Chapter 72: Naval Battle for Humanity (4)
The other ship went over.
I watched it go, across the basin, exactly the way ours had gone. The hull lifted, the deck emptied of everything it was carrying, and the ship rolled onto its side with a crash that drowned out the stands for a moment.
They climbed the way we had climbed.
They got over the rail, hauled themselves onto the wood, and ended up flat on the hull looking at the water, and when they lifted their heads it was toward us.
There were eight of them.
Eight men clinging to the flank of a ship, facing seven, with a stretch of water between them, every one of us covered in somebody else’s blood and in the blood of our dead.
Nobody shouted anything. Nobody waved.
We looked at each other, that was all. Long enough to count. Long enough to understand that in this entire arena there were fifteen men left alive.
I didn’t know a single one of their names. They’d come out of a corridor with us that morning, they’d run for the nearest hull the way we had, and now they were the last thing standing between us and being alone in here.
Then our hull dropped out from under my stomach.
The ship wasn’t floating anymore. It was sinking, slowly, and it didn’t sink all the way. At some point it struck something and stopped dead, shuddering, half under, its keel against the bottom of the basin.
This wasn’t an ocean. It was a stone oval filled with water, and our ship had just touched the floor of it.
What was left was that back of hull above the surface, tilted, slick, and us on top of it.
BOOM.
The impact came from underneath and travelled from my hands up into my teeth.
They hadn’t stopped.
They kept charging, over and over, throwing themselves at the wood at a speed that killed them outright. Every hit shook the hull, every shudder shook a few of us loose.
And every time a man slipped, they came up.
BOOM.
The one lowest down went all at once. His hands let go, he slid the whole length of the wet wood, and he never reached the water. Three of them caught him on the way, halfway down.
I saw his legs kick. Then nothing.
Six.
"WE CAN’T!"
The man on my right was screaming it while holding on with both hands, his whole body flat against the hull.
"WE CAN’T FIGHT! Look at us! There’s nothing to brace against! I can’t strike, I can’t hold myself, I can’t do a damn thing!"
He was right and everybody knew it.
You drive a trident with your legs. With nothing under your feet, a man can only hang on and wait, and he has one hand left to defend himself while the other keeps him alive.
I tried it once, to be sure. I let go with my right hand and brought the trident round toward a shape coming up the wood below me, and the whole weight of the shaft nearly took me off the hull. I got my hand back on the rail and stayed there, breathing, with the thing still climbing.
BOOM.
Another man slipped, caught a line, dragged himself back up a meter and tore his palms open doing it.
"And they know!"
That one was talking while spitting out the water running into his mouth.
"Have you noticed? They hit exactly when we move! Not before, not after! They come up at the precise moment somebody loses his grip! It’s like they talk to each other without talking, that’s not norm—"
He didn’t finish, because the next impact landed exactly as a man below was pushing himself up onto one knee.
He’s right.
They’ve never struck at random, not once in this whole fight. On the deck, all three of them jumped at the same instant without any of them giving a signal. They stopped eating all together when we started singing. And down there, the ones ramming the hull can’t even see what’s happening up here.
And still they hit at the exact moment we’re least stable.
They know what the others can see.
It changed everything, and it helped with nothing.
Think. Fast. We don’t last five minutes like this.
The ship is down and it won’t sink any further, so it will never move enough to drown them. We’re flat on soaked wood with a slope getting worse with every hit. They have the water, the speed, the numbers, and they talk to each other.
What do we have?
Nothing. We have nothing, and we’re waiting.
I lifted my head, and that was when I saw it.
Between the two ships, halfway across, it stood out of the water.
A rock.
One of the rocks planted in the arena before the water came. The widest of them, a flat back of stone breaking the surface, big enough to hold everything left of us standing on it.
It hadn’t shifted a centimeter since the start.
There.
That’s it.
They put it there to make the show last. For the ones who go in, a last way out, one more chance. I worked that out at the very beginning and never thought about it once since.
Stone. It doesn’t roll. It doesn’t slip. It doesn’t sink.
Footing. A back to cover, a line to hold, and they’d have to come out of the water to get us.
We’d be men standing up again.
And between us and that stone was their element.
I measured the distance with my eyes and I made myself be honest about it. It was far. Not impossibly far for a man who could swim properly, but far for a man with one leg, and the water in between belonged to them entirely.
Some of us don’t make it across. Maybe most of us.
And staying here, all of us die. Every single one, in the next few minutes, one at a time, without taking one more of them with us.
So it isn’t a choice. It only looks like one.
BOOM.
The hull moved again, and this time two men went at once.
One caught the upturned rail at arm’s length. The other didn’t.
Five.
There are five of us left here, and a second ago there were seven.
So I pushed myself up.
I got onto my knees on the slick wood, one hand hooked on the upturned rail, and I screamed hard enough to tear my throat open.
"GLADIATORS!"
Heads turned. Ours, and the ones opposite, on the other hull.
"OUR DAY HAS COME!"
BOOM.
The ship shook and I stayed on my knees on it.
"LISTEN TO ME! We’re not fighting anymore! We’re waiting! We’re hanging off a piece of wood waiting for them to come and take us one at a time!"
My voice carried across the water. I knew because the men on the other ship hadn’t taken their eyes off me.
"IF THIS GOES ON, EVERY ONE OF US DIES HERE! All of us! Without taking a single one more with us!"
I raised the trident and pointed it.
At the stone.
"THERE!"
Nobody needed it explained.
I watched the understanding cross the basin, from one hull to the other, over every face at the same moment. Eyes going to the rock, then to the water, then back to the rock.
They’d all understood what it would give them.
And they’d all understood what had to be crossed to get it.
Nobody moved.
One man looked at the water and turned his head away. Another tightened both arms around the rail. On the other hull, they’d drawn closer to one another without advancing a step.
I couldn’t blame them.
Under that surface there were sharks, there were twenty-odd things that swam faster than we could think, and there were all of our dead.
They won’t go first.
Nobody goes first into water like that.
Up in the stands the noise had changed. They’d worked out that nothing was happening, and they didn’t like it. Somewhere above us the whistling started, thin and vicious, the sound of a crowd that has been kept waiting.
And they’re right, in their way. Standing here changes nothing at all.
So I sat back on the heel of my right leg.
My only leg. The left hung there, useless, the way it had since the first day, and I braced it against the wood so I wouldn’t go off crooked.
I took the trident in both hands, points forward.
And I looked at Blackbeard.
He was holding on a couple of meters below, those old man’s hands closed around a rope, his beard plastered to his face. He was already looking at me.
He didn’t tell me to wait.
He nodded, once.
So I filled my lungs, and I screamed the only word those men still heard.
"FOR HUMANITY!"
And I drove off that leg with everything I had.
I left the hull with the trident held out in front of me, and for a moment there was nothing at all. No wood, no blood, no stands, no demons, no tower, no Alice.
Only a man in the air, above water full of things that were waiting for him.
Then the water took me.