1.4
“Lean into it,” Manuah told his middle son. “Don’t steer with your arms; steer with the weight of your body. These are real waves; they’ll tire you out in an hurta if you go at it like that.”
“Yes, Father,” said Hamurma. “Thank you.” Unlike his older brother, he was generally eager to please, and eager to be taught rather than to learn everything himself, the hard way.
“That’s it. Keep your back straight.”
The waves weren’t bad at all by ocean standards, but Manuah felt there wasn’t much time to waste here. They’d gotten a late start, thanks to Belurin the olive merchant being a total idiot, and the sun was already low in the sky.
“We’re turning toward the shore,” Manuah warned. “Now you have to pull. Lean away from the oar, use your weight in the other direction. We’re not in the harbor; these waves will spin you if you let them.”
“Yes, Father.”
The shore was a kos away—far enough that they needn’t have any great fear of reefs or sandbars. A bit of bad steering didn’t present much danger, unless it got them sideways to a rolling wave. But it cost time, and it was sloppy. As it was, they’d be hugging the coast all day and night on their westward journey. Between The City and Surapp Great Town, the currents pulled generally eastward, although they were slower near the shore and faster a few kos farther out. The winds blew generally westward, and they were faster close to land, where the river valleys (for some reason) seemed to suck them in much of the time. And so one traveled to Surapp by hugging the coast, and back home from Surapp by keeping the shoreline halfway between the boats and the horizon.
At this point Manuah called out, “Is this really your twentieth voyage, Letoni? Tighten that sail! Are you trying to rip it?”
“No, Captain,” said one of the two men manning the sail. “Sorry, Captain.”
The sail was a square made from two layers of untreated linen, which people were always advising Manuah against. It tears too easily, they would say. It soaks up water and gets heavy. Yes, well if you coated it with beeswax it was heavier still, and much more expensive, and it still had a tendency to tear without warning. And if you coated it with tallow, the seagulls would never leave you alone. No, the smart thing was to use the cheapest sails you could, and replace them often, and always carry a spare on every voyage, or two if you were going to be gone all month. And tie them down tightly so they didn’t luff and flutter in the face of the wind!
Letoni was partnered with Kop—a short, heavyset man only a few years older than Hamurma—and together the two of them untied and re-tied the sail so that it was tighter. Still luffing, though, because the wind was nearly against them, and it was hard to keep the linen filled while Hamurma steered like a drunkard. But these were good sailors, and they knew that Manuah knew the blame wasn’t theirs.
He’d brought a crew of ten on this short voyage, and with Letoni and Kop at the sail, and Manuah and Hamurma at the stern, that left six other men without much to do. Being also experienced sailors, they were presently sprawled on the wooden deck in between clay jugs of wine and pickled olives, with their faces covered, attempting to get some sleep while they could. One never knew when the sea’s mood might change and they might need to man a paddle for several days. Too, most traders anchored for the night, often hugging the shore just outside the surf zone, or sometimes even beaching at their own preferred, quasi-secret spots along the way, and having a delightful little campout on the beach. But that was hard on the boats, and wasteful of time; Manuah’s fleet sailed day and night, and the men who were sleeping now would be wide awake from midnight to dawn.
Then things went quiet for a while, with only the creak of reeds in the hull, the gentle splashing of water, and the straining and fluttering of the sailcloth against the yard arm. If the wind cut any closer against their path, Manuah would have ordered the sail lowered, and if it increased in force he might even order the men to strike the mast. But for now they were enjoying smooth—if slow—sailing. Fine weather for training a new stern.
After perhaps half an hurta of silence, Hamurma called out. At first Manuah though he’d lost his balance and was going overboard, and he turned toward his son, ready to grab him or dive in after him. But no, Hamurma was merely pointing.
“Father, look! A spout!”
And indeed, where Hamurma was pointing there was fountain of water and air in the distance, perhaps half a kos away.
