Part 8 (1/2)
Even though the edge sliced easily through the gentle swells, the ocean still tugged and pulled on the sword. Gritting his teeth, Ehomba held on, the hilt locked in his long-fingered grip, the blue glow penetrating deeply into the waters that tried to steal it away from him. Above, Simna and Hunkapa Aub watched from the rail. The swordsman could see that the strain of holding on to the ladder with one hand and the submerged blade with the other was tiring his friend.
”Want me to spell you awhile, bruther?” he called out.
The herdsman's face turned upward. Somehow, he managed to grin.He'll grin when he's on his deathbed, Simna mused.It'll be the last expression he wears.
”Thank you, friend Simna, but all is well.”
”Well as what?” the swordsman retorted. ”What is it you hope to do?”
”Light a way through this confusion.” With the effort of looking upward putting additional stress on his body, Ehomba lowered his head.
Hunkapa dropped a ma.s.sive, s.h.a.ggy arm over the side. ”Look, look! More prettinesses!”
Simna squinted. Something was rising from the depths of the ocean. It was not large-no longer than one of theGromsketter 's small boats-but it was lined with lights that flashed bright yellow and pale red. As it loomed nearer the surface he saw that it was a fish-but a fish unlike any finned denizen of the deep he had ever seen before, either in kitchen or in art.
Its body was more than nine feet long and silvery black, but it was no thicker around than a ribbon. A single long fin ran the length of the spine, and two tiny pectoral fins fluttered just beneath and back of glaring eyes the size of dinner plates. Above the head three long spines bobbed and weaved, and each was tipped with a bright yellow light. Prominent in the narrow, gaping mouth were fangs like shards of broken gla.s.s.
It was soon apparent that it was not alone.
Drawn by the light of the sword, all manner of wondrous deepwater creatures were rising to the surface.
They swam and drifted and hovered about the cerulean halo of the sky-metal sword like moths romancing a candle on a summer's eve. As the abyssal ascension gave rise to this luminescent benthic epiphany, more and more of the crew crowded to the port side to gape. Though somewhat muted by the persistent fog, their reactions were a mixture of awe, wonder, and sheer childlike delight in an exotic and beautiful phenomenon the likes of which none of them had ever encountered before.
Up came a pair of fish like bloated black bladders, one thirty times larger than its companion. Each had a single long, curving appendage like a thin filament fis.h.i.+ng line attached to its forehead, from whose tip twitched a lure of irresistible intensity. Their eyes were so small as to be almost invisible, and they burned with the fire of a hundred natural lights. Nearby swarmed a school of a thousand small silvery fish, each flas.h.i.+ng a thumb-sized soft blue light from just aft of its eye.
There were jellyfish larger than any the sailors had ever seen, their pulsing bells decorated with blue and green and yellow lights that trailed fifty-foot-long tentacles of unbroken luminescence. Deep-sea sharks swept tails full of sapphire light in steady arcs, like glowing oars in the water, and all manner of toothy fish darted to and fro in b.a.l.l.s of intense yellow or green.
But it was when the tiny lanterns of natural luminescence finally arose that the sea around the Gromsketter turned from dark to light. There were billions of them, seemingly in as many shapes and sizes, many so small that even sharp-eyed seamen wearing spectacles could barely make them out.
Ehomba could. The herdsman's vision was particularly acute.
Then the mid-ocean merfolk arrived, showing oval, slightly protuberant eyes and gills that flashed gold around the edges. They displayed elegant patterns of light along their sides and fins and carried short staffs tipped with transparent crustacean bodies scavenged from the hidden places of the sea. These were filled with glowing krill individually selected for their color and brightness. A number of merfolk rode in sh.e.l.l chariots drawn by man-sized seahorses that glowed brown and were harnessed with kelp and sea-gra.s.s strips radiating an intense crimson.
The lightwhals came too. Looking like crosses between oversized dolphins and blind seals, they radiated a ghostly, pellucid purple. There were night penguins that emitted green light only when hunting in dark seas, and merlions whose manes were fringed with pallid lavender. The mournful, watery moans they exchanged with their land-bound cousin Ahlitah resounded regretful and forlorn across the mist-shrouded swells.
There were deep-ocean crabs whose sh.e.l.ls boasted imbedded iridescences in lines of intense green spotted with azure, and strange turtles whose carapaces wore diadems of lights like pulsating jewels. Eels slithered and writhed like living lightning, while squid and cuttlefish ranging in size from palm-sized to giants that might have been family of the Kraken itself sent waves of opalescence rippling through their skin. Sea b.u.t.terflies more colorful than any of their terrestrial counterparts flew beneath the surface on wings tinted emerald and topaz and tourmaline, occasionally emerging from the water in jubilant bursts of dazzling effulgence.
Drawn by the incomparable blue glow emitted by the sky-metal sword, all this great upwelling of light and life swirled around theGromsketter, disturbing neither water nor sky but overwhelming and beating back the darkness imposed by the clinging fog. Whereas before Stanager and her crew could barely see one another clearly enough to avoid running into each other on the deck, now the excess of spectacular natural light illuminated the sea around the s.h.i.+p for nearly half a mile, making not only onboard activity but also navigation possible.
”Terious!” the Captain shouted. ”Set the mains'l and the lower fores'ls! Let's punch through this murk before our herdsman's flock grows bored and decides to sink back from whence they came.” Her cla.s.sic profile was aglow with light from the thousands of luminescent deep-sea dwellers that had gathered around the s.h.i.+p.
