Chapter 11 #2
The familiar constellations and stars, the brilliant cluster of al-Thurayya and the two Shi’ra sisters, the jeweled belt of al-Jawza and the Henna-Dyed Hand—even fucking al-Dabaran, which I could never spot without recalling the lunar aspect that lived in its light—either they were all gone or had transformed into a vast, swirling formation that moved like a dancer’s wrist, the starlight twinkling with unnatural intensity, candles blown out and relit as though entranced.
“God save us,” I breathed. “What . . . what am I looking at?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Tinbu confessed in a tight voice. “One moment, everything was normal. A few minutes later, I glanced up and—”
I flew to my feet, searching the sky but could no longer find al-Zuhara.
I could not find anything, and judging from the murmured sounds of shock from other sailors as they awoke, we were not alone in our distress.
At my captain’s bench, Majed sat in stupefied confusion, an oil lamp throwing light over both my rahmani and his own charts and notes.
“Do you know of anything like this?” I asked as I made my way to him.
He glanced up, his eyes wide with bewilderment.
“No. The position of the stars changes, of course, as one nears and crosses the equator, but we are not nearly that far south and this . . .” He gestured to the dangerously unfamiliar constellations of stars and planets across the sky.
The moon was as full as it had been earlier, but nearly four times larger, throbbing and streaked with clouds as it hung low over the horizon.
“Nothing like this. We are beyond the realm of known maritime science.”
“Perhaps that indicates we are close to Queen Lab’s realm,” I suggested, then glanced at the sky.
“Best get familiar swiftly. If we’ve not yet changed course, that pair of stars—you see, the one rather bright and its neighbor just below—they seem to have replaced al-Zuhara.
Let us call them the Scales and head there, for that was where I spotted land. ”
Majed pursed his lips. “There is perhaps a week of fresh water left, Amina. Ten days if we tighten rations.”
“Then we tighten rations.” I forced a smile. “God provides, brother.”
With that sentiment, I roused the rest of the crew, and we tried to continue our journey.
I spoke to those of my sailors from the farthest reaches of our world: a quiet, older refugee from one of the fallen towns of al-Andalus and a boisterous young man who’d left his fishing village at the very end of Africa searching for adventure.
Both told me of treacherous waters: waves like mountains and sudden storms, but while the map of stars looked different in the skies above their homelands, it was nothing like this abrupt change.
I paced the deck with what I hoped was a confident air, aware of the nervous looks aimed in my direction, and kept Firoz in the crow’s nest as long as I could.
But he spotted no sign of land and by the next morning, the map of stars had changed yet again.
And the next morning.
And the next.
When we woke the fifth morning to a new celestial map fading into the warm colors of sunrise, despair had thoroughly set in.
I had tried to maintain our course toward the glimmer of land I had spotted, but it was impossible to chase the ever-changing stars on a watery landscape with no other markers.
There were no birds, no ships, no other signs of life or land and we had halved our daily rations of water as the weather grew even more vicious, the sun burning and merciless.
We were in uncharted waters, unnatural waters, and the crew was starting to lose their wits.
“It is that witch,” I heard Bushto, a recruit we’d picked up from the season’s returning pearl divers, whisper to a comrade. “The assassin who lurks in the cargo hold with her unnatural experiments. We are being punished for her sinfulness.”
His companion leaned close to whisper, but my hearing was sharp. “It is worse than that. I bet she attracted the attention of a massive sea beast who keeps us here, conjuring a swath of night to blind us to our position.”
Bushto scoffed. “Such creatures exist only in your imagination.”
“A spot on your eye, you were not here during our last adventure! The nakhudha fought off a beast bigger than the Marawati, with a tail like a scorpion and tentacles more numerous than a giant squid.”
I dropped from the upper deck to land before them, provoking startled yelps.
“The nakhudha will not hear you denigrating another member of the crew,” I warned coldly.
“That way lies madness, and we can ill afford such a thing.” I nodded at a group of men I’d just commanded to adjust the oars.
