Pirates Of Gohar rb-32, page 13
part #32 of Richard Blade Series
So they gambled, and at first it looked as if the gamble would pay off. There were two jugs of water in the boat, and they had their own fishing gear. At this time of the year rain wasn’t common, but in an emergency they could drink the blood of seabirds or the body juices of fish.
«The only way we can’t get those is the Sea drying up,» said Khraishamo. He should have added-«Or not being able to catch them in the first place.»
They didn’t worry about their fishing gear at first. They were more worried about bad weather and being sighted by Goharan ships. Summer storms were rare but when they came they could be savage, littering the shores of the Sea with the wreckage of ships and the bodies of sailors. Goharan ships were also rare at this time of year in the middle of the Sea. When they sailed at all, they usually crept along the eastern shore to catch whatever land breezes they could. Even galleys hugged the shore, landing every few days and resting their rowers.
The guard Blade pulled overboard took all the arrows in the boat with him, so there wasn’t much they could do to the seabirds. They were luckier with the fish-until on three successive days they lost both their hooks and the fishing spear.
Suddenly dying of thirst was no longer a possibility but a real danger, coming closer each day. They turned east, willing to risk being sighted by Goharan ships in the hope of reaching land and finding water.
«If we find only a small merchantman, perhaps we can capture it,» said Khraishamo.
«And a galley?» said Rhodina, then answered her own question. «Never mind. A quicker death than thirst, for sure.»
Unfortunately they sighted no Goharan ships on the first two days, and on the third day the wind died completely. The sea turned to glass, blazing under the sun until even Blade was half-dazzled. Rhodina’s tan didn’t keep her from getting a murderous sunburn, and Blade found himself turning red and peeling. They both would have started wearing clothes if the sunburn hadn’t made it too uncomfortable.
The third day of the calm, the last of the water ran out. Now their only hope was rain, which seemed unlikely, or a lucky encounter with a Sarumi ship, which didn’t seem very likely either.
«We don’t know the eastern Sea that well,» said Khraishamo. «But that’s where all the ships worth catching sail in summer. So we pull the ships up, caulk, rig, paint, harvest the crops, salt down the fish-«
«I understand,» said Blade.
«I swear you have nothing to fear,» said the pirate chief. «If the Sarumi do find us, I’ll pledge my life to see you and Rhodina in Mythor before autumn.»
«But they won’t be finding us,» said Rhodina. Her voice was dull and her eyes were half-closed. «Even HemiGohar couldn’t find us now.»
Waking on this hot morning, Blade couldn’t help wondering if Rhodina might possibly be right.
Dawn on the sixteenth day. Blade was on watch, but dozed off for a moment. When he awoke, he found Rhodina half out of the boat, mouth open and gulping salt water. He pulled her back into the boat. She started to sob, but she was too dehydrated for any tears to come. Blade held her until the fit of hysterics passed.
«Blade, Blade,» she murmured. «This-the end. You and Khraishamo-to go on, you need water. Kill me-drink my blood. No!» she said as Blade stiffened in uncontrollable horror at the idea. «No. You must.»
«We must not,» said Blade, desperately hoping that Rhodina hadn’t gone completely mad. «Without you, we couldn’t get to the rebels. Without getting to the rebels, it’s a wasted trip even if we live.»
«You must live, even so. You-«
Khraishamo cursed them for waking him and sat up. Before Rhodina could say a word, Blade explained what she’d suggested. Khraishamo’s look of horror matched Blade’s own, then he bent and kissed Rhodina on each caked eye.
«Rho, Rho, silly Rho,» he said. «Blade’s right. Without you alive at the end of the voyage, we might as well jump overboard right now. We need Blade, too, because he knows all the secrets of Gohar, including some he hasn’t told us.»
«And we need Khraishamo’s strength and skill with boats, and we’ll need him to speak for us if the Sarumi do find us,» said Blade. «We each of us need the others. So we’re going to Mythor together, or die here together.»
«Yes,» said Khraishamo. He took Blade’s right hand and Rhodina’s left. «All for one, and one for all.»
