The trireme's oardeck was wet and dark and stinking. More rain than light came through the narrow ventilators between the main deck and the outriggers.
The ship swung almost on her beam ends in the troughs of the mighty waves that swept down on her with the storm. Sharina had followed the oarsmen below at Nonnus' direction. Many of them were still trying to reach their benches. When a particularly fierce sea caught the ship, oarlooms jerked from the hands of men holding them and flailed like quarterstaves in the darkness. Baggage stored in the lower hull flew about, tangling men wholly intent on not losing their grip on their oars.
The crew was trying to turn the vessel out of the wind: there was no possibility of putting her bow into a gale like this one. Rowers on the port side stroked normally while those to starboard backed their oars. Sharina couldn't imagine how the officers communicated their orders. She could barely hear the drummer beside her giving the stroke through the deeper thrumming of the storm.
She huddled in her cloak, trying not to be stepped on. Asera was somewhere ahead on the narrow aisle. Many of the Blood Eagles were with her, though the soldiers' awkwardness meant there was danger they'd crush the procurator when the ship rolled.
Because of the chaos, it was some minutes before Sharina realized that Nonnus hadn't followed her into the belly of the ship. She looked up. The hatch had been closed but not battened down in the confusion. One of the two hinged panels lay open to spray and the black sky.
Sharina stood, stepping over a soldier who lay curled bawling in a fetal position. She gripped the ladder with one hand and tried to lift the other panel with her shoulder and remaining hand. A wave combed the deck, battering and smothering her with its weight.
Sharina continued to hold the ladder. When the green surge passed, she threw the hatch fully open. Before the next wave came over the stern, she'd gained the deck and grabbed the railing with both arms as her eyes tried to pierce the gloom.
Sailors crawled about the deck, trying desperately to hold on with one hand while the other did the business of the ship. The sail and yard were down in an untidy heap amidships, but the mast itself flexed dangerously.
There hadn't been time to strike the deckhouse, so the wind had taken off the roof and two sides. The remaining panels were jammed into a V shape that protected Meder in its lee.
A rosy glow surrounded the wizard. He held his copper athame and his mouth contorted with the spells he shouted inaudibly into the wind. Half a dozen Blood Eagles crouched nearby, either guarding Meder or unwilling to go down into the bowels of a ship they were sure would soon be overwhelmed.
Nonnus sat in the far bow, his feet clamped against the solid bulkhead to either side. Waves foamed over him waist high. He was at work on something; his knife reflected the cold white glitter of lightning. Sharina crawled toward him, pressing her whole body against the rail as she inched along.
The wind weighed against Sharina like a collapsing sandbank; its howl numbed her ears. A section of rail, replaced in Barca's Hamlet after the previous storm, creaked inward against the pegs fixing it to the original fabric. She waited for a minute lull, then scrambled past the weakened section.
She couldn't tell what the hermit was doing, nor did she really care. All she knew was that at this moment she didn't want to die with strangers.
Nonnus looked up and saw her coming. He started to rise. She screamed and waved him back. He remained tense, but he didn't leave the relative shelter of the prow bulkhead except to bend forward and tug her the last of the way toward him with a grip like iron.
"Nonnus," she shouted. "Is the ship going to sink?"
She wasn't afraid. Despite the question, in her own mind Sharina was quite sure that they were going to sink and that she was about to die. She was wet and cold. She flinched at each lightning bolt's flash/crack, preceding the longer ripping sound of the thunder itself; but death wasn't a fear, only a fact like the clouds that writhed by overhead as dark and textured as a gravel shore.
"I can't save the ship," Nonnus said. He'd put away the big knife and was using the ship's cordage to tie sections of wooden pole into a triangle. "I think I can save you, though, child; which is what I swore to try."
The hermit had lopped the jib pole into three sections and bound them together. Now he pulled the bundled jib sail from under him—he'd been sitting on it like a pillow to keep it from blowing over the side—and began to unfold it.
"You're making a raft!" Sharina said. She caught a corner of the canvas to keep it from whipping violently before Nonnus was ready to tie it to the frame.
"A float, rather," he said. His spread hands worked with the instinctive precision of spiders binding prey with their silk. Neither the wind nor the salt-stiffened cordage caused the hermit's fingers to fumble or have to redo a task. "I'm making loops of rope that we'll hold to while the float supports us."
"But what about the seawolves?" Sharina blurted, then wished she could take the words back. The fang-jawed reptiles had been the first thought that sprang into her mind. She hadn't meant to complain about the efforts of the man who was doing everything humanly possible for her.
"Raw their meat feels like a jellyfish and doesn't taste much better," the hermit said as he went on with his work. She thought he smiled. "I suppose we'll have to make do with it till we get to a place we can build a fire, though."
Sharina laughed until an eddying gust splattered enough salt water down her throat to choke her silent. He was serious. Doubting Nonnus would be like doubting the sky: it was simply there, night or day, storm or no storm.
She looked down the length of the vessel. The outriggers were alternately awash. A sailor caught Captain Lichnau by the shoulder and pointed over the starboard rail. Lichnau shouted something. Sharina couldn't hear the words, but Lichnau and the two men near him struggled forward toward the flexing mast.
"I wanted you sheltered below as long as you could," Nonnus said, his eyes on his task. "I'm glad you came up, though. We're drifting faster than I'd expected. The current must have changed as well as the wind."
Sharina held down flaps of cord and canvas, but she didn't try to help with the float's construction. The hermit knew what he was doing; she did not. Her involvement would waste time in circumstances where time was very short.
"Drifting where?" she said, leaning back against the wind so that Nonnus could turn the frame over.
"Look to starboard," he said, nodding without turning his head. "I've been hearing them for some minutes now."
Sharina raised her eyes, squinting. The storm threw her hair about her face like a thousand tiny whips; the braids and coil into which she'd bound them hadn't survived this wind.
A line of white separated the black of the sky and the sea's black beneath it. "The Reefs of Tegma," Nonnus said as he tied and tucked and tied again.
An officer stood to grasp a line. His tunic flared in the wind and lifted him from the deck with his limbs flailing.
His feet didn't even touch the railing as he flew over it. The sea drank him down without a bubble.
Lichnau and the men with him were hacking at the mast with axes: even the bare pole caught the wind and accelerated the trireme's sideways drift. The reefs were a line of gnashing foam so close that Sharina could distinguish their rumble from the wind's howl.
The ball of red light surrounding the deckhouse expanded, reaching the mast and the sailors around it. Its hue paled from rich magenta to the pink of high clouds when the sun still lingers on the horizon.
The mast cracked vertically, twisting against the wind. A dagger-sharp splinter sprang back. It gutted Captain Lichnau in a spray of blood.
The glow boiled up to envelope the whole ship, as fiercely red as a sunstruck ruby. Every hair on Sharina's body stood out. She tried to scream but her throat was a block of marble.
The trireme lifted with a roar louder than the breaking of the earth. The oars were in the air; the keel itself no longer touched the roiling sea. Wrapped in red flame, the vessel and those aboard her sailed over the slashing reefs and landed thunderously in the calm on the other side. Waves spouted higher than the mast had been, but the hull swam up from the trough of its arrival.
The air was gray with warm mist. Sharina struggled to her feet. The wind had died and the sound of the storm was fading in the distance.
The ship grounded softly on a sloping ramp. Lush jungle wrapped cyclopean stone structures on the shore.
The Isle of Tegma had risen from the sea.