The Paralos tumbled back end-over-end as the gargantuan ocean wave crashed down. Gontran barely had time to take a breath before he plunged into rushing water so frigid it felt like slamming into a wall of ice. He gripped the rope as the sea surged around him and tried to force itself down his throat. The ship had vanished, he could see nothing, so he must have been flung over the side, but the rope was taut, and still tied to the mainmast, though he feared it would tear the skin from his hands or break his wrists, such was the water’s strength.
Now his lungs burned. The game voice told him that his oxygen was decreasing. More than anything he needed air. When would he surface? How deep was the water? Gontran panicked. He needed to release the rope and swim up, but where was up?
Gontran fell, rolled, tumbled, and bubbles rushed around his ears. Then freezing wind gusted on his face in the night. He gasped for breath, restoring his oxygen. Something flashed, and he opened his eyes—they’d been closed?—and then wished he’d kept them that way. It was lightning. Blinding, jagged pillars of light were strobing across the sea, while thunder shook the bones inside his flesh. As if that wasn’t enough, it was also snowing.
Great, Gontran thought. More snow.
By some miracle he was still lashed to the Paralos. The ship had capsized and was now showing its wooden belly to the world. Diaresso and Samonas were gone.
Though the icy water felt like a thousand needles pricking him at once, Gontran resisted the urge to scream. With the game voice warning that his health was decreasing, he kicked his legs and swam arm over arm toward the Paralos. What he would do when he got there, though…
By the time he arrived, the Paralos was climbing another wave, which righted the ship. Shivering and swearing, he grabbed the rope and pulled himself aboard.
The hold would have flooded if I hadn’t closed the hatch, he thought. I’d be underwater now and dead. As long as you can keep their insides dry, these wooden ships float like corks through even the worst storms. It’s amazing her masts and rigging held.
Over the shrieking wind and that odd unearthly moaning—louder now than ever—Diaresso was shouting. Then he stopped. Gontran peered over the side and saw Diaresso’s long arms waving above the surging sea, his head dipped below the waves. He was drowning.
Gontran was so numb he stumbled into the sea—diving was out of the question—and swam toward Diaresso. By the time Gontran grabbed him, both men were almost too cold to keep their heads above water. Terrified of drowning, Diaresso even pushed Gontran under the surface to raise his own head, but he was so exhausted he could only do this for a moment.
Gontran dragged himself and Diaresso back to the Paralos. Both men hauled themselves onto the deck, which was foaming with seawater. There they hugged each other tightly to share what little warmth their bodies possessed. Gontran’s health was down to 70/100, and his stamina was completely gone.
“What I would give,” Diaresso stammered, “for the deserts of my homeland.”
“It’s hot enough in the Hell of the Damned, don’t worry,” Gontran said.
The ship climbed the crest and swung down the far side. But this time, instead of more waves, a vast darkness lay ahead. It was surrounded by those huge islands which were now closer.
“What in the name of God is that?” Diaresso said.
“New terrible things,” Gontran said.
He squinted. It was an enormous whirlpool, one focused into a towering funnel by the water flowing through a narrow gap in the islands. There was a word for this kind of phenomenon, but Gontran had forgotten it.
As lightning flashed, he peered to the bottom of the spinning depths. Far below on the seabed—which was as distant as a mountaintop from its foundations—he discerned jagged boulders jutting up like fangs.
“It’s a maelstrom,” Gontran said. “That’s what it’s called.”
“Save your language lessons for another time!” Diaresso said.
Before Gontran could widen his eyes, the whirlpool pulled the Paralos inside. The ship raced alongside the vertical funnel wall so quickly that centrifugal force kept Gontran and Diaresso pressed to the deck. As the Paralos descended, the whirlpool rose above them so that the opening to the sky shrank to a tiny gap flashing with lightning. The sea floor, meanwhile, was rushing up to meet them. Before long it would smash the ship to pieces.
No coming back from this, Gontran thought.
The wind was so strong that Gontran and Diaresso were almost dry even with the snow blowing in their faces, and the moaning was so loud Gontran feared he would lose his hearing. Yet he still heard another sound, one faint enough to be almost lost in the depths of his consciousness. When he looked back, he saw that the three pursuing Venetian galleys had been sucked in after them. Some men were still trying to row their way out, a few were reefing the sails, while others had fallen overboard, though they had yet to drown. Instead they were waving their arms and crying for help, the whirlpool sweeping them toward the bottom.
