. . . and lifted it bodily from the boiling sea.
Someone aboard Sir George’s own vessel was gibbering, gobbling out fragments of prayer punctuated by curses of horrified denial, but the baron himself stood silent, unable to tear his eyes from the impossible sight. He saw streams of water gushing from the ship, draining straight down from its half-flooded hold as if in a dead calm, only to be whipped to flying spray by the fury of the wind as they neared the sea below. Yet the shapes enfolded it in their brilliance, raising it effortlessly towards the far vaster shape which had birthed them, and he winced as someone aboard that rising vessel, no doubt maddened by terror, hurled himself bodily over the rail. Another body followed, and a third.
“Fools!” Father Timothy bellowed. “Dolts! Imbeciles! God Himself has offered them life, and they—!”
The priest broke off, pounding the rail with a huge, gnarly fist.
The first plunging body struck the water and vanished without a trace, but not the second or third. Additional shafts of light speared out, touched each falling form, and arrested that fall. The light lifted them once more, along with the cog, bearing them towards those brilliantly lit portals, and Sir George swallowed again. A mile, he had estimated that shape’s length, but he’d been wrong. It was longer than that. Much longer, for the cog’s hull finally gave him something against which to measure it, and the cog was less than a child’s toy beside the vast, gleaming immensity that rode like a mountain peak of bronze amidst the black-bellied clouds of the gale’s fury.
“Were they fools?” He didn’t realize he’d spoken—certainly not that he’d spoken loudly enough for Father Timothy to hear through the crash of the sea and the wind-shriek, but the priest turned to him once more and raised an eyebrow. Even here and now, the expression brought back memories of the days when Father Timothy had been Sir George’s tutor as he was now Edward’s, but this was no time to be thinking of that.
“Were they fools?” Sir George repeated, shouting against the storm’s noise. “Are you so certain that that . . . that thing—” he pointed a hand he was vaguely surprised to note did not tremble at the shape “—was sent by God and not the Devil?”
“I don’t care who sent it! What matters is that it offers the chance of life, and while life endures, there is always the hope of God’s mercy!”
“Life?” Sir George repeated, and Father Timothy shook his head, as if reproaching his patron and old student’s slowness.
“Whatever its ultimate purpose, it clearly means for now to rescue that ship, and possibly all of us who remain alive.”
“But . . . why?”
“That I do not know,” Father Timothy admitted. “I’ve known enough of God’s love to hope it is of His mercy, and seen enough of man’s evil to fear that it is not. Whatever its purpose, and whoever sent it, we will find out soon enough, My Lord.”
Sir George’s cog was the last to be lifted from the sea.
He had regained at least the outward semblance of his habitual self-control and hammered a shaky calm over the others aboard the vessel by the time the lesser shapes surrounded the ship. Now he stood at the rail, gazing at the greater shape with his wife and son beside him. It might strike some as less than heroic to cling to his wife, and he tried to look as if the arm wrapped so tightly about her sought only to comfort her, but the two of them knew better. As always, Matilda supported him, pressing her cheek proudly against his shoulder even as he felt her tremble with terror, and he turned his head to press a kiss into her sodden, wind-straggled hair. For fourteen years she had stood beside him, one way or another, always supporting him, and a vast, familiar tenderness swelled within him as he drew strength from her yet again.
He kissed her hair once more, then returned his eyes to the vastness hovering above them. His people knew that he knew no more about what his they faced than they did, but the habit of obedience ran deep, especially among the men of his own household and their families, and the need to find some fragment of calm in pretending their liege knew what he was doing ran still deeper. He felt their eyes, locked upon him as the light flooded down and the scream of the wind and the thunder of the sea were abruptly shut away. There was no sense of movement, and he kept his own gaze fastened on the huge shape awaiting them rather than let himself look over the rail and watch the sea dropping away in the sudden, unnatural silence. He dared not look, lest the sight unman him at the moment when his people most needed him.