Pytheas, aft by the helm, shook his head. “What makes the waves rise when we have no wind?” he asked through the tumult.
The steersman gripped his useless tiller and shuddered. “Things out o’ the deeps,” he rasped, “or the gods o’ these waters, angry that we trouble them.”
“Launch the boats,” Hanno advised Pytheas. “They’ll give some warning if we’re about to drift onto a rock, and maybe they can pull us clear.”
The steersman bared teeth. “Oh, no, you don’t!” he cried. “You’ll not send men down to the demon-beasts. They won’t go.”
“I won’t send them,” Hanno retorted. “I’ll lead them.”
“Or I,” Pytheas said.
It became the Phoenician who shook his head. “We can’t risk you. Who else could have brought us this far, or can bring us home? Without you we’re all dead. Come help me put spirit into the crew.”
He got his men, because Pytheas’ calm words damped the terror in them. They unlashed a boat, dragged it to the side, shoved it over a rail when the deck canted and white-maned waves galloped just beneath. Hanno sprang down, braced calves between two thwarts, took an oar a sailor handed him, fended off while his rowers followed one by one. They fought free at the end of a towline and the next boat came after.
“I do hope the other skippers—“ began Hanno. A dash of brine choked off what nobody heard anyhow.
The ship was gone into wet smoke. The boat climbed a comber that was tike a moving hillside, hovered on the crest, plunged into a trough where men looked up the heights of water around them. Noise rolled empty of direction. Hanno, at the rudder, could only try to keep the hawser unfouled behind him. “Stroke!” he bawled. “Stroke, stroke, stroke!” Men gasped at oars and bailing buckets. The sea lapped around their ankles.
A monstrous grip seized them. They whirled. A cataract leaped out of the fog. It burst over their heads. When they could see again, the ship was upon them. The boat smashed into her hull. The water ground it against the strakes. Wood broke, tore free of nails, shrieked. The boat fell asunder.
Pytheas beheld it. A man flailed arms and legs. The sea dashed him at the ship. His skull split open. Brains, blood, body went under.
“Lines out!” Pytheas shouted. He himself didn’t stop to uncoil any from a bollard. He drew his knife and slashed a sheet free of the slack mainsail. When he cast the end overboard, it disappeared in fog and foam. None of the swimmers he glimpsed, lost, glimpsed again had noticed it.
He signalled for another length. The cut sheet still cleated and in his left hand, he slid over the rail. Feet planted on the hull, arm straining to hold the cordage taut and himself in place, he leaned straight out. With his right hand he swung the second line like a whip.
Now he was visible to those he would save, except when the vessel rose onto that side and a wave fountained across him. A man swung past. Pytheas flicked the loose line at his face. The man caught it. Sailors on deck hauled him aboard.
The third whom Pytheas rescued was Hanno, clinging to an oar. After that, his strength was spent. He got back with the help of two mariners and fell in a heap beside the Phoenician. No others attempted his feat; but no more waifs came to sight in the rage around.
Hanno stirred. “To the cabin, you and me and these two,” he said through clattering teeth. “Else the cold will kill us. We wouldn’t have lived ten minutes in that water.”
In the shelter, men stripped, toweled till blood awoke to stinging life, pulled blankets tightly about themselves. “You were magnificent, my friend,” Hanno said. “I wouldn’t have supposed you, a scholar—tough, but a scholar—could do it.”
“Nor would I have.” Exhaustion flattened Pytheas’ voice.
“You saved us few from the consequences of my folly.”
“No folly. Who could have foreseen the sea in windless air would go so wild so fast?”
“What might have done it?”
“Demons,” mumbled a sailor.