As all four ships raced to the maw in the abyss, the wind gusted with such strength that Gontran was flung away from Diaresso to the mainmast. Striking it almost broke his body, and the game voice warned that his health was now down to 50/100. But when Gontran recovered, an idea came to him. He climbed the mainmast and pulled out the mainsail again, all while keeping the rope wrapped around his wrist. There was a risk the wind would shred the sails or uproot the mast from the deck, but he was out of options.
Once the mainsail was deployed, Gontran struggled to do the same for the foresail. Diaresso seemed to have understood his plan at this point and—for once—joined him without arguing. When they finished, the masts creaked and groaned, and the whole ship shuddered as the sails snapped into place, the sound much louder than the distant lightning far above—the sky by now just a point, a star flickering in the darkness.
Gontran stumbled back to the steering oars and set them in their oarlocks. At this point he gestured for Diaresso to take his oar, and Diaresso only did so reluctantly; both men were almost too cold and weak to stand. Yet they did their best to push the ship’s prow toward the top of the funnel. To Gontran’s amazement, the Paralos began to ascend, even as the Venetian galleys swept down past them, their banks of oars rowing helplessly. Some sailors stared at Gontran and Diaresso, and even gestured to one another, perhaps giving orders to re-deploy their sails, but it was too late.
With a loud crash, the first galley exploded against the sea bottom. Now the jagged boulders were covered with planks, ropes, oars, sails, bodies, and blood. Some men were still crawling about even as the other two Venetian ships burst on top of them.
Gontran and Diaresso laughed, and then—despite trembling with cold and almost collapsing from fatigue—they high-fived. (Gontran had earlier taught Diaresso this motion from the old world.)
The Paralos climbed out of the whirlpool and righted itself on the surface. There the strong current carried them straight toward the islands. In moments the ship would run aground. Gontran was too weak at this point to row the steering oars or reef the sails again; he lacked even the strength to scream as the Paralos was dragged inside an enormous gaping cavern of rock, plunging into blackness. By now he and Diaresso were holding their steering oars only to keep from falling to the deck. In the darkness it sounded like they were traveling along a swiftly flowing river. Soon the entrance behind them vanished, and a vast waterfall roared up ahead.
“Wallahi, I should have stayed in Tomboutou,” Diaresso said.
Gontran stared at him in the darkness.
The deck fell away, and Gontran rose into the air as the ship fell over the waterfall. His oar slipped out of his grasp, but he still had his rope wrapped around his wrist, and he was able to kick from the oarlock and grab Diaresso before it was too late.
“Gotcha!” Gontran shouted.
“Yes,” Diaresso groaned. “But do you have yourself?”
The Paralos struck the water, and an instant later Gontran and Diaresso slammed onto the deck and rolled forward to the bowsprit. Yet the vessel righted itself and was soon sailing along strangely placid waters.
Hell of a ship, Gontran thought.
He checked his body to make sure nothing was broken. Aside from a few scratches and bruises, Diaresso, too, was fine, though both men were so cold and battered they lacked the strength to stand.
Lightning was flashing again, but there was no snow, and the air was warm and calm. When Gontran looked up, the storm strobed silently in the sky, but it was blurred somehow. The lightning allowed him to see that they were floating upon a river, and that they had fallen inside a cavern of stupendous size, its walls on the horizon, its interior full of mountains and islands which were themselves covered in glowing forests.
“Where the hell are we?” Gontran said.
“We must have perished in the storm,” Diaresso murmured, too weak to even open his eyes. “If I’m still with you, I must be in hell.”
“Thanks, Diaresso.”
The Paralos’s hull ground against a sand beach. Trembling from the chill that had seeped into his bones, Gontran climbed to his feet and threw himself over the side. Then he crawled up the beach on all fours, unsheathed his pistol sword, and hacked at the closest tree, which was like a date palm, but one covered in colors so bright and vibrant they hurt his eyes. Each strike of his pistol-sword made the colors pulsate.
Soon he gave up on cutting the tree. The bark was strong and he was weak. Sheathing his pistol-sword, Gontran settled instead for gathering ferns and sticks, which he piled on the beach. His flint and steel were wet, so he dried them in the sand before using them to light his brush pile. Once the fire was leaping from the black curling leaves, he groaned with ecstasy in the heat, though he could only stay a moment to warm his bones; he worried that Diaresso would soon freeze to death. Picking himself up—he could walk now—he stumbled back to the ship, used the rope to climb aboard, and hauled Diaresso to the fire. After Gontran gathered as much brush as he had the strength to find, he passed out before the flames.
