As they brought the ship around to the south-west, the first shower swept over them. With that and the spray coming inboard from the rougher sea, men had to be set to bailing regularly. It kept the men with the scoops warm, and, Ballista thought, it gave the whole crew the impression they were more than passengers being delivered helpless to their fate. Wyrd will often spare an undoomed man, if his courage is good.
They ran the whole day, angling first towards the shore then standing out again. The coastline here was flat, remarkably featureless, with little offer of refuge. It would be difficult to beach. There were frequent sandbanks offshore, the surf breaking on them. The beaches themselves were often studded with jagged, half-submerged tree stumps and drift wrack, which might tear the bottom out of a boat. They did pass inlets. Only dire emergency would force them to turn into one. The lack of landmarks meant they were unsure how far they had travelled. But they had left behind the known shoreline of the Rugii. Any channel might be nothing more than a dead end. They were a long way yet from the territory of the Farodini, who were allies of the Himlings. This inhospitable coast was held by the Heathobards, and they were friends to neither Angles nor Rugii.
Wada was getting the best out of the Warig. She was a weatherly craft. Clinker-built, her lashed planks flexed and creaked, but she was not taking much water and sailed taut and responsive to the helm. Through the drizzle, the Brondings did not seem to have narrowed the distance. Ballista took turns at the stern-rudder and at bailing. The steering gave Wada a chance to check the rigging, bolt some cold food and snatch a little rest. Their commander bailing was intended to hearten the men.
In the gloom, night succeeded day with no great show. In the first hours the rain blew over, but the wind did not slacken. Weary, cold and soaked to the skin, they raced on over a silver sea, the shore black to larboard, the sky between the tattered clouds a strange, threatening yellow. In the glinting light among the rushing shadows the dark shapes of the Brondings could still be seen.
In the dead of night, when the moon and stars were obscured, Ballista was bailing. He filled the scoop, handed it up to Maximus, who threw the contents to the wind, handed it back down, and Ballista filled the scoop again. Over and over: the repetition numbed the mind. The screws and pumps of Mediterranean vessels were equally monotonous and hard work. But you did not have to crouch, were not actually in the water. They should not be hard to fit on a northern longboat. Ballista came out of his daze. The water was slopping around his boots. It was gaining. Telling Tarchon to take over bailing, he got to his knees. The water was cold on his legs. In the darkness, he ran his hands under the surface along the bilges. The wood seemed sound. As he worked along, he found no cracks, no holes. Perhaps it was nothing.
The Warig came down the leading edge of a wave, bottomed out in the trough. A jet of water hit Ballista’s forearm. Carefully, not wanting to trap a finger, he felt the overlaps between the side planks. He found the wadding. A clump of it came out in his fingers. The material was still sticky, but it came apart in his hands. Whatever it had been treated with was being washed out by the seawater. As the ship flexed more water squirted through.
They bailed in shifts. There were only three scoops. The others bailed with their helmets, bowls, whatever would hold water. Some mutton fat was produced from the supplies. Rikiar and Heliodorus rubbed it into torn-up strips of clothing. Down below the waterline, working by touch, Ballista and the Rugian pilot packed it into the overlaps where the water seemed to be coming in worst. They hammered it home as best they could with wooden mallets. It was cold, filthy work. Time and again Ballista swore as the mallet caught his numbed fingers. After an hour or so, the water stopped rising, even fell. But there could be no stopping the bailing.
In the dawn, they were about half a mile offshore. The gods had not been kind. The Brondings were still there. They were closer, much less than a mile astern. The sun played on the water between. But behind them a great curtain of lurid purple-black cloud stretched across the eastern horizon. Lightning flickered in its heart.
‘This will be bad,’ Wada said. The evident profundity of the oncoming danger banished all fatigue. The crew leapt to lower the yard halfway down the mast. Wada had them brail up the sail so that there was only enough showing to keep steerageway. Back on the benches, the men feverishly tied their oars to the thole pins ready to be run out. Eight men were kept bailing.
With terrible speed the Brondings disappeared behind the outlying squalls.
The noise of the wind in the rigging rose to near a scream. The sun vanished.
A gust of spattering rain, then the storm was on them. It smashed the stern of the Warig to the right. She heeled, her starboard gunwales in the water. Men crashed from their benches. Wada was fighting the helm. Ballista scrambled across the sloping deck to help. The Warig was near side on to the sea, a tall wave bearing down. Ballista threw his weight on the steering oar. Agonizingly slowly, she began to come around, get her stern to the storm.
The wave towered over them, green and immense. The Warig shifted, heeled even further. Somehow, she did not tip but climbed crabwise up the wave. At the crest, she twisted, righted herself and slid down the far side.
The following wave was looming. Ballista and Wada strained. Her prow began to turn. The wave kicked in under her stern, throwing it high. Her bows lost in white water, again slantwise she rose up the awful incline.
A crack of wood, loud even in the uproar. The steering oar suddenly limp in Ballista’s hands. A moment of blank incomprehension.
‘Out oars!’ Wada was bellowing.
The steering oar had broken just below the handle.
‘Row! Larboard side, row hard. Starboard steady. Bring her round.’ Wada’s voice carried.
Ballista scuttled across the moving deck, grabbed an unused oar, hauled it back. Together with Wada, he shoved it over the side. The force of the water near tore it from their hands. The impromptu stern-rudder was far from effective, flimsy and likely to break any moment, but it was something to help control the ship.
‘Keep her stern to the waves.’
The rowers needed no urging. They bent their backs to the fraught task. The makeshift rudder groaned ominously. The wooden idol on the prow crept around to the west. The next wave hit, but now the Warig lifted as it drove almost square under her stern.
Ballista yelled to Maximus to lash two oars together to make a better rudder to steer them to shore.
‘It will break,’ Wada shouted in his ear.
‘If we just run — the men cannot row and bail — she will waterlog and go down,’ Ballista shouted back.
The rain fell hard now. Lightning hissed and threw fleeting hard-edged illumination.
Maximus and the Rugian lugged the ungainly thing they had created to the stern. They lashed it to a thole pin.
‘Rowers ready to turn to larboard. On command, starboard side full pressure, larboard easy.’
Ballista and Wada ran out the slender, inadequate-looking double oar.
‘Now.’
In the maelstrom, some blades missed the surface, others dug far too deep. One snapped altogether, flinging its rower down. Ballista and Wada braced the lashed-together oars. They kicked and struggled in their hands. Water streamed through the boat. The air was full of it. Yet little by little their head came around and they pushed across the storm.
Ballista realized he was praying. Ran, do not take me with your drowning net; spare me the cold embrace of your nine daughters.
‘Breakers!’