Chapter 13
The storm hits hard.
One moment the ship is heeling in the gusting wind, the crew scrambling across the tilting deck in the organized urgency Indrie has come to recognize as preparation, and the next the sky opens and the world becomes water.
Rain comes down not in drops but in sheets, horizontal, driven by a wind that screams across the deck, shrill and metallic.
It hits Indrie's face and he gasps, blinded, the force of it stinging his skin and filling his mouth before he can close it.
He grabs the nearest rope and holds on.
The deck beneath his feet is suddenly treacherous, slick with rain, tilting at angles that shift without warning as the swells take hold of the hull and toss it between them.
A wave crests the railing to port and crashes across the planks, knee-deep and shockingly cold, and Indrie feels it grab at his boots and pull before the scuppers catch it and funnel it overboard.
His fingers lock tighter on the rope. The hemp is wet and slippery and his burned palms scream against it but he does not let go.
The crew is prepared. They spring into motion with practiced ease, each person finding their station with a certainty that speaks of storms weathered and survived before this one.
Lines are tightened, sails adjusted, hatches checked and rechecked.
Voices cut through the wind, clipped, efficient, stripped of everything but instruction, and the ship responds to its crew with effort, with protest, but with compliance.
The ship rocks violently. A swell catches them from the starboard quarter and the vessel rolls so far that the deck becomes a wall for a breathless, eternal second before the keel catches and she rights herself with a shudder that Indrie feels in his teeth.
He's on his hands and knees before he realizes he's fallen, the rope torn from his grip, seawater washing over his fingers and soaking through his trousers.
Eskil captains it with expertise and calm.
Indrie can see him at the helm, a dark shape against the darker sky, lit in flashes by the lightning that's begun to fork across the clouds.
He's braced at the wheel, both hands locked on the spokes, his body angled against the wind with a solidity that makes him indistinguishable from the ship itself.
His voice carries even over the storm, shouting orders that Bohdi relays down the chain, each command clear and decisive.
There is no panic in his tone. No uncertainty.
He sounds no different than he does on a calm morning issuing routine directions, the storm an inconvenience he's choosing to manage rather than a force that could kill them all.
Indrie finds his feet. He grabs a new handhold, a cleat bolted to the deck, solid and unyielding, and pulls himself upright.
The rain is in his eyes, in his mouth, plastering his hair to his face and neck.
He can barely see. The lanterns that line the deck are swinging wildly on their hooks, their light useless, reduced to smeared yellow streaks in the downpour.
What little visibility remains comes from the lightning, brief, blinding flashes that freeze the scene in stark white and black before plunging it back into darkness.
In one of those flashes, Indrie sees the sail.
One of the secondary sails, smaller than the main, rigged forward of the mast, has torn loose from its lower binding.
The canvas is caught by the wind and billowing outward, alive with it, the fabric snapping and cracking with the violence of breaking bones.
The ropes that should be holding it are flailing, whipping through the air, and the sail itself is pulling against its remaining attachments with a force that's visibly straining the rigging.
Several men scramble toward it. Indrie watches them fight across the tilting deck, grabbing ropes, hauling themselves forward against the wind.
One reaches the mast and begins climbing, climbing, in this, in the dark and the rain and the wind that could peel him off the rigging without effort, and Indrie's stomach lurches.
He can't help them. He doesn't have the skill, the strength, or the knowledge.
He presses himself against the cleat and watches and tries to be ready for whatever comes after, because something will come after.
Injuries. Broken bones. Rope burns. Hypothermia.
He is a healer and the storm is generating patients and the best thing he can do is stay alive and stay upright and be ready.
The men get the sail partially under control.
Two of them are hauling on a line, leaning back with their full weight, feet braced against the tilting deck, and the canvas is coming down, reluctantly, fighting them for every inch.
The man on the mast has cut the torn section free and it whips away into the darkness and is gone.
A wave hits. Bigger than the others, Indrie sees it in a flash of lightning, a dark wall of water rising above the port railing with calm, terrible inevitability, and it breaks over the side of the ship with a sound that swallows every other.
The force of it sweeps across the deck in a churning flood of white water and black sea, and Indrie wraps both arms around the cleat and presses his face against the wood and holds on and holds on and holds on.