In his dreams he fell into the sea and plunged deep into the depths, the bright surface churning far above, a place he could not reach no matter how hard he tried. Again and again, the darkness sucked him down, and the cold salt seawater filled his lungs. What was worse, the money in his pockets fell away, and the coins always slipped out of his grasp.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
It was hotter than ever when he woke—it was actually stifling, and he was drenched in sweat—though the fire had gone out. Everything was bright. With his eyes still shut, he jammed his hands into his pockets, checking to make sure he hadn’t lost his money. The two bags were still there—his one hundred and twenty golden nomismas. He sighed with relief.
He remembered his money, but he had forgotten where he was. Opening his eyes, he saw that he lay on a beach of gleaming black sand. Above him, the sky was not a sky. It was a cave roof, one made of something like thick volcanic glass, a kind of quartz, through which huge bars of sunlight burned down into a vast chasm, a whole inner world.
Maybe I’m inside an extinct volcano or something, he thought.
Many different birds were singing, and insects were buzzing. Other animals were hooting, growling, hissing, or groaning. He recognized none of their calls. Looking to the palm trees that loomed over the beach’s edge, he saw blue macaws perched on their limbs. Deeper inside the forest, lost in the tunneling windows of green leaves, lanky black shapes were swinging from branch to branch. Were they…spider monkeys? The word alone made Gontran shudder. He hated spiders, and anything associated with them. And at the foundation of the forest, rooting in the brush, was a group of large brown animals. At first he thought they were dogs, but he soon discovered that they were capybaras—a creature from the old world he never thought he’d get a chance to see.
Damn.
A tall thin muscular man dressed in white clothing was sleeping beside him, and the man’s skin was very black. In the old world, this would have shocked people in Maine. They would have stared, made threats, called the police, drawn weapons, or talked about property values or public safety.
On the shoreline a sailboat was beached, a two-masted galley that looked like a mix of many different ship designs. It had two sharp lateen sails, like Arabian dhows, but also banks for many oars, like ancient triremes, while there was even a poop deck, like the caravels used by Columbus. He remembered now: they called these ships dromons. This one was named the Paralos. Along with his friends, Gontran had stolen it from people who, in the old world, were called Byzantines, though here everyone called them Romans.
Now he remembered. Kambine Diaresso was the name of the man sleeping beside him, a friend he’d met in Palermo. Another man had come with them on this voyage—Samonas—but he must have perished in the storm.
He was kind of annoying anyway, Gontran thought. At least now I can relax without having to hear about any more philosophy.
Something rumbled inside the Paralos, and the hatch slammed against the deck. Samonas climbed out while clutching his turban, which was partly unwound, exposing his curly black hair. But he was unable to reach the side of the ship, and—after vomiting up a mouthful of seawater—he collapsed.
Spoke too soon, Gontran thought.
“No more sailing for me, thank you,” Samonas said. “From now on, I stick to land.”
Diaresso stirred at the sound of Samonas’s voice. Then he started, bolted upright, and looked back and forth. His shoulders sagged only when he spotted Gontran. But before Diaresso could speak, he was distracted by the lush, colorful forest which surrounded him in every direction save the wide, gently flowing river of dark saltwater.
“Have we come to Jannah?” Diaresso said. “The abode of eternity above the seven heavens?”
“Probably not.” Gontran stood and strode to the forest edge some distance from the capybaras and macaws. “We might be inside a volcano or something…which might not be the best place to be. It looks pretty, but it could turn out to be a real hellhole.”
“All of that which was created by Allah is sacred.” Diaresso stood and brushed himself off. “There are no hellholes on Earth, save for those made by man, himself but a shadow of the divine. We still live only because He has a greater purpose for us.”
“Well, right now this is my purpose.” Gontran peed against a palm tree.
“A day shall come when you repent for your blasphemy,” Diaresso said.
“Not today, though. You’re still talking to me like that after I risked my life to save you multiple times last night.”
“Even the devil can do good by accident. He does nothing without Allah’s permission.”
“Whatever that means.”
“You know nothing of the Prophet Ayūb, may peace be upon him. You know nothing of Allah’s purposes.”
