Pirate Wars (7 page)

“An earthquake!” cried Munk, instinctively pressing himself against the rock wall. Lantern fish whisked from behind his back and firmly attached themselves to him elsewhere so as not to be squashed.

Jolly listened tensely. The rolling grew louder, came closer. Now faster and faster. The dust vibrated more strongly. Their greatest concern was that pieces of rock might come loose above them. Was that why the fish were holding them fast on the bottom of the ravine? So that they’d be buried by the quake?

The deep booming now swelled to a volume that drowned out Munk’s voice. Jolly saw that his mouth was moving, but she didn’t understand him. Her eyes moved up to the top of the rocks.

Something was happening up there.

It looked as if the darkness itself were starting to boil. Jolly couldn’t really tell what it was. The water? Or stirred-up dust? The darkness over her seemed to seethe, just at the edge of her vision. Now the sand began to rain down. Perhaps it was only a question of time until the larger pieces would also plunge down.

The noise was deafening. Jolly was going to press her hands over her ears, before she noticed that the fish had already inserted themselves into her ears and damped the noise. So in reality, the booming and rumbling must be even louder.

Munk again began to beat around him frantically. Jolly, too, lost her self-control and tried to brush the fish off her body, now utterly uncertain whether they were helping her or preventing her escape.

Something raged across the ravine. Like a storm—or a mighty hand—it stroked over the stone and set the entire area trembling. Only very gradually did it grow weaker again. Dust still sprinkled down in fine curtains, but the noise receded. The ground also quieted. The trembling died away.

Then there was only stillness.

As if on a silent command, all the fish suddenly detached themselves from the two polliwogs and streamed apart. For a moment Jolly and Munk were imprisoned in a glowing, whirling chaos, then the school rose from the bottom of the ravine in a single pulsing movement. In a minute the last fish had vanished on the other side of the rock edge.

Jolly sank to her knees and rubbed her eyes. Because of the sudden dimness, for a moment it seemed to her that she was blind. Munk took two or three stumbling steps and then leaned against the rock wall again, breathing hard.

“What the dickens was that?” He sounded hoarse, as if he had swallowed one of the fish. But it was only the fear that had settled in his throat like a lump.

“How would I know?” Jolly got wearily to her feet, supported herself on a rock with one hand, and tried to clear her head. Her thoughts arranged themselves very gradually, but she had trouble making sense out of what had just happened.

Something had stormed over the rocks. The fish had protected them from it by holding them down on the floor of the fissure. They had been saved from whatever it was.

“Was that
him
?” Munk asked.

She was about to say
I don’t know
, but then she nodded. “The Ghost Trader spoke of the currents and—”

“Currents?” He clenched his fists and banged them helplessly on the stone at his back. “That thing there was…I don’t know, something like a tidal wave!”

“At least he isn’t particularly careful. The next time maybe that will warn us early enough.” She tried pushing off the bottom and floated effortlessly a few feet off the ground. “What has me racking my brains much more is the question—”

Munk finished the sentence: “Who
they
were?”

“Of course.”

“Not ordinary fish, were they?”

She shook her head because, much as she wanted to, she didn’t know the answer to that. She could think of only one power that might have come here to help them. The water spinners. But when Jolly had met the strange old women, it hadn’t seemed that they intended to intervene in events personally.

She’d have loved to have been able to talk with Munk about that and she knew very well that it would only have been fair—but something made her shy away from it. She’d told Soledad about the spinners, but not the Trader, and the reason for her silence was still unclear to her. Perhaps because the spinners had revealed things about Aelenium and the Ghost Trader, who hadn’t found it necessary to reveal them himself. That he’d once been a god, for instance; about who Forefather and the other founders of the sea star city were; and that the masters of the Mare Tenebrosum were perhaps not monsters of sheer malice but only demanded for themselves what Forefather had also sought a long time ago: nothing less than a world.

Possibly it was a mistake to conceal the explanations of the spinners from Munk. On the other hand, Munk had been a close friend of the Ghost Trader for a long time, and both occupied more or less the same square on her mental game board. What Jolly didn’t tell the Trader was better kept a secret from Munk as well.