“Go make yourselves useful. The air is thick, and I wish for the ship to be ready if God forbid a storm strikes.”
I watched them go, unease curdling in my belly.
Was it worth attempting to warn Dalila? An effort to engage the Mistress of Poisons the other day had earned me nothing but a tongue-lashing for disturbing her work; Dalila seemed to scarcely notice our predicament, muttering that the impossible map of stars didn’t concern her.
Later, I decided. There was work to be done now. And perhaps I could ask Tinbu if he’d heard similar mutterings; there were confidences he held with the men when they were too intimidated to approach their captain. If so, we could offer a united front.
However, as the day wore on, crew gossip about Dalila took less and less precedence in my mind.
The sweltering stillness I’d mentioned to Bushto and his companion worsened and by noon, clouds had moved in to veil the cruel sun.
They offered slight relief in the heat, yes, but not with the humidity.
The air was heavier than wet laundry and when it started to rain, any aid the precipitation might have brought—joyous sailors filling drop cloths and buckets—was dampened by dread over what such a change portended.
And portent it was.
By late afternoon, the rain that began as a patter had grown so torrential that I had four men bailing out water, all of us drenched to the bone.
Shortly after, the winds kicked up, driving rain into our eyes and stirring the roiling sea into increasingly perilous waves.
My crew dashed to secure loose items while vomiting violently over the side, the ship swaying so intensely that I feared it was only a matter of time until some unfortunate soul was swept away.
The storm showed no sign of abating, the air so thick with petrichor, it was as though the gale had yet to find its release.
With each hour, the sky grew ever more mottled with green and purple clouds, resembling a poisoned wound.
The wind screamed its rage, rushing over the ship with such fierce noise that it became impossible to shout orders.
Water rushed across the deck, the Marawati lying perilously low in the tumultuous deep.
Every spare hand was now bailing, but there was only so much we could do.
“Everything that isn’t essential goes overboard!
” I shouted, rain blasting my face. “Cargo, clothes—anything! Save only our food, weapons, and tools. Then fasten yourselves to the ship!” I already had the tether I typically used in such situations looped around my belt, but I forced myself to do another round of the Marawati first, making sure everyone was in position.
Majed was strapped in at my captain’s bench, and Tinbu supervised the vulnerable rudders.
There was no steering through waters like this, only praying we stayed afloat and letting the waves take us where they would.
Another wave washed across the deck, and I sent a fervent prayer to the Almighty as twin strikes of lightning dashed across the sky, illuminating a churning sea with molten steel swells taller than mountains heaving their impossible bulk across the horizon.
If the storm lasted much longer, we were doomed.
“Keep bailing out!” I shouted, tethering my strap to the railing along with the other men struggling to keep the Marawati from being inundated. To encourage them, I took up a barrel, dumping water over the side as more surged in. This was no time to worry about concealing my uncommon strength.
“Rocks, nakhudha!” Firoz suddenly screamed. “Dead ahead!”
Rocks? Were we nearer land than we realized?
But there was no time to ponder it, no way to properly steer in this maelstrom of driving rain and waves larger than my vessel.
Instead, as we rode the next swell, rising higher and higher, I yanked free my tether and rushed to the closest rudder.
Three others joined me as we pulled hard.
My arms burned, battling the furious ocean an impossible task.
“More to the right!” Firoz shouted. “More! MORE!”
Additional men rushed to join us, pulling with all our weight. We were almost certainly going to damage if not shatter the rudder outright, but if we were dashed on the rocks in this storm, we would all drown either way.
“Pull!” I cried, spotted the wet slab of black rock just ahead. It melted into the storm-dark sky, lethal protrusions concealed by the driving rain. “PULL! There, there, there—God is greatest!”
We passed the slab so close that I could have reached out and touched it.
The rudder smashed into the side as we scraped by, an ominous grating coming from the hull, but then another wave carried us along and we were charging down the swell like a barrel rolling down a hill.
Two men went flying toward the ship’s bow, the rest of us still clinging to the damaged rudder.
