Though they numbered only twenty and were no thicker than a man's arm, the monster's rear tentacles seemed to fall in a deadly rain. Against them harpoons were useless. The sword and ax men managed to damage a few, but the beast seemed oblivious to pain. Its head reared high to starboard and observed critically while its tail worked murder to port.
Dead men speckled the sea.
Tentacles began reaching through hatches and snaking out the boys below. Terrified, pathetic screams echoed below decks.
Rickli suddenly understood that they were fighting the wrong end. Its normal prey probably never realized that. He tried to tell someone, but with Dymon gone there was no one to make them listen. He glanced to starboard. The creature was casually nibbling on a boatman. He bent, picked up a harpoon, cast it.
His knee betrayed him. He collapsed on bloody sand, almost cried when the harpoon whispered past the thing's trunk, a meter below his target. He had to get closer.
It had to be out the bowsprit. From nowhere else could he be certain of being close enough to overcome his knee. He grabbed another harpoon and started.
There wasn't much thought in the journey, that seemed an endless pilgrimage to keep a rendezvous with death. There was pain such as he hadn't known since the Fenaja harpoon had struck. Tentacles whipped about with Rickli Manlove seemingly their special target. One seized him round the bad knee, pulled and squeezed, but fate placed a levelheaded ax-man nearby. He went on, crawling, dragging the reinjured leg. Something had gone in the knee. He had heard and felt it.
Three meters out the bowsprit, he collapsed, unable to go on.
Salt spray stung his eyes. Or was it tears? Failed again.... He wasn't sure where he was, on a chaser racing after the humping brown back of a brunwhal, or lying half-dead after LaFata.... His will returned. Then his strength. Just enough. He made it to the leadsman's platform, dragged himself upright, gripped his harpoon, threw.
And sagged in defeat. Low again. It buried itself deep, but a meter below the huge yellow eye for which he had aimed.
"Rickli! Rickli Manlove!" The Earthman's curious, harshly accented voice seemed to come from years and kilometers away. Slowly, he turned.
The Earthman stood at the foot of the bowsprit, harpoon in one hand, his talisman in the other. A tentacle had him round the waist.
Rickli reached a futile hand....
The Earthman put the harpoon in the air. It slapped his palm.
He felt familiar ivory, the old, comfortable grip of his high years.
He turned. He aimed. He cast.
He collapsed, but only after he had seen his old companion buried gripdeep in the yellow eye.
Rickli lay unconscious for days. He came round to find Rifkin's Dream, with help from other ships, trying to keep afloat during repairs to her hull and rigging. Some vessels worked the beast's remains. Masts crowded the battle site. Through them he could see a similar cluster in the distance.
The Shipwrecked Earthman lay beside him, drugged, his waist a mass of ripped skin and ugly bruises. His guts must have been churned good. His talisman remained gripped in his left hand. "Good afternoon, Captain." "Ilyana Wildhaber. What're you doing here?"
"Keeping this tub off the bottom." She was captain of Replete, a repair and stores vessel, "It's a jinx."
"Have Weatherhead change our station."
"There'll be changes. This made LaFata look like a christening party." "Tell me."
"There were six of them. Several ships weren't as lucky as Dream. Three were dragged into the deep. Six more went down in the shallows. Two we'll re-float. Most everyone got involved."
"Guess there'll be work for a crippled sailmaker, then." Rickli's greatest fear was that the crew would vote him supernumerary, a fear that had begun while the Fenaja harpoon still quivered in his knee. No such vote had been taken in living memory, even against incorrigibles, but Rickli felt he was a child of fate. A malevolent fate. "Didn't you hear? You're captain now."
"No."
"Yes. They voted. You'll replace Dymon. If you live." Rickli at last found the nerve to look down. "A one-legged man?"
She shrugged. "Got to go. You lie still, don't get it infected. They'd take it off at the neck next time." Rickli stared at the battered masts and rigging, pondering the odd course of fate. A harpoon man in good condition grew old in his job, usually perishing when age tricked him into fatal error. But as a sailmaker who could fight, he had with one cast of a harpoon won the hearts of a crew. Such as it might be. His elevation might be a mockery. Losses had been heavy when he had made his throw.
Rifkin's Dream did not weigh anchor for six weeks and then moved only a kilometer. Rickli and the Earthman were both off their backs but not in good health. Hakim couldn't handle solid food, Rickli drilled his crew mercilessly, trying to meld a scattering of veterans and dozens of transfers into a new ship's company. "What do you think?" he asked the Earthman one day. 'They'll cope. They always do.
Why worry?"
"I want them to look sharp. We're going on pilgrimage."
"Landing?" The Shipwrecked Earthman had never visited the site of Man's first touchdown on Quiet Sea. During his tenure individual ships or squadrons had felt the need and made the hadj, but Rifkin's Dream had sailed on, remaining with the fleet as it crawled from bank to bank. It had been twenty-five years since the vessel had gone. "The whole fleet. We need the luck. Two disasters in one year.... It's time."
Landing's special significance hadn't attained religious standing, but some superstition had attached itself, encouraged by the augurs. To maintain their birthluck, all Children of the Sky were encouraged to visit the Ship every few years.
The reason, the Earthman had suggested, was so the augurs at the Ship could gather information from scattered sources, collate it, and disseminate it again.
The Earthman, Rickli reflected, had a lot of strange ideas about the Children of the Sky. He supposed that was the alien viewpoint. Whatever, Thomas was eager to reach Landing.
If anything, the encounter with Grossfenaja had ripened and mellowed their relationship. The Earthman now shared more of his alien thoughts.
While crossing the Finneran Bank, the traditional boundary between seas well-known and the frontier waters the fleet generally cruised, just a week's fast sail from Landing, Rickli said, "Thomas, you've never told us why you're here. Something must've brought you."
The sun had set an hour before. The bright jewels of the galaxy winked down as they began their migration toward dawn. Rifkin's Dream had settled into the long, lonely silence of night, whispering and creaking to herself, but telling few stories to listening ears. The passage of ships excited bioluminescent plankton in the shallows, scrawling pale stripes across the quiet sea. Hakim stared at the stars, at the constellation the sea people called the Spiderfish, for a long time.
"I don't know, Rickli," he said at last. "Why does a man leave home? I thought I knew then. Somehow, from here, it doesn't seem all that important."
"Was it so wicked a thing?" Rickli knew he had touched a nerve with the initial question. When Thomas stayed awake to watch the Spiderfish, he was feeling homesick. That much Rickli knew for sure about the Earthman.
Hakim frowned to him, his expression barely visible in the starlight. Afraid he had overstepped, Rickli turned to survey the running lights of nearby ships. Night sailing could be tricky.
"Some thought so. You wouldn't comprehend. The survival imperatives are different. Here, you all live in the same environment and culture." He pointed upward. "There's a fleet, the greatest of them all. Every ship is as far from its neighbor as we are from any of them. Some are big, some small, some strong, some weak. Like the fishes of the sea. Here, there're warm shallows where the living is easy and the fish get along, then the cold deeps, and in them things that get hungry, that sometimes surface, like Grossfenaja...."