CHAPTER TWO
SINKING HOPES
Princess Bronwyn was hoping that she would drown. The storm was well into an enthusiastic second day, thereby outlasting the princess by at least thirty-six hours. Since she was never a good sailor even under the best of circumstances, the cyclone was an agony for her.
Although her mind was now morbidly preoccupied with preparing to welcome death, it had not been so a day and a half earlier, as her fleet variously steamed and sailed from the port; then her thoughts had been reflective and even introspective. She stood braced near the bow of the ship, which rose and fell like the ponderous head of a galloping workhorse. She had dressed for the occasion and was just as attractive in her sailor’s costume as she thought she was…far more so, in fact, since Bronwyn habitually underrated her personal appearance. She had procured a blousy red-and-white-striped shirt and a square red scarf, tied in a knot at the bottom of the V of the open neck; a short blue jacket and white bell-bottomed trousers that left her calves daringly bare. The present Princess Bronwyn was, she was more or less realizing, not the same princess who two years previously had entered upon what then to her was little more than a rebellious adventure. She had thought herself—and admittedly with some justification, if not reason—invulnerable. Cut off during her childhood and adolescence from most positive and honest human contacts, and later by the isolation enforced by Payne Roelt, she had retreated into fantasy and romance. In addition to her atlases, geographies and travel books, she had accumulated a library of lurid novels and penny dreadfuls—she had a nearly complete collection of Baron Milnikov’s unlikely adventures—and had finally convinced herself that the world could be exactly like the fictions with which she had replaced a less pleasant reality. She ultimately came to expect this to be so, apparently by force of her own will. Yet, ironically, she was no Romantic herself—though she often thought of herself as one, confusing, as many do, romanticism with sentimentality. She preferred a life of predictable perfection and did not particularly enjoy adventure, change, ambiguity, the unexpected or surprises for their own sake. Although she had never realized it herself—or if she had would certainly never have admitted it—what she enjoyed most about the fictional adventures she devoured was that she always knew exactly how they would turn out. Even the enthusiasm with which she had embarked upon the present adventure—so long ago!—was more than a little mitigated by the fact that she had been supremely confident that she knew exactly what the outcome was going to be…as though it were a play she had seen a dozen times. She had been vastly overconfident, as events proved. She now had ample opportunity to see the not entirely happy results of her self-centered vindictiveness.
Yet some things had changed. She was still on the same course she had set for herself that distant day in Blavek when she had stolen the letters that Payne had so imprudently sent to her brother, and she knew (though the thought was a complexly phrased one) that if she had known then how things would have turned out that she probably would not have considered for a moment doing what she had done. Revenge petty enough to have qualified as a pernicious practical joke would not have seemed to have been worth everything she had since gone through. Yet, looking back on events from this end of the journey, she felt as though she were, indeed, fully justified in her actions; that is, her present, revised motives now retroactively affected everything that had transpired before.
She felt immeasurably mature.
She had meanwhile discovered a drawback to the shedding of her self-interest. She was becoming uncomfortably aware of what she had demanded of others. Hitherto blindly and blissfully unaware of anything other than the goals she had set for herself, she had been neither aware nor particularly interested in what their achievement had cost anyone else. Now she had time to consider what she had been demanding and what had been paid unquestioningly, generously and, it appeared, thanklessly.
Every friend and ally she had made since leaving Blavek had ultimately been repaid with disaster. The gypsies who had helped her escape the city were now, as far as she could guess, at best languishing in some prison cell (or cells); her beloved cousin, Baron Piers Monzon, was dead, as was his family and hundreds of others both friend, family and stranger; Duke Mathias had actually loved her, in his way, and her singlemindedness and self-interest had managed to alienate him—so thoroughly that he was only carrying through with his part of this expedition because he was a man of his word (and she was not a little glad that the duke was on the flagship of the fleet, the Winged Dugong, rather than here with her on Basseliniden’s ship), and she was so practiced, accustomed, and addicted to using people that she saw no reason to release him from his promise. Thud had completely vanished—the only person who had ever cared for her wholeheartedly and unselfishly: he had first risked his life for her before he had even known who she was (and what would Bronwyn have thought had she known that, more or less at that very moment, and more than a thousand miles away in a straight line, Thud was being prepared to be burnt at the stake? Perhaps, for her sake, it is a question best left rhetorical)—Baron Milnikov was gone, too, no one knew where; and Gyven…Oh, dear,Gyven is gone, too. And he’s the first person I ever really cared for.
Bronwyn knew that each person she had met along the course of her joumey had borne some sort of message or lesson for her—that was the sort of thing that people like that did. However, she was not at all certain what it was she was supposed to have learned.
With any luck, her brooding and ill-humored mind continued, a few weeks will see the end of all of this. Leaning on the forward railing of the Sommer B., braced with stiffened arms, she looked at the darkening horizon. Beneath her the bow of the ship spread a coverlet of foamy lace over the transparent green water. Her hair whipped around her face like a snapping auburn pennant. The wind smelled of salt and fish and iodine. She had never dreamed that such a simple action as stealing a few letters could escalated into anything so dramatic. She had only intended to carry the papers a few hundred yards, turn them over to the Privy Council, discredit Payne and her brother and gloat for a month or so. Now, going on two years later, she was at the head of an army sailing to invade her own country. She had been scarcely eighteen then; now she felt so much older than twenty.
