Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven

by Curt Benjamin

  Another of the giant oars snapped in the heavy seas, this time to starboard and far to the stern. Llesho saw the rowers flutter like birds with arrows in their breasts, though they seemed to come to rest with all their limbs intact.

  “Stow oars! Stow oars!” The wind had risen so that they couldn’t hear the call from the stern. Pirates stationed at short distances from one another along the gangway passed the order down the ship, however, and gradually the oars came to rest. Llesho thought that they would tie the oar above the waterline using the stanchion as they had during their break, but Singer showed them how to tuck the oar up along the side and lash it out of the way.

  This had to be done in order, so that their oar would rest above that of the bench in front of them and below that of the bench behind. Then Singer grabbed onto the stanchion chain and told them to do the same. Together they huddled on their bench, trembling with fear that they would be cast into the sea with a leg torn off at any moment, or capsized and drowned as they fought against the chains that dragged them down.

  “We’re not going to die, are we?” Tayy’s voice shook, and Llesho flung an arm around his shoulder, as much for something to hang onto in the galley as to offer comfort.

  “I don’t think so,” Llesho said, but inside he was wondering about Master Markko, with the greed of a failed magician and the captive spirit of a dragon-lord twisting his flesh out of true. They were still on the outer edge of the typhoon, but it felt like they were plunging into the very heart. He tried not to think about how much worse it must be where Kaydu was.

  “Can you find out?”

  “I don’t exactly have a silver bowl of still water handy.” He didn’t mean to snap, but they’d just plowed through another trough and he was feeling sick as well as terrified.

  Tayy looked at him with misery and threw up at his feet, too paralyzed with fear of the violent seas to hang his head over the side. Which was probably smart and made their bench smell no worse than the one in front of them, where the rowers were taking turns emptying their guts. Llesho figured in about ten seconds he’d be in the same position, with his head between his legs. It had been a lot longer since he’d eaten, but he expected the last water he’d drunk to make a reappearance real soon.

  Tayy was persistent in spite of his illness, however, and he made Llesho listen. “If Kaydu doesn’t turn the storm, it’s coming right down on top of us, isn’t it?”

  “Probably.” He was swallowing seawater in big unwelcome gulps, praying to all the gods he knew that they wouldn’t head down one of those troughs and not come up again.

  “Then don’t you think you ought to go and help her?”

  “I came to rescue you.”

  Master Den’s huge frame loomed over them suddenly. The trickster god looked ragged and waterlogged. His red-and-yellow-satin pants, rimed with salt, clung to his tree-trunk legs and salt water dripped from his lashes onto his thick lips.

  “I think he should go to Kaydu,” Prince Tayyichiut informed the trickster god. “If she fails, we all die!”

  “Of course, you’re right,” Master Den agreed.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do there!” Llesho shouted over the wind.

  “If you don’t think of anything more useful, you can always bail water.”

  With that, the trickster god picked him up under his arms as if he were a toddler and threw him into the sea.

  “Llesho!” Prince Tayy’s watery voice came to him from above the sea, but Llesho was sinking, sinking. Under the surface the sea moved in restless undulations, but he remembered old lessons and rode the surge effortlessly. He held his breath as if he’d never left the pearl beds and looked around, orienting himself by the movement of the seaweed and the direction of the fish who passed him indifferently on their fishy way. Then, underwater, he set his destination in his mind and started to make the motions of running on the land. He barely held his own against the sea pushing him away from the land, but he could feel the change coming and he leaped, scrabbled, found the deck and skittered across it. A rope snaked across his vision and he grabbed it as he slid down the wet and tilted surface until he caught up hard against a hatch cover that dug into his ribs like a knife.

  “Get under cover!” Bixei appeared at the hatch and grabbed at him, pulling Llesho through and latching it tight behind him. They stood in a patch of calm belowdecks while the wind howled like a mad thing over their heads.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to help.”

  Bixei shook his head, but opened another hatch that led them deeper into the bowels of the ship. They dropped through into a hold knee-deep in water and lit by one dangerously swaying lantern. Sailors milled in the darkness, sorting themselves into a line.

