Ten for Dying

DAY THREE
Chapter Seventeen

John knew what it felt like to drown.

The gusting wind whipped rain and blinding, stinging sheets of salt spray across his face. Opening his mouth to gulp in air, he inhaled water instead. He gasped and choked. His boots slid on slick planks as the deck tilted. He grabbed blindly at the rail to avoid falling. A splinter dug into his palm. He didn’t loosen his grip. The Leviathan continued to roll.

It was going to capsize this time.

But again, at what seemed the last moment, the ship righted itself.

He kept a death grip on the rail and stared out into a chaotic, nacreous twilight of roiling fog and rain. It was past dawn but the storm which had kept him awake all night had not abated. The wind had picked up and the waves increased.

In summer the winds usually came from the northwest, assisting the prevailing currents to hurry ships out of the Sea of Marmara, but the night before they had shifted to the south. It was peculiar, almost inexplicable, as if the hand of evil were upon them. Or so John had been told by one of the rustic fellow travelers he had taken to be a farmer.

Even farmers knew more about sailing than John. He knew only that he dreaded traveling across the bottomless pit of the sea.

Why the captain had decided to leave their overnight mooring was a total mystery.

John had passed the night pressed against Cornelia’s back, listening to rain clattering against the deck above, hearing the mingled moans and cries of the Leviathan and her restlessly dreaming passengers. Cornelia’s even breathing told of the calm oblivion he only wished for. How could she sleep when he could not? In the time they had been together, wounded though he was, she had come to seem a part of him and he part of her.

In the dark sour-smelling hold, battered by the sea, John found himself staring into the abyss he had confronted so often as a younger man during his first years in Constantinople, when he had still been a slave.

He was on a voyage to nowhere. An estate in Greece? He couldn’t imagine it. He had lived on the move, on the borders of the empire as a mercenary, had existed as a captive in Persian encampments, and lived in Constantinople as both a slave and a high official in turn. Through all the years he had fought to survive, battled steel and political intrigue to go on living. Was there truly anything else?

He had dreamt often enough of settling down in the country but now he realized if he did he would be no better than a shade, wandering Hades without purpose.

When the rain and wind let up for a time, John could here the occasional nightmare-induced cry or groan from a fellow passenger and the low prayers of the aged pilgrim on the other side of the thin partition. She mumbled on tirelessly to her god and the mother of her god. To some of these Christians prayer came as easily as breathing.

The pilgrim was convinced-or trying to convince herself, judging from the way she kept repeating her prayers-that the Lord would save her, as he had saved Saint Paul. She counted on her Lord’s steadfast love. Or so she said repeatedly.

So far as John had observed there was no steadfast love in this world except between two human beings and that was rare. To throw oneself on the mercy of some imagined, invisible god of love was nothing more than surrender. Mithra demanded His followers battle the darkness, not meekly await salvation from it.

And wasn’t John battling the darkness by working for Justinian, who imposed law and justice on the empire? Wasn’t Justinian on the side of the light? Or was the emperor part of the forces of darkness, as many supposed?

Would John ever be certain?

Finally he had risen quietly, letting Cornelia sleep, and gone out on deck.

Captain Theon, a short, rotund man with a fiery red face, was speaking to a sailor who was taking soundings. John overheard bits of the conversation.

“I expected this to blow over by now,” the captain was saying.

The other made what must have been a disparaging remark, judging from the captain’s scowl.

“I’m not throwing out the anchors. If we can’t see the shore we’re not in the shallows. Keep testing the depth.”

The rattle of wind-driven rain obscured most of the sailor’s reply.

“…besides we’re well past…Yes, I know when the wind shifted. That’s why…you think I’m a fool? Who’s captain on this ship?”

John told himself to be calm. Theon obviously did not consider their situation to be as dire as it seemed. This was a normal squall, terrifying only to a person unfamiliar with sailing.

The crew were doing whatever needed to be done, whatever that might be. It made John furious to be rendered helpless by his ignorance, dependent on these strangers.

The sea, vast and mindless, was not amenable to reason nor could it be vanquished by steel.

The deck shook as a wall of water smashed into the hull.

John knew he should return to Cornelia below, protected from the sea only by fragile timbers.

He hesitated to take his hand off the rail. He had been squeezing it so tightly his fingers were white, except where they were stained with red. He was bleeding freely from the splinter in his palm.

He paused, allowing a gust to die before releasing his grip.

Then he was hurtling forward, smashing into the back of the cabin. There was a shrieking, grinding noise and the ringing snap of splintering wood, a sound he had heard long ago when his company had battered down the gates of a besieged town.

He tried to brace himself against the cabin as the Leviathan began to swing around abruptly, as if trying to shake off the crew. Shouts and curses rang out over the groaning of the hull.

John had to reach Cornelia.

Another jarring crash vibrated through the ship and he found himself on his hands and knees, crawling up a tilting deck. Up and up the deck rose, a wooden cliff rearing itself in front of him.

Disoriented, he glanced around. He appeared to be suspended over the black water.

A wave hit him like a giant’s hand and he felt himself sliding down the impossibly tilted deck.

***

Cornelia woke from a nightmare.

No, not a nightmare. The jolt and the deafening crack of breaking wood had been real. Passengers shouted and screamed.

She turned toward John as the ship rolled.

She felt his absence before she saw he was gone.

There was another crash and the ship rolled again and settled back down with a concussion so jarring Cornelia was surprised the hull didn’t disintegrate immediately. It was in the process of doing so, to judge by the tortured grating and creaking filling the dark cavern below deck.

John must have gone up on deck while she slept.

She scrambled from the compartment and climbed out into the gray rain that rattled onto the deck with a noise resembling thousands of games of knucklebones.

The captain was bawling orders to the crew.

Cornelia scanned the deck in a panic.

Only strange faces, not the face she sought.

“John!”

There was no answer.