Blade repeated it, forcing himself not to laugh, and then Rhodina gasped out the words. Blade wondered what the creator of The Three Musketeers would have said if he’d heard their famous oath from Khraishamo’s lips. Certainly a pirate chief who wasn’t even human, a battle-scared young whore, and a traveler from another Dimension were as unlikely a trio of musketeers as you could hope to find.
Dawn on the seventeenth day. A seabird landed on the gunwale. Confident that none of the three sprawled bodies in the boat could harm it, the bird made the mistake of folding its wings. That was its last mistake. A quick snatch, a squawk, a twist, and Blade had the bird in hand, its neck neatly wrung.
They gave Rhodina the blood to drink and rubbed the fat on the worst of her sunburn. Then Blade and Khraishamo divided the flesh. It was gamey and reeking of fish, but they were past caring.
Dawn on the eighteenth day. The sea was as flat and the air as heavy as ever, but the sky held a bronze tinge and the sun was nearly invisible even though there weren’t any clouds. Khraishamo sniffed the air.
«This might be hatching a storm,» he said. «And it might not.»
«If it doesn’t-«began Blade, then found he didn’t have the will to finish the sentence out loud. He could finish it in his thoughts, though.
Another day, and Rhodina will be dead. A few days after that, and we’ll join her. Khraishamo and I are already too weak to capture a merchantman if she did pick us up. We’d have to lie. He didn’t feel very hopeful about lying convincingly. In fact, he’d never felt so nearly hopeless about survival in his life. He kept going purely on the principle that the nearly dead sometimes live, while the completely dead don’t come back.
Then he felt a puff of wind on his cheek. He blinked, and when he felt a second puff, he sat up. Then he felt a third, and Khraishamo was sitting up, and a fourth.
After the fourth puff it was a steady breeze. Khraishamo threw himself into movement, sponging off Rhodina and checking the sun-baked sail and rigging while Blade manned the tiller. The pirate seemed torn between joy and uncertainty.
«If this wind holds, it means a storm. But a storm maybe means going from no water to too much.»
«We can face that,» said Blade. «And if worse comes to worse, I’d rather be drowned than sun-baked.»
Khraishamo frowned. «Don’t joke like that, Blade. Not out here.» He pointed to the northwestern horizon. It was turning from bronze to a sullen slate-gray. The wind was now blowing strongly enough for the ripples on the water to start turning into waves. As the sail was filled, the boat began to leave foam in its wake.
Another hour, and Blade might have danced for joy if that wouldn’t have upset the boat. The sky turned completely gray, almost black, with the clouds pressing down on the sea as if they wanted to crush the boat. Out of the clouds came a downpour so fierce that for a while Blade was afraid they would have to start bailing. Suddenly there was all the water they could use.
They filled the pots, drank them empty, and filled them again. They wrung out the drenched sail and used the water to wash their clothing. Then they wrung out their clothes over their sun-dried, salt-caked skins. They drank the pots empty again, then filled them and poured them over Rhodina. They even gave her a full pot to wash out her hair.
When she was finished with that, she had the strength to stand, holding onto the mast. She stood there as the wind rose and her hair began to fly about her, a naked, magnificent storm goddess. Blade knew he’d never forget the sight of her in that moment.
Then she had to sit down and hang on, because the wind went on rising as the rain slackened. Before long Blade wouldn’t have tried dancing for a million pounds. He’d have gone overboard before he could take three steps. Besides, he wasn’t feeling quite so cheerful now. He remembered that summer storms on the Sea could blow like hurricanes. There wasn’t enough room for them to build up gigantic waves, but to small-boat sailors that wasn’t an important difference.
Blade looked around him. It was becoming impossible to tell where the sky ended and the Sea began. Waves were already nearly ten feet high with the wind peeling their crests off in clouds of spray. Water roared under the boat and the wind roared in Blade’s ears. He found he had to shout to make Khraishamo hear him.
«How does this blow look to you?»
«It could get a lot worse. It probably will, too. But at least it’s taking us the way we want to go.»
