Chapter 69: Naval Battle for Humanity (1)
At his words, hatches opened in the outer wall, all the way around the arena.
They weren’t small. Each was as wide as several men standing side by side, and they were everywhere, at even intervals, along the whole stretch of stone that separated us from the first rows.
Then a rumble came up.
It came from below, it went through the sand, it went through my soles and my bones, and it shook the stands right to the top. A deep, enormous, continuous sound, pouring out of those open hatches and getting bigger.
And everybody went still.
The spectators. The gladiators around me. Me too. Tens of thousands of people hanging on the same noise, waiting to find out what was about to come out of those walls.
To my right, a man muttered something and I watched his lips move without a sound coming out. Another had backed up a step without noticing, and a third followed him, and soon the whole line backed up together, toward the middle of the arena, as though getting away from the walls could possibly help.
My mind, meanwhile, had already started working.
The ships. The rocks. The set. That noise.
It’s a continuous rumble, it doesn’t stop, it doesn’t strike, it runs. Only one thing makes that sound.
Water.
Water, and we’re thirty men standing at the bottom of a stone basin.
"WATER!"
I screamed it hard enough to tear my throat and I watched the understanding cross every face around me at once.
"IT’S WATER! EVERYONE TO THE SHIPS! RUN! MOVE!"
A second of hesitation, then the panic.
They all went at once. Somebody fell, somebody else hauled him up by the collar without breaking stride, two men collided and set off again toward different hulls.
Or rather, they ran. I dragged this wrecked body along as fast as it was willing to go, and the sand was soft, and my left leg was no use at all, and I watched their backs pull away in front of me.
The rumble had doubled behind me.
Then a hand closed around my wrist.
Blackbeard. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t ask me anything. He pulled my arm over his shoulder, set his other hand into my ribs, and he took me with him. He was blowing like a blacksmith and he didn’t slow down once.
By the time we got there they were already leaning over the rail with their hands out, five or six arms reaching down for me, and they hauled me up along the hull, and the wood scraped my whole side raw.
And the water arrived.
It came out of every hatch at the same moment, in a crash that drowned out the entire crowd, white with foam, and it took the arena in an instant. It covered the sand, it climbed the rocks, it swallowed half of them, it slammed into the hulls of both ships and lifted them.
The deck heaved under my feet and I grabbed whatever was closest.
Somebody screamed behind me, a child’s scream, high and out of control, and nobody turned around to see who it was.
The current carried us, spun us in place, then settled, and there was nothing left but an enormous basin where the sand had been, two ships on it, and a crowd standing all the way around, howling.
We’d been split in two.
Nobody had chosen. Everybody had run for the nearest hull in the panic, and now there was this ship and the other one, and a stretch of water between them.
On the far deck, a man was searching the faces and shouting a name across the basin. Nobody answered him.
The sun came straight down on us. The water threw the light everywhere, into your eyes, under your chin, and it was already hot enough to cook in.
Arthur came up beside me, soaked to the waist, his breathing ragged.
"Nice work, mate. Without you we might not have moved in time."
"Got to pay back what I owe."
He laughed briefly, and then he stopped laughing altogether.
Because the water hadn’t come in alone.
They came out of the channels with it. Sea creatures, no taller than children, fish bodies standing on two legs, green and grey scales, round lidless eyes set one on each side of the head. And each of them was carrying a trident.
Some were swimming. They cut through the water fast enough to leave a white trail behind them, crossing from one side of the basin to the other in a few strokes.
The others were riding sharks.
They stood on their backs, one foot on either side of the fin, with chains looped around the jaws that they hauled on one-handed like reins. The other hand held the trident.
They started circling our two hulls.
They didn’t climb. They didn’t charge. They circled and they looked at us, heads tilted, sizing us up, and I don’t know whether they were deciding what we were worth or where they were going to open us.
And they talked to each other.
"Krazsaaqqezrfl—"
"Krazsaaqqezrfl!"
It came from everywhere at once, from the water, from behind the hull, from underneath the ship.
Around me, nobody was speaking anymore. One man had crouched down against the rail with both hands on his head. Lucas was staring at the water without blinking, and his jaw was shaking.
Up in the stands, the noise swelled in waves every time a shark went past.
Think. Think, right now, it’s all you’ve got.
This is a show. A show can’t be one-sided or the stands empty out. That’s why there are ships. That’s why they planted rocks that still break the surface, they’re there for the ones who go in, a last way out, one more chance.
They rigged the set so it would last.
I looked around me. Thirty-odd men with bare hands, half naked, on a wooden deck, surrounded by armed things that swam faster than they could run.
And even so, if this starts now, we get slaughtered in no time.
So there’s something else. There has to be something else, somewhere, put here on purpose.
There has to be, or every one of us dies on this deck in the next few minutes.
I pulled myself up on the rail.
"SEARCH! Find something to fight with! There’s something on this ship, tear it apart, look everywhere!"
Nobody moved for a moment, and I thought it wasn’t going to take.
Then Blackbeard barked "YOU HEARD HIM! MOVE!" and they scattered at once. Some threw open the deck chests, others dropped into the hold through the hatch.
The ship rolled.
My whole weight was on one leg and that was all it took. I went over backward, I landed on the deck, and the water running across the planks soaked my back before I got myself up again on the rail.
