Pirates Of Gohar

Chapter 17

Dawn. The fifteenth since their escape from Shell Island. No different from the last five, as far as Blade could tell when he woke to face it.

He woke reluctantly, as soon as he realized the night hadn't brought the rain they so desperately needed. He hadn't reached the point of refusing to wake in the hope that sleep would turn peacefully into death.

Three more days without water would see the end of him. Rhodina wouldn't last that long. Khraishamo could last a day or two longer than Blade, because in an emergency his body could cope with drinking salt water better than the two humans. That wouldn't be enough to save him without rain.

A splash from over the side, and Khraishamo reappeared dripping. With the sun and the lack of drinking water, he needed to bathe in the sea two or three times a day. Fortunately he still had the strength to do it. When he lost the strength he'd die of thirst before he could die a more painful death from his skin drying out, cracking, and bleeding.

Rhodina muttered feverishly in her sleep as Khraishamo climbed into the boat, but didn't wake up. Blade looked at her, then at the pirate chief, and they both nodded. It would be better to let her sleep as much as she could, since there wasn't anything else they could do for her.

And the voyage from Shell Island to Mythor had started so well! It was a waste of strength to curse sheer bad luck, but Blade felt like doing it anyway.

They pulled up their anchor as soon as dawn let them tell direction, heading east and slightly north. Finding a channel through the reefs and sandbars would be a matter of luck rather than steering any particular course. Steering slightly north would keep them as far as possible from the Goharan ships bound to and from Shell Island.

In spite of this precaution, they were sighted twice. Once it was a single-masted merchant ship, which came lumbering up and hailed them.

«You our pilot?»

«He's on his way,» replied Blade. «We're looking for a boat with four men in it. They didn't come back last night. Orders are to cover every channel.»

«If'n you haven't found 'em by now, you're not going to find 'em in one piece.»

«I know that,» shouted Blade. «You know that. But does the commander know that?» The sailors laughed, then went forward to lower the anchor. The captain stared at the boat so long that Blade began to suspect something was wrong, then: «Good luck.»

In an hour the merchant ship was hull down astern. In two hours it was gone and a Goharan galley was coming up rapidly to starboard. She would have been a much more formidable proposition than the merchant ship, but she passed half a mile off. The men on her deck waved, Blade and Rhodina waved back, and the galley drew quickly away.

As soon as she was safely out of sight, Blade changed their course to nearly due south. «Just in case the galley talks to the merchant captain and smells something rotten,» he said. They ran south until evening without sighting any more ships, then anchored for the night with the wind from the open Sea already blowing over them. At dawn they set sail again, and by noon they were safely away from the last of the shallows, heading southward across the Sea.

They had to gamble that the gear from the shelter and what they found in the boat would be enough. The prisoners of Shell Island were strictly forbidden to have any sort of boat gear, including water jugs, oars, and so on. There was no hope of bribing a guard for any without instantly arousing suspicion. Stealing some might be possible, but it would be risky, and almost certainly take more time than they could afford.

So they gambled, and at first it looked as if the gamble would pay off. There were two jugs of water in the boat, and they had their own fishing gear. At this time of the year rain wasn't common, but in an emergency they could drink the blood of seabirds or the body juices of fish.

«The only way we can't get those is the Sea drying up,» said Khraishamo. He should have added-«Or not being able to catch them in the first place.»

They didn't worry about their fishing gear at first. They were more worried about bad weather and being sighted by Goharan ships. Summer storms were rare but when they came they could be savage, littering the shores of the Sea with the wreckage of ships and the bodies of sailors. Goharan ships were also rare at this time of year in the middle of the Sea. When they sailed at all, they usually crept along the eastern shore to catch whatever land breezes they could. Even galleys hugged the shore, landing every few days and resting their rowers.

The guard Blade pulled overboard took all the arrows in the boat with him, so there wasn't much they could do to the seabirds. They were luckier with the fish-until on three successive days they lost both their hooks and the fishing spear.

Suddenly dying of thirst was no longer a possibility but a real danger, coming closer each day. They turned east, willing to risk being sighted by Goharan ships in the hope of reaching land and finding water.

«If we find only a small merchantman, perhaps we can capture it,» said Khraishamo.

«And a galley?» said Rhodina, then answered her own question. «Never mind. A quicker death than thirst, for sure.»

Unfortunately they sighted no Goharan ships on the first two days, and on the third day the wind died completely. The sea turned to glass, blazing under the sun until even Blade was half-dazzled. Rhodina's tan didn't keep her from getting a murderous sunburn, and Blade found himself turning red and peeling. They both would have started wearing clothes if the sunburn hadn't made it too uncomfortable.

The third day of the calm, the last of the water ran out. Now their only hope was rain, which seemed unlikely, or a lucky encounter with a Sarumi ship, which didn't seem very likely either.

«We don't know the eastern Sea that well,» said Khraishamo. «But that's where all the ships worth catching sail in summer. So we pull the ships up, caulk, rig, paint, harvest the crops, salt down the fish-«

«I understand,» said Blade.

«I swear you have nothing to fear,» said the pirate chief. «If the Sarumi do find us, I'll pledge my life to see you and Rhodina in Mythor before autumn.»

«But they won't be finding us,» said Rhodina. Her voice was dull and her eyes were half-closed. «Even HemiGohar couldn't find us now.»

Waking on this hot morning, Blade couldn't help wondering if Rhodina might possibly be right.

Dawn on the sixteenth day. Blade was on watch, but dozed off for a moment. When he awoke, he found Rhodina half out of the boat, mouth open and gulping salt water. He pulled her back into the boat. She started to sob, but she was too dehydrated for any tears to come. Blade held her until the fit of hysterics passed.

