The Southern Trail (Book 4) (32 page)

Those were the captain's last words, as the ship struck a submerged sandbar while traveling at its high speed.  It came to a full stop so suddenly that men and objects went flying forward, and the mast that held the sails snapped loudly, then toppled forward and landed on top of the captain, crushing him beneath its weight.

Marco tumbled forward and was thrown over the bow of the ship.  He flew through the air and landed solidly in the shallow water that flowed over the sandbar they had struck.  He lay on his back in a momentary daze from the impact.  He shook his head and wiped his face as he listened to the shouts and screams taking place above him on the deck of the ship.

After moments of confusion, Marco stood and splashed over to the ladder built into the side of the ship and climbed back on board.

Numerous men were injured, and no one seemed be in charge, as the boat shivered and shook from the impact of the river current that struck it.

Marco ran to the captain; the man was clearly dead, his eyes staring vacantly up into the sky.  There was no other officer on board; the captain had directed all activities on board the ship.  Not knowing what else to do, Marco started working around the deck, helping to set free those who were trapped by the cargo that had hurled across the ship.  Two others were dead, and several were injured, which led Marco to finally remove his gloves and offer Diotima’s spring water to the astonished crewmen who were injured.

By noon time the ship was settling into a state of bare organization, and Marco found that the crew was looking to him to make the decisions.

"We need to bury the dead," he proposed, and organized a burial party to take the victims of the ship wreck up out of the river's floodway to bury them.  When they returned to the ship it was late afternoon.

"How did this happen?" Marco asked the assembled remaining crew.  "Who took my powder and made this happen?"

"It was Ferguson," A voice spoke up, naming one of the men who was conveniently dead.

"I want a pair of you to go down in the hold and check the hull to make sure we don’t have any damage to the beams or the ribs of the ship," he ordered and pointed to two men he thought seemed reliable from what he had observed on the journey.

While he waited on the report back, he went among the injured men and offered them more of the spring water.

"Master, are you a sorcerer?" one man asked.

There were many ears listening for his response, Marco realized as the ship grew silent, except for the sound of the river water flowing best.

"Yes," he answered without a pause.  "I am a sorcerer.  If we all work together, I'll do my best to get us all out of here and on our way to Tabora."

"What will you do?  When will you do it?" a voice asked.

"We won't do anything today," Marco answered.  "Let's find out what shape the ship's in, and then we may be able to do something tomorrow."

The report on the condition of the hull came back an hour later.  “It’s in good shape; we drove up on sand instead of rocks, and that saved us,” one of the men reported.

“It’ll be a bear to get us back out in the water again,” the other man who had been on the inspection opined.

“That’s a problem for another day,” Marco said aloud.  He silently wondered if he could use sorcery to make the ship move from the sandbar where it was trapped; it was a question he would face in the morning.

He had the men remove the broken mast and the ropes and sails, clearing the deck of the debris that littered it, and then they posted guard duties for the evening and all fell asleep.

When morning came he awoke to the sound of shouting, and discovered that another ship was on its way upriver, using the morning breezes to give it a few miles of progress; the men on the ship had told him that the journey up river could often take five or six times as long as the trip down stream.

The other ship had anchored near the wreck of Marco’s ship, and as Marco tried to find out what the cause of the ruckus was, one more ship – bound downstream – came into view and also dropped its anchor nearby.

“What’s going on?” Marco asked one of the crew members.  “Are they offering to help?”  He couldn’t understand why the men on the ships were screaming insults at one another.

“Help?  Hardly!  They claim that since we’re wrecked, they’re entitled to claim salvage rights, and they want to come plunder our cargo,” the man replied to Marco, then spit over the side of the ship.

“That’s ridiculous!” Marco snorted.  “There’s no right to steal from us, especially not when we’re right here.”

“Well, there are more of them than there are of us, especially the few healthy ones we’ve got, and now there are two crews that think they’ll get some spoils from us,” the man next to him said.  “See, they’ve about got their courage up,” he motioned to where men from the nearby boats were slipping over the side of their own ships, spears, clubs, and swords in hand.

