Pirate Wars (3 page)

He lay on his stomach, cursing, and tried to hold on while the last fountains from the monster’s interior poured down on him. He closed his eyes to protect them from the salt water and pressed his cheek firmly against the whale’s skin.

“Griffin?” said Ebenezer from below. “Everything all right?”

Griffin struggled to his feet with a groan. “Why didn’t you tell me he does that?”

“I thought you knew about whales.”

Sighing, Griffin shook his head, rubbed the water off his face, and looked over to the opening in Jasconius’s back. The fountain of water had been at least ten fathoms high. The pressure to expel such masses must be enormous.

“Griffin?”

“Wait. Just a minute.” A crazy idea was taking shape in his head. Really
quite
crazy.

“Ebenezer,” he called finally, “how often does Jasconius do that?”

“Oh, I can ask him to wait a while to do it.”

“No, no…the other way around!”

“Is it too hot for you?” Ebenezer sounded concerned. Perhaps he thought Griffin had gotten sunstroke on the shadeless back of the whale.

“I only want to try something out.”

“Try what out?”

“Can you tell him to do that once more? Blow out all that water, I mean.”

“Certainly.”

“On demand?”

Down in the mouth, Ebenezer was silent for a moment. Griffin was very happy not to have to see his face at this moment.

“Yes, very likely,” replied the monk after a while. He sounded skeptical.

Griffin shooed away a gull that was taking him for an overgrown hermit crab and made his way over to the opening. From up close he could see that the edges had closed.

He took a deep breath. If he wanted to get up higher to search for Aelenium, he had to try it.

And if the water pressure was too strong and broke all his bones?

He hesitated again, then he climbed onto the opening. It looked like a gigantic, pursed-up mouth that could open beneath him at any moment. Griffin took a moment trying to find the best position, and finally he knelt, legs and knees pressed together and hands crossed in his lap.

“Ebenezer? Now!”

“What the devil are you
doing
up there?”

“Just tell him.”

The monk hesitated. “Be glad I can’t come up there to knock the nonsense out of you, boy.”

Griffin grinned. “Just try it, old man.”

“The hand of the blessed is led by God’s will, don’t forget that. Even when it takes the hide off the backside of a braggart.”

“Who says so?”

“One of the blessed.”

“Go on, Ebenezer! We have to hurry.”

Griffin expected new arguments, but instead he felt movement in the whale muscles under his knees and feet.

He braced himself, tensed his whole body, and feared at any moment to be hit by a hammer of water so fast that he might not even feel his crash landing on the sea at all.

“Easy does—” he was beginning when suddenly he was raised as if by a giant hand, as gently as if Jasconius were trying to balance a breakable piece of china.

In his surprise, Griffin let out a jubilant sound, which Ebenezer, down in the mouth, misinterpreted.

“Are you dying?” came through the rushing of water.

“After you, Ebenezer.”

Now Griffin concentrated on controlling his balance on the growing column of water. He stretched his arms out to the sides and relaxed himself a bit to offer the pressure more surface. It went better than he’d feared. Wavering, swaying, and with an intense discomfort in his stomach, he was lifted up high by the stream of salt water with a gentleness that he
wouldn’t have dreamed possible in a monster like Jasconius.

“This is fantastic!” he shouted, laughing.

Five feet, then ten, he now floated over the whale’s back—all told, certainly some dozen fathoms over the surface of the sea. Gulls flew away, screaming, upset over this intrusion into their domain. Water sprayed up around Griffin, and yet he succeeded in looking in all four directions.

He discovered the fog. A gray stripe like lead that someone had sprinkled over the horizon. Far away, but certainly reachable within a day, perhaps faster if Jasconius hurried.

Scarcely had he seen the fog when the pressure decreased, and the water stream gradually subsided beneath him. Griffin floated down as if on a magic carpet and was set back on top of the blowhole almost tenderly.

A little dizzy, but relieved, he let himself slide down the curve of the whale’s body on the seat of his pants and splashed into the water. With a few strokes he glided alongside Jasconius’s gigantic eye, which regarded him curiously. At first Griffin was going to swim on, but then he stopped and trod water and turned toward the mighty black eye, at least twice as large as he was himself.

It was the first time he’d been able to look directly at the whale’s eye. Its curving surface was like a mirror—it looked as if Griffin’s image was imprisoned in a dark glass ball. But there was more than curiosity in the animal’s eye. A trace of melancholy?

