“I think you’re a dumb prick. But you can give me a longitude, at least. Look at the fucking Cross.”
“I see the fucking Cross,” Felk said acidly. “It tells me that we’re south of the equator and a lot farther west than we were when the Wave got us. You want better than that, let me go below and try to find my instruments.”
“A lot farther west?” Delagard asked.
“A lot. A whole lot. We really had ourselves a ride.”
“Go get your instruments, then.”
Lawler watched, comprehending very little, as Felk, after a lengthy rummage in the chaos belowdecks, emerged with the tools of his trade, the crude, awkwardly-fashioned navigational instruments that probably would have made a mariner of sixteenth-century Earth chuckle condescendingly. He worked quietly, muttering to himself now and then as he took a fix on the Cross, pondered, fixed again. After a time Felk glanced at Delagard and said, “We’re farther west than I want to believe.”
“What’s our position?”
Felk told him. Delagard looked surprised. He went below himself, was gone a long while, returned eventually with his seachart. Lawler moved closer as Delagard ran his finger down the lines of longitude. “Ah. Here. Here.”
Sundira said, “Can you see where he’s pointing?”
“We’re in the heart of the Empty Sea. We’re almost as close to the Face of the Waters as we are to any of the settled islands behind us. It’s the middle of nowhere, all right, and we’re all alone in it.”
2
Gone now was any hope of calling a convocation of the ships, of focusing the will of the entire Sorve community against Delagard. The entire Sorve community had been reduced to just thirteen people. By this time everyone aboard the one surviving ship knew what the real destination of the voyage was. Some, like Kinverson, like Gharkid, seemed not to care: one destination was as good as any other, for men like that. Some—Neyana, Pilya, Lis—were unlikely to oppose Delagard in anything he wanted to do, no matter how strange. And at least one. Father Quillan, was Delagard’s avowed ally in the quest for the Face.
That left Dag Tharp and Dann Henders, Leo Martello, Sundira, Onyos Felk. Felk loathed Delagard. Good. One for my side, Lawler told himself. As for Tharp and Henders, they had already had one brush with Delagard over the direction of the voyage; they wouldn’t shrink from another. Martello, though, was a Delagard man, and Lawler wasn’t sure where his sympathies would lie in a showdown with the ship-owner. Even Sundira was an unknown quantity. Lawler had no right to assume that she’d side with him, no matter what sort of closeness seemed to be developing between them. She might well be curious about the Face, eager to learn its true nature. By avocation she was a student of Gillie life, after all.
So it was four against all the rest, or at best six. Not even half the ship’s complement. Not good enough, Lawler thought.
He began to think that the idea of bringing Delagard under control was futile. Delagard was too powerful a force to bring under control. He was like the Wave: you might not like where it was taking you, but there wasn’t much you could do about it. Not really.
In the aftermath of the catastrophe Delagard bustled with inexhaustible energy about the deck getting the ship ready for the resumption of the voyage. The masts were repaired, the sails were raised. If Delagard had been a driven, determined man before, he seemed completely demoniacal now, a relentless force of nature. The analogy with the Wave seemed to be the right one, Lawler thought. The loss of his precious ships appeared to have thrust Delagard across some threshold of will into a new realm of purposefulness. Furious, volatile, supercharged with energy, Delagard functioned now at the centre of a vortex of kinetic power that made him all but impossible to approach. Do this! Do that! Fix this! Move that! He left no space about himself for someone like Lawler to come up to him and say, “We aren’t going to let you take this ship where you want to take it, Nid.”
There were fresh bruises and cuts on Lis Niklaus” face the morning after the Wave. “I didn’t say a thing to him,” she told Lawler, as he worked to repair the damage. “He just went wild and started hitting me as soon as we got inside the cabin.”
“Has that happened before?”
“Not like this, no. He’s a crazy man, now. Maybe he thought I was going to say something he wouldn’t like. The Face, the Face, the Face, that’s all he can think about. He talks about it in his sleep. Negotiates deals, threatens competitors, promises wonders—I don’t know.” Big, solid woman that she was, she looked suddenly shrunken and frail, as though Delagard were drawing life out of her and into himself. “The longer I live with him, the more he scares me. You think he’s just a rich shipyard owner, interested in nothing but drinking and eating and screwing and getting even richer. God knows what for. And then once in a while he lets you look a little way inside him and you see devils.”
“Devils?”
“Devils, visions, fantasies. I don’t know. He thinks this big island will make him like an emperor here, or maybe like a god, that everyone will obey him, not just people like us, but the other islanders, the Gillies too, even. And on other worlds. Do you know he wants to build a spaceport?”
“Yes,” Lawler said. “He told me that.”
“He’ll do it, too. He gets what he wants, that man. He never rests, he never lets up. He thinks in his sleep. I mean it.” Lis gingerly touched a purpling place between her cheekbone and her left eye. “Are you going to try to stop him, do you think?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Be careful. He’ll kill you if you try to get in his way. Even you, doc. He’ll kill you the way he’d kill a fish.”
The Empty Sea seemed well named, clear and featureless, no islands, no coral reefs, no storms, hardly even a cloud overhead. The hot sun cast long orange gleams on the listless, glassy blue-grey swells. The horizon seemed a billion kilometres away. The wind was slack and fitful. Tidal surges came rarely now, and they were minor ones when they came, hardly more than a ripple on the sea’s flat bosom. The ship coasted easily over them.
Nor was there much in the way of marine life either. Kinverson trawled his lines in vain; Gharkid’s nets brought up scarcely any seaweed that might be of use. Occasionally some glittering school of fish went by, or larger sea-creatures could be seen sporting at a distance, but it was rare that anything came close enough to be caught. The existing supplies on board, the stocks of dried fish and algae, were running very low. Delagard ordered that the daily rations be cut. It looked to be a hungry voyage from here on. And a thirsty one too. There had been no time to put out the usual catch-receptacles during the fantastic downpour that had struck just before the coming of the Wave. Now, under that serene cloudless sky, the level in the water-casks grew lower every day.
Lawler asked Onyos Felk to show him where they were on the chart. The mapkeeper was vague, as usual, about his geography; but he indicated a point on the chart far out into the Empty Sea, close to midway between the equator and the supposed location of the Face of the Waters.
“Can that be right?” Lawler asked. “Can we really have come so far?”
“The Wave was moving at an incredible speed. It carried us with it all day long. The miracle is that the ship didn’t simply break up.”
Lawler studied the chart. “We’ve gone too far to turn back, haven’t we?”
“Who’s talking about turning back? You? Me? Certainly Delagard isn’t.”
“If we wanted to,” Lawler said. “Just if.”
“We’d be better off just keeping on going,” said Felk gloomily. “We’ve got no choice, really. There’s all that emptiness behind us. If we turn back toward known waters, we’ll probably starve before we get anyplace useful. About the only chance we’ve got now is to try to find the Face. There might be food and fresh water available there.”