Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

The ultimate cape on the island’s eastern side, the butt of the highest hill, that we could see so clearly now, sweeping down to the sudden bite of cliff. Slanted rock stacks black in the wave-spray, taller than a lighthouse, reared up from the welter at their feet as the waves raged in and exploded, throwing spray higher than the very cliffs. We could even hear the seabirds wheeling round them, a cacophony of indifferent, high-octave shrieks.

  “Not just wind,” gasped the captain, struggling in his turn at the tiller bar, as I gravitated astern, where we all did, when we had a chance. “Got a—bloody—current—under us.”

  Therkon hung on the bar beside him. The imperial rings had cut deep around his salt-caked, swollen fingers, but he was still pulling. Still sharing the load.

  “Can we—ride it,” he panted too, “round?”

  “Round?”

  “Setting in—like that. Has to turn—doesn’t it? Off cliffs?”

  Wind and birds screeled in eldritch dissonance. But the captain actually dragged his head up, squinting through the sunlight, forward over his failing ship.

  His head dropped. His shoulders dropped too. A fresh gust took half his words away but I caught, “too dangerous. Like this.”

  Aspis’ failing resources, I understood, left too narrow a margin for such risk.

  Azo had been peering landward too. Suddenly she left her post, never six inches from me since the storm began, and moved over to the pair at the tiller bar. Stretching as if to throw her gaze up through the air like an arrow, she pointed landward. The wind robbed more of her woman’s voice, but her gesture and the fragments made sense enough.

  “Eddy, back along.” She was pointing left, along the base of the cliff. “Hill this side. Bet money, inlet—beyond it. Under cliff.”

  The captain said something, his head-shake demurring. Azo snapped at him, tone if not sense clear enough.

  “. . . see it. I know how to look!”

  He shook his head again, actually letting go the bar as he straightened. Therkon’s back stiffened under the load, though he did not lift his head. Azo yelled, pointing, all but growing agitated. The captain looked and looked again and shook his head furiously, doggedly, then bellowed back.

  “Can’t risk it!” He jerked an elbow at Therkon. His eye and hand picked me out as well. “Oughta know that—yourself!”

  Not dare such extra risk, with such precious cargo. Not with me aboard, as well as his own crown prince.

  The intonation had been final. Azo did not demur. Just came back to me and Verrith.

  And pulled my cloak undone, beginning to fold it in neat, tightly compacted squares, snapping something to Verrith. Who fossicked along the rail to find lengths of flailing rope, sliced them loose and handed them to Azo. Then sheathed the knife, her precious second throwing knife, and began undoing its straps from round her wrist.

  Before she grabbed my own left arm and started buckling it on.

  “What are you doing?” I was too stunned to argue, let alone think. “Azo? Verrith?!”

  “Could need ’em,” Verrith was never less than expressionless, “more than me.”

  She had the second sheath free, the one that went above her elbow, was scrabbling with my sleeve. Azo yanked rope under my arms and across my back, knotting corners of the cloak package, tying me into a virtual harness, I tried to stop them both and only managed a stagger on the shifting deck. “What in the Mother’s name are you doing? What is this? I’m going to freeze—!”

  Neither of them replied. Azo just glanced round, then slid halfway to the mast-foot to scoop up a broken oar-loom that had washed up and lodged there, perhaps for all the previous night. She brought it over to stow under the bulwark beside us. Said flatly, “Taking precautions,” and gave me a look that added like a slap, Shut up.

  Then she went back to staring through crystal-sharp sunlight across the tumultuous sea.

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. The wind strengthened: and suddenly my cheek, attuned through those six days’ purgatory as keenly as any ancient mariner’s, picked up an alteration. I felt Azo twitch and raise her head even as I lifted mine.

  The wind was shifting. Swinging, now, at the bitter last, slightly from the endless north-east. Coming round to east-north-east.

  Pushing harder on Aspis’ injured quarter. Driving her prow in, that last fatal fraction, toward and not away from the land.

  The captain had felt it. In his off-watch stupor the steersman, all but comatose under the bulwark, had begun struggling to sit up. And Azo and Verrith had caught it too.

