Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  “So then. We advance, if by hair-breadths. We have another island. Maybe, a direction. And . . . a name.”

  With an artist’s timing, he did not leave them long enough to consider the ill-omens of that name. Decisively, however politely, he addressed the fort commander.

  “Pheis, we must commend your alertness, and thank you for your warning. And,” a faint, decorous smile, “leave you most unjustly with the aftermath. You’ll see her safely—kindly? Bestowed? Like our own folk.” We can, the note said, give her that tiny recompense. “We ourselves should not, cannot linger. It must be past third watch?” At Pheis’ nod his mouth stiffened. “We must not miss the tide.”

  Not if we, at least, were to reach the city before evening. If we, at least, were to find our safe way home.

  The commander bowed in assent, but he was frowning when he straightened up. “Your Highness,” diffident but determined, “that wind’s making. It’s a long pull through the channels, even with the tide. You’d not consider waiting? Lying over the night?”

  Therkon nodded, but the way he pulled the cloak around him was signal enough. “You’re very kind, Pheis, but if Aspis can’t get us home through this, some Army designers will be finding another job.” There was a quick, over-eager laugh. “Besides, I promised the fastest tidings possible. To the Empress.”

  * * * *

  The rowers at least had been briefly rested, and fed. Therkon politely but as adamantly declined refreshments for the rest of us, though he did allow the fort cooks to press on us a basket of bread and ready-heated soup. We clattered downstairs, over the now almost horizontal gang-plank, and they pushed us off.

  The portcullis had hardly dropped behind us before I could feel the weather’s change. Aspis did not merely bounce now when she met the outside water, she bucked. A great sheet of spray flew abaft the bows as she swung toward the channel, and the captain, who had been unusually quiet as we worked out the gate, cast a glance ahead and silently sucked his teeth.

  Beside me, Azo said in my ear, “Find a stay or a belaying pin. And hold on.”

  I locked my hand around a belaying pin just below the gunwale, set to hold a brailing sheet. No-one, I could see, would try to raise a sail in this.

  The wind shrilled and squealed around us, the spray flew from our bow no less than from the short, vicious little waves. The whole world had faded to the monochrome grey of the forts: sea, horizon, sky, pieced with white frills and scraps of foam.

  Except in the wind’s eye. To the north-east.

  Therkon was watching the livid, broadening bruise over the horizon there. The white wall of rain beneath was as ominous as the furious boil of cloud above. He looked almost as grim as Azo. In a moment he said to the captain, “A squall, do you think?”

  The captain bit his lip. Then answered brusquely, “She’ll weather it. And the sooner we’re in the channel, the better.”

  Therkon nodded. Then he too took a step back in grasp of the rail, and fastened his hand round a rope.

  Whatever it was closed on us almost unnaturally fast: the wind quickened more fiercely, the light dimmed, we could hear the hiss of rain flying forward under the cloud’s feet. The captain shouted something to the steersman and grabbed the tiller bar himself. They pulled the Nikonian round to make the first turn in the channel. As she straightened out the air went dark, the rain whipped into us with a roar and the wind hit like a very warship’s ram.

  Aspis literally staggered under the blow. The bow flew sideways as the whole ship reeled and ocean bucketed over us from fountains of mast-high spray. Even the captain’s bellows paled against the din. The deck pitched and suddenly flung me sidelong against the gunwale, Azo grabbed me with a hand like a steel hook and my sight vanished in a choking wave of red.

  It ripped away. I had been hit by the breadth of Therkon’s cloak. He was wrenching it back around him and I would have been shouting at the captain, at anyone in earshot, but he was perfectly quiet: flattened to the rail just beyond us, eyes on the struggles of his ship.

  And she was struggling. The wind-spasms gusted fit to break oar-looms as they whipped and whirled and the Nikonian was being mauled like a weaker boxer under a hail of blows. The captain and steersman battled madly at the tiller. I caught fragments of the rowing officer’s yells. The oars beat like a winded bird’s wings, to keep time, to meet or at least match the oncoming blows.

