In Forest Afloat Upon the Sea

Seven

The ragged woods that sprouted at random from Kronos Float looked empty from the sea, but that did little to dispel the sense of menace that filled Telly’s heart as the Hotspur approached on a strong southwest wind.

The ship was loaded with warriors, ready to deal with whatever the invaders had left behind. But before putting the landing party ashore, they circumnavigated the home of the renegades. Blake’s careful plotting and close inspection with the long glass revealed that it was not a normal float. It was less than half the size of Schenker.

“But it used to be full size,” he said, explaining his findings to Henry Adorno, the council leader, who was now acting as master of the Hotspur and commander of the landing party. Telly stood beside him and listened.

“Are you sure?” Adorno asked.

“Absolutely. There’s hardwoods and other vegetation on the lee side that come from the heart of a mature float. And you can see places where the original pontoons separated—here and here.” He pointed to his crude but detailed map on a whiteboard. “It looks recent.”

“I guess we’ll have to learn why when we get ashore.”

Adorno ordered the landing party into small boats. Blake and Telly waited until they had grounded and the signal came that it was safe to proceed before going over.

They came ashore on a young pontoon, maybe eight or nine side-years old. The vegetation was lush, with featherduster and pigtail ferns thick from water to wood. There were a few stands of spider trees, and the painful-looking spikes of aging spar trees linked together at the heart of the pontoon. The place should have been thick with tree crabs and phibs, but Telly saw no sign of them, something he thought odd.

The first sign of human habitation came at the far side of the pontoon, a mile from the sea. There were poorly kept huts surrounding yards littered with trash. Though empty, they looked recently occupied. And they looked old to Telly, as if they had been there long before falling into disrepair.

A gray-haired woman sitting in front of the last hut gave them directions to the float’s central village, and the two dozen men of the war party pressed on.

“I knew they wouldn’t be a’coming back,” she said as Telly passed her by. She didn’t appear to be talking to anyone in particular, just expressing an opinion. “I knew it—sooner or later.”

They found the village on the far side of the float, its back against the open sea. This was where the pontoons had separated. Telly looked over the torn edge of ground to see roots and pumice and peat and soil exposed raw to the elements. Waves broke against the foot of a bluff a few meters below.

They found some of the survivors of Kronos in the village, mostly women and children, all looking hungry and lean. There were a lot of children, but most seemed passive and subdued. Telly thought they should have been more excited and playful, but they were fussy and squalling. Babies cried and clung to their mothers.

And Telly noticed that there were no dogs in the village.

But there were men there—some Downies, a few old men, and a handful of adult males who had been left behind because they couldn’t be counted on to fight. One of them came forward, introduced himself as Thomas Nym, and told the story of Kronos.

“It was our own fault,” Nym claimed. “We didn’t keep the discipline you need to for life on a float this big. There were too many squabbles over duties and responsibilities. Too many tasks went undone. We’re not religious like you Determinists. We were just too selfish to care about one another.”

The hog farm had been poorly tended—a dangerous failing. They had let the poisons from the animals leach into the ground, killing enough of the native life to weaken the glue that bound the float together.

When a storm hit about a watch-year ago, the float had cracked in two. The hogs and many of the float’s inhabitants were on the other half, which had broken into three smaller pontoons. “We lost the livestock—and more souls than we could afford,” Nym said.

The shattered community that was left behind had all it could do to survive. If they’d been closer to the big anchorages or if they hadn’t lost their only sailboat, they might have been able to get help. But the tragedy had struck somewhere in the heart of the Einstein Gyre, far from civilization.

They had stripped the float of its ready sources of food—phibs and crusties and much of the edible plants. They’d even eaten their dogs, and were losing the struggle to keep themselves alive on the few crops they could coax from thin gardens.

And then Ajax—Big Red—had arrived.

“He said that where he came from they talked to the gods. Not the one God of your church,” Nym said. “The gods of Homer—Ares, Apollo, and Athena. He got the younger men excited. Told them that he’d been sent by the gods to save the people of Kronos.”

He also taught them to turn some of the floats’ inedible plants into a mash that they could ferment and distill. Then he led them in long sessions of mad intoxication with promises of food and glory for those who joined him as warriors to prey on nearby floats.

“We figured that folks would just as likely help us as not,” said Nym. “But we didn’t dare say so. Those that did aren’t around anymore.”

Telly felt cold sympathy. A lot of people weren’t around anymore, thanks to Ajax.

Telly still felt vaguely unsatisfied.

They’d found their explanation, but it didn’t explain anything. A drunken renegade and a float full of starving misfits—that was all there had been to it. Nothing romantic or malevolent beyond the ravings of a single man.

But he wanted to know more about the man who had caused so much pain and suffering—about the man he had killed.

So when they began searching the village for the rational where Ajax lived, Telly was quick to volunteer. They followed Nym’s directions and headed aft. Before long, they came upon a high-walled stockade enclosing an area about a quarter the size of Telly’s rational back home.

The fence ran off to either side of a large hut sitting in the middle of a thick stand of conifers. As they drew closer, Telly saw that the place was marked with gruesome trophies—strings of human teeth, the skulls of pigs painted in bright colors, charred warclubs and broken spears. It set the skin on his back aprickle.

No one in the war party said a word, but the man in the lead held up a hand, and everyone stopped. They stood there in silence for a long time. Telly wondered if they all felt the same sense of haunting presence that he did—the feeling that Ajax and his warriors were still somewhere about.

When it was clear that no one was hiding in the dark corners of the woods, they continued on into the building.

