Doom's Break

His name was Pulbeka. He was a stone breaker and the largest man ever seen in Shasht. In height he stood nearly seven feet tall. He tipped more than three hundred pounds on the scale, and very little of it was fat. Nor was he stupid, Pulbeka. He broke stone in the quarry for his living, but he was known as something of a savant.

When they came to him with word that he was wanted at the pyramid, Pulbeka was silent for a moment.

"Do they want just my heart?" he said at last.

"No, they want all of you."

"Then I will go," he said, setting down his hammer.

They brought Pulbeka to the temple pyramid, and he prayed to the Great God and prostrated himself on the temple steps. He expected death.

Instead, he was brought inside to a vault in the heart of the temple and laid out upon a stone table. He was tied to the table with heavy ropes, beyond even his enormous strength.

He waited.

After a while the door opened to admit a pale, feeble figure. Indeed, it had to be helped into the room. It stood beside Pulbeka and stared into his eyes. Pulbeka felt the force of the mind behind the dark, penetrating orbs. Pulbeka understood the purpose of this fell being.

Pulbeka screamed.

The storm had passed. The
Sea Wasp
was still afloat, riding on the stubborn swell. The huge, mountainous seas were gone. The terrifying winds were but a memory. Now they tore at the waters far ahead, beyond the wall of dark clouds that lay across the horizon.

Aboard the
Sea Wasp
, the men and mots crawled out of their hiding places and surveyed the damage.

The foremast was gone, snapped off six feet from the deck. A tangle of rigging was strewn across the barque's waist. With the mast had gone the bowsprit, ripped out during the tempest's climax. The remaining mast, the mizzen, was relatively undamaged. The big triangular sail had been securely reefed well before the storm hit.

Thru Gillo's bare feet gripped the deck, which was beginning to dry under the hot tropical sun. Like the others, he felt the damage to the ship almost as wounds to his own flesh. Five months of sailing on the
Sea Wasp
had made him feel the ship was a part of himself.

At the wheel, defiant, stood gray-haired Mentupah, the brother of Emperor Aeswiren.

Thru gave a happy shout. "You're alive!" He ran lightly up the steps to the upper deck.

"You bet I'm alive," growled Mentu. "Take more than the waves to be rid of me, my fur-bearing friend. How about the others?"

Thru picked at the wet knots holding Mentu fast to the wheel. "Nobody washed overboard, but Juf got hit on the head with a block of wood."

"I saw that. He was on deck trying to tie up a loose line when the mast went. I thought he was a goner."

"Not our Juf. He's down below with a gash in his head."

"You mots have the hardest damned heads, eh?"

Finally, Thru gave up on the wet knots and cut the line with his knife. "Some of us, anyway," he murmured. Unconsciously, he put a hand up to the scar on the back of his own head.

Mentu held up the rope with a grin. His white teeth split the strange facial hair that showed him to be man. "Without this, I'd be feeding the fishes now."

Thru clasped Mentu's hand, reflecting briefly on how dear this man had become to him. Truly they'd become like brothers, despite everything.

Five months at sea had accomplished that, and more. They were five thousand miles from the dread Empire of Shasht, cruising in the tropical Maruka isles to take on fresh water and banyam fruit before they crossed the equator. Then they would head out across the vast reach of the northern ocean toward the homeland of the mots, brilbies, and kobs.

"Pity to lose the mast," grumbled Mentu. "Ship will be hard to steer now."

Thru was studying the damage. The other mots were doing the same. "We'll have to erect a temporary mast," he said.

"With what?"

"We have that old boom down below. It's broken, but there's a good twenty feet of it left."

Mentu pursed his lips. "Better than nothing, I suppose."

Thru clapped him on the back. "Compared to what we went through after Maringa, this will be easy work."

"Please, don't remind me!" said Mentu with a shiver.

While taking on water at the Isle of Maringa, they had also taken on some most unwelcome stowaways: a swarm, several thousand strong, of tropical fire ants. The struggle to eliminate the ants took up much of the succeeding week. During that time, the sound of oaths and screams of pain had been commonplace aboard the
Sea Wasp
.

Those on the deck were clearing the torn rigging and examining the bow and the gash in the decking left by the bowsprit when it was ripped away by the storm.

Simona climbed the steps a little unsteadily, took Thru's hand for a moment, then turned to examine Mentu. She'd cut her dark hair short and she wore a set of baggy trousers and vest just like the mots.

"I was sure we'd lost you," she said with a smile.

"Take more than a storm to be rid of me, Mistress Gsekk."

Simona smiled and patted his shoulder, an unheard of gesture by a woman of Shasht, but Simona was that incredible rarity, a woman of the upper class who had renounced purdah. Indeed, since leaving Shasht and abandoning her veils, her face had tanned a deep brown.

"You really are a survivor, brother of the Emperor."

Thru went down to help the others clear the wreckage.

"Keep anything that might still serve as rope," Mentu called after him. "We don't know when we'll be resupplied."

Janbur of the Gsekk appeared from below. He was a younger man with straight brows, dark hair, somber of eye but light of heart. An aristocrat who'd lost everything in his efforts to save the mots from death at the hands of the priests of Shasht.

"There's a foot of water in the hold."

"That's all?" said Mentu with some surprise.

