“The masts!” someone yelled. “They’re going to go! Get down! Get down!”
But the masts held firm, certain though it seemed that they would be jumped from their sockets and thrown into the sea. Their desperate vibrations shook the entire ship. Lawler found himself clinging to someone—Pilya, it was—and when Lis Niklaus came scudding down the deck at the mercy of the wind they both caught hold of her and reeled her in like a hooked fish. At any moment Lawler expected a deluge of rain to begin, and it bothered him that in all this frenzy of wind they would have no chance to put out any containers to catch the good sweet fresh water in. But the winds remained dry, dry and crackling. Once he looked out over the rail and by the light of the sea-foam he saw the ocean full of little glinting staring eyes. Fantasy? Hallucination? He didn’t think so. Drakken-heads, they were: an army of the things, a legion of them, long evil-looking snouts sticking up everywhere. A myriad of sharp teeth waiting for the moment when the Queen of Hydros capsized and its thirteen occupants went pitching into the water.
The gale blew and blew and blew, but the ship held and held and held. They lost all track of time. There was no night; there was no day; there was only the wind. Onyos Felk calculated later that it had been a three-day blow: perhaps he was right. It all came to an end as swiftly as it started, the black winds transforming themselves into a clear bright force that gleamed and cut like a knife; and then, as though some cue had been given, the storm dropped away in a moment and calmness returned with an impact much like a crash.
Stunned, Lawler moved slowly across the soaking deck in the strange new quietness. The deck was littered with torn bits of algae, clumps of jellyfish, angry flopping things, all sorts of marine detritus that the surging waves had thrown up. His hands ached where new rope-burns had awakened the pain the net-thing had inflicted. Silently Lawler took inventory: there was Pilya, there was Gharkid, there was Father Quillan, there was Delagard. Tharp, Golghoz, Felk, Niklaus. Martello? Yes, up above. Dann Henders? Yes.
Sundira?
He didn’t see her. Then he did, and wished he hadn’t: she was up near the forecastle, wet through and through, her clothes clinging to her skin so that she might just as well not have been wearing any, and Kinverson was with her. They were examining some creature of the deeps that he had found and was holding up to her, a sea-serpent of sorts, a long drooping comical thing with a wide but somehow harmless-seeming mouth and rows of circular green spots running down its flabby yellow body to give it a clownish look. They were laughing; Kinverson shook the thing at her, practically thrusting it into her face, and she howled with laughter and waved it away. Kinverson dangled it from its tail and watched its pathetic wrigglings; Sundira ran her hand along its sleek length, as though petting it, consoling it for its indignities; and then he flipped it back into the sea. He slipped his arm across her shoulders and they moved on out of sight.
How easy they were with each other. How casual, how playful, how disturbingly intimate.
Lawler turned away. Delagard was coming down the deck toward him.
“You seen Dag?” he called out.
Lawler pointed. “Right over there.” The radioman sat crumpled like a pile of rags against the starboard rail, shaking his head as though unable to believe that he had survived.
Delagard wiped strands of sopping hair out of his eyes and looked around. “Dag! Dag! Get on that fucking horn of yours, fast! We’ve lost the whole goddamned fleet!”
Lawler, aghast, swung about to stare at the eerily calm water. Delagard was right. Not one of the other ships was in view. The Queen of Hydros was all alone in the water.
“You think they sank?” he asked the ship-owner.
“Let’s just pray,” Delagard said.
But the ships weren’t lost at all. They were simply out of view. One by one they made radio contact with the flagship as Tharp tuned them in. The storm had casually scattered them like flimsy straws, carrying them this way and that over a great stretch of the sea; but they were all there. The Queen of Hydros held its position and the others homed in on it. By nightfall the entire fleet was reunited. Delagard ordered brandy broken out to celebrate their survival, the last of Gospo Struvin’s Khuviar stock. Father Quillan, standing on the bridge, led them in a brief prayer of thanksgiving. Even Lawler found himself uttering a few quick, thankful words, a little to his own surprise.
6
Whatever existed between Kinverson and Sundira didn’t seem to preclude whatever was coming into existence between Sundira and Lawler. Lawler was unable to understand either relationship, Sundira’s and Kinverson’s or his own and Sundira’s; but he was wise enough in this sort of thing to know that the surest way to kill it was to try to understand it. He would simply have to take what came.
One thing quickly became clear. Kinverson didn’t care that Sundira had taken up with Lawler. He seemed indifferent to matters of sexual possessiveness. Sex was like breathing to him, so it appeared: he did it without thinking about it. With anyone handy, as often as his body called for it, purely a natural function, automatic, mechanical. And he expected other people to look upon it the same way.
When Kinverson cut his arm and came to Lawler to have it cleaned and bandaged, he said, while Lawler was working on him, “So you’re fucking Sundira now too, doc?”
Lawler pulled the bandage tight.
“I don’t see why I need to answer that. It’s none of your business.”
“Right. Well, of course you’re fucking her. She’s a fine woman. Too smart for me, but I don’t mind that. And I don’t mind what you do with her either.”
“Very kind of you,” Lawler said.
“Of course I hope it works the same the other way.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It means there might be something left between Sundira and me,” said Kinverson. “I hope you realize that.”
Lawler gave him a long clear-eyed stare. “She’s a grown woman. She can do whatever she wants with whoever she wants, whenever.”
“Good. It’s a small place, a ship. We wouldn’t want any fuss here over a woman.”
In rising irritation Lawler said, “You do what you do, and I’ll do what I do, and let’s not talk about it any more. You make her sound like a piece of equipment we both want to use.”
“Yeah,” said Kinverson. “Damned fine equipment.”
One day not long afterward Lawler wandered into the galley and found Kinverson with Lis Niklaus, the two of them giggling and groping and grappling and growling like Gillies in rut. Lis gave him a quick wink and a raucous chuckle over Kinverson’s shoulder. “Hi, there, doc!” she called, sounding very drunk. Lawler looked back at her, startled, and went quickly out.
The galley was very far from being a private place: obviously Kinverson wasn’t much concerned about taking precautions against Sundira’s discovering—or Delagard, for that matter—that he had something running with Lis on the side. At least Kinverson was consistent, Lawler thought. He didn’t care. About anything. About anyone.
Several times in the week following the windstorm Lawler and Sundira found the opportunity for a rendezvous in the cargo hold. His body, its fires so long dormant, was quickly relearning the meaning of passion. But there was nothing like passion coming from her, so far as Lawler could see, unless swift, efficient, enthusiastic but almost impersonal physical pleasure qualified as passion. Lawler didn’t think so. He might have when he was younger, but not now.
They never said anything to each other while they were making love, and when they lay together afterward, returning from it, they seemed by common treaty to limit their conversation to the lightest of chatter. The new rules were established very quickly. Lawler took his cues from her, as he had from the start: she was obviously enjoying what was going on between them, and just as obviously she had no wish for any heavier transaction. Whenever Lawler encountered her on deck they spoke in the same inconsequential way, now. “Nice weather,” they would say. Or, “What a strange colour the sea is here.”