  I had the belaying pin in both hands as the ship flung me to and fro like a pendulum until Azo yanked us both down on the deck. It isn’t natural, was all I could think. I had no need of Two’s memories, I knew already: this was one of the huge storms, the abnormal storms, that caught the freighters in open ocean. And now it was taking us.

  With shattering suddenness the wind dropped. The sea roared and beat at us, the rain scourged down on us, but the wind had collapsed like a fallen tent. Suddenly Therkon and the captain, shouting beside me, were loud as heralds over the rest.

  “—can’t hold her! . . . afford to spend them! Not in here!”

  “. . . then? . . . make the fort?”

  “—never do it—sea-room! Channel . . . tight! Have to run—!”

  The captain gestured wildly ahead, then to the left, where the fort had vanished into a wall of rain, then behind and left again. Two and I understood together and my heart climbed right out of my throat.

  The rowers could not hold her in the wind’s face. Nor could we reach the fort, and the channel was too narrow to manoeuvre. He wanted to run: to flee for a beleaguered ship’s only other, chancy safety.

  Out into the open sea.

  A minor gust screamed at us and fresh rain battered after it. Like his ship Therkon staggered. Then he swung one glance back to the fresh dark bearing down on us and as the wind quickened he shouted, “Yes! Now!”

  The captain needed nothing more. He bawled something forward and as the next gust rose at us he and the steersman heaved on the tiller bar.

  I know now that only something as light and deft as Aspis could have survived that move. She had just begun to swing when the wind hit and again the sea fountained round us, the bows flew up aslant. But the fulcrum moment had passed. The wind itself whipped her on past the deadly side-on broaching point, fatally vulnerable to wind and water both.

  She crashed back level over the next wave’s crest and the wind struck again, but this time on her quarter. The blow only drove her forward, oars dipping now to balance rather than impel, and she flew like a gull on the gale’s impetus, up channel toward the open sea.

  * * * *

  I never saw the forts pass. They too were shrouded in the grey pall of spray and cloud and driving rain, but even my landlubber senses felt the Nikonian’s stride lengthen and the wave patterns steady under us. It did not need the way the captain eased his back to tell us the first peril was past. We had sea-room again.

  They rigged a stormsail then, a ferociously dangerous if brief struggle that nearly put men overboard. The captain was determined to conserve rowers while he could. When it came to securing brails, Azo and I found ourselves urged perfunctorily if politely toward the tiny kennel abaft the steering oars that served as a captain’s shelter. The only cover on board. For all Two’s panic at losing information, I did not have the heart to resist. No matter that Therkon was still outside, and even Deoren had not protested it. If they lost us overboard, I could tell, it would be the final straw in the load of calamity.

  Two has the full count of time. I seem to have been numb for much of it, after the first few hours, when the terror of anticipation slowly dulled, under the endless noise, the wind and water’s battering, the all-encroaching wet, the never predictable lunge or buck that would fling you against wall or deck. Break a doze, upset a position, and almost always spill the tiny precious rations of water or soup.

  We blessed the Mother for that basket in the early part, despite the battle over its allo
tment. Therkon would take nothing unless his men did. Deoren insisted Therkon at least had to be fed. The captain claimed he and his officers would take shame not to match the sailors and rowers, who swore they could last on water alone. All of them were adamant that Azo and Verrith and I had no choice in sacrifice. And eventually, for the same reason we had stayed in the kennel, we gave in.

  Two says the basket lasted three days. And that the mast snapped the first night, when they tried to rig a sea-anchor to slow us down. I do recall an unholy din of shouting and cracking, banging, crashing that reverberated through a hull which suddenly seemed to be lunging hither and thither like a riderless horse. That would have been when the mast went, and she lost steerage way, until they cut the wreckage clear and got her back on the first shift of oars.

  Leaving two sailors overboard.

  The sea-anchor rope parted the second morning, Two computes. To me nothing distinguishes it from the night, except a paler light creeping in the hatch cracks, and a view of salt-rimed, red-eyed, raggedly-wrapped wet and struggling scarecrows outside.

