Chapter 71: Naval Battle for Humanity (3)
At my shout, the whole deck answered.
Tridents came up, one after another, everywhere there was one, and the words came back over the noise and over the stands.
"FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY!"
More men were coming up out of the hold at the same moment, arms full of nets, stepping over the bodies lying across the hatch without slowing down. There were more of them than I’d have thought. Somebody must have gone right to the bottom and cleared out everything left down there.
So I took the deck in hand.
I didn’t plan anything, I didn’t work it out in advance, I simply looked for where the holes were and shouted at whoever was nearest.
"YOU, YOU, get on that one! Three on that net, not two!"
"Nets in the middle! Keep alternating the way you’re doing it, don’t change a thing!"
"Tridents on the flanks! They’re going to try to come round the outside!"
And it fell into place.
Three lines ended up forming, one behind the other, each with its own net stretched out at arm’s length. The first took the charge, closed on whatever it caught and went down with it. The second came forward over the top of them, one step further up the deck, and took over before the first had even hit the wood. The third waited behind, ready to do the same.
It made one continuous movement, wave after wave, and with every cycle we were a little closer to the rail.
On the sides, the armed men held the flanks. The ones that came too wide to be caught in the mesh arrived straight onto them, and they learned fast. They stopped trying to hit hard and started hitting where the scales were thin, under the jaw, in the armpit, behind the knee.
And at the back, others followed every net that dropped, finished what was inside it through the mesh, then tore the trident free and passed it to whoever had nothing.
Every catch armed one more man.
I moved everywhere. I had no fixed position and that suited me, because my leg wouldn’t let me hold a line but it didn’t stop me crossing the deck at a limp to kill something bearing down on a man who hadn’t seen it.
"WE’RE GAINING GROUND! HOLD!"
I screamed it, and it was true.
Between runs, I dragged the wounded by the arms or by the collar toward the mouth of the hold. That was where Blackbeard had set himself up, on his knees in the red, with strips of cloth torn off what the dead were still wearing.
He couldn’t work miracles. He had no flask, no blade, nothing at all. He tied tourniquets, he rolled a man onto his side so he wouldn’t choke, he pressed a palm down on a wound and put the wounded man’s hand over his own and told him to press, hard, and not to let go.
Nothing more than that. Just a little more chance, for each of them.
He looked up at me once and gave me a nod.
I turned back to the fighting.
It was holding. It was genuinely holding. Half of us were wounded or dead, but the formation was taking it, and they were going down a lot faster than we were.
We can do this.
We can actually—
Then.
BOOM.
The whole ship shook.
The deck went over to one side all at once and everybody staggered together. I went down on one knee. An entire line slid a step to port.
And they charged within the second.
Arthur was on the front line at that moment.
Our eyes met. For an instant, no longer. He was holding a net that was already sliding out of his hands, and he looked at me, and he smiled.
"FOR HUMANITY!"
A trident went into his stomach.
Blood came out of his mouth, a thick line of it, and he went forward anyway. He took one step, then another, closing his arms around the creature that had him spitted, and he carried it back with him.
The whole first line did the same thing.
"FOR HUMANITY!"
"FOR HUMANITY!"
They threw themselves in, all of them, taking them bodily, and they went down together onto the planks.
Damn it.
Damn it, Arthur.
I gripped the shaft of my trident until my fingers hurt and I made myself not come apart, the way I always do, made myself swallow it and stay upright.
Because it had been happening since this fight started.
It was exactly how we’d been winning every exchange on this deck from the beginning. The things opposite us fought to eat, for themselves, each one for its own mouth.
We fight for the group. For humanity. For hope.
And that’s why we’re holding.
So I screamed in spite of myself.
"SECOND LINE!"
And I ran.
Or did whatever passed for running with me, that lopsided broken thing, but I got out in front of them to buy the seconds they needed to reset.
I took one in the throat, the point in under the jaw and out the other side.
A second in the eyes, pushing, turning the shaft.
And I cut the leg out from under a third before it could plant its foot, above the knee, and it went down on the deck with its arms flailing.
The line closed behind me.
Then—
BOOM.
The ship heaved again, harder, and the world went sideways.
And in that same instant I saw three of them coming straight at me, in the air, at chest height.
My body decided on its own.
It did exactly what it had done with the wolf in the arena. I dropped forward and slid under them across the soaked deck with the trident held up, and I took one of them straight through the belly on the way. The three barbed points went in and didn’t come back out, and since I was sliding and it was flying, the weapon did all the work by itself down the whole length of its body.
The blood came down over me in a sheet.
I got up as fast as this body would allow, hauling on the shaft.
And I saw where I was.
Shit.
I’d slid clean past our lines. Completely. There wasn’t a single man near me, only the rail at my back and a dozen of those things turning toward me one after another.
My reflex had saved my life and set me down in the middle of them.
I set myself anyway.
Trident up in guard, weight on the right leg, the left dragged back behind me as a dead anchor, my back to the rail so they couldn’t get behind me.
Fine.
Come on, then.
The first came head-on and I let it come. I took the shaft by the middle, turned its point outward with a flick of the wrist and put my three into its sternum, then used it to pivot the body between me and the two behind it.
They collided with their own and I bought a moment.
I hauled the trident back. It wouldn’t come. The barbs had set and I had to plant my foot on its chest and pull with both hands, and while I was doing that a point opened up my whole left side.
I screamed and kept pulling and the weapon came free.
I spun it round at head height and caught one in the face, not fatally, but hard enough that it fell back with its hands over its mouth.
Another came at me from the right. I let myself go backward against the rail and its trident buried itself in the wood beside my ear, close enough that I heard the timber split.
