The day died slowly but the fever-heat lingered. Brook and Foam slouched in the shadow of the cabin roof. Shale, dressed once more, lolled aft. Rope stood frowning at his charts. Net reared on his wrist, turning an ominous purple. “Spit!” Rope muttered.
“What?” Foam murmured. The boat was trying to rock him to sleep. “Why d’you swear?”
“Swell.”
Shale looked up. “Hey! The boat’s rocking. Why is there a swell in this calm? It was flat as flat when I was swimming.”
Foam’s eyes widened. “And why is it coming from the west?” He scrambled to his feet.
“That’s what I’m hoping the charts will tell me,” Rope said.
A cat’s-paw batted the masthead pennant, then vanished.
Rope looked up sharply. “Gale,” he murmured. The islanders glanced at one another.
“It’s there,” Jo whispered. “I can hear it coming.”
Rope stood for a long moment, staring at the western horizon. Feeling the sea turn uneasily beneath his boat.
His voice crackled with tension. “We may not have much time. Get the mainsail down! We’ll keep the jib up as long as we can. Shale, you help Foam. Brook and Jo, tie down anything that moves.”
Rope lashed himself to the wheel as his crew jumped to work.
“At least I get a chance to use my knots,” Jo muttered.
Oiled broadcloth snapped as Brook shook out a tarp. “Over there with that. No, over the barrel.”
“Move it!” Rope snapped.
Tense and unsmiling, Brook met the haunt’s eyes. “We islanders fear the sea.”
The ocean ran heavier with every wave. Each new roller threw the Salamander to the top of a higher hill, then pushed her down into a deeper green valley. Rope hove to as Foam and Shale worked furiously to strip the mainsail.
“Topsail?” Foam yelled.
“Let it go! Get your gear!”
“Look!” Shale cried. A black line came racing across the green waves and a roaring wind bore down on them. “Fathom,” she whispered.
“Here it comes!” Rope yelled, and then all words were blown away by the storm.
The gale spun the Salamander sideways, and heavy rollers caught her square abeam. A great sea crashed over the decks. Sails cracked explosively overhead.
The big wind hit just as Foam was fumbling to lash himself to the mast. The whirling boom clubbed him into the side of the cabin so hard it made him sick.
Then the first wave buried him, beating his head against the cabin again, rushing up his nose and into his lungs. He yelled, retching salt water as the retreating wave tried to suck him into the sea. He grabbed for a cleat on the cabin roof and hung on as the Salamander swooped down the next great trough. A wall of white spray exploded over the bow.
The whole storm was ringing in his head. He couldn’t tell the thunder from the savage wind, the driving rain, the salt water that burned his eyes, his nose, his lungs.
Going away.
He was going away. Annihilated by the fury of the sea, he had no thoughts, no fancies, no memories, no ideas. He was a length of rope, a piece of wood. The sky was a purple bruise. The air was drowning and stank of salt. It was suddenly cold. A curtain of white swept toward him from the storm: hail beating into the black water.
A hand yanked around his waist. Shale crouched behind him, trying to tie a line around his middle. Something was wrong with her left hand; one stiff finger refused to curl. She screamed at him, but the wind tore her words to pieces and threw them overboard.
She wrenched the rope around his waist. The hail was almost on them now. She grabbed his shoulders and turned him around, leaning in until their faces touched. “Get under cover!” she screamed.
She dove back for the mast, staggering as the Salamander pitched to port. A tiny spark was rekindled in Foam. He struggled to wake up, to reach the mast, but he couldn’t unclench his fingers from around the cleat.
He screamed. A ball of hail cracked against his wrist and he jerked madly until his fingers opened. He scrabbled back to where Shale held a corner of the mainsail over her head. And then he too was beneath the tarp, propping it up with one hand, clutching Shale’s arm with the other. He clung to her like a drowning man to a spar, needing something human to hold, something alive in the midst of the storm’s vast, mindless hate.
White fury took them.
