Kushiel's Justice - Jacqueline Carey [234]
"I saw it," I said. "I thought it was Vral's insignia.”
"In a way." He shrugged. "It is a sign that he rules in Yeshua's name.”
I frowned. "Why not the khai?”
"You sound like my old Nonna." Ravi looked amused. "You know the khai?”
I sketched it in the hard-packed dirt. It was a character formed by combining the Habiru letters Khet and Yod to make khai. Living, the word meant; a symbol of the resurrection of Yeshua ben Yosef. All the Yeshuites I'd ever met in Terre d'Ange wore pendants with the symbol. Ti-Philippe had told Gilot that Joscelin had worn one for a long time. He would have been wearing it when he taught Micah ben Ximon how to fight in the Cassiline style.
"Ah, well." Ravi peered at my work. "Tadeuz Vral doesn't speak Habiru, let alone write it. He chose the cross to show his faith. To remind us of the cross that Yeshua died on," he added, seeing my perplexed look.
"Huh." I wasn't sure what I thought about that.
"It speaks to Vralians," Ravi said. "The khai doesn't.”
He erased the character I'd drawn, murmuring a quick, reverent prayer in Habiru. And then we spoke no more of Vralia or Yeshua, for Captain Iosef summoned us all to confer over a midday biscuit.
I sat beside Urist and listened. I understood only one word in twenty, but one thing was clear; our captain was not a man given to despair. And neither, it seemed, were the Vralians. They listened and nodded as he spoke, pointing and offering suggestions.
What it came down to, I learned later from Ravi, was a realistic assessment of our situation. Our most pressing need was food, since the biscuits wouldn't last. There was an abundance of birdlife on the island, and fish in the sea. We needed to get the bow working as best we might and fashion arrows, and we needed to find the ship's fishing nets or fashion new ones.
Our second most pressing need was getting the hell off the island. Iosef thought we couldn't have been driven that far from the trade routes in a single night; that we might be near enough there was hope a distant ship might spot us. He proposed that we keep a lookout posted and build a signal pyre on the eastern shore.
He also thought there was also a good chance that he was wrong; that we could linger here for months without sighting a single ship. That our hope of salvation would pass us by in the night, unseen. That our pyre would go unremarked in the bright light of day. And if that happened, if we were still here come winter, no one liked our chances for survival.
To that end, Captain Iosef proposed we repair the ship.
"Is he serious?" I asked Ravi when he told me. "Can it be done?”
"Oh, he's serious." He gazed out at the listing, half-sunken ship. It lay almost a hundred yards from the shore, most of it deep water. The ship might be stable now, but there was a gaping hole in the hull, and it was filled with water. It was impossible to imagine we could shift it without having it sink like a stone. "And I have no idea. I hope he does.”
Over the course of the next three weeks, we found out.
I know the precise duration of the time, because Urist kept track of it, marking each day with a slash on one corner-pole of our shelter. It would have driven him mad to lay idle all that time while we labored like oxen, but mercifully, Captain Iosef thought to put him to work. Urist spent long hours laboring over the hunting bow, unstringing it and rubbing the string with handful after handful of wool pried from a sunken bale, rinsed in fresh water and laid in the sun to dry, still greasy with lanolin; and after that, a mixture of pine rosin I gathered from the forest for him. It took two of us to restring it when he'd finished, but the string held when drawn.
Most of what we did those first days was salvage. The early going was rewarding. Everyone cheered when one of the fishnets was found, and for my part, I whooped with joy when a sailor named Yuri came up grinning, my sword-belt in hand. Dive by dive, piece by piece, we retrieved