The Face of the Waters Read online

  Farther out the ocean would be other colours, depending on the microorganisms in it, the surrounding climate, the upwellings of particulate matter from the depths. The different seas were named according to their prevailing hue: the Red Sea, the Yellow, the Azure, the Black. The one to fear was the Empty Sea, the sea that was pale ice-blue, a desert sea. Great tracts of the ocean were like that and almost nothing lived in them. But the route of the expedition would pass nowhere near any of that.

  The ships were travelling in a tight pyramid-shaped formation that they would try to hold to day and night. Each vessel was under the command of one of Delagard's ferry captains except for the one on which the eleven women of the Sisterhood sailed all by themselves. Delagard had offered to give them one of his men to be their pilot, but they had refused, as he had expected them to do. "Sailing a ship's no problem," Sister Halla told him. "We'll watch what you do and we'll do the same thing."

  Delagard's flagship, the Queen of Hydros, was in the lead, at the apex of the pyramid, with Gospo Struvin in charge. Then came two side by side, the Black Sea Star commanded by Poilin Stayvol and the Sorve Goddess under Bamber Cadrell, and behind them the other three ships in a broader line, the Sisterhood in the middle aboard the Hydros Cross flanked by the Three Moons under Martin Yanez and the Golden Sun commanded by Damis Sawtelle.

  Now, with Sorve altogether gone from view, there was nothing in sight anywhere but sky and sea, the flat horizon, the gentle ocean swells. A curious sort of peace descended over Lawler. He found it surprisingly easy to submerge himself in the vastness of it all, to lose himself completely. The sea was calm and seemed likely to stay that way forever. Sorve could no longer be seen, that was true. Sorve had disappeared. What of it? Sorve no longer mattered.

  He moved forward along the deck, savouring the force of the wind against his back as it pushed the ship steadily onward, every minute carrying him farther and farther from anything he had ever known.

  Father Quillan was standing by the foremast. The priest wore a dark grey wrap of some unusual light woven material, airy and soft, something he must have brought with him from another world. There were no such fabrics available on Hydros.

  Lawler paused by his side. Quillan gestured broadly toward the sea. It was like an enormous blue jewel, sparkling with fierce brilliance, its great glassy curve reaching outward on all sides as if the entire planet were a single shining polished sphere. "Looking at all that, you wouldn't believe that anything but water exists anywhere in the world, would you?"

  "Not here, no."

  "Such an enormous ocean. Such emptiness everywhere."

  "Makes you think there has to be a god, does it? The immensity of it all."

  Quillan looked at him, startled.

  "Does it?"

  "I don't know. I was asking you."

  "Do you believe in God, Lawler?"

  "My father did."

  "But not you?"

  Lawler shrugged. "My father had a Bible. He used to read it to us. It got lost, somewhere, a long time back. Or stolen. I remember a little of it. 'And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters… And God called the firmament Heaven.' That's Heaven up there, right, Father Quillan? Behind the sky? And the waters that are supposed to be above it, that's the ocean of space, isn't it?" Quillan was staring at him in astonishment. " 'And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.' "

  Quillan said, "You know the whole Bible by heart, do you?"

  "Only this little bit. It's the first page. I couldn't make any sense out of the rest of it, all those prophets and kings and battles and such."

  "And Jesus."

  "That part was in the back. I never read it that far." Lawler looked toward the endlessly retreating horizon, blue curving away under blue toward infinity. "Since there's no dry land here, obviously God meant to create something different on Hydros from what He created on Earth. Wouldn't you say? 'God called the dry land Earth.' And He called the wet land Hydros, I guess. What a job it must have been, creating all those different worlds. Not just Earth, but every single world in the galaxy. Iriarte, Fenix, Megalo Kastro, Darma Barma, Mentirosa, Copperfield, Nabomba Zom, the whole bunch of them, the million and one planets. With a different purpose in mind for each world, or else why bother creating so many? It was all the same god that created them all, wasn't it?"

  "I don't know," Quillan said.

  "But you're a priest!"

  "That doesn't mean I know everything. That doesn't even mean I know anything."

