by J. S. Bangs
The Wave Speaker
Prelude to the Powers of Amur
J.S. Bangs
2016-03-01
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
The Wave Speaker
Copyright and Acknowledgements
The Wave Speaker
Coming Soon Heir of Iron: Chapter One
More By J.S. Bangs Storm Bride
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Copyright and Acknowledgements
The Wave Speaker
Copyright © 2016 by J.S. Bangs.
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The Wave Speaker
The sea roared in Patara’s ears. Wind tore at the mast and the tatters of the sail, battering strands of hair across his face, hurling sheets of water across the deck. Spray stung his cheeks and left the taste of salt on his lips. Waves leapt up like cliffs around them, white foam at their lips. The little wooden dhow flew towards the sky on the face of the storm swells.
“The sail,” Patara cried. “The sail! Can’t you fools go any faster?”
He was holding the aft rail, wrestling the steering oar with Khinda. Ashturma struggled with another sailor to bring the sail all the way down to the spar; they clung to the mast and the rails with their legs while furiously working the knots.
The steering oar kicked in their hands, and the handle swung and smacked Patara in the thigh. Khinda grabbed it with both hands and pulled it back, his eyes firmly on the foam-churned reef to the north. His lips were fixed in a curious, manic grin.
“Captain,” he shouted over the wailing of the wind. “Do you think we got away from the pirates?”
Patara got his hands on the rudder oar and knifed it back into the water. The reefs. The reefs and the sail. If they could furl the sail and ride their way through the storm without hitting the reefs, they might live.
“Captain—” Khinda started again.
“Not thinking about pirates right now,” Patara said. “Trying not to wreck.”
“Just trying to find the bright side.”
“Appreciated, but—”
Screams of terror cut off his answer. Ashturma had dropped the half-loosened rigging into the hold, and he stood with one hand curled around the mast and the other pointing off into the waves. Patara couldn’t make out what the boy was pointing at, but he didn’t care.
“The sail!” Patara screamed. “Forget the pirates!”
None of the other men moved. A sheet of spray blinded Patara for a second, and when he blinked the salt from his eyes he finally made out the object of their terror.
Someone was walking across the waves.
The figure slid rapidly down the surface of a giant swell as if running down a hill, little tracks of white spray leaping up in its footsteps. It reached the trough between the waves, twenty yards from where the dhow rocked, and turned running towards them. Gray clothes and gray hair whipped like streamers in the wind behind it. A phantom.
A gust howled and caught the edge of the half-furled sail. The mast creaked. Patara shouted an inarticulate yell. Splinters flew. The mast broke.
The sailor at the rail hurled himself aside and just avoided being crushed, but the falling beam shattered the rail and cast sail and rigging into the water. A moment later the boat shuddered and pulled against the wave, and the ropes went taught.
The sail had snagged on a stone.
Patara swore. An outlier of the damned reef had snagged them. “The ropes!” he screamed. “Ashturma, Vaija, Jauda, all of you! Cut the ropes or we capsize!”
Vaija and Jauda, the two junior crew members, ceased bailing and leapt onto the tackle and the remnants of the mast, hacking wildly at the lines tying them to the unseen stone and the sinking sail. Two, three of the lines were cut through and disappeared into the sea.
A swell washed over them—they could not ride it, pinned as they were. For a moment Patara lost hold of the oar and clung to the rail to avoid being swept overboard. The deck pitched beneath him, then the water pulled back. He could breathe.
He opened his eyes and counted the shapes in the boat. Six. No one was lost.
Ashturma scrambled forward and laid a hand on the last piece of line. His knife split the fibers, the ends frayed, and, with a sudden snap of freedom, the dhow rose on another swell, freed from the hidden stones, rising on the shoulders of another wave.
“Well done, my son,” Patara whispered. He threw himself with Khinda against the steering oar.
“Bail!” he screamed. “Ashturma! Thikritu! Take up the buckets and bail.”
They crawled across the pitching deck towards the buckets as water slopped back and forth in the hold. Patara put his hands back on the rudder oar and faced Khinda. “Just stay off the reefs, now,” he shouted.
Khinda shook his head, his ironic grin finally vanishing. “Stay away from that, too.” He pointed with a nod towards the gray shape walking across the water.
Patara had almost forgotten the phantom. It seemed to slide and slip as the storm swells picked it up. For a moment it faltered and dropped into the water up to its waist, then it regained its balance and stood aright. Patara shuddered.
“Away from it!” he said to Khinda. “Bail, you fools!”
All of the men except for Patara and Khinda now held bailing buckets and were emptying the hold of water as quickly as they could. Another swell picked them up, and its crest passed over the prow, sloshing churning storm-water across the decks. The men’s bailing was in vain—they rode too low and took on too much water.
“Take the oar,” Patara shouted to Khinda. Then he scrambled across rear deck and into the belly of the boat where the men stood with their buckets. He grabbed his son’s hands and pulled the bucket out of it.
“Have to dump tin,” he screamed. Ashturma looked at him with wide eyes and nodded.