“Got that right.”
Once Gontran had finished peeing, he noticed how dry his clothes were. Though his sweat kept them damp, they felt like they were made of brittle leaves rather than soft linen. His skin, too, seemed to be caked with salt. All of this was thanks to nearly drowning in the sea the night before. He would have given anything for a Roman bath, or a dip in fresh water, but the river behind him was flowing from the ocean.
What if the whole cave is like this? he thought. What if there’s no fresh water? We’ll need to ration our supplies…
Diaresso had gotten up and was walking to the river, while Samonas was on the deck singing a folk song about a virgin going off to marry someone in distant foreign lands.
“You washed her hair in the dark,” Samonas sang. “You washed it in the moonlight!”
Gontran heard splashing water, and his eyebrows narrowed.
“Ah, so much better!” Samonas exclaimed. He shuffled to the side of the Paralos deck in his buskins while clutching a dripping water pouch; he himself was drenched. “Hello there, whatever your ridiculous barbarian names are! Would either of you care for a bit of a soak, as it were? It’s positively divine!”
“Stop!” Gontran shouted, running toward Samonas and waving his arms. “Close that water pouch!”
“Why on Earth would I ever do such a thing?” Samonas hefted the pouch. “It’s almost empty, in any event. I must have squeezed it to practically the last drop!”
Using the rope that was still dangling over the Paralos’s side—the rope which had saved his life—Gontran climbed aboard and snatched the pouch from Samonas. As he had said, it was almost empty, with its freshwater contents spilled all over the deck as well as on Samonas himself. Before Gontran could yell at him, however, he noticed the thirst tearing at his own throat, and soon found himself guzzling the remains of the pouch without any thought for his companions. How long had it been since his last drink of water? Almost being drowned twenty times the night before might have made him hesitate to drink anything—and images of those great waves surging over his head flashed in his mind—but although the water was lukewarm, he drained the pouch in a moment, his thirst only partly quenched. This drink, combined with his sleep, restored his health to 65/100.
Samonas frowned. “That was rather inconsiderate, wouldn’t you say? Yet I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, considering your barbaric nature.”
“Do you know if there’s any more water aboard?” Gontran wiped his mouth.
“I have no idea.” Samonas shrugged his shoulders. “Practical matters, you know, they’re for the hoi polloi, as it were…”
Samonas resumed singing about a long-lost daughter. Gontran disappeared belowdecks to search for water.
Typical of the uprising to leave the ship empty, he thought as he jumped down into the darkness. No water, no food, no provisions or supplies of any kind. Completely disorganized with idealistic fools like Herakleia and Samonas running things. It’s a wonder they survived as long as they did.
And yet as Gontran’s eyes adjusted, he discovered that the hold was packed with barrels and crates, all of which were fastened to the walls with secure ropes. Nothing in the hold seemed to have been dislodged in the storm; it was as clean and dry as if they were still at port. Frantically he examined the cargo, and found many large barrels of fresh potable water as well as containers of hardtack and salt pork. There was even a crate of oranges shipped all the way from al-Andalus—meant to prevent scurvy, he remembered from his life in the old world—in addition to the usual Greek necessities: barrels of olive oil as well as black Trapezuntine wine. The Paralos, after all, was a ship built for a crew of dozens. It seemed that the uprising had meant to send it on a long voyage.
“Ah, yes.” Samonas struggled down into the hold. He had re-tied his turban, and was already dry from standing outside in the sun. “Now I remember. We purposed to deploy this vessel on a kind of whirlwind diplomatic tour of the Pontic coast in order to forge trade links and political alliances with the Iberians, Khazars, Russians, Vlahoi, and other sundry savages dwelling alongside its soothing waves. Laden with goodly merchandise, this vessel—and I have forgotten its name—was to sail east with the winter winds, and circumnavigate the sea before returning to Trebizond in the spring.”
While Samonas was speaking, Gontran had filled his pouch from a spigot in one of the water barrels, and he was now guzzling so much he felt his belly expand with liquid that was still cool from the winter raging outside the cave’s quartz walls. Once he had finished, he found a bar of soap—made, like almost everything in the Empire of the Greeks, from olive oil—and returned to the deck, though Samonas was still talking. There Gontran pulled off his clothes in the sunshine and soaped himself in the nude before washing his pants, tunic, and undergarments, soaking everything with soap and fresh water. Samonas followed him to the deck, then turned away and gasped at the sight of his naked body.