  “Take this.” Hmishi handed him a bucket full of water and when he turned around, Bixei was already gone.

  “Where’s Kaydu?” Llesho shouted above the sound of the sea and the wind pummeling the ship. “I came to help turn the storm!”

  Lling took his bucket. “Do you know how to do that?”

  Without breaking the rhythm of the bailing line, Hmishi thrust another bucket into his hands. Llesho passed it off to Lling, who handed it to a sailor who handed it to Stipes. He didn’t, actually, know how to help Kaydu, so he took the next bucket Hmishi slapped into his hands and moved it along.

  “I saw Habiba on deck, but he looked exhausted just from fighting the storm to get here,” Bixei mentioned as he sloshed by with half a dozen empty buckets slung by their handles over his arms.

  Llesho grabbed a full one from Hmishi, moved it on, took the next one. “Marmer Sea Dragon has offered to help, but the storm is out of control. He says that Master Markko started it.”

  “As usual,” Hmishi growled. “He spends all of his time scheming about how to create a disaster, but he never bothers to figure out what to do with it, or how to calm it back down when he doesn’t need it anymore.”

  Which did about sum it up. Llesho moved another bucket up the line. As far as he could tell, they weren’t making any progress lowering the level of water in the hold. Good seamanship kept them running ahead of the wind, but heavy seas washed over them, spilling through the chinks in the decking to the holds below. Gradually, in spite of the bucket brigade, the ship settled lower in the water.

  “Here.” He handed off his bucket and slipped out of line. Wiping the blood from his reopened blisters on his pants legs, he headed for the hatch. He wasn’t sure what he could do on deck, but it had to be more than this.

  The wind nearly took him over the side when he stepped out on the deck. As he skittered down the slope of the listing ship, he reached for a handhold and missed. His legs went over the side and he scrabbled frantically for something to grab onto. Whipping by the deck rail, he managed to get an arm around it before he went flying out over the water. He hung on tight with his legs dangling in the air.

  “Pig!” he called. “Pig!”

  A set of piggy fingers wrapped around his collar while another set grabbed him by the seat of his pants and hauled him back on board the ship. “What do you want?” Pig asked. Neither the wind nor the thundering waves that washed over them troubled the Jinn’s easy stance on the canted deck.

  “Where’s Kaydu?” That wasn’t what he’d meant to say when he called out to the Jinn, but he’d already accomplished his main purpose; Pig had prevented him from washing overboard. The Jinn had missed a good opportunity to blackmail a wish out of Llesho, but the idea didn’t seem to upset him much.

  “The good captain is at the stern, lashed to a mast. Her incantations have held the storm at bay. She would not have held much longer, as her strength was failing, but help has arrived to save the day.”

  Llesho didn’t know if that meant Habiba or Marmer Sea Dragon, or even Pig himself, but the question of “who” came second to the warning he had come above decks to issue. “We’re taking on water,” he shouted over the howling of the wind and the crashing of the water. �
�I don’t know how much longer the ship will stay afloat!”

  “That is a problem,” Pig agreed. He was turning a sickly shade of green, which was a strange sight on a large black pig. “Nevertheless, this is just the very tip of the storm, which will wash us all before it as if we were mere specks in the maelstrom.”

  That seemed a bit more elaborate an explanation than the moment required, but Llesho got the point. Why worry about the water in the hold when they would be washed off the decks or smashed to splinters up against some reef? They were all going to die.

  Not if he could help it, though. Determinedly, Llesho made his way to the stern, clinging to Pig as to an anchor. Habiba had moved out onto the gallery. He stood exposed to the sea with his hands spread wide, calling down his spells and incantations to the wind and the water and the earth itself.

  As Pig had described, Kaydu stood on the deck, frozen in a position of supplication, her hands also held wide. The ropes that held her fast to the mast had stretched with repeated soaking from the waves, so that she was battered against the spar one minute and flung off the mast at the next. She held her arms out steadily, but her eyes had lost the sense of an intelligent presence behind them. She chanted her spells mechanically, the way a clockwork blacksmith might hammer out the hours on an automaton.

