“For suddenly, crack and blaze! The brightness blinded me. I lost hold of my oar, like most of us did. Somehow I fumbled out and got a grip on it again before it slid away between the tholes. That may have saved my sight, because I wasn’t looking up when the second bolt smote.
“Aye, we’d been hit by lightning. Twice. I’d heard no thunder, but maybe the roar of the waves and shriek of the wind covered that. When the dazzle began to clear from my eyes, I saw the mast aflame like a torch. The hull was slashed and weakened. I felt the sea shiver my skull, and my arse, too, as it broke the ship apart under me. “That scarce seemed to matter right away. For by that fitful, ragged light I glimpsed things in heaven, like yonder winged bull but huge as real oxen and ashine as if cast in iron. Men were astride them. They swooped downward –
“Then everything went to pieces. I found myself in the water, clutching my oar. A couple other men in my sight had got hold of flotsam also. But the fury wasn’t done with us. A lightning bolt struck down, straight into poor Hurum-abi, my drinking friend since I was a kid. He must’ve been killed right off. Me, I ducked below and held my breath as long’s I could.
“When I must needs bring my nose up for air, I seemed to be alone in the sea. But overhead was a swarm of those dragons or chariots or whatever they were, a-dart through the wind. Flame raged between them. I went under again.
“I think they were soon gone to wherever in the Beyond they’d come from, but I was too busy staying alive to pay any more heed. Finally I made it to land. What had happened seemed unreal, like a mad dream. Maybe it was. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m the single man on that ship who ever came back. Praise Tanith, eh, girls?” Undaunted by memory, Gisgo pinched the bottom of his nearest wife.
More reminiscence followed, which took a couple of hours to disentangle. Finally Everard could ask, his tongue dry despite the wine: “Do you remember just when this was? How many years ago?”
“Why, sure I do, sure I do,” Gisgo answered. “An even one score and six years, come fifteen days before the fall equinox, or pretty near to that.”
He waved a hand. “How do I know, you wonder? Well, it’s like the Egyptian priests, that keep such a close calendar because their river floods and falls every year. A seaman who doesn’t take care, he’s not likely to get old. Did you know that beyond the Pillars of Melqart the sea rises and falls like the Nile, but twice a day? You’d better watch those times sharp, if you’d fare in those parts.
“But the Sinim, they were what really drove the idea home in this head. There I was, attendant on my captain while they bargained with him for passage, and they kept talking about exactly which day we’d depart -talking him into it, you understand. I listened, and I thought what gains might lie in that kind of remembering, and told myself I’d make a point of it. Back then, I couldn’t read or write, but what I could do was mark whatever special things happened each year, and keep those happenings in order and count back over them when I needed to. So this was the year in between a venture to the Red Cliff Shores and the year when I caught the Babylonian disease -”
Everard and Pum emerged and began walking from the Sidonian Harbor quarter, down a Street of the Ropemakers now filling with dusk and quietness, toward the palace.
“My lord gathers his forces, I see,” murmured the boy after a while.
The Patrolman nodded absently. His mind was in a storm of its own.
Varagan’s procedure seemed clear to him. (Everard felt well-nigh certain it was Merau Varagan, perpetrating a fresh enormity.) From wherever in space-time his hideout was, he and half a dozen of his confederates had sought the Usu area, twenty-six years ago. Others must have carried them on hoppers, which let them off and immediately returned. The Patrol couldn’t hope to catch the vehicles in that brief an interlude, when the exact place and moment were unknown. Varagan’s band had gone afoot into town and ingratiated themselves with King Abibaal.