The day was brilliantly fine, and the trireme ran on mainsail with the breeze dead astern. A V of white foam lifted from the bow and a pair of lesser Vs trailed from the steering oars, weaving behind the vessel in a pattern of remarkable complexity on the sea's slow swells.
Also trailing through the water astern were four seawolves: three of them to port, their side-to-side sinuosities synchronized as though they were parts of a single animal. On the starboard side swam a single monster over ten feet long, a ton of ropy muscle with fangs the length of a man's hand.
"I don't like it!" Captain Lichnau said. "Look at those lizards. Just like the morning the storm struck us, isn't it? I think we ought to change course for Sandrakkan."
Sharina and Nonnus squatted on either side of the far stern, behind the captain's seat and the steersmen standing at the ends of the outriggers. The Blood Eagles had taken over the deck forward of the mast as their own preserve. Mixing with them would have been uncomfortable, though Sharina wasn't really concerned about her physical safety or that of the hermit. The Blood Eagles were disciplined troops, under the eye of their officer and the noble they were guarding.
"We can't put in to Sandrakkan," Asera said flatly. The two nobles and Kizuta, the vessel's mate, had joined Lichnau in a conference made public by the trireme's close quarters. Half a dozen sailors were near to the commanders. "At the very best, the earl's hostile to King Valence and will do us an ill turn if he can. At worst, he's in league with the queen's agents."
Only one set of benches was manned, and even there the oars weren't run out. The oarsmen were available for an emergency, but with the wind so favorable rowing would do nothing to speed the vessel.
The off-duty oarsmen sat on the outriggers to either side, though with the seawolves present they didn't dangle their toes in the water sparkling just below. A few men trailed fishing lines, but for the most part they basked in the sun and talked about their luck in not having to rasp their hands raw for the moment on the salt-roughened oarlooms.
"We'll make Kish by midafternoon if this wind holds," Kizuta protested. "The Needles on Sandrakkan aren't an hour nearer and we'd lose some of the wind besides."
"The wind will hold," Meder bor-Mederman said. He glanced beyond his immediate group and assumed a look of hurt when his eyes fell on Sharina.
She turned as if to study the huge seawolf. The low dorsal fin rippled like a ribbon, barely cleaving the surface. The skin between its spines was translucent and tinged with red and purple from the blood vessels feeding it. Even a monster can be beautiful if viewed in the right way.
She shivered and looked at Nonnus. He smiled wanly, as though he knew what she was thinking. Perhaps he did....
"I don't need a boy to help me tally distances, Kizuta," Lichnau said. "It's not distance that worries me."
The captain wore a kerchief to cover his bald head. He touched it, testing the knotted corners as a ploy to gain a moment in the face of general opposition.
"It's what the course takes us close to," he went on. "That's Tegma, and I don't care what your political problems are with the Earl of Sandrakkan, they're not as bad as getting our bottom ripped out on those reefs in a storm."
He pointed over the side to the trio of seawolves weaving easily around a course parallel to the swift trireme's. "If you think those lizards are bad," he said, "you should see what's waiting for shipwrecks there."
"I don't expect a storm, sailor," Meder said coldly.
"With all respect, sir, you didn't expect the first one!" Lichnau protested. "If we'd been as close to the reefs then as this course puts us now, we'd all be lizard food this past week!"
Meder raised his hand to strike the captain. Asera stopped her colleague with a cold glance and a finger tap, then stared at Lichnau with eyes like those of the reptiles alongside.
"Watch your tongue, commoner," she said, each syllable an icepick. "Or you'll find yourself feeding lizards right now."
Lichnau knelt and touched his forehead to the decking. "Mistress," he whimpered from that position, "it's my duty to bring you safely back to Valles. Forgive me if I misspoke in my zeal."
Sharina grimaced in distaste at what she was hearing. She didn't know who had the right of the argument, but the sight of an honest man being humiliated for stating his opinion to a noble offended her deeply. Haft had always been a more egalitarian society than those of most islands of the archipelago. In Barca's Hamlet the question of birth status didn't arise simply because nobles didn't visit the region.
