Chapter VI

“I killed her,” I said.

The wind howled over the lantern platform and whipped ice down my cheeks before it could dry the tears.

“I didn’t mean—I didn’t want—I never saw—” Anyone actually die before. Before my living eyes, rather than in Two’s double-distance memories.

“And it wasn’t any use—we still c-couldn’t understand.”

Azo put her arm around me. It should have dried my eyes from simple shock.

“Heads’ work,” she said.

“Head’s—? How can that be Head’s work? To kill—!”

“To decide.”

My mouth shut on, Killing’s your work. Troublecrew’s.

“To decide what?”

She still had her arm around me. Hard, impossibly unaccustomed shield against the cold, even as she stared out to the sullenly darkening sea.

“The hard choices,” she said. “The ones no-one else can make. Not just for the blood. For the—capacity.”

She hitched a shoulder to the stairwell behind us, where Verrith was standing guard. “Like him.”

Like Therkon. In that moment when he had deliberately chosen, with pity and grief and anguish, to take the weight of a life on his own shoulders. The blood on his own hands.

I looked at my hands, clamped on the gritty stone. My mother’s palm shape, my father Sarth’s long, strong fingers. The blood, as on Therkon’s, invisible.

“Know it,” Azo said. “Rightly, be unwilling. Rightly, grieve. And then, do what must be done.”

Know what I did, I slowly understood. And carry the weight of that memory, as much a Head’s as the responsibility for House or empire, and as necessary, if you are to rule. And if your rule is to be good.

Azo said, “Like Tellurith.”

Another fury of air screeled over us while I worked out all that meant. Not simply a recourse to precedent. Full understanding of what I felt. Comfort, of the hardest sort. That I had done the right thing, however it hurt. Had done what my mother would.

When she felt I had mastered myself, she took her arm away. Reading her body language in turn, Verrith glanced from the stairwell. With an impassivity that carried its own signal, she said, “Chaeris, can you see them now?”

* * * *

Thankfully, they took us back down to the first floor, where the fort-commander and his staff evidently convened. A somber room with no adornment but the maps and charts on the walls, the piles of signals and reports on the commander’s table-desk. We all stood, whether by custom, or respect. Whether for me, or Therkon, or something else.

“My lady,” Therkon murmured, before the silence could grow painful. Very quiet, very formal. Knowing better than to express either sympathy or gratitude. “My lady, is there anything you would wish to say?”

Like Azo and Verrith, the officers were waiting. Trying not to appear greedy for whatever grains of value might have been won, but waiting, and hoping. That there might be worth for Dhasdein, at whatever the price.

When I could not answer immediately I felt Therkon give me one swift up-under-the-lashes glance. And turn to the fort-commander before he said, “The last word. Words. Did anyone recognize them?”

I only realized I had let my breath out when a voice among the officers replied, “‘Maer’. That means Shadow. On Greenhill, anyhow.”

The stifle of tension eased. Someone else added, “Most of the Archipelago. At least, where we know.”

“And the rest?”

A wave of mumbles to which I could add visual signals: Not me, unsure, Can’t tell, Never heard before. Then, hesitantly, another voice.

“‘Thassa.’ I think—that’s something like ‘sea.’ On the Mel’ethi coast.”

“Thassa,” Therkon repeated slowly. “Not ‘Sthassa’? Does anyone know . . .”

“Sthassa,” Two said. “Like ‘S’hurre’. Something of the Mother. Sacred. Different.”

Sounding startled, Therkon said, “Holiness?”

“Not . . . necessarily.”

In the tumbling pause I had time to think, Just another riddle with no answer, no sort of useable information. Just more loose, stray, uninterpretable words.

“Sea. Shadow. Something, perhaps, more.” No way to tell if Therkon shared my despondency. But after a moment, more tentatively, he added, “My lady. Can you tell us? The other words? Carsia? And, whatever you said?”

“Beyond sea. Whale road. Swan’s path.” I could translate them now. I was thankful Two let me have the say. “I must have remembered them. From where, I can’t tell, but they’re names. I think maybe poet’s names. Names for her island. Carsia.”

