The surgeon came quickly and went out. Drokler had no further need of him, being dead.
The sea lay down and seemed to smoke. The smoke formed a gray twilight that crept coiling on the deck. They baled and slung off the water, and cooked the dead fish on damp fires to replace the provisions the sea had taken.
“Sir, it was good of you to help us,” Elon said to Raldnor. “With Drokler dead, it will be a serious business getting her to Saardos.”
“Jurl will cause you trouble, then?”
“Oh, indeed, yes. And he doesn’t like to fall asleep across his oars. I warn you to be on your guard, sir, while you continue to ride Rorn’s Daughter.”
“My thanks for the warning. But we’re only a day out, aren’t we?”
“No longer,” Elon said. “The storm blew us off our course, and how widely this fog holds, only the gods know.”
Later, the gray thickened and became a swathe of black velvet wrapped about the ship. No moon, no star pierced the velour curtain.
A woman came with fish and a flagon of wine. Yannul, now much recovered, kept her through the night.
All next day they drifted through the fog. It was a silent ghost world. Shapes emerged from it resembling galleys, mountains, or great birds, all melting before impact, folding in on themselves in charcoal subsidences.
In the polished metal that served as mirror, Raldnor saw how the gray tinge had invaded his hair. For a while it would mimic the hair of any of the crew, that pale black common to the sailor. It was the salt in the winds. Soon the salt would scour out the last of the black dye, and there would be no replacing it from the broken bottle he had found among his things after the storm. He would be then naked among his enemies, a yellow-haired man, a Lowlander: Plains scum. Yet curiously, in the regions of the fog, none of this seemed greatly to matter. He, like the ship, was adrift without compass or sight of land. There being no remedy, there seemed also no great distress.
Men lowered the body of Drokler into the iron water. The short, harsh Zakorian prayer was spoken. He sank like lead, for weights had been put in his boots to make his going hasty.
About an hour after this makeshift burial, the insubstantial prison around them began to break up. Inside an hour the waves were empty of anything but themselves and the night.
Not a trace of land in any direction could be seen. Such instruments as the ship had owned to divine her position, had been lost. The night had provided neither stars nor any moon.
A slight wind moved Rom’s Daughter.
Toward midnight the watch horn sounded. Ahead and to larboard there was a red flickering on the horizon.
“By Zarduk, the beacons of Saardos!” one of the officers cried out. A cheer went up. They had all feared some kind of disaster, adrift in the ghost world.
The wind was against them, blowing for the west, so they set down where they were to wait for morning. There were beer casks breached and emptied. Raldnor saw Jurl drinking in the shadow of the king mast—that peculiar and specific drinking which showed neither pleasure nor intoxication. His rowers would take them into Saardos tomorrow, and no doubt he would drive them hard.
Saardos. And after Saardos, the Plains. Raldnor thought of it in the dark of his cabin. And somewhere in the dark there came to him a sense of incompleteness—this ending was altogether too provident. It was an intimation of destiny which he neither knew nor answered.
Dawn woke him, a dawn like the cinders of a rose. Also a sound that had no place in a man’s dreams.
Yannul still slept, without a girl for once. Above, the levels of the ship creaked and settled. The sound pierced through wood and flesh and bone and exacerbated his ears.
On the deck the ashy crimson light that had squeezed in at the cabin slit below the tower was one great indissoluble wash across the sky and sea. Everything else was black in silhouette—the huge king mast with its slightly bloated sail, the bulk of the tower, the sweeping prow, the groups and huddles of men and women, all quite still, standing gazing out across the water to the scarlet flickering of the horizon, listening. It was a low, unhuman droning note, like some enormous pipe sounding far down in the crust of the world. But it had no definite location—rather it was all around them, ambient as the morning.
One of the women began to wail abruptly, crying of devils in the sea. A big man came hulking from the rail and struck her hard across the face as he passed her.
“Shut your mouth, trull.”
It was Jurl. He made for the galley hatch without a look to either side, his grim, sneering face devoid of any feeling. Somewhere on the deck, Elon’s voice rang out. Men jumped to their work, the women scuttled to ropes. The anchor was drawn up, the sail set. Abruptly the ship lurched into life as the oars below struck water. She began to move, straining, before the slight warm wind, with every semblance of life. Yet she only seemed living. The dawn was stopped still. No sun rose and no darkness fell; only the rosy grayness persisted. And with it the demon’s piping that seemed its vocal expression.
Raldnor stood at the rail.
There came a sudden crack of thunder beneath the sea, which did not surprise him, though his guts turned cold with an automatic fear. The piping ceased. A great roiling turmoil of movement below the ship pitched him down across her deck, as a lightning erupted from the sea. The light grew big, swelling from crimson into savage white. A rain fell on his face and hands and neck, a black burning rain. Men screamed. There came a wind over the ship like the rustling wings of a great bird composed of fire.
He pulled himself up against the rail and stared over the plunging sea.
The ocean was tumultuous with the pangs of birth, but it was a monstrous, a terrifying child: smoldering ebony, the cone stretched up to spit into the sky. Breakers burst in white steam against its molten buttresses. From the gaping mouth spewed lightning and a blazing vomit.
“Mountain of Fire!”
The frenzied cry racked across the deck. It was the legend of Aarl, the burning stacks that rose from the sea—dragons’ mouths belching up pyrotechnic blasts. The Zakorians yelled their horror. They were in hell, and the eternal agony had begun.
Raldnor stumbled back along the deck and pulled wide the doorway in the tower. He tried to shout to them to seek sanctuary inside, but men turned their blanched faces and their blind wide eyes on him and away, their mouths extending cries. A glittering needle hail of embers fell abruptly into their midst. There was a rush for the hatches, and now some came for the tower. They collided, fought and cursed each other at the entry. Beyond their struggling, Raldnor saw the sky split over the sea cone’s maw, and white explosions burst in the water. Rom’s Daughter bucked the length of her body. Men rolled shrieking down the deck, over the rail, into the boiling waves. A plume of fire appeared like a miracle on the sail.
Beneath them all, he felt the motion of the oars stagger to a halt.
The picture came to him, disastrously clear, the panic that had seized them once again in the dark and personal hell of the rowers’ deck. He thrust through the press at the door and at the hatchway and somehow got down into that reeking place. They were in uproar, and there was no beater on the platform. Where Jurl had taken himself was beyond questioning at this time. Raldnor seated himself at the oars master’s station and took up the hammer, as once before. With thunderous strokes he began the rhythm. A half lull came; they were slaves in their own way to that inexorable beat.
“Row!” he shouted at them.
“The ship’s on fire!” a man yelled. Others cried out in unison.