by Robin Hobb
“Serpent!”
Althea's voice rang out clear and cold as the night that surrounded them. She clung with near-numbed fingers, her feet braced against the look-out's platform. Her eyes strained through the darkness to track the creature even as she heard the thundering of the crew's feet on the deck below, heard her cry passed on. Hatches were flung open as all hands hit the decks to do whatever they could do to withstand this latest attack.
“Where?”
“Three points off the starboard bow, sir! A big one. ”
They were all big, she reflected bitterly as she strove to tighten her weary grip. She was cold and wet and tired, and the healing injury on her scalp still throbbed all the time. In the cold of a night like this, the throbbing became a dull agony as the chill tightened her skin. The fever had passed days ago, and Reller had snipped and tugged the stitches out when the itching had become unbearable. Reller's clumsiness and coarse jokes about her pain were infinitely preferable to the guarded tenderness she saw in Brashen's eyes whenever she chanced to be near him. Damn him. And damn him again, for here she was thinking of him when her very life depended on her focusing her mind on her task. Where had the serpent gone? One moment she had seen it, and now it was gone.
In answer to her question, the ship gave a sudden starboard lurch. Her feet slid on her ice-rimed perch, and she found her life depending on the clutch of her numbed fingers. Without even thinking, she wrapped her arm about a line and held on. On the deck below she could hear Captain Sichel cursing and demanding that the hunters do something, shoot the damned thing before it took them all to the bottom! But even as the hunters with bows drawn ran to one side of the ship, the serpent had doubled back and nudged them from the other side. It was not a sharp impact like being rammed. It was a strong upward push, like a shark nosing a dead carcass floating on the water. The ship heeled over and men scrabbled across the decks.
“Where is it?” the captain demanded furiously as Althea and the other look-outs strained their eyes into the darkness. The cold wind streamed past her, the waves heaved and she saw serpents in the curve of every swell. They dissolved into fear and imagination when she tried to focus on them.
“He's gone!” one of the other look-outs cried, and Althea prayed he was right. This had gone on too long, too many days and nights of sudden random attacks followed by anxious hours of ominous cessation. Sometimes the serpents crested and writhed alongside the ship, always just out of reach of a bowshot. Sometimes there were half a dozen, hides scintillating in the winter sun, reflecting blue and scarlet and gold and green. And sometimes, like tonight, there would be but one monstrous creature, coming to mock them by effortlessly toying with their lives. Sighting serpents was nothing new to Althea. Once, they had been so rare as to be legendary; now they infested certain areas on the Outside, and followed slave ships through the Inside Passage. She'd seen a few in her time aboard the Vivacia, but always at a distance and never threatening. This proximity to their savagery made them seem new creatures.
Between one breath and the next, the ship heeled over. Hard. The horizon swung and suddenly Althea's feet were flung from under her. For an instant she flapped from the spar like a flag. On the canted deck below sailors roared and flailed wildly as they slid and tumbled. She hitched her belly tight and kicked up a foot to catch a ratline. In a moment she was secure again even as the ship tilted further. The serpent had come up under the ship, and lifted it high to roll her hard to starboard. “Hang on!” someone roared, and then she heard a shrill cry cut short. “He took him!” someone shrieked, and the cry was followed by a confusion of voices, demanding of one another, “Did you see that? Who did he get? Picked him off like a ripe plum! That's what this thing is after!” The ship righted itself and through the chaos of voices, she clearly heard Brashen cursing. Then, “Sir!” His voice rang desperate in the night. “Can we not put some hunters on the stern, to keep him off our rudder? If he takes that out . . . ”
“Do it!” the captain barked.
There was the clatter of running feet. Althea clung to her perch dizzily, feeling sick not with the sudden lurching of the ship but from the abruptness of death that had visited them. The serpent would be back, she was certain. He would rock the ship like a boy shaking cherries from a tree. She didn't think the beast was powerful enough to overturn the ship completely, but she was not certain. Land had never seemed so far away. Land, solid land, that could not shift beneath her, that did not conceal ravenous monsters who could erupt at any time.
