«We don't know the eastern Sea that well,» said Khraishamo. «But that's where all the ships worth catching sail in summer. So we pull the ships up, caulk, rig, paint, harvest the crops, salt down the fish-«
«I understand,» said Blade.
«I swear you have nothing to fear,» said the pirate chief. «If the Sarumi do find us, I'll pledge my life to see you and Rhodina in Mythor before autumn.»
«But they won't be finding us,» said Rhodina. Her voice was dull and her eyes were half-closed. «Even HemiGohar couldn't find us now.»
Waking on this hot morning, Blade couldn't help wondering if Rhodina might possibly be right.
Dawn on the sixteenth day. Blade was on watch, but dozed off for a moment. When he awoke, he found Rhodina half out of the boat, mouth open and gulping salt water. He pulled her back into the boat. She started to sob, but she was too dehydrated for any tears to come. Blade held her until the fit of hysterics passed.
«Blade, Blade,» she murmured. «This-the end. You and Khraishamo-to go on, you need water. Kill me-drink my blood. No!» she said as Blade stiffened in uncontrollable horror at the idea. «No. You must.»
«We must not,» said Blade, desperately hoping that Rhodina hadn't gone completely mad. «Without you, we couldn't get to the rebels. Without getting to the rebels, it's a wasted trip even if we live.»
«You must live, even so. You-«
Khraishamo cursed them for waking him and sat up. Before Rhodina could say a word, Blade explained what she'd suggested. Khraishamo's look of horror matched Blade's own, then he bent and kissed Rhodina on each caked eye.
«Rho, Rho, silly Rho,» he said. «Blade's right. Without you alive at the end of the voyage, we might as well jump overboard right now. We need Blade, too, because he knows all the secrets of Gohar, including some he hasn't told us.»
«And we need Khraishamo's strength and skill with boats, and we'll need him to speak for us if the Sarumi do find us,» said Blade. «We each of us need the others. So we're going to Mythor together, or die here together.»
«Yes,» said Khraishamo. He took Blade's right hand and Rhodina's left. «All for one, and one for all.»
Blade repeated it, forcing himself not to laugh, and then Rhodina gasped out the words. Blade wondered what the creator of The Three Musketeers would have said if he'd heard their famous oath from Khraishamo's lips. Certainly a pirate chief who wasn't even human, a battle-scared young whore, and a traveler from another Dimension were as unlikely a trio of musketeers as you could hope to find.
Dawn on the seventeenth day. A seabird landed on the gunwale. Confident that none of the three sprawled bodies in the boat could harm it, the bird made the mistake of folding its wings. That was its last mistake. A quick snatch, a squawk, a twist, and Blade had the bird in hand, its neck neatly wrung.
They gave Rhodina the blood to drink and rubbed the fat on the worst of her sunburn. Then Blade and Khraishamo divided the flesh. It was gamey and reeking of fish, but they were past caring.
Dawn on the eighteenth day. The sea was as flat and the air as heavy as ever, but the sky held a bronze tinge and the sun was nearly invisible even though there weren't any clouds. Khraishamo sniffed the air.
«This might be hatching a storm,» he said. «And it might not.»
«If it doesn't-«began Blade, then found he didn't have the will to finish the sentence out loud. He could finish it in his thoughts, though.
Another day, and Rhodina will be dead. A few days after that, and we'll join her. Khraishamo and I are already too weak to capture a merchantman if she did pick us up. We'd have to lie. He didn't feel very hopeful about lying convincingly. In fact, he'd never felt so nearly hopeless about survival in his life. He kept going purely on the principle that the nearly dead sometimes live, while the completely dead don't come back.
Then he felt a puff of wind on his cheek. He blinked, and when he felt a second puff, he sat up. Then he felt a third, and Khraishamo was sitting up, and a fourth.
After the fourth puff it was a steady breeze. Khraishamo threw himself into movement, sponging off Rhodina and checking the sun-baked sail and rigging while Blade manned the tiller. The pirate seemed torn between joy and uncertainty.
«If this wind holds, it means a storm. But a storm maybe means going from no water to too much.»
«We can face that,» said Blade. «And if worse comes to worse, I'd rather be drowned than sun-baked.»
Khraishamo frowned. «Don't joke like that, Blade. Not out here.» He pointed to the northwestern horizon. It was turning from bronze to a sullen slate-gray. The wind was now blowing strongly enough for the ripples on the water to start turning into waves. As the sail was filled, the boat began to leave foam in its wake.
Another hour, and Blade might have danced for joy if that wouldn't have upset the boat. The sky turned completely gray, almost black, with the clouds pressing down on the sea as if they wanted to crush the boat. Out of the clouds came a downpour so fierce that for a while Blade was afraid they would have to start bailing. Suddenly there was all the water they could use.
They filled the pots, drank them empty, and filled them again. They wrung out the drenched sail and used the water to wash their clothing. Then they wrung out their clothes over their sun-dried, salt-caked skins. They drank the pots empty again, then filled them and poured them over Rhodina. They even gave her a full pot to wash out her hair.
When she was finished with that, she had the strength to stand, holding onto the mast. She stood there as the wind rose and her hair began to fly about her, a naked, magnificent storm goddess. Blade knew he'd never forget the sight of her in that moment.
Then she had to sit down and hang on, because the wind went on rising as the rain slackened. Before long Blade wouldn't have tried dancing for a million pounds. He'd have gone overboard before he could take three steps. Besides, he wasn't feeling quite so cheerful now. He remembered that summer storms on the Sea could blow like hurricanes. There wasn't enough room for them to build up gigantic waves, but to small-boat sailors that wasn't an important difference.
Blade looked around him. It was becoming impossible to tell where the sky ended and the Sea began. Waves were already nearly ten feet high with the wind peeling their crests off in clouds of spray. Water roared under the boat and the wind roared in Blade's ears. He found he had to shout to make Khraishamo hear him.
«How does this blow look to you?»
«It could get a lot worse. It probably will, too. But at least it's taking us the way we want to go.»
That was true. The gale would drive them toward the eastern shore of the Sea. It might blow out before they reached Mythor, or it might drive them ashore before they reached the city. Meanwhile, it was giving them all the water they could use, as well as protection from Goharan ships. Blade shouted to Khraishamo again.
«We don't need to worry about Goharans any more. The merchant ships'll all be too busy to pay attention to us, and the galleys'll all be heading for shelter.»
Khraishamo nodded. «Let's hope we can do the same if we have to.»
Blade looked up at the sky without loosening his grip on the tiller. It could hardly be much after noon, but already the day was as dark as late evening.
Chapter 18
In the chronicles of Gohar, it was called the Storm of Thrayket's Passing, because it started blowing on the day of the temple rites in his memory. It had various other names among the other peoples around the Sea. None of them ignored it.