The Sea Peoples(98)
“Get for’ard and out oars. Move your arses, all of you!” Pip shouted.
No, Captain Pip shouted that, his mind thought, as he scrambled to obey and a large foot landed in the small of his back.
The oars were loose in the bottom of the craft. They all grabbed one and shoved it through the thwarts; John was the second-slowest, with Alan hanging back a fraction of a second to see what they did. He wasn’t a total novice at oars, though; Boise did have lakes, and a few big rivers, and presumably he’d gone fishing now and then.
Though I wouldn’t want to eat anything caught in these waters.
“Captain!” Deor called. “Take us downstream!”
John could see back behind them; it was an advantage of running away while rowing. It was a big river, not on the scale of the Columbia but comparable to the lower Willamette, say a long bowshot and a half across. The thing—
Wasn’t there anymore? They all rested on their oars for a moment.
Or at least I can’t see it, John thought as the village faded into the darkness.
He muttered a sincere prayer—the sincerity of his prayers in general was improving, though he thought the cost was a bit excessive—of thanks. The others did as well, in their varied fashions.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW
“Bloody glad to see the last of . . . whatever that was,” Pip said from the tiller of their hijacked boat.
Gnomically, she added: “I’m never going to sneer at Uncle Pete’s taste in fiction again.”
Deor was at the oar just sternward from John; he handled himself on boats and ships with the workmanlike competence he showed at most things besides music, where he shone to a degree that made John a little envious—though when you added in fifteen years more experience . . .
“What was that thing? The . . . demon, I suppose it was?”
Deor shrugged his shoulders, and his mail shirt rustled and clinked. “I don’t know,” he said.
“You’re an honest man, Deor Godulfson,” Pip called—she was less than ten feet away.
Deor laughed, a little hoarsely. John realized he must have been shouting the commands to move back step by step, shouting against the muffling power that had nearly crushed them into paste.
“I think,” he said, “that it is part of the . . . story, the story of the Yellow King. Perhaps an avatar or emissary of that Power, perhaps a great servant, like the Pallid Mask. What worries me is that it sensed us. Now the Power will seek to see.”
“Speaking of which—” Alan said.
A man was standing on the bank of the river, laughing, with his arms stretched over his head. As they passed they saw his empty, bleeding eye sockets and that each hand held an eyeball in its palms. They turned and followed the boat as it drifted past . . .
“Enough jawing,” Pip said in that crisp tone of command that seemed to operate directly on your nerves. “If we need to get downstream, let’s go.”
That’s not the way Father did it, or Mother does . . . but it works, John thought. She has what they had, the Baraka, the thing that rulers need.
“Toa, give us the stroke,” Pip said. “This boat deserves a good one, it really flows with the water.”
The Maori did, in his growling bass, and they all fell into the rhythm of it:
“E pari ra koe te tai,
Whakaki ana mai
Nga ngutu-awa.
Hui nga ope au
Ki te tai uru.
Aue! Tiaia!
Aue! Koia hoki.
Huˉkere, Waikato!
Aue, ku-umea!
Tuˉpara, Tuˉpara,
Tuˉpara, Waikato!
Toˉia, e!”
John could feel the silken smoothness of the way the boat cut the low riffles of the river’s current, and leapt to the stroke of the oars. When Toa finished Pip took it up; he guessed it was the same chant in English, because it had the feel of something translated, an alien rhythm:
“Flowing there is the ocean tide,
Surging towards me,
Filling up the mouth of the river.
Gathering are the armies
At the sea of the west.
Now dip the paddles!
That’s it! Come along!
Harder, faster, O Waikato!
Oh, a long, strong stroke!
Now quickly, quickly!
Quicker, Waikato!
Pull away O!”
Rowing in armor wasn’t as easy as in ordinary clothes, but wasn’t impossibly difficult either—you could do acrobatics in a good suit of plate if you were strong and experienced, and the set his mind had conjured was the same as he usually wore, one made of chrome-alloy steel by master-craftsmen. It felt the same, which meant he just clanked a bit as he swayed forward and back pulling on the oar.
“Where are we going?”
“The place we came in when we left . . . Baru Denpasar, the world, the real world,” Pip said. “Which only Deor can find, of course, so please don’t get eaten by any monsters, eh? The only thing I’ve found here I like are Johnnie and this boat.”
“I will do my best, my lady Captain,” Deor said.
“The place with the Hell Horse,” Pip added. “Which we evaded by running as fast as we could.”
John half missed a stroke. “Are . . . you sure that’s what it was?” he said.