  "Do you believe in God?" Lawler asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Do you believe in anything at all?"

  Quillan was silent for a time. His face went completely dead, as if his spirit had momentarily left his body.

  "I don't think so," he said.

  * * *

  The sea seemed flatter here, for some reason, than it did on the island. Darkness came suddenly, falling almost with a crash. The sun plummeted through the western sky, hovered for a moment just above the sea, and sank. Virtually at once the world turned black behind them and the Cross began to glow overhead.

  "Mess call, first watch," Natim Gharkid yelled, banging on a pan.

  The working crew of the Queen of Hydros was divided into two watches, four hours on and four hours off. The members of each watch took their meals together. The first watch was Leo Martello, Gabe Kinverson, Pilya Braun, Gharkid, Dag Tharp and Gospo Struvin; the second watch was Neyana Golghoz, Sundira Thane, Dann Henders, Delagard, Onyos Felk, Lis Niklaus and Father Quillan. There was no special officers' mess: Delagard and Struvin, the owner and captain, took their meals in the galley with the others. Lawler, who had no fixed duty schedule himself but was on call round the clock, was the only one outside the watch system entirely. That suited Lawler's biological rhythms: he took his morning mess with the second watch at dawn, his evening mess with the first watch at sundown. But it gave him an oddly free-floating sense of not really being part of things. Even here in the earliest days of the voyage the two watches were beginning to develop a kind of team spirit, and he belonged to neither team.

  "Greenweed stew tonight," Lis Niklaus said, as the first watch filed into the galley. "Baked sentryfish fins. Fish-meal cakes, suppleberry salad." It was the third night of the voyage. The menu had been the same each night; each night Lis had made the same jovial announcement, as though expecting them all to be delighted. She did most of the cooking, with help from Gharkid and occasionally Delagard. The meals were spare, and not likely to get much better later on: dried fish, fish-meal cakes, dried seaweed, seaweed-meal bread, supplemented by Gharkid's latest haul of fresh algae and whatever live catch had been brought in that day. So far the catch had been nothing but sentryfish. Schools of the alert, eager-looking spear-nosed creatures had been following the fleet ever since Sorve. Kinverson, Pilya Braun and Henders were the chief fishers, working from the gantry-and-reel fishing station aft.

  Struvin said, "Easy day today."

  "Too easy," grunted Kinverson, leaning into his plate.

  "You want storms? You want the Wave?"

  Kinverson shrugged. "I don't trust an easy sea."

  Dag Tharp, spearing another fish-meal cake, said, "How are we doing on our water tonight. Lis?"

  "One more squirt apiece and that's it for this meal."

  "Shit. This is thirsty food, you know?"

  "We'll be thirstier later if we drink up all our water the first week," Struvin said. "You know that as well as I do. Lis, bring out some raw sentryfish fillets for the radio man."

  Before leaving Sorve the villagers had loaded the ships with as many casks of fresh water as they had room for. But even so there was only something like a three-week supply on hand at the time of departure, figuring cautious use. They would have to depend on encountering
rain as they went; if there was none, they'd have to find other means of meeting their fresh-water needs. Eating raw fish was one good way. Everybody knew that. But Tharp wasn't having any.

  He looked up, scowling. "Skip it. Fuck raw sentryfish."

  "Takes away your thirst," Kinverson said quietly.

  "Takes away your appetite," Tharp said. "Fuck it. I'd rather go thirsty."

  Kinverson shrugged. "Suit yourself. You'll feel different about it in a week or two."

  Lis put a plate of pale greenish meat on the table. The moist slices of uncooked fish had been wrapped in strips of fresh yellow seaweed. Tharp stared morosely at the plate. He shook his head and looked away. Lawler, after a moment, helped himself. Struvin had some also, and Kinverson. The raw fish was cool against Lawler's tongue, soothing, almost thirst-quenching. Almost.

  "What do you think, doc?" Tharp asked, after a time.

  "Not half bad," Lawler said.

  "Maybe if I just took a lick of it," said the radio man.

  Kinverson laughed into his plate. "Asshole."

  "What did you say, Gabe?"

