The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  It was still Bolutu: his voice was unchanged, and his taste for odd little confessions. “Dastu has already told you about me,” he went on. “You see now that I spoke the simple truth. The truth about myself, and also, incidentally, about this blizzard of light. For it is the same manifestation that struck us twenty years ago, heading north. Clearly it has magic-canceling properties. It nullified the flesh-disguises of some of my comrades; now it has erased my own.”

  “You look a bit like a giant crawly,” said Haddismal. “Are you in league with them?”

  Bolutu stared at the Turach in disbelief. “No,” said Dastu. “More likely he’s with the Mzithrinis. Right, Master Ott? I’ll bet he signaled the Jistrolloq somehow, as we neared Bramian.”

  The lad took a step toward Bolutu, as if he intended some violence, but was unsure of the creature’s abilities. Bolutu backed toward the door. From his corner, Ott shook his head. “If the Black Rags had creatures from distant countries working for them, I’d have heard about it. My guess is that we are looking at Arunis’ lieutenant. Where has he gone, creature? Did he double-cross you, leave you here among your enemies when the rats attacked?”

  Oggosk caught my eye and cackled, and for once I felt I understood the source of her mirth. Just minutes ago we had escaped a horrible death, and yet like performing monkeys these three had snapped back into their routines, to suspicion and intrigue and lies.

  Bolutu looked from face to face. “Incredible,” he said. “You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said. Why do you bother to spy on us, when your own theories are so much more attractive? For what it’s worth I have but one enemy on this ship: Arunis himself. You people, you humans of the North, should have been my natural allies, but most of you have lacked the sense to see it. And now I think I shall go. I have known twenty years of interrogations by angry, frowning persons like yourselves. I find the questions as sad and stunted as the questioners. Goodbye.”

  And with that he threw open the door and walked out, breathing freely. Like the others I held my breath against the outdoor air, feeling it bite at the edge of my nostrils. But Bolutu was obviously, utterly immune. A result of his transformation, I presume. He strolled away through the Red Storm, past men and crawlies alike. When he caught up with Pathkendle and Thasha Isiq (she looked spent and fragile, now, and the Ormali held her tight in his arms) the creature greeted them like old friends.

  You will be wondering how I can speak of pride, when still caged by crawlies? I shall tell you briefly, and then let Oggosk do her witching best to deliver this letter. She assures me she can do so even here, locked out of her cabin, provided we wait until dark.

  Like a soundless, strengthening gale, the Red Storm grew brighter and brighter. Men deserted the topdeck—I could not even see a man at the wheel, though I could not be sure: looking down the length of the glowing ship was like staring into the heart of a bonfire. The other prisoners urged me to cover the window, and there was no good reason to refuse. We tacked up another shirt, but the light crept in somehow: through the crawlies’ bolt-hole, maybe, or the seams in the walls. All I know is that within a quarter hour we were shielding our eyes from one another, and from the room itself. Another five minutes, and it was penetrating our eyelids. Sometime after that—how else can I put this?—it had filled our brains. We stood shivering, as if our eyes had been skinned and our heads surrounded by row upon row of scarlet lamps. We did not move or speak or moan. There was no pain, but there was no place to hide.

  And then it was gone. Normal vision returned. And when I dared look out again, I saw the red light in pools upon the deck, running here and there as the Great Ship rolled, and pouring like rain through the scuppers. We were on a natural sea, among stout forty-foot swells. When the crawlies came to rebuild the fire, they ventured to inform us that the storm was visible behind us—to the north—still stretching from horizon to horizon. To this day I do not know how long we spent in that scouring light. Minutes, hours? The better part of a day?

