Chapter 43
The water was warm and buoyant. That was Gavin’s first warning. Now that he was in it, swimming a stroke that one of the Guile house slaves had taught him long ago in a different life, he remembered that the confluence of the Great River and the Cerulean Sea caused odd currents and warm spots throughout the Great Delta—and that the sharks didn’t like the freshwater coming from the river. On the other hand, the crocodiles didn’t like the saltwater. Crocodiles were much more likely closer in to shore. So Gavin would be giving both kinds of predators a chance at him.
And yet. There was something of that old blue peace here in the sea. Better, of course, to float on a narrow blue luxin skimmer. Better to feel the sun like a caress on the skin, the water a cool counterpoint. Better by far to be able to see the blue. He felt the briefest pang of loss, and then pure, unadulterated rage washed over him.
Limbs cutting smoothly through the waters, he suddenly wished that a shark would come. He wanted to fight. No, he wanted to kill. He wanted the terror of almost dying and the mastery of killing, of triumph.
Insanity.
He headed straight in, not pausing to look behind. He shed the encumbrance of his shredded tunic and trousers to give himself every chance at speed. He saw a river galley ahead and swam for it. He was a faster swimmer than he remembered. Perhaps the leaner muscles of rowing were better suited to the task than the bulk he’d developed from shooting a skimmer from a dead stop in the water to flying across the waves. That was a freedom he would never feel again.
The river galley started moving when he was still two hundred paces out. Its inertia should give him a chance. He kicked.
No damn sharks. Please no damn sharks.
Water was streaming through his beard, causing a drag he’d never felt in his clean-shaven past.
Let them be blind to me, just for a little longer.
But the galley began moving, and within moments, it was no longer perpendicular to him. He cut the angle, but ended up only even with the riverboat, and then behind it.
And then it pulled away, and left him exhausted.
But he’d come to some sort of channel. He saw buoys to either side. He treaded water for a minute. When he looked back, the Bitter Cob was in the distance. But the oars were out, and it was turning toward him.
Oh, hells.
But another river galley was sweeping through the channel, from farther out. It would pass fifty paces south of him—so he swam back toward the Bitter Cob. In another minute, he saw he’d miscalculated, or the river galley was turning, because it was headed straight for him. It was going to hit him.
He started to swim off to the side, when he saw a fin and a dark shadow, that way. He turned, heart in his throat, and saw another to the other side.
It was too late to move either way now. The galley was on top of him, sending out little sprays to each side of the bow as it cut the water.
Gavin took the deepest breath he could, and flipped around, his feet pointing toward the hull, and dove backward. The hull slapped against his feet even as he sank, but he absorbed the shock and pushed off it, using the hull’s force to propel himself deeper into the water.
He arched his back as he sank, hoping he’d made it deep enough not to be crushed by the rest of the hull or ripped to shreds against barnacles. He flipped over, opening his eyes, ears full of water, pressure on his chest. The monstrous shadow was passing above him. It was impossible to tell exactly how far away the hull was.
There was good news, if you could call it such. There were no barnacles on the hull. Of course, it must be a riverboat. Easier to keep clean and moving fast.
It meant he could surface, and if he misjudged, it wouldn’t be his death by scraping and infection. Though if he shed blood in this water, the sharks were close.
He kicked, and felt his hand brush something rough and muscular. He barely saw the shape as the shark’s shadow disappeared into the murk. He lost a bit of air. One chance at this.
A bank of oars went down on one side, agitating the water. A sharp turn. It slowed the boat at just the right moment. Lungs afire, Gavin swam hard for the surface, nearly cracking his skull against the last edge of the hull as it passed above him.
He shot out of the water and clawed for anything, blinded by the spray of water.
His fingers caught in something, but his left hand pulled free immediately. He held on by his right hand alone, body dangling and then pulled through the waves. He almost lost his grip before he was able to slap his left hand up into the net as well.
He blinked and coughed, trying to get his bearings. His legs were still dragging in the water and his hands were holding on to a thick net, the individual ropes cutting into his fingers as he tried to support his entire body’s weight on their narrow cords.
The net wasn’t empty. There was a tiger shark in it. Alive. One of Gavin’s hands was right by a pectoral fin. The other was stuffed nearly into its gaping, gasping mouth. Gavin’s weight was holding his hand away from those rows of razory teeth, but one thrash—
The shark thrashed.
Gavin dropped his hand and his body spun. With the motion of the boat dragging his body through the water, he couldn’t stop his momentum. The other hand got twisted painfully into the net. He almost cried out.
Then, being dragged backward, he almost cried out again at what he saw. Four fins in the water—no, six. All following the boat. Being dragged like this, he was the bait. And the boat wasn’t traveling nearly as fast as the sharks could swim.
He saw blood course down his extended arm. It wasn’t his. The shark in the net above him had been harpooned. With Gavin at the net’s lowest point, he became the path for the blood to course into the water. He was no expert on sharks, but he had seen them in frenzy—and it all started with blood.
“Blood’s drawin’ ’em, Kleos. See if you can get another before we get to the freshwater!” a voice called out above Gavin on the deck.
