Pirate Wars (8 page)

After hesitating briefly, she followed Aina and Munk downward along the lane. Here and there she noticed small creatures between the rubble pushing themselves along the ocean floor with difficulty. Obviously the deep sea wasn’t as dead as she’d thought in the beginning. Even the ugly albino plants that grew everywhere among the ruins and fished invisible nutrients out of the water with their stumpy outgrowths spoke for that.

The lane broadened and led on over a bottomless crack between two mighty fragments. They swam over it and reached a kind of plateau, which in truth was the mirror-smooth broken edge of a gigantic coral piece. All around it lay rubble.

“Behind there is the place.” Aina pointed across the bizarre plaza, where more coral mountains arose at the edge of their polliwog vision.

“The area is too open,” said Jolly to Munk. “If one of the currents comes now, we’re unprotected.”

He agreed, if reluctantly, and so they went around the
plaza in the protection of the heaps of debris. Aina had nothing against that. She even appeared to be a little frightened to realize that she’d already risked crossing the open surface.

Finally they reached the place the mysterious girl had meant. Jolly had to admit that it was a solid hideout. Not perfect. Not secure through and through. But it was a place in which they could take cover for the moment.

It was a tower that was still standing almost upright and whose upper half had caved in with the crash onto the sea floor. Inside, a funnel-shaped slope of debris had formed. Here there were no plants and no crabs. But the best thing was that other rubble had fallen onto the opening above and closed it like a roof. There were two entrances: the old entry and a window opening farther up to which they could easily swim in an emergency.

“Looks good,” said Munk when they’d made themselves fairly comfortable on the coral heap.

“One hour,” said Jolly. “No more. We don’t have time.”

He nodded, and the two turned to Aina, who knelt not even an arm’s length from them, her hands crossed on her thighs. Her long hair fell down into her lap.

“It’s strange,” began Aina. Her eyes were turned toward them. “It’s already so long ago now. But I can remember it as if it were only a few years.” She was silent for a moment before she went on. “At that time we were sent out to close the Maelstrom. There were three of us, two boys and a girl. We were good friends.”

Jolly and Munk exchanged a brief look, almost a little ashamed.

“We succeeded. We closed in the Maelstrom, but also ourselves.”

“Into the mussel?” exclaimed Munk with a groan.

“Yes. The Maelstrom was not dead, you know. He wasn’t even asleep. He was simply locked in the whole time. And we with him.”

Jolly had a number of questions burning on her tongue, but she hesitated. Gradually her pity for Aina was growing into real sympathy. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be closed in with your greatest enemy in a narrow space for thousands of years.

“What did he do to you?” Munk wanted to know.

“First we resisted. We were all three powerful mussel magicians, and in the beginning we could keep him from doing anything to us. It even looked as though we could keep him away from us forever. But the Maelstrom was superior to us in one thing—he had all the time and patience in the world. He wasn’t strong enough to break the mussel magic, but he didn’t mind waiting. Sometime our vigilance must diminish, and that’s what happened. When the years had worn us down, he struck unexpectedly. And from then on we were at his mercy.” Aina moved uncomfortably back and forth on her knees. It was a wonder that the sharp edges of the coral didn’t cut her skin. “First he tortured us. Then, when the pain could no longer be any greater, he suddenly left us alone. He simply lost the pleasure in harming us. Perhaps we
weren’t important to him any longer, for presumably by that time he’d already begun to plan his return. We were only his past, but he wanted the future. He separated us from each other and must have hoped that we would perish of boredom. Or go mad.”

Jolly couldn’t utter a word. She was ashamed to have met Aina with such mistrust. Had the girl experienced what was also in store for them? An eternal imprisonment at the side of the Maelstrom? Was that why Forefather had claimed that he didn’t know what actually awaited them at the end of their road into the Crustal Breach?

Munk stretched out a hand to touch Aina. Very carefully only, on the arm. Perhaps he wanted to be sure that they weren’t merely dreaming the girl, that something hadn’t taken shape out of their fear to warn them.

His hand went right through Aina’s arm. She offered no resistance.

Munk shrank back with a gasp. Jolly leaped up. But the girl only looked sadly up at them without moving.

“I am fading,” said Aina.

Munk stumbled to his feet. “She’s a ghost,” he whispered tonelessly.

“No.” For the first time Aina sounded energetic, as if all the sorrow and all the pain were gone with one stroke. “No ghost! I am I. I am Aina. And I live.”

A spark glowed in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Perhaps that’s enough proof that I’m telling you the truth.” She was silent for a moment and then went on in a quieter
voice. “I’d like for you to believe me. Since I succeeded in escaping the spell of the Maelstrom, I’ve lost…substantiality. I’m fading, and it’s going faster and faster, the farther I go from the Crustal Breach. Perhaps because in the world outside there, in the
time
outside there, I really oughtn’t to exist anymore.”