If he realized what was going on in her mind, he didn’t speak to her about it. Like her, he pushed off from the bottom, and together they swam upward, at first very fast,
but then more cautiously, out of concern that the might of the Maelstrom could roll over the rocks again.

When they got to the top, they found not much changed. Except that the sand dust that had covered the rock towers before was now largely washed into the crevasses. The upper surfaces seemed cleaner now, some as if scoured bare. Shuddering, Jolly wondered what would have happened if they’d been in that chaos. Would the boiling sand have torn the flesh off their bodies?

“Swim or walk?” asked Munk, as they cautiously stayed close to an edge, so as to be able to dive down quickly in an emergency.

Jolly looked down. The ground in the chasm had once more sunk into the darkness, as if a deep black stream flowed there. Then she looked in the direction whence the current of the Maelstrom had come thundering. Nothing there indicated a threat of danger either. Like a stone that you throw into the water, the Maelstrom sent out waves like rings that moved in all directions and at some point ebbed again. Had they had the misfortune to encounter one of these rings, they’d probably have been killed, but at the least it would have betrayed to the Maelstrom that they were here.

“We’ll swim,” she answered Munk’s question. “What else can we do? We have no time to lose.”

He nodded but didn’t seem thoroughly convinced. He must have had the same sorts of horrific visions going through his mind as she did.

“We’ll just keep an eye peeled,” she said with a shrug,
attempting to appear as relaxed as possible. One look in his direction was enough to reveal that he didn’t buy this coolness for a second.

He took a deep breath and began to move. Lower than before, they glided away over the rock plateau.

After a while, which felt like many hours to them, they decided to take a rest in a cave in the upper part of a rock wall. It wasn’t a cave, only an indentation, which offered them temporary protection but wasn’t deep enough to harbor something unforeseen. Something like a slumbering giant octopus.

They ate awkwardly from their waterproofed provisions, drank even more awkwardly from the drinking tubes of their water bottles, and finally rested for a little while. Neither one had intended to fall asleep, but when sleep finally came after all, it was of the sort that leaves one even more exhausted after waking up: deep enough for bad dreams but not so deep that it provided new strength.

As they started out again, they were both too tired to speak. Day and night did not exist on the bottom of the sea, and since there was nothing else to help them determine the time—no sun, no stars, not even the ebb and flow of tides—they had soon lost any feeling for the duration of their trek.

At some time they reached the end of the rock labyrinth. Before them opened a broad plain that led gently downward to the end of the polliwog range of vision.

Jolly and Munk glided steeply down from the last plateau, and when they looked over their shoulders a little later, the
rocks rose behind them like a forest of petrified giant redwoods. It was a majestic and deeply alarming sight. If they really had gone on foot as the Trader had advised, they would have become hopelessly lost in that maze.

This was a worrisome insight, but also one that gave Jolly new self-confidence. Obviously it was not so bad to take matters into one’s own hands and to make one’s own decisions. Until now, anyway, that had turned out well.

The plain ended very soon and changed into a pile of bizarre chunks of rock. Jagged formations reached toward them like stone hands.

“Those are corals,” exclaimed Munk.

“Looks like”—Jolly hesitated—“like fragments of a giant coral!” Following an impulse, she pushed off from the ground and floated upward.

The view from above was like a blow in the face.

Suddenly Munk was beside her.

“That’s rubble,” she whispered. “Rubble of a sunken coral city.”

Munk nodded, spellbound. “Like Aelenium,” he murmured.

The remains of individual houses were clearly recognizable, grown structures that had somehow been hollowed out and reshaped; gigantic splinters with chiseled-out stairs running along them; burst towers that had exploded like porcelain on impact with the sea bottom; roofs and even the facade of a palace, which lay flat on its back like the fragments of a collapsed card house.

Munk was as pale as a ghost.

Suddenly he raised his arm and pointed into the depths and froze. “Jolly!”

“What?”

“Something moved down there!”

Her eyes followed his outstretched forefinger down into the dark mountain of coral. There was nothing to be seen in the burst and splintered confusion. The sight looked like a gigantically enlarged pile of shards.