Manuah felt a tingle of fear. The only animals that spouted were dolphins and greatfish, and this spout was too large to be from a dolphin. Many sailors regarded greatfish as good luck, or at least not bad luck, but Manuah’s family had traveled too far and heard too much. He knew that greatfish came in a variety of sizes and shapes, and some of them had eyes the size of your head and teeth the size of your fist, and some of them would come up under your boat and capsize it for no apparent reason. He’d never heard of one eating a human being, or even accidentally drowning one, but they were certainly large enough to do either, and anyway they were unpredictable. He regarded them much the same way he might an untethered bull; not necessarily dangerous, but certainly not to be trusted. Of course, people were always telling Manuah that he worried too much.
“Was it a greatfish?” Hamurma asked, while Letoni and Kop clapped their hands and called out in delight.
“It was,” Manuah confirmed, trying to keep the tension out of his voice.
“Will it spout again?”
“In a few vimadi, yes. They always come back to the surface. I think it’s how they breathe.”
Kop laughed at that. “A fish that breathes air!”
To which Letoni said, “Have you been sneaking wine while our backs were turned?” Then, more seriously, “We’ll find it again, Hamurma. I’ll look this way. Kop, you look over there.”
They waited for what seemed like a long time, but presently the spout came again, much closer—barely three sixties of feet away from the boat, and loud as a fat man snoring.
“Found it!” Kop joked.
The other men were looking up now, some alert and some rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.
“Greatfish!” someone shouted, quite unnecessarily.
The thing lifted its giant tail and submerged again, only to resurface in the same position a few vimadi later.
“It’s following us,” Letoni said.
“I think it likes you,” said someone else.
And from there it devolved into comments Manuah would rather his fourteen-year-old son not hear. But of course Hamurma had spent his life around sailors, and already cursed like one when he thought his parents weren’t listening.
But indeed, it did appear that the greatfish was following the boat, just tootling along behind them—sometimes closer and sometimes farther, but always nearby. Was it looking for scraps, like a gull? That seemed unlikely for such a large animal—easily twice the length of the boat itself. Perhaps it was just curious.
In the west, the sun slipped down below the waves, and the sky grew yellow and then red and then blue and then black, and still the greatfish followed them. Despite the delight of the sailors, Manuah found his sense of foreboding growing only stronger. There was something not quite natural about this, something perhaps magical or divine, and that was a worse kind of unpredictability, because the gods seemed to get bored very easily, and you never knew what they might try next to entertain themselves.
And then Hamurma was pointing again, this time at the sky. “Father, look! There’s something in the stars!”
Manuah looked where his son was pointing, and saw…something. A smudge, a glow, a little spray of stars, just above the horizon. It wasn’t a cloud; it was behind the clouds, and also a different color. It was the color of stars, or of the thin sliver of moon that was following the sun down into the ocean.
“What is it?” one of the sailors demanded.
“I don’t know,” answered another.
Letoni came forward. “Captain, do you know what this is?”
It was a captain’s job to know the stars, to navigate by them on the rare occasions when land was not in sight. But Manuah had never seen anything like this, and he felt a clawing superstitious dread, because he had kept a secret from his wife, and he was planning on keeping it from the inhabitants of Surapp Great Town as well. People he counted as friends. Normally he wouldn’t think himself important enough that his own actions might anger the gods, and yet…the spray of stars was immediately behind the greatfish, and it seemed to him that the thing had spouted its mist all the way up into the sky. If that was not a sign from heaven, then he didn’t know what possibly could be.
But he dared not share these thoughts with his men—not in the middle of a voyage—so instead he said, “Hamurma, mind your steering!”
And then, to Letoni and Kop, “Keep to your sail, my friends. I have some thoughts about this thing, but I’ll speak with my brother before I share them. Meanwhile, if it doesn’t help us steer, or sail, and it doesn’t help us carry olives to Surapp Great Town, then it’s a distraction we can’t afford.”
