Immortal At Sea (The Immortal Chronicles Book 1) (5 page)

In the distance, the Spanish were scrambling to get their boat in order again, but it seemed half their men were either wounded or in the water.  Still, if the serpent was done with them they looked undamaged enough to make it back to Spain, barring any pirate intervention.

It wasn’t finished, though, as became breathtakingly apparent a moment later when the head and about one third of the beast’s body breached the surface near the ship, soared over the deck, and then came crashing down on top of it.  The impact was explosive and thoroughly devastating, as the wood ship shattered like a toy balsa wood raft.  Sailors that weren’t crushed instantly were thrown a hundred feet from the wreck, only to sink as soon as they hit the water.

When the serpent went back down it took all evidence of a gilded Spanish ship with it.

We stood, all of us, dumbstruck in silence and paralyzed by what we had just seen.  For a long while the only sound in the air was the screaming for help from one or two of the former occupants of the former boat.

“I really think we should be going,” I said.  Yassine felt the same.

“OARS!”
he roared.  He looked up. 
“Trim sail!” 
Then he shouted a bunch of other nautically pertinent commands.  In all honesty, I couldn’t tell you what they were, because as I told Yassine, I stopped understanding sailing long before this.

The first mate started pounding the drum, double-time, and that I understood.  It got the men rowing much more quickly.  Soon we were moving as fast as we could in what was still a mild wind.

A loud
HOOOOOT
sounded from the creature somewhere in the water behind us, a noise we hoped was a declaration of victory and not the announcement of another attack.

“Do you think it will give chase?” Yassine asked, shouting over the drumbeat.

“I told you I’ve heard tales of a tanakh destroying fleets.”

“So you have.  If we survive this day, and assuming I do not decide to kill you, we are going to talk about where you heard these tales.  I’ve been at sea my whole life and I know less of this creature than you.  I find this unacceptable.”

“You may find the explanation equally unacceptable.”

The man near the top of the middle mast—the same one who’d first spotted the serpent—began shouting and pointing at the water. 
“It comes!”
he said.

“Hold on to something!”
I shouted to everyone in earshot.  I had nothing to hold onto—a rope attached to something heavy would have been nice—so I took off my belt and wrapped it around the nearest railing, then tied my wrist to it.

Yassine saw what I was doing and began lashing himself to the wheel.  “First it will soften us.”

The attack came a moment later.  It’s impossible to describe exactly what happened from the center of things, but I know that we were lifted, and then dropped again.  Lifted from where, and dropped at what angle I don’t know.  I saw the body of the addled sailor from the rigging slam onto the deck and bounce into the ocean, a tangle of blood and unnatural angles, and I heard shouts and cries of pain from all around me in four different languages.  I felt wood beneath me bend.

When it was over we were still afloat, and Yassine still had the wheel.  The first mate had survived the assault as well, but I didn’t know this from seeing him.  I heard the drum.

“Are you all right, scholar?” the captain shouted.

“I’m not broken.”  In truth my shoulder felt dislocated, but it seemed like a bad time to bring it up.

“We are still sound.  That eyeless bastard hasn’t beaten us yet.”

I got to my feet.  “What did you call him?”

“A bastard?”

“Eyeless.”

“Your books didn’t tell you this?  I saw his face!  His head was near as close to mine as you are.  He’s an eyeless worm.  I tell you, I’ll not be sunk today by a worm!”

If he couldn’t see, how did he find us? I wondered.  And then I understood not only how that was possible, but why the Spanish ship had been targeted first.

“Stop the drum!” I said.  Then I repeated it for the first mate, and in Arabic. 
“Stop the drum!”

He couldn’t hear me, though, over that very drum, so I untied myself from the rail and raced to the prow. 

The deck was a slick mess of blood and vomit, and with the rocking of the upset sea I nearly ended up in the lap of one of the oarsmen, and almost tripped over an injured second oarsman.  Still, over my shouts and obvious distress the first mate wasn’t listening to me.  He had at least noted that I was there.

When I reached him, rather than try and convince him that the drum was a bad idea, I put my hand on the drum skin.

“What are you doing?”
he asked.  The first mate, not incidentally, was two heads taller than me, twice as wide, and from some sort of country where piercings were more common than hair.  I didn’t relish the prospect of confronting him physically. 

I put my finger to my lips and pointed.

Over the mate’s shoulder I could see the tanakh running straight for us.  With the drum stopped the oars had stopped, and if I was right, both of those facts would make it more difficult for the creature to find us on the water.

I held my breath, and waited, as did the first mate and everyone else aboard, it seemed. 

It didn’t attack.  The tanakh passed beneath us.

“It’s the drum,”
I said. 
“It’s blind; it responds to the vibration of the drum.”
 

On the Mediterranean, we had reached a calm, which forced us to use the oars and to keep time on the oars with drums.  My Hebrew captain knew to run silent to keep from being attacked, but he might not have known why it worked.  Likewise, the creature attacked only after hearing Juan Pedro on
his
drum, and came after us when we did the same.

I turned to face Yassine on the bridge.  Shouting, I said, “The drum calls it.  Without it we should be…”

And then the world was turned upside-down.  The deck lifted up and at an angle, and down I went, straight for the water.  The first mate, standing next to me a half-second earlier, flew past and straight for the water.  I didn’t see him emerge again, but I was busy trying to keep myself from following him.  I nearly did, but my hand found a loose chain on the deck.  (It wasn’t truly loose, it was attached to a shackle around one of the oarsmen’s legs.)  I dangled in the air for two or three seconds by the same arm with the dislocated shoulder—this was super painful, but it fixed the shoulder, which was nice—before the boat righted itself, and sent me sliding across the deck in the other direction. 

