All Ryan wanted to do was to claw his way up the rope ladder dangling from the side of the Salvation, stagger to his bunk, strip off his sodden clothes and climb between the thin, gray blankets and sleep for a week.
But there was much to be done, miles of work to put behind him before he could rest.
The survivors of Walsh's boat had to be helped to safety, and then lines had to be made fast to the body of the whale. Johnny Flynn had told Ryan that speed was essential after the kill had been completed, for two reasons. The body would not float for very long, so it had to be tied alongside the mother ship. Also, the voracious predators that roamed the deep oceans would scent blood at a dozen miles or more, catch the sound signals of distress from the dying leviathan at ten times that range. They'd come to try to rend their own share of the spoils before the seamen could break down the carcass to blubber and oil.
"What of Jacob Lusk?" Walsh shouted.
"Flense it open and the wretch might still be living," Ogg replied. "I've heard of such happening. Years back in Nantucket, so they used to say."
"He could be alive!" Ryan exclaimed.
"If we're right quick in gutting the beast, then he might yet live."
The Salvationwas heaving to, only a stone's cast away from the boats. Captain Quadde was leaning over the bow, the telescope in her fist.
"It took a man!" she bellowed.
"Seaman Jacob Lusk," Ogg replied warily.
"Clean swallowed?"
"Aye, ma'am."
"Fix lines and we'll haul it alongside. Got a man on the windlass. Sling the boats to the davits sharp as new paint, Mr. Ogg. Then all hands to flense and render down."
"Aye, ma'am." The first mate turned to his crew. "I'll drive a spike through your knees if ye dawdle and lollygag around, my hearties. Let's to it."
It was chaos on a grandly, bloodily organized scale.
Ryan had been on hunts before, after the mutie deer and moose in the foothills of the ranging snow-tipped Darks. He'd seen the excitement of the ville when the carcasses were brought home on the backs of the cat wags, but he'd never seen anything like the activity on board the Salvation.
As soon as the whaleboats were hoisted on the deck, the men tumbled out and ran to their appointed places. Ryan and Donfil hadn't received any orders and stood, confused amid the scurrying, bellowing bedlam.
Ryan never heard the woman come up behind him. Most of the time the rapping of the cane located her position on the ship. But when she wanted, Pyra Quadde could move as quietly as a tracking tiger.
The first warning Ryan Cawdor had was a cracking buffet to the side of his head that deafened him and made him stagger, nearly falling into the scuppers from the shock and force of the blow. Donfil began to turn, but he was too slow. The woman grabbed him by the front of his soaking shirt with one hand, then tugged his head lower so that she could slap him across the face with the other hand. The Apache was unable to move with surprise.
"Get with Mr. Ogg's crew and do what thou art blazing told, thou scum ballast!"
She raised her stick as though she were going to lash out at the tall Mescalero, but hesitated a wary moment at the look of scarlet murder that blazed in his eyes. With a gruff laugh she turned away from them and walked to the port side of the ship, to watch the attempts to rescue the vanished seaman from the belly of the whale.
"By Ysun," said Donfil softly, rubbing at his face with a wondering hand. "No woman born of man has ever... can ever... If any of the people of my... my tribe had seen that, then the shame would mean I'd need to chill her. Tear the heart still beating from her body and devour it. Then — and only then — I could take my own life with some shred of honor."
"Thought you wanted to stick around and give the life of a whaler a tryout?" Ryan said, leading the way to where Johnny Flynn and the others from their boat's crew were working.
"It was a good day for the hunt, my brother. And as I took the life of that monster of dark water I felt his spirit flow to mine. Yeah, Ryan Cawdor. The job of harpooneer could be wonderful. But only when that daughter of cold fire has quit life."
Captain Pyra Quadde was back on the quarterdeck, watching as the two mates led the rest of the men. Once the dead whale was tied alongside, a half dozen of the most experienced and nimble hands swarmed down lines and began to hack their way into the creature. Blood flooded out, crimsoning the sea for a hundred paces around. Captain Quadde had ordered the yards backed so that the Salvationonly crept forward slowly, avoiding too much pitching and rolling. The men worked with special butchering tools, such as knives with blades three feet long, lethally sharp, fixed into wooden hafts another four feet in length. They cut great hunks of meat from the animal, attaching iron hooks to it, while the men on board ran and scurried like monkeys, pulling and stacking the blubber, slicing it into smaller pieces ready for the try-pots. The cooks were loading hunks of the meat into the smoking ovens, ready to begin the stinking process of rendering it down to fine oil.
"Cut deep for Jacob Lusk's sake!" the skipper called, cupping her hands to her mouth to make sure her orders were heard.
Ryan and Donfil took their places on the lines, pulling up the dripping haunches of meat and carrying them to the growing pile on the main deck, then throwing the hooked cords down to the furiously hacking men. Ryan found himself standing next to Jehu, both of them waiting a moment for more blubber to be attached to their ropes.
"Can that poor bastard live?" Ryan asked.
"Jacob?"
"Yeah."
The round little head shook and nodded at the same time, so that Ryan couldn't tell whether he was saying yes or no. Other than the clatter of the cleated seaboots and the screaming of a flock of gulls, the only sound was the clean thunking of steel blades biting into the quivering flesh of the harpooned whale.
"Well, Jehu? Can he still be alive? He'll have choked to death!"