“I thought Greeks liked getting naked.” Gontran spread out his clothes to dry on the deck. Then he tossed the water pouch down to Diaresso. “Don’t you guys like to wrestle in the nude in front of big crowds?”
“We are Romans, my good fellow.” Samonas kept his face averted. “This word you barbarians keep deploying, Graikoi, we only sometimes use it to distinguish our language from that of the ancient Latin of emperors like Konstantinos Magnos and Kaisaras. Now, to answer your question. Shouldn’t you already know? Haven’t you dwelt among us for some time? Or are you so ignorant as to—”
“I’m just messing with you.” Gontran flashed a wide grin as he stretched his limbs in the hot sun. “It’s good to be alive.”
“Well, really,” Samonas said. “Outside of the baths or other private spaces, we remain clothed. Nudity is for poor wretches who can’t afford clothes, for prostitutes and actors in the Hippodrome, and for holy fools—for the Stylite saints who pray atop pillars for decades at a time, seeking to rescue the world of men from sin.”
“But Constantinople is full of Greek statues of naked people,” Gontran said. “There’s more art on one street in Constantinople than in all of France. But that’s not saying much, I guess. The days of Greeks wrestling in the nude are long gone.”
“Our Hellenic ancestors were ignorant of the gospels, ignorant of sin. Nudity encourages profligacy.”
“Nude women especially. They’re really the enemy of the church, aren’t they?”
“Preposterous.”
“You religious types love keeping them covered up as much as possible,” Gontran said. “You don’t like people noticing how beautiful they are. Deep down you know even the ugliest woman is prettier than all the churches in the world. In Constantinople, a lot of them don’t like going around veiled, or they pull the veil back as much as they can get away with. That’s the way it is in Trebizond, now, too. Or that’s the way it was. Veil ‘em, don’t veil ‘em, I don’t care, let ‘em do what they want. The landlords we just escaped will go back to imprisoning rich women indoors and forcing poor women outside to work and have babies. That’s how they do things in France—where, by the way, no one gives a damn if you’re naked. It’s kind of strange. I remember in the old world, nudity terrified people. In some ways, they’re even more conservative than medieval people—”
“God will punish us for our sins. He already has—by sending your fellow barbarians to destroy all we sought to build. For we were sinful, and now we have received our just recompense.”
“Hey, listen, they may be barbarians, but they aren’t my fellows,” Gontran said. “They’re the reason I left France. I can’t stand landlords. And those guys we left back there, they’re just landlords with horses and swords.”
“Thank you, whatever your name is, but I think I know what landlords are.”
“Feeling a little insecure about your education?” Gontran said. “There’s all kinds of things I know that you don’t. Even someone with a halfway decent high school education is more knowledgable than almost everyone who has ever lived. Once you get into college and grad school, you’re just disciplining yourself into jumping through hoops for the rich.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t care, either.”
“I used to love all that shit,” Gontran said to himself, looking around at the expansive cave. “I jumped through so many hoops, thinking I could make it. ‘Just work hard, and you’ll succeed. You’ll have a good job, a nice house, a car, a family, and your kids will go to college, and you’ll retire comfortably.’ Then I ended up here because some racist teacher threw me in detention. And I was going to be valedictorian, too…”
Samonas didn’t hear. He was looking at the enormous cavern packed with green mountainous jungle, all unmoving because there was no wind, yet almost deafening with the sound of life piled on life. Colorful macaws stormed through the broad misty beams of sunlight, their screeches echoing off the distant cave walls. The black river thrashed with fish—were they called sturgeon, or gars?—and long-armed spider monkeys were swinging from one palm tree to another. And at that moment, in fact, some kind of gigantic lizard—as long as a man was tall—was crawling toward Diaresso while flicking out its tongue. Gontran knew these creatures from the old world. They were dangerous. But what were they called? At first he couldn’t remember. Then he recalled the name. They were komodo dragons.
I think I’ll be staying on the ship from here on out, he thought.
Diaresso responded to the dragon’s approach by muttering imprecations about Shaitan and climbing onto the deck.
“We really ought to give thanks,” Samonas said. “For He, in His Holy and Eternal Wisdom, has seen fit to send us across the ocean in our humble little craft to this fantastic place that lies beyond all knowledge and dreams. Yet I cannot help wondering: what devilry shall we soon uncover here?”