The fort-commander stirred and let out a sigh. “At least we have a name. Or another name. If it’s only one more,” grimly now, “nobody’s heard before.”

I looked up and he saw more than I wanted, for his face changed abruptly and he almost gestured to me. “My lady, whatever we can find’s a gift. We’ve begun a map, we can add on these. Beyond sea, it has to be a long way from whatever they call Centre in the Archipelago. Swan’s path, I swear I’ve heard that before.”

“West,” somebody said. “The sea-songs, on Grey and Greenhill, they’ll sing that. About losing, um, your girl. Or somebody like Deor or Ciannan, heroes. Taking the swan’s path. Going away, lost, dying. But properly it just means, going west.”

Another gust reverberated in the floorstone and the hair crept sharply on my neck. The woman from Carsia had indeed taken the swan’s path, far past her own island. Further than any of us could go.

Therkon must have been intensely aware of every breath I took, for he shot me one almost invisible sidelong glance and asked softly but firmly, “And the center? Where’s center, for the Archipelago? I thought maybe Phaerea?”

Phaerea meant nothing to Two, but it brought a rumble of general agreement. “Phaerea,” summed up the commander. “At least, t’was in our day.”

“Ah.” I just had time to silence Two’s, Where is it? What is it? Not now, I berated her, he’s balancing this group, this meeting, this entire fragile consensus like a half-blown bubble of glass on his fingertips. Wait.

“So then. We advance, if by hair-breadths. We have another island. Maybe, a direction. And . . . a name.”

With an artist’s timing, he did not leave them long enough to consider the ill-omens of that name. Decisively, however politely, he addressed the fort commander.

“Pheis, we must commend your alertness, and thank you for your warning. And,” a faint, decorous smile, “leave you most unjustly with the aftermath. You’ll see her safely—kindly? Bestowed? Like our own folk.” We can, the note said, give her that tiny recompense. “We ourselves should not, cannot linger. It must be past third watch?” At Pheis’ nod his mouth stiffened. “We must not miss the tide.”

Not if we, at least, were to reach the city before evening. If we, at least, were to find our safe way home.

The commander bowed in assent, but he was frowning when he straightened up. “Your Highness,” diffident but determined, “that wind’s making. It’s a long pull through the channels, even with the tide. You’d not consider waiting? Lying over the night?”

Therkon nodded, but the way he pulled the cloak around him was signal enough. “You’re very kind, Pheis, but if Aspis can’t get us home through this, some Army designers will be finding another job.” There was a quick, over-eager laugh. “Besides, I promised the fastest tidings possible. To the Empress.”

* * * *

The rowers at least had been briefly rested, and fed. Therkon politely but as adamantly declined refreshments for the rest of us, though he did allow the fort cooks to press on us a basket of bread and ready-heated soup. We clattered downstairs, over the now almost horizontal gang-plank, and they pushed us off.

The portcullis had hardly dropped behind us before I could feel the weather’s change. Aspis did not merely bounce now when she met the outside water, she bucked. A great sheet of spray flew abaft the bows as she swung toward the channel, and the captain, who had been unusually quiet as we worked out the gate, cast a glance ahead and silently sucked his teeth.

Beside me, Azo said in my ear, “Find a stay or a belaying pin. And hold on.”

I locked my hand around a belaying pin just below the gunwale, set to hold a brailing sheet. No-one, I could see, would try to raise a sail in this.

The wind shrilled and squealed around us, the spray flew from our bow no less than from the short, vicious little waves. The whole world had faded to the monochrome grey of the forts: sea, horizon, sky, pieced with white frills and scraps of foam.

Except in the wind’s eye. To the north-east.

Therkon was watching the livid, broadening bruise over the horizon there. The white wall of rain beneath was as ominous as the furious boil of cloud above. He looked almost as grim as Azo. In a moment he said to the captain, “A squall, do you think?”

The captain bit his lip. Then answered brusquely, “She’ll weather it. And the sooner we’re in the channel, the better.”

