“The mast’s free. Get back below and be tended to, you fool!”
It was Grimsoar One-Eye. Pirvan looked up. His friend recognized him and shrugged, then said, “So be it. You’re not a fool. You still look as if you’d been wrestling sea trolls.”
By now, Pirvan’s exalted mood had worn off and he’d begun to feel the same way. He gripped Grimsoar’s arm, and with his help rose uncertainly to his feet.
“You said the mast’s cut away?”
“Gone, and a man with it. It won’t pound any holes in the hull now. We’re safe until we fetch up on the Gallows Reefs. This ship’s too stout to founder, but she can’t survive the rocks.”
“What else can we do?”
“Besides pray, you mean? I’ve heard a mate say we’ve a chance to make the Flower Rocks, but how much I don’t know.”
Pirvan had never heard of the Flower Rocks, but they sounded like a place where you had to work hard to be saved. This meant more wrestling with the sea in a few hours or a few days.
And that meant doing what Grimsoar suggested.
* * * * *
Prayers must have reached at least some well-disposed gods; they were still afloat and off the Flower Rocks at dawn. Or so Pirvan heard someone say.
He was on the main deck, too low to see anything more than a ship’s length away through the spray and the murk. All he saw was the length of anchor chain in his hands, and the sailors of the hauling party ahead of and behind him.
The Flower Rocks, he had learned, were a series of rocky mounts with deep water close inshore on all sides, enough for the largest ship men could conceive. Prudent seafarers some centuries before had sunk stout iron and stone mooring posts (“bollards” or some such word) into the rocks on all four sides. A ship that could moor to a set of bollards could ride out most gales in the lee of the rocks. Sometimes the lee of the rocks alone cut the wind enough to let a ship anchor safely.
Anchoring was the plan for Golden Cup, as its captain seemed not to wish the ship too close to the rocks themselves. The main bow anchor was ready to let go, but the light chain on the stern anchor would never survive this blow.
The Mate of the Hold and her gang had broken out a heavier chain from below. Now all available hands had turned to, for hauling the chain aft and securing it to the anchor.
“We’ll be letting both go together,” Kurulus had told Pirvan. “Riding on one anchor in this sea, we lose chain, anchor, and most chance of staying off the rocks even if it holds for a bit.”
What would happen if the anchor didn’t hold, needed no explanation. The ship’s motion had thrown Pirvan out of his bunk three times, until between the lingering pain from his half-healing, fresh bruises, and the heaving deck, he gave up trying to sleep.
Tarothin slept through everything, strapped into his bunk and with most of his possessions wedging him in even more tightly, with more straps around the bags and boxes. Pirvan had suggested that it might not be easy to leave his bunk quickly if it became necessary; he had not forgotten the wizard’s reply.
“If we strike or founder, it’s hardly going to matter how fast I go anywhere. I can’t swim a stroke, and I don’t command any spell that will let me breathe underwater long enough to walk to shore.”
Pirvan held his tongue after that.
Now he held his tongue because he needed every breath in his body for hauling on the anchor chain. Even if he had not, the sight of the waves would have left him speechless.
The ship no longer seemed to be taking solid water over the main deck. But on either side the waves leaped up, white crested, like an endless pack of wolves howling around a great stag. The stag still stood tall, but how long could this last before the wolves dragged it down?
Pirvan shivered from more than the cold, then saw that the hauler ahead of him was now Haimya.
“Haimya!” he shouted, above the moan of the wind. “Are you a shapechanger now?”
“Eh?”
“Never mind. How fares your lady?”
“She said that one of us ought to join this work.”
“You say-”
“I insisted on going instead of her.”
“Your lady has more courage than sense, and more sense than strength.”
He did not add that the same could be said of Haimya. Her face was no longer greenish, but it was still pale and set. It was as though a long and wasting fever had just broken, leaving her well but weak.
How long they hauled before the stern anchor was ready to lower, Pirvan never knew. He remembered only a moment when he realized that the wind had dropped, and even spray no longer blew over the deck. Then came a second moment, when he realized that Haimya had turned to Grimsoar One-Eye.
The big man was hauling with a will, but his single eye seemed aimed at the sky.
“Now what’s wrong?”
Pirvan knew he sounded petulant, but he was tired. He found distasteful, to say the least, the possibility of safety being snatched from them at the last moment.
“I don’t like this lull,” Grimsoar said. The wind was so mild now that he could make Pirvan hear him without raising his voice much above a whisper.
“It could be the end of the storm,” Pirvan said.
“Maybe. Maybe also just the eye, or even a sign the wind’s about to shift.”
Pirvan did not need to ask for the details of that last danger, or wish to contemplate them. With the wind from any direction but the south, they had rocky lee shores far too close to give them much hope of surviving if the storm lasted beyond a few more hours.
At some time while Pirvan was considering this, the trumpets blew for the anchoring party and someone led Pirvan aside. Another someone pushed a cup of hot tarberry tea laced with brandy into his hands.
It was only after the third swallow that he realized that the hands holding the tray were white, clean, and lavishly ringed.
“My lady?”
He looked up as a puff of wind blew Eskaia’s hood back from her head and made her dark curls dance. So did her eyes, with both mischief and determination.
“I promised Haimya that I would not haul on the line. Nothing more.”
Pirvan did not care if Eskaia had promised her guard-maid some dwarf-forged armor and a castle on Lunitari. The less time she spent on deck, the happier he and many others would be.
Before he could say anything, however, a wild cry came from aloft, and more cries from forward echoed it.
“The anchor’s parted!”
* * * * *
It was the chain to the main anchor that had parted, being the only one over the side. Lowering both together, it seemed, would have taken more hands than were available for the work. So the captain had gambled on the lull in the storm holding for a few minutes longer.
The lull held for the most part. But enough wind remained blowing, and imperceptibly shifting as well, to pull the chain hard against a sharp edge of rock. As the wind rose and the anchoring party rushed aft to lower the second anchor, the rock sawed at the stout chain like a notched sword at an ogre’s neck.
Moments after it parted, Pirvan felt a puff of wind that turned into a steady blowing-from the northwest. In the time since they’d sailed into the lee of the Flower Rocks, the wind had shifted around until now the rocks were themselves alee shore!
If every soul aboard Golden Cup had been twins, there would still have been work for them all in the next few minutes. Pirvan was caught up in it all, turning his hands to whatever work he was ordered to do or saw not being done. He could not have said from moment to moment what was going on, as the ship’s people struggled to save it and themselves, but he remembered what he saw when he could at last look up from the deck.
Golden Cup’s stern had turned toward the wind and was driving south, with the Flower Rocks seemingly close enough to touch. The ship also seemed to be making some way toward the east, with every scrap of sail set that its two remaining masts could carry. Somebody had even tied something to the stump of the foremast, and it was beyond there that Pirvan saw it: