Back | Next
Contents

40: At Sea

The same tug that old Captain Bull had once flogged into slaving duty was in port—brought this time by the new Government toughs. So they cabled it up, ready to tow the Nina out of Thomas Harbor once preparations were done. The Nina's maneuverability was yet untested, so it was better to have a graceless exit than a founder in the shallows.

Gregory observed from the aft deck, by the hatch to the officers' quarters, dazed as he watched the deck and rigging aswarm with sailors. At starboard, the blind chronicler Jersey Saple teetered on the gangplank with his sun reader balanced on his right shoulder. Little Tom stood on the docks, arms akimbo—he would stay behind, watch after the old man's interests. The younger's skin still was quite dark, but at least he did not mind so much showing himself in public anymore.

Gregory was still awed by the Nina's size. Five hunnerd feet of wooden craft went against all human instincts—by proportion, he mused, the ship must have all of the stability of a child's boat, one made of folded paper. Big Tom had explained the science of it to him patiently—for it was Gregory that had to certify that the captain had met his obligations to the new Government. But it was hard to trust that mere steel banding looped around the hull would keep this monstrosity together.

Center deck, Big Tom was in a full-lung shouting match with the decksman Verrengia, an independent shrimper by trade—not so submissive as the old merchant's regular sheet winders.

Gregory could hear only bits of the conversation, but it appeared the deck salt was balking at an order to clear a last few sacks of mangoes out of the way and into the holds. Big Tom had angrily thrown his walking stick aside, and through the intermittent cracks of rising sail Gregory heard him bellow the foulest of possible obscenities. But just when Gregory thought the scene would get violent, the old seaman's shoulders sagged sadly inside his crisp white blouse. From a distance, Big Tom appeared to have surrendered the argument amicably, and he threw a fat arm around back of Verrengia's neck.

The two stood awkwardly locked centerdeck as the captain drew from his thigh pocket a fat bone flute and blew four long and mournful notes. The scurrying sailors halted, and especially grim were those who had long crewed on Big Tom's skimmers.

"Men!" Big Tom shouted, and the word disappeared into the morning gusts now clean of other human sound. "We go asail today under the flag of the new Government and under the command of Big Tom. An' them what know me best know how an argument with the commander will be ended."

With one arm still crooked around Verrengia's neck, Big Tom gave the bone flute a shake. The shaft clattered to the deck, leaving a narrow steel blade in the captain's hand. With a quick lunge, Big Tom thrust the steel through the sailor's neck and severed the top of his spinal cord. Verrengia's head nodded, and the body fell away, leaving a splatter of crimson across Big Tom's fresh blouse. Big Tom was casually wiping the blade on his ruined blouse when Gregory marched up.

"You pushed that boy to an argument," Gregory accused.

Big Tom patiently reassembled the bone flute and jammed it into his thigh pocket. "Ya. Hmph. Ya. But he warn't a regular, y'unnerstand. I juss brought 'im on for something like this—will keep the rest of 'em scared for their dicks most of the voyage."

Gregory bit the edge of his tongue until he tasted blood. He recalled Billister, pen poised behind a large desk in Chautown, politely declining to join the expedition. Gregory wished it had been that simple for himself. He about-faced, walked as calmly as he could to the officers' hatch, and went below.

Pec-Pec sat alone at the grand table in the center cabin, poking delicately at a dozen oddly shaped pieces of ebony the size of horse teeth. The magic man's eyes flitted up at the intruder and down again.

"Gregory. . .."

There came no reply. Pec-Pec's guest paced about the small room fitfully, his face turning redder and redder.

"Gregory, have you ever played chess like this?" He nudged another shard of ebony a few inches across the polished top of the grandtable. "Chess, I mean, without a chess board? Hmm?"

Gregory sputtered his lips impatiently. "Ho, it's not so hard I imagine if you're the only player. Who needs a board? Who needs pieces what look like chessmen? Who needs rules?"