"Jacob might have climbed the ladder to the peace that passeth all understanding. Now he sitteth at the right hand of all good... and bad and different and all for rent and rent his garments on the road to Bozra where..."
"Forget it, you double-crazy stupe," Ryan said disgustedly.
But Jehu, little eyes fixed on Pyra Quadde, who stood to their left, plucked at his sleeve.
"What is it?"
"Master Ten-from-Ten, thy pagan friend."
"What about him?"
"Do his people butcher the double-crazies? Do they, huh?"
"No, they treat them well."
"So it is on the Salvation. Sailed on her for eleven years, has Jehu. Not many on board this trip can say that. Too many chilled by... the dark sea eagle, if thou dost take my meaning?" He nudged Ryan in the ribs to make his words more clear.
"I get you, Jehu. There's nobody so sane as the crazie who isn't."
"Near through the ribs, Captain!" called one of the men with the long flensing tools.
"All hands cease work and stand by. Listen well, lads, for a word from Jacob!"
Everyone obeyed Captain Quadde's order immediately, glad of the chance for a brief break in the spine-cracking labor.
"Two more trips and mad Jehu will have the lays to buy a fine chandler's store near the quay. And be a man of leisure and pleasure and treasure."
"Still haven't said if that poor bastard could be alive."
"Been stories of it happening. They comes out much changed, so they says. With their mind set to wandering and their skin all..."
"Hold thy noise, thou pinheaded loon!" the captain yelled.
"Aye, Captain. I'll hold my tongue so thrtth ogn-luur..." Jehu gripped himself literally by the end of his tongue so that his words became instant garbled gibberish.
The ship fell silent.
Ryan was joined at the rail by the rest of the crew, peering down at the ruined carcass. The head remained untouched, but much of the meat of the sides and back and belly had already been hewed from the pale bones. Each of the flensers had a safety rope tied around his waist, to help him keep his balance on the slick flesh.
"I hear something!" called one of the men, from down below, standing with head on one side, as though that might somehow help his hearing.
Then they all heard it, soaring above the banshee wailing of the gulls, silencing them and sending them wheeling away to the north like etched shadows on the blue sky.
The sound was muffled, but distinct. A human voice crying for help.
"Quickly, my lads." Cyrus Ogg broke the spell of stillness that fell upon every man on the ship.
The two hands standing deepest in the bloody wreckage began to cut and slice with a renewed vigor, opening up more of the noisome stomach of the whale.
"Watch ye do not fucking cut him apart with the lances!" Walsh yelled.
"Something's moving!" shouted one of the men, clambering clumsily away from where a glistening expanse of pale yellow intestine could be seen rippling like a polecat trapped inside a silken bag.
Ryan watched with the others, seeing that the swallowed seaman still lived and fought to tear himself free of the sack of guts that held him a squealing, mewling prisoner.
Like the birth of some mutie lizard, the stomach wall tore open.
And Jacob Lusk emerged... What had once been Jacob Lusk.
Now it was as white as Jak Lauren's hair, bleached by the powerful acids in the stomach of the whale, acids that had already eaten away the shirt and pants from the seaman's body, and left his skin wrinkled and partly raw. The face seemed worst afflicted as Jacob Lusk turned it toward where he sensed the sun still shone.
He could only sense it, for his eyes had been seared from their sockets, leaving raw, weeping holes in the scoured bone. The lips had been eaten away, and the tongue and soft flesh of the inside of the mouth, so that all that came out was a gargling scream of horror.
"Virgin save us!"
There was a collective indrawing of sighing breath from every person there.
The creature stood, balanced, waving its peeled arms, fingers spread and oozing blood, crying out in its terrible choked voice. It was like seeing some dreadful embryo born, full grown, yet not properly complete.
"Fireblast!" Ryan called to the flensers on the carcass. "Chill the poor bastard. Cut him down, someone. Chill him!"
The cry was picked up by Jehu and by Donfil, by Johnny Flynn and a dozen more, until every man of the Salvationwas calling out for Jacob to be set free from his misery.
Only Pyra Quadde said nothing, watching the nightmare scene from the rail of the quarterdeck.
But Jacob Lusk was quicker.
Some tattered shreds of consciousness remained in the dark skull, and he flung his arms together above his head with a damp, clinging, slapping sound. Without another cry he dived neatly off the dead whale into the welcoming waters of the Lantic.
They watched his whitened body as it sank into the gray-green deeps. It seemed to go down forever, until the rippling waves finally wiped the image clear away.
Ryan lifted his eyes to the horizon, seeing the first triangular fins of the hunting sharks that had taken over possession and lordship of so many of the oceans of the world.
Pyra Quadde had also seen them.
"No use watching him sink. Take him an hour or more to reach the mud around these deeps. Sharks coming after the blubber. After ourblubber. Set to, cullies. Set to!"
Ryan shook his head. More gut-wrenching labor before they could rest. It crossed his mind at that moment to wonder where Krysty might be and what she might be doing.
"No sun dreams, Outlander Deadman," Cyrus Ogg said at his elbow. "Unless thou dost want to face some punishment from our captain."
"No, thanks," Ryan replied, readying himself to pull on the hooked cords.
Then he heard the shout from the lookout in the crow's nest, high above the blood-slick deck. "Sail ho! Sail on the larboard beam! A ship!"