"The seawolves breed on the Reefs of Tegma," Nonnus said, speaking to give Sharina something to concentrate on rather than the abuse still being directed at the prostrate captain. "Sometimes you'll find them a thousand miles away, but that's rare and the reefs are the only place they lay their eggs."
Sharina nodded as the name came into focus in her mind. "I thought Tegma was an island far in the Outer Sea," she said. "That's where Rigal puts it in The Wanderings of Duke Lachish."
"I don't know where Tegma was when your Duke Lachish visited it," Nonnus said. His tone was too precise to be quite sneering. "When I was there, it was fifty miles downcurrent from the south coast of Sandrakkan. It was an island once but it sank the same as Yole. It's just a ring of reefs now, as tight as a virgin's—"
The hermit paused and barked out a bitter laugh. "Child," he said, "now that I'm back among men I find I'm falling back into the ways of the man I once was. You may have to forgive me; and I humbly pray that the Lady will do the same if..."
He traced a quick pattern on the deck. His finger left no mark on the smooth planks, but Sharina's eyes followed the gesture into an outline of the Lady.
Nonnus raised his eyes to Sharina's again. "If things happen that I do not wish to happen," he concluded.
"May the Shepherd watch over us," Sharina said uncomfortably. The Great Gods had never been a major part of life in Barca's Hamlet, though most houses had a little shrine to the Lady and her consort, and the shepherds of course made offerings to Duzi on the hillside.
Being so close to Nonnus made her realize that the hermit didn't worship out of inborn faith. His belief was a matter of need, the desperate hope that there was something, somewhere, greater than the world in which he lived.
"When the water's clear in the lagoon," Nonnus said in a mild voice, "you can see the tops of the old buildings from when Tegma was an island. Square gray outlines with just a touch of pink when the sun catches them right. They're hundreds of feet down, now."
The commanders' discussion had ended. Sharina had successfully distanced herself from its latter portion, but the ship continued under sail on the same course as before. Meder heard what Nonnus was saying and stepped closer to him.
"I've intended for some time to visit Tegma," the wizard said, his eyes slightly narrowed. "The reefs, that is. I'd been told that there was no way through them to the lagoon. How did you get there, old man?"
Nonnus looked at Meder with the same dispassionate intensity with which he viewed the sea. "It was a long time ago, when I was a boy hunting seals," he said. He shrugged. "Tegma may have changed since my time."
"Tegma never changes," Meder said. His expression wavered subtly between anger and interest. "Tegma is a nexus of ancient power."
"It sank the way Yole did?" Sharina said to divert the wizard's focus from Nonnus. The hermit couldn't be pushed into communicating more than he wanted to, and there was a chance his noncommittal responses would send Meder into an arrogant rage.
"The same way, perhaps," Meder said, his tone softening with the pleasure of Sharina having shown interest in his knowledge. "But much earlier, infinitely earlier, Sharina. It sank thousands of years before Yole did, and perhaps thousands of times as many years earlier."
He looked at the hermit again and said, "How did you get into the lagoon, old man?"
"A Pewle woodskin can go most places," Nonnus said, meeting the younger man's glare with no particular expression of his own. " 'Skim across a meadow on a dewy morning,' we used to say. That was a joke, but I picked a spring tide and there was enough water between coral heads to get me through the atoll."
He shook his head with a rueful smile. "I was younger then," he added.
Meder slapped his left palm with two fingers of the opposite hand as he thought. His eyes returned to focus on Nonnus. "You and I will discuss this—" he began.
Nonnus leaped to his feet, looking past the wizard and pointing to the southern horizon. "Down sail!" he roared in a voice that could break rocks. "Oarsmen to your benches!"
"What?" Captain Lichnau cried as he and everyone on deck turned their eyes in the direction Nonnus was pointing. "Who—"
Almost to the horizon the Inner Sea was a soft green with no more chop than a millpond on a hot August afternoon. The horizon itself was a wall of black cloud glittering with jagged teeth of lightning, sweeping toward the ship at the speed of a racing horse.
"Down sail!" Lichnau screamed as the favoring breeze died and the first gust rocked the trireme's broadside.