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She remained at her post, hating that she could not see what was happening on the deck right below her. She did not need to know, she reminded herself. What she did need to do was keep good watch and cry a warning that might save a man's life. Her eyes were weary from peering into the darkness, her hands no more than icy claws. The wind snatched the warmth from her body. But, she reminded herself, it also filled the sails and pushed the ship on. Soon, they would be out of these serpent-infested waters. Soon.
The night deepened around the ship. Clouds obscured both moon and stars. The only light in the world was that of the ship herself. Down on the deck, men worked at fabricating something. Althea moved swiftly and often, a small spider in a web of wet rigging, trying to keep some warmth in her body as she maintained her futile watch. All she could hope to see was some disturbance in the faint luminescence of the ocean's moving face.
Eventually the ship's bell rang and her replacement came to relieve her. She scampered down the now-familiar rigging, moving swiftly and gracefully despite the cold and her weariness. She hit the deck cat-lightly and stood a moment kneading her stiff hands.
On the deck, she was given a crewman's measure of rum thinned with hot water. She held it between her near-numb hands and tried to let it warm her. Her watch was over. Any other time, she would have gone to her hammock, but not tonight. Throughout the ship, cargo was being lashed down more tightly to prevent it shifting if the serpent attacked again. On the deck, the hunters were constructing something that involved a lot of salt meat and about fifty fathom of line. They were both laughing and cursing as they put it together, swearing that the serpent would be sorry it had ever seen this ship. The man who had been devoured had been one of the hunters. Althea had known him, had even worked alongside him on the Barrens, but it was hard to grasp the completeness of his death. It had happened too swiftly.
To her, the curses and threats of the hunters sounded thin and impotent, the tantrum of a child pitted against the inevitability of fate. In the darkness and the cold their anger seemed pathetic. She did not believe they could prevail. She wondered what would be worse, to drown or be eaten. Then she pushed all such thought aside, to fling herself into the work of the moment. On the deck was a hodge-podge of items jarred loose by the serpent's attack. All must be carefully re-stowed. Below decks, men worked the pumps. The ship had not sprung, but they had taken in water. There was work and plenty to spare.
The night passed as slow as the flow of black tar. From alert vigilance, all decayed to a state of frayed anxiety. When everything was made as tight as it could be, when the bait was readied and the trap set, all waited. Yet Althea doubted that anyone save the hunters hoped the serpent would return to receive their vengeance. The hunters were men whose lives centered around successful killing. For another creature to stalk and successfully devour one of their own was a sudden reversal of roles they could not accept. To the hunters, it was manifest that the serpent must return to be killed. Such was the rightful nature of the world. The sailors, however, were men who lived constantly with the knowledge that, sooner or later, the ocean would take them. The closest to winning they could come was to tell death, “Tomorrow. ” The sailors working the ship strove only to put as much ocean behind them as they could. Those who had no tasks napped where they could on deck, well-tucked into nooks and crannies where a man could brace himself. Those who could not sleep haunted the rails,
not trusting to the look-outs who stared from the masts above into blackness.
Althea was leaning thus, eyes straining to pierce the night, when she felt Brashen take a place beside her. Without even turning, she knew it was him. Perhaps she was that familiar with how he moved, or perhaps without realizing it, she had caught some trace of his scent on the air. “We're going to be all right,” he said reassuringly to the night.
“Of course we are,” she replied without conviction. Despite the greater danger they all faced, she was still acutely aware of her personal discomfort around Brashen. She would have given a great deal to be able to recall dispassionately all they had said and done that night. She did not know what to blame it on-the drugged beer, the blow to the head or the cindin-but she was not entirely sure she recalled things as they had happened. She could not, for the life of her, recall what had possessed her to kiss him. Maybe, she reflected bleakly, it was because she did not want to recall that those things had happened at all.
“Are you all right?” he asked in a quiet voice that freighted the words with more meaning.
“Quite well, thank you. And yourself?” she asked with impeccable courtesy.
