Authors: John; Norman
I saw the sky, a bright blue in the spring afternoon.
“Aiiii!” I heard, a sudden, startled, weird, hideous cry, and the knife arm, and the head, and the torso of Seremides suddenly disappeared beneath the water, which churned, rocking the mat of vines, lifting and scattering the broad blue and yellow blossoms amongst the foliage.
“Where are you?” called a voice.
“Here, here!” I said.
I was not thinking clearly.
It was a moment before I understood what had happened.
I saw Seremides emerge then from amidst the vines and blossoms. He was alive. He was some eleven feet away. He no longer held the knife. He grasped at the vines. I had never seen the eyes of a man look so. I had never seen such an expression on a human face, one of such horror.
“Callias!” he whispered, holding out a hand to me.
I made my way to him, a bit before he lost consciousness. I turned him on his back, and drew him through the water, and over the vines, to where I had departed the small vessel of nailed beams. Behind us there was a trail of blood, in the water, over the vines.
I drew him onto the makeshift vessel.
The shark had taken the left leg, from above the knee.
I heard the dip of oars in the water.
“Here!” I called, standing up, lifting my hand.
In moments I, and two oarsmen, had put Seremides in the ship’s boat.
“You have saved the life of Rutilius of Ar, well done,” said the rudderman.
“He is a high officer,” observed one of the oarsmen.
“You will be commended for this,” said another.
“Why did you not let him die?” asked an armsman.
“He will bleed to death,” said another armsman.
I tore away part of my tunic and thrust it against the part of the leg left.
“Let him die,” said a fellow.
“Put him overboard, kill him,” suggested an oarsman.
“Have you twine, rope, a belt?” I asked.
“Use this,” said the rudderman, tossing me a length of knotted rope, which bore some reddish stains.
“We found it floating nearby,” said an armsman.
I fastened the rope about the stump of the leg, and tightened it. The blood slowed, and then stopped.
“He needs care,” I said, “the attention of physicians.”
“Back to the ship,” said the rudderman.
“There is no hurry,” said an armsman.
“He is going to die,” said an oarsman, looking at the prostrate figure between the thwarts.
“No,” I said, “he is Seremides, he is strong.”
“He will wish he was dead,” said an oarsman.
“He is an officer,” said an armsman.
“No longer,” said another armsman. “There are no crippled officers.”
We began to make our way, largely through open water, to the great ship.
Seremides opened his eyes. They did not seem the eyes of the Seremides I knew. He looked up at me. “Do not hurt me,” he said.
Chapter Fifteen
Seremides;
The Slave, Alcinoë
“Turgus commands a galley!” said the fellow to Seremides.
“Let me alone,” said Seremides.
Seremides supported himself with a narrow, sticklike crutch, perhaps a hort in width, at the top of which, fitted over the shaft, was a small, rounded crosspiece. This was under his arm, tight against his body. Lord Okimoto had found Seremides of use earlier in the voyage; his sword had been formidable, and he had muchly facilitated Lord Okimoto’s contacts with those of us not of the Pani. He was, in a way, a liaison between Lord Okimoto’s group and the mariners and armsmen not of the Pani. As we feared Seremides, so, too, we were concerned to be found pleasing by Lord Okimoto. Tyrtaios, who was of the retinue of Lord Nishida, had a somewhat similar role, but, if he were latently more dangerous than Seremides, he did not have the temper, and the character of Seremides, which had much to do with intimidation, humiliation, and the drawing of blood. If Seremides disliked you, or was thinking of killing you, it was reasonably clear; indeed, it pleased him that you might suspect such things; but with Tyrtaios, one could not be sure. One did not know. In its way, this rendered Tyrtaios more frightening. His view was long; he was patient; he seldom acted on the moment, but each action, one suspected, rather like the carving of a bow or the sharpening of a knife, had its contribution to some end in view. Seremides no longer wore the yellow livery of Lord Okimoto, for Lord Okimoto had dismissed him from his service. Seremides, now, had no master, and no men. He wore a short, brown, ragged tunic, a cast-off. Tyrtaios, who had been of the retinue of Lord Nishida, had now been requisitioned by Lord Okimoto to fulfill the role which had been that of Seremides. Accordingly, Tyrtaios was now of the retinue of Lord Okimoto, and no longer of that of Lord Nishida. There remained four nested galleys. Tyrtaios’ place with Lord Nishida had been taken by Turgus, an officer in the tarn cavalry, who had been given the command of one of the four remaining nested galleys. When called to flight, Turgus’ galley was to fall to Pertinax, and if the entire cavalry were put aflight, I was pleased that the galley’s command would fall to Philoctetes, a mariner of Cos, for whom I would be eager to draw oar.
We were now beyond the Vine Sea.
It had taken days to effect our escape, against the thickets of vines, and the renewal of growth.
Our tarn scouts had been invaluable, apprising us of the movements of that frightful garden in the sea, the circumambient, encroaching barricades of which might shift radically in days. That border which might lie within a dozen pasangs on one day might, as one sought it, given the shifts in wind and current, lie twenty or thirty pasangs away the next, and what had been further might now be nearer. The ropes of vines which entangled so many ships might extend their snares, as they would, but the great movements had their rhythms, and these, with tarns, could be tracked. Thus our sea road might be cut in a direction which seemed hopeless on a given day, given the tentacles of the garden, but, given the movements of the sea, might beckon on the next. The border, so to speak, as far off as it might be in any case, tended to move, and with some periodicity; it was thus sometimes closer, sometimes farther away. Charts, prepared on the basis of the reconnaissances of the tarn scouts, plotted these movements, and we moved toward the border, or edge, which, on the whole, was often closer than farther.
