Cutter’s thirty feet, but this monster was three times that, at least. The great armored plate slowly began to swivel towards him. Water churned, and the elf saw two huge webbed and taloned feet kick into the air. The shell angled down, and a large wave churned as it surged toward the sailboat in a rolling crest.

  The beast dove, vanished. A long, scaly tail thrashed the air and followed into the depths, leaving a vortex of frothing water swirling on the surface. Kerrick and Coraltop clutched the gunwale as the wave heaved Cutter upward, rocking them violently back and forth as it passed on until, once more, they bobbed on a placid, featureless sea.

  “Lucky for me-as my grandmother used to say-that it never did that while I was sitting on it,” Coraltop said.

  The elf’s head was spinning. “You were riding on that dragon turtle.” He glared furiously at the kender, straining to keep his voice low. “I thought you said you were clinging to a barrel.”

  “Oh, I drank almost all the water that was in that keg, I remember, and I was starting to get kind of hungry. Then the dragon turtle surfaced, and I think it fell asleep. Say, do you have anything to eat?”

  “Yes-but first let’s get some canvas up. I want to be away from here before that thing surfaces.”

  “Not much chance of that,” said Coraltop Netfisher. “It’ll be coming up real quick now, like it did when it ate my other boat. First you see it, then you don’t, then bang!” He leaned over the gunwale, stretching down so far that his nose was bare inches from the gentle swell.

  The elf wasted no time staring into the depths. He scrambled past the cabin and started to unlash the sail from the main boom. If the dragon turtle had sounded merely to rise up and smash his boat, they would never get away in time. If it had dived for reasons of its own, they still had a chance.

  His hands shook so badly that for a second he could only fumble with the lines. Forcing himself to be calm, he at last freed the ropes, one after the other, that bundled the sail onto the long timber. He was reaching for the mainsail guyline when Coraltop Netfisher’s voice, incongruously cheerful, reached him.

  “Here it comes!” chirped the kender, pointing into the ocean deeps.

  Kerrick felt the boat slide sideways and grabbed onto the mast as Cutter tilted violently. He swung into space, certain they would capsize, but the little boat spilled down the water rushing off of the great carapace. The dragon turtle’s great head broke from the surface, rising past the boat, one eye glaring coldly. Its jaws were wide, blue-green brine gushing out, as the elf tumbled, getting tangled in the sail. Coraltop fell sprawling on the deck of the cockpit.

  “Look out!” shouted the kender, his narrow face split by a wide, toothy grin, as he tried unsuccessfully to lift himself up.

  “Zivilyn Greentree protect us!” the elf prayed fervently, lost in the folds of the sail, clutching the mast and feeling the impact as the sailboat spilled off the shell and plunged back into the ocean.

  The bow and half the hull vanished into blue water, but in another instant Cutter’s sharp prow rose up out of the sea, water pouring off the deck. The elf swung wildly, free of the sail now, still clinging to the mast, then slamming into the boom and feeling-hearing-his arm snap. He saw the monster’s rough, scaled shell rolling past, looming out of the water like a mountainous horizon, then following the head, which had already plunged into the depths.

  The last thing he saw was the spiked tail, long and wicked as a dragon. It lashed overhead, striking the mast and boom with a sickening crack of timber. Kerrick was buried under a wave of billowing blue canvas as a hard beam smashed him in the skull.

  The blue faded to black.

  9

  Strongwind Whalebone

  How many more days?” Garta asked Moreen, as the tribe broke camp on a drizzly fall morning. The wind was light, fortunately, but dampness per
meated every one of the Arktos, and there was no wood to spare for a breakfast fire. “Remember, Little Mouse said he found a cave yesterday. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to at least have a look at it before we go any farther north?”

  “I did have a look at it,” the chiefwoman replied, with a shake of her head.

  “When?” the matron inquired, surprised. “You were still up when I got the last of the children bedded down, and that was halfway into the night!”

  Moreen sighed. “I went up there early this morning, before the rest of you stirred. Mouse was right. It was pretty big, and it was dry-but not big enough for all of us, unless you want to spend the winter standing up. It had a wide mouth facing south, so it wouldn’t provide any shelter against the Sturmfrost.”

  Garta blanched and drew a deep breath. It was an awareness they all shared-the onslaught of the Sturmfrost was less than three months away, now.

  “Well, we have to find something better then, don’t we?” she said with forced cheerfulness. “How far can it be to this Tall Cedar Bay you told us about? Surely we must be getting close?”

  Moreen nodded, once again wondering if she should share her secret, her hope of finding safety for the tribe in ancient Brackenrock. Instead, she changed the subject. “Our food situation is very good, now.”

  They had plenty of food, thanks to the black whale. Immediately after the battle with the thanoi, the women had set to work with skinning knives, carving long strips of flesh from the meaty carcass. For two weeks the elders tended low fires and suspended the strips of meat on makeshift racks made from the weapons recovered from the slain walrus-men.

  Garta’s hand came to rest on Moreen’s shoulder. “I don’t mean to question your judgment,” she said softly. “You already know how hard this is on the little ones-”

  “And the elders, yes.” The chiefwoman looked at the hobbling grandfathers and grandmothers, most of them accompanied by a child or toddler. She saw the women hoisting great backpacks, the bundles of dried whale meat that weighed them down so much they couldn’t move any faster than the elders.