But part of his mind wandered away to Krysty Wroth, wondering if she still lived, thinking back to their many conversations on what future they desired. She hoped for safety and stability. Ryan looked for a perfection that he hadn't found yet. And might never find.
Time, to Ryan Cawdor, swinging effortlessly between heaven and the deep, cold sea, had ceased to have any meaning. He knew that when enough minutes had ticked by on the ship's chron, then someone would climb up the rigging and relieve him of the lookout's task. But until then, there was no hurry.
It was pleasant to have, for once, leisure without any responsibility. There was nothing he could do, for the time being, to extricate himself from the danger of his position. There was a rare opportunity to think about his past, and even wonder a little about his future. If there was to be one.
Ryan thought back to the many places in the Deathlands that he'd passed through. So many of them seeming the same bleak pestholes.
One of Trader's favorite sayings came back to him at that moment. "One handful of ashes looks just like any other handful of ashes."
His eye was caught by a flurry of white spray ahead of the ship, on the starboard side. Ryan didn't need the telescope to recognize what was happening, though he'd never seen it before in his life.
"There she blows!" he shouted. "There! There she blows!"
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was madness. The most terrifying, leaping, heart-stopping madness that Ryan had ever known. He was soaked to the skin within seconds, hands blistered from the heavy oars, muscles in his shoulders cracking with the effort of pulling. His hair was flattened to his skull, and he gritted his teeth as the frail boat bounded over the long Lantic rollers in pursuit of the broaching whale that he'd sighted.
How long ago?
Eternities hurtled by, like grains of sand. But his common sense told Ryan that barely twenty minutes could have elapsed. He'd been ordered down immediately from the masthead, to be replaced as look-out by one of the Oriental cooks. He was needed in the lead whaleboat, skippered by Cyrus Ogg, with its ironsman, Donfil More, crouched in the bow.
The long, narrow boat had been lowered hastily into the sea alongside the Salvation, now running under a skeleton crew, most of her men eager to row after their prey.
Pyra Quadde had raged the decks like a woman possessed of demons, lashing out with her stick at any sailor unlucky enough to run within range. Froth clung to her fleshy lips, and her eyes rolled bloodshot in their sockets.
"Now we see him, ye shiftless lazy sons of gaudy whores! Get to the boats and after him. Row and row, cullies. Jack in plenty for a good hunt and a clean kill. No food for a week if he slips away from ye!"
"Naught but ears and arms, my brave lads," said Cyrus Ogg, encouraging the five men to pull for their lives toward the patch of disturbed, misty water where the whale had last been sighted. "Pull and pull and pull again. That's the word for the silver mug of fine oil and a rich lay for us all. Pull and pull and pull yet more."
Ryan had never traveled in such a bizarre way before — with his back to where they were going, unable to see what was happening. Only Donfil in the triangular bow section and Ogg at the tiller in the stern could judge what should be done.
Walsh in the second whaleboat and a grizzled veteran named Piper Fairman in the third were only a dozen yards behind them. Ryan had heard that Captain Quadde sometimes took an iron herself if a whole school of whales was spotted. But here, with only a single beast marked down for the hunt, she was content to remain on board the Salvationand shadow the trio of small dories.
Because of the height of the long ocean waves, it was often impossible for the oarsmen to even glimpse the Salvation. Most of the time Ryan could see the three masts, and occasionally the whole white and black hull. The lookout at the top of the mainmast was still pointing dead ahead of them, to where Ryan figured he could see the birds waiting for the reappearance of the monster.
"Steady and together, my stout boys, with an in and an out, an in and an out. Any roan stops rowing, and he'll be tied to the grating and I'll flog the skin from his back. Next I'll flog the muscles and flesh away from his back. Then the gleaming ivory of his spine shall feel the kiss of the metal-tipped lash. I'll whip that man so hard his liver and lights'll be shredded and flensed and pulverized and torn so that they can be served over the side as bait for the sharks."
The world was shrinking around Ryan. Though there were few men fitter in all of the Deathlands, the endless heaving at the clumsy oar, sometimes deep in the water and sometimes kicking the empty air, was taking its toll on him. He fought for breath, feeling soreness across the tops of his thighs from the pressure and the movement against the seat.
"I'll press thine eyes inand then outof thy skull and drive a white-hot awl inand then outof thine ears and hammer hook-end nails inand then outof thy nostrils." Each repetition of "in" and "out" was accompanied by a barely audible change in the pitch of the mate's voice.
"She blows!" Donfil yelled from the bow.
Ryan wasn't able to stop himself from turning on the planking seat, seeing the most amazing sight, catching the scent of old, old earth, ripped from the belly of the Lantic.
It was as though someone had thrown up a great wall of wrinkled, blue-gray stone across their course. Rearing it, dripping and gleaming, streaked with shards of green weed, unimaginably huge.
"Turn thy face to me, outlander, and bend thy back. Or we all perish."
Cyrus Ogg nodded at him like a friendly schoolmaster, mentioning some tiny error in his tables of multiplication.
Ryan bent again to the oar, hearing a deep, sonorous roaring, which seemed as if it were vibrating the very marrow of his bones, shaking the core of his being.
"She blows, she blows!" the Apache repeated. Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan could see that his companion had taken up one of the long harpoons and was hefting it in his right hand, just as he'd done on the quayside of Claggartville, aeons ago.
But now his target was not a daub of white paint upon an old door. It was Behemoth itself, the lord over all deep waters.
"Hold oars," the first mate called, raising his voice for the first time, forced to raise it over the caldron of boiling foam and spray that seethed around them. "Now, Master Ten-from-Ten! Here be thy chance. Strike!"
Ryan was able, now they had no further need of rowing, to glance over his shoulder once more and witness the next — and most dramatic act — of the murderous play.
The towering bastion of living flesh had hardly moved. Its skin was dappled with small shellfish and crusted with strange cancerlike growths. Near the crest of the blunt head Ryan could see the tiny eye — not dead like that of the great shark that had attacked them on their raft. This eye twinkled with life and with curiosity. The jaws were only just ajar, the sea swilling in and out between the fronds of its teeth. They were nearly close enough to touch it.
"In with the lance, outlander!" one of the rowers yelled.
"Aye," called another, voice cracking with tension. "Before he sinks us with his fucking tail!"
"Thanks for the meeting!" Donfil cried, casting the harpoon with all of his power, driving it deep into the whale, by the great hump of muscle behind the head.
"Clear of the line, lads," Ogg ordered, keeping one hand on the tiller, using the other to fill a metal dipper with seawater.
The thin rope that was attached to the harpoon ran through a notch in the bow of the whaleboat, under the seats of the oarsmen and around the stubby wooden post, called the loggerhead, between the feet of the first mate. The line was controllable there, running back into one of the two kegs of coiled rope. Hundreds of feet in all, ready to be linked together if the whale should run and run. And in the bow, clipped to a bracket, was a small honed ax. The other task of Donfil was to cut the line if the wounded monster should suddenly decide to dive deep. The ocean thereabouts was of a depth that could lose a thousand whales.