The Gospel According to Verdu (a Steampunk Novel) (The Brofman Series) (15 page)

Chenda had been alone with her own thoughts for too long today, and a short distraction was welcome. Even a petulant child would be great compared to the demons rattling in her own head. She sat cross-legged next to Afham, playfully elbowing him in the ribs and offering a warm smile. He glared at her out of the corner of his eye, not willing to turn his body fully toward her. She placed a finger on her shoulder and thought to him,
This is exciting! I’ve never fished for targa before.

Afham let out a shout and crawled backward from Chenda, who smiled and waved a single finger at the surprised boy. The lad was sharp, and figured out quickly that Chenda had thought the words directly into his head. More than that, he understood her language when she did. He scuttled back toward her and poked her with his own finger, speaking a demand. She spoke back at his mind.

Sorry, kid. It doesn’t work that way. I can talk to you, as most of the thoughts we have are pictures and emotions; they don’t need a translation. But I have found very few that can talk back to me the same way—mind to mind.

Afham frowned and then poked her with his finger, his eyes saying,
Do it again!

As you wish. Now, your dad said the
Tao-Tallis
will separate for this fishing?

Afham nodded and pointed down to a thin crack, just to the far side of the mainmast, that ran from bow to stern of the ship. Afham put his palms together and held them parallel over the crack. With a hiss of breath and making a series of ticking noises, he slowly drew his hands apart.

Chenda grabbed his hand in alarm.
Right down the middle! How does the ship not fall over?
He laughed and showed her his thin arm, flexed like a bodybuilder showing off rippling biceps. Chenda had no idea what the boy meant, and it showed on her face, so he pointed at the crew of the
Tao-Tallis
, who were all in motion around the deck. Several of the women were dragging bundles of various types of netting up on deck, while the men were uncovering small openings in the decking, revealing several winches and gears. Rainor had stepped to the helm of his ship and carefully watched the crew, his family aboard ship, make preparations. He glanced at the sea several times, and on a cue known only to him he shouted to his people as he turned the ship away from the wind, slowing the progress of the boat. Two-man teams began to crank wildly at the long handles on the gearboxes and, just as Afham had described, a great hiss issued forth from the crack in the ship. Chenda leaned her head toward the crack to take a better look, but Afham pulled back on her arm and shook his head.

Stay back?
she asked. He nodded seriously. He tied a bit of rope to himself and then wrapped it once around the mast and handed the other end to Chenda, gesturing that she, too, should tie herself to the ship, which she did.

The clanking of metal teeth against winch parts came from several places around them at once. A gap formed in the center of the ship. As the divide expanded, crewmen leaped back and forth across it, securing netting on each side. At first, she thought it was the catching net, but as the crack between the halves widened more and the webbing became taut, she realized it was a way to suspend the crew over the water. In a matter of moments, the
Tao-Tallis
had transitioned from a sailing ship to a catamaran.

Chenda watched in awe as Rainor steered the ship back into the wind and gained speed.

She leaned her head over the side and saw two telescoping support beams holding the halves of the ship apart. At first glance, the ship had looked much like any other to Chenda, but she now knew it was an engineering marvel. The pieces of the
Tao-Tallis
fit together so precisely, she doubted a knife blade would have slid between the sections when it was closed. Spread apart as it was now, she could feel how stably it cut through the water, and with the wind at their backs, it flew faster than ever before.

Rainor shouted more instructions to his crew, ones Chenda could not understand, but she guessed they were coming up on the school of targa. Everyone held their positions with bodies tensed and eyes trained on the water between the hulls.

A man frontmost at the bow shouted and made a chopping motion with his hands. Three women at the front of the taut webbing pitched a large net into the water zipping by below. Two men behind them leaped to their feet and ran along the webbing toward the back of the ship, bouncing along it and using it like a trampoline. At full speed, they sprang into the air off the back of the
Tao-Tallis
, each drawing knives from their belts in midair and diving blade first into the water.

As the two men disappeared into the sea, several things happened at once. The sails of the ship dropped and the
Tao-Tallis
immediately drifted to a stop. All around the outside of the ship, men and women shot barbed harpoon bolts into the water. The sea around the boat boiled with blood and bubbles. Chenda was terrified. She clutched Afham to her and he flapped his arms. To finally get away, he smacked the back of Chenda’s strangling hands with his own and turned back to gleefully watch the excitement of the hunt.

After more than a minute of blood and bubbles, the sea around the
Tao-Tallis
was stained red, and there was no sign of the two men who had jumped overboard. Everyone seemed watchful, but not overly concerned. Chenda felt unnerved enough for everyone. They just paced the perimeter of the ship, occasionally firing barbs into the water. Another minute passed. They waited. There was no way a man could hold his breath underwater for this long.

Chenda pressed a finger into Afham’s side.
What happened to those men? Shouldn’t they have come up for air? Are they . . . drowned?

The child gave her a reassuring smile, and waved his father over. Rainor, pacing along the netting between the halves, looked less assured than his son. He bounced over to where Chenda and Afham sat.

“
Are the men all right?” she asked before Rainor came to a stop beside the mast.

He glanced at the water. “Probably,” he said.

Chenda focused on the water, searching for anything that was not liquid: bones, lungs filled with air, the blades of their knives. She gasped when she sensed a giant fish—at least fifty feet long, and inside that fish were the bones of the two men. She gasped and shouted, “The men are inside the fish!”

Rainor sighed with relief. “Thank you, Pramuc. You put my mind at ease.”

“
But the fish have eaten your crewmen! Your family!”

“
That’s how one catches targa, Pramuc. One must kill the beast from within,” he said, his tone calm and matter-of-fact. Chenda blinked at him, confused.