The water passes. He's still there. His arms are shaking and his lungs are burning and his grip is so tight his fingers have gone numb, but he's still there.
He lifts his head and blinks water from his eyes and sees the netting.
There's netting holding crates on the port side of the deck, the same cargo they'd spent the afternoon securing, lashed down with rope and covered with canvas and bound with netting that should have held through anything short of a direct hit.
The wave was a direct hit. The netting on the port side has torn free from its deck anchors, and the crates beneath it are shifting, sliding, the lashings groaning as the weight redistributes with each roll of the ship.
A second wave hits, smaller than the first but angled differently, catching the ship on the quarter, and the remaining lashings give.
The crates break loose. They careen across the deck, heavy, wooden, loaded with supplies, and hit the port railing with enough force to shatter the wood.
Indrie hears the crack even over the storm, a splintering sound that cuts through the wind and the rain and the thunder, and then the crates are going over, tumbling through the broken railing and into the black water below, and the netting is going with them.
The netting is going with them and the netting is caught on something and the something is Indrie's boot.
He feels it before he understands it. A tightening around his ankle, a sudden lateral pull that wrenches his foot sideways and tears his grip from the cleat.
He has time, a fraction of a second, less, to look down and see the tangle of rope and netting wrapped around his boot, pulled taut, connected to the crates that are already half over the side, and his body understands what his mind hasn't caught up to yet.
He's going over.
He grabs for the cleat. His fingers brush it, wet wood, slippery, impossibly far away, and close on nothing.
The netting drags him sideways across the deck, the wet planks offering no friction, and he scrabbles at the wood with his hands, his nails, anything, but there's nothing to hold and the force is relentless and the broken railing is right there, open to the sea, gaping, and the crates are pulling him through it.
His eyes go wide. The world narrows to the broken railing and the dark water beyond it and the certainty, absolute and final, that he is going to die.
He hears Bohdi yelling over the storm. A single word, a name, his name, maybe, or a warning, and then the deck drops away and the sky tilts and Indrie is gone.
He goes over the side and the fall is nothing. A breath, a blink, a moment of weightless silence between the ship and the sea. The storm disappears. The wind disappears. There is only the dark and the falling and the strange, peaceful certainty that this is how it ends.
He hits the water and the cold is everything.
It swallows him whole, not gradually, not by degrees, but all at once, a totality of cold that seizes every muscle in his body and locks it rigid.
The shock drives the air from his lungs in a burst of bubbles that stream upward, away from him, toward a surface he can no longer see.
The water is black. Not dark. Black, the absolute absence of light, pressing against his open eyes with a weight that is physical.
He can't see. He can't breathe. He can't tell which way is up.
He thrashes. His arms and legs move without coordination, without purpose, driven by a panic that overrides every other function.
He doesn't know how to swim. He has never learned.
Kalkoa is landlocked, the castle miles from any body of water large enough to require the skill, and no one had ever thought to teach the healer boy anything that wasn't directly related to keeping the king alive.
The netting is still tangled around his boot.
He can feel it pulling, dragging him down, connected to the crates that are sinking beneath him into the deeper dark.
He kicks at it, frantic, but the knots are tight and the water makes his movements sluggish and his fingers can't find the tangle in the blackness.
His lungs are screaming. The pressure in his chest builds, a burning, swelling agony that demands he open his mouth and breathe and he knows, he knows, that if he does he will breathe water and that will be the end, but the demand is primal and absolute and he is running out of reasons to deny it.
The cold is in his bones now. In his thoughts.
It dulls the panic, which should be a mercy but isn't, because what replaces the panic is worse, a quiet, exhausted acceptance that settles over him, soft and total, whispering that the struggle is over and the sea is patient and it doesn't hurt to stop.
He thinks of Dagny. Of Ermin. Of Gunnar's terrible stew and Bohdi's warm hand over his and Sven's carved bird on the shelf beside his pillow.
He thinks of Eskil.
He thinks of pale eyes in the moonlight and a hand held out, palm up, waiting.
Stay a moment.
The last of the air leaves his lungs in a stream of silver and the dark closes in and Indrie stops fighting.