  "You really want me to repeat it?"

  "Go on deck if you're going to have a fight, you two," Lis Niklaus said, disgusted.

  "A fight? Me and Dag?" Kinverson looked astonished. He could have picked Tharp up with one hand. "Don't be silly, Lis."

  "You want to fight?" Tharp cried, his sharp-featured little red face turning even redder. "Come on, Kinverson. Come on. You think I'm afraid of you?"

  "You ought to be," Lawler told him softly. "He's four times your size." He grinned and looked toward Struvin. "If we've used up our water quota for this evening, Gospo, how about brandy all around? That'll fix our thirst."

  "Right. Brandy! Brandy!" Struvin yelled.

  Lis handed him the flask. Struvin studied it for a moment with a sour expression on his face. "This is the Sorve brandy. Let's save it until we get really desperate. Give me the stuff from Khuviar, will you? Sorve brandy is piss." From a cupboard Lis took a different flask, long and rounded, with a deep sheen. Struvin ran his hand along its side and grinned appreciatively. "Khuviar, yes! They really understand brandy on that island. And wine. You ever been there, any of you? No, no, I can see you haven't. They drink all day and all night. The happiest people on this planet."

  "I was there once," Kinverson said. "They were drunk all the time. They did nothing at all but drink and vomit and drink some more."

  "But what they drink," said Struvin. "Ah, what they drink!"

  "How do they get anything done," Lawler asked, "if they're never sober? Who does the fishing? Who mends the nets?"

  "Nobody," Struvin said. "It's a miserable filthy place. They sober up just long enough to go out into the bay and find a batch of grapeweed, and then they ferment it into wine or distil it into brandy and they're drunk again. You wouldn't believe the way they live. Their clothing is rags. They live in seaweed shacks, like Gillies. The reservoir holds brackish water. It's a disgusting place. But who says all islands have to be alike? Every place is different. One island is nothing like another. That's the way it always has seemed to me: each island is itself, and no place else. And on Khuviar what they understand is drinking. Here, Tharp. You say you're thirsty? Have some of my fine Khuviar brandy. My guest. Help yourself."

  "I don't like brandy," Tharp said, sounding sullen. "You know that damned well, Gospo. And brandy'll only make you thirstier, anyway. It dries out the mouth membranes. Doesn't it, doc? You should realize that." He let out his breath in an explosive sigh. "What the fuck, give me the raw fish!"

  Lawler passed him the platter. Tharp speared a slice with his fork, studied it as if he had never seen a piece of raw fish before, and finally took a tentative bite of it. He moved it around in his mouth with his tongue, swallowed, pondered. Then he took a second bite.

  "Hey," he said. "That's all right. That isn't bad at all."

  "Asshole," Kinverson said again. But he was smiling.

  * * *

  When the meal was over everyone went up on deck for the change of watch. Henders, Golghoz and Delagard, who were scrambling around in the rigging, came down and Martello, Pilya Braun, and Kinverson took their places.

  The brilliant gleam of the Cross cut the black sky into quarters. The sea was so still that its reflection could be seen, like a taut line of cool white fire lying across the water and stretching off into the mysterious distances, where it blurred and was lost. Lawler stood by the rail and looked back toward the soft flickering points of light that marked the presence of the other five ships, moving along in their steady tapering formation behind them. Here was Sorve, right out there on the water, the whole little island community packed up in those ships, Thalheims and Tanaminds and Katzins and Yanezes and Sweyners and Sawtelles and all the rest, the familiar names, the old, old names. After dark every night each ship mounted running lights along its rails, long smouldering dried-algae flambeaus that burned with a smoky orange glow. Delagard was fanatically concerned that the fleet should keep together at all times, never breaking formation. Each vessel had its own radio equipment and they stayed in constant touch all through the night, lest any of them stray.

  "Breeze coming!" someone called. "Let go the foretack!"