“Yes, Captain,” said several voices from around the boat. But all heads remained turned toward the sky, and several of the sailors raised their hoods up over their hats, untied the straps from behind their necks, and tied them under their chins as if to ward off cold.
* * *
Manuah’s time in Surapp Great Town was marked by a great weight in his stomach. He steered the boat into their triangular harbor, noting that the mouth of it seemed wider than he’d ever seen it, even at the highest of tides. Surapp’s harbor was entirely natural, with no sea walls, no dredging of the bottom, no excavation or upbuilding of the low sandstone hills around it. But here, too, the water was rising. It was rising everywhere. He supposed the ocean must seek its own level, just like the water in a bucket, but where could all this extra water be coming from? The idea staggered his mind: if the ocean rose a foot—even a hand, even a finger—then the volume of added water was that finger, plus the finger next to it, and so on across all the area of the ocean itself. Could a mountain be that large? Could a whole range of mountains? If all the snow melted off of all the mountains in the world, how much water would that be?
This must be a matter for gods, because it was all out of scale with the world of human beings. And now the sky was changing, too, and he didn’t know what to do about it. Repent? Sacrifice? Reveal the secrets of his king?
He didn’t trust this changing harbor. Even though it was deeper, even though it was wider and should be safer, he felt exposed and vulnerable. Once they were past the mouth he ordered the sail lowered, and they completed the final kos of the journey with paddles. At the docks, by the time his men had dropped the wooden side bumpers and tied the bow and stern to the mooring pylons, word of his arrival had already spread, and before he reached dry land he was met by the merchants who were buying his cargo. Absently, he exchanged pleasantries with them while their laborers carried off the jars of olives and wine. Five minutes later he couldn’t have told you what was said; his mind was racing on other matters, not least the impending invasion during which these men might lose their lives or their homes or their sons, or the virtue of their wives and daughters, and would certainly lose their autonomy. Unless they somehow managed to defeat Sraddah’s army, which seemed unlikely.
Why wouldn’t the gods of Surapp Great Town be angry about something like that? Perhaps even the gods of Kingdom would be displeased, to see so much effort being spent somewhere else.
The men asked for shore leave, but he refused them. He wanted to get out of here as quickly as he could. He wanted to get home and consult with Adrah; if anyone knew what was going on—if anyone could know—then surely it was the Cleric Astrologers.
Manuah had to go hunting for the byssa cloth merchants, and when he found them they didn’t have a whole bale of the cloth after all.
“Our president purchased several yards of it,” they apologized. “We could have refused her, could have explained that you had priority, but we desire her favor. Surely you understand.”
“It’s fine,” he told them.
“Is it? Really?”
“It is, really,” he answered, because the whole matter suddenly seemed quite trivial. Of course, he did need to caulk his new boat. In a world of rising waters and angry gods, a boat was perhaps a better investment than a house or an army! But he couldn’t quite bring himself to care about the economics of it. He now owed a debt to the cloth merchants, but the wine and olive merchants owed a debt to him, and the whole thing had been calculated to balance out so that they would owe a debt to one another, and Manuah would be out of it entirely. But now there was an imbalance that he was probably going to have to eat, or at least split with the cloth merchants, unless he wanted to be back here every week for a month sorting the whole thing out. And he worried—he feared—that that would not be the best use of his time.
He wanted to say, “My cousin will invade this place before the next new moon. Soon, if you’re smart, you’ll be paying tribute to a king you’ve never met, and it’ll be more expensive than this. And if you’re not smart, then this will be the last time we ever speak.”
He wanted to say, “We were followed by a greatfish, that spouted pure light into the sky.”
He wanted to say, “The water keeps rising, and I don’t know when it will stop, or if it will stop, and I sometimes wonder if the whole world is going to drown.”
And most of all, he wanted to say, “If all of this is happening at the same time, can it really be a coincidence? Is it even possible to make the gods less angry?”
But what he did say was, “I need to get out of here by midday or the tides will be murder. Have your man load the bale, and we’ll sort this out some other time. And may the next month be kind.”