  Aspis took a fresh wave and stumbled, worse than before. A vision of those working planks flashed before my eyes. Therkon hauled his own head up and addressed something to the captain. The wind gusted, they both heaved instinctively on the tiller bar.

  And the port steering oar snapped.

  Both oars must have taken untold stresses in the length of the storm, I would have expected the tiller bar itself to go first. But it was the oar that broke, with a crack like firing qherrique and a shower of flying chips.

  Then the tiller bar was slapping, even I could tell how much looser in the steersmen’s hold, the great blade and half the loom bobbed forlornly astern, and the rest hung down, like an amputated bird’s wing, at the Nikonian’s side.

  Nobody had to gloss the calamity. Nobody shouted, or screamed, or even swore. All along the deck there was only a final, exhausted hush.

  Then uproar broke out as the captain and officers started shouting, flogging numbed brains for the last desperate chance to compensate. I caught fragments of “deck-oar!” “double-watch!” Something about the sail. Men began running, or at least staggering, sailors, guards, off-duty rowers, the trembling deck reverberated to their hurry as the voices beat at the whistling air.

  Therkon had heaved himself up from the tiller bar. The steersman had almost respectfully pushed him aside, taking the captain’s place. Somebody had found an upper-deck oar, they were running it astern through the ruck. Someone else was scavenging for unbroken rope, half a dozen others had begun heaving in the massive steering-oar loom. They meant to rig a jury oar, to hold her at least partly into the wind. They meant to fight to the bitter last.

  The loom came up against the side and somebody swung himself astride it: hands proffered ropes, lashings were passed round the loom, then a dozen other hands shoved the rowing oar through the loops. Frantic with haste and weakness, several hands began to pull the lashings tight.

  The knots were fast. The men around me touched breast or forehead or lips with knuckle-backs and I heard the mutter of invocations, to the River-lord, to sundry other gods. The big loom slid back through its port, and the blade hit with a splash.

  Suddenly it was almost wholly quiet. Everyone had gone mute, waiting, watching, as the tillerman and his offsider took up pressure on the bar.

  And Aspis moved. No more than a point or two, but her bow came round for all that, slowly, so slowly, pointing away toward the east.

  The uproar this time was yells of glee, relief, furious delight. They scrambled about the deck as if they had never known six spent and starven days at sea. They even crowded over, at the captain’s shouts, to make her starboard side weigh heavier, to counteract the thrust of wind and sea.

  The cape was close enough to see the seabirds now, a whirling white and grey flaked cloud. To hear the strike of each separate wave, the thunderous, reverberating impact of ocean on naked rock. But its seaward butt showed now, almost on the nearer side of the bedraggled figurehead. We had, again, a chance of getting past.

  Azo and Verrith exchanged another look and leant on the bulwark, some unspoken purpose ebbing from their stances, postponed, if not revoked.

  “Can I get out of this now?” I demanded. The ropes under my arms had already begun to chafe. “If it’s not bad luck?”

  Azo answered brusquely, “Not yet.”
Verrith muttered, “Don’t test the Mother too far.”

  Aspis wallowed on, even I could tell how unhandily, her wounded, over-loaded hull struggling against the sea-scend. I had a painful memory of her leaving Riversend, that gay, bright fighting cock, and closed my eyes.

  And felt through my feet the moment it happened, even before a pair of sailors burst up the hatchway, wild-eyed and dripping from head to foot, screaming, “She’s opened! Midships starboard! Planks gave way!”

  I heard the uproar, and it beat on me insensibly as wind. Even for Two my brain had stopped. But Azo and Verrith’s eyes met over my head, one quick wordless look.

  Then Azo yanked the oar from under the gunwale and cast another loose loop of rope around the loom and Verrith put a shoulder under mine and heaved me bodily onto the bulwark too.

  “What are you doing?” I was too stupid to do more than shriek. Azo said through her teeth, “Hold this,” and slapped the oar-rope into my hand.

  “I can’t! I won’t!” Understanding seared like lightning. “I won’t go without you!”