Things do change.
In spite of a threatening horizon and a freshening breeze that was cold and damp, she felt optimistic and looked forward to what she expected to be a journey of only a few days. After landing on the shores of Tamlaght she could foresee no reason why the liberation of her homeland should be little more than a token show of force. Although she was indifferent at best to sailing (in spite of her youthful and romanticized fascination with ships) she found herself looking forward to the brief voyage. Within hours of leaving Diamandis Antica, however, the sky had become increasingly threatening and the symptoms of a tempest became manifest. The sky looked bleached and misty and fine strands of cirrus clouds on the horizon were replaced by masses of heavy-looking cumuli that obscured the sun. The upper stratum of cloud was traveling much faster than that beneath, an indication that before long the accumulated vapor would descend, changing the coming gale into a tempest. The sea began to rise in swollen billows. Of the swarms of sea birds that had accompanied the ships, only the gloomy petrels remained. The steady breeze freshened to gusts of up to forty miles an hour and Basseliniden, a worried look on his face, ordered the sails shortened. In the captain’s cabin, the needle of the barometer began to fall rapidly. The atmosphere was as heavily charged with electricity as a Leyden jar. There was a crackling and tingling whenever Bronwyn brought her hand near any metallic object.
The storm burst late that afternoon, when the convoy was a hundred miles from port, and the sky fell upon them like a collapsing circus tent.
Though the cyclone as a system had come from the north, its circular nature made the local wind come from the southwest at first, scattering the little fleet into the midst of the Mostaza Sea and miles in the direction opposite to that which it wished to go. The helmsman of Bronwyn’s ship was forced to lash himself to the tiller to prevent himself from being washed overboard by the monstrous waves. The low-lying clouds, racing and billowing past the Sommer B., seemed as though they were sponges being saturated by the waves.
At seven o’clock a torrent of rain fell, which had no effect on either wind or waves. The drops stung like buckshot as they were blown almost horizontally by a wind that was now gusting up to eighty miles an hour and more. Waves more than fifteen feet in height crashed into the Sommer B. at speeds of over thirty feet per second. The ship shuddered with each blow like a punch-drunk boxer.
As the night deepened, the intensity of the storm increased. Bronwyn glimpsed the last of her fleet painfully struggling in the distance, its lights finally engulfed by the impenetrably black vapors.
Near midnight the sky was laced with lightning; it seemed as though it had caught fire and the princess had to shade her eyes from the brilliance. A complex and terrible noise filled the air, composed of the howling wind, the roaring waves and the explosions of thunder. The wind now came from all directions.
The lightning seemed as though it were being swept from the atmosphere by the rain, and a torrent of electric flames fell upon the deck of the ship. Each drop of water, charged like a battery, was transformed into a dazzling spike. They spit and exploded like fireworks when they struck the deck. The tips of the masts and yards spat long, snaking sparks like one of Doctor Tudela’s machines and every line and sheet glowed and hummed like a Geissler tube. Enormous bolts struck at the towering wavecrests and the Sommer B. seemed to be in the midst of a whirlpool of flame.
Bronwyn had at first taken refuge in her cabin, but it was impossible to stand upright and she couldn’t remain in her pitching bunk. The ship creaked and groaned as though it were being ripped apart by gigantic hands, and finally the fear of being trapped in the confining cubicle overcame her terror of the open deck.
The storm had now exceeded in violence even that memorable hurricane of aught aught which had devastated the Isles of Filizsi, when even heavy cannon were torn from their carriages. What little sail Basseliniden maintained in order to have some control over his ship was carried away. It was now under bare poles that the Sommer B. was driven. In spite of the lack of canvas, the remaining hull, masts and rigging together gave enough purchase to the wind that the progress of the ship was scarcely impeded. Its rolling became fearful. Enormous waves followed one upon the other in rapid succession, traveling faster than the Sommer B., and there was now the danger of one catching the ship full astern. Without sail there was no possibility of escaping that peril. Only what little headway the engines still provided and the adroit skill of the helmsman saved them so far.
The deck was almost constantly under water. Bronwyn lashed herself to the deckhouse by passing a heavy rope around her waist. The hatches were still tightly closed, she was glad to see. Should even one fail, the ship would inevitably fill and founder.
All of her discomfort had passed away in the excitement she always felt when confronting Nature exercising her most elemental processes.
Bronwyn brushed the heavy mats of sodden hair from her face and looked in amazement at the primal chaos around her. The slim, raked funnel had been torn from its roots, and black smoke swept along the deck from the ragged crater that remained; gone, too, were the tubalike ventilators and the princess wondered how long the engineer could now keep the boilers going.
