The sea looked unflurried, but there were certainly the gulls. More and more of them, mute at that distance.
Though Ryan watched carefully for three or four minutes, until his eye began to water and his vision blurred, nothing more seemed to be happening and he eventually lowered the telescope again and returned to his musings.
In the past year he and his friends had traveled thousands of miles. Many had gone, most chilled in sudden, shocking ways, their lives snuffed out in the blinking of an eye.
Ryan made a tentative attempt to count the number of people he'd called friends who'd gone to buy the farm. Names trickled past his mind like a jerky parade of stone-faced corpses. He counted to fifty without even having to pause. Another twenty faces came to him, and he had the certain knowledge that another forty or fifty acquaintances waited, gibbering, in the black wings of his memory.
There was the killing cloud in the Darks.
The Russians who had tried to invade and been driven back. The snow and the cascading flood of choking ice.
The mud and the heat when he'd first met the young killer with the hair like snow and eyes like molten rubies.
Triple-crazies, gibbering a thousand feet below a lake, surrounded by all the laboratory trivia of a new genocide.
The return down the twisted lanes of the past, to confront the old nightmares. And the trip past the ruins of...
"Aloft! Anything?.. Aloft, there! What dost thou see?"
"No!" Ryan called, cupping his hands to his mouth, taking the greatest care to keep the telescope safely tucked beneath his arm.
"Keep thine eyes skinned or I'll have thy backbone!" Second Mate Walsh screamed.
Ryan took up the glass, ready to look once more across the pitching acres of glittering water.
But part of his mind wandered away to Krysty Wroth, wondering if she still lived, thinking back to their many conversations on what future they desired. She hoped for safety and stability. Ryan looked for a perfection that he hadn't found yet. And might never find.
Time, to Ryan Cawdor, swinging effortlessly between heaven and the deep, cold sea, had ceased to have any meaning. He knew that when enough minutes had ticked by on the ship's chron, then someone would climb up the rigging and relieve him of the lookout's task. But until then, there was no hurry.
It was pleasant to have, for once, leisure without any responsibility. There was nothing he could do, for the time being, to extricate himself from the danger of his position. There was a rare opportunity to think about his past, and even wonder a little about his future. If there was to be one.
Ryan thought back to the many places in the Deathlands that he'd passed through. So many of them seeming the same bleak pestholes.
One of Trader's favorite sayings came back to him at that moment. "One handful of ashes looks just like any other handful of ashes."
His eye was caught by a flurry of white spray ahead of the ship, on the starboard side. Ryan didn't need the telescope to recognize what was happening, though he'd never seen it before in his life.
"There she blows!" he shouted. "There! There she blows!"
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was madness. The most terrifying, leaping, heart-stopping madness that Ryan had ever known. He was soaked to the skin within seconds, hands blistered from the heavy oars, muscles in his shoulders cracking with the effort of pulling. His hair was flattened to his skull, and he gritted his teeth as the frail boat bounded over the long Lantic rollers in pursuit of the broaching whale that he'd sighted.
How long ago?
Eternities hurtled by, like grains of sand. But his common sense told Ryan that barely twenty minutes could have elapsed. He'd been ordered down immediately from the masthead, to be replaced as look-out by one of the Oriental cooks. He was needed in the lead whaleboat, skippered by Cyrus Ogg, with its ironsman, Donfil More, crouched in the bow.
The long, narrow boat had been lowered hastily into the sea alongside the Salvation, now running under a skeleton crew, most of her men eager to row after their prey.
Pyra Quadde had raged the decks like a woman possessed of demons, lashing out with her stick at any sailor unlucky enough to run within range. Froth clung to her fleshy lips, and her eyes rolled bloodshot in their sockets.
"Now we see him, ye shiftless lazy sons of gaudy whores! Get to the boats and after him. Row and row, cullies. Jack in plenty for a good hunt and a clean kill. No food for a week if he slips away from ye!"
"Naught but ears and arms, my brave lads," said Cyrus Ogg, encouraging the five men to pull for their lives toward the patch of disturbed, misty water where the whale had last been sighted. "Pull and pull and pull again. That's the word for the silver mug of fine oil and a rich lay for us all. Pull and pull and pull yet more."
Ryan had never traveled in such a bizarre way before — with his back to where they were going, unable to see what was happening. Only Donfil in the triangular bow section and Ogg at the tiller in the stern could judge what should be done.
Walsh in the second whaleboat and a grizzled veteran named Piper Fairman in the third were only a dozen yards behind them. Ryan had heard that Captain Quadde sometimes took an iron herself if a whole school of whales was spotted. But here, with only a single beast marked down for the hunt, she was content to remain on board the Salvationand shadow the trio of small dories.
Because of the height of the long ocean waves, it was often impossible for the oarsmen to even glimpse the Salvation. Most of the time Ryan could see the three masts, and occasionally the whole white and black hull. The lookout at the top of the mainmast was still pointing dead ahead of them, to where Ryan figured he could see the birds waiting for the reappearance of the monster.
"Steady and together, my stout boys, with an in and an out, an in and an out. Any roan stops rowing, and he'll be tied to the grating and I'll flog the skin from his back. Next I'll flog the muscles and flesh away from his back. Then the gleaming ivory of his spine shall feel the kiss of the metal-tipped lash. I'll whip that man so hard his liver and lights'll be shredded and flensed and pulverized and torn so that they can be served over the side as bait for the sharks."
The world was shrinking around Ryan. Though there were few men fitter in all of the Deathlands, the endless heaving at the clumsy oar, sometimes deep in the water and sometimes kicking the empty air, was taking its toll on him. He fought for breath, feeling soreness across the tops of his thighs from the pressure and the movement against the seat.
"I'll press thine eyes inand then outof thy skull and drive a white-hot awl inand then outof thine ears and hammer hook-end nails inand then outof thy nostrils." Each repetition of "in" and "out" was accompanied by a barely audible change in the pitch of the mate's voice.
"She blows!" Donfil yelled from the bow.
Ryan wasn't able to stop himself from turning on the planking seat, seeing the most amazing sight, catching the scent of old, old earth, ripped from the belly of the Lantic.
It was as though someone had thrown up a great wall of wrinkled, blue-gray stone across their course. Rearing it, dripping and gleaming, streaked with shards of green weed, unimaginably huge.
"Turn thy face to me, outlander, and bend thy back. Or we all perish."
Cyrus Ogg nodded at him like a friendly schoolmaster, mentioning some tiny error in his tables of multiplication.