Paul Kearney - The Mark of Ran

You are not human.

Three

Black waves, white-tipped with fury in the howling night. Rol had outsailed the sheltering promontories of the deep-bitten north Dennifreian coast, and he was truly out in the open ocean now. The great swells that were looming astern had come all the length of the Wrywind and were monsters of their kind-or so it seemed to him with nothing but coastal squalls to compare them to. A numbness had set itself about Rol’s mind, and he watched the pitching horizon with a kind of dulled stubbornness, the tiller clamped grimly in one armpit. He ought to shorten sail, but the numbness kept him sitting there at the steering bench, and below him Gannet was hurled forward recklessly. In the hollow of the great waves it grew almost calm, but as the wherry coursed manfully up the side of the next swell the wind would take hold again, and the boat would stagger, the stem digging deep in the flanks of the sea, water foaming aft and flooding down into the hold. Already, she was lower in the water than she had a right to be, and her painful dance was becoming jerky as that of a mishandled puppet.

There came a moment when Rol finally realized that he must see to his craft or perish there in the heaving night. Painfully, he rose and slipped the deadman’s lines about the tiller to hold the course, and then methodically set about reducing sail. As he loosed the halliards the gaff struggled against him, beating about the mainmast, but finally he had it lowered on deck and began gathering in the loose bunt of the mainsail. The canvas thrashed him in the face as it flapped and fought his fists but he managed to secure it to the gaff and then square away the yard, Gannet pitching and rolling under him like a wild horse all the while. Finally he set up a little triangle of a storm-jib that they kept in the forward locker for emergencies, and that was just enough to keep the wherry’s head to the wind and prevent her from broaching-to. The effort left him bleeding, bruised, and exhausted. He stumbled aft like a man who has been flogged, and then set about sealing the mainhatch with a swatch of tarred canvas. That done, he was able to collapse on the steering bench once more, securing himself there with a length of cordage.

West-nor’west, the wind on the larboard quarter. Rol had no idea what speed Gannet was making, but even with the mainsail taken in, it was greater than any he had ever seen her achieve before. The wherry, broad-beamed as a duck, seemed to skate across the great swells, moving now with a more rational purpose. Rol bent and kissed the smooth wood of the tiller, momentarily loving the sturdy little craft and her valiant heart. She had not been designed for deep water, but seemed to revel in the challenge all the same. Some of the numbness that had fogged his brain seemed to lift, and his mind began turning again. He looked up and saw the stars glittering cold and white above him, found the Mariner, and the five points of Gabriel’s Fist. Still on course, then. Some new life awaited him out there along the winking pathways of the nighttime sky, and he knew now that he was ready for it.

The storm blew itself out in the watch before the dawn, the sun rising over a succession of long, blue swells. Seen from land, even a stormy sea is flat, a featureless horizon. But to one at sea in a small boat, the ocean is a moving landscape of hills and valleys, mountains and canyons. When Gannet rode up the side of the tall waves Rol was able to look straight into the eyes of swimming fish, as though they lived in some great-walled tank of glass. Then the wherry would be over the crest, and he would be as it were sliding down a steep hill into the windless valley at the bottom.

A clay beaker of water and some sheaves of dried fish were kept always in the boat’s stern locker. The water was weeks old, but it tasted sweet and cool to Rol as he sluiced the salt out of his mouth and nibbled on ablaroni fillet. It would last some days, with care. The welcome sunlight began to dry out his sodden frame, and a curious gull circled the wherry, perching for a while on the truck of the mainmast and preening itself unconcernedly. The sight was somehow reassuring-the wider world had not disappeared in the chaos of the night. Umer wheeled on as always amid the vast gulfs of the stars. Life continued on the other side of the storm.

Twice during the days that followed, Rol caught sight of other vessels abroad upon the Wrywind. They were high-seas ships, tall carracks flying pennants of silk. One sailed close enough to become hull-up on the horizon, and he could actually glimpse the tiny forms of mariners about her decks. He watched them with a strange mixture of fear and longing. He trusted no man now-whatever his heritage was, men obviously feared and hated it. Could they even sense it, like a horse smelling fire? And yet he would have given much to be one of those mariners, no longer alone, but part of a ship’s company abroad upon the open ocean. Belonging to something.

The carrack passed, until even her masts had disappeared beyond the curve of the earth. They could not have seen the tiny scrap of jib that was all the canvas on Gannet ’s yards. Rol’s horizon was empty again. These were well-traveled waters, full of the sea trade of the Seven Isles, policed by oceangoing enforcers in the pay of the Mercanters. He need not, at least, fear pirates here; they cruised in the warmer waters of the Westerease Sea, and down in the Inner Reach. So Grandfather had said, back in saner days.

Rol studied his left palm in the clear morning light. It was white, pale as the inside of a shell, and scalloped in ridges. A cluttered tangle of tiny lines, darker than the skin about them, wound about the scar like the blind trails of sea-worms. Almost he thought there was a pattern to them. The thing that had done this to him-it was no man, of that he was certain-had said things, called him by a name that he could not now remember, so much having happened after. So many things.

He thumped Gannet ’s timbers in frustration, shouted at the empty sky, cursing his grandfather’s riddles and mysteries; and finally bent his head and wept for the ending of the world he had known. Angry tears, full of salt.

Four days he sailed along, keeping rigidly to his course. He set the mainsail again as the wind fell and Gannet began to wallow, and dozed shivering on the hard steering bench by night, the deadman’s lines securing the tiller. His clothes he took off and flew from the mast to try to dry them. On his naked skin the salt sat dusty and ash-gray, and his hair was harsh as a horse’s mane with it, his eyes red-rimmed and smarting. He grew sick of the very sight of dried fish.

The skies remained clear, the wind backing a point now and again, but always veering round once more, as though under orders to remain constant. It was cold, but bright, as if spring had come early to the Wrywind. The swell never grew taller than half a fathom, and Gannet puddled along equably, as though she had been made for this crossing of the open sea.

On the fifth morning Rol sighted land fine on the larboard bow, a tall blue line of hills, and a white-tipped mountain in their midst. He was in the coastal waters of Gascar now, at the center of the Seven Isles. Some eighty leagues he had sailed, and a few more would see his landfall. He studied the sunlit hills as though he might decipher the answers to all his questions on their slopes.

The wind dropped to a moderate breeze, and as Gannet coasted with Gascar’s hills to port, Rol passed a few late inshore fishermen taking advantage of the unseasonally clement weather. They stopped and stared at the strange sail before continuing to haul in their catch. There was little enough in the coastal grounds this late in the year, but a last netful might mean the difference between hunger and plenty at the tail end of winter.