Meanwhile, the boat continued to grow. At last it was large enough for everything. In fact, Nona was concerned that they would not be able to move its mass across the water. She consulted, then reversed her concentration and made it slightly smaller.
Darius stepped aboard first. He picked up a paddle. “Ooof!” he exclaimed.
No wonder! The paddle was monstrous. They would not be able to use such tools effectively; each one would weigh more than the person wielding it. Darius, working with a tiny model, had misjudged the scale.
“I can fix it,” Nona said. She stepped onto the boat, put her hand on the huge paddle, and concentrated. It diminished, until it was of about the right size. She did the same with the other paddles, and with the poles. She saw that at this scale they were crudely carved, as was the boat; the magnification exaggerated everything. But everything was serviceable, which was what counted. Except for the swatch of handkerchief cloth, which was now like a net fashioned of ropes. It wouldn’t be much good for catching fish.
Colene led Seqiro onto the boat. Nona was surprised by that, but Colene’s thought clarified it: the horse was attuned to their minds, but tricky things like stepping over the gunwale onto a shifting deck could be troublesome. So Colene led him, guiding him, so that her senses rather than his prevailed, and he handled it without stumbling.
Then it was Burgess’ turn. He floated across the water to the side of the boat; then Darius got out and stood in the shallow water to lift one side, while Nona and Colene reached over the gunwale. Seqiro took over their minds, and with great strength and perfect coordination they heaved Burgess over and onto the deck. Burgess pumped air as they let him go, and floated to the rear center of the craft.
Now Darius and Nona poled off, and the boat slid into deeper water and floated. “Uh-oh,” Colene said.
Nona looked. Crevices that had been invisible in the model now showed clearly; they too had been magnified in proportion. Water was leaking in to flow across the bottom between the horse and the floater.
“What we need is a bilge bucket,” Darius said.
Nona set down her pole and fetched a cup from a pack Seqiro carried. She magnified this until it was the size of a pail. Colene took it and began dipping and tossing. The leakage was not extreme, and she was able to keep up well enough.
As they got into deeper water, Darius took up a paddle, and Nona took another. They stood at opposite sides of the clumsy craft and stroked the water. Slowly the boat moved forward.
“Well, we’re on our way,” Colene said. She glanced at Nona. “What happened to Mary?”
“Oh, Marrella? I let it go. It wouldn’t be happy across the water. Perhaps I can tame a new familiar on the other side.”
As they got toward the center, their boat’s motion became imperceptible, but they kept paddling. Unless there was an adverse current, they were surely forging toward the other shore.
She looked back. There where they had been was the huge crab, Seqiro had stopped sending it the fear, and it had evidently discovered that they had been mostly bluffing it, so it had come after them immediately. But it was a land crab, and could not pursue them in the lake.
Predatory presence. That was Seqiro’s thought, which Nona preferred to hear as speech though it really wasn’t. There were aspects of danger, concern, warning, and mystery: something large and menacing.
“The big crab?” Colene asked.
“No. In the water.”
Then Nona saw it. A huge flat thing was gliding close. An eye on the head part gazed at them. She and Darius ceased paddling.
The Anomalocaris. That was Burgess’ thought. The creature did not know what the boat was, Burgess concluded.
“Well, let’s hope Anomaly doesn’t find out,” Colene said, pausing in her bilge bailing.
Nona stared at the thing. The eye stared back at her. “Do you think our paddling will disturb it?” she asked.
“If we don’t paddle, we won’t get across,” Darius said. He put his paddle back in the water.
Reluctantly, Nona did the same. The end of her paddle was close to the glistening hide of the creature. She moved the paddle through the water, stirring up a ripple.
The creature oriented on the paddle. Suddenly a nose-tentacle hooked onto the paddle, wrenching it out of Nona’s hands. The end of it disappeared under the Anomaly, and there was a crunching sound. Then fragments of the paddle floated up around the head.
Darius studied the situation. “I think we aren’t going to get far, poking at this thing. But if it won’t let us paddle, how are we going to get on across the lake?”
It would be best not to provoke it. That was Burgess again. It preyed on anything in or on the water. It was once a bottom feeder, but it had adapted to consume surface creatures too. Burgess thought it could not harm this craft, but it could surely harm the living creatures.
Darius considered further. “Nona, can you grow something big enough to block it off from us, so we can paddle?”
Nona reached over the gunwale and caught a floating chip from her former paddle. She concentrated, and it grew.
But the lake monster didn’t wait. It shoved its nose up over the gunwale. The two tentacles cast across the deck. Each was segmented, with a spine projecting from each segment. It was evident that these tentacles didn’t grasp, they stuck, holding the prey with many hooked barbs.
“Get to the far side,” Darius said tersely. Nona retreated, with Colene, standing next to Seqiro and Burgess.
Darius fetched his axe. He was a handsome man as he stood there facing the monster, in his green tunic from the Julia Mode, and boots she had made magically for him before they set out on the Virtual Mode. He was, in the fashion of men, determined to defend the women and animals against the common threat. There was something almost quaint about it.
“You bet,” Colene murmured.
Animals? That was Burgess.
“Companions,” Nona said quickly.
Nona continued to make the wood chip grow. But she wasn’t sure how to use it to block off the Anomaly, now that the creature was hooking on to the boat. Maybe try to get the monster back into the water, and then try to keep the block floating between it and the boat?
Darius stepped toward the Anomaly, eyeing its head. But the creature was eyeing him back. “Oh, I don’t like this,” Colene murmured. “That’s no lunatic monster; it’s aware”
Darius decided that the eyes would be the best targets. He swung the axe. But as he did so, the Anomaly moved its head lower, using the leverage of the mass of its body, and depressed the entire end of the boat so that water slopped over the gunwale.
Darius, caught by surprise in midswing, missed. Then the force of the missed swing pulled him off balance, and his feet slipped as water sloshed over the rim. He fell on his back. Nona screamed. Her block of wood was now so big that she was holding it against her chest with both arms, but she still didn’t know what to do with it. She felt supremely ineffective, in the midst of an ongoing disaster.
The Anomaly followed up its opportunity instantly. A tentacle slapped across Darius’ left boot. It didn’t coil; the spines dug into the mock leather and held it firmly. Then it curled in toward the head, pulling Darius with it.
Darius sat up and swung his axe at the head. But the tentacle jerked, making him miss again, and in any event he lacked leverage to make an effective strike.
Now Nona saw the monster’s mouth. It was circular, with bony plates that overlapped around the center hole. Where were the teeth?
“Pull your foot out of the boot!” Colene shouted to Darius. “Get away from that thing!”
Darius, startled by the obvious, braced his right boot against the tentacle and shoved. His left foot came out of the boot. He tried to scramble away, crablike, but was jammed against the gunwale behind him. He couldn’t retreat further, and couldn’t move to the side without risking getting snagged by a tentacle again.