  The work that had begun in terror now resumed with sanity and calm. Or at least without panic. There was soon a new emergency: fresh water. To ensure that we all collapsed together, the damnable crawlies had poisoned every last reserve of water, from the big casks in the hold to the hogsheads used for cooking purposes in the galley. The stateroom’s private supply was beyond their reach, but Uskins (I soon discovered) had stopped delivery of water to the stateroom some months ago, thinking it a smart blow against the Pathkendle &Co. to force them to lug buckets from the berth deck. There were a few flagons and skins that the crawlies had missed, and some ash-polluted rainwater caught in the furled sails. The live animal compartment had a reserve, but it was smashed open at the top, and full of rat blood. Most of the animals themselves were dead: throats torn open, flesh burned black. A surprising number, including Oggosk’s wretched cat and the Red River hog, had simply disappeared. Those that remained (a goose, two swine, three chickens) were slaughtered at once. Mzithrinis are not the only ones capable of drinking blood.

  We could, of course, still drink from the casks that had survived the fire. And quite a few men did, in days ahead, as the sun beat down mercilessly, and our thirst grew and grew. We would find them sprawled about the taps, well hydrated, asleep. We tried working in shifts, letting some men drink and sleep, while others waited their turn. No use: a pint of water would knock a man out for two days, and by the time he woke he’d be thirstier than before. And of course the work slowed with every man we lost.

  So the crew lived, and in some cases died, with thirst. In the forecastle house, we prisoners sat around dry-lipped, trying not to sweat in that room where a fire always burned, and fresh air could kill us. Meanwhile Fiffengurt and his new crawly “commander” oversaw the repairs. In just two days (the men were strongest at the beginning), they had the foremast and spankermast rigged anew, and we were able to aim the ship south once again. The remaining masts followed at a rate of about one every three days. We picked up speed. There were accidents, broken shrouds, a broken arm from a falling wheelblock. All told, however, the quartermaster proved his worth. And the crawlies? They cared not what we thought of them, so long as the ship ran south.

  Eighteen days like this. It was winter in Arqual, here it was sweltering and cloudless. The men were going mad for rum, but Fiffengurt knew enough to post the Turachs about the liquor compartments with orders to kill: spirits, of course, only make one pass more water than one has swallowed. Men sucked lemons, drank up the vinegar and syrups. The crawlies began to fight among themselves. Was it their messiah, I wondered, who had ordered them to spring this trap, which had now caught them as well?

  He came to see me, at last, and begged my advice. “Your men are choosing death, Captain [suddenly I was Captain again]—drinking their fill and crawling into their hammocks, as if someone else were about to appear and sail the ship for them. Won’t you tell your man to give them rum?”

  “Is that what you were counting on?” I said. He did not understand the effects of alcohol, and paled when I told him that it increased thirst. “What are they to drink, then?” he shrilled, as if I were being unreasonable.

  I had him bring me Teggatz, and told the cook how he might fashion a boiler-condenser, to distill fresh water from salt. “Use bilgewater; it will have less salt than the sea itself. Meanwhile, boil the rum in an open cauldron; the alcohol will go up in fumes.” Teggatz assembled the device, and stoked the galley stove until the whole deck felt the heat. But the machine and the flat rum together only yielded another forty gallons a day, and the men tending the stove had to drink a quarter of that just to keep from passing out in the heat.

  Perhaps those forty gallons made the difference, however. For a morning came when, parched and gritty-eyed, I woke to find the little lordling’s girl (Myett, she is called) standing before me with a white pill in her hand. “Eat it, Captain, and go to the quarterdeck. Our lord wishes you to see something.”

  I gulped the pill (before Ott or Haddismal
chose to wrestle me for it) and staggered to my feet. Outside on the deck, I felt no pain in my lungs at all. She ran ahead of me, and I walked stiff and angry toward the bow, taking in the damage to my ship. At last I pulled myself up the quarterdeck ladder. The lordling was there, on a man’s shoulder, having my own telescope held up for him. It was aimed—like six or eight others in various hands—at something two points off the port bow. Thasha Isiq saw me before the little tyrant did, and brought me Admiral Isiq’s instrument to gaze through. I raised and focused it, guessing already what I would see.

  “Congratulations, Captain,” she said. “You brought us across, alive.”

  I lowered the scope; was she mocking me? The choices I’d made, the alliances I’d condoned! The ship still reeked of fire, the boards beneath our feet were black. My men were lifting carcasses of rats and wondering if they dared drink from their veins.