When the storm hit, Jo was belowdeck with Brook, putting on her slicker. The gale’s first blast hurled her to the cabin sole. Thunder ripped back the sky. Wood screamed around her and the lines sang and snapped.
Fear rushed up her throat like bile. She was trapped in a wooden egg, soon to be crushed between the sea and sky. The world was howling through her. She could think of nothing but staying human. If she gave in to the storm it would tear her into nothingness.
But what would happen if she was listening to her twin when Brook drowned?
Then the hail descended, battering against the cabin roof. Jo howled like the storm itself. She was trapped in a peal of thunder, a moving pocket of hate. She was going to die. Her thin cage of flesh would fill with water and she would drown, trapped in it, and the cruel wind would shriek with joy.
Unless . . .
She could join it. She could let herself billow up into freedom. She too could sing for joy, could blast through the shrouds and ride the wild lightning.
Beside her Brook sobbed and screamed, but Jo heard only the waves, and the wind, and the sea.
Nothing Is, That Resists Me Forever.
Even the fishes, that I give life, I give in turn as life to others.
Even the trees I bleach their bones.
Even men sink, when they can swim no longer.
Even the fire, I drown with cool fathoms.
Even the sand, I pound into rock.
Even the Mist, I churn into the world.
All Is Change, And I Am That Change.
When the blue sky is black with clouds, I am that darkness.
When the drought fails, and the rain comes, I am that life.
When the heavens open and the flood descends, I am that death also.
When the waters break, and the child is born, I am there.
When the newborn dies, and sorrow leaks from human eyes, I am those tears.
I am the world, and I am the movement of the world.
I water the desert, I eat the mountains, I dance with the moon!
The Salamander crested a giant wave and hung, skewing wildly. Then the murderous sea drove her over. With shattering impact she dropped flat on her wooden belly and lay dead in the water. Another wave caught her in the bow, and a boiling wall of fury smashed down the cabin doors. It hurled itself on Brook and Jo, driving them against the aft bulkhead.
The ship lurched, then shuddered, making way again. Brook struggled to her feet in water up to her knees. They were in terrible danger of losing their freeboard. They would have to close the hatchway as fast as possible and start bailing. The wave had drowned the cabin lamp; she and Jo were in total darkness. She retched, coughing salt water through her nose. Hail screamed and skipped off the companionway. The world was pounding hail and groaning wood and choking blackness.
She spent an eternity there, pressed against the aft bulkhead of the cabin, staring into the darkness. She couldn’t go abovedeck in the hailstorm. But each time the ship heeled on her side, Brook had to fight a mad urge to dash upward. Anything, anything but dying trapped belowdeck, holding her breath until the sea strangled her. She remembered Blossom’s bloated body, drowned last summer and washed up on the Talon, water running from her mouth. Crabs had eaten her lips and eyes.
Brook reached into the darkness for Jo. It was impossible to hear anything above the fury of the storm. The haunt could be dead already, knocked out by a big wave and drowned. She could be wedged under the starboard bunk or drifting face down against the companionway with her long white hair floating like seaweed in the black water.
Or she could be drowning rig
ht now, screaming for help, trapped and gurgling under a trunk or a piece of wreckage. Crying with horror, Brook thrashed around the tiny cabin with the water up to her waist, gasping at every touch until she found Jo’s arm and grabbed it.
The haunt’s flesh squished beneath Brook’s fingers like a jellyfish and she screamed. She gagged and clamped her jaws until she could breathe. “Jo! We need you here, Jo.” She could barely hear herself shout.
Jo’s arm quivered and firmed. “That’s it! That’s it,” Brook cried. “Come back. Come back to us. Keep coming. Storm’s almost over,” she lied frantically. “As soon as the hail lets up we’ll go topside.”
At last she felt the haunt’s hand fumble for her own.
* * *
Up top, water bubbled across the foredeck and streamed down the mast. The hail had given way to lashing rain. Salt water battered Shale from every direction. The straining storm jib was driving the ship onto her starboard side; the mastheads and yards circled as if waving for help. All around them huge mounds of black water heaped and vanished, swallowed by the deep.
