Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

He went up to Gharkid later and said, “You mustn’t pay attention to the things Father Quillan was saying. I’d hate to see you falling for that pile of nonsense.”

In Gharkid’s unreadable eyes appeared a momentary glint of surprise. “You think I am falling?”

“You seemed to be.”

Gharkid laughed softly. “Ah, that man understands nothing,” he said. And he walked away.

Later in the day Quillan sought Lawler out and said testily, “I’d be grateful if you’d avoid offering your opinions about things you hear in the conversations you eavesdrop on. All right, doctor?”

Lawler reddened. “What do you mean?”

“You know very well what I mean.”

“Ah. I suppose.”

“If you’ve got something to contribute to the dialogue, come and sit with Gharkid and me and let’s hear it. But don’t snipe at me from behind my back.”

Nodding, Lawler said, “Sorry.”

Quillan gave him a long frosty look.

“Are you?”

“Do you think it’s fair, trying to sell your beliefs to a simple soul like Gharkid?”

“We’ve been through this before. He’s less simple than you think.”

“Perhaps so,” Lawler said. “He told me he wasn’t very impressed with your dogmas.”

“He isn’t. But at least he’s approaching them with an open mind. Whereas you—”

“All right,” Lawler said. “So, I’m by nature not a religious man. I can’t help that. Go ahead and turn Gharkid into a Catholic. I don’t really care. Make him an even better Catholic than yourself. That wouldn’t be hard. Why should I care, after all? I’ve already said I was sorry for butting in. And I am. Will you accept my apology?”

“Of course,” Quillan answered, after a moment.

But things remained strained between them for some time. Lawler made a point of keeping away whenever he saw the priest and Gharkid together. It was evident, though, that Gharkid wasn’t making any more sense out of Quillan’s teachings than Lawler could, and his dialogues with the priest eventually came to an end. Which pleased Lawler more than he had anticipated.

An island came into view, the first they had seen on the entire voyage, unless you counted the one that the Gillies were constructing. Dag Tharp hailed it by radio, but no answer came back.

“Are they just unsociable,” Lawler said to Delagard, “or is it a Gillie island?”

“Gillies,” Delagard said. “Nobody but fucking Gillies over there. Trust me. That’s not one of ours.”

Three days later there was another, in the shape of a crescent moon, lying like a sleeping animal on the northern horizon. Lawler, borrowing the helmsman’s spy-glass, thought he could see signs of a human settlement at the island’s eastern end. Tharp started down to the radio room, but Delagard called him back, telling him not to bother.

“This one a Gillie island too?” Lawler asked.

“Not this time. But there’s no sense putting in a call. We aren’t going to pay them a visit.”

“Maybe they’d let us fill up on water. We’re running pretty damned low.”

“No,” Delagard said. “That’s Thetopal over there. My ships don’t have landing rights on Thetopal. I don’t get along well with the Thetopali at all. They wouldn’t let us have a bucket of stale piss.”

“Thetopal?” Onyos Felk said, looking puzzled. “You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. What else can it be? That’s Thetopal.”

“Thetopal,” Felk said. “All right. Thetopal, then. If you say so, Nid.”

Once they had passed Thetopal, the sea was devoid of islands again. There was nothing but water to be seen in all directions. It was like travelling through an empty universe.

Lawler calculated that they were about halfway to Grayvard by now, though it was only a guess. Surely they had been at sea at least four weeks, but the ship’s isolation and the unvarying daily routines made it difficult for him to work out any very clear sense of how rapidly time was passing.

For three days running a cold, hard wind raked down on the fleet from the north and stirred the wrath and fury of the sea all about them. The first sign was an abrupt transformation of the atmosphere, which in the region of the coral reefs had been soft and almost tropically mild. Suddenly now the air turned clear and tight-strung, so that the sky arched high above the ship, vibrating and pale, like an immense metallic dome. Lawler, who was something of an amateur meteorologist, was troubled by that. He brought his fears to Delagard, who took them seriously and gave orders to batten down. A little while later came a distant drumroll that heralded the first strong winds, a prolonged deep booming; and then the winds themselves arrived, quick nervous short-lived bursts of chilly air that licked and jabbed at the sea, stirring it as though with a pestle. With them came sparse rattling scatterings of dry hail, but no rain.

“Worse to come,” Delagard muttered. He was on deck constantly as the weather worsened, scarcely taking the time to sleep. Father Quillan was often beside him, the two of them standing together like old cronies, peering into the wind. Lawler saw them talking, pointing, shaking their heads. What did these two have to say to each other, anyway, that coarse raucous man of blunt appetites and the austere, melancholic, God-haunted priest? There they were, anyway, together in the wheel-box, together by the binnacle, together on the quarterdeck. Was Quillan trying to convert Delagard now? Or were they trying to pray the storm away?

It came on anyway. The sea became an immense waste of broken water. Spray as fine as white smoke filled the air. The full wind struck with a hammering rush, burning past their ears and leaving a confused clamour echoing behind. They shortened the sails to it, but the ropes pulled free nevertheless and the heavy yards went whirling from side to side.

All hands were on deck. Martello, Kinverson and Henders moved about precariously in the rigging, lashing themselves in to keep from being whirled off into the water. The rest yanked on the ropes while Delagard furiously shouted orders. Lawler worked alongside the rest: no more doctor’s exemption for him, not in a gale like this.

The sky was black. The sea was blacker, except where it was tipped with white foam, or when a mammoth wave rose beside them like a giant wall of green glass. The ship wallowed forward into it, boring down instead of rising as it should, pitching headlong into dark smooth hollows, rolling as some great wave backed off to leeward with a terrible sucking sound, then came crashing toward them again to send cataracts of water tumbling across the deck. The magnetron was useless for this: the winds were coming in from contrary directions, colliding, surrounding them with unruly water that slammed against them from all sides, so that there was no rising over it. They had battened down everything, they had brought whatever they could belowdecks, but the sluicing waves found anything left behind, a bucket, a stool, a gaff, a water cask, and sent it thumping and leaping across the deck until it vanished over the side. The ship’s nose dipped, rose, dipped again. Someone was vomiting; someone was screaming. Lawler caught a glimpse of one of the other ships—he had no idea which, it flew no flag—hard alongside them, caught in an oscillating wallow, now rising above them as though it planned to come crashing right down on their deck, now plummeting out of sight as if being dragged straight to the bottom.

“The masts!” someone yelled. “They’re going to go! Get down! Get down!”

But the masts held firm, certain though it seemed that they would be jumped from their sockets and thrown into the sea. Their desperate vibrations shook the entire ship. Lawler found himself clinging to someone—Pilya, it was—and when Lis Niklaus came scudding down the deck at the mercy of the wind they both caught hold of her and reeled her in like a hooked fish. At any moment Lawler expected a deluge of rain to begin, and it bothered him that in all this frenzy of wind they would have no chance to put out any containers to catch the good sweet fresh water in. But the winds remained dry, dry and crackling. Once he looked out over the rail and by the light of the sea-foam he saw the ocean full of little glinting staring eyes. Fantasy? Hallucination? He didn’t think so. Drakken-heads, they were: an army of the things, a legion of them, long evil-looking snouts sticking up everywhere. A myriad of sharp teeth waiting for the moment when the Queen of Hydros capsized and its thirteen occupants went pitching into the water.