Her answer came in the form of a sharp crash distinctly different from the pounding of the monstrous waves. A towering fountain of sparks shot from the deck before being swept away by the gale. Several more loud reports were heard, and clouds of dense smoke poured from the riven searns of the deck. A single tongue of flame licked up from around the base of the mast.
A hand grasped her by her upper arm.
“Bronwyn!” shouted Basseliniden. “What are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t stay below!”
“You were wise! The boiler’s exploded and there’s probably a fire!”
“Fire! What are we going to do?”
“There’s nothing we can do! We have to stay with the ship!”
“Aren’t there lifeboats?”
“There’s a single longboat, but it’d be worse than useless to launch it in this sea!”
“Captain! What about the armory? What if the fire reaches that?”
“I don’t know!”
“The explosives are in the hold, is that safe from the fire?”
“No place on the ship is ultimately safe from the fire, if it goes on long enough!”
Still grasping the rope that bound Bronwyn’s waist, Basseliniden suddenly stood as erect as possible, looking past the girl. “You men there!” he cried into the darkness. “What’re you doing?”
“What’s happening?”
“The fools! They’re launching the boat!”
“What?”
“They’ll be lost for sure!” The captain made his way across the pitching deck, one hand clutching the pistol he had drawn from his waist. Bronwyn could just make out his tall, slim figure against the billowing clouds of vapor and spume. She heard him shout something and in retum she heard the sharp crack of a pistol. Basseliniden had quickly ducked behind the stump of the mast, but she heard the smack of the bullet as it hit the deckhouse wall beside her. Bound as she was, she suddenly felt like the target for a circus sharpshooter. There were flashes from the captain’s gun as he answered the mutineers, then she saw him clutch his shoulder as he fell to the reeling deck. A wave broke over the steamer and, before he could right himself, Basseliniden was washed against the bulwarks, not far from her feet. He grasped feebly for purchase, but Bronwyn could see that the next wave would take him overboard.
She quickly unwound the rope that held her to the stanchion. Tying one end to the metal pipe and the other to her belt, there seemed to be just enough slack to allow her to safely cross the deck to where the captain was Iying limply.
She had reached him when another foaming wall of water broke over the ship, sweeping across its deck; at that moment she wrapped her arms as tightly as she could around his waist. She thought that either the rope would snap or she would be cut in two. The water passed, leaving her choking and half blinded but still clutching the semiconscious captain.
“Captain!” she cried, shaking him. “Captain!”
His only response was to paw feebly at her ragged sleeve. She could see the dark blood welling from the hole in his coat.
The Sommer B. suddenly lunged into the air, atop a mountainous wave, heeling so far to port that the girl thought that it would certainly turn turtle and capsize. Below, in the black, glassy trough, she caught a momentary glimpse of the crowded, wallowing longboat. There was another explosion of foam and when she again looked for the boat, it was no longer there.
Bronwyn could not have told how many hours she lay there, with one cramped arm holding onto the captain and the other hooked around a massive pulley. Lightning wove a cocoon of white-hot wire around the ship and the thunder was not so much a sound as a force that pummeled her continously like a sandbag. Muffled reports shook the deck, which she could feel distinctly growing warmer. When the ship rose on a wavecrest and the water momentarily cleared from its decks, the glistening sheet steamed, and she could see smoke oozing from every crack and seam. She spat hair and salt water from her mouth and wondered where everything had gone wrong, eventually coming to the grim and depressing conclusion that it was sometime just after her fifth birthday.
At some hour during that long night Bronwyn passed into a useful state of semiconsciousness. When she awakened, she was still clutching the captain, who was snoring stentoriously but evenly. The brunt of the storm had passed. The sky was like a low, flat ceiling of dirty plaster, and the sea was leaden. The Sommer B. rolled sluggishly on long, heaving swells. The chilly drizzle that drifted through the heavy air actually managed to make the soggy princess feel wetter. The deck steamed in the early morning light, but for a reason that had to do with neither the ambient temperature nor the dew point: the deck was hot to the touch. Mixed with the steam were thick pennants and tendrils of smoke, like feather boas trailing after an ailing dowager.
She thought that the poor Sommer B. Iooked as though it had just been through, well, a hurricane. Its deck had been stripped of virtually every appurtenance save the deckhouse itself. The rakish funnel raked no more and the ventilators had been reduced to useless stumps. Both masts were gone; the big mainmast, however, still hung over the opposite side of the ship in a tangle of cables and splintered wood. It thumped regularly against the hull with a dismally hollow sound. Even to the princess, who was no expert, the ship was obviously a derelict.
She wondered what she should do.
Food was one of the first subjects to enter her mind, as it so often was. She knew that the galley was below decks, but that was also where the fire was. How far had it spread? She wasn’t certain of the relationship of the boiler room to the galley, nor, for that matter, of the boiler room to the hold, where their store of munitions was kept—including a large quantity of high explosives. She knew that they would need fresh water even more than food, and that, too, was kept below.