They dropped into the waist-high water in the hold and grabbed the first basket of ingots. Two others saw what they were doing and jumped to help, grabbing the basket that Ashturma and Patara lifted and tipping it overboard. Patara’s heart lurched as the cargo tumbled into the sea, and he thought of his creditors—but only for a moment. Dead men made no money.
He and Ashturma splashed forward and lifted the next basket. A wave sloshed over them and filled their mouths with seawater for a moment. Breath returned. Patara shook the water from his eyes. They lifted another basket to the men above, and the tin tumbled into the sea. Then another, and another, cold seawater around his legs, rough basket handles scraping his hands. Two-thirds of the cargo was gone before Patara heaved himself up and shouted to Khinda.
“How are we riding?”
Khinda didn’t answer. His face was fearful, his knuckles white on the oar. “Patara—” He pointed to the starboard rail.
A pair of hands gripped the rail. Someone had gone overboard. Ashturma was closest, and he pulled himself up to the rail, grabbed the man’s wrists, and heaved him into the boat. Only as they both fell backwards did Patara realize the long, bony fingers were too thin to be a man’s.
The gray shape fell into the boat with his son.
Patara scrambled towards them, screaming, but he stopped when he saw clearly what Ashturma had pulled from the sea. A woman. Dressed in dirty gray, with silve
r hair matted to her head and a bulky leather bag strapped to her back. She lay sprawled atop Ashturma, her chest heaving, her thin brown hands clawing at Ashturma’s sleeves. She pushed herself up and spat seawater onto the deck.
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “The storm may cease now.”
She fainted against Ashturma’s chest.
Ashturma struggled to push the limp woman off him. She slid into the bilge water in the hold, but Ashturma grabbed her wrists before her head went under and pulled her to his side. He heaved her up to the planking at the edges of the hold and pushed her against the rail, then he took a seat on the plank, breathing heavily and washing seawater and rain from his eyes.
Only then did Patara realize that the rain had stopped. The black-and-silver clouds scudded to the south. The wind blew, a stiff but fading breeze. The ocean swells rocked the dhow with the gentleness of a mother holding a newborn.
The men in the boat watched the woman in eerie stillness.
Thikritu was the first to speak up. “Throw her overboard.”
“What?” Ashturma answered.
“The Lady is jealous. She nearly killed us. Give her to Ashti.”
“We’ve already given Lady Ashti most of our tin,” Patara said. “I don’t know that she wants a woman.”
Ashturma clasped one of the woman’s hands in his. “She saved us.”
Khinda spat and looked cross. “Bad luck to sail with one woman aboard.”
Ashturma looked at him with fierce defiance. “No one will hurt her. Right, father?” He gave Patara a glare that was half pleading, half insistence.
“Everyone leave her alone,” Patara growled. He glanced at the broken mast and the twisted, frayed ropes that were all that remained of their rigging. Now the storm was over, he remembered the value of the tin they had cast overboard and the creditors he had to pay in Davrakhanda. He shook his head and spat into the seawater. “We ride out the last of the wind, and then we row to shore. And we make an offering to Ashti when we’re safe on shore. Now bail!”
For a moment he suffered the glares and grumbling of the sailors, but one by one they bent and picked up their buckets and began to bail.
Except for Ashturma. He remained next to the gray-clad woman, holding her hand as if they were lovers. Patara pulled himself up to the aft deck and sat himself down at the woman’s feet.
She did not appear to be extraordinary. A ragged gray cloak hung off of her shoulders, barely covering the bindings around her breasts and waist. Her hair was long, silver striped with black, and her face was sunbaked and creased with wrinkles. She was old, but not ancient, and her hands preserved a soft, smooth look to them. Her chest rose and fell evenly. She lay crookedly because of the leather pack strapped to her back. Patara bent and began to untie the leather laces which bound the pack to the woman’s shoulder.
“Don’t,” Ashturma said.
“Why not?”
“That’s hers.”
“I’m not taking it from her,” Patara said. He loosed one lace and moved to the next.
“Father, please,” Ashturma said. He put his hand on Patara’s wrist.
“When did you become her protector?” Patara asked. “Did I give you that duty?”
“I got it when I pulled her out of the sea,” Ashturma said.
Patara narrowed his eyes at his son. If he didn’t know better, he would say that Ashturma was infatuated, but he couldn’t guess why Ashturma would be lusting after a woman older than his mother.
“Get down and bail,” he said. “Your duty is to me and to your crewmates, not to a woman we found walking on the water. We’ll talk about her when we get to shore.”
The sun sank below the horizon in the west before the bottom of the boat ground against the muddy, weed-choked shore. Groans of exhaustion mingled with curses and cries of thanksgiving on the lips of the sailors. Patara and Khinda were the first who leapt to the ground, toes squishing into warm mud. They took up the ropes thrown down to them by the other mates and headed up the shore until their feet found firm ground. More feet splashed down into the soft, muddy shoreline after them and followed them up the little hummock of dried grasses. Ashturma was the last.
“Heave!” commanded Patara. With a massive groan they all strained against the ropes and heaved the boat a foot further up the shore. They heaved again and dragged the boat another foot, then another, until finally Patara declared that it was enough, and there was little danger of the vessel drifting away on the high tide.