  At her feet, Little Brother clung to the mast, his wizened face solemn, his eyes bright and alert as he took in all the surrounding chaos. With the wind and the high seas, he should have been swept from his perch the moment he set himself down there, but the sea seemed never to touch him.

  As if he felt the weight of Llesho’s thoughts on him, Little Brother pulled back his lips in a wide monkey grin. By a trick of vision it seemed that two creatures sat in the same place, one the monkey that had traveled with them from the reaches of Farshore Province to the very brink of disaster on the stormy sea. The other, an old man, seemed to sit huddled at the foot of the mast. His eyes were dark as Little Brother’s. A bristly gray beard covered his chin and his long, flowing gray hair fell from a topknot almost to his elbows. The avatar of the monkey god met Llesho’s gaze and grinned, becoming again the monkey that remained at the foot of the mast even while the graybeard had appeared like a ghost around him.

  Llesho shook his head, afraid that the near spill into the sea had damaged his eyes, or his perception. The old man was gone, however, leaving only the mystery of how the monkey escaped the perils of the storm. It seemed unlikely that he would solve the puzzle while the ship threatened to sink at any moment, though, so he stepped out, hazarding himself to the wind, and called upon Marmer Sea Dragon.

  “Lord Dragon!” he called, “I have come to help turn back the storm!”

  No answer came, and Llesho felt the cold touch of despair freezing his heart. They would founder under the great mountains of water that rose up around them. He had done this, bringing his friends out on the terrible sea to die. With their deaths, the quest would end in failure. Thebin would remain under the despotic rule of the Harnish raiders and the very gates of heaven would fall. All because of an unthought word spoken in hurt and in haste to a friend. The enormity of the outcome of so small a mistake stole his breath and drove him to his knees.

  “No!” he shouted, and recalling that a failure of manners had brought him to this place, he replaced the angry words he would have spoken with a plea. “Please! I know you are doing all you can to help. But they don’t deserve to die for what I’ve done.”

  “No, they don’t,” Pig agreed.

  Llesho had forgotten the Jinn’s presence, but now he weighed the cost of another, potentially dreadful mistake. Pig had great powers, but they were held in check by one condition. He couldn’t do anything unless someone made a wish.

  No one had ever confused a Jinn with the mortal god of mercy. Wishes came with a price every bit as dreadful as the wish was grand. He figured that wishing away a storm of this size was a pretty grand wish, and didn’t figure he’d survive the price. On the other hand, it didn’t look like he was going to survive the storm either.

  He turned, took a deep, wet breath to shore up his courage, and Pig said, “Don’t do it. My lady, the Great Goddess would have my head boiled for her dinner if I gave you a wish. She would bar me from her gardens forever, and they need me.”

  “Is there any other way?” he asked. Llesho knew the difference between the instructions that a spirit guide might rightly give and the exercise of a Jinn’s powers to grant wishes. Once before, Pig had led him into the hills where he had freed the Holy Well of Ahkenbad and gained the pearl that was Pig in his disguise—or banished form. It hadn’t been the working of a wish, but it had served the purpose.

  Pig, however, shook his head. “You are where you need to be,” he said, which was information at least if not more help than that. “I can’t do anything else without jeopardizing my own position in heaven.”

  Llesho stared back across the sea to the shore from whence they had come. He was thinking not of Edris or the grasslands, but of Thebin and the gates of heaven hidden in the mountains high over the Golden City.

  “I need to save my wish,” he realized. “I’m going to need it on the mountain.” To fight the demon Master Markko had raised, he meant. Pig understood, gave a lift of a shoulder in a shrug as if to say he didn’t know, but wouldn’t risk his own fate for stakes as small as the lives of Llesho’s friends.

  Marmer Sea Dragon was there, however, sliding like moon-glow beneath the water. Llesho knew the way of dragons, that they might appear as small as a human being or large enough that four armed soldiers might walk abreast down their backs. So it didn’t quite surprise him that the sleek worm gliding across their stern was longer by far than their little ship.