  But somewhere in that light’s span a sudden and even more untowardly savage spasm of wind and wave caught Aspis like a striking snake and smashed oarlooms like twigs, losing us half the upper starboard oars.

  And men along with them.

  We were out of the kennel that day for good. I still cannot bear to remember the sounds of the injured as they struggled to free them from the shattered looms and benches, to get them astern through the ship’s bucking and the treacherously slippery spume, to lay them, close as packed fish, in the tiny shelter. And then the heart-breaking battle, with nothing but a bucket of water and a layman’s experience and a few bandages, against broken arms, legs, stove-in ribs . . .

  The lower-bank oars were too short to use on deck, if they could have been freed. By evening I was down in what had been the bilges, shouting signals in the fragmentary lulls, as guards and off-shift oarsmen fought to shove lower oars out their ports. And then to block the ports themselves, with bare hands, a shipwright’s maul, pieces of scavenged sail and broken oar-loom,

  naked swords.

  That did give us more hands for upper shifts. With the sea anchor gone and the mast broken off short, leaving a mere rag of storm sail, she was almost unmanoeuvrable otherwise. As for the steersmen . . . Almost everyone took a hand at that, wrestling beside one or other of the red-eyed, sleep-walking experts who had been the captain and actual tillerman.

  And by the fourth day, as Two accounts it, all of us could help to bail.

  “Never spring a plank in less!” I recall the captain bawling at Therkon. “Most weatherly ship in the fleet!” His outrage was only rivaled by his injured pride. But even Aspis could not withstand the strain the torn-off starboard oars had put on her flank.

  “She’s working,” I heard one of the sailors say hoarsely, as Azo and I came past him to the handles of the baulky, back-breaking, hand-mangling pump. Even deeper than the lower deck, dripping, raging gloom about us, the whole long submarine cavern stumbling and staggering under unseen blows, while we heaved to the point of exhaustion. And atop it, the terror that any fresh bellow of sea or wind might be the last. That those moving, twisting planks he pointed at would actually part, the water not merely leak but gush in from above and below and find us trapped there, with no chance but to drown.

  “Keep pumping,” his mate muttered. “Gotta be land somewhere.”

  They both winced. “Don’t matter,” the first growled, turning for the midships hatch, “which comes first.”

  Taking the weight of the first pump stroke I gasped at Azo, “Don’t we want land? Surely?” Surely, any port would be a sanctuary in this?

  Azo snorted with the remnants of her breath. “No say—how we’d strike it. Best chance. Lee shore.”

  My own blood ran cold. I had heard the old water-tales of Amberlight. Even on the River, there was no peril greater than a leeshore. Caught with wind behind you blowing onto the land, in a ship that had no way of fighting clear.

  * * * *

  It was no better on deck, battered by the implacable wind, the relentless rain, a shivering misery as salt crept in to abrade through every fold of cloth or flesh. And the exhaustion. The hunger’s palpable weakening. The ongoing terror that never let up.

  “Five days,” I heard the captain whisper as he collapsed into the shelter of a bulwark at the end of his latest shift. “Has to drop some time.”

  Verrith measured him a cup from the water breaker. Rain we had in plenty, but the sea adulterated every drop that came aboard. The other scarecrow in a sopping red-black cloak put a hand for a moment on his shoulder, and I tucked my own blistered palms into my armpits and carefully did not meet his eyes, even though I knew he would not ask. Like me, he already knew the nature of this storm.

  The wind and sea shrieked and cascaded round us, unremitting, undeterred. Saying for themselves, No cause for this ever to end.

  That evening the worst injured rowers began dying.

  The corpses had to lie among the living, with no more than the gesture of burial: Therkon, as most senior officer, reciting in a husk of whisper prayers they use in the Delta for the safe passage of a soul.

  When he crawled out of the shelter the last time the light was going too, smothered in the maelstrom of wind and spray and endless, ear-breaking noise. I could feel everyone of us, from me to the off-duty oarsmen, literally dropping on our feet.