Griffin lingered so long in front of Jasconius’s eye that Ebenezer called to him in concern. Even then he wasn’t able
to detach himself from that gaze right away. He had never seen anything more beautiful, and yet it filled him with inexpressible sorrow. Perhaps the monster’s centuries-long loneliness was rubbing off onto him. What was going on in the whale’s head? What was he thinking about the tiny beings in his interior? Was he pleased to have a little company after so long a time?

A deep booming sounded, almost a trumpeting—the voice of the whale. It was a warm, friendly sound, and suddenly Griffin could do nothing else but smile at the whale eye and wave to him with one hand. It was a wonderful, confusing moment. Only then did he shed his heavyheartedness. He felt as if the whale wanted to share something with him, thousands of stories from thousands of years.

Ebenezer reached both hands out to Griffin and helped him climb into the whale’s mouth.

Griffin pointed. “That direction,” he said, and then he and the monk fell into each other’s arms with relief.

Swiftly they made their way back into the whale’s stomach and to the door on the rubble heap.

Jasconius shut his mouth and waited until they had reached the magic room. Then he dove and swam with mighty flipper strokes toward the sea star city.

Jolly didn’t know
how long they’d been under way when Captain d’Artois turned his head toward them and pointed wordlessly ahead. She sat up and squinted her eyes into tiny slits to discern anything in the glaring light of the sun. But the spectacle in the distance was impossible to take in at one look. She had to turn her head in order to see it from one end to the other.

“It’s so big,” she whispered.

Far, far away the line of the sea dissolved into a gray fog, not unlike the fog wall around Aelenium, and yet much higher and inconceivably wide. The water below them was churning, but it had nothing about it of the unrest of an approaching storm, and anyway the air was almost windless. The farther ahead Jolly looked, the more clearly she could see that they were already over the outermost currents of a
titanic whirlpool: The sea moved in broad, sweeping orbits from west to east, like the annual rings on a severed tree trunk. And it inclined very gradually downward, which was really impossible according to all known rules.

Over and over, towers of foam sprayed into the air, for no apparent reason, for there were no reefs or sandbanks to break the waves. The surface boomed and raged, and here and there the waves seemed to possess wills of their own, for they also turned against each other, as if there were something beneath them resisting the terrible suction. Foam lay in streaks on the water like scraps of skin on boiled milk, and not even the blue of the heavens was mirrored here anymore, the sea was so stirred up, so scarred. Instead the endless expanse beneath them had turned a purplish black, as if the disturbance of the waters had washed up the darkness from the depths like the camouflage color of ten thousand octopuses.

“It would be much worse if we flew closer,” said d’Artois. His voice sounded hoarse and thick.

“Do you intend to?” asked Soledad. “To fly over the Maelstrom?”

Jolly shuddered at the thought.

“Of course not. That would be much too dangerous. But I thought it would be good if we all finally saw what we’re dealing with.
Maelstrom
is only a word. But that down there, that’s…” He shook his head when no suitable expression occurred to him. “A chasm between the worlds, the one-eyed one says. But it looks to me more like the
end
of the world.”

He was right. If Jolly hadn’t known better, she’d have been
convinced they’d reached the end of the ocean, that place where, people had once believed, the water poured over the edge of the flat earth. Jolly’s foster father, Bannon, had explained to her that the world was round and that there was nothing like an end of it. But the sight of the Maelstrom could convince a person that the opposite was true.

Jolly felt horribly small, much too tiny to cope with such a force of nature. Mile after mile of roaring sea stretched out down there, and that was certainly nothing compared to what awaited her in the center of all this chaos. In the Crustal Breach, in the heart of the Maelstrom.

D’Artois gave a wave to the soldier flying the second ray, and the two animals simultaneously turned in a wide curve.

“We’re now flying back to a place where the sea isn’t so churned up,” he explained over his shoulder. “It’s important for you two to be able to dive vertically so as not to get caught in the suction.”

“But we have to get closer in any case,” Jolly countered. “Sooner or later we’re going to feel the suction anyway.”

“Not necessarily. A maelstrom is shaped like a funnel. Up here it might be fifty miles wide, but it decreases on the ocean floor. You’ll be able to walk on the ground unharmed, straight underneath its outer edges.” He paused for a moment. “The one-eyed one says that in the center, where it rises from a gigantic mussel on the floor of the Crustal Breach, the Maelstrom isn’t much wider than a tower.”

