Выбрать главу

The way the breeze whipped her hair about her face did more in that cause, to Pirvan’s way of thinking. He knew that he could find it hard to remember that she was betrothed if he did not make the effort.

“Good day, Haimya,” he said.

“To you likewise, Pirvan. I expected to find you aloft, admiring the sea.”

Pirvan looked at the masthead, swaying through a moderate portion of a circle, and shuddered. “The sea will do well or ill, whether I am watching it or not.”

“You don’t think we are in danger?”

Asking that question was a large admission of being like other folk than he had expected to hear from the warrior-maid, this side of her deathbed. He tried to be both truthful and reassuring.

“I believe it takes much worse weather than this to affect a ship of this size.”

He thought the moan of the wind and the hiss of water alongside would conceal minor flaws in his speech. A moment later, he had cause to think again.

“And how many voyages have you made, Pirvan the Sailor?” She’d mustered from somewhere the will to quirk up one corner of her mouth.

“This is my first real one.”

She thrust out a hand. “Very well. Let us seal a bargain. Whichever one of us sees land first after the ship goes down, she guides the other to it.”

Pirvan was torn between smiling at her determination and his distaste for words of ill omen. He wondered if Tarothin had any weather spells, and if so, whether he could be persuaded to use them.

“You can swim?”

“It’s one of the few things I knew from girlhood. My father thought it doomed my hopes of marriage. My mother knew I was not much inclined that way, and said I should be good at as many things as I wished. ‘Man or woman who is good at nothing,’ she said, ‘is hapless, hopeless, and helpless.’ ”

Pirvan nodded, looking upward again. His eyes were not on the rigging, however. They were looking inward, at a picture of Haimya swimming-a pleasant picture even if she garbed herself, for wet clothes clung tightly.…

A faint laugh broke off suddenly in a choking sound. Pirvan looked about the deck to see Haimya thrusting her head and shoulders over the railing. Her torso heaved and twisted for a moment. When she drew herself back, water dripped from her face and her hair was plastered down her cheeks and forehead.

Silently, Pirvan hoped that the weather would grow no worse, or if it did, that Haimya would have no urgent duties until it quieted.

* * * * *

Pirvan’s hopes were disappointed.

Toward late afternoon, the high, dark clouds swept forward and turned black, then swelled and seemed to burst. A howling wind swept across the sea, churning up the waves into gray hillocks. Rain and spray swept across the deck, turning the planks as slick as the surface of a glacier.

The sail on the bowsprit and the triangular mizzensail had long since been taken in and the yards double-lashed. Now men struggled aloft to take in the topsails on the fore- and mainmasts. Pirvan watched from the aftercastle, though he had offered to go aloft.

“No place for even the best climber if he doesn’t know the way of a wet sail,” Kurulus told him firmly. “You’ve duties to Lady Eskaia, more, I wager, than you’ve told me. You splatter on the deck or go over the side, the lady’ll have my blood.”

Pirvan didn’t like the hint in those words, but he also knew that the mate would have been better spoken if he’d been less worried. Golden Cup was in no easy circumstances; the faces of the men going aloft said as much. The fair-skinned ones were many of them as green as Haimya; the darker ones looked as if they were forcing themselves to climb the rigging rather than hang over the railings.

One man did go off the main topsail yard, and in this gale there was no hope of picking him up. But he struck the mainyard on the way down, and fell bonelessly limp and probably already dead into the sea, spared the ordeal of drowning alone as his ship sailed on.

The remaining sails kept the ship manageable until after nightfall. Pirvan had gone to his cabin and was beginning to drowse in spite of the motion of the ship and the uproar of the storm, when it happened.

A shout, then several, then a scream. Wood cracked thunderously. Another shout: “All hands on deck!” Then even more thunder, drowning out the gale and sounding like some great tree falling.

Pirvan had been out of his bunk at the cry of “All hands on deck!” As he flung open his cabin door, he felt the deck under his bare feet taking up a new motion. Then it tilted, farther than it ever had, sending him slamming backward against the wall. For a terrible moment he thought the ship would never come back, and that he and everyone belowdecks faced gurgling out their lives as the ship sank.

Then the deck began to level out, with more shouts from above, cracking and creaking of wood, and screams from the cabins. The deck tilted as far the other way as it had the first way, and this time flung Pirvan forward. He would have slammed into the opposite wall if something both soft and solid hadn’t broken his fall.

He struggled clear of his companion and discovered that it was Haimya, clad in a loinguard that covered no more than his did, with a sword in her hand. He noted that she offered no unpleasant surprises unclad, then gripped the nearest handhold as the ship began another roll.

“Haimya, I think it’s something in the ship, not pirates. If you go out on deck, you’ll need both hands.”

She looked at her sword, then at herself. “Perhaps more than that,” she said, and in the dimness he could have sworn that she was blushing. Then she vanished toward her cabin as Pirvan lunged out on to the deck, lurching back and forth as the ship did the same under his feet.

He kept his balance and his sea legs alike until he reached the deck. Then two steps outside, and a foaming wall of water reached his chest and swept him off his feet. Something told him not to trust the bulwarks to catch him, and as his head went under, he spread arms and legs wide.

A foot caught on something solid enough to hold him until the wave receded. Then he found a rope almost hitting him in the face and clutched it with both hands. He didn’t know whether it was a shroud, a stay, a line, or a dragon’s tail; sailors’ fancy terms didn’t matter as long as it kept him aboard and alive.

He survived three waves before he saw the problem. The foremast had snapped off a man’s height above the deck. In falling, it hadn’t quite cleared the ship, but flattened a long stretch of the bulwarks to starboard. Now every time the ship rolled, waves boiled in through the gap.

Already sailors were hacking at the wreckage, some holding on with one hand and working with the other, others tied to the ship and trusting to their safety lines. Other less lucky ones were struggling on the deck, or, knocked senselsss, washing back and forth in the surge of incoming waves and the rolling of the ship.

Pirvan saw one of the unconscious men wash overboard before his eyes. He also saw that the rope he held would let him reach most of the deck. He tied it around his waist and began methodically following the senseless men. He had little knowledge of even nonmagical healing, but a man who didn’t slide overboard and drown might live to be healed by someone more skilled.

One by one he overtook them. He lost count of how many, and he cursed gods and men alike when a wave snatched one of them out of his hands and overboard. Other waves slammed him against protrusions from the deck, or wreckage against him, or him and the man he was trying to save together. He knew he was bruised all over and bleeding in at least one place, but ignored that until he heard a wild cry from above.

Even then, he kept crawling about the deck in search of more men to snatch from the sea, until someone shouted in his ear.