God, please, I begged, my silent entreaty joining the wails and prayers of the sailors around me. Have mercy on us.
A bolt of lightning struck so close that I could feel the buzz of energy dancing over my skin.
And then something else, an abrupt change in the wind as though everything were being sucked upward.
The air that had been thicker than stew chilled so fast that anyone whose life depended on the weather knew it was a terrible sign.
“Firoz, get down!” I cried, swiftly resuming my bailing as we climbed again, like a piece of bobbing driftwood in a foaming, churning bath. “Everyone—hold on!”
The wind went wild, a possessed entity screaming its rage and ripping over the deck.
The barrel was torn from my hands, my rain-soaked garments whipped around my body like a flag, and then worse—there was a sudden pressure downward like a great punch, like the wind was pounding us into the sea as though grains in a mortar.
Men were screaming, the Marawati’s wooden ribs were groaning, and then with an ominous earsplitting crack . . . the main mast snapped in half.
The Marawati was carried with it, immediately listing.
“Cut it loose!” I screamed, my carpenter already rushing over with a saw. The heavy, sea-ready beam, the expensive sail—none of it mattered if it dragged us down to a watery death.
Knife at hand, I raced to the shattered mess of the drowning mast. “Firoz!” I searched for the boy in the tangled remnants of the crow’s nest, finally spotting his dark curls as he spluttered and fought to remain above water.
I tethered myself and climbed out on the sinking beam, clutching the slick wood.
Firoz gasped for breath, a wave washing over his face. “—stuck,” he choked out. “My leg . . .”
I cut through what lines I could reach as swiftly as possible, ripping apart the batting with my hands, but a hard jerk on my tether stopped me when I tried to grab Firoz, the youth still an arm’s length away.
I swore, but there was no further slack, and with the men working furiously to sever the mast, the tether was all that would bring us back to ship.
Even so, I reached out. “Your knife, boy,” I urged as a salty wave slapped me in the face; I could scarcely see like this.
“Can you cut away what’s tangled round your legs?
” The wind whipped the tail of my turban into my face, more rain driving into my eyes.
“Firoz!” I snapped when he began to sob, clearly too terrified to act.
Another swell washed over his head. “Maman!”
The word cut through me. Desperate, I ripped off my outer cloak, unfurling the cloth and tossing him one end. “Grab it and I’ll pull you!”
The sinking mast shuddered under my body with each thwack of the carpenter’s axe. “Nakhudha!” he cried. “Come back!”
“Sever it!” I shouted. “That is an order!” The Marawati did not have time for me to climb back up the tangle of wrecked wood. Firoz was trying to grab the end of my cloak, the water yanking it to and fro. Finally he caught it with a choked wheeze, wrapping it around his hand.
“Hold tight!” I dragged him forward—or rather I tried, heaving not only Firoz but the debris that still snarled his body.
“Amina!” It was Tinbu, sounding shattered. “We cannot delay!”
“SEVER THE DAMNED MAST!” I crouched on the bobbing beam, trying to balance as I held tight to the cloak, the only thing keeping the boy from being washed away on the next churning wave.
With a grief-stricken wail, Tinbu brought the axe down in a final crunch.
I leapt into the water as the mast dropped beneath my feet, trying to jump as clear of the debris as possible while still clutching my end of the cloak. Instantly submerging, I fought to the surface, taking a deep breath as the water dragged my body around like a shark ripping into prey.
But God be praised, my tether still held. I dragged Firoz to my chest, finally ripping apart the net of ropes that entangled him.
“Pull us in!” I shouted to the crew, then to Firoz, “I’ve got you, boy. I’ve got you.” I looped the twisted cloak under his arms, meaning to tie him to the tether as well.
Firoz clung to me, sobbing and shaking as his fingers dug into my shoulder. I could barely hear anything over the crashing sea and furious storm, save his breathy apology. “I am sorry. I am sorry . . . Nakhudha!” he screamed. “Watch—”
Pain exploded at the back of my skull and the world went dark.