He brought the hammer smashing down.
“Do I use this on the block or on your heads? Put your backs into it, you sniveling fools!”
They cringed and held to their places. He had assumed Jurl’s voice and manner. Almost as one, they snatched back their oars.
A crash came from above, dim screams, the bald flare of fire.
He increased the strokes of the hammer. It was the speed of war he used, for ramming or for flight. He left them no room for their terror.
When the first breath of safety came, he knew by instinct only. Beyond the hatches the ocean was like blood and ink, yet the judderings had left the ship. He slowed their speed, then ceased beating. They sank on their oars like dead men.
He went up the ladder, but the hatch was hard to lift. When he got it open, he found the dead lying across it.
The dead also lay about the deck. The planks were thick with them and with a fluttering violet ash. Little fires trickled here and there; a few men were creeping from cover to deal with them. The sail flamed. Cinders swirled like moths. The air was thick and turgid with smoke.
Behind them now, the volcano was fading in the murk, still a blare of red or white. The distant rumbling filled the sea.
For miles the water was full of burned things. They cast their own human corpses down to join them. This time, there were no prayers.
16
The wind hummed in the patched sail.
“We no longer hold a course,” Elon said. “Our instruments are smashed. The stars indicate we’re far from Alisaar, but their configurations are strange and altogether untrustworthy. Tullut tells me he thinks the dust from the fire mountain distorts the size and pattern of things in the sky. Who can doubt it? Last night the moon was huge, the color of a blue plum. No, we can’t judge our way by star charts.”
“Turn back,” Jurl growled, facing him across Drokler’s table.
“And pass again through the Gates of Fire? We lost half our crew to the storm and the burning mountain, and ten oarsmen. There’d be mutiny if I told them to risk that way again.”
“You’re too soft, too gentle altogether, Elon. They’d mutiny because they know you’d let them. Resign your position to me. We’ll see things settled then.”
“It would seem you resigned your own position to the volcano,” Raldnor said.
Jurl swung about.
“Why does this landsdog sit at council with us?”
“Because, Jurl, he has twice proved himself a better oars master than you,” Elon said.
“Where were you, Jurl, when we passed the fire?” Tullut, the younger of the two officers, cried out.
“Below, about my own business.”
“Saving your worthless, diseased and filthy skin!”
Elon banged on the table top to silence the altercation.
“The wind blows us southeasterly,” he said in a sober and dispassionate voice. “The watch have seen flocks of birds, which should mean land of some sort.”
“There’s no land in these seas.”
“Probably an island, too small to have been charted. Nevertheless, we may hope for fresh water, and perhaps meat. We’ll rest the men there. After that we can decide on what to do with ourselves and our ship.”
They cut a notch in the door lintel of the tower at each sunset. The sea was exceptionally, searingly blue; sometimes patches like blue fire moved over it. The skies were strange colors by day; at night men made superstitious signs against the amethyst moon, the vitriolic lemon of the stars.
The food, rationed since the storm, began to bear hard on them. No longer were there dinners at Drokler’s table—only the fish stews and dried biscuit common to all.
The burned men lay under awning on the deck, groaning, muttering, weeping; howling for water, the dull-eyed women tending them as best they could. In the predawn gray of the fifth day past the volcano, Raldnor woke from a deadly sleep and, going up on deck, became aware of a peculiar and ominous silence. Not a man cried out, not even a whisper sounded.
Yannul, coming after him, stopped still and said: “Can they all have died?”
“Indeed they can,” a man’s voice said sneeringly, almost with amusement. “With a little help.”
Jurl stepped out from under the awning. He carried his knife flamboyantly, letting them see the blood. A couple of sailors slunk out after him, making less of it.
“You’ve butchered them,” Yannul said. His hand went to his own knife, then fell away uselessly.
“Why let them go on eating our share of rations?” one of Jurl’s men blurted. “They’d’ve died tomorrow—the day after. Better off dead they were.”
“Shut your mouth,” Jurl rapped. “Do we need make apologies to land scum?”
He swung past, his acolytes hurrying after.
Dawn tinged the sea.
Yannul swore in a virulent undertone.
“Will you refuse an extra share of the food?” Raldnor said softly, gazing out at the rim of the sun. “As Jurl’s friend told us, they’d have died anyway, and in great pain. Now they rest, and we eat.”
Yannul turned to stare at him, but in the expanding light a new surprise usurped the first.
“Raldnor,” he said, “your hair—is white.”
Raldnor did not look at him. His eyes and face were quite blank.
“Sea salt,” he said quietly. “It bleaches out the best dye. I’m a Lowlander, Yannul.”
Yannul swore again, softly.
“I thought in Abissa . . . I wondered—But, Raldnor, all that time in Koramvis—you dared that deception with Amrek?”
“An irony worthy of the annals of the old myths I used to read. Yes, I was Amrek’s nearest Commander. I stood at his right hand. I nearly bedded his mother; certainly I took his betrothed. I fell from my office because of simple indiscretion, not race. There was no hint of my blood. I was Dortharian, and my crimes suited me excellently. I am Amrek’s brother.”
“His brother—”
“Rehdon’s son. Not by Val Mala, as you will surmise. Ashne’e carried me, the amber-haired witch. She accommodated me in the womb which killed my father.” The words had come flooding from him, yet he felt no release at speaking, or any pain. On the horizon a dark cloud was resting against the sea, blotting out the lower hemisphere of the sun.
“Then, by the law of Dorthar, you’re their King,” Yannul said. There seemed to be no doubt or query in his voice; both the situation and the curious blank face of the teller carried their own conviction. Besides, Yannul had always sensed some vein of mystery in this man he had called a friend.
“The King of Dorthar.”
Raldnor smiled blindly at the sea, at his own thoughts. “There’s the island Elon promised us,” he said.
Yannul, startled, turned about and saw it. Simultaneously the watch yelled from above, and men came running to the deck.
It was a mere small silhouette lashed by the sea. It had no look of home. Yet men shouted and pummeled each other’s shoulders.
Only the dead men under the awning continued their silence, as if they were wiser, or more content.
The island.
It was formed in the shape of a flat platter; at its center steep-built rocks, smoking with white falls, splayed above into a broad plateau. Jungle rose in blue-black tiers from the beach, noisy with birds. They flew in flocks, wheeled screaming in the sky, vocal with alarm at this invasion.
Rorn’s Daughter cast down her anchor in the bay and the boats put out; only the women and a handful of the men were left behind with their officers to watch the ship.
Their legs were uncertain on the ground. Men rolled and played like babies in the nacreous sand.