«Yes,» said Khraishamo. He took Blade's right hand and Rhodina's left. «All for one, and one for all.»
Blade repeated it, forcing himself not to laugh, and then Rhodina gasped out the words. Blade wondered what the creator of The Three Musketeers would have said if he'd heard their famous oath from Khraishamo's lips. Certainly a pirate chief who wasn't even human, a battle-scared young whore, and a traveler from another Dimension were as unlikely a trio of musketeers as you could hope to find.
Dawn on the seventeenth day. A seabird landed on the gunwale. Confident that none of the three sprawled bodies in the boat could harm it, the bird made the mistake of folding its wings. That was its last mistake. A quick snatch, a squawk, a twist, and Blade had the bird in hand, its neck neatly wrung.
They gave Rhodina the blood to drink and rubbed the fat on the worst of her sunburn. Then Blade and Khraishamo divided the flesh. It was gamey and reeking of fish, but they were past caring.
Dawn on the eighteenth day. The sea was as flat and the air as heavy as ever, but the sky held a bronze tinge and the sun was nearly invisible even though there weren't any clouds. Khraishamo sniffed the air.
«This might be hatching a storm,» he said. «And it might not.»
«If it doesn't-«began Blade, then found he didn't have the will to finish the sentence out loud. He could finish it in his thoughts, though.
Another day, and Rhodina will be dead. A few days after that, and we'll join her. Khraishamo and I are already too weak to capture a merchantman if she did pick us up. We'd have to lie. He didn't feel very hopeful about lying convincingly. In fact, he'd never felt so nearly hopeless about survival in his life. He kept going purely on the principle that the nearly dead sometimes live, while the completely dead don't come back.
Then he felt a puff of wind on his cheek. He blinked, and when he felt a second puff, he sat up. Then he felt a third, and Khraishamo was sitting up, and a fourth.
After the fourth puff it was a steady breeze. Khraishamo threw himself into movement, sponging off Rhodina and checking the sun-baked sail and rigging while Blade manned the tiller. The pirate seemed torn between joy and uncertainty.
«If this wind holds, it means a storm. But a storm maybe means going from no water to too much.»
«We can face that,» said Blade. «And if worse comes to worse, I'd rather be drowned than sun-baked.»
Khraishamo frowned. «Don't joke like that, Blade. Not out here.» He pointed to the northwestern horizon. It was turning from bronze to a sullen slate-gray. The wind was now blowing strongly enough for the ripples on the water to start turning into waves. As the sail was filled, the boat began to leave foam in its wake.
Another hour, and Blade might have danced for joy if that wouldn't have upset the boat. The sky turned completely gray, almost black, with the clouds pressing down on the sea as if they wanted to crush the boat. Out of the clouds came a downpour so fierce that for a while Blade was afraid they would have to start bailing. Suddenly there was all the water they could use.
They filled the pots, drank them empty, and filled them again. They wrung out the drenched sail and used the water to wash their clothing. Then they wrung out their clothes over their sun-dried, salt-caked skins. They drank the pots empty again, then filled them and poured them over Rhodina. They even gave her a full pot to wash out her hair.
When she was finished with that, she had the strength to stand, holding onto the mast. She stood there as the wind rose and her hair began to fly about her, a naked, magnificent storm goddess. Blade knew he'd never forget the sight of her in that moment.
Then she had to sit down and hang on, because the wind went on rising as the rain slackened. Before long Blade wouldn't have tried dancing for a million pounds. He'd have gone overboard before he could take three steps. Besides, he wasn't feeling quite so cheerful now. He remembered that summer storms on the Sea could blow like hurricanes. There wasn't enough room for them to build up gigantic waves, but to small-boat sailors that wasn't an important difference.
Blade looked around him. It was becoming impossible to tell where the sky ended and the Sea began. Waves were already nearly ten feet high with the wind peeling their crests off in clouds of spray. Water roared under the boat and the wind roared in Blade's ears. He found he had to shout to make Khraishamo hear him.
«How does this blow look to you?»
«It could get a lot worse. It probably will, too. But at least it's taking us the way we want to go.»
That was true. The gale would drive them toward the eastern shore of the Sea. It might blow out before they reached Mythor, or it might drive them ashore before they reached the city. Meanwhile, it was giving them all the water they could use, as well as protection from Goharan ships. Blade shouted to Khraishamo again.
«We don't need to worry about Goharans any more. The merchant ships'll all be too busy to pay attention to us, and the galleys'll all be heading for shelter.»
Khraishamo nodded. «Let's hope we can do the same if we have to.»
Blade looked up at the sky without loosening his grip on the tiller. It could hardly be much after noon, but already the day was as dark as late evening.
Chapter 18
In the chronicles of Gohar, it was called the Storm of Thrayket's Passing, because it started blowing on the day of the temple rites in his memory. It had various other names among the other peoples around the Sea. None of them ignored it.
None of the sailors caught at Sea could ignore it either, but many of them didn't live long enough to give the storm a name. They could only go down into the Sea, cursing the gods as salt water filled their mouths for the last time.
The Goharans, the Mythorans, and the other cities and kingdoms who had ships on the Sea lost ninety merchantmen and fifteen galleys. More fishing boats went down than anyone could ever count. Even the Sarumi lost some fishing craft and a few war vessels, swamped at sea or driven onto the rocky north coast of Sarumland. They also had crops washed out, huts blown down, and food spoiled by the ton.
On the other hand, the rivers between them and the plains horsemen swelled to raging torrents. Three thousand horsemen gathered to raid the Sarumi were caught by a flash flood, and the bodies of men and horses were strewn along the river banks all the way to the Sea. The Sarumi suddenly found themselves free of enemies on land, their enemies at Sea weakened, and their own fleet intact.
As the Sarumi realized this, the storm blew itself out. After five days of wind, gray skies, and waves the size of houses, there was blue sky and soft breezes. Only the surf still roared in on the eastern shore, carrying with it planks, beams, masts, oars, barrels, and bodies.
On the third day of the storm, Blade began to wonder if Khraishamo was right. Perhaps they were going to die from too much water instead of too little. The wind blew nearly a full gale every hour of the day and night. All around them the Sea rose into waves twenty feet high, and overhead gray clouds raced madly past. The nights were an experience Blade wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, with the waves turned into ghostly monsters, always threatening to swamp or overturn the boat.
Blade's muscles were stretched and twisted to the limit, his eyes became salt-reddened pits, his clothes rotted on his back, his brain screamed for sleep. Khraishamo and Rhodina were no better off, and several times the woman seemed about to collapse. Somehow she always managed to find a little more strength and keep going.
Fortunately the boat was just the right size for the three of them to handle, superbly well-built, with a high freeboard made higher because she was lightly loaded. She rode up and over nine waves out of ten, and while the continuous rising and falling made Rhodina deathly seasick, it also kept them from being swamped. There were no leaks worth mentioning, in spite of the worst the waves could do, and they could easily bail out what came aboard in spray and rain.