“What was it?” Her tongue felt swollen. “A fish—or something bigger?”

Munk cleared his throat, then his brows knitted, and he met her eyes.

“A human being,” he said. “A girl.”

“A girl?” Jolly
stared at Munk as if he’d announced that he intended to pick flowers now. “Here?”

He nodded uncomfortably. “I saw her. Down there.”

Jolly surveyed him a moment longer and then looked along his outstretched arm down into the outspread rubble of the sunken coral city. It was an eerie view that filled her eye to the limits of her polliwog vision: Sand and mussel colonies had settled on the shattered ruins, though not enough to completely distort the shapes lying beneath them.

When and why had the city sunk? Who had destroyed it?

And above all, why had no one told them about it?

The place where Munk was pointing lay desolate and uninviting behind the eternal veil of gray in which their vision immersed the sea bottom. It was a sandy lane between two towering pieces of rubble, the one a shapeless block full
of cavities and cracks, the other obviously part of a former palace, with hewn columns and a multitude of rooms. The crash had broken the building in two, so that you could look into the open rooms like the inside of a dollhouse. They were empty and covered with mussels, all furniture disintegrated into dust eons ago.

“There’s no one there,” said Jolly.

“She was there, believe me.” Munk gave up trying to convince Jolly, throwing up his hands in frustration. They had mounted high over the crash site to get a better view over the landscape of the ruins; now he dove downward again, straight toward the lane.

“Munk, wait!”

“You don’t believe me!”

“Yes. But we have to be careful.”

He stopped, floating, and turned to her. In spite of the all-encompassing gray, it seemed to her that his face was red with excitement. “If it really was a girl, Jolly, then she must be a polliwog. Just like us.”

She nodded numbly. If he hadn’t been mistaken, that was the only explanation.

A third polliwog.

And where there was a third one, there might be more. Lord knew how many.

“I don’t like this,” she said, but she followed him as he again headed downward. They were now about fifteen feet over the bottom of the lane. They were already much too close to the depressing ruins for Jolly’s taste. If it had been
up to her, they would have gone around the ruins. Even a longer way around might save them time in the end if danger threatened them in the ruins.

She could literally taste the threat in the water. It was as if all her senses were screaming one desperate warning at her.

Munk would not be restrained. How thoughtlessly he was jeopardizing their mission amazed Jolly and frightened her.

“If it turns out to be a kobalin…,” she began.

He didn’t even look around at her. “I can tell a girl from a kobalin.”

Munk was the first to reach the ground. Dust puffed up when he set his feet down and looked around him.

Jolly stopped above him and let her eyes roam. Even more than the box-shaped cross-section of the palace rooms that rose up to the right of them, she disliked the shapeless coral monstrosity to their left. White plants had settled in the openings, waving in the invisible currents like the fingers of corpses and appearing to be alternately waving them in or waving them away.

“Which direction did she disappear in?” Jolly asked.

“That way.” Munk pointed along the course of the lane.

Good
, she thought.
At least he doesn’t intend to search through the holes and cracks.

The floating plants were doughy, like the flesh of a drowned corpse. Jolly could hear the sounds they made when they rubbed against each other: a slurping and smacking, as if hidden behind them were something that was in the process of greedily devouring its prey.

The pile of rubble around them grew increasingly taller as the two approached the part of the ruin that had apparently once formed the center of the city. Obviously the coral city had not been destroyed on the surface, not completely anyway. It had only broken into hundreds of pieces on impact with the sea floor, but it had partially retained its original plan. The city must have been structured similarly to Aelenium, arranged around a kind of mountain cone or a massive coral formation in the middle. But nowhere did Jolly discover fragments of a giant sea star. If there had ever been one, its remains were buried somewhere beneath the other rubble.

“What do you think?” said Munk suddenly, while he kept straining to look in all directions.

“About the girl?”

“About the city.”

“I’d love to know why no one thought it necessary to ever say something about it.” She cast a sidelong glance at him. “Or
did
Forefather tell you? When I wasn’t there?”

He shook his head, his face serious. “No, he didn’t.” Was there a spark of mistrust of his teacher for the first time? Disappointment, perhaps? Munk had always been the more intellectually curious of the two polliwogs. He’d spent much more time with Forefather than the impatient and rebellious Jolly.