Simna had not left his position by the rail. ”Better to worry not about losing their interest, but about my friend losing the strength in his arm.”
It was a procession never to be forgotten by all who saw it: the gracefulGromsketter, sails set and making her way southwest, englobed by millions of colored lights worn by as fantastic a profusion of undersea life as could be a.s.sembled in one place. Even experienced seamen would have been paralyzed by all that beauty, had they not been so busy. Stanager Rose kept her crew occupied lest they lose themselves in the embarra.s.sment of natural magnificence.
Thrust back by the luminescence, the fog began to shrivel and disperse, until a single light brighter if not more beautiful than all those a.s.sembled began to illuminate the scene from above. Then even the blue intensity of the sword could not sustain the interest of the visitors from the deep. In their tiny millions and larger pairs and trios they began to sink back into the abyss from which they had risen, untold numbers of lights descending and dissipating, until, with a last silent wave of a phosph.o.r.escent scepter, one of the deep-sea mermen saluted the s.h.i.+p and turned his glowing chariot ultimately downward.
The sun burned away the last of the fog, enabling the crew to put on still more sail and to flee from that darkling, benighted patch of ocean. Then it was time to bring forth a small quant.i.ty of the s.h.i.+p's precious supply of ice, kept sealed in the darkest, coldest depths of her hull. Not to cool her crew, who were certainly sweating heavily enough to deserve it, but to ice down the muscles of one of her pa.s.sengers.
Held in one position for so long, Ehomba's left arm and fingers had become badly cramped. The application of ice wrapped in towels might not equal the recent display of magic, but it was blessedly effective.
While the herdsman sat on the helm deck trying to restore the flow of blood to his aching muscles and tendons, Simna gingerly held the sky-metal sword. As always, the crosshatched lines on the blade fascinated his eye.
”How do you make it work, Etjole, if you are not the sorcerer you keep insisting you're not?”
The herdsman would have shrugged, but his cramped shoulders would not allow it. ”Practice, friend Simna. Otjihanja showed me some things, and other elders had suggestions. It is not something to be described. You mustfeel the proper motion, the way the weight of the metal travels through the air and fights the pull of the Earth.”
Simna nodded. ”You know, it's funny. When I was younger I would have taken that as a challenge, and as a result probably tried something stupid.”
”I do not see much that has changed with age.” Curled up against the railing that separated the helm deck from the main deck below, the black litah murmured sleepily.
”And I do not take criticism of my profession from a yowling devourer of carrion.” When the big cat chose not to respond, Simna turned back to his lanky friend. ”Having seen what this remarkable blade can do, I would no more try to make use of it than I would a sculptor's chisel or a musician's lute.”
Ehomba smiled softly. ”You did, once.”
A startled Simna looked sharply at the seated herdsman. ”I thought you were asleep!”
Ehomba looked away. ”I was.”
The swordsman started to reply, discovered that he did not have an adequate response at hand, and decided against it. Instead, he laid the wondrous weapon carefully down alongside his seated friend and pulled the thin blanket a little higher on Ehomba's narrow shoulders. The herdsman had spent far too much time with his hand and part of one arm immersed in the cold water. Sorcerer or not, he was starting to s.h.i.+ver.
”I will be all right.” He smiled rea.s.suringly up at his concerned companion. ”The ocean below my village is much colder than this, and I have spent many an hour wading and swimming in its waters.”
”I don't care,” Simna told him. ”Any man can catch a chill and die from the complications.” He looked out to sea. ”Attract like to like, you said. More like light to light. It was a grand sight. I never dreamed quite so many splendid phantasms dwelled in the sea, and all of them lit from within by sorceral glow.”
”Not sorceral,” Ehomba corrected him. One hand held the edges of the blanket tight against his throat.
”The lights you saw were all natural, manufactured from within their own bodies by the creatures themselves. There was nothing of sorcery about it.”
The swordsman's forehead furrowed. ”How do you know that?”
”Because many such creatures wash up dead on the beaches near my home. Their bodies are flaccid and their lights dimmed, but they still glow for a little while after dying.” He nodded toward the clearing sky. ”The waters offsh.o.r.e from my village go down very deep. It must be exceedingly dark in the depths, like a perpetual night, for the creatures that live there to need to make their own light.”
”A handy property,” Simna agreed. ”There have been times when I would have liked to have been able to s.h.i.+ne a little light from my own body.”
The herdsman looked at him strangely. ”Everyone does so, Simna. It is just that it is difficult to see. It takes practice to separate it out from the natural light that surrounds us every day.”
The shorter man laughed easily. ”So you're saying that I glow like those fishy things? Like a jellyfish, maybe?”
”No, not like a jellyfish. The light that people, or at least most people, emit, is something very different.
But you do glow, my friend. Less intensely in ways than you would like to believe, and more brightly in other kinds. There are many, many different kinds of light.”
”Well, at least I'm not dark.” Simna enjoyed the notion, even though he was not sure he understood at all what his cryptic companion was talking about. ”How about everyone else?” Turning, he gestured at those nearby, not really expecting the herdsman to respond.
Instead, Ehomba rested his chin on his knees and squinted, pausing once to wipe away a lingering droplet of salt water. ”The Captain, she glows only a very few colors, but those colors are as pure and strong as I have ever seen in a person. The helmswoman Priget emits light in fits and bits, like the sparks from a fire. That man working the ropes over there, his lights are few and dim, but far from being absent.”
The herdsman's gaze roved the open decks.