Alt Mer rocked back on his heels and stared at the shipwright as if he were speaking in a foreign language. “All of them?”
“They were all in one crate. The crate fell out through a hole ripped in the hull.” Spanner Frew reached up to touch the gash in his forehead, flinching as he did so. “As if I needed another headache.”
“Can we fly with what we have?”
The shipwright shook his head. “We’re down to three. We lost the port fore tube and everything with it on landing. What’s left might let us fly in calm weather, but it won’t get us off the ground. If we try it, we’ll just go over the side and into the trees with the crystals.”
He sighed. “The thing of it is, we came through this all right otherwise. We’ve got the timbers to repair the hole in the hull. We’ve got spare draws and fastenings. We’ve got plenty of sail. Even the spars and mast can be fixed with a little time and effort. But we can’t go anywhere without those crystals.” He rubbed his beard. “How’s Little Red?”
Redden Alt Mer looked down at his sister. She was still unconscious. He had let her sleep while he worked on her injuries, but he thought he’d wake her soon in case she had suffered a concussion. He needed to know, as well, if there was damage inside that he couldn’t see.
“She’ll be all right,” he said with a reassuring smile. He wasn’t sure at all, but there was no point in worrying Black Beard unnecessarily. He had enough to concern him. “Who went over the side?”
“Jahnon Pakabbon.”
Big Red grimaced. A good man. But they were all good men, which is why they had been chosen for the voyage. There wasn’t a one he could bear to lose, let alone afford to. He had known Jahnon since they were children. The quiet, even-tempered Rover had a gift for innovation in addition to his sailing skills.
“All right.” He forced himself to quit thinking about it, to concentrate on the problem at hand. “We have to go down there and bring him out. We’ll look for the crystals when we do. Choose two men to go with me—and make sure you’re not one of them. I need you to work on the repairs. We don’t want to be stranded here any longer than necessary. Those airships with their Mwellrets and walking dead will come looking for us soon enough. I don’t intend to be around when they do.”
Spanner Frew grunted, stood up, and went back down the pilot box steps. The Jerle Shannara was canted to port at a twenty-degree angle perhaps a hundred yards from the precipice, the curved horn of her starboard pontoon lodged in a cluster of boulders. She wasn’t in much danger of sliding over the edge, but she was fully exposed to anything flying overhead. Behind her, running back for perhaps another hundred yards, a forested shelf jutted from the cliff face of the mountain on which they had settled. They were lucky to be alive after such a crash, lucky not to have fallen all the way into the jungle below, from which extraction would have been impossible. That the Jerle Shannara had not broken into a million pieces was a testament to her construction and design. Say what you would about Spanner Frew, he knew how to build an airship.
Nevertheless, they were trapped, lacking sufficient diapson crystals to lift off, short one more crew member, and completely lost in a strange land. Big Red was normally optimistic about tough situations, but in this particular instance he didn’t much care for their chances.
He glanced skyward, where clouds and mist hung like a curtain across the horizon, hiding what lay farther out in all directions. Nothing was visible but the emerald canopy of the jungle and the tips of a few nearby peaks, leaving him with the unpleasant feeling of being trapped on a rocky island, suspended between gray mist and green sea.
“Spanner!” he yelled suddenly. The burly shipwright trudged back over to stand below the box and looked up at him. “Cut some rolling logs, rig a block and tackle, and let’s try to move the ship back into those trees. I don’t like being out in the open like this.”
The big man turned away without a word and disappeared over the side of the ship. Big Red could hear him yelling anew at the crewmen, laying into them with his shipyard vocabulary. He listened a moment and shook his head. He missed Hawk, who was always a step ahead in knowing what needed to be done. But Black Beard was capable enough, if a bit irksome. Give him some direction and he would get the job done.
Redden Alt Mer turned his attention to his sister. He bent down and gave her a gentle shake. She groaned and turned her head away, then drifted off. He shook her once more, a little more firmly this time. “Rue, wake up.”
Her eyes blinked open, and she stared at him. For a moment, she didn’t say anything. Then she sighed wearily. “I’ve been through this before—come back from the edge and found you waiting. Like a dream. Still alive, are we?”
He nodded. “Though one of us is a little worse for wear.”
She glanced down at herself, taking in the bandages wrapped about her torso and leg where the clothing had been cut away, seeing the splint on her arm. “How bad am I?”
“You won’t be flying off to rescue anyone for a while. You broke your arm and several ribs. You ripped open the knife wounds on your thigh and side. You banged yourself up pretty good, all without the help of a single Mwellret.”
She started to giggle, then grimaced. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts too much.” She lifted her head and glanced around, taking in as much as she could, then lay back. “We don’t seem to be flying, so I guess I didn’t dream that we crashed. Are we all in one piece?”
“More or less. There’s damage, but it can be repaired. The problem now is that we can’t fly. We lost all our spare diapson crystals through a break in the hull. I have to take a search party down into the valley and find them before we can get out of here.” He shrugged. “Thank your lucky stars it wasn’t worse.”
“I’m busy thanking them that I’m still alive. That any of us are, for that matter.” She licked her lips. “Got anything to drink that doesn’t come from a stream?”
He brought her an aleskin, holding it up for her as she took deep swallows. “You hurt anywhere I can’t see?” he asked when she was done. “A little honesty here wouldn’t hurt, by the way.”
She shook her head. “Nothing you haven’t already taken care of.” She wiped her lips and sighed deeply. “Good. But I’m really tired.”
“Then you’d better sleep.” He arranged the torn bit of sail he had folded under her head for a pillow and tucked in the ragged folds of her great cloak about her arms and legs. “I’ll let you know when something happens.”
Her eyes closed at once, which was what he had expected, given the strength of the sleeping potion he had dropped into her drink. He took the aleskin and tucked it away in a storage bin to one side of the control panel, out of sight but ready to use if he needed it again. But she wouldn’t wake for twelve hours or better, if he’d measured the dosage right. He looked down at her, his little sister, tough as nails and so anxious to demonstrate it she would have insisted on getting up if he hadn’t drugged her. She confused him sometimes, the way she was always trying to prove herself, as if she hadn’t already done so a dozen times over. But better to be like that, he supposed, than to be content with the way things were. His sister set the standard, and she was always looking to improve on it. He could wish for more like her, but he wouldn’t find them no matter how hard he looked. There was only one Little Red.
He yawned, thought he wouldn’t mind a little sleep himself, then walked over to the ship’s railing and looked down at Spanner Frew and the others as they placed the rolling logs under the pontoons. The block and tackle was already in place, strapped to a huge old oak fifty yards back with the rope ends clipped to iron pull rings that had been screwed into the aft horns just above the waterline.