  Then I saw the ghosts clustered behind her, scores of them, the complete repertoire of former captains, six centuries strong. They were toasting me with brandy. They were shouting the name of Nilus Rose.

  Only the girl and I were aware of them, of course. But as they cheered, Pathkendle came up beside her and offered me his hand. You crafty little bastard, I thought, but I shook it all the same. If they were recruiting me for something it was handsomely done.

  Now I shall send this, Father, and hope that you are not ashamed to call me son.

  I am, and ever shall be, your obedient

  Nilus

  P.S. The antidote was temporary. Within the hour, as the crawlies intended, I was back in the forecastle house. Oggosk declared that she could receive letters from you so long as we remain trapped here. We fell to arguing; and by a slip of the tongue she revealed how she has been opening and reading your letters before passing them on to me. I confess I was quite angry. I took her unlit pipe (yes, the same one; she will masticate no other) and crushed it beneath my heel.

  Pray do not trouble yourself to write, therefore, until you hear that I have resumed my command. Of course I shall still write, to you. But will you really see these letters? Is she truly sending them, as she feeds them page by page into the fire pot? There is no proof one way or the other. I must trust the hag, as I have been doing (not always profitably) these many years.

  Finally, I implore you not to tell Mother of my conflict with her elder sister, who is savage without her pipe. Whether she took my side or Oggosk’s, the headache would be intolerable. Some things are best kept among men.

  * Receipts signed by Captain Theimat Rose indicate that he purchased ixchel for use as poison-tasters, letter-readers, and small-item (watch, compass, eyeglasses) repairmen. To judge by the frequency of purchases, the average life expectancy for an ixchel in the Rose household was two years.—EDITOR.

  ** Nearly illegible, rather. After hours of scrutiny I believe the line read: “Fate nearly reunited our family in the depths.” Or possibly, “… in death.”—EDITOR.

  41

  Thirst

  16 Ilbrin 941

  215th day from Etherhorde

  “Captain Fiffengurt,” said Mr. Thyne, “aren’t you going to name it? You have that right, after all.”

  “Don’t call me captain,” growled Fiffengurt. “The ixchel can’t promote me, no matter what Taliktrum says.”

  “The Trading Family, however, has named many a captain. And your qualifications—”

  “Hang it all, man! It’s not Family approval I’d go looking for if I wanted to hold on to this job.”

  Thyne sighed, gazing south over the carronades. “Such a beautiful place. It just feels wrong to keep calling it the island.”

  It was by general acclamation (and only because it was expected to save their lives) the most beautiful island in all the world. Not that they could see much of it: Bolutu warned of sandbars, so with five or six miles to go they had tacked westward, and were keeping a safe distance.

  Even through the stronger telescopes, however, there was little to be seen. A meandering, sand-colored smudge. No rocks, no human (or dlömic) structures. Low trees or bushes on dune-tops, possibly. That was all. The island was so flat and low to the horizon that the first men to see it confessed they had thought it a mirage.

  But it was no mirage. And it was no tiny island, either, at least in length: the wall of dunes vanished west as far as any eye could discern. Bolutu had given them one name already: the Northern Sandwall, a two-thousand-mile-long barrier of offshore banks, entirely without rock or coral, torn and shaped and sifted by the Nelluroq. “Within lies the great Gulf of Masal,” he said. “Almost a sea unto itself.”

  “Gods of mercy!” Fiffengurt had exploded. “You can’t be saying we have another voyage to make, before we reach solid land?”

  “I have no way to know that, from here,” said Bolutu. “The coast is quite irregular. In places the Sandwall comes to within five miles of the mainland; in others it stands three hundred miles offshore. But it is solid enough, and quite broad in places. There are fishing villages, small forests, naval stations—and yes, fresh water. In other places the Sandwall is so thin one can throw a rock from the north beach into the Gulf of Masal.”