  There was a hatch on the aft deck as there had been amidships. It opened against the wind, so that it opened only with difficulty. Llesho slid through and the storm slammed it closed tight behind him. He managed to secure it with only a brief spill of water following him onto the quarterdeck and made his way to the captain’s cabin. There the shutters were closed tight, but a door let onto the gallery where Habiba had taken his stand against the storm. Llesho joined him on the narrow walk. He said nothing to distract the magician, but found the gate in the rail and passed to the outer side. Nothing protected him from the sea now but his faith in the dragon-king.

  As if he’d been waiting for this very act of trust, Marmer Sea Dragon glided to a halt and raised his immense green head. Llesho craned his own head back on his neck, watching Marmer Sea Dragon rise and rise and rise out of the sea until the worm towered over the ship’s naked masts.

  The dragon-king’s body created a little oasis of calm between them in the stormy sea, and Llesho bowed with appropriate respect to the great green king.

  “My Lord Dragon,” he said, confident that the creature would hear even a whisper in his own domain. “I am no great herdsman, but I have ridden from Farshore Province across half the known world to this place, and I would ride in defense of my comrades and the great Marmer Sea that is your home.”

  The dragon smiled, a terrifying sight in such a creature. Standing rows of teeth big as glaciers stood guard in a mouth from which smoke lazily drifted past a red carpet of forked tongue. Llesho held his ground, however, and bowed to show that he meant no disrespect by the request.

  “We will see how good a seat you have,” Marmer Sea Dragon agreed. He didn’t reduce his size, but dropped into the sea so that his great snout sat level with the gallery. For a moment Llesho wondered if the dragon-king meant him to walk down his gullet and ride to battle against the storm in his belly the way Mara the healer had traveled in Golden River Dragon’s gut. But Marmer Sea Dragon dipped his nostrils into the sea, making a gangplank of his nose.

  Llesho walked up between the dragon’s eyes, clambered over his great eye ridges, and reached the top of the monstrous dragon’s head, between sharp curved horns like a gate of bone. Looking around him, Llesho found a hump like a third eye protruding out
of the dragon’s forehead. He remembered the dreaming-room between the horns of Stone River Dragon, where the dream readers of Ahkenbad had read the future in the sleep of pilgrims.

  Green scales, each longer than Llesho was tall, overlapped in a protective glittering pattern that covered the head and back of the dragon. Llesho’s trust had been abused on this leg of his quest, first by Master Den and later by Pig, making him question his judgment in allies. But he did trust Marmer Sea Dragon, at this moment and in this situation. The great worms had their own sense of time and purpose, and they could hold grudges long enough to wear down mountains. But if a dragon-lord made a bargain, you could trust him to keep to it. Llesho pushed at a scale until it shifted enough to expose a hollow depression like the cave he remembered at Ahkenbad.

  “Be my guest,” the dragon rumbled.

  Tumbling inside, Llesho found again the strange veins of light that crossed everywhere in the bony knot that formed the cave. In Ahkenbad, the dream readers had placed a pallet against the rocky wall, but here a bed of seaweed spread a thick carpet between the horns of the dragon. At the center of the cavity, a spur of bone like a saddle rose out of the cavern floor.

  Llesho undid his belt and wrapped it around the base of the bone spur. Then he settled his feet on both sides, using his belt as reins, to keep him in his place. He had no illusion he could control the dragon’s flight from here, but he hoped not to fall into the sea.

  “Take a deep breath.” The words rumbled through the cavern of bone. With no more warning than that, Marmer Sea Dragon dived.

  Chapter Twenty

  WHEN LLESHO came up with his big rescue plan, he’d expected to use his skills underwater to save Tayy’s life. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind. Water was pouring into the tiny cavern of bone above the dragon-king’s forehead, though, so he held his breath and clutched his makeshift reins until his knuckles whitened. The dragon plunged deeper and deeper into the sea.