Pec-Pec's expression hardened into exasperation. The dark man removed a piece from the grand table and tucked it between the strands of hair at the tip of one of his braids. Quietly and methodically he played through his game, removing every piece the same way. Then he stood.

"You can't leave," Gregory said. "The man—Big Tom, I'm sayin'—is gullybonkers. We'll not have any crew left by mid-ocean."

Pec-Pec's nostrils flared. He shrugged. "I can advise. I can not do for you or your Government. I must go."

"But you killed the Monitor!" Gregory said. "How could this be so much more than that—to escort the first expedition overseas?"

Pec-Pec's eyelids closed and seemed to quiver. "The dragon fish and I—we killed the Monitor, ya. An' that was much much too much. Not again will I slay monsters for the Government of the Fungus People." He placed a long booted foot on the ladder up to the main deck.

"Final advice then, Pec-Pec?"

Slowly, the magic man pointed a bony finger toward the empty grand table. "Ya," he said. "Learn it quickly—how to play chess without a chess board."

The Nina had been towed mid-harbor by the time Pec-Pec arrived on deck. He strode to the starboard rail, his black silks snapping in the wind. Then he turned a quick back flip and disappeared into the brine below. There was a great hissing and thrumbling under the water, and a black figure in the shape of a giant manta ray darted off toward Pec-Pec's anchored craft, the odd skimmer with the deck shaped like half a barrel. All of this was witnessed by no one.

 

Outside the captain's quarters, Gregory twisted his toe against the planking. The ship was groaning with the unnatural stresses of being towed out to sea, and Gregory strained to make out the voices inside—Big Tom and someone. Courtesy had to be suspended, however, in the face of the deliberate murder of a crewman. The new Government's mission to Europe was embarking under untenable circumstances, in Gregory's judgment, and the voyage had to be stopped to regroup. He would have to interrupt Big Tom.

He lifted a fist to rap the door, hesitated, and just threw the oak panel open. In such an act of bravado, one is not surprised to catch lovers embracing, perhaps, or an occupant attending to personal hygiene. But never could Gregory have been prepared for the shock he felt now, the horror that clenched its sickening tendrils around his gut: He had interrupted a conversation between Big Tom and a vile-looking cat-boy, the Cantilou, a living, pulsing version of the sadly stuffed creature he had seen in the garden shed on Thomas Island.

Big Tom jutted his beard toward the door. "Ah," he drawled casually, "wang it shut, would ya?"

Gregory reluctantly obeyed, then stepped into the room with the anguished feeling that he had blundered into another man's nightmare. Big Tom stood near a massive desk gleaming of polish. The Cantilou lay on the captain's bunk, forward paws flat against the blanket and rear legs relaxed into two muscular discs on either side of its buttocks.

Gregory spoke to Big Tom: "In the shed, it was an old stuffed cat what you had, no?"

Although its lips did not move, Gregory heard the voice of the Cantilou, and clearly Big Tom did as well. "You see what I wish you to see," the beast told him, "in the same way that you are hearing the words that I wish you to hear."

Big Tom was looking puzzled, and the aging captain huffed his fat frame down into the desk chair. "Ho up here," he said.

"Ho up your own," the Cantilou's voice replied gruffly, although the boy's face on the feline body still showed no emotion. Its wide black eyes stared indiscriminately. "You, Big Tom, with an ego larger even than yer belly, wishes to be the first captain across the Big Ocean. An' you, Greggie, the blind soldier of this new Government—well, for both a ya, this is a day for a change of expectations."

Big Tom stroked one set of fingers through his beard and turned his puzzled eyes on Gregory. It began to dawn on Gregory that the rotund captain was nearly as baffled as he.

The cabin had grown unnaturally warm, and Gregory was aware now of a gut-turning odor, as if the stench of the darkening blood splashed across Big Tom's blouse were amplified forty times.

