“Anything?” Shading his eyes against the sharpness of the early morning sun, the herdsman scanned the surrounding waters.
“Nothing. Nothing at all, unless you call the presence of a hundred or so flying fish significant. I hope your crab was not keeping you hand-talking so long merely because he valued the opportunity for conversation.”
“I do not think so. And he is not my crab, nor the sargassum man’s. Whatever happens, he was most definitely his own crab.”
A cry came from the lookout. It was indistinct, perhaps because the man was choked with surprise. But his extended arm, if not his foreshortened words, pointed the way.
Rising from the calm surface of the sea beneath the bowsprit was a line of crabs. All manner of crabs. Every type and kind and variety of crab the sailors of the Grömsketter had ever seen, as well as a goodly number that were new to them. Ehomba recognized some they did not, and there were many that he had never seen before. There were blue crabs and stone crabs, snow crabs and lady crabs, rock crabs and green crabs. There were tiny sand crabs and fiddler crabs, each sporting a single grotesquely oversized dueling claw. Pea crabs vied for space in the line with hermit crabs, while pelagic crabs shared the water with benthic crabs that were utterly devoid of color and nearly so of eyesight. There were king crabs, too, but of them all were subjects and none visibly a king.
The line they formed was a good two feet wide and stretched across the surface as far as one could see. Stretched all the way across the valley and up the nearest aqueous slope, in fact. Claws linked tightly to claws while spiny legs entwined, the chitonous queue continuing to thicken and grow even as those aboard the trapped vessel gathered to gaze at the astonishing sight.