The Sacred Band

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Shirtless and sweating, Melio faced the massive warrior. His Marah sword sliced the air. He backed and parried. The warrior stepped toward him on legs like tree trunks, his blade hissing in the air with each massive swing. Several times Melio dodged to the right or left as his foe’s sword struck the frozen ground, sending up splinters of ice. He felt the giant’s anger growing, possessing him, driving him to more and more furious attacks. He bellowed and swung his blade around. Melio ducked and spun and leaped with a swirling aerial attack of his own. It would have been a wonderful move. He would have soon followed it with a head-hewing attack.

Except that the timing of his landing was off. The ground moved beneath him in such a way that he landed on the edge of his foot. His ankle twisted and he yanked it into the air, hopping on the other leg, cursing. His sword hung limp, and his foe, for that matter, went forgotten. Forgetting the slickness of the surface on which he stood, Melio’s good foot suddenly took off in a horizontal direction, bringing the rest of his body crashing down a moment later.

“What, exactly, was all that about?”

The voice was Geena’s. She sat suspended from the rigging of the league clipper, the Slipfin. She had one leg wrapped around the rope ladder. That was all she needed to feel secure, even though the vessel rose and fell at a rapid, wind-whipped clip. As Melio had fought his battle, she had munched dates and spit the pits out over the water. Sometimes upright, sometimes hanging upside down, she had watched the entire scene with barely contained mirth. It had taken Melio an extra measure of focus to block her out.

He lay prone for a moment, as if he had decided to make a close inspection of the deck planks. Like everything else on the outside of the vessel, the deck was coated in white skin, slicker for it. It was not the first time Melio had found himself studying it. Things had gotten a bit better since Kartholome had found a supply of gripping deck socks, but even these only seemed to work when he remembered that he was wearing them.

“A revised version of the Eighth Form,” he said, pushing up. “The Eighth Form is the combat routine that reenacts Gerimus’s battle with the guards of Tulluck’s Hold, when he fought the giants that guarded the-”

“Who’s Gerimus?”

“You don’t know who Gerimus was?”

“Not everyone sucks at the tit of Acacian lore!” Kartholome called, though from where was not immediately obvious.

“A king from the Second Candovian Kingdom.” When this did not seem to register with her, Melio wiped the sweat from his brow with his shirt, which he had taken off before he began. It was actually quite chilly, but he liked the feel of air on his skin when he trained. They were eighteen days out of Bleem, heading west with a slight edge toward the south. Clytus made that small adjustment for his own reasons, which he did not share. Around them stretched the Gray Slopes. As far as the eye could see, waves, sky. It was bleak, the sky a lighter version of the water it hung over. He took a swig from his waterskin, feeling her eyes on him all the while.

Geena flipped upside down again. Her shirt began to fall with gravity, but she pinned it to her abdomen. “Where’s Tulluck’s Hold?”

“It’s…” Melio set the waterskin’s spout in his mouth again, but pulled it away without drinking. “I don’t know, really. Candovia, I believe.”

Geena unwrapped her leg and climbed down the ladder, managing to do so without actually putting her hands or feet on the rungs very often. He had seen her do that before, but could not for the life of him figure out the technique. She landed on one of the horizontal stacks of harpoons they had bought at Bleem. Balanced at the topmost of them, Geena walked along it. “You’re guessing? You were there, weren’t you?”

“It was a long time ago,” Melio said. “There’s not a Tulluck’s Hold anymore.” She just looked at him, eyes expectant. “I mean a really long time ago. Before my time.”

“And yet you remember every move this Gerimus made?”

“Anyway, that’s only part of it. What I was doing was the revision created by Leeka Alain, an officer of the Northern Guard. It’s partly the traditional Form and partly the way he modified it when he killed the first Numrek.” Geena began to speak, but Melio carried on. “And this Leeka I actually knew. He detailed the battle, and I even worked some of it through with him. So…” He toasted her with the skin and took a drink, not sure he had won the point but keeping up appearances.

Clytus climbed down from the bridge. “Sharratt, enough playing with your sword,” he said. “On to your evening round of duties. Might as well start.”

Melio grabbed for his shirt.

“Oh, don’t do that!” Geena tossed a date pit at him.

“Geena,” Clytus said, a warning in it.

“What? I just like to watch. Melio Sharratt, my private performer.”

