Captain's Sacrifice

by Meghann McVey

had. The third, however, greeted them with a rain of harpoons. Chatir managed to duck behind the leviathan, whose thick hide easily deflected the cruel darts. Behind them, cannonfire boomed, louder than it had ever been below the surface. Wind rushed past, the invisible fist of an angry god. “They’re aiming for us!” Chatir yelled over the din. Though every instinct screamed for her to leap for the safety of the water, she clung to the shreds and tatters of her courage.

  “Hang on!” The leviathan ducked beneath the waves.

  Salt water stung Chatir’s eyes, burned in her human lungs. With fumbling fingers, she wrenched the sunshell from her neck.

  “I apologize,” the leviathan started to say.

  Above, an explosion shattered the night into orange shards and hissing steam.

  “They were quite close.” The leviathan continued its descent into the deep.

  “Understood. You did right,” Chatir said. Without a doubt, the leviathan had saved her life.

  “The time has come,” the leviathan said. “We must attack the big ship. The humans realize now that I am your greatest asset. They will target me until I die.”

  “But!” Chatir’s heart fought the idea as fiercely as it once had Assan’s indifference. “The ship is many times your size!” She twisted her pearls of far-seeing. Long ago, merfolk had used them to see over time, as well as distance. How useful that would prove now!

  “Life and death are meaningless to me,” the leviathan declared. “Should the ship destroy me, I will resurrect in the Rift. It has been so since the hazy dawn of my long memories. But it is not my welfare that concerns you, is it?”

  “No,” Chatir said in a small voice. The leviathan’s intimate understanding of her intentions made her feel utterly exposed. “If you return to the Rift, I won’t be able to summon you again,” Chatir said. But that was not it, either. Again, Chatir saw how she had fooled herself. For all her talk of honorable death, she yet clung to life. Slowly she relinquished her hopes that any in Zurolind would hear first-hand stories of this battle.

  The narrative the Brigades and civilians pieced together when they returned would have to be enough.

  “I understand. It is the only way.” As Chatir voiced her acceptance, the darkness seemed to deepen. Sightless, she found herself aware in an entirely new way of the sunshell’s smooth edges and slight weight in her hand. “Let’s go.”

  “It shall be.” With that, the leviathan increased its speed, so that Chatir nearly lost her seat. She hurried to tighten her free arm around the sea serpent’s neck. The other, she frantically wrapped around her pearls and the sunshell.

  They emerged from the water so quickly, the leviathan actually became airborne. Cymbals clashed in Chatir’s head as the surface air inundated her, and she barely had time to throw on the sunshell.

  From this height, it would have been a great advantage to survey the battle through the pearls of far-seeing. However, there was no time. Chatir just glimpsed the large ship below before it rushed up to meet them. On deck, humans screamed and scurried. Some stood their ground and shouted orders. The cannons belched fire and smoke.

  The leviathan twisted in mid-air. Although it dodged several cannonballs, they kept coming. Ten feet above the ship, the first cannonball struck the sea serpent full in the chest. Diamond and sea-green scales clattered to the deck. The leviathan twisted in pain; its pounce changed to a plummet.

  Chatir started to leap free just as another cannonball struck the leviathan. She smacked her head on the rails at the ship’s edge and landed ondeck. For several minutes, she lay senseless. When Chatir finally opened her eyes, she found a strange scene before her.

  A crowd of sailors and soldiers had formed, with weapons bared. Despite what must have been grevious wounds, the levithan still loomed tall above them, an ancient god surrounded by puny mortals. The boards where it had landed were splintered and broken. With thrashing tail and teeth deadlier than one hundred of their swords, the leviathan continued to raze the ship.

  “Stop that creature!” a black-bearded man trumpeted.

  No one moved.

  “Do the soldiers of Joadon have dead eels for their manhood?” the same man challenged the crew.

  Several men rushed at the leviathan with desperate cries, only to break their weapons on its scales. Two pulled back, chagrined, while the third was flung overboard.

  Over the shouts and vows of vengeance, the thin notes of a whistle rose, silencing them all.

  “Trouble on the Q deck!” The black-bearded man pointed at several of his men. “You see if some additional cannonballs can’t kill this monster. The rest of you, come with me. Though I wonder if I’d fare the same in my own company.”

  “You kill the damn beast, then,” someone muttered.

