Alan Akers - The Tides of Kregen

With a beast’s roar, a roar as of the leems being let out into the Jikhorkdun, I gathered my feet under me and sprang.

The Jiktar’s head flew high as his torso toppled.

"You are unharmed, Duhrra?"

"Aye." He panted now and lowered the sword. "I thought you done for, although I could not see. ."

"No." I looked at this hulking man-mountain with the idiot face and bulging muscles and the useless stumped right arm. Very gravely I lifted my bloodied sword in the salute.

"Hai Jikai, Duhrra. Henceforth, I think, I shall call you Duhrra of the Days. Hai Jikai!" He gaped at me, amazed. The reference to the Dam of Days was clear enough.

"If you. ." He started over. "It is for you. ." I swung the sword at the pipe valve wheels. The workers, freed by the fight from oppression, had all run off. They had closed the valves down. I could not blame them. I walked across. The moment I began opening the valves again to let water flow from the lake reservoir into the tanks and so lift the caissons and open the gates, the three Todalpheme hurried across. They had been shaken by the savagery of fighting men; but this business now, they conceived, concerned them. I disabused them.

As gently as possible, I said, "If you seek to stop me I shall knock you all down." They appeared to understand.

The flat rather than the edge sometimes works as well.

One said, "The tide is rising fast and the storm comes on apace. If you open but one gate the water will-"

I finished with the valves, for I had spun the wheels with savagery, and said, "The water will serve Zair. After that, you may close the tank valves and open the caissons’." They knew I would stand by the wheels with a naked sword in my fist until I was ready. The blood had ceased to drop from the blade now, but the length was shining red and evil in the light. Tremendous power was to be unleashed in the next few murs. Water from the lake reservoir ran through the multi-branching pipes and past the valves I had opened, filling the counterweighing tanks. The wind tore at us, streaming our hair, screaming past our ears. The roar of the waters mounted. The tanks began to sink. The weight of water pulled them down and the steel wire ropes groaned under the strain. Duhrra put his sword down and ran to slop grease onto the series of pulleys, using the flat wooden spatula with his left hand, the grease-bucket caught up under his right arm stump.

"Pour it on, Duhrra!" I bellowed in my foretop hailing voice. He barely heard. He upended the bucket over the pulleys.

The caissons began to rise. I knew that if they did not rise sufficiently for my purpose before the full weight of the tide bore against them they would not budge thereafter. On the coast of Scotland the measurement of breakers has revealed a stunning effort of six thousand pounds per square foot. So I stood while we opened a door to hell.

Clouds blew furiously overhead, drowning the faces of the suns. Up there the moons were lining out in that deadly conjunction which would certainly spell destruction and might mean death for many a seaport city around Kregen where the seaward defenses had been neglected. Even the three smaller moons, which hurtle frantically low over the face of the planet, were in conjunction. The first and largest moon, the Maiden with the Many Smiles, the two second moons, the Twins, and the third Moon, She of the Veils, all were exerting their gravitational pull together with the Suns. When no moons are in the sky of Kregen — when they cannot be seen, that is — it is called a night of Notor Zan. When all the moons blaze at the full, when even the three smallest join with the major four, that is called the Scarf of Our Lady Monafeyom. We could see nothing overhead but the dark swirling clouds lowering down, but we knew what was going on out there as we knew how the waters of the ocean were responding to the titanic forces.

The Dam shuddered.

All that monstrous construction thrilled to the shock, alive with the vibration. The wind tore the reason from our skulls.

The tide burst through.

The gale broomed its own violence and added to the pell-mell tumult. I hung onto the guardrail, my hair blown forward over my face, staring at the mouth of the Grand Canal.

The opening was small at this distance and the argenters appeared like dots in the gloom, but I have imagination and the whole scene was described vividly to me later by one who was there and saw it all at close hand.

Across the bay leaped the tidal bore.

A wall of water, tipped with the vicious fangs of breakers, towering, cresting, blowing, omnipotent in its might. How tall was the eagre?

The famous Severn bore rushes up at the equinoxes to heights of five to six feet. Good friends have told me that in New Brunswick they have seen the daily tidal bore roaring up the river from the Bay of Fundy in a mightily impressive sight: a genuine wall of water simply rolling up the river with the floodwater following directly behind. The rise and fall of the tide in the Bay of Fundy is known to every schoolboy. At the head of the bay the tidal height reaches a fantastic sixty-two feet and even halfway up, at Passamaquoddy Bay, it is twenty-five feet. The force and power of millions of tons of water rolling along with the fang-toothed eagre at their head are enough to convince the most skeptical of mortals that in sober truth nature is the lord and master of the worlds we inhabit.

All this power and smashing violence, the colossal movement of water — with only one sun and one moon! How high?

I stood there as the Dam thrilled to the vibrations of untold millions of tons of water smashing at its ancient structure, as the water spumed through the opening I had made, shuddering under the shrill of the wind. How high?

I saw the small shape of an argenter lifted up and up and up. It broke apart. It flew apart as a barrel flies apart when its hoops are broken through. Planks, timbers, bundles — dark, pitiful objects — whirling and smoking through the frenzied turmoil of the waves, with the spume covering all with a white confetti of death.

Horrible, terrible, malignant. I would prefer to pass lightly over that destruction of a fleet, for I am an old sailor who has a love for ships.

But the ships were broken and riven. Crushed against the hard stone of the terraced Grand Canal, tossed up like chips to fall, cracking open and spilling shrieking bloody things that had been men, the ships died. The wind lashed the sea and drove relentlessly on. The bore sliced through the Grand Canal and the waters boiled and roared and fought as they cascaded on.

On and on through the cut smoked the waters.

The tide had struck and destroyed, shouting in its strength.

How high?

High enough for death.

High enough to claw up past terrace after terrace of the Grand Canal, filling the cut with the violence of unleashed waters, rolling remorselessly on and on over the wrecked remnants that had once been a fleet proud with flags.

So, I thought, ended Genod Gannius plans to use vollers from Hamal against Zairians. The sight of those broad comfortable ships, those splendid argenters, being smashed to driftwood did not please me, even when I knew what they were and what errand they had been on. I, an old first lieutenant of a seventy-four, am sentimental in these matters. Against the shriek of the wind Duhrra’s voice reached me thinned. "It is time we moved on, Dak my master. I see the green moving in the shadows beyond the Dam."

The darkness pressed down as the stormclouds boiled. The Todalpheme were anxious to lower the caissons once I gave them leave. I stepped past the body of the Jiktar. He had been a Ghittawrer, a Grodnim member of a green brotherhood that attempted to ape the ways and disciplines of the Krozairs. His sword would be of fine quality. Duhrra and I would leave the novices; we must find our own way out of this situation. I turned back.