  Azo got an arm under my leg. I started struggling in earnest. “Let me back! Let me back! Azo! Verrith, I won’t, I won’t!” No time to shout that others would have no chance to escape, even if there were they would fight for the ship, no time to invoke Therkon’s fate, the anguish awaiting the Empress. I fought like the proverbial maniac. And Azo and Verrith grabbed me either side and literally threw me in the sea.

  The cold green water sank me, scraps of Azo’s last shout ringing like a warcry in my ears.

  “. . . or what’ll I say . . . Tellurith?”

  * * * *

  The sea drank me like a pebble. I have no idea how far down we plummeted before the oar and my own lungs’ air-bladder drove us back toward the light. My head shot out into streaming, reeling vistas of green splashing water far too close to my nose under far too distant cloud-dappled blue sky. I thrashed aimlessly till by merest luck one arm hit the oar loom, that the rope had kept close by.

  I got some sense back then. Enough to work my arm over it. To understand why Azo had tied my cloak on my back instead of leaving me to wear it. To realise why the oar had come with me. To comprehend that they had put me clear of the ship now, to avoid, if it foundered, any chance of being sucked down. To understand Azo’s last, so chancy plan.

  To hold my head a little higher, and stop fighting for air, and let the sea bear me, as it would bear me, if I let it. Two had the memory of water-wise generations. She translated the tingle and push around my calves. It was the current. Taking us in, where the ship could no longer go.

  Into, I realized slowly, the eddy Azo had so madly, so desperately gambled on. Into what she had guessed or intuited or just prayed would be an inlet, under those cliffs and back behind the intervening hill.

  Because I, at least, was so low in the water that now the wind could not come at me. The ocean alone would take me to what might be safety, our other, most inveterate enemy at last annulled, the ocean’s indifferent malice turned against itself.

  I shook water from my eyes and tried to see Aspis.

  Green hills surrounded me, moving, sometimes colliding, ever-changing green hills with foam strung like sliding daisies on their flanks. The seabirds screeled, much closer, filling the register above the waves’ thunder with their din. But no human voices wove amid their clamour. The shifting horizon showed no barest glimpse or fragment that might be the work of humankind.

  The eddy did set along the cliffs’ feet, though it was so close I shut my eyes and committed my soul to the Mother if Azo’s guess proved wrong. But then I opened my eyes again, unable to help myself. And the great rock stack that had been straight before me was perceptibly further to my right.

  It seemed another eternity before the water motion steadied. Until the making tide carried the oarloom in, over yeastily thrashing shallows where my feet touched, where I could at last, with the onward swing of the tide, get my feet firmly set. And wade, stumbling, staggering, breast, waist, calf-deep, towing the precious oar-loom after me. To reach, at last, the brief, coarse sand-margin. Where I fell down, weeping, cloven between relief and anguish, but understanding to my bones’ marrow what it means to be cast up—disdained, thrown back, regurgitated—by the sea.

  Chapter VII

  Two insists that we came ashore some time in second day watch, as sailors count the time. But when the rising plaints of skin and bone and muscle forced me to wipe my streaming nose, and shift position, even consider trying to sit up, it was early afternoon.

  The wind was still blowing, however thwarted by the lesser cape. Still, my internal compass verified, from the malevolent north-east, and despite a watery sun little past its zenith, still colder than the sea. The sheets of blown sand and spume drifted from the breakers’ thunder forced me, eventually, to begin struggling with the cloak harness. To remember, after uncounted ages, that I had a knife.

  Verrith’s wrist-blade slid smoothly from the sheath. It was salt-rimed but the steel was intact. Its razor-edge parted the rope. I saw, heard, felt, smelt Verrith, close as Azo, as watchful and taciturn: their Uphill but not House-born accents, the crinkled Amberlight hair, Azo’s unruly left eyebrow, the gap in Verrith’s teeth. Their troublecrew solidity. Permanent as history, my bulwark on this journey. The bulwark of my life. Of my mother’s life. In Iskarda, before I existed. Even in Amberlight.

  Eventually the tears ran dry. I got the ropes off. The cloak was wet as the rest, but its oiled goat’s-wool worked as always. Drawn round me, it cut the wind solidly as a wall, almost with a fire’s relief.

