The Vampire Megapack: 27 Modern and Classic Vampire Stories Page 3

  “You there! Steersman!” The captain’s first officer, known as Ynay, struggled along the deck, clinging to the rope as the ship pitched and wallowed. His language was a variation of Byzantine Greek, but with an accent that indicated the man came from Colchis.

  Sant-Germainus lifted his head, his body aching with fatigue, his clothes soaked and clammily cold, his eyes almost swollen shut from the relentless waves washing over the deck. He stared at the first officer and forced himself to speak.

  “What is it, Ynay?”

  He knew his response could earn him a beating for insolence, but that hardly seemed to matter; being on running water without the protection of his native earth was more punishment than any whip could mete out. He found it ironic that this night or perhaps the next would be the anniversary of his birth.

  “The other steersman!” shouted the first officer.

  “He can’t answer you,” Sant-Germainus responded.

  Ynay was almost up to the steering-oar; blinking into the wet; he reached to shake the second steersman, then hesitated. “Is he ill?”

  “No longer,” said Sant-Germainus. “He stopped breathing some time ago.”

  The first officer faltered. “Dead?”

  “From a fever,” said Sant-Germainus, who had recognized the disease as something that could not be treated on this boat at sea. “It settled in his gut. He complained of it last night: to you.”

  “But…he hasn’t fallen,” said Ynay, reaching for the amulet that hung around his neck.

  “Because he is closely chained to me, and I can only hold the oar standing up. His oar is chained to mine,” Sant-Germainus said as patiently as he could.

  The first officer blinked, then nodded twice. “Yes. Yes. You shouldn’t have to…I’ll have the oar-master come and release you.” He was hesitant to touch the corpse. He stood as straight as he could without letting go of the safety rope. “The captain is ordering the two of you to remain on deck until the skies clear. In such a storm as this, and with long nights, we must have the attention of every man.”

  “One of us cannot comply, Ynay,” said Sant-Germainus. He looked over his shoulder at the frothing sea. “We should be nearing Paros or Naxos. You will need a guard in the bow as well as a second steersman.”

  “How can you be sure? We’re probably off-course by leagues.”

  “Possibly. But there are more islands than those two in the Cyclades, and we should be wary of them. They are around us in the dark, and we may not see them until we are up against their shores.” Sant-Germainus had to shift his stance as the dead body struck his legs. “We will all drown if we scrape a rock in this gale.”

  The first officer looked uncomfortable. “The captain doesn’t want to risk any more lives. He’s afraid anyone on deck could be washed away.” As if to support this idea, the ship pitched toward its port side and tried to turn abeam to the wave, which would bring a fatal shift in position. Sant-Germainus held the oar with all his strength, and gradually the prow slid back to taking the waves straight on while the dead man slid as far down the other steering oar as his manacles permitted. Ynay dropped to his knee in an effort to keep hold of the safety rope.

  “If you lose your steersmen, you will sink. That is certain,” said Sant-Germainus.

  “The storm could lessen,” the first officer growled.

  “If it does, we may run aground on one of the islands—if we are lucky,” Sant-Germainus warned. “If we’re not dashed apart on rocks or cliffs.”

  “I suppose,” said Ynay, regarding the corpse of the second steersman with increasing distress. “He’s got to go over the side.”

  Sant-Germainus nodded, trying to keep the steering-oar steady. “If there is no lookout, we may lose the bottom of the ships to unseen shoals.” As much as he longed for solid earth under his feet, he dreaded the shoals, no matter how solid they were, that would rip the bottom out of the ship; he, unlike the others aboard, could not drown, and the thought of lying, chained in a wreck, alert and aware until his flesh was eaten away by sea-creatures appalled him. “Then more than cargo would be forfeit.”

  “I know,” muttered the first officer; his voice did not carry over the roar of the waves and the wind’s moan.

  “The winds are rising,” Sant-Germainus pointed out. “They have changed direction three or four times.”