That was crazy—and at the same time it sounded so plausible that this time it was Jolly who was the first to get over her suspicion.

Poor thing
, she thought sympathetically. “Why didn’t the others flee with you? Your friends.”

“I don’t even know if they’re still alive. The Maelstrom separated us. I haven’t seen them for an eternity. But I can feel them. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

Automatically both of them shook their heads. They were polliwogs, no matter how things stood among them. Aina was right: There was a connection among them, unseen and incomprehensible.

“Will you help me?” Aina’s eyes glowed. “Will you help me to free them?”

Munk looked at Jolly. “What do you think?”

She nodded. “We’ll try.”

Munk sounded a little hesitant as he turned to Aina. “Good. Agreed. We’ll help you if you help us. You know the way.”

Jolly looked at his face. It was closed, as so often in recent days. She didn’t understand him. Just a minute ago he was ready to quarrel with her in order to support Aina. But now
it was as if
she
had to convince
him
, not the other way around. Was it because of disappointment that after Jolly, for the second time a girl had become unreachable for him?

For now she gave up trying to understand him. Everything was confusing enough without trying to figure out a boy’s mind.

“So, shall we go together?” asked Aina hopefully through the strands of black hair that kept falling into her face. They looked a little like strands of dark water plants.

Jolly nodded. Munk did as well.

Silently they sat in their hiding place, each of them lost in thought. And although Jolly had a multitude of questions going through her head, she was reluctant to ask them aloud. Did she really want to know more about what the girl had lived through? Or would the answers be worse than all the unknowns?

Somehow she fell into a restless sleep, perhaps several hours long. When she awakened, Aina was still with them, sitting above them in the window of the tower ruin with her knees drawn up and looking out into the black deep sea, lost in her own thoughts.

“Buenaventure! Here they
come!”

The pit bull man didn’t look up as Walker pointed over the wall toward the water. With his keen canine senses he’d already scented the kobalins not far from the shore before anyone else could have seen them.

The rays were still wheeling in three wide orbits around the city, but soon their mission would be at an end. Even d’Artois and the other commanders must know that. It had been clear from the beginning that the Maelstrom’s hosts couldn’t be halted from the air forever.

This task would fall to the men and women on the shore, the defenders of the first wall. Most of them were frozen with horror when the first kobalins crept onto the land.

Skinny, almost skeleton-like bodies with arms much too long; hard-bitten gargoyles of faces with receding foreheads,
dark slits for eyes, and mouths so large that they could dive into fish schools with wide-open jaws and swallow dozens of prey at once; scaly skins that shimmered in all colors of the rainbow and in their fascinating play of color were a bizarre contrast to the ugliness of these creatures; and not least, the knife-sharp claws on bony fingers, some of which held weapons: primitive harpoon lances replete with barbs, rusty sabers from the bottom of the sea, the odd dagger that had once belonged to a sailor.

The kobalins were creeping out of the water in oil-slick-lustered waves, as if the spume itself were spitting them up. Creatures that had not been created to leave the sea, and nevertheless now dared to. Buenaventure might almost have admired them for their determination—if it weren’t for the certainty that they were not acting of their own free will but were being incited by their chieftains and driven forward with threats. Chieftains who were under the influence of their lord, who himself obeyed the Maelstrom.

With many others, Buenaventure and Walker were manning a defense line on the north side of Aelenium: a twelve-foot-high wall of coral pieces, which had been broken out of the undercity and strengthened by sandbags, wooden beams, and even furniture that the inhabitants had dragged there from the nearby houses. To the right and left of the barricade rose the walls of a wide street. All the accesses to the sea were closed with similar blockades.

The first row of defenders awaited the kobalins above on the wall, with loaded rifles and flintlock pistols, which
were discharged at the attackers nearly simultaneously on command.

The noise hurt Buenaventure’s ears, and the powder dust stung his eyes. When the smoke cleared, he saw that the front row of kobalins was down, some dead, others wounded and still screaming. Their comrades, pressing forward behind them, climbed heedlessly over the fallen—they had no choice, for behind them still new fighters of the deep tribes rose from the surf, an incredible flow of bodies and claws and bared teeth.

Buenaventure, Walker, and many others quickly took the places of the shooters on the wall while the latter sprang down to reload their weapons. In his right hand, the pit bull man carried his saber with the broad, toothed blade that had already given him good service in the fighting pits of Antigua; in his left he held a dagger long enough to be a passable sword for an ordinary person.