  Therkon must have been near dropping himself. But as he straightened up with the now automatic clutch for a handhold, I saw his eyes go round the haggard faces, the eyes coal-red and inflamed as his own. Before he pulled himself a little straighter, and managed almost full-voiced words.

  “Thank you, Deoren,” he said formally, to his Trouble-head, who had met him with a steadying arm at the shelter’s door. And then, more clearly, to the extra man on the tiller, “I will take this watch.”

  And I felt the rags of will and resolution tighten and re-firm in everyone around me, for if he went on, how could we not?

  * * * *

  I have no real measure for the span of eternity before the light came back next, only a marker for its end. Staring out from my lair under the gunwale with a muzzy sense of change. And then sudden, shocking comprehension, as the ragged stump of mast, the splintered midship bulwarks, the rags of fighting screen, the listing, paint-stripped figurehead assembled, above the clusters of bodies huddled among it all.

  And the water that raged up beside us, cascading over the bows, doubtless the water still crashing at the slightest chance on our stern behind me, had changed color. Under the white spray and inlay of thrashing foam, it was green.

  Ice-cold, bitter deep southern green. But no longer the eternal grey of the storm.

  The light strengthened. I craned up over the gunwale. And for the first time in six days, stared out not into a wall of spray and rain but over a wilderness of heaving ocean. The wind still flogged, the sea tossed us fiercely, but the air had cleared at last.

  The others were rousing too. I heard murmurs, faint and hoarse, from cracked, bleeding lips. The slow lift of attention, and with it spirit, that ran like an intangible wave down the entire ship.

  Beside me Azo dragged her elbows over the gunwale. On my other side, Verrith did the same. With the swift scrutiny of trouble­crew they stared about. Then across my head their eyes met in a long, expressionless look.

  “What is it?” Alarm signals went off through every terrorstrung nerve. I got one of my own swollen, blistered hands on the gunwale and heaved myself up. “What’s wrong?”

  After all, they did not have to explain. The light was creeping slowly but surely out into what, above the sea’s furore, would sometime be a blue if cloud-wracked sky. And beneath it, on the horizon where sea and air met, low, swaybacked, and already far longer than it was high, lay a tiny but unmistakable shape.
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  “Land?” I could hardly whisper. “Is it really land? At last?”

  Azo looked at Verrith. Verrith lifted a shoulder in a shrug.

  “What is it? What’s wrong? If it’s land, we’re saved, aren’t we? It’s all right?”

  When neither of them answered, Two did the extrapolating for us both.

  “Oh, Mother. You mean . . . it’s right ahead of us? The wind . . . it’s a lee-shore?”

  After a moment, not looking at me, Azo answered.

  “Unless the wind drops—yes.”

  * * * *

  Therkon knew what hope there was of that, as well or better than I. Not that the rest of them needed urging to struggle with the tiller and set to the oars with all their strength. Double-shifts, even three men sometimes to an oar-loom, as they fought with their swollen hands and their exhausted muscles to turn and hold us across the wind’s weight. To force us, however imperceptibly, to the right of that distant shape.

  “Get past, into the land’s lee,” Azo did not have to explain, “get ashore if we can, lie to if we must.” Her glance down the working deck, past the great gap in the starboard oarblades, added the rest: if we can keep afloat long enough to postpone beaching till the seas go down. “Do that, and . . .”

  The shrug finished for her. In that unlikely event, we might still have some hope.

  It seemed to go on for another eternity, in the knife-edged wind, over the thrashing green water, under that tormentingly blue sky. Cruelest of all, to fight the last battle in sunlight, in what would otherwise have been a fair, cheering day.

  We did fight, all of us. At times I struggled with an oar myself. And for all our efforts, against the wind, with Aspis’ dead weight of intaken water, the lack of sail or full oarbanks, it was not enough.

  “If t’forsaken Adversary’d let the wind drop,” I heard the next oarsman pant as I fell out. “Just a knot or two . . . ’d be enough.”

  And the man beside me gasped back, “Gonna all but clear it anyway. Just that last . . . bloody . . . cape.”