NOVEL NEXT 132. Forty Days
Forty days they'd been asea staring at nothing and no one but themselves. Eating through their dwindling stores in meagering rations. The water was cold and once they sailed up on a berg of ice drifting out of the murk. Grave pilgrim, dirty and travelworn, seeking its ending someplace warm. How the bosun reckoned their way without stars or sun or landmarks of any kind she never knew, yet on the forty first day they passed into the chasmic channel separating dwarfdom from the kingdom of men. Black faced cliffs on either side rose indefinitely out of a flat sea, sheer and ominous, their rims lost in that great cloud of ash that used to be the sky. White tears of dried birdshit streamed down the craggy cliffs but of the seabirds there was no other sign. She looked upon the right side for the great falls of the white mountain's discharge, for the cut of the Seaway's descent to Seaway's End, for the span upon which she had first met Orc those years ago. But she saw none of these things. There was only the black water, the dreadful cliffs, the cold wind rippling the subdued sea.
The chasm seemed to go on forever into the dark. The wind sighed along the rough stone and they soon began to pass in sight of great cleavings out of the cliffs. Places devoid of dung and of weathering. Places whence rose stony voices fresh to the air, wondering what world they now witnessed and what role they might play within it.
"Ere long to make yon port at Seaway's End," said the bosun. "Make ready."
Before her Orc stirred through some things stowed between his feet. He passed back Mym's longarm, passed back her powderhorn.
"Thank ye," she said.
"Yeah," he said. He was slinging his musette over his shoulder and he shifted to look at Daraway. "Looking forward to being home?"
"Yes," said the woman.
Mym raised an eyebrow. "I thought ye hated the place."
The woman cast up her hood. "I've just suffered twoscore days downwind of an orc's armpit, eating more salt than what's left in the sea, bumming over the gunwale everytime I needed to piss and shit. I'd kiss the king himself if it got me out of this goddamned boat."
"You don't smell a peach yourself," said Orc.
"Boy I know that better than anyone."
Behind them all the bosun cackled.
Mym reached over the side to touch the water. She had to lean way over now that the skiff was unladen from forty days worth of food and rum and freshwater. The water tracked cold across her hand. She leaned back inboard and wiped a finger across her forehead as if in some ritual of homecoming. But she wasn't home yet.
Daraway pointed off to the right. "There's the breakwater."
"I see it," said the bosun. Everyone leaned slightly as the skiff steered toward a dark line, long and low in the water. Any moment the town would emerge out of the fog of ash. Any moment.
"What's that?" said Orc.
Everyone looked after him. What looked to be three crucifixes sized for ogres rose out of the harbor.
"Someone's lost their royal yards," said the bosun.
"Better said someone's lost their ship," said Daraway.
"Sunk in the harbor?" said Orc.
"Looks that way," said the woman. "Hazard maybe. Or the Dragon."
"It's Ansel's Dragon," said the bosun.
The water was quiet where it slipped past the hull. All held their breath and waited for the town to hove into view. There was perhaps a hundred yards of roadcut yet visible, perhaps shingles of a painted roof scattered up by the wind, but where Seaway's End should've been there was only a crush of fresh fallen rock, as if some giant out of an age of myth had cleft a mountaintop and hurled it down upon the seafront with all the force of a meteor. In the harbor before the obliteration bobbed a mass of wreckage, planks and rags and the shards of things, none of it recognizable as any one thing, none of it fitting together. All bodies long since drifted to the bottom. All silent as the wind would allow. The five of them looked on, their hearts shocked and breaking.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The bosun uncleated the main sheet and put the tiller into the wind. The skiff slowed and drifted upon the current and by whatever airs drafted upon the hull.
"Take us in then," said Daraway.
"No ma'am," said the bosun. "There's bound to be reefs of wrecks and wharves and who knows what else."
"My people."
"Fair certain they're there too. Certain too ain't a one of them's alive."