“Performance over,” Clytus said. “Up to the nest, girl, or I’ll get the strap out.”

“Don’t you wish?” She scaled the swaying ladder effortlessly.

Clytus stood beside Melio. The two of them watched her ascend and then tip herself into the tiny basket of the crow’s nest. “How old is she?” Melio asked, once he was confident Geena was well out of talking earshot.

“Acts just like a girl, doesn’t she? You’d think she was sixteen and had never seen an obstacle she couldn’t leap. She’s always been like that, all thirtysome years I’ve known her. Giver bless her.” The brigand set somber eyes on Melio. “It’s not true, though. She’s seen hard times, especially when she was a girl. She likes you, but don’t get the wrong idea. She’d not roll with you. It’s the dance she likes; not the wrestling.”

“I… I never thought-”

“You know why? In your case, it’s because of Mena. For a certain type of woman, the princess is… well, a person to aspire to. Like a hero if she were a man. You understand me?”

Melio thought a moment and then said, “Yes, I do. I know the feeling. About Geena, though, I wouldn’t have tried anything.”

“Good,” Clytus said. “She’d go off you in a minute if she thought you would. You’re a fine lad, but if you slighted Mena she’d likely introduce your stiffy to a blood eel’s teeth. She’s done it before.” Before Melio could configure his face in response to this, Clytus slapped his shoulder. “Now, to chores. This ship runs clean in many ways I’ve not figured out yet, but there’s still work to do.”

As he always did, Melio went to his chores without complaint. Since leaving Tivol he had learned more than he had ever wished to about nautical matters. Four was not nearly enough to crew a vessel like the Slipfin, but Clytus and Geena had enough brigand tricks up their sleeves to make hard things easier, to finesse the impossible into only improbable. He had to respect them for it, and do his part.

If these were to be his last days, Melio could not complain that they were being spent poorly. He had seen wonders at sea before. In the time before he found Mena on the docks of Ruinat, he had worked for a feeble living among the Floating Merchants. The Inner Sea was beautiful, but its teeming life had not prepared him for the things he saw riding the Gray Slopes.

O ne afternoon, a week from land, Geena had shouted from high in the rigging. He did not catch what she said, except that it was an alarm. Melio turned. He saw the movement low on the horizon. He could not make sense of it at first. Low clouds? A storm brewing? Neither. It came on fast, with a speed and swarming quality that set it apart from some phenomenon of the weather. But it did not ride the water like a fleet of boats, nor was it in the water, as aquatic life should be. It was above the surface, skimming the crests of the waves.

Geena slid down the rope at a speed akin to just plain falling. She hit the deck and sprang up with purpose.

“What is that?” Melio shouted.

“Dinner or death,” she said as she passed him. She flipped open one of the wooden deck crates and hit him in the chest with a wad of netting. She bolted away, climbed the stairs to the bridge, and disappeared inside.

“Or make it both.” Kartholome slid up to them with an uncanny grace on the skin, looking like a performer skating on ice. “Dinner and death.” He grabbed one of the nets and careened away.

Standing where Geena instructed him to, netting loose in his fingers, Melio stared at the rocking view of a seething sea atop which a great mass of something approached. Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. They were innumerable. Large enough to see at a distance. They flew, but something told him they were not birds. There were no birds out here. Not so far from land. Not low-flying birds like that.

Geena, back again, grabbed him by the elbow. “Don’t get skewered, love. Stay near the cabin door.”

It was not until they were upon them that Melio understood what they were: a massive flock of flying fish, with flipper wings so wide and nimble that individuals wheeled like starlings within a vast, unstoppable torrent of momentum. The front wall of them broke over the ship. Motion engulfed them: that of the sailing ship and of the fish flying across it. Sound that textured the air with scales. A sea-deep stench of salt and life and moisture splattered Melio’s face. The air became liquid enough to swim in.

Of course! Melio thought. That’s how they fly. They swim the air!

The fish careened over the deck. They slipped between the sails. Most flew with amazing precision, even snapping their wings against their sides to cut through narrow gaps. Their bodies were slim splinters, thick around as a man’s leg and, fins included, a little longer. They were as dangerous in flight as javelins, striped down the side with one slash of violet. One sliced Kartholome’s shoulder through his shirt, several smashed so hard against structures on the boat that they skidded across the deck, broken. A hundred, it seemed, tried to cut strands of Melio’s curly hair as they passed.

