And racing along the sand were several hundred angry cannibals, all howling at the top of their lungs, all waving spears and bows, heading for the ship and already almost past their beached canoes, although others had turned aside to run out a few of those, planning to cut Stormdancer off if she escaped. That made it a four-way race, then.
As Rap reached the shore, a roar from the sailors announced that the ship was free, sliding away into the dark. Men had fallen headlong into the surf and now were scrambling up, grabbing one another’s hands, grabbing also at the nets that had been hung over the bow for just this purpose.
As Rap reeled across the sand, the ship was already drifting off into the night, being caught now by the wind, trailing her struggling tangle of men like some strange marine weed.
He galloped into the waves, but the cannibals had seen him and their yells redoubled. He fell headlong, rose, fell again, and breathed water and choked and lurched forward, tripping repeatedly because the sea caught at his legs. His pursuers were moving much faster than he could and he was already almost out of his depth and Stormdancer was moving fast now, turning away, heeling as she escaped from the lee of the hill and the gale caught her.
Half a dozen anthropophagi were closing in on Rap, with a couple of giants in the lead. They were swimming while he just floundered, helpless in the waves, trying to run on tiptoe in the troughs, trying not to drown in the crests, being carried shoreward, but his farsight found the cable even as two huge hands reached out for him. He grabbed it just seconds before it could slither out of reach. The anthropophagite’s fingers touched his shoulder, and then the rope whipped him away, burning his tattered hands, almost yanking his arms from their sockets, burying him under leagues of suffocating black water.
The tension eased; he knew he had only seconds before the next jerk, and it was not easy to think straight when farsight said you were four cubits underwater, out he managed to wrap the rope around one wrist before it pulled taut—and then it did and he shot through the sea like a fish. It slackened and he lashed fruitlessly, struggling to reach that surging, essential, breathable surface, but before he got there another heave on the rope sucked him along again, and deeper, spinning him giddily. If the sailors knew he was there they could haul him in, but they’d better do it soon . . .
6
Gathmor sent two youngsters over the side as the faun came within reach. They bent a line around his ankles and hauled him inboard bottoms up, so he’d jettison some of his bilge on the way.
Even so, he carried a cargo of seawater that would have floated a galley. They worked him like a bellows to pump it out of him and get him breathing again.
But the seer’s work was not over yet. The channel that had seemed so unending to his farsight was still only one of many in the archipelago. Even on a bare pole Stormdancer crossed it in a couple of hours, living up to her name, leaping and plunging against a sea anchor. If the sun came up, no one knew it, and the deluging rain cut visibility to less than a length. Neither Gnurr nor Gathmor could guess where the ship was by then; there were rocks out there, rocks and shoals and islets as uncountable as the stars of heaven, and only one man aboard could scry them.
With the tiniest sail the ship could hoist, still every blast seemed likely to unmast her. If that happened, she’d be a hulk, bearing her crew to the last weighing. And if she broached to, she’d be on her beam ends in seconds. It took four men to hold the steering oar, and she moved like a pig. Another three men kept the kid awake, walking him up and down, slapping his face, pouring rainwater into him—they had plenty of water now—and yelling in his ear. ”There!” he would mumble, or “Rocks that way!” and then his head would droop again.
The mate reckoned afterward they’d likely gone through Eelskinner Gap by way of the Bunghole—a couple of times they’d had cliffs in view on both sides, and not much more than an oar’s length away at that. It went on for half a lifetime, seemingly, but when nothing had shown up for an hour, they knew that they’d broken through into Dyre Channel itself, and by then they couldn’t waken the faun anyway, so they rolled him in a blanket and laid him under a bench and said a prayer that he would live.
Water willy-nilly:
I came like Water, and like Wind I go,
Into this Universe, and
Why not knowing Nor Whence,
like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, As Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.
— Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (§29-30, 1879)
ELEVEN
Wilderness were paradise
“This bread is remarkably good, Fooni,” Azak said. He wiped one last fragment of bread around his bowl, popped it in his mouth, and simultaneously belched loudly. Inos winced. Such vulgarity was a compliment in Zark, she knew, but there were some local customs that she found harder to accept than others.
Azak and Inos, Kade and little Fooni—the four of them were sitting cross-legged on rugs, on the ground outside their tent, First Lionslayer and his family. The sun was setting, the temperature falling like a stooping falcon. The tents had been pitched in the lee of a steep rocky bank, but even there they all flapped and surged in the wind that howled through the pass. The night would be noisy; but Inos never had trouble sleeping these days.
Apparently Fooni was not going to comment on the bread. “How fast it cools off!” Inos said, pulling her coat closed and fastening it. By day Gaunt Pass was a furnace, the rocky walls tossing the sun’s heat back and forth. By night it felt like winter in Krasnegar. At sunset everyone donned warm mountain garb, heavy garments that Elkarath had purchased in the little foothill settlements during the past few weeks. She wondered if he would haul them all the way through the Central Desert to Ullacarn, or sell them again on the west side of the mountains. The big fleecy boots she had pulled on a few minutes ago might have crossed the range a dozen times already.
“Did your mother teach you to make such good bread, Fooni?” Azak inquired.
Inos shot him a puzzled glance. Why this sudden interest in cooking? He normally never bothered with trivia. The bread had not been specially good. In fact it had been poor stuff, flat and tasteless, made from a gritty meal paste spread on hot rocks. That and goat stew were standard fare for the camel folk. Tonight there had also been some sour wine as a special treat.
Hard bread and sour wine, distant laughter and the clanking of camel bells, braziers twinkling and a cithern twanging—these things were all very familiar to her now. Watch out for snakes in the bedding and scorpions anywhere; she was learning. Hair full of dried sweat, air full of flies. She could handle a camel quite adequately and erect a tent no floppier than her neighbors’.
Fooni was scowling and still saying nothing. Fooni was a miserable little pest, and Inos was planning to be rid of Fooni very shortly. She had served her purpose and soon could be sent off to travel with her great-grandfather, who would not have to tolerate her snide remarks and snappy temper.
Eastward, the first stars twinkled above blood-red crags. Gaunt Pass had turned out to be spectacular beyond Inos’s farthest expectations. For days the caravan had been trekking over scrubby hills and through barren valleys, gradually losing altitude as it neared the western slopes of the Agoniste range, and yet all those hills and valleys had been mere wrinkles in the floor of the pass itself. On either hand a dreamscape of real mountains soared up in incredible cliffs and faces of rock to far-off icy peaks. The sheer scale of the scenery had astounded her. Her eye refused to comprehend it. It was a land for Gods, under a sky immeasurably huge.
Of course Kade enthused about this interesting experience, as she always did about anything, and for once Inos was inclined to agree with her. All her life she would remember this journey.
Everywhere were signs of a long and bloody history. Ruins of cities long forgotten sprawled in the mouths of tributary valleys; the wind wailed around derelict remains of castles on jutting spurs of the mountains. No one lived here now except goat herders, and perhaps bandits. She would have liked to have explored some of the ruins, but the caravan must keep moving.