“
The targa is a great and powerful fish. We could just catch it in a net, but it’s a fighter. Caught in a net, it would dive and pull all of us down with it. But, if we challenge it in the water, anger it with a net, and then dangle a few tasty morsels before it, we can trick it into gulping our men down whole. From there, it’s safe and easy to kill the beast, and they just float up to the surface.” He waved at the crewmen with the harpoon guns. “The key is to scare away the rest of the school so we can collect our prize!”

“
Won’t the men suffocate below the sea inside the fish?”

Rainor laughed. “Just above the stomach of the targa is a sack of air that helps the big brute dive and rise. The first step to surviving the targa is being able to cut into that bladder. That pains the great beast and gives the men a good ten minutes of air to breathe inside the fish as they fight to get out. When the sack is burst, the targa can no longer dive. From within the belly, it’s pretty simple to pierce the heart. Once the beast is dead, the hunters ride along as it floats back to the surface. No problem.”

Chenda stared at Rainor with her mouth hanging open. She wondered who was the first idiot to have tried this method of catching a fish, imagining that it was likely an accident that turned fortunate for some Mae-Lyn sailor long in the past.

Rainor responded to her look of disbelief. “I have done this myself. Many times. No problem,” he said.

The crew scanned the water around the now becalmed boat. They were looking and listening for any sign of the great fish and the two men who had jumped. Chenda, having searched the water with her powers, opened her mouth to tell Rainor where the men were, and that they were slowly rising just off the stern, but Afham put a finger to her lips. He pointed to all the people around. Men and women alike were silently mouthing a prayer as they waited, their eyes ever searching and their ears straining for the sound of the surface breaking. It was a moment of devotion that Chenda would not spoil, not even to allay their fears. To break the tradition of the hunt, the faith the Mae-Lyn had in their fishermen and the sea, would have been deeply wrong.

Chenda silently pointed to the place where the fish would rise to the surface, as Afham watched. She smiled—and in doing so she told the boy that all was well and that, if he was patient, he would be the one to cheer first; he could announce the triumph of the men of the
Tao-Tallis
. Afham winked at her in understanding. This small part was enough to satisfy his need to join in the hunt.

Seconds passed, and Afham, his eyes glued to the spot Chenda had shown him, shouted and waved his arms.
“Papa! Papa!”
The ship erupted into cheers as the white belly of the targa bobbed in the sunshine a few boat lengths behind the
Tao-Tallis
. Rainor flipped a switch on the helm, and Chenda felt the shudder of a small motor whiz to life. The catamaran came about slowly and inched toward the fish, straddling the beast a minute later. Men, knives in hand, jumped into the water under the webbing between the two halves of the ship and slapped the sides of the great fish. Still tied to the mast, Chenda had a front-row seat as the men splashed and banged on the dead fish. Every so often, a knife would slash into the flesh, and a large hook on a stout rope would be attached to the skin of the upturned fish—if one could call it skin. It was more like fingers of armor lying one over the other like an artichoke. But the men in the water found a few soft spots and gaps, and they took the opportunity to cut in and tie on another hook. Winches started pulling the fish up between the two halves of the
Tao-Tallis
.

As the fish came up, the men began to beat a pattern with their fists and open hands on the scaled belly: hit, slap, hit-hit, slap-slap. After the first few rounds of this pattern, the belly of the fish began to undulate until, under the tension of the ropes pulling against it in two directions, it split open. Another cheer rose from the deck of the ship as two people appeared in the newly formed pocket in the fish. The men were doused in bright blood and the remains of the unfortunate targa’s last meal, and they squinted in the sunshine as they waved to the people surrounding the beast. The men who had been hooking the flesh of the targa scrambled into the now exposed belly of the beast and, assisted by the undigested hunters, started cutting away the offal and pitching it into the sea. Armloads of intestine and other bits—none of which smelled too good—fell into the water and sank out of sight, leaving bloody clots to bob on the surface of the sea in the ship’s wake. Smaller fish, which would have run from the targa on any other day, nibbled on the entrails of the great monster.

The crimson men, having finished gutting the targa, splashed as much of the gore from themselves as possible and climbed the hook ropes back onto the ship. They were strong, agile, proud, and pleased with their efforts.

The catamaran platform net was released on one side and the winches began to raise the targa’s body upward. Inch by inch the entirety of the massive fish was revealed. The pale belly gave way to shining iridescent sides and spiny pectoral fins, each the size of a house’s door, and, finally, the greenish rainbow of a dorsal fin was all that dangled in the water, guiding rivulets of the beast’s blood into the sea. The tail was tattered into long ribbons of translucent squiggles, and at the head, a great glassy red eye the size of a manhole cover glared at Chenda—fierce even in death.

The catamaran net was drawn under the beast and resecured, and the winches released one side of the fish then the other, neatly laying the targa on its side. Once the fish was at rest, the crew of the
Tao-Tallis
turned away from their catch and, under shouts issued by Rainor, worked to put the ship under full sail once more. Altogether, the hunt had lasted less than half an hour.

As the
Tao-Tallis
slid through the waters of the Kohlian Sea once again, the crew returned their attention to the targa. Gathered around the still body, they each placed a hand on the iridescent armor and closed their eyes in reverence for the beast they had killed. Respect having been paid, they began to dismember the fish. The armored scales, valuable for making decorative items from fine buttons and combs to mirror cases and picture frames, were clipped off with great shears and stacked into net bags, which were taken below for storage. The skin beneath, heavy with rich yellow fat, was cut into long strips and rolled. The rolls were stacked into crates placed around the deck.