Therkon nodded. Then he too took a step back in grasp of the rail, and fastened his hand round a rope.

Whatever it was closed on us almost unnaturally fast: the wind quickened more fiercely, the light dimmed, we could hear the hiss of rain flying forward under the cloud’s feet. The captain shouted something to the steersman and grabbed the tiller bar himself. They pulled the Nikonian round to make the first turn in the channel. As she straightened out the air went dark, the rain whipped into us with a roar and the wind hit like a very warship’s ram.

Aspis literally staggered under the blow. The bow flew sideways as the whole ship reeled and ocean bucketed over us from fountains of mast-high spray. Even the captain’s bellows paled against the din. The deck pitched and suddenly flung me sidelong against the gunwale, Azo grabbed me with a hand like a steel hook and my sight vanished in a choking wave of red.

It ripped away. I had been hit by the breadth of Therkon’s cloak. He was wrenching it back around him and I would have been shouting at the captain, at anyone in earshot, but he was perfectly quiet: flattened to the rail just beyond us, eyes on the struggles of his ship.

And she was struggling. The wind-spasms gusted fit to break oar-looms as they whipped and whirled and the Nikonian was being mauled like a weaker boxer under a hail of blows. The captain and steersman battled madly at the tiller. I caught fragments of the rowing officer’s yells. The oars beat like a winded bird’s wings, to keep time, to meet or at least match the oncoming blows.

I had the belaying pin in both hands as the ship flung me to and fro like a pendulum until Azo yanked us both down on the deck. It isn’t natural, was all I could think. I had no need of Two’s memories, I knew already: this was one of the huge storms, the abnormal storms, that caught the freighters in open ocean. And now it was taking us.

With shattering suddenness the wind dropped. The sea roared and beat at us, the rain scourged down on us, but the wind had collapsed like a fallen tent. Suddenly Therkon and the captain, shouting beside me, were loud as heralds over the rest.

“—can’t hold her! . . . afford to spend them! Not in here!”

“. . . then? . . . make the fort?”

“—never do it—sea-room! Channel . . . tight! Have to run—!”

The captain gestured wildly ahead, then to the left, where the fort had vanished into a wall of rain, then behind and left again. Two and I understood together and my heart climbed right out of my throat.

The rowers could not hold her in the wind’s face. Nor could we reach the fort, and the channel was too narrow to manoeuvre. He wanted to run: to flee for a beleaguered ship’s only other, chancy safety.

Out into the open sea.

A minor gust screamed at us and fresh rain battered after it. Like his ship Therkon staggered. Then he swung one glance back to the fresh dark bearing down on us and as the wind quickened he shouted, “Yes! Now!”

The captain needed nothing more. He bawled something forward and as the next gust rose at us he and the steersman heaved on the tiller bar.

I know now that only something as light and deft as Aspis could have survived that move. She had just begun to swing when the wind hit and again the sea fountained round us, the bows flew up aslant. But the fulcrum moment had passed. The wind itself whipped her on past the deadly side-on broaching point, fatally vulnerable to wind and water both.

She crashed back level over the next wave’s crest and the wind struck again, but this time on her quarter. The blow only drove her forward, oars dipping now to balance rather than impel, and she flew like a gull on the gale’s impetus, up channel toward the open sea.

* * * *

I never saw the forts pass. They too were shrouded in the grey pall of spray and cloud and driving rain, but even my landlubber senses felt the Nikonian’s stride lengthen and the wave patterns steady under us. It did not need the way the captain eased his back to tell us the first peril was past. We had sea-room again.

They rigged a stormsail then, a ferociously dangerous if brief struggle that nearly put men overboard. The captain was determined to conserve rowers while he could. When it came to securing brails, Azo and I found ourselves urged perfunctorily if politely toward the tiny kennel abaft the steering oars that served as a captain’s shelter. The only cover on board. For all Two’s panic at losing information, I did not have the heart to resist. No matter that Therkon was still outside, and even Deoren had not protested it. If they lost us overboard, I could tell, it would be the final straw in the load of calamity.