Jolly looked over at the Ghost Trader, the one-eyed one, as d’Artois called him. The Trader was talking urgently to Munk,
but at this distance she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Perhaps he was giving instructions similar to the captain’s.

“How many miles do we have to go?” Jolly asked.

“If we set you down at the edge of the Maelstrom…well, about twenty or thirty. It’s not possible to say exactly, because it’s getting bigger every day and we’ve given up measuring it.”

Thirty miles
, thought Jolly, shaken. The Crustal Breach itself supposedly lay at a depth of thirty thousand feet, Forefather said. And they were supposed to cover all that without any help? They couldn’t even take a compass with them because the water pressure would immediately destroy the glass.

“Don’t forget that you mustn’t get too far from the ocean bottom,” d’Artois continued, repeating an instruction that the Ghost Trader and Forefather had already hammered into them. “The Maelstrom will be looking for enemies approaching him. The one-eyed one says as long as you keep to the bottom, he won’t discover you. It would be best if you actually walk, and only swim in emergencies.” He shook his head as if he were sorry to be parroting rules that he didn’t understand himself. “You should be careful of strong currents, of changing pressure, and so forth. These all could be signs that the Maelstrom is reaching straight at you.”

Jolly nodded numbly. She’d already heard all that at least a hundred times in the last few days. But to hear it now, explained by someone like d’Artois, who didn’t accept magic as a given, made the terror ahead even more palpable and threatening.

Soledad had said hardly anything during the last few
minutes, and she kept still now, too. Jolly knew the princess felt guilty at the thought of the burden being placed on the polliwogs. That she herself could do nothing and knew of no better solution made her wild with helplessness.

The rays were now flying in a southerly direction again, where the sea wasn’t so rough. During the flight they’d seen kobalin hosts in the deep, seething dark swarms like ants that were moving under the surface in the direction of Aelenium. Kobalins as far as the eye could see. Once they’d flown through a zone where it was raining fish cadavers out of a clear sky, and all knew that somewhere beneath them there was a creature of the Maelstrom, a monstrosity like the Acherus, who had killed Munk’s parents. Possibly they’d even passed over the lord of the kobalins himself, a creature that none of them had seen as yet but whom Jolly had already twice been close enough to touch. Once on the open sea during their trip to Tortuga, a second time with Griffin on the island of the shape changer. Both times it had rained dead fish in his vicinity.

Gradually the waves under them settled into smoothness, and finally d’Artois gave another wave to the second ray. The animals slowed their flight and began to circle. Jolly looked over her shoulder. The dark stripe on the horizon was still visible, but the arms of the Maelstrom did not reach this far. And the kobalin hordes had long since passed this spot, so there was at least a chance for them to push their way to the sea bottom unhindered.

“D’Artois!” Soledad cried suddenly. “Up ahead there!”

“I see it,” growled the captain.

Jolly looked to the south and discovered what the two of them meant. A dark spot was approaching them on the water, so fast that it was flying over the surface.

“Is that a sea horse?” she asked.

“His rider must be riding it almost to death to go so fast,” replied d’Artois, frowning.

“A servant of the Maelstrom?” Soledad said what they were all thinking.

D’Artois whistled in the direction of the second ray, but its riders had already caught sight of the spot in the distance. The captain pulled a small crossbow from its halter on the saddle and stretched it with one practiced hand. An old-fashioned weapon like this was easier to handle from the back of a ray than a pistol, which first had to be rammed and loaded.

Soon the new arrival had come so near that its outlines allowed no more doubt. It was a sea horse. But its rider wore thrown-together clothing in the fashion of a pirate, not the leather uniform of the guards of Aelenium.

“Who the devil is that?” asked Soledad. Judging by her tone, she would probably have liked to be holding a weapon in her hands herself.

“I know the animal,” said d’Artois a moment later. “That’s Matador.”

A tremor ran through Jolly. Her breath stopped, her heartbeat altered. “Griffin’s sea horse?”

The captain nodded.

And then the rider raised an arm and waved excitedly to them, and although his voice could not be heard over the rushing of the rays’ wings and the distant roaring of the Maelstrom, and although his face was still just as small as the head of a knitting needle, Jolly knew who he was.

“That
is
Griffin!” Her voice broke, she sounded shrill with excitement. “Go down, d’Artois! Please—go lower!”

Circling, the ray lost altitude. When it was still four or five fathoms over the water, Jolly recognized Griffin’s blond braids, then his smile. He was now waving so exaggeratedly that for a moment she believed it might be a hallucination, something conjured up by her longing.