He heard the heavy breathing of a fat man on the deck above him, audible even above the hiss of the waves, and he could just see the tip of a harpoon bobbing in and out of sight.
Gavin almost called out to the man. But he knew how he looked. He looked like an escaped slave. Most mariners would claim him as the bounty of the sea, and immediately put him back on an oar. Without papers to prove he wasn’t a slave, there would be nothing he could do except try to convince them to ransom him—to whom? Would Karris hear about his plight before his father would? Would the men believe that the Prism himself had come to their boat, or would they dismiss it as the ravings of a madman?
He wouldn’t work an oar again. He would die first.
The net holding his hand shifted as the fat man stepped on it and heaved the harpoon into the waves. Gavin spun again, this time with the net releasing its grip on his hand. He couldn’t even feel that hand, couldn’t tell if his grip would hold. He scrambled, kicking in the waves, desperate to swim to steal the smallest moiety of assistance.
Two fingers of his other hand caught the net. Worn to scar and callus by his months on the oar, those blessed fingers held despite everything. And now he was being dragged straight backward, giving him a perfect view of the shark approaching. This would be no exploratory nuzzle, he could tell. It was going to strike.
Swinging slowly from left to right, Gavin got his fists full of net. He couldn’t spare the time to look up and see if he was putting a hand in the captured shark’s mouth above him; he couldn’t take his eyes off the shark in the water.
He pulled his knees up to his chest as the shark struck. Jaws flashed past his feet—missed. The shark spun in the waves and swam off in a broad circle. They didn’t like approaching the hull. Didn’t like that they could only strike from directly behind.
At least Gavin hoped that was how they were thinking, and that none were swimming deep under the waves to strike him from below.
The man on deck had almost retrieved his harpoon now, and Gavin saw his chance. The weight of the harpoon meant that it would dangle within reach of him at the stern. When it came, he would grab it and yank hard. The sailor, not expecting any such thing, would be hurled overboard. For the sharks.
It meant killing a stranger. A man about whom Gavin knew nothing. An innocent.
Fuck him. Gavin would live, and he would live free, and he would be armed.
The rope stretched within reach for one heartbeat, but Gavin couldn’t get his cramping hands to loosen in time to swing—and then the sailor pulled the harpoon off to the side so it wouldn’t tangle in the net. Damn!
Gavin turned his eyes back to the sharks, but none of them came at him. And indeed, they began hanging back farther and farther. The sailor with the harpoon swore.
“Freshwater,” he said, grumbling to himself.
And now that Gavin’s vision wasn’t battle tight, he saw that they had entered the very mouth of the river, not far from the western shore. The river itself was vast, wider than any river in the world. But the western shore was close—and as dirty with the sluggish current as he’d feared. If the boat he was riding on docked somewhere nearby, at least its hull would cut the sludge, and a quay would give Gavin plenty of places to hide. If, instead, they went farther up the river, he would jump off at the Great Bridge.
In a few minutes, though, he realized that he was being terrifically optimistic. He was hanging on the back of a boat, and though his arms didn’t have to bear the full weight of his body since he was half immersed, he did have to fight against the waves trying to pluck him from the boat, and his hands were losing feeling again.
He decided to try to climb up the net, but as soon as he coaxed one hand into releasing its death grip, the other hand betrayed him. He fell into the water.
The pain in his unclenching fingers was excruciating at first, but as he flopped his way to the surface, the pain almost felt good, a promise that his hands would function again. Someday.
With the river galley pulling away from him, Gavin got his bearings again. In the mouth of the river, with the sun rising, he was far more visible than he had been before. If he could get far enough up the river, he would fall under the city’s jurisdiction, and then at least he could hope to be turned over to a magistrate rather than directly enslaved. Depending on how law-fearing whatever captain picked him up was.
Best not to get captured at all.
By luck, he wasn’t too far from the Great Bridge. If he could make it to its shadow, he would be far less visible. Swim to a huge pylon, climb up the scaffolding, and make it to shore.
He set off immediately. He’d not made it this far in life by hesitating.
When he was two hundred paces away from the bridge, he saw two things at the same time, both of which took his breath away, for opposite reasons. A Ruthgari war galley was emerging from the shadow of the Great Bridge, and the standard flying from its low mast—deliberately just a couple of feet shy of the height of the Great Bridge—was the proud bull of the Malargos family. At the same time, Gavin saw a dolphin coursing through the river toward him. It popped out of the waves, and though Gavin couldn’t see the hue, he remembered the drawings, long-beaked and muscular. A river dolphin.
Please come here, you little miracle.
Gavin had heard of dolphins saving swimmers before. He’d heard of them letting men grab on to their backs and ride. The dolphin was his only hope to make it to the shadow of the bridge in time.
River dolphin. He couldn’t tell if it was pink or not, of course. It could have been piss yellow for all Gavin cared: it was salvation.
Gavin kept swimming as the dolphin slipped right up to him. But at the last moment, it turned and stabbed its beak into his ribs. His breath shot out and he inhaled water. Before he could even cough it out, the dolphin emerged again from nowhere and hit him again, cracking a rib.
He flailed, gasping for breath. Then it hit him again, this time smacking his head. Dazed, he sucked up a lungful of water. He lost consciousness.