Two has the full count of time. I seem to have been numb for much of it, after the first few hours, when the terror of anticipation slowly dulled, under the endless noise, the wind and water’s battering, the all-encroaching wet, the never predictable lunge or buck that would fling you against wall or deck. Break a doze, upset a position, and almost always spill the tiny precious rations of water or soup.

We blessed the Mother for that basket in the early part, despite the battle over its allotment. Therkon would take nothing unless his men did. Deoren insisted Therkon at least had to be fed. The captain claimed he and his officers would take shame not to match the sailors and rowers, who swore they could last on water alone. All of them were adamant that Azo and Verrith and I had no choice in sacrifice. And eventually, for the same reason we had stayed in the kennel, we gave in.

Two says the basket lasted three days. And that the mast snapped the first night, when they tried to rig a sea-anchor to slow us down. I do recall an unholy din of shouting and cracking, banging, crashing that reverberated through a hull which suddenly seemed to be lunging hither and thither like a riderless horse. That would have been when the mast went, and she lost steerage way, until they cut the wreckage clear and got her back on the first shift of oars.

Leaving two sailors overboard.

The sea-anchor rope parted the second morning, Two computes. To me nothing distinguishes it from the night, except a paler light creeping in the hatch cracks, and a view of salt-rimed, red-eyed, raggedly-wrapped wet and struggling scarecrows outside.

But somewhere in that light’s span a sudden and even more untowardly savage spasm of wind and wave caught Aspis like a striking snake and smashed oarlooms like twigs, losing us half the upper starboard oars.

And men along with them.

We were out of the kennel that day for good. I still cannot bear to remember the sounds of the injured as they struggled to free them from the shattered looms and benches, to get them astern through the ship’s bucking and the treacherously slippery spume, to lay them, close as packed fish, in the tiny shelter. And then the heart-breaking battle, with nothing but a bucket of water and a layman’s experience and a few bandages, against broken arms, legs, stove-in ribs . . .

The lower-bank oars were too short to use on deck, if they could have been freed. By evening I was down in what had been the bilges, shouting signals in the fragmentary lulls, as guards and off-shift oarsmen fought to shove lower oars out their ports. And then to block the ports themselves, with bare hands, a shipwright’s maul, pieces of scavenged sail and broken oar-loom,
naked swords.

That did give us more hands for upper shifts. With the sea anchor gone and the mast broken off short, leaving a mere rag of storm sail, she was almost unmanoeuvrable otherwise. As for the steersmen . . . Almost everyone took a hand at that, wrestling beside one or other of the red-eyed, sleep-walking experts who had been the captain and actual tillerman.

And by the fourth day, as Two accounts it, all of us could help to bail.

“Never spring a plank in less!” I recall the captain bawling at Therkon. “Most weatherly ship in the fleet!” His outrage was only rivaled by his injured pride. But even Aspis could not withstand the strain the torn-off starboard oars had put on her flank.

“She’s working,” I heard one of the sailors say hoarsely, as Azo and I came past him to the handles of the baulky, back-breaking, hand-mangling pump. Even deeper than the lower deck, dripping, raging gloom about us, the whole long submarine cavern stumbling and staggering under unseen blows, while we heaved to the point of exhaustion. And atop it, the terror that any fresh bellow of sea or wind might be the last. That those moving, twisting planks he pointed at would actually part, the water not merely leak but gush in from above and below and find us trapped there, with no chance but to drown.

“Keep pumping,” his mate muttered. “Gotta be land somewhere.”

They both winced. “Don’t matter,” the first growled, turning for the midships hatch, “which comes first.”

Taking the weight of the first pump stroke I gasped at Azo, “Don’t we want land? Surely?” Surely, any port would be a sanctuary in this?

Azo snorted with the remnants of her breath. “No say—how we’d strike it. Best chance. Lee shore.”

My own blood ran cold. I had heard the old water-tales of Amberlight. Even on the River, there was no peril greater than a leeshore. Caught with wind behind you blowing onto the land, in a ship that had no way of fighting clear.