Melio would never forget the mad way he and Kartholome and Geena dashed around on deck, fishing. They tossed nets up over their heads, and then fell to the deck, clutching the ropes as the fish’s force pulled them. He would never forget that, try as he might, he could not say he saw even one of them jump from the water or fall into it. They just flew. Nor would he forget the taste of them afterward, when the crew gathered snug in the cabin, getting stupid on ale. Roasted over an open flame, the fish needed nothing but salt to flavor them. “Like tuna,” he declared, and Geena had added, “If tunas could fly and were a white fish that tasted like sea air after a storm on an island of lemon trees.”

She had it right, he had to admit.

A nd then there was the morning two weeks from land, nothing around them but endless ocean, when the sails suddenly appeared. Twenty or thirty of them, diaphanous white triangles blown by the same steady wind the Slipfin hitched. They came over the horizon behind them midmorning, and by the midafternoon they cruised right by the league clipper. But the sails were nothing human made. They trailed beneath them long tendrils of aquatic life, ribbons of yellow and blue, splattered with sparkles along the entire long length of them. Melio could not shake the feeling that each shimmer was an individual creature attached to the tendrils, passengers that watched him as they flapped in the current, as casual as so many Agnates passing them in their pleasure crafts.

There was the doubled sky at night. Above, the constellations he knew. Below, beneath the undulations of the waves, another universe of glowing orbs. They were not reflections from the sky, as he thought at first, but shone with their light from somewhere far below. He knew that the stars below were living creatures, which made him wonder if the stars in the sky might be likewise. Creatures of some vast ocean he could not comprehend.

And there were the deep whales. He had heard tales of them, but seeing them was another thing. They appeared in a pod off a way to starboard. They looked, from the middle distance, like a series of rounded granite boulders, save that they bobbed with the seas. One broke off from the rest, dipped below the surface a moment, and then rose and came toward them. The enormous wedge of its head pushed a billow of water before it. Just before its nose would have hit the Slipfin, the whale dove. Its tailfins stretched wider than the Slipfin was long. When it submerged, the surge of water it pulled down tilted the boat with it. The upsurge of water from the fin sent a wave over the boat, drenching all on board. Melio clutched a safety rope, laughing uncontrollably at the bizarre beauty of it. He was starting to understand the way Geena lived.

The way Dariel must have lived when he grew to adulthood among these people.

The trials to come should have daunted him, but for some reason they did not. It was not that he thought they would pass through the Range, survive a run-in with the sea wolves, or possibly find one young prince in a foreign land that he knew nothing of. Just the opposite. It was the fact these things seemed so out of the reach for four small people in a relatively small boat that heartened him. They should fail. They would fail. There was no way they could not fail. With that established, he could go forward without struggling with expectations.

D ead calm. The third week in. Just as far from land as was possible. Near where the Range might well have begun. Instead of that roaring tumult-stillness. It just came upon them while nobody was paying attention. Melio did not feel the boat’s constant rocking stop; he just realized that it had when he awoke that morning. It was not even the lack of movement that woke him. It was the silence. No creaking of boards, no murmuring off somewhere in the ship’s innards, no whistle of wind or slop of water against the hull, no tinkling from the bells high up on the mainmast.

They all gathered on deck and stared at the breezeless sky and the mirror-flat surface of the water and the ghosts of limp cloths where the sails should have been. The Slipfin sat as if stuck in a sea of glass.

“When did this happen?” Clytus asked.

“Didn’t you notice?” Geena responded.

“Nah. I was deciphering what I could from league manuals in the bridge back room. I set the course and stepped away from the wheel, stuck my nose in the books. Don’t know how long for, but when I looked up this calm was on us. Couldn’t have been more than a few minutes,” he said, but none of the confidence of the statement was in the voice making it.

Geena jumped up onto the port railing. She stood there, balanced above the water. For a moment, she looked like she was going to leap down onto the hard surface of the once-was-water and go running across it, playing. A few seconds standing there, however, took the jauntiness out of her posture. “Passing strange,” she whispered as she climbed back down to the deck.

Kartholome had heard of a league fleet becalmed for nearly a month during an early crossing, but that had happened so long ago the tale had the feel of legend. He seemed more disbelieving than any of them. “I’ve never seen a stillness like this,” he said. “It isn’t possible. We’re supposed to be in the Range now. The Range of the Gray Slopes, for the love of light. This isn’t possible!”