They heard the Cantilou sigh, and the beast delicately crossed its paws. "Hoo, well," it said, "wouldn't ya think it time to go up on deck?"

It was then that Gregory noticed the muffled shouts and foot-poundings coming from above, signs of a crew in panic. The two men stood simultaneously and bolted out the door, down the corridor, through the center cabin to the hatch ladder. There they had to wait as six of the new Government's toughs clamored down. Gregory caught Widekilter's elbow—Gregory liked him best—and said, "What is it?"

Widekilter slapped the butt of his holstered pistol. "Prolly we'll be needin' something bigger. Going down to tear into the lockers."

The Cantilou, alone in Big Tom's cabin, uncrossed its forepaws and sighed again: "Hoo." Heard by no one.

 

Just minutes before, the crew had cast off the tow line and the tug that had pulled them to open water was circling its thrumping and labored way back toward Thomas Harbor while a deckhand astern reeled in the cable. Out of the harbor's protection, the spring sea had come to life, darkened, glistening, like a lolling plain of liquid obsidian. The Nina was now at half-sail, as she was expected to be until they cleared the Out Islands.

But it was the horizon that had inspired the howls and panic. Evenly spaced, in all directions of open sea, were nine dark skimmers of unmistakable design: the sleek new vessels that the Rafers had somehow come to possess.

Nine. Who'd a thought the savages could have built so many in just a few seasons? Or crewed them competently?

Bark was apoplectic up on the pilot's deck, shouting his orders. Sailors scrambled like monkeys through the rigging to set the Nina full sail, with the thought of ramming past the Rafers if they intended any harm. Two decksmen were setting the gunpowder and shot in each of the ship's six cannons—three starboard and three backboard.

Big Tom turned to Gregory and grumbled, "Ho, it's a pig's arse of a morning," then limped off toward his first mate.

"I've headed 'er due east," Bark shouted as his captain approached. "Hang 'er like so an' pray ta god we juss have to meet one Rafer skimmer head-on. Two more, most, might catch us broadside. But it'd take six er more of those little things ta do us much harm."

The Rafer skimmers were still quite distant, and Big Tom had not had a chance to draw out a telescope from the servator on the backboard rail. "Those back six, then, can we outrun them?" he asked.

Bark squinted into the unfamiliar rigging of the new ship and glanced astern. He shrugged—who could really know? "We get full sail boogerin' fast, I'd say ya," he replied.

Big Tom dug the fingers of his right hand into his beard. He glanced back at the diminishing Thomas Island, the spits of land forming the harbor like a protective embrace. The wind pushed his hair up into a demented, graying halo. "Would not it be better to come about? Take 'er back in?"

"Time we come full 'round, I gully they'd be on us," Bark hollered impatiently—he had considered all of the options, of course.

"I 'spect they'd go after the sails with fire arrows—put us to a stop," the captain said. "Have the hands haul up buckets of water in case."

Bark's black eyes shifted away. "Ya, Big Tom, soon's we're full sail."

"And have all starboard cannon draw bead on that one skimmer," Big Tom ordered, wagging a finger eastward.

Gregory found Jersey Saple clinging unsteadily to his sun reader as the deck surged and then fell away with increasing urgency. A portfolio of dot scriptings fell from its storage slot on the apparatus, and the pin-pricked papers scattered on the decking. "I'd meant to lash the reader down, but we've made such a rough start," the scribe told Gregory, his sightless eyes rolling wildly. "Help me, hey, or it'll be dashed ta kindling."

Gregory dragged the sun reader to the wall below the pilot's deck and tied it securely. He placed Saple's hand on a rail post. "Hold 'er there till we're out of this."

"What's all the poking fuss?" Saple asked.

"Oh, Rafer skimmers. All over—gawd. They's closing in, but I'm not sure thass such a danger," Gregory said. "You know a crew like this, what been hauling red-leggers up until now. Sets 'em on edge."