  Chatir dropped back to the ground, watching with lidded eyes as the humans tramped past. She waited until the sailors were wrestling with the cannons so they could fire on-deck, then came closer to the leviathan.

  She had not expected a few mere scratches. Nonetheless, she gasped at the sight of the gore-splashed mast – who knew how many cannonballs had exploded against the immense creature? The cannonfire had gouged a hole in the leviathan’s chest. The proud spines that rose, crown-like, from its head, were broken off, and its jaw was bent at a grotesque angle. Blood filled the air with a metallic scent like the heaped coins of Laselan. And still, the leviathan lived.

  Chatir wept for its pain. From across the deck, the leviathan’s gaze settled on her. To her grief, its eye, once so clear and vibrant, was growing dim.

  “Our time nears, Captain.”

  “No,” Chatir whispered. “No,” she said more firmly. “I will stay until my duty is done.”

  The leviathan made a hoarse hacking sound Chatir took for a cough. “I believe you shall, Captain Chatir. Your will is strong.” Again the hacking. “I daresay, you are the most stubborn mortal ever to summon me.” The sea serpent was laughing at her. Laughing! “Go,” it commanded her. “Your comrades – some of them -- must still live.”

  “The trouble on the Q deck,” Chatir breathed, suddenly heady with the realization.

  “Yes.” The leviathan managed a small nod. “I will use my last strength against this ship.”

  “Thank you, my friend,” Chatir whispered.

  “I will see you in the Rift soon, Captain.”

  Chatir swallowed hard. Was that where she would go when… She forced the thoughts from her mind.

  Chatir slipped away to a quiet part of the deck to survey the battle. Her pearls of far-seeing showed the Brigades’ work. Two ships smoldered in the night. Fire. How many times Assan had speculated about it. The last ship had drifted away from the company. Chatir saw no living beings on its dark deck.

  The mersoldiers had destroyed four small ships, but this one, the biggest, could still reduce Zurolind to memories and rubble. Chatir swept her gaze down the endless decks. Somewhere in this labyrinth of salt-seasoned wood lay the Q deck, site of the deciding battle.

  When she found it, Chatir set off at an awkward, stumbling run, cursing her cumbersome legs. The sounds of battle became louder: steel on steel on wood; shouts, whimpers and screams, the endless hammer of feet on the wooden deck.

  The fray itself took on an almost-surreal quality. Bodies and blood did not float free; they fell, always down to the deck. Sweat ran down Chatir’s face and sides, bringing with it a flavor of salt. Her muscles ached as they never had, even in her most strenuous days of training below the surface. Her breath came faster and faster; as she tried to catch it, Chatir thought she understood the origin of human greed. Underwater she had never faced such a struggle for such a simple thing.

  The battle soon brought Chatir to Assan. He was engaged with a woman, one of the few Chatir had seen that night. Her grand jeweled armor shone with gems and precious metal, vibrant against her night-dark hair. Her skin was brown like Castle Zurolind’s bricks.

  Assan, Chatir knew right away, was in trouble. Close
-range fighting had never been his strength, but the greenest mersoldier would have blocked the hits he had just missed. Perhaps the human woman had ensorcelled him, or poisoned him. Chatir had just decided to dash into the fray as the human woman disarmed him.

  “Meyroth,” Assan was saying as he backed away with his hands held before him. “Meyroth, please!”

  A lover’s quarrel. Had they been underwater, Chatir reflected, electric sparks would have leaped from Meyroth’s eyes.

  Chatir’s rush caught Meyroth off-guard, allowing her to slash the human’s leg. As Chatir turned back to her opponent, raising the geluvial in a challenge, she imagined they were equally repulsed by one another, green hair and black, green eyes and black.

  Unlike Chatir’s sword, the human woman’s did not curve like the ocean waves, but was rigid and straight. She wielded it with more speed than guile and strength. Together, Chatir and Assan might have subdued her. As it was, Chatir fought alone, weary from the prior fights.

  “Assan!” Meyroth rasped. “We might have been king and queen over everything with Laselan’s treasure! Damned fool!”

  Ocean-born geluvial rang against Meyroth’s air and fire-forged blade. Chatir stumbled over her unfamiliar human feet; they were as heavy as heartache. She feared her strength would give out before the battle ended. Still she fought on. She could only block Meyroth’s impassioned blows, seizing no advantage for herself.

  “Assan!” Chatir cried