“Shhhh,” Geena said, and Melio was glad she did. A voice should not, he felt, speak loudly into such stillness.

For two days the impossible continued. No wind stirred. No ripples moved on the surface. No fish darted in the water, or flew above it, or sailed across it. No motions or sounds in all the world other than the ones they themselves made. The silence in particular grew in intensity. Melio had never experienced a silence like this one before. The lack of noise made them all shy of making any sounds. Each scuffing of a foot on the deck or the thrumming of fingers on the railing, a cough at night or a clearing of a throat: they all seemed like an affront to the emptiness that was the world. A sign that would betray their existence to something that should not know of their existence. They spoke only when they had to, and then only in whispers. Melio always felt ill at ease afterward.

On the third morning a fin broke the surface-the dorsal of a gap-mouthed shark. It moved with an eerie slowness, as if it worked at a different pace from the rest of the world. It seemed to carve not through water but through the thick syrup the water had congealed into. Watching the shark for the better part of an afternoon, Melio felt the Slipfin to be akin to whatever tiny creatures that behemoth sucked into its gaping maw. Just as vulnerable. Just as still in the water, waiting for the mouth that would engulf them, boat and all.

By the third night they had had enough of it. Gathered together in the captain’s cabin, they ate their fill from the rich stores. More to the point, they got drunk. They filled the small room with more noise than they had heard in days. Awkward, forced humor. Boisterousness with a slightly mad edge. Kartholome drank his warm ale from a languid stretch of glass that no doubt was intended for finer things. Geena raided the league’s stores. She shared around a flask of something with an aniseed tang. None of them could name the liquor in it, but it went down.

“If it keeps on like this,” Clytus said, “we’re not going to get to die fighting sea wolves.”

“It’ll be boredom that takes us,” Kartholome quipped.

Geena drank from the flask, closed her eyes as she processed the taste and potency of it. Still doing so, she said, “I’ll not abide that. I made a pact a long time ago with the afterdeath. I’m not going to it quietly. A howling death I’ll have. None other.” She slapped a hand on the polished wood of the table.

Kartholome rose abruptly and went outside. They could hear him shouting out across the water, damning the calm and insulting the wind for cowardice, calling the waves craven. He returned and commenced to drink more.

Melio’s gaze drifted up from the ring of familiar faces and moved across the walls. Leagueman walls, decorated with their sparse sense of nautical gentility. He could not see it well from where he sat, but there was a mural at the far end of the room, painted right onto the smooth wood panels. He had studied it before. A league brig plied a sea filled with carnage, the bodies of leviathans thick in water stained crimson. Sea wolves, Kartholome had confirmed. The painting brimmed with details. Individual leaguemen and Ishtat on the deck of the brig. Harpoons caught in midair. A sea wolf pierced through a grasping tentacle, just one of many. Seabirds circling in the air above. Melio knew that detail to be true. The biggest brigs had their own contingents of birds that made the ocean crossing with them.

Despite the details, Melio could not quite believe the scene. The sea wolves themselves had no shape that he could credit. They looked like whales and squids and sharks all cut into pieces and floating in a wave-heavy stew together.

“What do they want anyway?” Melio asked. “The sea wolves, I mean. Why attack ships? Nothing else does that. Not even deep whales.”

“Nah, they just come and take a look, near to sinking in the process,” Clytus said. “You know how much we’d have made if we were whalers? If we’d taken that big bastard and dragged him back to Tivol?”

“The four of us? Not possible.”

Clytus guffawed. There was a comment to go with it, Melio could see, but Clytus kept it in. “So, do they have a taste for man flesh or what?” Melio asked.

Kartholome warmed to the question. “Leagueman flesh, I’d say. The league and they are enemies. Always have been. Just like in the painting you’ve been eyeing. Before they had the skin, the league lost a lot of ships to them. Even a brig went down once. Disappeared. None lived, but everyone believes it was sea wolves that took her. Long time ago, this is, but the leaguemen know how to hold a grudge. Once they came up with the skin they-”

“What is the skin? Do you know how it’s made?” Melio accepted the flask from Geena. He drank with the help of her finger, which tilted the flask up to lengthen his measure.