  In such spots, he explained, the Nelluroq frequently punched inlets straight through the Sandwall. Entering the gulf by one of these, a ship could make a safe landing on the Sandwall in any number of places, by following the channel-markers set by fishermen. “Provided, of course, that we are in Bali Adro territory. That is likely, for most of the gulf is claimed by our Empire. But I cannot know for certain without a landmark.”

  “Are those inlets deep enough for a ship like the Chathrand?” Taliktrum had demanded from his perch on Big Skip’s shoulder.

  “It depends, sir,” was Bolutu’s reply.

  “Depends, depends,” grumbled Fiffengurt. “Everything blary depends.”

  They had plenty of sea beneath them now: twenty fathoms, when the lead was cast. Fiffengurt called for topsails, on the masts that could take the strain. Time was against them: the men’s spirits had lifted at the sight of land, but they were still half mad with thirst. And there would be no landing of any kind this side of the Sandwall. When the wind was right they could hear the breakers: a smashing, bellowing surf that would crush any vessel caught in its grip. They had no choice but to sail on.

  Taliktrum ordered the release of the steerage passengers, a command Fiffengurt found it easy to obey. At first the forty pale, wasted souls had to be urged not to stand in the sun, losing moisture to sweat: Rose had kept them a long time in darkness, and some did not hide their glee to learn that he was now the one imprisoned. The sailors watched them, shamed by their filth, their long invisibility. But their hearts did not soften toward the crawly who had seized the ship.

  Midafternoon the sea grew clearer, and they edged to within three miles of the Sandwall. Now there could be no doubt: the dunes were capped with trees. Smiles broke out on salt-crusted lips: trees meant water, fresh water; they could taste it already. But there was still no inlet, and no sign of home or village on the yellow shore.

  When the sun touched the horizon, Fiffengurt cursed under his breath. “Take us out five miles, Mr. Elkstem, if you please. Mr. Fegin, I want double lookouts forward. We’re going to hold this pace straight through to sunrise.”

  A cold snap fell in the night, bringing down a teasing dew. Men tried to suck it from the rigging, only to end up with mouths full of salty tar. Others spent the night running their cracked fingers over sails and oilskins, then touching fingers to lips.

  At daybreak the Sandwall stretched on as before. The heat grew and the wind diminished, and the Chathrand lost half her speed. Hope turned all at once to panic: there was almost nothing to drink. The boiled rum was gone. Captain Rose’s saltwater still had twice exploded, and the repaired device produced only a trickle of fresh water. Tempers began to fray; even some of the ixchel exchanged rebellious glances; soon they would be thirsty too.

  That night the wind picked up for several hours
. At dawn, they found to their great dismay that the Sandwall had shrunk to a brown thread on the southern horizon: it had curved sharply away from them, and they spent the better part of the day creeping back toward it.

  Outside sickbay the line grew long. Chadfallow and Fulbreech put drops of almond oil into blistered, leathery mouths. But there were serious maladies too. One man had a fever but was unable to sweat. Another had closed his eyes for a moment and found that they refused to open. A third complained of muscle spasms; they gave him linseed to rub on his arms. An hour later he lost his grip on a forestay and plummeted from the mainmast: his body sounded like a bundle of sticks when it struck the deck.

  The third day along the Sandwall passed in a sort of group delirium. There were storm clouds to the north—forty or fifty miles to the north—but they failed to provide even shade, let alone moisture. There were whales to starboard, blowing froth into the air that looked like the mist over a waterfall in some forest glen.

  In the evening water queue outside the galley, a Plapp’s Pier sailor choked on his ration. His throat had become too dry to swallow; he coughed, and his precious quarter cup sprayed against the wall. The Burnscove Boys laughed and hooted, and the sailor who had lost his water promptly lost his mind. He struck the nearest Burnscover hard in the jaw, and seconds later received the same treatment himself. Knives appeared, the Turachs shouted and charged the troublemakers, and the bulk of the men in line seized the chance to rush the water barrel. Mr. Teggatz, swinging his ladle like a club, was knocked over; seconds later, so was the barrel. Few had even wet their lips, but four men lay bleeding underfoot. One, the unfortunate Plapp, died before his mates could carry him to sickbay.