* * * *

It was no better on deck, battered by the implacable wind, the relentless rain, a shivering misery as salt crept in to abrade through every fold of cloth or flesh. And the exhaustion. The hunger’s palpable weakening. The ongoing terror that never let up.

“Five days,” I heard the captain whisper as he collapsed into the shelter of a bulwark at the end of his latest shift. “Has to drop some time.”

Verrith measured him a cup from the water breaker. Rain we had in plenty, but the sea adulterated every drop that came aboard. The other scarecrow in a sopping red-black cloak put a hand for a moment on his shoulder, and I tucked my own blistered palms into my armpits and carefully did not meet his eyes, even though I knew he would not ask. Like me, he already knew the nature of this storm.

The wind and sea shrieked and cascaded round us, unremitting, undeterred. Saying for themselves, No cause for this ever to end.

That evening the worst injured rowers began dying.

The corpses had to lie among the living, with no more than the gesture of burial: Therkon, as most senior officer, reciting in a husk of whisper prayers they use in the Delta for the safe passage of a soul.

When he crawled out of the shelter the last time the light was going too, smothered in the maelstrom of wind and spray and endless, ear-breaking noise. I could feel everyone of us, from me to the off-duty oarsmen, literally dropping on our feet.

Therkon must have been near dropping himself. But as he straightened up with the now automatic clutch for a handhold, I saw his eyes go round the haggard faces, the eyes coal-red and inflamed as his own. Before he pulled himself a little straighter, and managed almost full-voiced words.

“Thank you, Deoren,” he said formally, to his Trouble-head, who had met him with a steadying arm at the shelter’s door. And then, more clearly, to the extra man on the tiller, “I will take this watch.”

And I felt the rags of will and resolution tighten and re-firm in everyone around me, for if he went on, how could we not?

* * * *

I have no real measure for the span of eternity before the light came back next, only a marker for its end. Staring out from my lair under the gunwale with a muzzy sense of change. And then sudden, shocking comprehension, as the ragged stump of mast, the splintered midship bulwarks, the rags of fighting screen, the listing, paint-stripped figurehead assembled, above the clusters of bodies huddled among it all.

And the water that raged up beside us, cascading over the bows, doubtless the water still crashing at the slightest chance on our stern behind me, had changed color. Under the white spray and inlay of thrashing foam, it was green.

Ice-cold, bitter deep southern green. But no longer the eternal grey of the storm.

The light strengthened. I craned up over the gunwale. And for the first time in six days, stared out not into a wall of spray and rain but over a wilderness of heaving ocean. The wind still flogged, the sea tossed us fiercely, but the air had cleared at last.

The others were rousing too. I heard murmurs, faint and hoarse, from cracked, bleeding lips. The slow lift of attention, and with it spirit, that ran like an intangible wave down the entire ship.

Beside me Azo dragged her elbows over the gunwale. On my other side, Verrith did the same. With the swift scrutiny of trouble­crew they stared about. Then across my head their eyes met in a long, expressionless look.

“What is it?” Alarm signals went off through every terrorstrung nerve. I got one of my own swollen, blistered hands on the gunwale and heaved myself up. “What’s wrong?”

After all, they did not have to explain. The light was creeping slowly but surely out into what, above the sea’s furore, would sometime be a blue if cloud-wracked sky. And beneath it, on the horizon where sea and air met, low, swaybacked, and already far longer than it was high, lay a tiny but unmistakable shape.

“Land?” I could hardly whisper. “Is it really land? At last?”

Azo looked at Verrith. Verrith lifted a shoulder in a shrug.

“What is it? What’s wrong? If it’s land, we’re saved, aren’t we? It’s all right?”

When neither of them answered, Two did the extrapolating for us both.

“Oh, Mother. You mean . . . it’s right ahead of us? The wind . . . it’s a lee-shore?”

After a moment, not looking at me, Azo answered.

“Unless the wind drops—yes.”

