Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [135]
Six hours at the oars had left his muscles beaten. Granger crawled into the bow and tried to sleep, with only the thin wooden skin of the hull separating his body from a mile of brine below. He lay there for a long time, listened to the rain on the tarpaulin, the creaking planks and the furious concussions of the thunder. He wondered if Ianthe was listening too.
‘I couldn’t stop them from doing what they did to your mother,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to let that happen to you.’ He felt suddenly foolish, talking to himself like this in the middle of the ocean. Was Ianthe even listening to him? ‘I’ll find you in Awl,’ he said, ‘even if I have to walk across the seabed to get there.’
He must have slept, for although it was still dark his joints had seized again, and the rain had stopped. The sea felt calmer. He got up and stretched, and lifted the shutter from the gem lantern. The storm canopy sagged over his head. A few inches of rain had collected there. He pricked a hole in the oilcloth with his knife and raised his mouth to catch the water that trickled through. It was pure enough, so he slaked his thirst and topped up his flask.
Then he pulled back the tarpaulin and looked out.
The storm had moved on to the north, leaving the skies overhead clear. A thousand stars sparkled in the heavens among the pale pink and blue wisps of nebulae. The sea shone like dark glass. The lifeboat rocked gently back and forth in low swells. Granger stood up and scanned the horizons, but he could not spot any sails. His breath misted in the freezing air. He was the only one breathing it for leagues around.
He took his position from the stars. Awl would be almost a hundred leagues to the north-west. He was about to sit down when he spotted Ortho’s Chariot racing overhead. The tiny light zigzagged erratically across the sky, then seemed to pause directly above him for an instant before shooting off again to the north.
An uneasy feeling crept into Granger’s stomach. For an instant he thought he had sensed the presence of an unnatural force. It was like the time he’d almost fallen from the makeshift bridge in Losoto’s Sunken Quarter. The cosmos had seemed to shift in some subtle way, although he couldn’t say how or why he felt this. He returned to his seat, took up the oars and began to row.
Time passed with nothing to mark it but the sound of the oars splashing through the water and the occasional grumble of thunder in the north. But then Granger heard a different sound, like the distant drone of a ship’s horn. He set down the oars and listened. After a moment he heard it again – a long, mournful bellow. It seemed nearer this time. He clambered over to the stern and took out the pistol, powder and shot from the storage locker. He loaded the pistol and tucked it into the belt of his breeches.
The sound resonated across the water again, louder now.
To starboard Granger spotted a faintly phosphorescent shape under the sea. As it drew nearer he saw that it was a whale, about three times the size of his boat, with an elongated body and a massive blunt head. He aimed the pistol at it, but did not fire. The creature glided under the lifeboat’s keel, about a fathom down, its black eye looking up at him.
A sudden splash off the bow made him wheel round.
A second whale had surfaced nearby. Its back arced out of the water as it blew out a jet of seawater. And then the great blade of its tail broke the surface and crashed down again, showering the lifeboat in brine.
The whales stayed with him for about an hour, until the sky began to lighten in the east. And then they dived down into that dark and