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He grinned. She could not see it, but she could hear it in his voice. “I'm fine. When we get to Candletown, all of this is going to seem like a bad dream. We'll have a drink and laugh about it. ”
“Maybe,” she said neutrally.
“Althea,” he began, just as the ship gave a lurch beneath them and then began to rise. She caught frantically at the railing and clung tight. As the ship listed over, the sea seemed to rise towards her. “Get back from the rail,” Brashen snapped at her, and then flung himself aft shouting, “Feed it to him! Get it over the side, feed it to him!”
The deck under her feet kept inclining towards the vertical. Everywhere sailors shouted out their anger and terror. The ship screamed, too, a terrible creaking of wood accustomed to being supported by water and now pushed up out of it. The flexibility of the ship that made it possible for the Reaper to withstand the pounding of the sea told against her now. Althea could almost feel the pain of planks as fore to aft the whole structure twisted and racked. The rigging groaned and the canvas swung. She found herself crouched on the railing rather than clinging to it, gripping it with both hands. She looked up the slanting deck. Sanded smooth and clean, it offered no handholds to retreat from the edge of the ship. Below her the black sea boiled suddenly as the serpent's tail lashed the water for more purchase.
A man above her roared in sudden, helpless fury. He had lost his grip, and now he slid down the sloping deck towards her. He wouldn't strike her. If she just stayed where she was, she'd be safe. He'd hit the railing and probably go over, but she'd be safe. If she just stayed as she was.
Instead she found herself letting go with one hand, and reaching for him. He struck the railing, she seized his coat and suddenly they were both swinging, attached to the ship only by her hand's grip and one of his legs crooked over the railing. “No,” she heard herself gasp as she felt her muscles cracking with the strain. They clutched at each other and the ship, the man's hands clutching her so tightly she thought he'd break her bones as he instinctively tried to scrabble up her body to the ship. Below her, the water seethed.
Aft of her, there was a concerted yell of effort and a huge net-wrapped wad of gobbets of oily sea-bear meat was flung over the side. Althea caught a glimpse of a section of chain following it and then line began to pay out. The meat had no more than touched the surface of the water before an immense open maw rose from beneath the waves to engulf it. She could have touched the scaled curve of its neck as it dived after the bait. She caught a glimpse of layered teeth and huge eyes, then it was gone, a hump of serpent body arching beneath her feet.
There was a triumphant shout and then Brashen was shouting to snub it off, snub it off! As abruptly as the deck had tilted up, it was falling away, while rope was snaking out across the deck as if they had dropped an anchor. Althea and her companion were abruptly on the ship's railing instead of dangling over the side of it. They both scrabbled frantically to get their whole bodies onto the deck. The bait line snapped suddenly taut, and the whole ship shuddered to that tug as the hook was set. Then there was a shriek of torn wood and the huge cleat that had anchored the line was jerked free. The cleat vanished over the side. The lashed-together line of barrels that followed took out a section of the ship's rail in their passage into the sea. The empty barrels popped under the water as if made of stone rather than wood. As the ship righted itself, there was a general rush of men towards the railing. All scanned the dark sea for some sign of the vanished serpent. Men were poised, silent and motionless, looking and listening. A soft-voiced hunter spoke into the silence. “He can't stay under forever. Not with all those barrels tied to that hook-and-chain. ”
Privately, Althea wondered. What could they really know of what a serpent could or could not do? Might those scissoring teeth be capable of severing the chain leader that bound the meat to the roped together kegs? Perhaps the serpent was so powerful, it could take the kegs to the bottom with it and not even feel the strain.
As if in answer to her thought, there was a sudden shout from the other side of the ship. “There! See them, they just bobbed up! Look at them go! And she's down again!”
“So now it's a she,” Althea muttered to herself.
She started to cross the deck but was stopped by the mate's yell. “All of you, quit your gawking. While the damn thing is busy, let's get out of here. ”
“You're not going to run it down and kill it?” One of the hunters demanded in astonishment. “You don't want to be the first ship to bring a serpent's head and hide back to port? A man could drink for a year on even the telling of such a story!”