Shale raged back at the storm. She wanted to hurt it, kill it. Her hands itched to pull a line or take the wheel, to fight back. Delta, she thought furiously. The mainland. The Northern Desert and Lianna’s jungles, the western grasslands and the strange mountain cities of the stone people who lived forever and trod upon the clouds. “You won’t stop me!” she screamed. “Not Sere, not Fathom, not anyone!”
The wind howled her curse away.
The Salamander’s prow burrowed into the heart of another giant wave. A huge sea raced over her foredeck, hurling the dinghy up into the air. Either the cleats or the ropes holding the small boat gave way and it tumbled aft, caving in part of the cabin roof. It clipped Shale, hammering her against the mast, then smashed through the starboard rail and disappeared.
Salt water filled her mouth as she tried to scream. Her lifeline bit into her waist as she was swept helplessly aft and battered by the passing waves. She banged against the cabin and felt something drive into her shoulder, a splinter or a nail. Salt burned in a dozen cuts and she coughed seawater from her lungs, choking with fury. “Not yet, you bastards!”
She was weak and shaking when Foam pulled her back. Pain raked her shoulder, her ribs, her hands. He reached out to hold her, but she panicked and shook him off. It was a death-grip. She couldn’t let Foam freeze onto her now. She was still strong enough to live; she couldn’t let herself be dragged down by his weakness. She knew she hurt him when she struck his hand away but she had to do it. It was all she could do to save herself.
Through the storm Rope stood at the helm like a straining statue, willing his rudder to bite. Willing his ship to go on.
It was dark, endlessly dark. The world was one great roaring. He did not know if the others were alive or dead. He was alone. Wind and salt closed his burning eyes and he steered by touch. His right thigh trembled from bracing against the gale and his shoulders felt like burning jelly. The sea was taking him as it had taken Brook’s parents, as it had taken Blossom. As it always took the men of the islands, one by one.
He was alone. Alone and utterly insignificant. The storm wrestled with him through the helm. Whether he rested now or later, the end would be the same. No one would ever know if he let the wheel spin free, if he fell against the mast and let the gale drive them back the way they had come: blowing past Telltale and the Snout, Tansy and Four Tops and Pinehaven, Giant’s Tomb, Trickfoot, the Harp, Double-Eagle, past Clouds End, into the east, into the Mist.
A hundred times he gave them up for dead. And a hundred times he forced himself to go on a little longer.
At last a pale, sickly light announced the coming of a dawn drenched in spray and driving rain and offering no hope. The ravening wind made the masts quiver; made the lines whip and hum.
There was an explosive crack. Where the topsail had been, furious streamers knotted themselves around the stays and shrouds. The Salamander fell off a cliff of water. The next wave, racing up with unfair speed, caught her amidships and threw her on her beam ends. Like a dead thing she lay down, tilting at almost 60 degrees. The crew dangled from the mast, kicking madly as the sea chased them up the deck, wondering if it would stop, or if they would founder at last.
A lifetime later the storm began to blow itself out. Clouds splintered and went spinning to the east. The crew of the Salamander was battered and beaten, stiff with cold and sleeplessness and hunger.
Shale swore weakly at the sea.
“Reef the mainsail.” Rope’s voice was cracked and hoarse. His face and beard were caked with salt. He did not turn to look at his crew; his body had frozen into place, locked together with the wheel. Open or closed, his eyes saw only seething ocean. His right leg twitched and trembled.
“What?” Shale said stupidly.
“The mainsail,” he whispered. “Reef and set the mainsail.”
Numb with disbelief, Shale and Foam clambered over the tilted deck, creeping along spars, trusting only to balance, too tired to be wary. Now that it seemed they might survive the storm, they no longer cared; they had long since used up the last of their fear. They took crazy risks before a sea more terrible than they had ever seen, merely because it was less terrible than it had been before the dawn.