Even so it seemed unlikely we could have freed the great ship, as opposed to small boats, if we had not had an enormous complement of men, a small army, to work at the vines in our path, and cut them away from the ship. After the losses of the mutiny we fortunately had still better than two thousand men who might be applied to the work, some four hundred and fifty Pani, distributed between the commands of Lords Nishida and Okimoto, and some seventeen hundred mariners and armsmen, mostly armsmen.
If it were not for the tarn scouts and the complement of men at our disposal, it seems unlikely we could have effected the release of the great ship. On the final day, we heard the cry from the foremast, “The sea! The sea!” There was much cheering, from the small boats, from the towing galleys. We redoubled our efforts. Toward noon we saw tarnsmen returning to the great ship, hastily, almost frantically. There seemed agitation about. The grasping arms of the Vine Sea, from the north and the south, were drifting toward us. It had taken us longer than anticipated to reach this point. I remembered the signal, the beacon. Lord Nishida, I recalled, had feared the imminence of an enemy. It was at this point that I was suddenly aware of the movement of wind. “Ho!” cried men. The expansive blanket of odor, of the blossoms of the Vine Sea, with their clouds of insects, surely pervasive, yet seldom noticed for days, seemed suddenly rent. Briefly I drew in the first breath of the free air of Thassa which I had drawn since the night at the edge of the Vine Sea. Licinius Lysias, who had survived the sinking of the galleys of Seremides and Pertinax, rose at the bench, and pointed backward, toward the great ship. “See?” he cried. “Yes!” I said. The huge sails which had for so long lain slack from their yards, stirred. “Wind!” cried men about us. What a beautiful sight it was, to see the shaking, and then the lifting, and swelling, of those vast breadths of canvas. “Cast off the tow ropes!” we heard. The great ship was moving, like a mountain at sea. We went hard to port. The galleys, and the small boats, scattered, some being dragged over the vines. The great ship approached. Then it was abeam, and then off the bow. One of the small boats, tardy, caught in the vines, was crushed, and men leapt to the water, to be drawn aboard others of the cutting boats. The single, gigantic rudder of the ship of Tersites, was swathed with vines, but the wind drove her ahead. We saw yards of vines being torn from the sea. By evening the great ship was free of the Vine Sea and, sails furled, and sea hooks cast, she waited, a pasang west of the vines, the odor, and insects, while the numbers of ship’s boats, and the four galleys, rejoined her. By nightfall the small boats were tiered in the galley holds, and the galleys themselves, scraped clean of vines and clinging blossoms, were nested. The wind shifted to the south, and we could no longer smell the Vine Sea. Rather we felt the sharp, salted air of bright, vast, green Thassa, fresh and clean, once more in our nostrils, in our lungs, and blood. We were again alive. Behind us was the Vine Sea.
The summer solstice had now occurred.
It was the third week in the month of En’Var.
“Perhaps you remember me?” said one of the four fellows gathered about an uneasy Seremides on the open deck.
“No,” said Seremides, “no!”
“You are lying,” said the fellow, Tereus.
“No,” said Seremides, trying to turn away, but he was held in place.
Seremides was no longer armed, for he was no longer an officer. He did small things about the ship, in the pantries and kitchens.
“I am Tereus,” said the man. “I sat third oar on your galley. My back wears still the welts of your rope.”
“I was there, too,” said another man, Aeson.
“And I,” said the third, Thoas.
“And I,” said the fourth, Andros.
“I do not know you!” said Seremides. “I know none of you!”
Some slave girls had gathered about.
Surely they had business elsewhere.
I was nearby.
Tereus kicked the crutch out from under Seremides and he fell sprawling to the deck, and could not regain his balance.
There was laughter from the girls.
Seremides reached for the crutch, but Tereus kicked it away from him. He tried to crawl toward the crutch but was kicked back, and then, the four of them, with belts, and ropes, apparently brought for the purpose, began to belabor him, fiercely, he at their feet, and Seremides began to whimper, and moan, and he folded his body on the deck, drawing up his knees, and covered his head, and, under their repeated blows, began to shake and shudder. His body trembled, as if chilled. I saw blood through the back of his tunic. “Go away!” he begged. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Do not hurt me! Do not hurt me! Please, stop! Please, mercy!”
Some of the slave girls, there were six of them, clapped their hands with pleasure.
“Mighty Rutilius begs for mercy,” said Tereus.
“Rutilius, the scullion, weeps!” laughed Aeson, and Thoas and Andros joined in the merriment.
Muchly, too, were the slaves pleased.
How pleasant to see the once formidable Rutilius so discomfited.
Tereus, and his cohorts, resumed their beating.
“For the sake of the Priest-Kings,” I cried, at last, “it is enough.”
They looked up, desisting.
There were four of them.
“Be done with it,” I said.
“Perhaps you would like some of the same,” said Thoas, swinging his looped belt. He was sweating.
“It was you,” said Aeson, “who brought this wretch back.”
“Why,” said Tereus, “did you not leave him for the sharks?”
“He has been beaten enough,” I told them. “If you would beat someone find a whole man.”
“You are a whole man,” said Tereus.
“Better,” said Andros, “you had left him in the sea.”
I shrugged.
“I advise you, dear Rutilius,” said Tereus, “not to be on the open deck after dark.”
Thoas delivered another kick, from which the bent, cringing, knotted body of Seremides recoiled. “Seek Thassa, sleen,” he said.
“It is enough,” I said to the men.
“Do you seek to interfere?” asked Tereus.
“It is enough,” I told him.
Tereus looked at me, and he, and his fellows, lifted their belts and ropes, and I prepared to defend myself.
But Tereus looked behind me.
“Yes,” he said, then, satisfied, contemptuously, “it is enough.”
The four then turned about and left. This had occurred in the vicinity of the second mast.
I sensed someone behind me, and I turned. The strange warrior, Nodachi, stood there.