I managed to get to my feet again.  The boat was rocking madly and I could see cracks in the wood of the hull, but it had steadied enough for me to keep upright and to try and make my way around.  The oarsmen were the only crew I could see at first, and they all looked like they’d been slapped hard onto the deck, as perhaps they had been.  Nobody looked particularly prepared or capable of rowing.  The sails and the mast were still intact, so there was hope yet that the vessel, although wounded, could remain afloat for long enough to reach a shoreline somewhere. 

But there was no way we could survive a third blow.

I couldn’t see any crewmen.  The first mate was gone, although his drum was still there and the drumstick was attached to it by a cord.  There were no men in the riggings. 

“Scholar!” the captain yelled, pulling himself to his feet against the wheel.  “I hope you have another idea!”

“Where is it?” I asked.  “Can you see it?”

“He swings wide to starboard.  I think he means to break us in two like the Spaniards.”

I looked around the devastated ship for something that could help.  With the strength of a thousand men I could maybe fashion the mainmast into a lance, I thought.  Or if I had wings I could fly away, or with fins I could swim to shore.

None of those were reasonable options, but they highlighted an important point: I should try harder to stay off of boats.

The insistent pulse of the creature’s heart—or whatever part of its anatomy caused the water to thrum—was banging in time with the blood in my ears. The tanakh was close.

That gave me an idea.  It was a tiny idea, but as the only thing I hadn’t tried yet I thought it was worth a shot.  I ran to the drum, picked up the stick, and listened again for the heart of the sea.

It was two or three beats before I got the rhythm down, and thankfully the serpent was more than three of its heartbeats away from us still.  I started hitting the drum to the same tempo. 

“What are you doing?” Yassine shouted.  “The drum only makes it more angry!”

“Clap to the beat, or stomp, or do something!  We have to match his rhythm.”

Yassine looked at the beast still fast approaching, shrugged, and started clapping in time with my drum solo. 
“Stomp your feet, you dogs!”
he ordered, for the benefit of whatever crew still had their feet under them.  I couldn’t see anyone, but I heard the ship tune itself to the drumbeat, so there were still people conscious and able, somewhere.

“How are we?” I asked the captain.

“I am ready to sing, Giovanni, but the beast still approaches.  May we go down with music in our hearts!”

I couldn’t hear the beast any longer, because the beat of the drum was matching it.  My hope was that it would have the same problem hearing us.

“Brace yourselves!”
Yassine shouted.

The third impact never came, though.  I heard the rush of ocean water as the creature emerged in parallel with us on the starboard side, and the boat rose with the sea, but it didn’t attack.  It ran beside.

“Hey, scholar?  You are very clever, and this might work, but now that it sees my ship as another serpent, what do we do when it decides to mate with us?”

*   *   *

The tanakh didn’t decide to mate with us, but it did swim alongside for the remainder of the day and most of the night.  We manned the drum in shifts, with every able-bodied soul aboard taking a turn.  The drumming continued for hours after the last sighting, until we felt confident it had slipped away to wherever it called home.

It was another two days before the coast of Africa came into view.  I happened to be holding the wheel at the time, which was symbolic if nothing else.  The attack on the pirate ship had decimated the crew.  Nearly everyone that wasn’t dead or missing-and-presumed-dead had an injury of some sort, so Yassine had to cobble together a full complement of hands from what he had.  That meant unshackling the oarsmen and trusting me.

“I have decided I’m not going to kill you, Giovanni,” Yassine said, upon relieving me.  He took the wheel in both hands, and I stepped back and limped to the rail to watch the shoreline grow larger.

“That’s a great relief,” I said.  “As I steered your boat and wondered if we were about to be crushed by a giant serpent my foremost thoughts were that surely any second you were going to appear and run me through.”

He shot me a look over his shoulder.  “Don’t get sarcastic, I can still change my mind.”

“We’re both too tired to fight to the death, Yassine.”

“You have a bad shoulder.  I can take you.”

“And you’re nearly blind in your left eye, your right knee aches when it’s cold, and I believe you have no feeling in at least two of the fingers on your left hand.”

The captain laughed.  “You are too observant by half.  Do you still wish to be a pirate? Or was that only the best possible outcome given your circumstances?  Because unless my first mate swam to shore ahead of us, I am need of one, and most of the crew will change over once we reach a friendly port.  If I say you are the first mate nobody will question it.”

“In honesty, after this voyage I’m not certain I ever wish to step aboard another boat.”

“No, no, you’re thinking about this all wrong.  You’ve discovered a valuable thing, Giovanni.  We both have.”

“I have discovered that land is more valuable under my feet than seen from a distance.”

  “You’ve learned more, my friend.  Listen to me: it’s not so bad a thing, being a pirate.  There are cruelties, for certain.  And if there is a heaven, I don’t expect to be welcome there.  But it is lucrative.  Now imagine being a pirate who knows how to tame a sea serpent?  Come with me.  If we can figure out how to
summon
it, we can own the sea.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to talk me into something, Yassine.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.  But putting my feet back onto a ship and returning to those depths and then attempting to deliberately call that beast?  That’s insanity.  You survived an attack from a force of nature and would try and make it your pet.”

“I would try, yes.  And with your help I feel as if I would succeed.  With your patron dead, tell me, what else do you have for yourself?”

“I have my life.  That’s sufficient for now.”

*   *   *

Yassine didn’t manage to convince me to stay on as a first mate.  We took to port in a friendly harbor—don’t ask me the name of it, I don’t know—and repaired his ship adequately to make the trip north to Algiers, where as promised he switched out his entire crew and refitted his vessel.  The venture cost him dearly, financially, without even taking into account the gold he lost by not capturing the Spanish ship.