  “We’ve furled the sail and pulled in half the oars. I don’t know what else we can do.” Ynay was clearly worried but unwilling to admit as much to this captured foreigner. “The captain won’t permit us to lighten our load.”

  “You can put a watchman in the bow,” said Sant-Germainus. “And bring that Egyptian oarsman to steer with me. He knows these waters and he has come through his share of storms.”

  “The Egyptian from your ship?” The first officer shook his head. “The captain would never agree.”

  “He must have someone else on the other oar, and all of you know it,” said Sant-Germainus. “No one man can hold the ship on a single steering oar alone. If the other steering oar breaks, you will have no control on the starboard side, and the ship will roll more heavily than it does now.”

  “But you and…he…are chained together. Your oar and the other one are linked by the chain,” said Ynay in a desperate attempt at reason.

  “Think of the risk of my falling, or worse.” Sant-Germainus regarded him steadily as the seas pitched around them.

  “I suppose that’s what you would have done on the Morning Star,” said Ynay.

  “At the very least, had I been caught in such a storm,” said Sant-Germainus with more emotion; the loss of his merchant-ship five days ago to these Greeks still rankled; bales of silk lashed to the deck bore the eclipse symbol of his trading company, serving as a constant reminder of his capture, the capture of his men, and his cargo’s theft. “You would do the same, Ynay; you know the sea.”

  “Our captain is not so willing to put lives—”

  “He may risk one or two, or he may risk all,” said Sant-Germainus over a new wash of wave.

  “It is dangerous, to chain a man on deck in such a storm,” said Ynay, then realized what he had said, and to whom; he added, “Your crew could drown if they are brought to help you. Let them be safe at their oars.”

  “Then the captain is risking all,” said Sant-Germainus, relieved that he had taken no nourishment for more than six days, for had he received sustenance since then, he would now be enduring crippling nausea as well as severe pain in his muscles and joints from his exposure to water and light. His hunger was growing as he tired and with it his formidable strength was waning—another day or two like this and he would be utterly exhausted and disoriented by the enervation the water gave. He clutched the oar to his chest and hung on as the waves pounded over the bow of the ship, washing back to where he stood on the after-deck. “We will all pay the price for his greed and cowardice.”

  Ynay winced as he nodded. “So I fear.”

  “Then, for your own sake, convince him of what he stands to lose.”

  The first officer clung to the safety-rope, his face distressed. “I will ask the captain if he will accept volunteers to man the oar, and the watch. And I’ll send the oar-master to—” He motioned to the corpse.

  Sant-Germainus watched Ynay lurch back toward the middle of the ship and the hatches that led below. He frowned at the man’s struggle to keep his footing. The ship rolled ponderously and threatened to capsize, but Sant-Germainus held the oar, his whole body leaning into it; the wood moaned in his hands, and for a long moment he feared the oar would break, leaving the ship at the mercy of the storm. The ship topped the swell and righted itself, sliding down the wall of water into another trough, and he used this short time to align the bow more safely.

  How he hated crossing running water! At least it was the dark of the year, so that sunlight did not join with the sea in wearing him out. Even the hard months crossing the Takla Makan in the Year of Yellow Snow, thirty years ago, was less arduous than this passage through the Aegean Sea—then there had only been cold and hunger to exhaust him, not the vitiation of running water and unrelenting labor. He wondered briefly how Rutgeros was doing below-decks and hoped that his bondsman was faring better than he was. Looking over at the dead man, he said, “May you rest quietly.”

  * * * *

  Some while later, the oar-master—a massive fellow from Odessus called Dvlinoh—came wallowing along the safety-rope and unlocked the manacles holding the corpse to the oar. “I’ll bring someone up to help you,” he said bluntly. “No one can hold these oars alone, not in a storm. The captain’s a fool.”

  Sant-Germainus said nothing, watching as the body slid down the after-deck; the oar-master caught it by the ankle and let the next wave that broke over the ship carry it off.

