The Bloodstained God (Book 2) (44 page)

Paddles dipped almost silently into the water, propelling the canoe across the sea, the sound of its surging progress concealed in the
shuffle and hiss of small waves on the distant beach. The paddlers did not speak. To the east there was the faintest hint of light, the ghosts of the mountains that were the Dragon’s Back standing out against the pre-dawn light like shadows upon shadows.

There was starlight, too, but no moon. He had chosen this moonless night, and had been blessed with calm seas and light winds. At this time of year it would be at least an hour until the sun crested the peaks, but a long time before that they would have lost their cloak of darkness.

To the north he could see lights on the shore. They were passing the town of Benafelas, a cluster of flickering yellow stars on the black mass of the land, a town mostly still asleep. Hiralo had never been to a town outside the Green Isles, but he knew well enough that they were unlike his own towns. The buildings were made of stones and dead trees, rare things to a man of the Isles, and they were made to stand beyond the life of a man, which he found strange. If a man build a house for himself, then his son will do the same, and the first house will fall with the first man, should he die. It was the way of things, the way of the Green Isles.

He was aware of other canoes close to his own, the men in them paddling with stealth, but moving quickly all the same. It was a skill. There were forty canoes, and four men to each. They were the men of the round finned shark, Hiralo’s own shoal, charged with the mission which the northern god had given his people. He was proud of that.

As the Wolf had said there were great boats here, the side of them more than the height of two men, secured by great ropes that reached down into the water, trees draped with cloth standing upon their decks. He could see no oars, which was not surprising because the Wolf had called them wind boats. The huge vessels wallowed in the water, taking on the movement of each gentle swell rolling in from the south, the tips if the trees waving as much as ten feet each way.

These great boats smelled terrible. It was a smell that he could not place, like something burned and pungent, and it smelled a little like some strong teas that men of the north made. Something painted on the wood, he supposed, to keep out the water.

As they passed the first hulk he saw a canoe peel away from them, slowing, moving beneath the stern of the thing. The steersman of the canoe raised his hand to Hiralo, and then was left behind.

They went on, each canoe moving beneath the stern of a ship. That is what the Wolf had called them: ships. It was not an Isler word. They had no ships, no great boats that moved over oceans.

The sky in the east was a shade lighter now. As they passed along the coast Hiralo could see lights moving on the shore. There were men there, the strange Seth Yarra men that he had never seen, but the enemy for all that. He watched a light, a lamp he supposed, bobbing along the beach until they passed behind a ship and it was hidden. He looked about them. This was their ship. He waved the others on and steered into the darker shadow, close under the stern.

It was like a wooden cliff. Two of the paddle men reached up and secured the canoe and Hiralo ran his hands across the wood. He found it rough with salt, and a few feet above the water it was as dry as summer reeds. He smiled. The Wolf had been quite right. This would burn like a torch. He looked more carefully at the wood, and found handholds, places that he might put his feet, and he climbed.

He reached the top of the wooden cliff and peered over the edge. He saw the deck, a long, broad platform of wood out of which the man made trees sprouted. He saw the cloths hanging from them, but he saw no men. He waited for a moment, looking for a movement in the shadow, a light somewhere, but he saw nothing. He climbed onto the deck, turned and waved down to the men below.

They threw a rope end to him, which he caught deftly and tucked under one arm. He watched as one of the paddle men unslung a fire tube from his shoulder, a thing of animal horn into which hot embers had been packed. The man tumbled the embers out onto a green leaf and covered them with dry straw while another man unwrapped a taper. When the taper was lit the embers were dropped in the sea and the taper secured to a bag. He hoisted it up to where he crouched on the edge of the deck and opened the bag. It held three pots of the oil they called King’s Blood, a substance that burned fiercely, and into the neck of each pot a cloth had been stuffed, and now smelled strongly of the oil.

Hiralo looked out at the other ships and saw sparks of light near the stern of more than a few. He lit the first pot at the cloth and quickly threw it away from him, onto the deck. It burst and became a pool of flame. He lit the second and threw it at the closest of the trees, which it struck, and fire began to climb towards the cloths which hung above. The third pot he threw as far as he could towards the bow, and saw it break over a coil of rope near to the side.

There was no more that he could do. He watched for a moment as the fames crawled up and out from their beginnings, satisfied that the job was done.

A man burst up onto the deck from a hatch. He looked dishevelled and half awake, dragged from sleep by the smoke that had begun to billow from below. He didn’t see Hiralo, who took the prudent course of climbing quickly back down the side of the ship to the waiting canoe. It was dangerous to wait here. He signalled the men to paddle and the blades dipped in the sea again, quickly pulling them away from the now doomed ship.

All along the line of ships he saw the same thing. Red and yellow was blossoming from the decks and sides of the ships, to be greeted by cries of alarm. Hiralo saw men dive from the ships into the sea to escape the fire, which spread as quickly as though the ships were made entirely of oil.

Something whipped over his head and tore into the sea. An arrow. He looked up. There was a ship quite nearby that was not on fire. Its decks swarmed with men. This one, then, had not been empty, and its crew had managed to douse the flames. Hiralo picked up a paddle and added his strength to the canoe, driving it even faster towards the safety of the isles. It was a long way, though. It had taken an hour to paddle this far in the dark, and it would take the best part of that to paddle back.