"Ya, sets 'em on edge," Saple repeated, as if trying to reassure himself.

The Nina plunged ahead ever more forcefully as each square of canvas pulled taut and billowed. Her bow pounded through the gentle waves effortlessly, dolphinlike. But still the Rafer outriggers sliced closer. They were visible now in precise detail: long and elegant shafts lilting over the emerald water. Intricately carved aplustres bobbed from their sterns like the tailfeathers of demon swans.

The one Rafer skimmer straight ahead had turned east as well, and was matching the Nina's speed and direction closely enough to come alongside. Bark ordered the helmsman to veer a few degrees south to evade, but the smaller skimmer did the same easily, and it became clear that such maneuvering would slow the expeditioners fatally.

Finally, a flower of black smoke burst silently over the near skimmer, and seconds later the ominous sound—the crack of gunpowder—reached the Nina. Then a cabled lance crashed into the Nina's starboard side.

Big Tom sprinted forward and leaned over the rail to look. It was a multipronged harpoon. The point had burst through the hull just below the forward cannon, and four anterior barbs had sunk themselves securely into the wood. The harpoon's thick hemp cable sagged into the sea in the direction of the Rafer skimmer.

The fat captain spat, turned back, and grabbed a passing sheetsman by the sleeve. "Where's yer blade, Fenton?" he demanded, and the frightened seaman produced a ten-incher from his thigh strap. "Over!" Big Tom demanded. "Whack the line, son."

Big Tom grabbed the sailor by the collar and slung him overboard, dangling him carefully until his toes touched the shaft of the harpoon. Stitches along the shoulders of the young man's shirt began to burst—phitt, phitt, phitt—until he put his full weight on the protruding Rafer missile.

"Slash it, boy!" Big Tom howled. "Cut the poker now!"

Two more blooms of smoke appeared over the Rafer attack vessel. Two more explosions. And two more many-barbed missiles struck the Nina—one biting into the bow and the other slamming the young sailor Fenton square in the chest. The barbed tip exploded through the wood wall and forced a small gusher of blood and flesh between Big Tom's legs. Pinned to the ship's hull, Fenton's body went limp, and Big Tom slowly released his collar.

The black fin of a feeder beast sliced through the rush of water several feet below the dead sailor. Teased by the torrent of human blood.

At 100 yards, the dark sailors aboard the Rafer skimmer were easily visible now, teams of two cranking at either side of large cable spools, others somersaulting and spinning about the curved decking like crazed crickets.

When the three dripping hemplines rose from the water and grew taut, Big Tom's belly tightened too. Over each hempline he witnessed a whirling blur of motion, and instantly three Rafers were clinging to the starboard rail of the Nina—two men, one woman, all slender and naked but for the weapons strapped to their limbs and torsos. Oddly, through his horror, Big Tom found himself admiring the arrangement of blades and tosser disks about their bodies—how they formed a kind of patchwork armor.

An explosion on deck shattered the momentary standoff. A half-moon-shaped piece of the starboard rail vanished into splinters, and the Rafer who had perched there fell overboard in a shower of red mist. Fel Guinness stood at the aft hatch, both barrels of his snubgun smoking. The remaining Rafers whirled their arms, and tosser disks caught Guinness in the throat and forehead. He gurgled and keeled over.

"No!" screamed Gregory, springing to the starboard side. Teasing the edges of his memory were images of a nurturing people who had pulled him from the sinking Lucia. "We don't know what the Rafers want!"

The tense silence lasted barely two seconds before three more Rafers—a total of five now—appeared on the rail as if by magic. As the decksmen backed away, two Rafers set about dismantling the cannons.

"We knows wat they want," growled Bark from the pilot's deck. "They wants our willies dangling from their necks!"

The towering first mate drew his thigh blade. Before he could throw, a disk splashed into his hand.

