If I had gained nothing else from my term in the service of Deinaros the All-knowing, I had obtained several volumes of esoteric maps and the goodwill of the new master of the sorcerer’s tower. Both of these I gave to Hamilcar, in exchange for his aid on this most perilous of journeys.
We would sail west first, out of the Summer Sea and into the vast, unforgiving ocean. We would then turn south and sail as long as the Lady of Osona could withstand the wind and the waves. She was a sturdy vessel, reinforced with the best shipbuilding techniques known to all the peoples of the trade routes, but Hamilcar warned me that even she would not hold together in the waters at the end of the world. I would have to traverse the last miles over land, alone.
Bran, my faithful companion, the bravest of horses and the last gift that I still carried with me from Phyreios, would have to stay behind. He had already endured a number of sea voyages, none of them even a tenth of the length of the one I was about to undertake. He deserved solid ground beneath his hooves, green growing things to eat, and the open sky over his head. Confining him to the ship’s berth for so long would be little better than torture.
I wandered Marenni for hours in widening circles, delaying the moment of our parting. In the evening, I left the city proper and stepped out into the surrounding hills, where the late-autumn fields spread out bare and brown beneath a cloudless sky.
Not long after, I came across a young boy leading a herd of small, horned sheep home from the pasture, and negotiated with the boy’s father a fair price for Bran and the promise that he would be treated well for the rest of his life. The boy was just learning to ride, and Bran would make a fine companion to him.
I told Bran what I thought Aysulu might have told him when she gave him to me. “Take care of this young man,” I said.
As usual, there was no answer in his steady, black gaze, but I felt that he understood.
I bade him farewell for the last time, and I returned to the ship.
***
For twenty-seven days, we outran the coming winter. Its winds carried us past Ksadaja and Gallia alike, while dolphins danced alongside the ship’s hull, hunting shining silver fish just out of reach of the oars. Sea-birds circled overhead, hoping for a share of the catch, their wings gleaming white in the slanting sunlight.
The sun grew scarce as the weeks stretched on. When we reached the narrow strait that served as a gateway between one sea and the next, the sky was as gray as the cliffs on either side. The water rose high all around us, and the current drove us faster and faster toward the spearing rocks. Hamilcar stood at the rudder, his hands white-knuckled. I brought down the last sail as it pulled and kicked against the wind.
It was like being spat out from the mouth of a great serpent. The water surged beneath the ship, lifting it toward the sky. It dropped us then, and we plummeted into the trough of another wave, wind screaming in our ears and tearing at the moorings. Salt spray lashed at my face.
Then, quiet, or something like it, covered the soaked deck. The waves that broke upon the hull rose no higher than the rail. The wind’s song quieted from a roar to a lonely keening. Rain, soft and heavy, fell from the impenetrable gray dome of the sky.
We did not escape the rain on our route south, not for many weeks. I shivered in my hammock and through my meager rations as I broke my fast, not warming until my work at the oars warmed my blood at last. My clothes grew damp and did not dry. The air smelled of wet wood for several days before I ceased to notice it.
The Lady of Osona was still a trading vessel, and we stopped at a port on the western coast of a vast, mist-shrouded continent. We exchanged chests full of lengths of silk, sealed carefully against the damp, for grains and dried fruit. Some of it was for us, for the long journey, while the rest would be traded in the farthest southern reaches, where the rocky earth brought forth neither crops nor trees.
“You’ve been this way before?” I asked Hamilcar.
He shook his head, adjusting the tilt of his feathered hat. “Never. Your books told me of where this coast will eventually lead. We may have to part ways sooner than I anticipated.”
It was a great boon that he and his companions had granted me, and one that I might never repay. I would disembark at the last safe port, and I did not hold onto hope that I would find my way back there—and certainly not in time to find the ship again. If I did cross to the other world and back, I would be making my way back to familiar lands on foot.
I returned to the ship that evening with the growing understanding that I might not ever come back from the other world; that I could count the remaining ports I would see in my lifetime on both hands. This was a sort of death that I was undertaking, an early crossing over to the realm of spirits. That I intended to bring along my living body was only a complication. I could easily lose it, and spend the rest of eternity as a wandering spirit, and I could only pray to the gods of the shadowed borderlands that I found Khalim first.
Finding him was only half my mission. The other was to bring him back, to give him the life that the god of Phyreios had taken from him. I would have liked to spend that life with him. I feared that it might not be possible. Contending against demons and ghosts with only my harpoon might turn my approximate death into a true one, and that was only if I reached the gate of bone without perishing from shipwreck or plague.
