The sticks were the signals that the boats were ready. Whoever threw the first stick waited until the second gave its signal before taking action.
Karkri balanced himself, rocking a little, the floor giving way to each shift of weight and the boat also rocking. Then he hurled the lance and the line, thin almost to the point of invisibility, followed. The shaft tore through the skin of the beast and disappeared.
Karkri had sunk to one knee after the throw. Now he fell back and grabbed the strap and buckled its wooden tongue to hold him fast to the bow position. The line whirled off a spindle as the beast loosed from its underside several tons of silvery water. It rose swiftly, rotating its wing-sails so that they would present the least surface to the air during its ascent.
Ishmael had but one chance to look at the leviathan, and then he was busy furling the sail. Koojai worked to draw up the sail of the undermast. The rudderman waited for the jerk that would either snatch the craft upward or break the line.
Ishmael tied up the sail and secured the boom. He looked upward. The whale was dwindling, though it was still huge. The other boat was even with them, its crew waiting tensely for the first jerk of the line. The harpooner turned his dark face and flashed white teeth at Karkri.
The line raced outward and upward from the whistling spindle, which leaned forward a little on the hinge at its lowest end. Abruptly, the spindle stopped, and the nose of the boat turned upward, and then the boat was rising. Though the line looked fragile enough for Ishmael to pull it apart with his hands, it held. Together, the two boats soared.
The wind whale was almost two hundred yards above them. Below, the red cloud drifted by. The Roolanga was hidden in it for a moment and then it emerged from the western side, beating against the wind. The other boats were a mile to the east and somewhat below, also being dragged upward by a beast.
The wind whistled through the rigging. The air became colder and the sky darker. Their heads grew light, and they had to suck in deep breath. Far below, the Roolanga was a stick with wings.
Karkri, despite the weakness caused by the thin air, was winding the spindle with a stick he had inserted through a hole. It was now necessary that the boats be drawn as closely as possible to the animal before he decided to dive. Rising, he could not jerk the line nearly as violently as he would when he loosed the gas from the bladders and upended and fell head-foremost. And so Karkri and the harpooner in the other boat worked as swiftly as they could. And when they could not move an arm, and their breaths came so strongly that it seemed they must burn their throats, they secured the spindle and crawled aft. Ishmael relinquished his post to Karkri and took up the task. Though he was larger and more heavily muscled, he did not last as long as Karkri. If they had been at sea level, where he had spent most of his life, he might have surpassed the little brown man. But here, in the upper reaches to which Karkri was accustomed, Ishmael's breath gave out and his arms felt as if he were convalescing from a long illness.
Koojai, grinning at Ishmael, crawled past him to take his turn. Then the steersman gave up his post to Karkri, and after a while Karkri was working again. Ishmael took his second turn, lasting a shorter time than the first. By the third turn of duty, he felt as if he could not crawl to the bow, let alone turn the spindle, which now seemed to have rusted tight. But he went up the almost vertical slope of the deck, using the holes in it as a ladder, and strapped himself in and strove mightily to make a few turns. He succeeded, locked the spindle, and crawled back. Once he looked back, and he wished that he had not. Where was the Roolanga?
The boats had drawn up steadily until they were now about thirty feet behind the gigantic fin-sails. Karkri called a halt then. If the whale dived now, he could not put too sudden a strain on the lines.
Ishmael's heart would not stop pounding, and his breath sawed in and out. The whale was getting dim; was this the prelude to the fuzziness of mind, the sometimes suicidal actions resulting from the drunkenness of the heights? He hoped that the others, who were better able to live in this poverty of atmosphere, would watch over him. Perhaps...
He came fully to his senses with the air rushing by and the sky suddenly not quite so dark. The boat was tipped almost vertically downward. The dead sea sparkled in the light of the red sun; the Roolanga was directly below and seemed destined to be struck headlong by the beast.
Indeed, this had happened before, though never, according to the sailors, by design. The whale sometimes miscalculated its vectors and struck a ship. And when that happened the ship was lucky to stay in one piece.
They shot within fifty feet of the Roolanga. Ishmael saw the men staring out at them from behind the transparent skin and in the open spaces. Some heads were also sticking up out of cockpits on the upper deck, or top, of the vessel. Some waved; others joined their hands together and bowed forward, praying to the lesser god of the ship and to Zoomashmarta that this dive end safely for their fellows. Though several minutes must have passed, they seemed seconds. The earth spread outward; the shores of the sea shot away; and then there was nothing but water below.
Usually the whale ended the dive and began rising with plenty of room to spare for the boats swinging behind it. Say, twenty feet or so. Yes, it was scary. Even the oldest hand became frightened when this happened, unless you were talking of Old Bharanhi.
Old Bharanhi was the Paul Bunyan of the sailors of the air, and he was never frightened. He had lived long ago, when men were giants, and...
With an explosion, the giant wing-sails snapped out from the beast's side, where they had been tightly folded. The starboard wing narrowly missed striking the harpoon line. The whale checked its speed, and the boat gained on it. There was nothing for Karkri to do. To have tried to haul in even more line would have meant being caught in the middle of a turn, and the unlocked spindle would run out the whole length of line. The length of the arc the boat would then describe as the whale turned upward would be deadly.
Ishmael understood now why that first boat had crashed. The crew had not been able to haul up the boat to the animal as closely as they wished.
Koojai, behind him, shrieked something. Perhaps it was a prayer, though it was considered bad form to say anything beyond what duty required, and then the forward part of the boat was snapped upward with a force that drove Ishmael's thighs against the strap and sent a pain shooting across his back.
The sea charged them and then suddenly sprang aside. They were in the sky; then they were swinging back toward the sea.
On the second swing, Ishmael saw why Koojai had cried out. The other whale, also coming up out of the dive, was heading for them.
Apparently it saw that they were going to collide, for it rotated its wings to present a fully resistant surface to the air. It slowed and dipped, but not quite enough. Its head struck the other whale just back of its head, and the skin and the fragile bone of Ishmael's whale crumpled under the impact.
The head also rammed into the line, jerking the boat and snapping the line.
Ishmael was catapulted forward, saw the plum-colored skin expand out before him, hit it head-first, went through it like an arrow, struck a number of things -- organs and bones, probably -was turned on his back, while still falling, and went through the skin on the other side or the underpart. He could never be sure. He was half-conscious and half-aware that he was falling. The two behemoths were blurs above him; another and smaller blur might have been one of the boats.