Buenaventure exchanged a brief look with his friend—that had to be enough to wish each other luck. Then they plunged into the battle side by side, as they had countless times before. And yet they’d never had to face opponents like these. They’d dueled on land and ship, not seldom against a superior force of Spanish soldiers who far surpassed them in weapons and numbers; they’d fought in the alleys of Tortuga and New Providence, in the great prison uprising of Caracas, and on the burning tobacco fields of Jamaica. In the fighting pits Buenaventure had more than once found himself in hopeless situations, but in spite of everything he’d always escaped with his life.

Today it might turn out differently.

He dealt out blows like a dervish, mowed down two, even three kobalins with one blow, avoided their hooked lances and claws, broke the scrawny neck of one, and with a kick sent another flying back into the advancing masses. At the same time he kept his eye on Walker, who was no less skillful than he was with a blade, to be sure, but might well have been inferior to him in strength. Buenaventure would go to his aid if he got into difficulty, as he always had.

The plan had been to fight in an orderly formation. But after the first encounter with the enemy, all plans and wishes went up in smoke. Everyone fought as he could, always in the hope to be a little faster, a little more unpredictable than the enemy. In the hurly-burly of a battle, fighting possesses no elegance, no matter what the chroniclers claim: It is cruel and brutish.

The kobalins possessed no bodily strength. Their advantage was in their sheer mass. When one died, two others slid forward into his place. When one was wounded and fell to the ground, those behind did not trouble about him but jumped, climbed, and crept on over him. Thus they trampled many of their own fighters to death and filled the hearts of the defenders with horror at their cold-bloodedness and cruelty.

Buenaventure no longer counted how many he killed. Again and again he slashed a broad swathe in the flood of attackers. After a while his opponents grew fewer; it was as if more and more of them made a detour around him and instead turned against Walker and the other men. So
Buenaventure had time to take a breath, and in that brief moment when time was frozen, he realized the truth about the alleged strategy of the kobalins: There was none! They followed no strategy, no elaborate battle plan. And it wasn’t the will to victory that drove them up to the enemy walls, but sheer panic. Whatever it was that their leader had threatened them with in case of defeat, it must be much worse than death by a saber blade.

Buenaventure caught sight of one of their chieftains under the water. He wore a head ornament of a set of open shark’s jaws, which he’d put over his head like a helmet. His ugly face peered out between the open jaws. On both sides he’d fastened the arms of an octopus, which hung down from his head like braids. He was screeching and gesticulating excitedly, and with every movement of his head the octopus arms dangled and whirled crazily.

With one leap Buenaventure jumped from the crest of the defense wall into the water, in the midst of the squealing, roaring, shimmering mass of the kobalins. He heard Walker call after him and swear, but he had no time to look around. Again he let both blades whirl, the short straight one and the curved toothed one, and both cut into fishy kobalin flesh and sowed death in the ranks of the enemy. He wasn’t proud of the many small victories; he felt no triumph when they avoided him and fled before him. All was only a means to the end, steps on his way to the goal.

And that goal was the chieftain.

The kobalin with the shark head ornament noticed the
doom that was approaching him when he briefly stopped screaming orders and let his arms drop. For a moment he looked a little dumbfounded, his slits of eyes widened and revealed coin-sized fish pupils. Then he called over his soldiers in his chattering, exhorting speech.

Too late.

Buenaventure reached him on a trail of lifeless kobalins. The lane that the pit bull man had slashed clear around him had closed behind him again after a few steps. And yet none dared to fall on him from behind. Instead the kobalins stormed unbroken up the wall, where they were received by the blades of the defenders, but as far as they were concerned, they chose one skirmish over the other.

Buenaventure had eyes only for the chieftain. The creature bared his teeth, and now the pit bull man realized what barbaric purpose the shark jaws had: As an additional pair of jaws around the kobalin’s head, it doubled the fearsome sight of his own horrible teeth. The chieftain might have put another opponent to flight that way. But not a veteran of the fighting pits.

The pit bull man’s saber whistled down, cut through the lifeless octopus arms, splintered the shark’s jaw, and beheaded the chieftain in a single blow.

A high whimpering and wailing arose, and the wave of attackers stopped. The death of the chieftain didn’t decide the battle, wasn’t even the fraction of a victory. And yet it gained the defenders of the northern wall a moment of rest.

The kobalins withdrew. Those who’d just emerged from
the water slid under the waves. Others whirled themselves round and rushed back into the surf. And many who were not fast enough to follow the stream of their brothers to the water were killed by the men and women on the walls.

A moment’s pause, no more. It wouldn’t be long before another chieftain took the place of the dead one, browbeat the attackers again, and formed them into further assaults. But for a moment the fighting on this part of the foremost wall died down.

