The Mahogany Ship (Sam Reilly Book 2) (16 page)

We waited until the second watch of the night, and then
went forward towards the Great Tower to steal the most valuable weapon the
civilization had harbored for more than a thousand years.

Where luck now played its part.

*

As I watched from a distance, my master walked with the
confidence of a man who knew that royal blood flowed in his veins as he
approached the pyramid.

A royal guard noticed him.

“Master, I thought you’d commenced the attack?” The guard
looked nervous, as though he was expecting something to be wrong.

“Soon – but we have a new plan. My father has decreed
that I should move the weapon to the edge of the mountain, so we can strike our
enemy down when they are on the retreat and believe that they are safe having
rounded the crest of the mountain.”

“A clever plan, master,” the guard replied, obsequiously
– obviously keen to avoid confrontation.

Together, my master’s men carried the weapon down the
stairs and along the ancient stone path that led to the edge of the inlet.

With every sound, my ear pricked with fear as though each
one might indicate that the ruse had failed, and that my master’s family were
going to kill him.

But the sound never came.

By the end of the second watch we reached the rowboat,
secretly left at the shore by his crew.

Carefully loading the heavy weapon in the center of the
boat, we all knew that any accident resulting in the weapon being lost
overboard would mean that it could never be retrieved again.   

By the fifth stroke of the oars, I thought we had made
it.

“Well Rat Catcher, there’s a tale to tell your
grandchildren – if you were still capable of having them.” My master laughed as
he said it.

I started to reply, but he didn’t hear what I said.

In the distance, his ship was on fire.

*

We rowed faster to our ship only to discover that my
master’s twin brother had attacked the ship. Our crew were strengthened by the
return of their master and were able to fight off the assailants, but not
before all but one of the masts were destroyed.

Every man on board then fought hard to save the ship from
burning. By the morning, we were far from land, and the fire was doused.

The narrow escape was almost mythical.

My master ordered the men to continue rowing past the
next two harbors, with the intention of going ashore at the third to make repairs.

After three days, we reached the third harbor, but as we
rowed in towards it our waiting enemy threw thousands of stones at us from the
high mountainside. Few reached us, but those that did destroyed everything in
their path.

If we had been under sail, we could have never turned
around in time.

As it was, the rowers were already at their oars and were
able to immediately change the direction of the strokes.

For nearly a week, each time the ship came close to the
shore it was attacked. My master became increasingly worried that his enemy had
a much better means of communicating from each outpost than he had predicted
and would soon attack him with their own warships.

It was a risk that my master was not willing to take.

On the fifth day, he ordered his senior commanders to the
deck and said, “It is my intention to return to our homeland with the weapon.
We have one mast intact and will be able to keep rowing as we cross. Our
supplies are less than I would like, but I fear that any attempt to go ashore
to replenish them will put us at far too much risk of losing the weapon. Once
we are out to sea, their ships will never find us again.”

There was a general agreement with our master that they
would be able to successfully row across this vast ocean.

And so, with the fatalism of all slaves who served a
master, we rowed towards home.

*

Again, Sam skimmed through the journal until he reached what
he was after – the final chapter in the fate of the Mahogany Ship.

Southern Land, August 8, 1442

I watched as the days went by, and my master struggled to
maintain our latitude with the strong winds and currents continuously pushing
our ship further south. With all but one of our masts destroyed, we struggled
to maintain a northern latitude as we headed east. Instead, we were forced past
the southern land.

Our supplies were not going to last with the increased
effort caused by the constant rowing.

After three months at sea and the death of one third of
the crew to malnutrition, my master made the decision that we would have to
come ashore in the new land.

We had no identifiable lands from which to take a
bearing, but the temperature suggested that we had deviated much further south
than our homeland. By this stage it didn’t matter. We were going to have to
find some fresh water, food, and some means of repairing the decimated masts.

The shore was edged by a rocky cliff, making it
impossible to land.

We followed it for three days before finding a place that
allowed a ship to anchor. It had a rocky bottom, but the anchor held in the
calm weather. Although it would most likely be useless if the swell or wind
picked up at all.

A rowboat was dropped, and my master ordered several of
his advisers to come ashore with him.

“You’d best come ashore, too, Rat Catcher – I may need
your advice.”

I beamed at the praise from my master and dutifully took
my place, as the smallest man, at the very front of the rowboat.

The enormous shoulder muscles of the slaves swelled while
they rowed towards the alien land. Once we reached the shore, the slaves pulled
the rowboat up on to the beach and I scurried up onto the beach.

Our weary group followed my master over the large sand
dunes and into the land beyond. It was flat and the flora sparse. This would
not be the place to fell trees and rebuild our masts. A large river could be
seen up ahead, running towards the ocean. Somewhere it would become fresh and
drinkable.

Men went ahead to find it.

And my master paced.

After hours, my master stopped and said, “All right men –
what do you make of it?”

“Do you mean where we go from here or if we can even
provision at this place?” the chief advisor and oldest person in the party
asked.

“Where do we go from here?” my master clarified. “We have
already spent nearly a week just trying to find an adequate place to make
landfall. Our men are weakening, and we have no way of knowing whether or not
this will be our best chance.”

