Episode 51
The Lifeboat
I darted back up onto the deck, my purse around my neck, hands tingling with anticipation. The storm was coming on frighteningly fast, the rain starting in earnest. There wasn’t much time. I caught a glimpse of the great kraken just as it slumped back down into the ocean, dragging a couple of screaming whalers with it. I kept moving and bounded up the stairs to get a better view.
“It’s in the water!” someone cried.
“Keep furling!” the bosun shouted. “Rubberneck when you’re dead!”
The Pegasus was moving well past the other ship now, which was shattered and listing in the rising seas. The crew who had abandoned ship a few long minutes before were desperately attempting to reboard with the help of their surviving crewmates.
A waister on the main deck turned from the gunwale, horror in his voice.
“It’s coming towards us! We’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna—”
The busun strode over, roughly turned the man around, and slapped him. “You wanna live, do you? Snap out of it. All of youse. Get moving now.”
The great wave was here. An enormous concentration of the mind all at once overtook us. Every sailor on the ship—and upon my life I do not embroider—every sailor fell at once into an intense awareness of what was before them and what needed to be done. And so we did it. We did what needed doing. In all my life, in all my years at sea, I have never felt more at one with a crew than I did right then. We sprang into action, with the utmost efficiency and purpose, without the slightest alarm, or should I say with complete alarm but without the slightest panic. Our best selves were present and accounted for: we knew what to do, and we did it. Rope, sails, wood, wind—the entire ship humming and coursing at every touch and turn. Easy does it, lasses and lads! That’s what I remember when I think back on it: Captain Polly completely at ease, looking on calmly, the wind in her feathers. The crew at work, the Pegasus straining in her harness as she ran before the storm. In truth, those minutes, though portending so much, though finite and unalterable, those minutes were a thing of beauty. I often dream of them, and am stunned to awaken in the soft light of morning to safety and comfort, the wind caught in my chest. To awaken, I almost want to say, to a lesser world. I cannot say if you would love those moments like I do, or feel what I felt in those moments of dark grandeur, only that—if you were me—you would treasure them, and know not what else to compare them to.
The storm was rising around us. The cry went up and I held onto the gunwale as the ship heeled suddenly round and the deck plunged precipitously. With a faint cry someone tumbled from a fighting top down into the big waves. I looked around to see if my other shipmates were safe, and glancing abaft the starboard beam I saw suddenly a small boat in the sea, the great back of my friend Tortoise at the tiller. He was facing the darkness of the storm, but my heart leapt. He was alive!
I looked to the fore along the tilted starboard gunwale, just in time to witness a waking nightmare—for out of the sea and over the gunwale boiled a horror of which I cannot speak, so small were the bodies of my living comrades, their blades like toothpicks in their hands, so great the many-handed horror’s seething fury and monstrous, devouring form. I picture it still, its gargantuan rings pulsing with unearthly light. It was time.
Horror boiled out of the sea, and hell followed.
Next episode: The Kraken