By day Yannul and Raldnor indulged in those immemorial pastimes of the passenger—the book, the dice or the flagon—or walked about the deck. At dusk they ate at Drokler’s table in the tower, along with Jurl the oars master, monosyllabic and mannerless, and Elon, officer of the deck, a quiet unremarkable man, who studied at table a succession of dark-bound, apparently entirely similar manuscripts.
In the night a woman might come stealing to their box. Yannul accepted what was offered him, and with any whose lovemaking proved inartistic, took it on himself to teach them Lannic methods. So Raldnor lay alone through the groaning, spume-sounding nights, listening to these activities of lust. He did not want their women and could not sleep. He took to prowling about the ship in the moonlight. In the moon’s path the water was like milk. He thought of the ruined city on the Plains, the white wolf and the white girl. He felt a kind of drawing exerted on him.
“Where is home? Is this then my home, after all I’ve done to escape it? The Lowlands and the shadow of Amrek’s threat. Why not? I am hated like my land, and believed dead and toothless like my land. Ashne’e, my mother, puts her ghost hand on my brain and turns it to the south. Perhaps, then, not Saardos but the Plains. Perhaps I will go home.”
A day out from the bay of Saardos, Drokler honored the brass Rom god in the prow with a pound of incense.
The blank god mask stared back at them through the pall of sweet blue smoke. It was an ugly rough-hewn thing, without the passion or the delicacy of a Xarabian Yasmis, and with none of the cruel magnificence of the dragon-headed icons of Dorthar. It gazed in myopic stillness out over the long shock of the waves, ignoring their words, their presence, their costly offering.
A blazing magenta sun sank, apparently steaming, in the sea. Black towers of cumulus clouds were rising in the south, and the heavy pulse of the wind pressed like a hand on the trembling hollowed sail.
The narrow craggy strip of coast which was Alisaar receded into darkness.
At dinner, Jurl was absent from the board.
“Poor weather to make harbor in,” Yannul remarked.
The wind kicked at the ship, and plates slid in their scoops. On their iron chains the low-slung candle wheels clanged dismally, and hot wax dripped.
“Rorn has a bellyache,” Drokler said.
Caught in the high window of the tower, the sky blushed black. The ship, as if sensing the maturing of unseen forces beneath her, leapt like an animal in fear.
“Can you make Saardos in this?”
“Oh, indeed, Lannic gentleman. We run before the wind and use our oars. This place is free of rocks. No need to be alarmed. Eat your meal, or have you lost your appetite?”
Elon rose and put aside his book. He went without a word, and when the door to the deck was opened, the room seemed filled by the plunge of the purple gulf all around them and by sudden lightning.
Drokler got to his feet.
“Continue with your food, gentlemen.”
Simultaneously, Rom’s Daughter tilted on her side in a horrifying yet almost frivolous movement. There came from every quarter of the ship the sound of unsecured things rattling and cascading. One of the great candle wheels, flung sideways with enormous force, struck Drokler on the temple with a sick, dull clash. The ship lord collapsed across the board without a sound. The two junior officers, who had risen with him, gave vent to cursing. One ran for the surgeon and left the door flapping on the crow blackness outside.
Yannul and the remaining officer eased Drokler on to the floor. He was breathing thickly, but otherwise looked quite dead. The officer made a clumsy religious sign to one of the many rough and uncaring sea elementals of the Zakorians.
Yannul got up.
“Look for me later,” he muttered as he passed Raldnor, “I’m about to give our dinner to the sea.”
The water-rushing, intangible darkness of the deck enveloped him. Raldnor moved out into it and passed the surgeon in the doorway, a man with swimming eyes and a look of terror ill-concealed on his face. It was not good to lose a captain while at sea, for the Zakorians carried their own factions and wars with them on their ships. Lightning speared the deck. Raldnor saw the livid shapes scurrying about the sail, and the yellow spindrift cast up from the oars below.
The oars.
Jurl still had them row, then, even against this. And yet, what hope could there be now, other than to ride the tempest out? Besides which, the hatches would be taking in the sea with every lurch of the waves, and there would soon be broken ribs or worse among the rowers, administered by bucking oar poles.
Raldnor swung aside and through the narrow, low aperture leading to the below-decks rowers’ station.
The dismal, gloomy, stinking dark of the place was accentuated by the odor of fear and the flickering lanterns smoking from the damp. There came the hiss of the ocean—already the lower positions were awash—and the creak of the iron-bladed oars and of men’s cracking sinews. Jurl sat on the master’s platform, spume spurling at his feet, relentlessly drumming the oars’ beat, his face an ugly, carven, immovable mask. He had a look of Ryhgon. Certainly he was of Ryhgon’s breed. Raldnor took a breath of hate from the fetid air and shouted: “Lay in, oar’s master! She’s drinking the sea.”
Without turning or faltering in his beat, Jurl spat through his teeth: “Empty your damned guts somewhere else, Dortharian. We run to Saardos.”
Raldnor sensed men straining to hear him even as they strained at the oars.
“Lay in, Jurl, and close the hatches before you sink this ship or kill half your oarsmen.”
“I’ll take no orders from you, you mewling bitch-birth. Get out before I break your back.”
Rorn’s Daughter seemed suddenly to spin beneath them. There came a cacophony of impossible thunder, and gouts of white water burst through the hatches, splintering them like broken glass. Men, up to their necks in the water, screamed and dropped their oars, which veered and struck others from behind. The compelling rhythm fell apart.
Raldnor leaped to Jurl and hit him in the ribs, then seizing the beater’s hammer, struck him between neck and shoulder with a blow suited to his bulk. Across the confused cries and shouting, Raldnor roared for them to draw in the oars and secure the hatches. Presently he went down into the chaos and pulled with them. These rowers were paid men—only war fleets or pirates used slaves—and therefore had none of the hypnotized discipline of helpless chattels. He sensed them on the verge of panic-stricken mutiny and formed them into a baling chain before it took them. A man’s voice called from the back.
“The wind’ll blow us beyond Saardos into the sea of hell—we’ll fall into Aarl!”
“Stories for women and children,” Raldnor shouted back. “Do we have someone’s wench down here, passing for a man?”
There was some crude laughter and no further complaints after that. He had learned what Zakorians feared the most, and it was not death.
When they had cleared the galley levels of water, he left them to Elon’s orders, and took Jurl over his back to the oars master’s quarters near the stern.
The fury of the storm seemed to be lessening. Rifts had appeared in the cloud mass, though the sea tossed them up and down like a ball. It had gulped men and supplies from the deck and left them, in barter, a host of flopping sea creatures.
He found Yannul with a paper face in the tower.
“Perhaps my sacrifice did us good,” he muttered. “Oh, to be in Lan, where the hills are blue and, above all, motionless.”
Overhead the sea had shattered the window, and glass and broken plates floated on the inch or so of water on the tower’s floor.
Elon came in from the deck and said: “Is the surgeon still here? I’ve some men with smashed bones.”