From below, Gregory saw three fingertips thump to the deck at Bark's feet, and his hope of averting a bloodbath evaporated. The first mate's throaty howl seemed to be the starting gun that set in motion a surreal circus of terror.

Hemp lines from two more Rafer skimmers slammed into the Nina, and the lithe little warriors whirled aboard by the dozens. The large ship's timbers were groaning now from the unnatural pull of the cables. The Rafers wheeled invisibly about the new decking and swarmed through the rigging above. All around Gregory, the new Government's panicking seamen were collapsing, felled by an enemy they could barely see. A few more banger blasts were fired, but those weapons quickly clattered to the deck.

Gregory thought to bolt into a Rafer spin himself, but he knew such a defense would be a laughable effort. Besides, where could he dart off to—where was there to hide? He longed for open land, or the protection of a forest. If he was to die amid this flailing carnage, well, he must die. He was trapped.

Gregory straightened his spine and walked soberly back to Jersey Saple, who was cowering in the shadow of his beloved sun reader. When he touched the old man's shoulder, the journalist squealed.

"It's juss me, Jersey," Gregory said, pulling him to a stand.

Saple's sightless eyes darted about maniacally. He shuddered. "It sounds like. . .a slaughter."

"But you know Rafer. Say something to them." Gregory squeezed his arm. "You know the pig-pokin' tongue. Say something! Stop it!"

Saple seemed to collect himself. He thrust both thumbs into the front of his trousers and lifted his scraggly chin to sing. His words were incomprehensible to Gregory, but they were cool and high-pitched, slicing easily through the clatter of battle and the blood-splashed sails. Gregory had heard the Rafer tongue many times, but never had it sounded like this.

"It's a nursery rhyme, taught ta me by Billister," the journalist said when he was finished. "About Big Bang Day—the Fungus People bringing destruction upon themselves."

"Great selection."

"It's the only song I know. In Rafer."

"Sing it again," Gregory demanded. "Look, they're listening."

"Hmmph. Ya. So I see," he replied sarcastically. But he sang again anyway.

The whirling dark soldiers did slowly come to a stop—some agrip in the high rigging, others busy hauling lifeless bodies up from below decks. They gawked at the spectacle of an old Fungus Person singing a song of their children. Gregory's vision began to tear up as he gazed in shock around the deck, for clearly the battle was already over. There were few lives left to save. The new Government's expedition was a disaster, although it had scarcely begun.

The Rafers had collapsed all of the Nina's sails to reduce her speed, but oddly they had left all of the rigging intact and did not seem intent on scuttling the massive vessel. Fore and aft, Gregory heard the metallic whump-and-rattle of the anchors being released, and soon all nine of the Rafer skimmers were lashed alongside.

Saple stopped singing when there came a commotion from the aft hatch. Gregory, not daring to move, watched as a trio of Rafers hauled Big Tom up out of the darkness. He was growling nonsensically and drooling into his beard, hands tied behind him and feet bound as well.

The Cantilou climbed up the hatch ladder, squinting in the bright light, and stepped haughtily over the writhing captain. The feline's boy-face fixed immediately on Gregory and Saple, and he sauntered across the deck, tail flipping. The Rafers were gaping at the fabled beast with awe and respect.

"Oh, hell, Gregory," came the Cantilou's voice, although the dainty lips never moved, "they all know me—or my ancestors anyway—through their legends."

"Who. . .who is that?" stammered Saple. He was hearing the voice too.

"A booger the likes of which you wouldn't believe," Gregory mumbled to him. "I think it's a beast what's had its claws sunk into Big Tom's mind for some time."

"And you would be Jersey Saple," came the Cantilou's keening voice again. "Is it true that you know languages? Several of them, including Rafer?"

The old man tugged at the canvas of his sun reader. "Ya," he said uncomfortably. "That is so."

"Then you will be of much use to me. And you, Gregory—you as well. You will be put to good work. It was not coincidence that you escaped the blades and disks during the Rafer attack. But for the moment, you will excuse me while I attend to a detail of cleanup before we embark."