Dwelling upon what I might find on the other side was of no use to me now. I had to survive the voyage, first. Soon, the work of rowing chased away all thoughts beyond the next stroke, and I lived the next months in blissful, exhausted ignorance.
As we descended the coast, the shining cities and bustling ports dwindled to seaside hamlets and then to empty, rock-strewn beaches. Soon, we lost sight of the other broad-sailed ships catching the trade winds, and even the tiny fishing boats disappeared. The sea stretched out, slate-gray and wind-battered, without another human soul or work of human hands as far as I could see.
It was then that the whales appeared.
I could not hear them singing, but I felt it when I put my hand to the inside of the hull. It seized hold of my body, shaking my very bones, and I feared the timbers would come apart under its terrible, magnificent force. I escaped it only when I returned to my hammock. The next day, it seized me by both legs as I sat at my rowing bench. The oar shook in my hands.
I welcomed them. Even here, so close to the end of the world, the whales had made a well-traveled road, and they kept to it as the seasons turned. Their broad backs were like islands emerging from the waves, and fountains sprayed with the breaths of their vast lungs.
A single blow from their enormous flukes would have overturned the Lady of Osona, but I could only see their presence as a fair omen. We kept well away from them, and before long, they took their world-shaking chorus away into deeper water.
We passed nearly a month before we saw another living thing. Even the birds did not venture far from the distant coast, and any fish that dwelled in these waters lay far beneath our hull where our nets could not reach them. I was nearing the end of my time upon the ship, and waited in dread for the word that I was to return to shore.
One last ship emerged on the horizon before that day came. It was an ugly, square vessel, little more than a wide raft with a shelter erected at the center. Several hunched figures walked in procession around it, their steps steady despite the tossing of the sea, and they sang a high, keening chant that carried upon the wind.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
Hamilcar spread his arms in an indifferent shrug. “Your books made mention of floating monasteries—ascetic communes that drift upon the waves until they’re either wrecked or wash up on a different shore.”
They had been at sea long enough to grow accustomed to walking their flat, creaking deck, but I could not imagine that they would last much longer. The storms were coming in twos and threes now, one after another. “Who do you think they pray to, all the way out here?”
“The books did not say,” Hamilcar said.
The long, southern summer turned to autumn and then, swiftly, to winter. Snow fell upon the deck and collected in the open sails. The winds howled, and the sea was as cold as it was in the North. In the distance, a pale mountain of floating ice drifted across the horizon.
It was time. Hamilcar guided his ship clear of icebergs and into a shallow bay surrounded by spires of pale stone. I bade him farewell, and wished the crew a safe journey home, and I swam the rest of the way to shore with a pack balanced on my shoulder. The chill of the water cut through me like the blade of an axe.
I built a fire of driftwood and dry grass and waited for my clothes to dry. The scarlet sail of the Lady of Osona receded to a tiny jewel on the horizon, and then it was gone.
The days were already short, and they grew shorter as I walked south, navigating by the distant, pale light of the veiled sun. I had expected to make this last part of my journey alone, but I soon found a procession of robed pilgrims, tracing a narrow path through the scrub with bells upon their walking staves, and I followed them deeper into this strange, bare continent.
I had walked the tundra and the steppe. I had crossed the mountains of the North, starving, mad, and alone. This would be no different.
The pilgrims spoke a wide spectrum of languages, most of which I did not recognize, and communicated with each other and me by signs and gestures. They were going to the far southern coast, they said, where soon the sun would hide for several days, and a passage would open upon the sea. They were here only to glimpse it, and thus complete their pilgrimage and return, after many months of travel, to the lands from whence they came.
We arrived at the coast soon after. No trees grew between the wind-sharpened rocks, but there was wood to be found: shattered, salt-stained timbers, some still bearing the fragmented images of their figureheads or scraps of rotted rope.
It was enough. As the days shortened from hours to mere minutes, I constructed a boat. When the sun disappeared entirely, I would be ready.
Back to Chapter LXII: Farther Shores
Forward to Chapter LXIV: The Gate of Bone
I’m working out a way for Eske’s artifact quests to tie in to his journey to the gate of bone. A lot of the editing process right now is making the plot 1) make sense and 2) be satisfying at the end. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
2 thoughts on “Journey to the Water Chapter LXIII: The Last, Lonely Harbor”