* * * *

Therkon knew what hope there was of that, as well or better than I. Not that the rest of them needed urging to struggle with the tiller and set to the oars with all their strength. Double-shifts, even three men sometimes to an oar-loom, as they fought with their swollen hands and their exhausted muscles to turn and hold us across the wind’s weight. To force us, however imperceptibly, to the right of that distant shape.

“Get past, into the land’s lee,” Azo did not have to explain, “get ashore if we can, lie to if we must.” Her glance down the working deck, past the great gap in the starboard oarblades, added the rest: if we can keep afloat long enough to postpone beaching till the seas go down. “Do that, and . . .”

The shrug finished for her. In that unlikely event, we might still have some hope.

It seemed to go on for another eternity, in the knife-edged wind, over the thrashing green water, under that tormentingly blue sky. Cruelest of all, to fight the last battle in sunlight, in what would otherwise have been a fair, cheering day.

We did fight, all of us. At times I struggled with an oar myself. And for all our efforts, against the wind, with Aspis’ dead weight of intaken water, the lack of sail or full oarbanks, it was not enough.

“If t’forsaken Adversary’d let the wind drop,” I heard the next oarsman pant as I fell out. “Just a knot or two . . . ’d be enough.”

And the man beside me gasped back, “Gonna all but clear it anyway. Just that last . . . bloody . . . cape.”

The ultimate cape on the island’s eastern side, the butt of the highest hill, that we could see so clearly now, sweeping down to the sudden bite of cliff. Slanted rock stacks black in the wave-spray, taller than a lighthouse, reared up from the welter at their feet as the waves raged in and exploded, throwing spray higher than the very cliffs. We could even hear the seabirds wheeling round them, a cacophony of indifferent, high-octave shrieks.

“Not just wind,” gasped the captain, struggling in his turn at the tiller bar, as I gravitated astern, where we all did, when we had a chance. “Got a—bloody—current—under us.”

Therkon hung on the bar beside him. The imperial rings had cut deep around his salt-caked, swollen fingers, but he was still pulling. Still sharing the load.

“Can we—ride it,” he panted too, “round?”

“Round?”

“Setting in—like that. Has to turn—doesn’t it? Off cliffs?”

Wind and birds screeled in eldritch dissonance. But the captain actually dragged his head up, squinting through the sunlight, forward over his failing ship.

His head dropped. His shoulders dropped too. A fresh gust took half his words away but I caught, “too dangerous. Like this.”

Aspis’ failing resources, I understood, left too narrow a margin for such risk.

Azo had been peering landward too. Suddenly she left her post, never six inches from me since the storm began, and moved over to the pair at the tiller bar. Stretching as if to throw her gaze up through the air like an arrow, she pointed landward. The wind robbed more of her woman’s voice, but her gesture and the fragments made sense enough.

“Eddy, back along.” She was pointing left, along the base of the cliff. “Hill this side. Bet money, inlet—beyond it. Under cliff.”

The captain said something, his head-shake demurring. Azo snapped at him, tone if not sense clear enough.

“. . . see it. I know how to look!”

He shook his head again, actually letting go the bar as he straightened. Therkon’s back stiffened under the load, though he did not lift his head. Azo yelled, pointing, all but growing agitated. The captain looked and looked again and shook his head furiously, doggedly, then bellowed back.

“Can’t risk it!” He jerked an elbow at Therkon. His eye and hand picked me out as well. “Oughta know that—yourself!”

Not dare such extra risk, with such precious cargo. Not with me aboard, as well as his own crown prince.

The intonation had been final. Azo did not demur. Just came back to me and Verrith.

And pulled my cloak undone, beginning to fold it in neat, tightly compacted squares, snapping something to Verrith. Who fossicked along the rail to find lengths of flailing rope, sliced them loose and handed them to Azo. Then sheathed the knife, her precious second throwing knife, and began undoing its straps from round her wrist.

Before she grabbed my own left arm and started buckling it on.

“What are you doing?” I was too stunned to argue, let alone think. “Azo? Verrith?!”

“Could need ’em,” Verrith was never less than expressionless, “more than me.”