The men collapsed into the grass around them. Patara wiped sweat from his forehead and looked at the little fishing village to their south. It was a ramshackle collection of daub-and-wattle huts with palm-leaf thatching, plastered with crumbling mud in pale colors. A dozen yards of beach had been cleared of weeds, and a collection of ratty outrigger canoes huddled together on the beach. A tiny stream tore a gouge in the mud and trickled out into the ocean between the village and the dhow. But there was no lamp visible in any of the windows, and Patara hadn’t seen a soul move since they entered the tiny cove.
“We go in and see if anybody’s home?” Khinda asked.
“We should,” Patara said. “I can’t imagine that the village is abandoned. Too many boats out front.”
“Boats get left behind sometimes.” He shot a baleful glance at their own craft, beached on the shore with a broken mast, no sail, and creaking side-boards.
“Not that many. And these look like they still float.”
Where was Ashturma, now? He wanted his son to come with him. They were butting heads like rams in the spring these days, with the boy’s endless stream of impossible plans. Patara finally spied him standing near the beached vessel, looking up at the top rail with a lost, forlorn look.
“You mooning over that woman?” Patara snapped.
“We left her in the boat,” Ashturma said, a touch of defiance in his voice. “We should bring her down.”
“Should we? If she hasn’t woken up yet, let her sleep there. If she can walk on waves, she can get herself out of a boat.”
Ashturma gave Patara a defiant look. “What if it rains in the night?”
“Then she’ll get wet. Come with me and Khinda. Jauda, you get a fire and shelter going.”
Jauda, the eldest sailor in the crew, nodded at Patara’s order and began barking at the other men to gather wood and make a shelter of palm leaves. Ashturma folded his arms and plodded after his father and the first mate.
“Don’t look so glum,” Khinda said. “We got out alive, and we got the lady safe as well. Wasn’t much more we could do.”
Ashturma looked back at the beached ship, snorted, and shook his head. Patara suppressed the urge to smack him. The boy was good on the dhow, but he refused to be satisfied running the tin route to Kalignas. Before their latest voyage, he had talked about buying the secret of the route to the Spice Colonies. Prior to that he had wanted to run pearls from Majadir. They had fought until their throats were hoarse over that one. Patara liked the woman from the sea even less than those fights.
The village was still as a stone in the pink evening light. They moved slowly across the mud and stones of the shoreline, then waded the ankle-deep stream of cold water. As they approached the first house Patara called out, “We’ve come ashore in dire need! Anybody hear us? Thikram’s blessing on those who help.”
“Thikram’s blessing on those who help,” Khinda repeated after him. Not a whisper of movement.
Patara stopped at the threshold of the first house and called for Thikram’s blessing again. When there was no response, he pulled aside the curtain over the door and stuck his head in. The interior of the house smelled like fish, clams, boiled corn, wood smoke, and unwashed clothes. The only sound was his own breathing.
“No sign of anyone,” he said. “Where did—”
“Shhh,” Ashturma said abruptly. He pointed into the forest brush just beyond the borders of the village. The rustling of leaves and snapping twigs gave away the flight of someone f
rom the banks of the stream.
“Hey!” Khinda shouted, and he charged towards the source of the sound. But as soon as he pushed into the palm bush his own ruckus covered any hope of following the sounds into the forest. Patara and Ashturma ran after him, but they met Khinda standing in the shadow of the palms, peering fruitlessly into the evening darkness of the forest.
“Friendly people,” Khinda said. “Seems like Thikram’s blessing isn’t on them or us.”
“Let’s go a little further into the woods,” Patara said. “If they’re hiding here, maybe we’ll flush them out.”
Khinda pushed ahead, swatting aside palm leaves and trampling the bristly underbrush. Patara called for Thikram’s blessing as they went. Ashturma brought up the rear in silence.
“Ah, here’s a thing,” Khinda said abruptly, and a moment later Patara came out behind him onto a footpath of trampled clay, cool and firm beneath his toes. “Someone comes by here often, it seems.”
“But why are they hiding?” Ashturma said. He folded his arms and glanced through the gloom in either direction. “We don’t have a lamp. We should go back.”
“In a few minutes,” Patara said. “This evening will be a whole lot easier for everyone if we have the help of the villagers.”
“The stream is that way,” Khinda said, pointing behind them towards the barely-audible tinkle of flowing water. “They’re probably further inland. Follow me?”
“Go,” Patara said, and they traipsed after him deeper into the forest.
Lamplight flared ahead of them with sudden brightness—a brilliant yellow flame bursting out from where it had been hidden. Khinda stopped so quickly that Patara nearly ran into him, and Ashturma’s breath caught behind them. An old man stood in the road, a smoky oil lamp burning in his hand and casting dancing yellow shadows across his face. He held a long stone knife at the ready in the other hand.
“You come begging for Thikram’s blessing?” he rasped.
Khinda spread his hands to show that he carried no weapon. “If you please,” he said. “Our ship was caught in a storm. Our mast is broken, our sail lost, and we had to row into the cove. We beg your mercy now.”