"You wanted more?"

"Bah," snorted Mentu. Janbur's humor rarely worked on the older man.

"A little water is still coming in from the bow, where the bowsprit was torn out," reported Jevvi Panst, a mot from Old Sulmo.

"I hope it can be repaired," said Simona.

"Oh, for sure," said Jevvi, one of their best at carpentry. "We can seal her up. Needs a new bowsprit, that's all. I've told you before, Mistress Gsekk, this boat is well built."

That was a comfort, since Simona had paid for it with the jewels of her family inheritance.

"We could use some help down here," said Ter-Saab, a big brown kob, in a loud voice from the waist. Everyone, including Simona, joined him in hauling up a cable to which was attached a spar and a mass of wet rigging that had caught on the spar after being dragged overboard. Carefully they pulled the tangle apart.

The mots began to make repairs. Mentu and Janbur, lacking experience in using tools, could only stand aside. In their world, such work was done by slaves.

The leak in the bow was plugged and sealed with tar. A bowsprit was fashioned out of a gaff brought up from the hold. After a lot of work, an old boom was fished into what remained of the foremast. To this runty mast they attached a small spar. Lines were run out to the new gaff bowsprit, and a small jib sail was set.

With the big triangular mainsail deployed on the mizzen and a square foretopsail placed on the new small foremast, they hoped the barque would respond to their efforts to steer her.

Meanwhile, everyone took a turn on the foot-powered pumps. While they worked, they sang. It made the time pass more quickly. Janbur had been teaching them the old songs of Shasht, and in return they were teaching him the songs of the Land.

Down below, Thru found Simona putting a bandage on poor Juf Goost's head. The back of his head was swollen from a three-inch cut. The wound had been cleaned and treated with salt, but despite the pain, Juf was his normal cheerful self.

"I suppose it could have been worse." His smile creased his battered face, destroyed by vicious thugs in the Shasht temple.

"You could have broken your foolish head," said Simona, who would have missed Juf's infectious good humor.

"Well, you'd have had one less mouth to feed."

"Yeah, and one less pair of hands to haul on a line," said Thru.

A strengthening breeze in the late afternoon drove the
Sea Wasp
eastward through the Maruka channel. As the daylight dwindled, they prepared a meal of banyam and salt fish. They soaked the fish to soften it, then boiled it and ate it sprinkled with a little lime juice. The starchy banyam fruit was baked in its husk. It was hardly eating in the manner of the Land, but it filled their bellies.

As usual, Simona, Mentu, and Janbur sat slightly to one side. The rapid-fire conversation among the mots in their own tongue was still hard for them to understand. Even Simona struggled at times.

So, as was also usual, they fell into a familiar conversation of their own, in Shashti.

"I dream sometimes that I am all alone, in a world of them," said Janbur quietly.

Simona nodded. She had actually lived that dream, briefly, some years before. A girl lost in a world of fur-covered people with strangely colored eyes and inhuman faces.

"We will adjust."

"Damn, I hope so," said Mentu, sopping up the juice in his bowl with a piece of banyam.

"My mother tried to warn me," said Janbur with a wry smile.

"Bah," said Mentu. "You young hothead. You should have listened to her and stayed at home."

Janbur never let Mentupah's annoyance bother him. Which annoyed Mentu even more, of course.

"We were young hotheads, but we saved our friends here."

"For which," murmured Simona, "I am profoundly grateful."

Finishing quickly, as he often did, Mentu went to the cabin and thence to the upper deck where he took sightings with the quadrant. The storm had ruined their reckoning of position and so it was necessary to come up with some idea of where they were. He used a sighting of the giant red star Kemm, which came above the horizon shortly after sunset. Kemm's ruddy glow was many times brighter than any other star in the heavens.

Later, the planet Igen—"the bright one," as it was called by the men of Shasht, also known as Zanth in the language of the Land—rose above the horizon and could be used for further measurements. Then the readings obtained were checked against the tables in the book of variables. With two figures in hand, their north-south location could be determined. East-west was another matter.

Thru went back to the main cabin to see the results of Mentupah's sightings. He found him with the lantern lit and a chart of the Eastern Marukas unrolled on the table. Mentu greeted him by pointing to the chart.

"From the readings I took, I'd say we're about two hundred miles north of where we were yesterday. But how far to the east we've been blown I cannot tell. We couldn't track our speed, and even the log and line were torn away." Mentu looked back to the map. "I think we must be fairly close to this arc of islands here, the so-called Lost Marukas. If I'm right, we'll pass through them in a day or so. Once we're past them, we enter the great ocean."

"So, this will be our last chance to find more banyam."

"Unless we want to turn back and search the other Marukas."

"Our voyage has been long enough. Everyone is keen to push on."

"Right, of course." Mentu looked down.

Thru guessed what was troubling him. "I know you're concerned about what it will be like when we reach the Land."

"Well, yes. Where will we fit in? I certainly don't want to join the Emperor's army. But then again, I don't know how I'd feel fighting against it either."

"I don't think you'll be forced to join our army."

"Well, that's a relief, I suppose."

"And you won't be alone. There will be other men, maybe even women. We had taken some prisoners, even by the time I was captured. By now there will be more."

"So you foresee a little village of us?"