That was true. The gale would drive them toward the eastern shore of the Sea. It might blow out before they reached Mythor, or it might drive them ashore before they reached the city. Meanwhile, it was giving them all the water they could use, as well as protection from Goharan ships. Blade shouted to Khraishamo again.
«We don’t need to worry about Goharans any more. The merchant ships’ll all be too busy to pay attention to us, and the galleys’ll all be heading for shelter.»
Khraishamo nodded. «Let’s hope we can do the same if we have to.»
Blade looked up at the sky without loosening his grip on the tiller. It could hardly be much after noon, but already the day was as dark as late evening.
Chapter 18
In the chronicles of Gohar, it was called the Storm of Thrayket’s Passing, because it started blowing on the day of the temple rites in his memory. It had various other names among the other peoples around the Sea. None of them ignored it.
None of the sailors caught at Sea could ignore it either, but many of them didn’t live long enough to give the storm a name. They could only go down into the Sea, cursing the gods as salt water filled their mouths for the last time.
The Goharans, the Mythorans, and the other cities and kingdoms who had ships on the Sea lost ninety merchantmen and fifteen galleys. More fishing boats went down than anyone could ever count. Even the Sarumi lost some fishing craft and a few war vessels, swamped at sea or driven onto the rocky north coast of Sarumland. They also had crops washed out, huts blown down, and food spoiled by the ton.
On the other hand, the rivers between them and the plains horsemen swelled to raging torrents. Three thousand horsemen gathered to raid the Sarumi were caught by a flash flood, and the bodies of men and horses were strewn along the river banks all the way to the Sea. The Sarumi suddenly found themselves free of enemies on land, their enemies at Sea weakened, and their own fleet intact.
As the Sarumi realized this, the storm blew itself out. After five days of wind, gray skies, and waves the size of houses, there was blue sky and soft breezes. Only the surf still roared in on the eastern shore, carrying with it planks, beams, masts, oars, barrels, and bodies.
On the third day of the storm, Blade began to wonder if Khraishamo was right. Perhaps they were going to die from too much water instead of too little. The wind blew nearly a full gale every hour of the day and night. All around them the Sea rose into waves twenty feet high, and overhead gray clouds raced madly past. The nights were an experience Blade wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, with the waves turned into ghostly monsters, always threatening to swamp or overturn the boat.
Blade’s muscles were stretched and twisted to the limit, his eyes became salt-reddened pits, his clothes rotted on his back, his brain screamed for sleep. Khraishamo and Rhodina were no better off, and several times the woman seemed about to collapse. Somehow she always managed to find a little more strength and keep going.
Fortunately the boat was just the right size for the three of them to handle, superbly well-built, with a high freeboard made higher because she was lightly loaded. She rode up and over nine waves out of ten, and while the continuous rising and falling made Rhodina deathly seasick, it also kept them from being swamped. There were no leaks worth mentioning, in spite of the worst the waves could do, and they could easily bail out what came aboard in spray and rain.
Meanwhile, the mast and sail not only held but drove the boat along at six and sometimes eight knots, faster than Blue Swallow, as fast as a war galley rowing in to ram. Where they were going Blade wasn’t entirely sure, but they were going toward it fast. Fortunately Khraishamo knew just about everything anyone could know about handling boats, Blade wasn’t far behind the pirate, and Rhodina soon became a valuable hand on the ropes. When she wasn’t flat on her back or bent over the side with seasickness, she was in good health and spirits. There was plenty of water, they were too busy to eat even if they’d had any food, and the storm didn’t frighten her nearly as much as the prospect of a slow, agonizing death from thirst.
By the evening of the fourth day, Khraishamo’s very rough dead reckoning had them closing the shore rapidly. They shifted their course more to the southward, in order to keep offshore during the night. Running at high speed onto an unknown coast in the darkness would be an unnecessarily complicated way of committing suicide. The wind rose, though, and they found they had to make more headway to the east than they wanted to avoid broaching to and being rolled over by the waves.
None of them tried to sleep that night. They pulled on all their wearable clothing; belted on their knives, and sat while the boat plunged on through the roaring darkness.