And it was as I straightened that I saw them.
They were already climbing.
Along the hull, the whole length of it, driving their claws into the wood and hauling themselves up hand over hand, in no hurry at all, tridents gripped crosswise in their jaws.
And they whispered as they came, teeth clamped on the shafts, which made the sound wetter and lower.
"Krazsaaqqezrfl..."
"Krazsaaqqezrfl..."
It ran the full length of the planking, end to end, under our feet, and the skin went up on both my arms.
"THEY’RE COMING!" I shouted. "GET READY!"
We fell back together toward the middle of the deck, shoulder to shoulder, without anybody needing to say it.
A head came up out of the hatch at that same moment, a man running up from the hold with a bundle of dark cordage in his arms.
"NETS! There are nets down there! NETS!"
Something went through the group, almost relief, and it didn’t last.
Three of us took hold of one, a heavy fishing net, thick, still wet, and I could feel the hands of the man next to mine shaking through the mesh.
"GO GET THE REST!" somebody shouted behind me.
We fell back to the mouth of the hold and set ourselves across it, the net stretched between our hands.
They were coming.
They came over the rail one after another and dropped onto the deck, and they didn’t rush us. They took their tridents back in hand. Then they advanced, step by step, in a line, points levelled at our stomachs, water running off their scales and pooling on the wood.
Nobody was breathing.
Then the first one stopped dead, opened a mouth full of needles and screamed.
"KRAZSAAQQEZRFL!"
And it charged.
We threw the net over it.
It caught it mid-run, the weight took its balance and it went over backward onto the planks, thrashing inside the mesh, and for a moment, one very short moment, it was working. Somebody behind me shouted in triumph.
The man on my right let go of his grip and threw himself onto it to tear the trident away.
"NO—"
I didn’t even get to finish.
Another trident came out of the scrum and went into his throat and out the other side.
The blood went across the deck, across the planks, across my legs. The creature pulled its weapon back with a sharp jerk and the body folded onto its side, and it hadn’t finished falling before they were on him.
Four or five of them went in at once. They didn’t carry him off, they didn’t drag him into the water. They ate him there, on the deck, in front of us, straight off the body, tearing with those needle mouths, and the sound they made doing it was the worst part of all of it.
I backed up.
I backed up without realizing, I ran into somebody behind me, and I noticed I was gripping that net so hard my fingers wouldn’t open again.
Nobody moved for a long moment.
The stands were howling with pleasure.
More men were coming up out of the hold with nets in their arms and stopping dead as they reached the deck, and I watched them understand in a second what they were looking at.
On my left, a man was shaking so badly the net was sliding out of his hands. Another had started praying under his breath, very fast, over and over, in words I didn’t know.
A third looked up at the white sky and said, almost gently:
"My love, I’m coming. Wait for me a little longer."
And that was when Blackbeard spoke.
He didn’t shout the way men shout out of fear. He put his voice out from the bottom of his chest, and it carried across the whole deck.
"STAND UP STRAIGHT, BROTHERS!"
Heads turned.
"If today is our last day, then let it be theirs as well! We take as many with us as we can, and we go with our heads up!"
He picked up a net and set himself in the front rank, ahead of all of us, this old man with his dirty beard and his priest’s hands.
"FOR HUMANITY!"
And something changed on that ship.
I watched it go from one man to the next, face to face. Because it wasn’t only a phrase. After what they’d lived through, after the cages, after the grey bowls, after the laughing in the stands, after years of being hung above the sand to amuse things that found them funny, that word gave them something back.
This wasn’t a fight to stay alive anymore.
It was us against them. It was what was left of men against what had taken everything from them.
So the one shaking on my left stopped shaking.
He tightened his hands on his net, blew out a breath, and started to sing.
It was that refrain I’d heard them humming downstairs in the evenings these past days. They’d been singing it a great deal longer than I had.
"They took our names from us, they took our land away,
they took our sons from us, they took our mothers too."
His voice broke apart on the last word, and he kept going anyway.
A second man picked it up. Then a third.
"For humanity, my brother, stand up straight.
For humanity, don’t die down on your knees."
They began stamping on the deck, all together, on the beat, and the planks carried it down through the whole hull.
"They put us into chains, they put us on the sand,
they made us dance for them to hear the devils laugh."
On the other ship, out in the middle of the basin, they heard it and they took it up too, and the two decks answered each other across the water.
"For humanity, my brother, stand up straight.
For humanity, don’t die down on your knees."
The creatures went still. They stopped eating. Every one of them raised its head at the same time, those round eyes turned on us, not understanding what was happening.
And the men formed up in a line, nets held out at arm’s length, feet striking the wood, and they sang the last verse looking them straight in the face.
"If I fall today, then sing my name tomorrow.
If you fall tomorrow, I will sing yours too."
I stood in the middle of them, one hand on my ribs, the other clenched on a net, stamping along with the rest.
And I sang with them without knowing the words, catching the ends of the lines, my throat completely shut.
For the first time since the hall in that tower, I wasn’t cold anymore.
They started moving again.
They gathered together, they came forward as one, step by step, tridents lowered, and the water slapped against the hull, and the ship rolled gently under our feet, and the stands howled, and we sang.