Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,359

side to side.

He was down there for a long time, which might have made the day tedious had Corvus not come flying in with dire tidings: “Beedles! A whole galley-load. I must warn Fern.”

“Should we extract Pick?” Mard asked.

Corvus was already beating his wings hard, building speed out into the open sky. “No point!” he squawked.

Prim ran down into the open and retraced the path they’d taken earlier today until she could get a clear view down to the cove where Silverfin had anchored. No Beedles were in sight, but the keelsloop, apparently having been warned by Corvus, had weighed anchor and struck the sunshades. Canvas was beginning to unfurl from mast and boom, but mostly what was moving the boat at this point was oar power.

“Not much of a breeze today,” Mard remarked. He had been only a few paces behind.

Prim and Mard stood there and watched for a time. Silverfin inched her way out into the open sea and unfurled all the canvas at her disposal. She steered into a northwesterly course, away from land. Prim understood that this was not an attempt to go anywhere in particular, but to harvest as much speed as they could from the wind available.

Then at last they saw what Corvus had seen much earlier: a galley, a small one with a single bank of oars on each side. Probably two dozen oars all told. From this high vantage point they could just barely make out the forms of the Beedles pulling on those oars. Above them, running right up the vessel’s centerline, was a catwalk connecting a poop deck at the stern to a foredeck at the bow, and those were populated by others, armed and ready for war—or so they could guess from the flashes of light that gleamed from their midst.

Mard let out a long breath. “Impossible,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“There is no way Silverfin can escape from this.”

They watched the pursuit a while longer. It was obvious that Mard was right.

“That galley must have followed us,” he said.

“Keelsloops don’t normally just stop and wait to be caught up with,” Prim guessed.

“Why would they?” Mard agreed. “But we did. And somehow they knew. They got wind of the fact that we were here to be caught.”

“The water!” Prim explained, as the thought came to her. “The fresh water, and the other stuff we left on shore—”

“We have to go get it, while there’s time!” Mard agreed. And without any further discussion they were off, descending yesterday’s climb in skidding, sliding, pell-mell style.

Meanwhile the pursuit of Silverfin unfolded slowly. Though the disparity in speed between the two vessels was obvious, Silverfin had been given a decent head start by Corvus’s warning, and even Beedles could only row for so long at top speed. Mard and Prim frequently lost view of one or both vessels as their descent took them into various gullies and chutes. The two of them descended faster, and the pursuit at sea went slower, than they had feared. Presently they found themselves on a ledge just above the cove. There they stopped for a few minutes to watch the culmination of the chase. From here details could not be made out. But Mard had explained how galleys were equipped with grappling hooks and spiked, hinged bridges that could be dropped onto the decks of vessels they wished to board. They clearly saw the two ships come together and merge into a single dark knot on the water, some miles out. From that point forward, they could do little more than imagine what might be happening to Fern and her crew as armed Beedles poured across those boarding ramps. Invisible at this distance, but presumably there, must have been Corvus, high enough to be out of the range of Beedles’ arrows. Perhaps later they would hear the melancholy tale from him. In the meantime it behooved them to fetch the casks of drinking water and other valuables they had left on the shore, and move those inland. For if those Beedles had gone to the trouble of following them this far, it stood to reason they might come ashore and hunt around for any stragglers.

That was what they were now. Stragglers. Prim remembered some of the grimmer parts of Querc’s story. She hoped Querc was still down beneath the Overstrike, not seeing any of this.

“A sail. It is definitely a sail!” Mard announced, just as Prim was turning her attention to the last phase of the descent.