Dawn came, showing them a high black cliff looming dead ahead. «The Black Head of Ryga,» said Khraishamo grimly. «Not the worst shipbreaker on the coast, but bad enough to do for us.» The surf beating against the foot of the cliff was throwing spray fifty feet into the air. For a few minutes the only question in Blade’s mind was whether he was going to drown or be smashed to pieces on the rocks.
Then Khraishamo noted that the current along the shore seemed to be setting them ever so slightly to the south. «Not much, but the Black Head’s not wide. We make a little southing, and there’s a good beach. Come on and haul.»
Khraishamo steered, while Blade and Rhodina hauled away with a will. A few more minutes, and Blade saw that the Black Head was no longer looming closer and closer each time he looked. They were still near enough to be drenched by the spray thrown up at the base. In a few minutes there was six inches of water in the bottom of the boat from the spray, and Rhodina started bailing furiously.
Gradually the deadly cliffs slipped away astern, while Rhodina struggled with the bailing pots, Khraishamo gripped the tiller, and Blade kept both eyes on the sails and both hands ready to trim them. A little while longer, and there was open water to port, with a low, hilly shoreline just visible over the wave crests and through the spray and mist.
It was then that the mast let go. With a rifle-shot crack it snapped off about a foot above the base. The pressure of the wind in the sail turned the mast into a club, flailing about wildly before the sail tore loose from the yard and flew off on the wind like a seagull. The yard whipped around, catching Rhodina in the back as she emptied a pot over the side. With a wild shriek she overbalanced and fell into the water.
Khraishamo let out a roar which drowned out the wind. There was rage, pain, and grief in the cry. Blade scrambled aft to grab the tiller as Khraishamo stood up in the stern-sheets. The pirate let out another roar as a wave lifted Rhodina’s head into sight and showed her swimming desperately. Blade was just reaching for the tiller when a larger wave than usual swept in. The boat heeled sharply, as Khraishamo’s standing weight affected its stability. Blade shouted: «Sit down, you fool!»
He was a breath too late. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the boat which had carried them safely so many miles across the Sea rolled over to port. Blade flung himself clear as it capsized completely, just in time to avoid being caught underneath. His foot struck hard against the boat’s upturned bottom, then it was gone, sunk or swept away.
Once he was clear of the boat, Blade didn’t fight the Sea. He knew that a good swimmer can make the water support him rather than swallow him, simply by not exhausting himself. He hoped Khraishamo and Rhodina knew this, but also knew there was nothing he could do for them except stay alive himself.
The current which had saved them from the Black Head still flowed, and it carried Blade southward as the waves pushed him toward shore. The combination of current, wind, waves, and shoaling water made for a choppy, steep Sea. Several times waves breaking over Blade swallowed him up or drove him deep under. Once he was sucked so far under that he began expecting every moment to hit bottom. That time he had to fight his way to the surface and reached it with the last breath in his lungs.
The fight cost him a good deal of strength, and he began to realize that the long open-boat voyage without proper food had taken more out of him than he’d thought. Getting sucked under again this way could be the end, and so could having to battle the waves for more than another few minutes.
Gradually, Blade saw the hills along the shore-grow clearer each time he rose on a wave, and the water around him turned brown with sand churned up from the bottom. He saw chunks of wood, clots of weed, a dead body that wasn’t Khraishamo or Rhodina. At last he slid down into the trough of a wave and struck bottom painfully hard, then rose, struck again, somehow managed to keep his footing, and plunged forward until his legs gave under him and he fell face-down on the damp sand.
After three weeks, he’d reached land.
At first he felt he could use another three weeks of lying here quietly to rest and recover. Then his judgment got the better of his aching muscles and joints and pulled him to his feet. He staggered forward until he was above high-tide mark, then saw that beyond the beach was a forest of scrubby, windblown trees. He kept moving until he was safely inside the trees, able to look along the beach in both directions but nearly invisible himself.
There was no sign of his comrades, but there was plenty of evidence that other ships had come to grief in the storm.