The mainsail flapped dead to wind, luffing hysterically. With Brook and Jo helping, they managed to reef and set it to Rope’s directions. It filled with a bang like a clap of thunder.
The Salamander began to drag sideways through the water. Again and again foaming seas swept the deck, kicking at their feet. They started up the side of a towering wave. “Hard a lee!” Rope screamed, wrenching furiously at the wheel. His rudder bit and the Salamander’s head turned through the wind.
He timed it perfectly. Just as they reached the top of the wave, wind rushed into the sail from the starboard side. The ship staggered up, shaking her head like a wild horse, and heeled to port.
An ocean poured from her decks; she bled like a great animal from many wounds. Clothes and rope and food and smashed dishes were belched out on the flood. A set of winter sailing gear, a present to Shale from her father, drifted by with its arms spread out, face-down like a drowned sailor.
“Give it back!” Shale yelled.
But Rope said, “Let it go, Shale. You know what the sea demands.”
“Everything,” Brook said. “Sooner or later.”
PART TWO
THE WAR LOOP
JO’S LINE
CHAPTER 7
HAZEL TWIST
THE THREE islands of Delta that Hazel Twist had spent so much effort on winning seemed tiny to him now, their houses and harbors and muttering inhabitants like flotsam, resting for an instant on three small rocks before being swept away by the next wave.
The sea, the sea: a vast, blind, groping animal curled around Delta. It was too great, that formless green-blue ocean; Twist’s woodlander eyes could not meet its empty stare for long. And so he stood before the eastern window of his commandeered quarters and studied his prize without self-congratulation.
Delta was his. Directly below his windows the cobbled streets of the Foot curved steeply down to the waterline. Wind-seamed sailors and longshoremen with brawny chests dawdled in the streets, trying not to look at the soldiers before his door. Down at the docks half the berths were empty now, marking Deltans who had fled during the first skirmishes, or slunk away while Twist’s men were taking the wealthy houses on the landward side of the Foot.
This close to land, the sea moved uneasily. Hard light glinted from its surface and made his eyes smart, as if an army in blue-grey-green had encircled him, visible only when the sun glanced from its steel. Hazel Twist did not like the sea. Its barren emptiness appalled him. Only days after their conquest a mighty storm had fallen on Delta with a fury and a naked power he had never imagined. But to take the rest of the islands he would have to cross that water.
He needed islanders, he decided. Islanders with whom he coul
d negotiate, who could teach his men to sail across open ocean. But Delta was old and prosperous; most of her people had never had to leave sight of land. And of course Deltans would not be inclined to aid him, now that he had taken their city.
He would think of something. The price of disappointing the Emperor was high.
Returning to his desk, Hazel Twist rubbed his eyes until they no longer stung, and picked up his quill. The touch of it, slim between his fingers, gave him the same assurance a soldier feels when he grasps the hilt of his favorite weapon.
My dearest Blue:
My love returns to you, yet one more time, prisoned in this clumsy cage of ink and paper. Too well I know that summer will be over before you receive this letter.
My thoughts cross the wilds
In the blinking of an eye
While on the ground a summer’s march
of chartless, pathless, leafmeal lies
Loneliness blew through Twist like wind in the branches of a willow tree.
He must be careful; his letter would certainly be opened and a copy given to the Emperor. Twist frowned. The Emperor would know that he knew the letter would be opened; any critique of Imperial policy would be considered a deliberate insult, and no Bronze bore insult well.
Hazel Twist wanted above all things to abandon this invasion and return to his family and his bower. He had to be discreet.
Things go well with us—if a war can go well. When last I wrote we were camped in the grasslands, and hoped to stay. I thought the Fire unlikely to reach there, and I was reluctant to leave all forest behind. We all felt naked and uneasy beneath the peering sky.
But the Emperor has many shadows to cast. He cannot allow himself to accede to his troops’ nostalgia. He ordered us on, demanding certain protection from the Fire before we called a halt to our quest. The safety of the clans, he said, must harden us to endure the blank northern skies.
But now at last we have come where the Fire can never reach: We have come to the sea.