“Griffin!” she cried, waving back. Softly she whispered into the wind, “Oh, Griffin, thank God….”

She paid no attention to the others anymore, not to Munk, who was looking over at her stony-faced, not to the lines of concern on the Ghost Trader’s forehead, not to d’Artois’s warning, or to Soledad’s good-natured murmuring. In a flash she opened her safety belt, stood up on the saddle, ran two steps across the broad wing of the ray—and slid into the water in a head dive.

The excited cries of her companions faded as she broke through the surface, in a confusion of dancing bubbles and foam. For moments she heard only bubbling and roaring, then she turned beneath the water and poked her head above the waves. Griffin steered Matador in her direction, reined in the seahorse two or three paces away, frantically opened the fastenings of his saddle girt, and jumped down into the
water. With one powerful stroke he was beside her, and then they hugged and kissed and felt as though the Maelstrom and the kobalins and the whole world around them had vanished into air.

“I followed the ship,” he got out breathlessly, while the water kept splashing into his face. “When you left Aelenium…with the
Carfax
…” He gulped for air. “And now I almost came too late again…you were just about to start off.”

She kissed him again, more vehemently this time, and they both threatened to go under, because in their joy they forgot to swim. Jolly had almost forgotten that Griffin, in contrast to her, couldn’t breathe underwater.

D’Artois’s ray was now circling low over the surface. The crests of waves lapped at the animal’s belly. Jolly saw that Soledad was smiling in satisfaction, and for some reason that appeared to her hugely generous and understanding in light of the situation. She became aware for the first time of how very much the princess meant to her.

Something splashed into the water not far away from her, and then Munk popped up beside them.

“Hello, Griffin,” he said and spat out salt water. He smiled, perhaps a little grimly.

“Munk.” Griffin nodded to him, then turned once more to Jolly and gave her a—much too short—kiss. Then he let her go. She knew why he did that: He didn’t want the wedge that, against his will, he’d driven between her and Munk to get any larger. Not considering what lay before them.

Now the Ghost Trader’s ray was also hovering over the
water. The animals circled around the two boys and the girl, while Matador swam in the waves several yards away. The draft of the ray’s wings blew cool in Jolly’s face. Perhaps that was the reason she was shivering. Or was it the certainty of leaving?

Well, it was there, the moment she’d been fearing for weeks. In a few minutes she’d be alone with Munk, down in the deep. Only the two of them, entirely on their own.

Griffin gave her an encouraging smile, but she saw through the facade: He didn’t care about the Maelstrom, about Aelenium, or about the fate of the world at all—he only wanted her to return home to him safely. At that moment, in those few intense seconds, she made the irrevocable decision to fulfill that wish: Come what might, she would not give up. She would do what must be done. And then she would return—to him.

“Jolly, Munk—look out!”

Knapsacks of oiled leather fell from the rays into the water. They both grabbed them and fastened them tightly to their backs. Griffin helped them with it, Munk too, who let him only after a short hesitation. The bundles contained waterproof boxes with pickled meat, fruit, and raw vegetables, as well as coconut pieces—food that could be unpacked below the surface without immediately spoiling or becoming soaked with salt water. When they spoke or ate no water passed the lips of the polliwogs, but that also made drinking water more difficult: The knapsacks held bottles with narrow, corked openings through which they could suck up the
contents, as if with a straw. They’d practiced all that, as they had so much else, so that their mission wouldn’t founder on something as ordinary as eating and drinking.

“Keep in mind,” the Ghost Trader called to them when they were ready to start out, “always stay close to the ground. Don’t be tempted to swim over impassable terrain. The Maelstrom will send out currents in all directions, and he’ll discover you if they encounter any unexpected resistance.”

“How does the Ghost Trader know all that?” murmured Griffin.

Jolly grasped his hand underwater. “I think he’s experienced all this before, that time when the first polliwogs conquered the Maelstrom in the Crustal Breach and shut him into his mussel shell.”

“But that was thousands of years ago!”

Jolly nodded. She had no more time to inform him of all she’d learned, so she only said, “Talk with Soledad. She knows about everything.”

He looked at her uncertainly, then he also nodded.

The voice of the Ghost Trader pushed between them like a separating hand. “It’s time to start!” he called down from his ray.

“Yes,” said Munk, with a sideways glance at the two of them.

Jolly tried to read his eyes, but he turned away quickly. She looked at Griffin, kissed him one last time, then let go of his hand.