She carefully moved from beneath the sleeping Basseliniden. His wound seemed no worse, and, in fact, had stopped bleeding. So far as she could tell, the bullet hole was not near any organ she could remember as being vital to life. It appeared, indeed, to have passed cleanly through his shoulder, just below the collarbone. It would hurt like anything, she easily imagined, but she was equally certain that he would live. The captain was sleeping easily, if deeply; his breathing was regular and, when she carefully pressed her fingertips to his neck, so also was his pulse.
She left the captain where he was Iying and headed toward tbe bow of the ship. The galley was in the forward part, she knew, ahead of the boiler room, she believed. There was a skylight and hatch there and when she opened it only a whiff of smoke wafted from the opening.
Emboldened, she went on down the steps. There was little light, only what came from the open hatchway behind her. Oddly, what had seemed perfectly familiar to her only the day before now seemed strange and sinister.
The galley was at the end of a short corridor. As she proceeded along it, she was uncomfortably aware of the absence of familiar sounds and the presence of others that were unfamiliar but disturbingly suggestive. Chief among the latter was the regular thumping of the dislodged mast—she could feel the vibration of each crash. There was an acrid odor in the air that must be from the fire somewhere ahead of her, amidships, mixed with the salty, fishy scent of seawater.
The galley, when she reached it, proved to be a shambles. The deserting crew had evidently raided it hastily before abandoning the ship. The pantry appeared to be entirely empty. She did find a few bottles of root beer that she nestled within her jacket.
Somewhere below the galley she knew there was a storeroom for the cook. She went out the door through which she had entered the galley and took the first companionway down she found. She was descending into a murky darkness that, with the dim light behind her, she could not penetrate. She was, consequently, startled when not halfway down she stepped into water. As her eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom she saw that water filled the passageway halfway up its walls. The surface, covered with a scum of oil and debris, surged sluggishly from side to side as the ship rolled with the swells. It didn’t take a better sailor than Bronwyn to realize that something was seriously amiss. In any case, finding the storeroom was clearly impossible, at least for the present.
Regaining the deck, she found that Basseliniden was sitting upright and looking, as much as possible under the circumstances, fairly chipper. Still, his face was grey and he would have had two days’ growth of stubble had he not already had a beard.
“Ah! there you are!” he greeted her. “I thought that you might have gone off foraging.”
“Didn’t find much,” she answered, placing the bottles at his feet. “I suppose there’s some nourishment in root beer. It’s made from roots, isn’t it?”
“We seem to be in something of a pickle, don’t we?” he asked, picking up one of the bottles and neatly flicking off its cap with the blade of his pocket knife.
“More than you may think,” she said, and told him about the water she had found.
“Hm. The mast must have sprung some seams below the waterline. Well, we’ll see if we can’t cut it loose before it does even more damage.”
“How are you feeling?”
“How do I look?”
“I hope you look worse than I do. Let me see your shoulder,” she asked, pulling back his shirt before he had a chance to reply. “Ugh. It’s awful.”
“Here, let me see that,” he said, moving her aside and craning his neck to see his own collarbone. “It’s not as bad as all that. It hurts worse than it is, if you follow me. See if you can find some water and I’ll clean it up.”
“Do you have any bandages?”
“There might be a first-aid kit in the wheelhouse, whatever’s left of it.”
“I’ll see what I can find.”
The wheelhouse still stood, though its roof had been carried away and its windows blown out. Fastened to one of its walls was a metal box with the first-aid symbol stenciled on it. She took this back to the captain.
“I don’t know if there’s any fresh water I can get to,” she said.
“Well, I don’t suppose it would kill me if you used seawater. The salt might even help. The antiseptics in the kit ought to make everything come out even.”
The captain was more or less right. Once the wound was cleaned it looked less threatening if not less ugly. The princess did a neat job of dressing it.
“It’s going to be stiff for a long while,” he said, “and it’ll hurt something awful, but then, that bastard’s aim could have been better, too. Or worse, depending on point of view.”
“Let’s see what we can do,” he continued, “about that mast before it staves in the whole side of the ship.”
He stood, and immediately wobbled, grasping the wall of the deckhouse behind him for support.
“Woo! I did lose a little blood, I think.”
“Finish that drink,” advised Bronwyn, “and give the sugar a chance to get in your system.”
The jettisoning of the broken mast was a more or less simple operation. Bronwyn wielded the axe and worked under the expert direction of the captain, so that the tangle of lines would be cut away in the safest order. The princess pulled off her short sailor’s jacket and tossed it over a belaying pin, then rolled up the sleeves of her blouse. She was barefoot and the cuffs of the flaring seaman’s trousers came to just below her knees. She had her russet hair pulled back tightly from her face and tied with a piece of string at her nape. She looked competent and strong and her muscles slid beneath the tanned skin of her arms like ripples in a crucible of molten bronze.
Once her chore was done, Basseliniden peered over the side and inspected the hull.
“How’s it look?” the princess asked.
“Not very good, I’m afraid. Feel how she’s wallowing? How sluggish she feels? We’ve probably been taking on water all night. How far up did you say the water was in the lower passage?”
“Halfway up the wall. Are we sinking?”
