Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [80]
But it was the third that did for us. While we’d held our own against those two outriders, she’d been gathering, drawing the angry sky into a thick funnel like a gigantic, bruised lily flower. The first two ran far away, taking the gale with them. They left us suddenly still, breathless and dumb. Then the sky flashed and she was there, with a density to her, an awesome gravity that stopped the blood.
The top was like a trumpet or a chanterelle, a horn of plenty from which the massed clouds of the canopy had burst forth like foam. The stem was a mighty trunk, grey, shot through with quivers of lightning, and she stood upon a shimmering darkness on the sea.
“Let go all halyards,” came the cry, but there was no time.
She charged. The wind came before, screaming. We should have got away. We changed course, tacked about like a flying bat, but she mimicked us, played Simon Says, turning as we turned, changing as we changed. You’d have sworn there was a brain in that thing. But they do that. I know it now. I’ve spoken with many a sailor’s seen the same or near enough. They chase, don’t ask me how, but they do. I didn’t know that then though, and its dogged, stalking pursuit horrified me in more than a merely physical way. I was filled with supernatural dread, as if what came truly was a living monster.
As of course she was.
She chased us no more than a mile full-out flying before we were hopelessly outrun and she hit. I flew out of myself. All was unaccountably silent for a second. I was a thoughtless fear unbodied and unbrained, a fleck of foam on my sleeve, a plummeting spar, a firy salamander tipping a wave of the sea. I was all these things, but I was not me. Me was gone out somewhere, dreaming it all and watching afar. Yet I felt it all—the shock of cold, wet air knifing down my throat and singeing my lungs, the sharp throb of a panicked heart in my chest, the warm sea a huge, shining coil, dragon green, a tongue licking over the rail. Sound crashed in with the sea. A horrible cry of pain, outraged and childish. Whose? A fiendish roaring, shouting, things falling spear-like around me on the deck.
The world rolled round and I rolled with it, banged and winded and beaten by the timbers of the deck and the hard outcrop of the tryworks that cracked my knee and sent a fire screaming up into my chest. I fell from there as the world swung all around my head, lurched again, grabbed and hung onto the weather rail.
We were on our beam ends, right over on our side with the waist of the ship awash. I saw Gabriel fly over the helm, and Mr. Rainey running backwards on his heels with his arms whirling. His face was stiff, features set in rock, though pure horror stared out of his eyes. I saw Wilson Pride swim out of the cookhouse door, and a tide of rats washed past me on a shivering black stream. Still screaming whoever it was, a shocking scream, a stabbing scream, a bad-hurt scream. Who? I took a mouthful of sea, it went up my nose and burned me. Abel came sliding along the upper deck, shouting: “The boats! The boats!” and I heard the captain’s voice come deep and loud as a foghorn through a mist of spray. A hand grabbed my collar and hauled me away.
“Jump to, Jaf!” Dan said brightly. “There’s work to be done,” and he shoved me along before him. I saw one of our whaleboats carried away and another stove in, smashed to match wood against the gunwale. We lurched along the side of the cookhouse. A great commotion was taking place beneath our feet.
The mainmast broke with a great crack, toppling like