Daraway flinched at that. Mym reached her hand to the woman's back. There was a heat coming off of her. A dangerous heat.
"Take us in please," she said.
"No ma'am. I won't."
Her cloak had begun to steam. The bosun stirred upon the transom but he did not shift the sheet or tiller. "Fix to burn me all you want but this scow's our galley too. I'll not risk it against counting your dead so long as my wife and boy might still be alive."
Mym watched Daraway, saw her crest fall. She realized then that the woman had a life in Seaway's End she knew nothing about. She'd never bothered to learn. What friends she had were now under a thousand tons of rock. What lovers.
Orc turned on his thwart. "Where else can we land?"
"Plenty of debarkins up the gold coast."
Daraway was shaking her head. "We'll be fighting wind and sea the whole way."
"Aye," said the bosun.
"We won't have but half our stores by the time we anchor."
"Aye."
Daraway nodded at the flotsam in the harbor. "It's here or its the new seat."
"Yer capital?" said Mym.
Daraway nodded.
"The blow's good for it," said the bosun.
"Take us there," said Daraway.
"Yes ma'am."
The bosun pumped the tiller and drew in the sheet to set the mainsail. Daraway reached forward and rummaged through the crates and casks under Orc's thwart. She sat up with a bottle of the kingsmen's rum and in the manner of the mariners of Seaway's End she stood on the deck and raised the bottle and drank its contents entire.
***
That night they drifted by the lantern's light. Dim sphere cast hissing upon the oil slick sea. Oppressed by the claustral dark. She looked back toward where her mountain must somewhere be. Her breath held, her pulse quickened. What lurked in the dark more horrible than what she'd already witnessed. Her uncertainty an intolerable dread.
"Here," said the orc beside her. Outheld in his hand a bowl of cold potatoes that they had boiled in seawater days before. Turning already.
"I'm not hungry," she said.
"You need to eat."
"I need te get home."
Before the mast Daraway snored softly on the deck buried under blankets and slickers. Moaning off her intoxication, wallowing names Mym didn't recognize of people now certainly dead. Over twenty years they'd lived apart. Twenty years to grow, to fall in love and out of it. To become profoundly different than who they'd been when together. It was like Orc kept saying: all is change.
She looked back at the potatoes. She fingered one into her mouth, tasted its subtle fermenting.
"They're rank."
"Yeah, a little."
She reached for another.
"Better than seaweed," he said.
"I wouldn't go that far."
Orc grinned at her, his teeth orange in the lamplight. "I'll be sure to get you some when we get where we're headed."
"Joy of joys."
Now he laughed. "Have you ever been there?"
"No."
He turned to the bosun. "You ever been where we're headed?"
"The new seat?"
"Yeah."
"Aye, some. Never much past the dockyards."
"Anything we should know about it?"
The bosun shrugged. "Lotta people there. Lotta houses two, three stories high. Towers and a wall higher still. Lotta stuff built up to fall down on your head, the king among them."
She noticed Orc frown, but the bosun wasn't done. "Lotta shoreline too," he said. "Wide mouthed river comes around the south of it all, tucked right up inside the wall. Wouldn't be nothing for those monster tides to surge right up the terracing like we saw back at Here First. Might have wiped it clean. If it didn't burn to bits that is. Either way I ain't ashamed to say the world's a better place if it's flattened and the king with it."
"Ye don't much love him either," said Mym.
"His thugs are who put me in irons and sold me to the podunk sheriff who sold me to that goddamn pit with our old friend here." He looked at Orc. "Fair chance that's all fallen in too."
"Yeah," said Orc.
The bosun nodded ahead. "The lady would know more than me."
"That so?"
"Sure. The title comes with turns at court. She'd have done those and who knows what else. Them with gold live lives of gold, they say. Lead for the rest of us."
Mym looked to where Daraway lay. Soft light cast upon her face, harsh lines enshadowed there. Twenty years was nothing in the lifespan of a dwarf. Why did it feel like everything?