He hesitated for a moment, then went on, “Is it possible that Forefather and the others didn’t know anything about it?”

“Oh, come on.” She uttered a scornful sound. “Of course
he knew about it. And he certainly didn’t just forget to tell us about it.”

“Then maybe he wanted us to find the city ourselves.”

“Oh, yes?”
You’re looking for an easy way out
, she thought, shaking her head. “Maybe he did think there was nothing left of it after so long. I mean, he may know a lot, but after all, he was never down here.”

At least not in the last million years. She recalled what the water spinners had said. If Forefather actually had created all this, why was he so helpless today? He was nothing but an old man who was hiding away in a floating city on the sea. Hard to imagine that he’d once had the power to create a whole world out of nothing. And it was even harder to conceive that that same power was vegetating in a fragile body and waiting for an end that would perhaps never come. If Aelenium were to go under, would Forefather die with the city?
Could
he even die? Still, the spinners had said that many of the old gods were dead. But Forefather was the first, the source of everything. Other laws might apply to him. Or none at all.

“Jolly.” Munk’s whisper pulled her out of her musings. “Up ahead there. Do you see that?”

Slowly she nodded, but the words were hard for her to get out: “You were right.”

“I told you so.”

Ahead of them on the path, on the bed of gray sand on the floor of the lane, stood a girl. Not ten yards away. In spite of the currents, her hair did not move; instead it fell
smoothly over her shoulders and clung to her back down to her hips.

“I am Aina,” she said. “Welcome to the threshold of the Crustal Breach.”

“Who are you?” Jolly asked, after they’d advanced to about ten feet away.

Aina looked like an islander. In the sunshine her body would have had a wonderful, light brown tint; but down here it was dark gray, like burned wood. Yet not even that could detract from how beautiful she was.

Doubtless Munk had noticed that as well, for he was staring at Aina as if he’d never seen someone like her in his life. Jolly was pretty too, but she acknowledged to herself that no one she knew could match Aina in beauty. Her build was delicate, almost vulnerable. Her eyes were large and dark, almost black, as if the pupils filled the entire iris. She had a small, pointed nose, which differentiated her from other islanders. Like Jolly and Munk, she also remained unaffected by the icy cold of the deep sea, for she wore no clothing. But she didn’t appear to be ashamed on that account.

“Munk!” said Jolly.

A little dazed, he tore his eyes away from the strange girl. “Uhh…yes?”

“Don’t stare at her like that.”

“I wasn’t staring.”

Jolly still hadn’t received an answer to her question,
so she tried again. “Who are you? What are you doing down here?”

“I was hiding from you.”

“Why?” asked Munk, a little more collected now.

“I wasn’t sure what you were. Who you were. There are others down here, not human.”

“Kobalins?”

For a moment the girl looked at them blankly. Then a smile flitted across her face. “You call them that, do you? We used to call them claw men.”

“Are they here?” Jolly asked cautiously, though she wasn’t overly alarmed. She had been taking in the surrounding crevices and cavities the entire time and discovered no evidence at all of an ambush.

“Many have gone away,” said Aina with a gentle shake of her head. “The Maelstrom has sent them away.”

To Aelenium
, thought Jolly, without any real relief. Had the battle already begun? Or might it even be decided?

“How long have you been down here?” Munk asked. “And who sent you?”

Jolly thought she heard a slight undertone of jealousy in his voice. Was he worried that Forefather might have secretly sent other polliwogs as well? And did that make him feel…yes, what, actually? Slighted? No longer so
important
as before?

“We came down here a long time ago,” said Aina. “An inconceivably long time.”

“We?” Jolly probed.

“I and the others, who are just like you.”

“Still more polliwogs?”

“If that is your word for us, yes.”

The whole thing was getting more and more baffling. And then suddenly it dawned on Jolly. “You’re one of the polliwogs from
the old
time?”

Munk gave her an amazed, then increasingly somber side glance. “That’s impossible,” he whispered to her grimly.

“Oh, yes?” she retorted, just as tense.