I let go with one hand, took its head, and smashed it into the rail.
Once. Twice.
Its grip went and I got my trident back into both hands.
They kept coming.
One caught me in the right thigh, the good leg, and I felt my footing go. Another opened my shoulder. I struck out blind to my left and hit something soft.
Then I heard a hiss behind me.
I ducked, not fast enough, the point scraped across my skull, and the weapon that had missed me buried itself in the belly of the one coming in from the front.
Again.
Do that again.
I started using them.
Every time I felt one behind me, I shifted a step instead of dodging clean, angling my body so the strike carried on into whatever was in front of me. It worked twice more. They were fast, they were strong, there were a lot of them, and they didn’t think quickly enough for that.
But I had ten of them around me.
My right leg was starting to give. My left side was pouring blood down my hip. My arm came up lower with every swing.
Then my footing went and I put a knee down.
They stopped advancing.
They halted all at once, closed into a half circle around me, and the nearest one raised its trident above its head in both hands, the points aimed at my throat.
I watched it lift.
Ah.
So that’s how it goes.
And then I heard it.
"FOR HUMANITY!"
Not one voice. All of them.
I turned my head and I watched them let go.
The nets dropped onto the deck, all at the same moment, all three lines, the entire formation, the system that was working and that had been gaining us ground since the start, all of it collapsed at once.
And they charged.
The ones with tridents and the ones with nothing, the ones bleeding on their feet and the ones limping worse than me, all of them, straight into the mass, screaming that word.
No.
No, hold the line. Don’t do this. DON’T DO THIS FOR ME.
They went in.
What followed had no shape to it.
There were no lines anymore, no flanks, no strategy, only bodies on bodies on a deck too narrow for any of it. A man jumped onto the back of the one about to strike me and got an arm around its throat and hauled it backward, and it opened his stomach as it fell, and he didn’t let go.
I got up. I don’t know how, but I got up.
I put my trident through the back of the one killing him and dragged him away by the collar, and there was nothing left to save in what he was holding in his hands.
To my left, two men had one by the arms while a third crushed its skull under his heel.
A little further off, somebody died with his hands still closed around the throat of the thing that had killed him.
I killed some. I don’t know how many. I struck, I tore free, I moved on, and every time a hand landed on me I turned on it before knowing whose it was.
I saw Lucas take a trident in the chest and stay on his feet.
I watched him walk into the one that had put it there, take its jaw in both hands and open it up to the chest before falling on top of it.
I screamed his name. He didn’t turn around.
They were everywhere. On the planks, against the rail, across the hatch, in the red water rolling from one side of the deck to the other with every swell and rising now to our ankles.
I tried to get one of them out.
I took him by the arm and dragged him toward the hold, and he weighed what a whole man weighs, and there was nothing left of him below the waist, and he died before I reached the hatch.
I set him down anyway.
Then I went back in.
And at some point, with nothing to announce it, it stopped.
There was nothing left to kill.
I stood in the middle of the deck with the trident hanging off one arm, turning on the spot looking for the next one, and there wasn’t one.
They were all dead.
There were seven of us.
Seven. Standing, or nearly standing, on a deck covered in bodies from the rail to the hatch. There were so many you couldn’t see the wood anymore. Ours and theirs, mixed together, tangled, men still gripping scales and tridents still standing in backs.
Nobody said anything.
One of the seven sat down where he was, in the red, and put his hands on his knees.
Blackbeard was still at the mouth of the hold, on his feet, one hand on the frame.
On the other ship it was still going. We could hear the shouting across the basin, we could see the shapes moving, and I didn’t even have time to count how many of them were left.
Because.
BOOM.
This time the ship didn’t merely heave.
It went over on its side and it didn’t come back.
The deck lifted under us, tipped, and everything on it started to slide, the bodies, the weapons, the water, the men. I dropped my trident and grabbed whatever was nearest, a length of cordage caught in a cleat.
"CLIMB!" somebody shouted. "GET ON THE HULL!"
The starboard side was rising toward the sky while port went under.
So we climbed.
I got over the rail on my arms alone, the dead leg swinging, hauling on the cordage. A hand caught my wrist at the top and pulled me the rest of the way, and I came down on the other side onto wet wood, and I crawled on all fours toward the highest point.
The seven of us ended up clinging to the flank of the ship, flat on the hull, looking at the water.
And I saw them.
The shark riders.
There were still about twenty of them and they weren’t even looking at us. They dived, all together, right down to the bottom of the basin, and they turned, and they came back up accelerating.
Tridents held out in front, bodies flat against their mounts’ backs, chains hauled tight.
They came at a speed I wouldn’t have believed possible in water.
And they hit the hull.
The impact went through the entire ship and up into my bones. The wood burst apart below us, the hull caved, the ship went over another notch and nearly threw all of us into the water.
Then I saw one of them come back up to the surface.
It floated on its side. Its shark floated beside it. Its trident was buried in our hull and it wasn’t holding it anymore.
They were killing themselves.
They were throwing themselves at the wood at a speed that killed them outright, and the next wave was already coming up underneath, and another behind that, and they weren’t slowing down.
BOOM.
They know they’re going to die.
They know it, and they go anyway, one after another, to bring this ship down.
I looked at the bodies coming up to the surface between the swells.
Do they have a cause too?
Did somebody give them a name, down there, before sending them up here? Did they sing something as well, somewhere I never saw?
Have I been unfair. Have I been calling them monsters all day without once stopping to ask the question.
Aren’t they victims of these games exactly the way we are. Don’t they simply want to survive, in the name of their own kind.
And above us, the stands were howling with joy.