Looking over his shoulder he saw a canoe overturned by the light of the burning ships. There were things floating in the water that could only be dead men. The air seemed suddenly full of arrows. It was only a short way, two minutes at the most, before they would pass beyond the reach of those arrows, but he still felt naked with his back turned towards the archers on their great ship.

An arrow brushed his shoulder and struck Danori, the man ahead of him. He saw the thing strike his back, ripping the flesh, releasing a quick spatter of blood, and then the man was tipping over, dropping his paddle into the sea, slumping to the left. The other men compensated at once, leaning right to stop the canoe tipping over. It was the reaction of men born to the skill, an unthinking act to balance the boat. Hiralo caught at him and tried to pull him upright, but Danori was a dead weight. The man in the bow, Hinoba, turned and looked.

“He’s gone, Hiralo,” he said.

“Dead?”

“Yes. Dead.”

He didn’t ask how Hinoba was sure, but he trusted the judgement. He let Danori go, watching him roll over the side into the dark water. He picked up his paddle again and paddled harder.

It seemed only moments more and they were free of the arrows, the points dipping into the sea behind them like a hot rain, hissing as they struck the water. Hiralo looked across at the other canoes. Some were missing, and some boats had only three men where they had once had four. Some had only two.

It was not a disaster, but the men were celebrating. One of them stood up in his canoe and shouted at the burning boats, at the one with the archers aboard, calling insults at them.

Hiralo looked back. The bay was alight, great palls of smoke standing up into the dawn sky and bending to the east as they rose so that they seemed to flow over the Islers’ heads towards their homes. Hiralo hoped that it was not an omen.

He heard a splash, loud noised of metal on wood and looked again. The archers had stopped shooting, and now he saw that one of the great ropes that held the ship in place, the undamaged ship, was being hauled in. Men were running up the trees, spreading out along the branches like monkeys. He saw a great device of metal lift from the water and one of the cloths fall down and open out in the breeze.

“They are coming after us!” he called out to the other paddlers. “Dig deep!” He took his own advice and began to paddle again. Some of the others did likewise, but several of the men jeered.

“They cannot catch us. They have no oars, and the wind is slight.”

Hiralo looked back again and saw that sheet after sheet was falling, filling with wind. Already he could see a tell tale line of white as the bow of the ship began to thrust the sea aside.

“That’s no Telan slaver,” he shouted. He paddled. The Green Isles were visible now in the dawn light. They were a string of dark gems, shrouded in mist and cloud, calling him home, but they were so very far away. It was true that they were leaving the ship behind, but Hiralo knew that when the sun struck the land it would raise a wind, and the thing behind them was now a cloud of white above its dark hull, and a strong wind would drive it faster.

Yet the gap grew, and the Isles came closer. It was half an hour before he became certain that the gap was shrinking again. By now the men were growing weary. They had done hard work building up the distance, and now they could not keep it. The great ship bore towards them, leaning out to sea, moving at a sharp angle to the wind. He could not yet see the men upon its decks, but he knew that they would be there.

He gritted his teeth and paddled, feeling his muscles burn. It would catch them, he was sure of it, but how close to the Isles could they get? A few minutes in open water and perhaps they could get in among the reefs before they were all shot down.

“Spread out,” he called across. “Spread wide.”

He saw the other boats understood at once and the small flotilla began to separate, the gaps between canoes becoming wider and wider as the wind ship closed. With luck it would only have a few of them in range when it caught up, and have to turn one way or the other to reach more. It looked as though turning might be a clumsy thing.

It was closing faster than he had hoped. The wind from the land had picked up a good deal and the cloud of white cloth above the ship was driving it forwards at a great rate. It looked as though they would be caught well short of the shelter of the reefs. It also looked as though Hiralo’s own canoe would be in the midst of it, for the wind ship was driving directly at his stern.

He tried to ignore it and paddle harder. They were being left behind now by the boats that still had four men, and they, in turn, were leaving the two man boats behind. It was stupid of him not to have done something about that. They should have filled as many boats as they could, left the empty canoes behind them.

Should he turn? The ship was large, and if they paddled towards the shore they may reach shallow water before they were caught, or the ship might hold its course and pass them by. It seemed worth the gamble. There were no reefs this far from the Isles, but the captain of that hulking thing might not know so much.

“Paddle for the shore,” he said, and the paddlers turned as one, their small craft spinning on the water and shooting away in the new direction. The great wind ship came on without changing course, but it was getting close now and moving quickly, a great froth of white foam raging about its bow. It would not be long before they were within bowshot. Hiralo could already see the men on the deck, the bows in their hands. His back and arms were burning with the effort of paddling, and Hinoba was grunting with each stroke.

Not long now, he thought, one way or the other. He drove the paddle down into the sea and pulled. It seemed for a moment that he had pulled so hard that he had lifted the canoe clear of the water. They rose into the air on the back of a huge wave, then raced down into the trough. The man behind him cursed. Somewhere beyond their canoe he heard another man shout, then a scream of pure terror.

He turned. He could not stop himself from looking.

There was a fin in the water, a huge fin. He knew at once that it was a shark, he had seen such fins before, but this was such a shark that he stopped paddling and sat, open mouthed, and stared. The fin protruded from the water to the height of a tall man. It was iron grey and firm, and beneath the sea there was a huge shape that seemed almost of a size with the wind ship.