“Stay back!” Marco shouted, moving down the side of his ship, past his men who stood grim-faced, weapons ready to try to repel the large group of invaders.  “Stay back or suffer the consequences!” he warned the approaching force.

He knew that his words would be fruitless, but he still felt compelled to make the effort.  Seeing no reaction, he raised his right hand over his head, prepared to give a more noticeable warning.  He focused his attention on the hand and its abilities – then fired a beam of pure white light straight up in the sky, a shimmering column of brilliant energy that shocked those who saw it – both those approaching the boat as well as those atop the boat’s deck.  It was a mild display of power, one that did not disrupt the flow of energy to Ellersbine.

There were shouts of shock and disbelief, while Marco ceased the intimidating display of his abilities.  He had hoped that he could make the journey along the river without any demonstration of his sorcery skills.

He watched as the men in the water stood still, observing him intently.  They were not retreating, though they were not advancing.

He lowered his hand from over his head and pointed it at the water near where the men stood, then released a pulse of energy, one that hit the water and caused a burst of steam.  Men began to flee towards their own ships rapidly.

“Go!  Go now before I aim at your ships!” Marco shouted, growing increasingly furious at the attempted piracy.  He had a boat run up on a sandbar, several injured men on the deck, and three men buried in the ground beyond the river.  He had been forced to reveal his power before numerous witnesses.  All the things going wrong were accumulating into an intolerable list of grievances.

He pointed his hand at the water immediately next to each of the boats and began firing off blazing shots that sent geysers of steam gushing up over the men who were driven to panic as they tried to move their ships as quickly as possible.  Marco felt himself growing weak from the dramatic overuse of his energy, but he couldn’t help feeling the need to vent his frustration over the events in the river – and the events before, when Ellersbine had run away.

The boats were moving away, both of them using oars to flee downstream, the one boat even reversing its course and stroking its oars as fast as the crew members could manage.  Marco was chasing them with his shots, until he suddenly felt deep, profound exhaustion setting in.  He fired one last shot, then stopped.  He knees buckled, and he grabbed hold of the ship’s railing to keep from falling to the deck.  The line of energy to Ellersbine was growing erratic, he regretfully saw.

“Master, are you well?” one of the crew members asked from a distance, afraid to approach the angry sorcerer.

“I did too much,” Marco gasped.  Despite his efforts, his knees hit the deck, and his vision grew dark.  “Lay me down somewhere so that I can rest,” he told the man, and then he blacked out.

Chapter 27

When Marco awoke, it was morning, again.   He had slept through an entire day and night.  He awoke feeling a terrible headache as a result of his extravagant use of his energy, and he immediately resorted to sucking spring water from his finger.

“At least I didn’t kill anyone,” he mumbled to himself.

“What’s that sir?” a voice asked, and Marco turned to see that he was laying on the deck next to the invalids who had been injured in the crash, the nearest of who had spoken.

“I said that at least I didn’t kill anyone when I threw my little fit yesterday,” he repeated, as he sat up and looked at the injured men.  They all looked better than they had on the day of the wreck, even though Marco had not dosed any of them on the day he had unleashed his powers.

“I wish you would have; that’ve taught the cheeky buggers a lesson,” the injured man, one whose leg had been crushed by a flying crate of cargo, said savagely.

“Oh, they learned a lesson,” a voice on Marco’s other side spoke.  He looked up to see Petran, the crew member who seemed most like a second in command, standing over him.  The man was a gregarious person, with a trim beard, who other members of the crew naturally liked and listened to.

“They won’t try to sail this stretch of the river for the next year,” Petran told Marco.  “And we won’t have any troubles from anyone on our way down river, if we can get off this sandbar.”  He smiled in satisfaction.

“Speaking of which, what plan do you have for us to try to move the ship?  We can have the fellows offload all the cargo to lighten it, dig out the sand around the prow as best we can, then run some cables and try to haul it back into the water,” the man laid out a plan.