Walker leaped down from the barricade, killed a straggler, and ran to Buenaventure. With an exuberant mixture of curses and jubilant cries he hugged his friend, and the two returned to the wall together, gathered their strength, cleaned their wounds, and waited together for the next wave of attackers.

They knew it was coming when the first dead fish rained down from the sky. Sparkling silver, as if the stars themselves were plunging into the sea.

Griffin clutched the reins of the flying ray. The shock of his marksman’s death had struck him so hard that he’d almost broken out of the ray riders’ ring formation. But then he got himself and the animal under control again, and for a few seconds he was too busy guiding the ray back into his path to think about Rorrick.

Only when he had the flight stabilized did the knowledge of his marksman’s death overwhelm him again. He could still see Rorrick sitting behind him, even feel him, although his
body had long vanished under the waves. The picture was overlaid by Rorrick’s last seconds, the lance, then the fall.

Griffin’s muscles were cramped. His knuckles showed white, as if they’d burst the skin at any moment. Thousands of thoughts were shooting through his head. Fear of a second lance. Despair that everything they were doing was in vain. And above all, the certainty that he bore the blame for Rorrick’s fate.

If he’d made the ray fly faster; if he’d flown higher or deeper; if he’d paid attention to where in the water most of the lances were coming from—well, then Rorrick would probably still be alive. But he hadn’t done any such thing. And Rorrick was dead.

He was on the brink of just giving up. He was a pirate, not a soldier. He’d often fought—if not so often as he might have claimed earlier—and he’d seen men die and ships sink. But this was something different. This was a war. Not a skirmish at sea, not a raid on sluggish, ponderous trader galleons.

War
, he thought once again. And suddenly the idea of killing and being killed had nothing daredevil about it anymore, and certainly nothing heroic. In these moments it didn’t matter who felt himself in the right, who was forced to fight, or who followed a lofty ideal.

We’ll all die
, he thought. Then an unexpected objectivity came over him, which frightened him almost more than the despair that had held him in its spell first.

We all will
, went through his mind.
Every one of us.

Jolly too.

He took his hands from the reins and rubbed his eyes with his palms, so hard that it hurt and he saw fiery wheels rotating before his eyes. Then a bit more of his reason came back.

“Griffin!”

D’Artois’s voice made him look to the right. The captain had brought his ray right alongside Griffin. The wings of both animals were almost touching, a chasm of emptiness yawning between them.

“Griffin, you must go back to the shore. There are more marksmen there. You mustn’t give up now!” The captain’s face was dead serious, his cheek muscles working determinedly. “Do it, Griffin! Now!”

Griffin nodded jerkily, then he let his ray drop six feet down and turned it around. At a narrow angle, really too sharp for such a placid animal, he broke out of the ray orbit toward the inside and flew up toward the coral cliffs of Aelenium. Beneath him, in the waters between the two sea star arms, the waves looked as if they were boiling, while everywhere skinny kobalin arms poked up through the surf and flung lances into the sky. None came close enough to Griffin to threaten him.

The place where Griffin had started out lay on the opposite side of the city. He had the choice of going around the cliff, with its gables and towers, or gaining altitude and flying over. He decided on the second choice.

The ray shot over the gaps between the houses of the city, over narrow lanes and steep gables, tower points with twiglike
coral battlements, and the outermost roofs of the palace. Griffin saw the familiar buildings beneath him to his right and the Poets’ Quarter, in which the Hexhermetic Shipworm continued to dream in his silken cocoon. He also could see—far away—the lower defense wall, just above the place where the sea star point ended in the massive mountain cone. Somewhere there Walker and Buenaventure were fighting, but at that distance he couldn’t make them out anywhere.

On that side of the city, in the north, beyond the water and over the fog, black clouds of smoke were rising, and occasionally the booming echo of distant cannon thunder drifted over. The Antilles captains were fighting against the fleet of the cannibal king. The sea battle appeared to be still undecided.

Griffin saw something else in his flyby, up in the center of the city, where the buildings were the highest. He was too shattered by Rorrick’s death to be able to process the whole complex at the first look, but then he recognized it. It was the library, where Forefather’s rooms were, the holiest of the holy temple of knowledge in the sea star city.

On one of the balconies, a semicircle with bizarre coral outgrowths pointing in all directions like frozen arms, two men were observing the battle.

Forefather and the Ghost Trader.

They stood side by side, motionless, not looking at each other but staring out at the rings of ray riders rotating in opposite directions around the mountain cone. At countless points within the flock there were flashes and then reports
when the marksmen fired their weapons toward the water. The kobalins answered their attacks with a black hail of lances from below.