"Cantilou," Gregory said after him sternly. The cat-boy craned its supple neck around to look at him. "Did they all have to die?" Gregory asked.

The Cantilou's eyes glowed red for a moment, and the telepathic reply came, measured and menacing: "They did not all die, Gregory, but that can be corrected."

The cat-boy swaggered toward the stern. When Gregory turned to ask, "What possible use. . ."—there she was. More muscled that he remembered. Handsomely strapped, arm and leg, in the deadly brass disks she had once had little use for—a few of them missing, flung in battle.

Tym. So she had ordered that he be spared. It would not be that difficult—do not whack the yellow-haired man with the Rafer tattoo.

She broke into the wide smile that had been haunting him for months. An animal lust welled up in him that he knew to be the dangerous, unquestioning devotion of the half-wit that he no longer was. She approached, placed a gentle fingertip on his quivering lip, and then let it slide down to toy with his neck and the tattoo work that had been carefully needled into his skin by one of her tribesmen.

"Gragi," she said.

She pulled at his arm and led him to the aft hatch, stepping carefully around the snarling captain hamstrung there.

Gregory stepped onto the hatch ladder and turned, shock-numb, still feeling knee-deep in the fresh slaughter, the crumpled bodies of Bark, Widekilter, Guinness, Bishop and—oh, gawd—poor H. Fenstemacher Lapp. The Rafers were already swabbing the deck to sparkling again. Bodies were being hefted overboard, Rafer and Fungus Person alike, to the delight of a growing pool of feeder beasts.

Big Tom, tied there amid the thickening dashes of blood, was bug-eyed with red fury as he struggled against the leather bindings. Gregory knew he would not see the old slaver again.

"If it makes you feel any better, Big Tom. . .Moori, she warn't coming back. Shacked up with some clothier in Chautown—underwear salesman, or some such." Gregory continued down the hatch ladder, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, waiting for his soul to adjust to the sickening mixture of horror and joy, and wondering which cabin they would use.

 

When the Nina got underway again, she was set at half sail, with a new crew. At the stern, a Rafer crewman fastened a twenty-five-yard hempline to the rail and its other end he wound around Big Tom's ankles.

"I'd de-ball ya, ugly li'l red-legger, if I was juss to get a pinkie free," Big Tom told the uncomprehending sailor.

The Cantilou and Jersey Saple had heard enough of the insults and now managed to ignore them. "Pec-Pec?" asked the Cantilou. His tail switched left and right. "Well, no, Mr. Saple. On the one hand, you could say he was quite aware of what would happen—or should happen. Near omniscience such as his does have its drawbacks. But on the other hand, it could not be said that he arranged any of this—the loss of the Government ship. No. You see, he's already quite mortified at the degree of involvement he's had with the matters of Fungus People. He finds very little pleasure now in helping or hindering them. As you know, he's done both. . .."

Saple held a large pad of paper in one hand and pecked notes onto it with a sharp stylus. "Ah. So. Then perhaps you could explain. . .uh, that splash overboard juss now—would that have been Big Tom?"

"Quite right."

"Ah." There was a short pause in which the blind writer tried to imagine a portly form bobbing through the waves. "Looking to the voyage ahead, then, perhaps you could explain why a few dozen Rafers and their little escort ships would care to sail to Europe."

Saple heard a soft laugh. "Oh, we will simply be the new emissaries. The Rafers will be the ones to find what's left of the old civilizations across the Big Ocean. But Europe? If there's time, if there's little enough radiation. But I thought we would begin with what you call 'the country of Africa.'"

"Ah. I am told now that our maps show it to be quite a large continent."

"A gigantic one. And we should start in the north, I think." Saple heard the cat-boy's tail whapping the deck. "Wouldn't it be nice to stop and see the Sphinx?"

Back | Next
Framed