“Let me try one other thing first, before we do that,” Marco suggested.

“You mean something like what you did yesterday?” Petran elliptically referred to sorcery.

“Something like that, but not so flashy,” Marco grinned.

“The fellows like flashy,” Petran told him.  “At first they weren’t so sure yesterday, but the more they thought about those robbers running with their tails between their legs, the more they liked it!”

Marco laughed softly.  He stood up and looked around at the men who were grinning at him.  “Let me take care of our wounded folks, and think a little more about what to do, then I’ll try to put on some kind of show for the crew,” he said, before he proceeded to work his way along the line of the wounded, giving them drinks of the spring water, as he asked how each was feeling and advised them on when he thought they might be healed, as best he was able to guess.

When that was finished he climbed down from the deck to the sandbar the ship had run aground on, and stood silently, one hand on his chin, as he contemplated the size of the ship and the enormity of the task at hand.

He thought for some reason about the band of energy that he had cast around the tower at the Doge’s palace in the Lion City, when the sorceress-imposter from the Temple of Ophiuchus had cast a bolt of energy that threatened to topple the structure.  Perhaps a similar band of energy could be used to help the ship move.

Marco closed his eyes and tried to recreate the spur-of-the-moment process he had used in the Lion City.  The band of energy was nothing he knew anything about, or had studied in any way – it had simply been an instinctive reaction on his part, and he had discharged his energy to deal with the immediate crisis at the time.  This time, though, required more thought.

“Is everything okay?” a voice asked from nearby after he stood in concentration for several minutes, and he saw that a trio of the sailors had climbed down to join him on the sand bar.  They held shovels, apparently planning to start digging the ship out according to Petran’s plan if necessary.

“It might be,” Marco told them.  “Watch this and judge for yourselves.”

He pointed his right hand at the ship, then whirled it around in a circular motion as a glowing band of energy emerged from his hand and floated to the ship, then wrapped itself around the hull.  Marco continued the whirling motion as the band of energy continued to emerge, then he lowered his hand, and the band wrapped further and further down, until it met the sand and excavated a flurry of grit and grime while it sank down to the very keel of the ship.

Once he had the hull satisfactorily wrapped, Marco turned his hand palm up, and prepared for the next stage in his experiment, as the band dwindled down to a mere thread between the ship and his hand.   It was just as thin as the tenuous string that still ran from his chest off towards the south, the life energy that connected him to Ellersbine, and that provided him with some reassurance that the two of them were still tied together.

The task was about to grow more difficult, he feared, as he refocused on the ship’s hull in front of him, and placed thoughts of Ellersbine in the recesses of his mind.  He began to raise his hand, and as he did, he felt an incredible strain begin to wear him down.  There was a grinding sound that suddenly came from the boat, then a flurry of shouts from the men who stood on the deck, and then the ship began to rise slowly into the air, rising several inches above the sand.

The drain on his abilities from lifting the entire mass was overwhelming, and Marco dropped to his knees, as the men with the shovels raced over to him.

“How can we help you?” one of them asked.

“Go over to the ship and push it backwards off the sand,” Marco grunted.  “Hurry!  I can’t hold this very long!”

The men sprinted to the ship’s hull and pressed their shoulders against it, their feet churning up sand as they slowly budged the ship a few inches at a time, heaving wildly against it to move it back into the waters of the river’s channel.

Marco felt his energy begin to sputter; he closed his eyes and willed the capacity within him to give one last burst of power to the band that surrounded the ship, as the men who were pushing the hull stepped into the water while making progress in their quest.  And then Marco was drained, and the energy pouring from him ceased, and even the band that stretched out to Ellersbine flickered, causing him to suspect she felt his weakness.

He closed his eyes in exhaustion as he rolled over on his back, and he tried to redirect any and all energy he had back towards the far-away princess whose health depended on him.  He panted heavily, and he felt sweat beading and running across his forehead.