  I felt Azo’s hands knotting it tight. I felt the cold space at my right elbow, empty as the one at my left. I heard their voices, and saw again that last moment on Aspis’ deck. I put my head back on my knees and wept.

  That time my belly brought me round, with a pang that overrode even grief. Inside the cave of hood I scrubbed at my eye-

  corners, trying to tell myself I must get up. That whatever the desire to lie down here and die, I must not squander Azo and Verrith’s gift. I must get on my feet, and go inland, and try to find . . .

  People? Refuge?

  Help?

  They’re gone, I thought. They’re all gone. What, I cried to Two, is the use of going anywhere? Of doing anything?

  Two had no reply. The wind had none either. But suddenly another sound overrode the sea and air’s untiring rumour. Fast, broken, thudding crunches in the sand. The sound of running feet.

  Then a body thumped down against me so hard it nearly bowled me over, arms smothered me like a wave and a hoarse voice cried into the cloak folds, “Chaeris!”

  * * * *

  We both cried then: I know that, because his tears were wet on my hair after I finally fought back out of the cloak. Then I buried my face again and tried to lose all but the sound and smell of him, sea-hoarsened voice, reek of salt water and human fear and indelibly persisting sweat. Anything to credit that someone else had survived. That at least, I was no longer alone.

  That at least, I would not have to take that news to the Empress.

  He was babbling, “Oh my lady. My lady. . . The River-lord be thanked, the Lord be blessed.” I re-wiped my eyes, and managed to look up.

  He was looking down at me with as fatuous, as unstrung an expression as I could feel on my own face. The once immaculate hair hung in elf-locks, its clip naturally lost. A week’s stubble improved that gaunt, haggard cheek. Salt and tear-reddened eyes squinted, come-and-go smile breaking over it all like the first of that morning’s light. He had not lost me, after all. His word, at least, remained intact.

  “How?” I achieved at last. I could not seem to let go of him. A handful of sandy, sodden cloak, a corner of irretrievably filthy shirt. “How did you get here? How . . .”

  The joy snuffed. He shut his eyes. The one remainder of the crown prince was those dark sm
ooth crescents of lash.

  “Deoren,” he answered, just audibly. “Suris. They saw . . . your troublecrew.”

  He bowed his head and his hand clenched on my shoulder till it hurt and I saw the tears run as mine had done, and understood.

  His troublecrew had done as Azo and Verrith did. Somehow, they had got him and the cloak, at least, overboard. Consigned him to the sea, and hoped.

  I put both arms round his neck. Tanekhet’s warning, my own hankerings, Two’s reaction, did not matter. It would not have mattered if both of us had been men or both women or each a hundred years old. It was human solace, answering desperate human need.

  “It’s what,” I whispered in one ear, through the lank tangled hair, “they meant to do. What they would have wanted. The same as . . .”

  I lost words then too. We hung onto each other and discovered the second miracle. That after everything, there were still tears.

  When that tide finally ebbed, we could at least begin to look around.

  The dry beach was a mere crescent above high water, its coarse, pale reddish sand backed by a dull green scrubby fringe. Some sort of ling, I guessed. Left hand, his footprints receded into dark wet sand, where the sea creamed pallid azure and silver behind the ebbing tide. Further off, the land rose precipice-steep to the main cape, a towering vista of slanted, sandy red, fissured and fragmented stacks. Waves still shattered along their bases, seabirds still gyred round them, keening like the undaunted wind.

  To our right scattered boulders marred a somber, not to say sullen green. More ling, or perhaps low-growing shrubs. And a crest, like the other slope, bearing not a track, a fence, a roof. Not even a distant twist of smoke.

  In a while I said, “Do you—did anyone—” I could not bear to mention any name, “have any idea where we might—where we are?”

  Mutely, he shook his head. I swallowed hard and shut my eyes. Far, far into the Archipelago, reason answered bleakly. Six days before a storm like that? No telling where this might be.

  I clenched my teeth on the new wave of grief. We would have to help ourselves. We would have to walk, climb that unwelcoming hill, look for succor. For news, and directions, and a bath, pray the Mother, and fresh clothes, and food.