“My best prediction is that we are almost due south from
the homeland. If we could somehow cross this landmass, we would be in a perfect
position to reach north towards home.” The navigator spoke.

“Then we should row around this land mass,” The leading
engineer said. “This land offers little with which to repair your ship,
master.”

“Do you think it will sail much further, given its long
list of wounds?” my master asked.

“No.”

“Then the decision has been made for us.”

“Tell me, master, what that decision is,” the lead
engineer asked.

“We’re going to carry the ship across this body of land,”
my master ordered.

It was the sort of stubborn solution that my master would
come up with. Something that he knew was as entirely unreasonable as it was
necessary, its success a certainty in the giant’s mind. I knew that I, along
with all the men aboard, would happily follow my master in his belief – towards
our certain deaths.

*

Again I stood at my post on top of the remaining mast.

At two hundred feet, I was in the best position to ensure
that the ship wasn’t heading directly for a large reef or rock bed. The
rowboats had been used to scout the area, but the eagle’s nest offered the best
vantage point. From there I could immediately see any changes in the water
color and by now I was well accustomed to determining what those changes meant.

On my master’s orders the men rowed the ship at full
speed towards the sandy beach with the fatality of men who served their master
at all cost. I watched as the color turned from a dark blue to a light green,
and then finally the sand could be seen below the keel.

There was a loud crunch as the flat bottom of our wooden
ship came into contact with sand, followed by a series of vibrations that resonated
throughout the ship, causing the eagle’s nest to sway ever so slightly.

For a moment I was worried it was going to tear the hull
in two.

Then the bow of our gigantic ship reached the sandy
beach.

Riding its own wave – which must have been twenty feet
high at least, it continued to move high up the first of the shallow sand dunes
as if there had been nothing in our way. Her momentum carried her forward like
the monster she was.

We passed all four sand dunes as though they weren’t even
there.

The ship finally came to rest more than a hundred feet
along the new, flat, earthy land. So much water had come with us that our
massive ship now appeared to be resting in a small lake of its own creation,
several feet deep and as much as a mile wide.

*

My master seemed invigorated by the progress we were
making.

He stood on the highest hill in the distance and examined
his ship. It had been a week, and still it rested in a small lake. It appeared
bigger, if that was even possible, out of the water.

Men were working in all directions. Tasks had been set
and teams had been formed to achieve specific purposes. My master confided in
me that they were already looking much better for their efforts. Men needed
tasks. Idleness often bred poor health. So did a lack of nutrients, but that
too was in the process of being rectified.

A great foraging party had been sent for miles in all
directions to return with provisions. Strange new animals had been found and
slaughtered. A great variety of berries had been located and those rich in
nutrients were identified, compared with those that were lethal. The men
followed their orders and tested the new foods until the ship’s master doctor
had a long list of edible, difficult, and lethal plants and animals.

The engineer had used more than two hundred men to make
changes to the ship. Large parts of the rigging, oars and weaponry were
cannibalized in order to build a system by which the monstrous ship could be
carried by an army of loyal men.

Today, the master engineer had ordered a party of three
hundred men to remove the remaining water from the lake so that he could make
the final adjustments to the base of the ship.

It reassured my master to watch the men work with such
loyal efficiency as they removed the water by hand held bucket.  

By the end of the day, the senior engineer approached my
master.

“We are ready master.”

“Excellent. We leave at once.”

*

It had been three weeks since we had first started
carrying the Godforsaken ship. The land was terribly dry and unforgiving. I was
starting to question the wisdom of my master’s decision to naively cross an
alien land in the hope that it was a narrow body of land with a northern ocean
nearby.

But still we pressed on through both day and night with
carrying teams rotating constantly. We numbered fifteen hundred men, and it
required nearly a thousand at any one time to lift the ship. Teams of ten on
each carrying oar would rotate further down every half an hour until they
reached the end of the ship and were thus allowed a break.

In doing so, each man would obtain a four-hour break
throughout a twenty four hour period.

By the end of the third day and the death of ten men who
literally pushed their bodies to death, my master realized that carrying the
ship through the night was going to be impossible.

The days continued on, and we traveled a little less each
day.

By the end of the second week we no longer had enough
healthy men to rotate the carrying shifts through the day. For a while the men
succeeded in maintaining the ship’s movement with a twenty-minute break in the
middle of the day. Then, their ability to carry it became less, and they were
no longer able to carry the ship throughout the entire daylight hours.

By the third week, my master accepted that the ship could
only realistically be moved for four hours each day. The rest of the time the
men would be required to gather provisions and prepare the land in front of
them, which often required the felling of many trees to allow the movement of
the great ship.

As we reached the start of the fifth week, our numbers
had dwindled to the point that the entire ship could only be moved every other
day and even then for only a matter of hours.

With my master’s encouragement, the men were able to
maintain this effort until the eighth week when they were no longer able to
move the ship more than twenty or so feet in the day.

“We’ll rest here for a week if we have to,” my master said.
“You have all honored me with your effort, but to go on further at this pace
would be to ask for failure. We shall rebuild our health and then continue.
Surely, the sea must be close. I can smell the salt in the air.”

I have an unusually sensitive nose, and I was certain my
master was merely encouraging the men.