«Blade, Blade,» she murmured. «This-the end. You and Khraishamo-to go on, you need water. Kill me-drink my blood. No!» she said as Blade stiffened in uncontrollable horror at the idea. «No. You must.»

«We must not,» said Blade, desperately hoping that Rhodina hadn't gone completely mad. «Without you, we couldn't get to the rebels. Without getting to the rebels, it's a wasted trip even if we live.»

«You must live, even so. You-«

Khraishamo cursed them for waking him and sat up. Before Rhodina could say a word, Blade explained what she'd suggested. Khraishamo's look of horror matched Blade's own, then he bent and kissed Rhodina on each caked eye.

«Rho, Rho, silly Rho,» he said. «Blade's right. Without you alive at the end of the voyage, we might as well jump overboard right now. We need Blade, too, because he knows all the secrets of Gohar, including some he hasn't told us.»

«And we need Khraishamo's strength and skill with boats, and we'll need him to speak for us if the Sarumi do find us,» said Blade. «We each of us need the others. So we're going to Mythor together, or die here together.»

«Yes,» said Khraishamo. He took Blade's right hand and Rhodina's left. «All for one, and one for all.»

Blade repeated it, forcing himself not to laugh, and then Rhodina gasped out the words. Blade wondered what the creator of The Three Musketeers would have said if he'd heard their famous oath from Khraishamo's lips. Certainly a pirate chief who wasn't even human, a battle-scared young whore, and a traveler from another Dimension were as unlikely a trio of musketeers as you could hope to find.

Dawn on the seventeenth day. A seabird landed on the gunwale. Confident that none of the three sprawled bodies in the boat could harm it, the bird made the mistake of folding its wings. That was its last mistake. A quick snatch, a squawk, a twist, and Blade had the bird in hand, its neck neatly wrung.

They gave Rhodina the blood to drink and rubbed the fat on the worst of her sunburn. Then Blade and Khraishamo divided the flesh. It was gamey and reeking of fish, but they were past caring.

Dawn on the eighteenth day. The sea was as flat and the air as heavy as ever, but the sky held a bronze tinge and the sun was nearly invisible even though there weren't any clouds. Khraishamo sniffed the air.

«This might be hatching a storm,» he said. «And it might not.»

«If it doesn't-«began Blade, then found he didn't have the will to finish the sentence out loud. He could finish it in his thoughts, though.

Another day, and Rhodina will be dead. A few days after that, and we'll join her. Khraishamo and I are already too weak to capture a merchantman if she did pick us up. We'd have to lie. He didn't feel very hopeful about lying convincingly. In fact, he'd never felt so nearly hopeless about survival in his life. He kept going purely on the principle that the nearly dead sometimes live, while the completely dead don't come back.

Then he felt a puff of wind on his cheek. He blinked, and when he felt a second puff, he sat up. Then he felt a third, and Khraishamo was sitting up, and a fourth.

After the fourth puff it was a steady breeze. Khraishamo threw himself into movement, sponging off Rhodina and checking the sun-baked sail and rigging while Blade manned the tiller. The pirate seemed torn between joy and uncertainty.

«If this wind holds, it means a storm. But a storm maybe means going from no water to too much.»

«We can face that,» said Blade. «And if worse comes to worse, I'd rather be drowned than sun-baked.»

Khraishamo frowned. «Don't joke like that, Blade. Not out here.» He pointed to the northwestern horizon. It was turning from bronze to a sullen slate-gray. The wind was now blowing strongly enough for the ripples on the water to start turning into waves. As the sail was filled, the boat began to leave foam in its wake.

Another hour, and Blade might have danced for joy if that wouldn't have upset the boat. The sky turned completely gray, almost black, with the clouds pressing down on the sea as if they wanted to crush the boat. Out of the clouds came a downpour so fierce that for a while Blade was afraid they would have to start bailing. Suddenly there was all the water they could use.

They filled the pots, drank them empty, and filled them again. They wrung out the drenched sail and used the water to wash their clothing. Then they wrung out their clothes over their sun-dried, salt-caked skins. They drank the pots empty again, then filled them and poured them over Rhodina. They even gave her a full pot to wash out her hair.

When she was finished with that, she had the strength to stand, holding onto the mast. She stood there as the wind rose and her hair began to fly about her, a naked, magnificent storm goddess. Blade knew he'd never forget the sight of her in that moment.

Then she had to sit down and hang on, because the wind went on rising as the rain slackened. Before long Blade wouldn't have tried dancing for a million pounds. He'd have gone overboard before he could take three steps. Besides, he wasn't feeling quite so cheerful now. He remembered that summer storms on the Sea could blow like hurricanes. There wasn't enough room for them to build up gigantic waves, but to small-boat sailors that wasn't an important difference.

Blade looked around him. It was becoming impossible to tell where the sky ended and the Sea began. Waves were already nearly ten feet high with the wind peeling their crests off in clouds of spray. Water roared under the boat and the wind roared in Blade's ears. He found he had to shout to make Khraishamo hear him.

«How does this blow look to you?»

«It could get a lot worse. It probably will, too. But at least it's taking us the way we want to go.»

That was true. The gale would drive them toward the eastern shore of the Sea. It might blow out before they reached Mythor, or it might drive them ashore before they reached the city. Meanwhile, it was giving them all the water they could use, as well as protection from Goharan ships. Blade shouted to Khraishamo again.

«We don't need to worry about Goharans any more. The merchant ships'll all be too busy to pay attention to us, and the galleys'll all be heading for shelter.»

Khraishamo nodded. «Let's hope we can do the same if we have to.»

Blade looked up at the sky without loosening his grip on the tiller. It could hardly be much after noon, but already the day was as dark as late evening.