  * * * *

  Dark water heaved around them, changing from mountain to valley and to mountain again in restless progression, but the wind had died down, so that the waves no longer piled up like hissing battlements. The ship was still afloat, but half the oarsmen were on the mid-deck, helping to bail out the holds on a bucket-chain. A wan swath of reddish sunlight smeared the eastern horizon off their port side ahead, its light revealing in the distance the suggestion of an island.

  Sant-Germainus hung over his steering oar and regarded Khafir-Amun, who held the other next to him. “I think the captain will relieve us shortly.” He spoke the Egyptian tongue with an old-fashioned accent.

  “A foolish, frightened creature, not worthy of this ship; he makes no offering to Poseidon,” said the Egyptian, a tall, wide-shouldered, leather-skinned man with arms as tough as tree-trunks from his long years at the steering-oar; he had a wide, irregular scar along his jaw and another cutting through his eyebrow, and his left hand was missing its little finger. “What made him think he could command a ship, let alone a band of sea-robbers?”

  “A family trade, perhaps?” Sant-Germainus ventured, making himself stand upright in spite of the ache in his limbs; his sodden dalamatica adding to his chill. He rarely felt cold, but combined with damp, Sant-Germainus was now distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Then he should have left the trade and apprenticed himself to a camel-drover,” said Khafir-Amun. “Ynay is better suited to this work than the captain will ever be.”

  “That is often the case,” said Sant-Germainus, thinking back to the many times he had seen outwardly powerful men who were supported by more capable assistants. “Ynay is a true sailor, and sensible.”

  “Your man—Rutgeros?—volunteered to watch, but the captain wouldn’t allow it, nor would he allow anyone who had been among your crew. He said you and they would hatch mischief if you were allowed to work together.” He glanced toward the island in the distance. “Do you know where we are?”

  “I know we are not at Naxos, or Paros. We cannot have been blown as far as Crete. Amorgus or Ios, perhaps.” Sant-Germainus squinted in the increasing sunlight, his skin starting to feel tight, as if he stood too near a flame.

  “Amorgus is long and thin and much too far south,” said Khafir-Amun. “From here, that island looks small and probably fairly round. There are no very high peaks I can make out.” He thought a moment. “The small island east of Naxos—what is it called?—that might be it.”

  “We may be east of Naxos,” Sant-Germainus conceded. “Not so far south as Koufonisia or Karos, I would reckon.”

  “Dhenoussa,” said Khafir-Amun. “That’s the island. I wish I could see it more clearly. I am almost certain I am right.”

  “I doubt we could have been blown so far to the east,” said Sant-Germainus, but even as he said it, he began to think of the long night and the furious wind. They might well have gone farther than he had assumed. He looked over his shoulder toward the west but could not make out the three peaks of Naxos. “We could have reached Dhenoussa,” he said with less certainty; now that they had come through the heart of the storm, he realized he was more exhausted than he could remember being in more than a century.

  “It’s too big for any of the Makaris, so it must be Dhenoussa. After such a night as we have passed, I would not be surprised to see Melos ahead, had we gone southwest, or Mykonos, had we been driven backward.” He chuckled to show he knew this was impossible.

  “With the seas still running so high, I wonder if we will find a safe harbor, whatever island it may be.” Sant-Germainus bore down on his oar as the ship crested another wave; his arms shook with the effort and he felt his grip beginning to fail in spite of the manacles holding him in place. “We will see more as it gets lighter. We’ll be better able to work out where we are.”

  “Dhenoussa has two shelters—one on the northwest side of the island, the other on the northeast, and there is a bay on the south-southwest side, and a few coves and inlets as well, but it is much more exposed.” Khafir-Amun recited from memory. “The southern inlets can also give protection, but not very good anchorage.”

  “If we cannot find them, it hardly matters,” said Sant-Germainus.

  “If the captain would post a watch, we would manage better. We need to know where we are,” said Khafir-Amun, repeating the cause of his anxiety. “We needs a man in the bow, and one in the stern.”