“Yes, but I don’t know which fate awaits us first: drowning or burning. Look at the smoke: it’s gotten heavier.”
“Just feel the deck,” she replied. “It’s almost too hot to touch. What if the water puts the fire out?”
“That’d be fine, but we’d still be sinking. And don’t forget, it’s not just the fire, it’s the explosives we have on board.”
“I haven’t forgotten. So we’re to be drowned, burnt or blown to bits?”
“Well, I don’t know in what order they’ll come, but those appear to be our choices.”
“Can’t we get off the ship? Couldn’t we make a raftt?”
“Maybe, but I’d like to get some idea of where we are first. I wish I could see the sun.”
“Couldn’t you just as easily find our position in a raft?”
“Probably,” he said, turning to her, “but I don’t think we’re in any present danger of sinking, not immediately, at least. That is, the ship is certainly going down eventually, but she’s sinking so gradually that, all things being equal, we can take some time thinking about what to do.”
“And things not being equal?”
“We ought to abandon ship as quickly as possible.”
“What can we make a raft from?”
“We can tear planks from the deckhouse. And there are plenty of spars; they should do if we can lash them together. Do you think you could help move them?”
“I don’t know.”
Bronwyn followed the man toward the wreckage that was piled in the middle of the deck. She looked with dismay at the destruction around her: the Sommer B. Iooked like an enormous dog had been worrying at it, like a bone that had been rolled around under the furniture until the saliva had picked up all sorts of forgotten fuzz and debris. It also had the same shaggy, disheveled look of a dead cockroach found under a sink.
“Just look at your beautiful ship, captain!”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s destroyed! Why, even if it weren’t on fire and sinking, it would be unsalvageable.”
“It’s unfortunate but it doesn’t really matter because it isn’t my ship.”
“What do you mean, it’s not your ship?”
“I’m a pirate; why should I want my own ship when I can have someone else’s?”
“But I thought that you always had the Sommer B.”
“I’ve always had a ship called the Sommer B.—I never said it was always the same ship. This was originally the Flying Phalander until I relieved her owner of the burden.”
“I see.”
“You know I was originally a smuggler and only got into piracy more or less by accident. It just seemed like a natural extension of what I’d always been doing.”
“I could see where that could happen.”
“I’ve no particular love for the sea, however, and I might as well admit now that I’d always pretty much left the actual operation of my ships up to my seconds-in-command. I’m more of an administrator, an idea man, you might say.”
Bronwyn did not consider that a particularly encouraging confession.
The construction of the raft took a full day, during which time the Sommer B.’s deck sank further toward sea level; the ship rolled ever more sluggishly. Whatever equilibrium it had been enjoying had al1 too obviously been lost, and the almost imperceptible settling now became a noticeably steady sinking. Basseliniden and the princess managed to build a small, ungainly, unattractive but serviceable raft. It was securely constructed of a dozen spars cut to length and lashed together, crosswise, one above the other, by strong ropes. A platform made of planking torn from the deck house rose nearly two feet above the water. The captain had fixed a rough step near the aft end of the raft so that a mast might be erected there.
It was late in the afternoon, nearly evening, before they we finished. They hadn’t more than a moment’s time to appreciate their handiwork before there was a tremendous crash that jarred the ship from one end to the other. The Sommer B. heeled far over to port and Bronwyn just barely avoided being crushed by the raft as it slid rumbling across the deck, smashing the bulwarks into splinters .
“What happened?”
“We seem to have run aground.”
“Aground? We’re in the middle of the ocean! There’s nothing out here for hundreds of miles.”
“You’re only seeing the top. We’ve probably run onto a shoal in the Grand Bank.”
“Now what?”
“It’s only an incident. Nothing’s really changed. We still need to get onto the raft as soon as we can.”
“The ship won’t sink if it’s stuck on a shoal, will it?”
“I don’t know. What if the tide’s out right now? If the water level rises, it could float us off and then we will sink.”
“Well, is the tide in or out?”
“How would I know?”
The launching of the raft, they discovered, had now become complicated by the angle of the deck and the fact that the raft was now wedged into the breach its corner had punched in the bulwark. They first had to secure the raft by tying a cable from it to the remaining stump of the mast, to prevent the raft from falling into the sea prematurely. Once this was done, they began the laborious task of cutting away the shattered lumber. It was now quite dark: neither moons nor stars were visible through the low, level canopy of heavy vapor. Bronwyn and the captain had to work by the light of the single unbroken hmp they were able to find. Bronwyn again wielded the axe and Basseliniden a heavy pry bar. Her muscles ached painfully from the previous day’s labor and she fought to keep them from cramping. She had to consciously force herself not to panic and try to work too quickly; more would get done by deliberation and steadiness: a difficult thing to do when facing such a literal deadline. She knew all too well that whatever condition the tide was in, it would be changing within a matter of hours…at best six, at worst any moment. Dual moons made such calculations difficult even for one who knew how to make them, which Bronwyn was not—and neither, apparently, was Basseliniden.