She had the second sheath free, the one that went above her elbow, was scrabbling with my sleeve. Azo yanked rope under my arms and across my back, knotting corners of the cloak package, tying me into a virtual harness, I tried to stop them both and only managed a stagger on the shifting deck. “What in the Mother’s name are you doing? What is this? I’m going to freeze—!”

Neither of them replied. Azo just glanced round, then slid halfway to the mast-foot to scoop up a broken oar-loom that had washed up and lodged there, perhaps for all the previous night. She brought it over to stow under the bulwark beside us. Said flatly, “Taking precautions,” and gave me a look that added like a slap, Shut up.

Then she went back to staring through crystal-sharp sunlight across the tumultuous sea.

I opened my mouth and shut it again. The wind strengthened: and suddenly my cheek, attuned through those six days’ purgatory as keenly as any ancient mariner’s, picked up an alteration. I felt Azo twitch and raise her head even as I lifted mine.

The wind was shifting. Swinging, now, at the bitter last, slightly from the endless north-east. Coming round to east-north-east.

Pushing harder on Aspis’ injured quarter. Driving her prow in, that last fatal fraction, toward and not away from the land.

The captain had felt it. In his off-watch stupor the steersman, all but comatose under the bulwark, had begun struggling to sit up. And Azo and Verrith had caught it too.

Aspis took a fresh wave and stumbled, worse than before. A vision of those working planks flashed before my eyes. Therkon hauled his own head up and addressed something to the captain. The wind gusted, they both heaved instinctively on the tiller bar.

And the port steering oar snapped.

Both oars must have taken untold stresses in the length of the storm, I would have expected the tiller bar itself to go first. But it was the oar that broke, with a crack like firing qherrique and a shower of flying chips.

Then the tiller bar was slapping, even I could tell how much looser in the steersmen’s hold, the great blade and half the loom bobbed forlornly astern, and the rest hung down, like an amputated bird’s wing, at the Nikonian’s side.

Nobody had to gloss the calamity. Nobody shouted, or screamed, or even swore. All along the deck there was only a final, exhausted hush.

Then uproar broke out as the captain and officers started shouting, flogging numbed brains for the last desperate chance to compensate. I caught fragments of “deck-oar!” “double-watch!” Something about the sail. Men began running, or at least staggering, sailors, guards, off-duty rowers, the trembling deck reverberated to their hurry as the voices beat at the whistling air.

Therkon had heaved himself up from the tiller bar. The steersman had almost respectfully pushed him aside, taking the captain’s place. Somebody had found an upper-deck oar, they were running it astern through the ruck. Someone else was scavenging for unbroken rope, half a dozen others had begun heaving in the massive steering-oar loom. They meant to rig a jury oar, to hold her at least partly into the wind. They meant to fight to the bitter last.

The loom came up against the side and somebody swung himself astride it: hands proffered ropes, lashings were passed round the loom, then a dozen other hands shoved the rowing oar through the loops. Frantic with haste and weakness, several hands began to pull the lashings tight.

The knots were fast. The men around me touched breast or forehead or lips with knuckle-backs and I heard the mutter of invocations, to the River-lord, to sundry other gods. The big loom slid back through its port, and the blade hit with a splash.

Suddenly it was almost wholly quiet. Everyone had gone mute, waiting, watching, as the tillerman and his offsider took up pressure on the bar.

And Aspis moved. No more than a point or two, but her bow came round for all that, slowly, so slowly, pointing away toward the east.

The uproar this time was yells of glee, relief, furious delight. They scrambled about the deck as if they had never known six spent and starven days at sea. They even crowded over, at the captain’s shouts, to make her starboard side weigh heavier, to counteract the thrust of wind and sea.

The cape was close enough to see the seabirds now, a whirling white and grey flaked cloud. To hear the strike of each separate wave, the thunderous, reverberating impact of ocean on naked rock. But its seaward butt showed now, almost on the nearer side of the bedraggled figurehead. We had, again, a chance of getting past.

Azo and Verrith exchanged another look and leant on the bulwark, some unspoken purpose ebbing from their stances, postponed, if not revoked.