“From the old time,” Aina repeated sadly, and her eyes fixed on distances that Jolly dared not imagine. “It was so long ago.”

How long ago might it have been that the Maelstrom was overcome the first time and imprisoned in the Crustal Breach? There had only ever been talk of thousands of years. Not once had Forefather or Count Aristotle said anything specific about the time of the first war with the powers of the Mare Tenebrosum, so inconceivably long ago had it been.

But Aina looked as if she was no older than fifteen.

Jolly’s knees grew weak, and for a moment it was all she could do to stay on her feet. If Aina could live so long, what did that mean for the other polliwogs? For Jolly herself?

She cleared her throat with an effort. “Aina,” she said, “are you one of those who fought against the Maelstrom in the old time? Did you imprison him in the mussel?”

The shadow of a smile crossed the girl’s regular features. “I have seen the Maelstrom,” she said hesitantly. “I know the way.”

Munk appeared to have decided to disregard Jolly’s surmise.
“Then you can show us how we can get there the fastest.”

Jolly poked her elbow into his ribs. “Munk, damn it…!”

He whirled around, and for a moment it looked as though their long-brewing conflict would be decided here and now, in the ruins of a forgotten coral city, many thousands of feet under the sea and before the eyes of this mysterious girl. For several seconds it looked as if Munk were going to hurl himself at Jolly, not with the help of mussel magic or any other tricks, but with bare fists.

He thinks I’m superfluous
, flashed through Jolly’s mind.
He thinks I’m only holding him back. That I’m of no use down here anyway because he’s much more powerful than I am.

And the worst thing is
, she thought,
he’s right. I am superfluous.

She’d scarcely formulated the thought when she contradicted herself:
No, I’m not. If he so innocently trusts the first one who comes along and hands over the fate of the whole world, then it’s good that I’m with him. Even if it’s only to keep an eye on him. On him and what he does. On his dumb tendency toward recklessness.

He needs me
, thought Jolly.
He doesn’t know it, doesn’t want to admit it—but he’s dependent on me. And I on him, if I ever want to get out of here alive.

“I can lead you to the Maelstrom,” said Aina, but it sounded as if it were not a confirmation of what Munk had said but an idea that had just come to her. “I can help you. But will you also help me?”

How?
Jolly wanted to ask, but Munk was ahead of her. “Certainly,” he said.

“I will explain it to you,” said Aina. Her eyes were so large
and dark. Jolly tried to read the truth in them, but there was nothing there she could discern.

The girl looked around searchingly. “But not here. It’s too dangerous.”

“Oh?” asked Jolly mistrustfully, thus earning a warning look from Munk. But she would not be sidetracked. “If you’re one of the polliwogs from the old time, you must have escaped from the Maelstrom, right? You were just running away when you ran across our path. Quite a coincidence, wasn’t it?”

Aina looked to Munk for help.

“Jolly,” he said sharply. But he wasn’t completely blinded yet and turned again to Aina. “Have you some sort of…proof for what you say?”

Thank goodness
, thought Jolly, relieved.

“Proof?” Aina opened her eyes wide in alarm. “Look at me—I don’t even have clothes. How can I prove anything?”

That beast!
flashed through Jolly’s mind.

Munk looked over at Jolly. “She’s right about that.”

“Oh, Munk, surely you’re not serious!”

Aina frowned. Obviously she was uncomfortable being in the firing line of an argument between the two. She quickly began to speak again. “Please listen to me. And then decide for yourselves.” She was silent for a moment, looking worriedly up at the slopes of rubble to the left and right of the lane.

Munk walked up beside her. “Don’t worry.” His voice sounded gentle and reassuring. “We’ll find a hiding place.
Some kind of a place where no one can see us from above so easily. And then you can tell us everything.”

“I’ve seen a place like that,” said Aina. “A little farther down. There’s an overhang, I’ve rested there.”

Jolly looked thoughtfully from one to the other. She still couldn’t shake off her mistrust of the girl. But she had to admit that it was only fair to listen to Aina. The girl didn’t actually appear too dangerous. Quite the contrary: She felt Aina’s vulnerability arousing pity in her, too.