The place was a mess, plain and simple. Baskets of sugar and dried meat and rotting vegetables littered the floors and piled in the corners. Heaps of charcoal sat before a metal stove, which Telly suspected had been stolen from one of their earlier victims. And weapons lay tossed helter skelter in every room.

In the rear of the hut, they found plastic jugs filled with foul-smelling liquids. Some were clear and bitter, others were dark and sour. They surrounded a collection of pipes, tubes, barrels, and bottles, all scarred by charcoal fires and dripping potions.

Telly touched a finger to the clear liquid and tasted it. The flavor was dozens of times worse than the smell, and the stuff made his throat clamp shut.

The yard was overgrown with ferns and included a small copse of mast trees in one corner. The war party converged on the trees where their leader sounded the rally cry.

Telly was one of the last to arrive, and when he reached the center of the trees he was horrified by what he found.

A thick beam had been lashed between two trees, with pegs protruding from its length and from the boles of the trees themselves. Hanging from the pegs on the trees were cruel pieces of wood and metal with handles at one end, and hooks and points and barbs at the other.

And hanging from the main beam were the bloody remains of what had once been a human being. He looked like he’d taken a long time to die and was glad when death finally took him.

At first Telly avoided looking into the man’s face, reluctant to give the hanging meat the form of humanity. But when he did finally look into the lifeless eyes of the corpse, he recoiled in shock.

It was Mark Wayland.

They held the trial for the twenty-seven surviving followers of Ajax at the beginning of the next noonwatch. It was the night-cycle of the side-day, and the proceedings were held by torchlight. The flames of the torches made shadows dance eerily across the ground.

The court consisted of the seven members of the Schenker Float Council. Henry Adorno presided. Duncan Blake stood as prosecutor. Pastor Kline spoke for the defense.

It took no more than half an hour.

Blake presented the events leading up to the invasion, which the council secretary recorded in a leatherbound log with pages of precious paper. He summarized the battle, then listed the terrible cost of the invasion. So many kilos of sugar, grain, pork, charcoal, and salt despoiled by the looters. So many dozen huts destroyed or damaged by firebombs. Fifty-three men, women, and children killed, and more than two hundred injured by the fighting.

“By their deeds shall ye know them,” Blake said. “The Law of the Sea is clear. In the name of our lost friends and family, I ask for the full penalty.”

Pastor Kline’s defense was neither long nor spirited. As with his sermons, Telly was not swayed by it in least. Kline asked for mercy, pointed to the culpability of their dead leader, and warned that men are easily led astray by false prophets.

The warriors, tied to one another with shining nylon line, sat sullenfaced and silent. As Telly watched, some tended to their wounds, while others shook with tremors caused by a combination of nerves and cold flesh.

When the testimony was over, the council members huddled closely for a few minutes to discuss their verdict. It was what everyone expected.

“You have violated the Law of the Sea, as drafted during humanity’s long struggle with itself on the waters of Okeanos,” Henry Adorno said solemnly after rising at the center of the long table. “The facts are clear. The evidence unchallenged. Your identities are known and unmistakable. Therefore, this court finds you all guilty as charged with the crime of piracy on the high seas. The penalty for your crime is death. Sentence is to be carried out upon conclusion of these proceedings.”

A murmur passed through the prisoners. Some cried out. Others simply cried. No one from Schenker Float cheered. But neither did they express any remorse for the condemned men.

A short while later, with as many of Schenker Float’s population watching as Telly had ever seen massed together, the execution was carried out.

The warriors, still bound together, watched aghast as the heavy line that bound them was lashed tight to a ballast log—a hollow tube filled with crushed pumice. A half dozen men carried the log to the edge of the Great Lagoon, where Henry Adorno stood beside the council secretary with the logbook. The prisoners were lined up along the edge of the dark water.

Henry said a few words that were snatched away by the wind.

Then the ballast log was thrown into the bottomless waters of the lagoon. In one swift motion down the line, the warriors were pulled in with it, one after the other in quick succession, reminding Telly of the tearing of a rotten waterskin. Some gasped, some yelled, some scrambled to avoid their fate at the last instant. But within a minute, they were all under the sea.

In a few days, when the bones were stripped clean and had fallen free from the line, the ballast log would be recovered. Little was ever wasted on Schenker Float.

That evening, while it was still dark, they held the funeral for those killed in the battle.

The pyre was large and nearly filled the treeless verge outboard of the boatyards in Landfall Bay. A lot of charcoal and firewood would be consumed this nightwatch—almost more than the float could afford. But there was no choice. The remains of loved ones were not left to the merciless tenders of the gyre’s deep.

Oils were poured on shrouded bodies, and sweetwoods were stoked around the pyre’s fuel. Grief-stricken family members lingered at the sides of their dead, though Telly could not bring himself to cry here in the open. He’d already said his farewell.

Pastor Kline read the words of the service, but Telly didn’t hear them. He watched the way the torches danced in the wind. He remembered the faces of his father and mother, their voices, their words.

Then the pastor walked the length of the pyre, setting his torch to the fuel. The fire was slow to start, but then roared to life when it reached the oil-soaked shrouds. The smoke rose thick and black into the star-filled sky.

Telly waited until he could feel the heat from where he stood, then approached the point in the pyre that held his parents. When it was almost too hot to stand, he stopped, looked one last time at the broom in his hands, and threw it into the flames.

Then he returned to the edge of the wood, where he sat on the ground, and waited for the fire to burn itself out.