In spite of their best efforts and most fervent hopes, the tide turned early. And, as Basseliniden feared, they had been at low tide. Soundlessly and steadily, the water above the shoal deepened and Bronwyn felt the ship almost imperceptibly begin to shift. Then, with a groan, it slid from the sandbar into the deeper surrounding water. It did not right itself, however, and the deck remained steeply slanted to port. Instead, and to the princess’s acute distress, the ship continued to settle into the water until the small waves began to lap at the breach in the bulwark.
“We’re sinking!”.
“We certainly are.”
“What’re we going to do?”
“We’ve got to get the raft launched before the ship carries it under, and us with it.”
There was a sudden rumbling, hissing sound and thick white clouds burst from every seam and opening.
“What’s happening?” cried the princess.
“Well, something good, for what it’s worth: the water’s put out the fire.”
“Well, that’s wonderful news, isn’t it?” she replied sarcastically. “How’re we going to launch the raft? It’s still jammed into the bulwark.”
“It’s almost free. If we can cut that piece there loose, it’ll slide right off the deck.”
The captain was perfectly correct: a single blow from Bronwyn’s axe splintered the remaining wreckage and she was only just able to leap back as the raft thundered from the deck and into the water with a splash that soaked them both.
“Quickly now!” cried Basselinden, unnecessarily. “Onto the raft! The ship’s going down!”
Bronwyn vaulted the bulwark and would have landed with both feet squarely on the raft had it been beneath her. She surfaced spitting, choking, gagging and flailing for a grip upon the raft. Unless one counts the time she waded and swam a short distance in Stuckney Bay, just downstream from Glibner, this was the first time in Bronwyn’s life that she had found herself, willingly or otherwise, immersed in seawater. She was only immediately conscious of two things: that she felt as though she were suspended above a bottomless black abyss, which for all practical purposes she was, and that she was swallowing a liquid tbat had been home and shelter to countless generations of sealife, as well as their toilet and graveyard—and how many hapless seamen and travelers were dissolved in the very water she was now inhaling?
Basseliniden, who had made a much more successful transfer from ship to raft, pulled the sodden and disgusted princess aboard. She shivered and spat.
“There she goes!” he cried, pointing behind her. Bronwyn turned in time to see the Sommer B. slip from the sandbar that had trapped her.
“No she doesn’t,” the princess replied, for the ship, after coasting for a few yards, settled until it reached an equilibrium, its deck awash and only the remaining masts and deckhouse roofs showing above the waves.
“Well, what d’you know about that?” said the captain, a little awestruck.
“What’s that?” asked Bronwyn, indicating a point just beyond the now nearly invisible ship.
“What’s what?”
“Over there, see it? Doesn’t it look like someone in a small boat or on a raft?”
The coincidence would be ridiculous and the captain said as much.
“No, look! I’m sure of it! They’re waving a flag or something!”
“What is this? A convention of castaways?”
“Who are they?” she asked, ignoring the sarcasm.
“ ‘Who is it?’ might be a better question. There’s only one person.”
Whoever it was had evidently just taken notice of the captain and the princess; Bronwyn saw a dark figure erect itself and begin semaphoring with its arms. The fellow castaway was still much too far away to be more than a mere silhouette against the leaden sea and sky.
“Can we get to him?” she asked, taking off her wet jacket and waving it in broad circles around her head, in answer to the stranger’s signals. The cheap sailor’s blouse she wore beneath clung to her like wet tissue and she shivered in the light breeze, although the air itself was warm.
“I don’t see how. We’ve no way yet of either steering or propelling the raft.”
The problem was a moot one as it related to the princess and ber companion; once the distant figure perceived their answering signals, he or she promptly threw up a ragged-looking sail. Although the breeze was only a very mild one, the stranger immediately began to draw perceptibly closer.
“I hope he has some food,” murmured the princess hopefully.
It was something like half an hour before the stranger approached Bronwyn’s refuge, riding up and down the long, low swells like a toboggan.
“You know,” said the captain, “that figure looks uncannily familiar.”
“It does indeed. In fact, it should. It’s Professor Wittenoom.”
“It couldn’t be!”
“Why not?”
“Well, he’s…I don’t know…I mean, Wittenoom?” he stammered, as though that word explained everything. In fact, it did. The last person one might expect to meet adrift in the midst of the South Mostaza Sea would be the cadaverous, unworldly chief scientist of the Londeacan Academy of Sciences.
“What happened to the Smiling Scrod?” the captain wondered aloud. “Did the entire fleet go down in that storm?”
“I haven’t given the other ships a single thought,” replied the horrified princess. “Do you think that they might have? What’ll we do if they did?”
“I don’t know,” said Basseliniden seriously. “We’ll just have to see.”
The captain began waving his own jacket at the approaching waif, while the princess completely forgot about the professor and his plight.
Holy Musrum, What if the fleet is lost? What will I do then? Without Thud. Without Gyven, without the Baron, without the Duke, without my army…what am I to do? Sue Payne and Ferenc?