  “Yes; but the captain is not willing to order that,” said Sant-Germainus, and after a glance at the brightening sky ahead beyond the bow, added, “And I fear I must rest soon.” This admission made him flinch inwardly.

  Khafir-Amun nodded. “No man should pull a steering oar longer than a full day or a full night.”

  “Including the day or night at the dark of the year?” Sant-Germainus asked.

  “The days are short now, but in bad weather it hardly matters—every hour seems a day or more.” Khafir-Amun looked again toward the island, now appearing a bit larger. “We’re getting closer.”

  “More risks of rocks,” said Sant-Germainus uneasily.

  “I hope the captain will decide to anchor here. He should order a full inspection of the ship.”

  “After she’s bailed out,” said Sant-Germainus, and shoved his end of the oar upward as the ship dropped down a swelling wave; men on deck grabbed hold of the two safety-ropes as water cascaded over them and into the open hold. Shouts from below erupted at once, and Sant-Germainus saw three more oars shipped inside. “One way or another, she will not go much farther.”

  “No. Nor will the men,” said Khafir-Amun.

  “The captain will order Dvlinoh to beat them.”

  Khafir-Amun laughed unpleasantly. “It will do no good. They have no food. All three water cisterns have been breached, so there is nothing to drink unless we open the amphorae for their wine—not that the men would object to that. The barrels of salt pork were washed away some time last night. And the beans are sodden—the cook says they are going to spoil, and must be thrown overboard. He’s only going to cook up the few that are dry, and when they’re eaten—”

  “Then he must reprovision,” said Sant-Germainus, holding the shuddering oar so tightly that he felt his manacles dig into his wrists.

  “If he wants to get back to Thera,” said Khafir-Amun with grim satisfaction.

  “Thera: is that where he is from?” asked Sant-Germainus. As another wave slopped over the side of the ship, he wobbled on his feet.

  “So he said,” Khafir-Amun said, frowning as he watched Sant-Germainus balance himself against his oar. “He could be from there.”

  Sant-Germainus regarded the men striving to move more buckets of water out of the hold. “It is cold enough that the oarsmen will soon have chilblains, if they do not already. They will have to be given something warm to drink, and soon.”

  “They are all cold,” said Khafir-Amun. “It was folly to set out so late in the year.”

  “It was that or have the ship impounded and the oarsmen taken as slaves,” said Sant-Germainus. “Storms were a more acceptable hazard.”

  “Storms are one thing, pirates are another.” Khafir-Amun nodded slowly.

  “The Morning Star could weather storms,” said Sant-Germainus. “But storms and pirates were beyond her to withstand.”

  Khafir-Amun touched his hands together. “You did not know about the pirates, or that the storm would be so severe. Every man must decide these things for himself.” He narrowed his eyes as the first long rays of dawn broke through the clouds, lighting them from beneath so that it looked as if the sky were afire.

  “Then steer for the island until the captain tells you otherwise,” Sant-Germainus recommended, then collapsed to his knees.

  “YNAY!” Khafir-Amun bellowed as he reached to seize Sant-Germainus’ oar. “Take Sant-Germainus below and send up another steersman!”

  It was Dvlinoh who answered the summons, shoving through the bailers and keeping hold of the safety-rope as he came to the after-deck. He gave Sant-Germainus a thoughtful stare. “Is he alive?” He did not wait for Khafir-Amun to answer, but leaned forward and unlocked the manacles. “Hang on until I come back. I’ll take his place at the oar, and the Captain may say what he likes.” Without another word, he slung Sant-Germainus over his shoulder and made his way back to the hold.

  * * * *

  Sant-Germainus opened his eyes; he was still cold and groggy, but he could feel the day waning above him, and although the hold stank of rotting cargo, unwashed bodies, and the effluvia of confinement, it was preferable to being on deck in the fading sunlight. He tried to move and almost fell out of the narrow bunk in which he had been sleeping as the ship weltered through choppy water; he muttered an oath in his native tongue and heard Rutgeros answer.