Old beyond age, younger than the chick, I strode across a mosaic floor now black and silver, now splintering into yellow as the sun rose like a wheel from the east. The night had passed like a folded wing.
And I saw the ship on the farthest edge of distance, etched there, immobile, as if awaiting me, almost as I had seen it on the shore of the island, behind my eyes.
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2
To the people of the southern ocean, the sea is the woman; what rides her and must be stronger than she, that is the man. So the ship was masculine that rode at anchor in the bright morning, storm-blown a great distance from the trading routes of the south.
He was a tall galley, this male ship, towering up from the water on his double oar-banks, twenty-five oars to a bank, fifty to a side, a hundred oars all told. The two high masts, stripped spar-naked after the hurricane, striped the dawnburned sky.
When he sailed, he had been a brave sight, twenty-four man-lengths fore to aft, a vessel painted blue as a summer dusk over his ironwood planking, the prow gilded, and the vast curving whale’s tail of the stern. The sails were indigo figured in ocher, with a triangular wind-catcher or shark’s-fin sail at the stern. His name was written on his side in southern picture writing:
Hyacinth Vineyard.
He had gone west of north, the ship, swallowing up red amber and black pearls, jade, cloth, pelts, purple dye, and antique bronzes from the archipelagoes of Seema and Tinsen, before he turned for home.
One morning, out of sight of land, the wind dropped. The oar-slaves, every black scaled like the backs of reptiles from the beatings that fell on them like rain, day in and out, grunted and sweated up their hate and agony on the ironbladed poles. It is the only death sentence that crucifies a man sitting, and may take ten years or more, if he is sufficiently tough and maddened, before it kills him.
The beautiful ship, courtesan-colored, pretty as a fancy boy and named for one, and for the earth rather than the sea, powered by a heaving of pain and fury in his oar-gripped bowel. He met the hurricane at midnight, the one stranger not to be bargained with.
A night and a piece of a day the galley fought the tempest.
The sails were taken in but presently broke lashings, rent,
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and were stripped. The oars, unusable, were belayed. The rowers’ station, though decked over, was nevertheless awash from the hatches, and dead men lay about in the untidy and unhelpful manner of the dead, for the overseer had tried to outrun the weather and paid for it by breaking the ribs and guts of others.
The ship staggered and wallowed at the mercy of the boiling cold sea and the black gale. He was well built for such work, or he would not have lasted.
About noon they passed into the cool eye of the storm. The sailors, of whom many were additionally slaves and recent landsmen, ignorant as I had been and thinking the fury done, lay facedown on the deck praising their amulets, as they had similarly lain wailing and puking at the storm’s violence. Others, knowing this lull to be the vortex and worse to come, were for throwing the precious cargo overboard as offerings to the sea. The officers, their greed larger than alarm or superstition, decreed otherwise. The naval instruments were broken or mislaid; no coast was visible. The master took stock, unsparing of his amber-necked whip.
Even at the tumult’s height this man, the master, Charpon by name, had been grim rather than disturbed. Charpon was a “Son of the New Blood,” thus, however lowly, a bastard fragment of the elite, the ninety-year conquerors of the great city that was home to the ship. His emotions were limited to avarice, obscure but definite pride, a certain brutal, unimaginative intelligence, and a liking for the flesh of boys.
While the Hyacinth Vineyard hung gently rocking under him, oddly becalmed between the two walls of the hurricane, Charpon, his face like a fist, stood in the bow, whip in hand, on lookout for the returning storm. He was not thinking of, death but rather of the abacus in his brain that was clicking away his profits in lost slaves, lost goods, a foundered vessel. He owned the ship; it represented the twelve years of his life he had labored to buy it.
Then, the hurricane failed them.
After two or three hours, the sky clearing into deep gold and the sea smoothing into a silk finer than the dyed stuff in the galley’s holds, the crew descended to their knees once more to give thanks to the ocean.
Smoke was burned before an image in the raised forecastle. It was an effigy of copper, depicting a male warrior-god grasping lightnings and mounted astride a lion-fish with enameled wings of blue and green. This was the demon of
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waves, Hessu, the spirit revered by the Hessek sailors of the “Old” Blood. Charpon did not bother with it.
The ship put down anchor to lick his wounds. Parties were herded up to patch and hoist the sails, stop leaks with heated bitumen, and sling overboard the useless dead. The master and his seconds prepared for the task of plotting their course afresh.
The day went out in night. A watch was set about the vessel; ten exhausted men, still half afraid the hurricane might attack again, like a tiger in the night, superstitiously telling the little red beads of Hessek prayer-necklaces, promising sweets to all the spirits ashore.
The sun, having circled under the sea, rose from it in the east. Suddenly one of the watch yelled out in terror, “S’wah ei!” a cry that roughly means, “May my gods guard me,” and thereafter repeated the plea with vehemence. A whistle was blown and sailors came running. By now the watch had collapsed on the deck, whining. Soon Charpon arrived, whip curled in hand.
“What does the piss-brain say?”
The sailors, having caught the plague of fright, yet aware of their master’s irreligious and mundane preference, hesitated to tell. A kiss from the whip, however, loosened their tongues.
“Lauw-yess.” (It was a Hessek word, expressive of respect and obedience.) “Ki says he saw a man, in the sea.”
At this Ki, appearing demented, began to mutter and groan and shake his head.
Charpon struck him.
“Speak for yourself, worm.”
“Not a man, Lauw-yess. A god. A god, the fire-god of the Kings-Masri, Masrimas, dressed in fiery flakes of the sun. I saw him, Lauw-yess, and he walked. He walked on the sea.”
The sailors gave off a shuddering murmur.
Charpon gifted Ki a second blow.
“My crew has gone mad. Maggots in the head. There is nothing in the sea. Take this worm and shackle him below till the fit soaks out of him. He shall not feed or drink till he’s sane again.”
But, as they were taking the unfortunate Ki away, another of the watch shouted. Charpon’s head jerked up. The sailors clustered at the rail, gabbling. This time, no sorcery. Two men, no doubt wrecked survivors of the storm, floating in the troughs, one splashing feebly to attract attention.
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Charpon nodded. He did not see survivors but replacement oarsmen, if they lived. Some recompense, after all, to be measured on the clicking abacus in his head.
Knowing I might cross the water afoot, reach the vessel, observe some two hundred men stricken on their faces with alarm, or else riotous and searching out weapons with which to attack me, I had preferred discovery in the image of a helpless destitute. I had heard the man scream his terror from the side, and that had been warning enough. I lay down in the sea, and Long-Eye with me. Levitation had surmounted the need to swim. I buoyed us up and let the swells drift us toward the blue ship.
At length ropes were thrown us. We threshed and floundered and were dragged up the iron-wood planking, over the picture-writing of the galley’s name, onto the deck.
Charpon’s black shadow fell on us.
He was a tall man, the “New” conqueror blood showing in his height, huge bones, and russet skin. His hair was clipped and oiled until it resembled a cap of black lacquer. His teeth were white but unevenly set, like shards stuck haphazardly into cement. In his left ear hung a long, swinging earring in the shape of a golden picture symbol-the sign of Masrimas, the fire-god.
Charpon prodded me with the handle of his whip.
“Strong doss,” he said, “to have lasted the storm. We shall see.” He fingered his earring and said to me, “Speak Masrian?”
“Some,” I answered slowly, not wishing to seem too proficient, though Masrian came as easily to me as the other languages I had met. It was the conqueror tongue named, like the conqueror race, for their god. Charpon nodded at LongEye. “No,” I said. “He is just my servant.”