By now she could hear the thin, reedy shouts of Wittenoom who, apparently, had finally recognized his fellow castaways. After a few more moments, his raft drew to within a few yards of the princess’s. The professor deftly struck his sail, which Bronwyn now saw was nothing more than a large blanket, and coasted to a halt.
“Hello, princess!” he shouted cheerily in greeting. “Hello, Captain Basseliniden! How are you?”
“Hello, yourself,” replied the captain. “What happened to your ship?”
“My ship? Oh, that really was unfortunate. Did you know that we were hit by a monstrous tempest? It was terrible!”
“Yes, we rather guessed.”
“It was the worst I’ve seen since aught aught.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know if I can adequately explain it to you. All I can remember is a great deal of darkness, noise and water. Fortunately, so it appears, I’d thrown myself onto a hatch cover and was clutching its grid like a limpet when the ship capsized and I and the hatch cover were thrown free. That’s really all I can remember until daylight. I’d been wrapped in this blanket when I rushed onto the deck to see what all the disturbance was about, so I employed it, along with a little wreckage that’d been providentially floating nearby, as a sail and here I am.”
“It’s lucky for you that you knew how to sail.”
“Me? I’ve never been on so much as a rowboat before in all my life!”
“Then how…?”
“Simple aerodynamics. Elementary, really, though it isn’t strictly within my field.”
“Professor,” interrupted the princess, “do you know anything about navigation? Where are we? How can we get to land?”
“That’s ridiculously simple.”
“You know where we are, then?”
“No, I haven’t the slightest idea. I meant that it’ll be simple enough to find out. It just hadn’t occurred to me that it might be useful to try.”
“Let’s get the rafts together, first,” offered Basseliniden.
“Excellent idea!” responded the professor.
By tying a light cord to one of his shoes (the princess having lost hers back on the Sommer B.), the captain was able to throw one end to the waiting professor, who then used it to draw to himself a heavier rope. A few minutes later, the two rafts were side by side and while the captain lashed them securely, the princess greeted Wittenoom with a handshake.
“It’s good to see you, professor. Do you have any food?”
“Not a crumb, I’m afraid. I take it from your question that you’re a little short of provisions yourself?”
“Everything was lost with the ship.”
“That ship?” the professor asked, pointing to the Sommer B., whose mast stumps and deck house still protruded above sea level.
“Yes.”
“Reached a state of temporary equilibrium, has it?”
“If you say so,” replied the princess, a little sourly.
“Well, tben, if there are still any supplies on board, why can’t we recover them?”
“The galley and its storeroom are under water, for one thing.”
“So?”
“And the ship is likely to sink any second, for another.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. If was going to sink suddenly it would have by now, I would say.”
“You’re not suggesting that we try to get back aboard it, are you?” asked the horrified princess.
“Why not? Are you suggesting that we starve, instead?”
“Of course not!”
“Well then, there you are!”
“What’re you suggesting?” put in Basseliniden.
“Surely there must be a large quantity of canned and preserved goods that haven’t been harmed by their brief immersion. It should be simple enough to recover them.”
“Simple enough for whom?”
“Why, you, surely, captain,” answered the professor with some surprise. “Who else?”
“Who else?” repeated Basseliniden.
“If there’s a chance that there is food that we could use,” put in Bronwyn, “I think you should try and get it.”
“You do, eh? Well, you can just forget it.”
“What do you mean?”
“What did it sound like?”
“It sounded,” said the princess with a sneer, “like a coward talking.”
Basseliniden stiffened and for a moment he didn’t reply. “My courage has nothing to do with it. It’s just that the risk hardly seems necessary. We can’t be more than fifty miles in any direction, except north, from some shore. And these are busy waters, besides. Why should I risk my life for a few soggy groceries when we’ll either make landfall or be picked up in a day or two at the most? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“But I’m hungry!”
“Well, that’s just too bad.”
Bronwyn’s lips tightened and her eyes narrowed to a pair of level slits that looked like the kind of icy slivers one gets from splintering an emerald with a hammer. She could look intimidatingly frightening with almost no conscious effort whatsoever and without a second’s thought. That the captain was actually making a lot of sense never occurred to her, not that it would have made a lot of difference if it had. Basseliniden, who knew in his heart that he was right, nevertheless found apologies and excuses rising to his lips, dragged there by the almost actinic glare of her face.
“All right,” she finally said. “At least now I know exactly where you stand.” Before the captain could defend himself, she turned to the professor, who stood in some embarrassment and confusion. “Do you think you could determine where we are? Even approximately?”
“Oh, well, I should think so,” he stuttered. “It’s nearly nightfall; if the Polar Parallelogram is visible I shouldn’t have much difficulty in at least discovering our latitude with some accuracy.”
“Aren’t there some instruments you need?”
“It would be nice, of course, but I think I can make what I need easily enough…at least if twilight holds out long enough.”
The professor squatted on the surface of the raft, folding up his long legs in a disjointed manner that made Bronwyn certain that be possessed more joints and angles than were normally allotted a human being. He pulled a small notebook from a breast pocket and from it tore a single leaf. He then proceeded to fold it several times, until it formed a very narrow triangle. Unfolding the paper revealed a series of very equally spaced lines all radiating from the same point. Wittenoom then, with a stub of pencil, divided the spaces between the creases even further.