“If I knew, I’d not be here,” Kartholome said. “I’d be sipping lemon liqueur from a cliffside estate in Manil, with two redheaded whores named Benda and Fenda.”

“He’s partial to redheaded whores,” Geena explained. “An experience he had as a lad, see. Give him enough drink and you’ll hear more about it than you want to know.”

“Anyway,” Kartholome continued, “what I’m saying is that I’d be rich, is what. Nobody knows how they make it. Could be a process the Lothan Aklun clued them to. Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s the only thing that made the mist trade possible.”

The mist trade? Melio mused. He never calls it the quota trade.

“So,” Melio asked, “should we ever get moving again and come up against these sea wolves, will the skin protect us or won’t it?”

“That’s right,” Kartholome said.

“Which?”

“It will and won’t. You were there when we bought and loaded the harpoons. You didn’t think we were going whaling, did you?” He held up a hand to stop Melio’s response. “Let me finish. You asked a question. Let me answer it. Once the league had the skin, their big ships were safe. Little ones not so much, but the big ones could sail as they pleased. The sea wolves just can’t grasp the stuff. They slip off it. Tentacles and beak and teeth and everything. So the brigs just slid on by. That’s all right if you’re two hundred feet above the water. But when you’re down low like we are… that’s a different story. They’ll jump clear out of the water and smash down on the deck. They’ve got these tentacles with grippers all up and down them. They get one of those around your leg and you’re heading for their mouth. Beaklike, the mouth is. Ugly thing so sharp it serrates the flesh like two curved knives angled just so. You maybe should have asked more about them before you signed on for this trip.”

Melio, remembering that he did not always like this man, met his gaze without humor. “You knew all that and you still came.”

“There’s more,” he said, after a long draft of ale. “The league wasn’t satisfied with just being able to get across untroubled. Spiteful bunch, they are. They took to slaughtering the beasts whenever they could. Harpoons. Those big crossbow bolts of theirs. They even threw out barrels of pitch and set seas full of the wolves alight.”

“They still do that?”

“On occasion, I suppose. Did it for generations. Never did any good, though.”

Kartholome dabbed at the moisture at the edges of his lips. For some reason this prompted him to flash a sly smile at Geena. She responded with a finger gesture threatening his manhood with an unfortunate break. They did that every now and then. A game, Melio assumed.

“I haven’t made a scientific study of it,” the pilot continued, “but I don’t think so. What I heard is, it never changed things in the slightest. The league got tired of the effort. Now they just sail through them.”

“As we’ll do as well,” Clytus said. “Might have to tack a bit, but-”

“ ‘Tack a bit’?”

The brigand, thickly muscled, masculine-featured in a blocky, weathered way, tried to shape his large hands into a demonstration of the maneuvering he had planned. He looked like a bear trying to explain the use of a pottery wheel.

Kartholome chuckled. He started to say something but found it too amusing to put into words. Geena flicked a spoon at him. He found that hilarious as well. He got up, coughing out an overflow of humor as he headed back on deck.

Geena reached across the table and patted Clytus’s hand with a solemnity that-on her-could only be in jest. “I’m sure the wolves have never seen the likes of how an Outer Isle brigand tacks. They’ll wet themselves.”

This sat a moment in the room before the dubious humor of it got Melio wagging his head. Geena slid her chair toward his and leaned into his shoulder. Clytus began to explain that it was not just tacking he had in mind. There was… He stopped midsentence. Melio turned, ready to nudge him back into it and feeling it best he get Geena’s head off his shoulder. He caught sight of Kartholome.

The man stood framed in the door. The blood in his face had drained out of him right along with the good humor he had stepped out choking over. His eyes searched the room without actually focusing on anyone.

Geena started to say something. Stopped. It was Clytus who asked, “What?”

Kartholome said, very softly, “Come outside.”

Stepping from the dim passageway onto the deck, Melio thought a full moon must have risen, so bone-blue was the light. A pungent scent invaded his nose. It flared his nostrils as it pushed inside, a sea stink so heavy he could barely breathe it. As he stepped on the slick deck, he heard the sound. Not silence anymore but a hushed slithering, a moist friction of something all around the boat, a wet sound like an enormous tongue licking his ear: all of these at once. Then he saw what made the noise, and the light and the smell. The sea was in motion around them again. Only, it was not the water that was moving.