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“I want to live to get to port,” the mate replied sourly. “Let's get some canvas on!”
“Cap'n?” the hunter protested.
Captain Sichel stared out to where they had last seen the serpent. His whole body was tense with hatred, and Althea guessed that he longed to pursue it with the same mindless tenacity as a hound on a scent. She stood still and silent, scarcely breathing, as she thought to herself, no, no, no, no, no.
Just as the hunters started to talk cheerfully amongst themselves about harpoons and boats and partners, the captain shook himself as if awakening from a dream. “No,” he said quietly, regretfully. And then, “No,” more firmly and loudly. “It would be a stupid risk. We've got a full hold of cargo to deliver. We won't risk it. Besides. I've heard some say a mere touch of a serpent's skin will numb a man's muscles and drag him down to death. Let the hell-spawn go. That wad of sea-bear meat hooked in its gorge will kill it, most like. If it comes back, why, then we'll fight it with everything we've got. But for now, let's get out of here. Let it drag those kegs down to the bottom with it, for all I care. ”
Althea would have expected the men to spring to such a command, but they went reluctantly, with many a glance at the black patch of sea where the serpent had last sounded. The hunters manifested their anger and frustration openly. Some threw down their bows with a clatter, while others meaningfully kept their arrows drawn as they scanned the night sea with narrowed eyes. If the serpent showed again, they'd feather it. As Althea hauled herself up into the rigging, she prayed it would stay away. At the farthest edge of the world, the sun was clambering up out of the ocean's depths. She could see a shimmer of gray where it would soon burst free. As illogical as it was, she almost believed that if the sun managed to rise before the serpent returned, they would all survive. Something in her instinctively longed for light and day to put an end to this long nightmare.
Beside the ship, the serpent suddenly rose like a log turned on end by a whirlpool. The creature shot up, shaking its head wildly, its jaws gaping wide as it sought to dislodge the hook. As it whipped its maned head frantically, sm
all gobs of bloody mucus flew wildly from its maw. Tiny flecks of stinging slime pattered against the canvas. One struck Althea's cheek and burned. She cried out wordlessly and wiped it away with a sleeve. A terrifying numbness spread out from the burn. Other cries from other sailors let her know she was not the only one hit. She clung where she was and tried to be calm. Would the stuff kill her?
On the deck below, the hunters whooped triumphantly and rushed to the side of the ship where the serpent stood on its tail and tried to free itself from the barbed bait it had swallowed. The chain rattled against its teeth and the kegs bobbed on the water nearby. Arrows sang and harpoons were flung. Some fell short or went wide of their target, but a handful found their mark. The serpent trumpeted its agony as it fell back into the water. It was a shrill sound, more akin to the scream of a woman than the roar of a bull. It dived again, for the kegs vanished like popping bubbles.
Above Althea, a man cried out more loudly, a loose, wordless sound. He fell, his body striking a spar near her. He teetered a moment, and Althea caught the sleeve of his shirt. But his body overbalanced and the sleeve tattered free in her grip. She heard him strike the deck far below. She was left gazing stupidly at the rotted cloth that she clutched. The serpent's slime had eaten through the heavy cotton fabric like moths through woven wool.
She wondered what it was doing to her face. A graver thought than that came to her, and she cried out, “The serpent's slime is eating our canvas!”
Other cries confirmed her. Another man, hands burned and numbed, was clutched by his comrades as they awkwardly worked him down to the deck. His head lolled on his shoulders, and his mouth and nose both leaked fluid. Althea did not think he was completely aware any more. It was a terrible sight, but more terrible were the small rips that were appearing in the canvas. As the wind pressed on the sail, the fabric first holed and then began to split. The captain watched with a wary eye, measuring the speed the ship was managing to hold against how long it would take to drag up the spare sails and set them. His plan seemed to be to get as far as he could from the serpent grounds before he paused to replace canvas. Althea agreed with it.