“You’ve made a protractor!” cried the princess.
“Yes, indeed! Now all that is necessary is to measure the height above the horizon of the indicator star in the Polar Parallelogram. The angle will tell us our latitude. I need a string and a small weight, however, to make a plumb.”
“Here,” said Basseliniden, pulling a short piece of heavy thread from the hem of his coat. “This and a buckle should do.”
“Excellent!” cried the professor, while the princess looked at the captain as though he had just intruded on a private conversation. Basseliniden ignored her.
Night fell swiftly, with little twilight. The sky remained overcast, much to the princess’s disgust and anxiety. The raft moved almost imperceptibly as it rose and fell with the broad swells and only the sound of the water lapping beneath the raft gave Bronwyn any sign that she was at sea. Neither she nor the captain had spoken since their discussion about salvaging of supplies from the foundered Sommer B.
Although the season was well into late spring, the high latitude and recent storm left the night air damp and chilly; as soon as the sun set, the temperature dropped dramatically. The princess, left with only a light jacket and clothes that were still moist from her plunge, huddled into a shivering ball. She could not remember when she had ever felt so comprehensively cold, and wondered if she had stopped metabolizing. The captain watched her discomfort with considerable sympathy, but was going to be damned if he would offer any immediate comfort.
The professor seemed to take notice of neither the damp nor the cold, but instead remained fixedly staring at a particular spot in the featureless black sky. So the three remained for the next several hours: one oblivious of his discomfort and surroundings, one miserable and stubborn and one perhaps a little less miserable but peeved.
Shortly before midnight (had any of them the means of determining the time) the princess and the captain were startled out of their respective black reveries by a cry from the professor.
“What is it?” croaked Bronwyn.
“There!” repeated Wittenoom. “Stars!”
“Stars?” she echoed, stupidly, “Where?”
But instead of answering, the professor had placed his makeshift astrolabe to his eyes. His feet were braced solidly on the deck, his long, thin legs as stiff and straight as the legs of a surveyor’s transit. In spite of the slow rocking of the raft, the buckle at the end of the thread barely wavered from the vertical.
Bronwyn stared at the sudden appearance of the stars. She immediately found the Parallelogram and from that her eyes swept outward in an ever-broadening spiral. She had once been as absorbed by the geography of the heavens—which is all that astronomy is, or at least so far as her Tamlaghtan education had been concerned—as she was by the geography of the earth. When she had commited to memory virtually every square inch of her enormous terrestrial globe—as pale and blue-veined as some vast breast: a spherical, geodesic, topographic mammary upon which her far-ranging imagination had suckled—she turned to the blue-black globes that hovered in the chambers of her brother’s tutors. Speckled with silvery stars and bound by golden lines, the constellations mirror images of their familiar shapes, the globes were universes turned wrong side out. She felt as Musrum must feel, looking at his creation from the Other Side and being amazed and amused at how small and self-contained they seemed to be.
She easily identified other, nearby constellations—the Rabbit, the Eggbeater, St. Wladimir, Musrum’s Nose, the Greater and Lesser Milkcans—and recalled how she had spent many nights on a palace parapet recasting the ancient sky drawings. There was, she felt, nothing official about them, just the results of a few centuries of bored sheepherders playing connect-the-dot. She thought that the Rabbit looked a good deal more like a race horse and, if she combined some of the Oxcart with most of the Eyedropper she could imagine a grand sloop cutting through the stars, leaving a milky wake in its silent passing.
“Fifty-two degrees!” the professor cried, checking the mark he had just made on the edge of his paper protractor, then immediately replaced it to his eyes. “Fifty-three degrees,” he said after repeating the process, then: “Fifty-two! Fifty-two! Flfty-three!” Then: “Gone! The clouds have come back again.”
“Fifty-two or fifty-three degrees,” said the princess, as a dark curtain closed over her clinquant theater. “Does that tell you where we are?”
“Only along a line running east and west,” replied the professor. “That is, I only know approximately how far we are from the equator.”
“Well,” put in Basseliniden, “we know we surely must be somewhere between the peninsula of Piotr and the east coast of Guesclin.”
“Oh, we can narrow it down a little more closely than that. Most of the north shore of Londeac lies at or above fifty-two degrees north latitude. Surely if we were east of, say, fifteen degrees of longitude, or so, we would either be within sight of land or on land itself. The same goes for the west. If we were as far in that direction as ten or eleven degrees, once again we would be in sight of land. I can think of only one place that would allow us to be at sea as far south as fifty-two or three degrees.”
“And that is?” asked the princess.
“Guesclin Bay.”
The princess frowned for a moment, consulting her mental atlas. “Guesclin Bay?” she repeated. “Guesclin Bay? Why, that’s the entrance to the Strait!”
“Oh yes, indeed it is!”
“Holy Musrum!” she muttered, in absolute awe of the perversity of her fortune.