“Can I get out of this now?” I demanded. The ropes under my arms had already begun to chafe. “If it’s not bad luck?”

Azo answered brusquely, “Not yet.” Verrith muttered, “Don’t test the Mother too far.”

Aspis wallowed on, even I could tell how unhandily, her wounded, over-loaded hull struggling against the sea-scend. I had a painful memory of her leaving Riversend, that gay, bright fighting cock, and closed my eyes.

And felt through my feet the moment it happened, even before a pair of sailors burst up the hatchway, wild-eyed and dripping from head to foot, screaming, “She’s opened! Midships starboard! Planks gave way!”

I heard the uproar, and it beat on me insensibly as wind. Even for Two my brain had stopped. But Azo and Verrith’s eyes met over my head, one quick wordless look.

Then Azo yanked the oar from under the gunwale and cast another loose loop of rope around the loom and Verrith put a shoulder under mine and heaved me bodily onto the bulwark too.

“What are you doing?” I was too stupid to do more than shriek. Azo said through her teeth, “Hold this,” and slapped the oar-rope into my hand.

“I can’t! I won’t!” Understanding seared like lightning. “I won’t go without you!”

Azo got an arm under my leg. I started struggling in earnest. “Let me back! Let me back! Azo! Verrith, I won’t, I won’t!” No time to shout that others would have no chance to escape, even if there were they would fight for the ship, no time to invoke Therkon’s fate, the anguish awaiting the Empress. I fought like the proverbial maniac. And Azo and Verrith grabbed me either side and literally threw me in the sea.

The cold green water sank me, scraps of Azo’s last shout ringing like a warcry in my ears.

“. . . or what’ll I say . . . Tellurith?”

* * * *

The sea drank me like a pebble. I have no idea how far down we plummeted before the oar and my own lungs’ air-bladder drove us back toward the light. My head shot out into streaming, reeling vistas of green splashing water far too close to my nose under far too distant cloud-dappled blue sky. I thrashed aimlessly till by merest luck one arm hit the oar loom, that the rope had kept close by.

I got some sense back then. Enough to work my arm over it. To understand why Azo had tied my cloak on my back instead of leaving me to wear it. To realise why the oar had come with me. To comprehend that they had put me clear of the ship now, to avoid, if it foundered, any chance of being sucked down. To understand Azo’s last, so chancy plan.

To hold my head a little higher, and stop fighting for air, and let the sea bear me, as it would bear me, if I let it. Two had the memory of water-wise generations. She translated the tingle and push around my calves. It was the current. Taking us in, where the ship could no longer go.

Into, I realized slowly, the eddy Azo had so madly, so desperately gambled on. Into what she had guessed or intuited or just prayed would be an inlet, under those cliffs and back behind the intervening hill.

Because I, at least, was so low in the water that now the wind could not come at me. The ocean alone would take me to what might be safety, our other, most inveterate enemy at last annulled, the ocean’s indifferent malice turned against itself.

I shook water from my eyes and tried to see Aspis.

Green hills surrounded me, moving, sometimes colliding, ever-changing green hills with foam strung like sliding daisies on their flanks. The seabirds screeled, much closer, filling the register above the waves’ thunder with their din. But no human voices wove amid their clamour. The shifting horizon showed no barest glimpse or fragment that might be the work of humankind.

The eddy did set along the cliffs’ feet, though it was so close I shut my eyes and committed my soul to the Mother if Azo’s guess proved wrong. But then I opened my eyes again, unable to help myself. And the great rock stack that had been straight before me was perceptibly further to my right.

It seemed another eternity before the water motion steadied. Until the making tide carried the oarloom in, over yeastily thrashing shallows where my feet touched, where I could at last, with the onward swing of the tide, get my feet firmly set. And wade, stumbling, staggering, breast, waist, calf-deep, towing the precious oar-loom after me. To reach, at last, the brief, coarse sand-margin. Where I fell down, weeping, cloven between relief and anguish, but understanding to my bones’ marrow what it means to be cast up—disdained, thrown back, regurgitated—by the sea.