  Lawler admired the art of turning the sails to catch the wind. He wished he understood a little more about it. Sailing seemed almost magical to him, an arcane and bewildering mystery. On Delagard's ships, more imposing than the little fishing skiffs that the islanders had used in the bay and on their wary journeys just beyond its mouth, each of the two masts bore a great triangular sail made of tightly woven strips of split bamboo, with a smaller quadrangular sail rigged above it, fastened to a yard. Another small triangular sail was fixed between the masts. The mainsails were tied to heavy wooden booms; arrangements of ropes fitted with threaded beads and pronged jaws held them in place, and they were manipulated by halyards running through block-and-tackle devices.

  Under ordinary conditions it took a team of three to move the sails around, and a fourth at the helm to give the orders. The Martello-Kinverson-Braun team worked under Gospo Struvin's command, and when the other watch was on duty it was Neyana Golghoz, Dann Henders and Delagard himself handling the sails, with Onyos Felk, the mapkeeper and navigator, taking Struvin's place in the wheel-box. Sundira Thane worked relief on Struvin's watch, and Lis Niklaus on Felk's. Lawler would stand to one side, looking on as they ran about shouting things like "Square the braces!" and "Wind abaft the beam!" and "Hard alee! Hard alee!" Again and again, as the wind changed, they lowered the sails, swung them around, rehoisted them in their new positions. Somehow, no matter whether the wind was blowing toward the ship or against it, they managed to keep the vessel heading in the same direction.

  The only ones who never took part in any of this were Dag Tharp, Father Quillan, Natim Gharkid and Lawler. Tharp was too light and flimsy to be of much use on the ropes, and most of the time he was busy belowdecks anyway, operating the communications network that kept the ships of the fleet in contact. Father Quillan was generally regarded as exempt from all shipboard labour; Gharkid's responsibilities were limited to galley duty and trawling for drifting seaweed; and Lawler, though he would gladly have lent a hand in the rigging, felt abashed about asking to be taught the art and hung back, waiting for an invitation that didn't get offered.

  As he stood by the rail watching the crew at work in the rigging something came whirring through the air out of the dark sea and struck him in the face. Lawler felt a stinging blow on his cheek, a painful hot rasping sensation as of rough scales scraping against his skin. An intense, unpleasantly sour sea-fragrance, becoming bitter and painful as it got deeper in his nostrils, rose up about him. There was a flopping sound at his feet.

  He looked down. A winged creature about the length of his hand was flailing around on the deck. Lawler had thought in the first moment of impact that it might have been an air-skimmer, but air-skimmers were graceful elegant things, rainbow-hued,
taut-bodied, streamlined for maximum aerodynamic lift, and they never went aloft after dark. This little night-flying monstrosity was more like a worm with wings, pallid and slack and ugly, with small beady black eyes and a writhing ridge of short, stiff red bristles along its upper back. It had been the bristles that had scraped Lawler as the creature smacked into him.

  The wrinkled sharp-angled wings that sprouted from the thing's sides moved in a disagreeable pulsing way, slower and slower. It was leaving a wet trail of blackish slime behind it as it jerked about. Loathsome though it was, it seemed harmless enough now, pitiful, dying here on board.

  The very hideousness of it fascinated Lawler. He knelt to give the thing a close look. But an instant later Delagard, just down from the rigging, came up next to him and hooked the tip of one booted foot under the creature's body. In a single deft motion he scooped it up atop his boot and with a quick kick flipped it on a high arc over the rail into the water.

  "Why'd you do that?" Lawler asked.

  "So it couldn't jump up and bite your silly nose, doc. Don't you know a hagfish when you see one?"

  "Hagfish?"

  "A baby one, yes. They get about this big when they're full grown, and they're mean sons of bitches." Delagard held his hands about half a metre apart. "If you don't know what something is, doc, don't get within biting range of it. Good rule out here."

  "I'll keep it in mind."

  Delagard leaned back against the rail and gave him a toothy grin, perhaps meant to be ingratiating. "How are you enjoying life at sea so far?" He was sweaty from his stint aloft, flushed, keyed up in some way. "Isn't the ocean a wonderful place?"

  "It's got its charm, I suppose. I'm working hard at trying to find it."

  "Not happy, are you? Cabin too small? Company not stimulating enough? Scenery dull?"