'Only for you, not for her,' said Kovan. 'Go back to work.'
'Come on, little one. Come and see the ship with a proper man. I'll take you places you've never seen before.'
Mirron stepped back and towards Gorian. He stepped in front of her and next to Kovan.
'Don't make me hurt you,' he said, his voice cold.
'Gorian,' warned Arducius. He looked to Patonius in appeal. She merely shrugged and carried on watching. She didn't understand.
The rigger laughed. 'What with? Your little boy fists and your funny eyes? Do you really think we believe the stories we heard? Don't insult me, boy or I'll put you over the side.'
'Fun's over,' said Kovan, glancing at Gorian. 'Let's not get angry. It isn't worth it.'
The rigger leered at Mirron. 'Young and firm. Just the way I like my women. Come on. Just a walk.' 'No,' she said.
'You heard her,' said Gorian. 'Now turn away before you never see anything ever again.' 'That's it, I warned you.'
The rigger stepped forwards, a determined look on his face. But he had misjudged Gorian. He was quick and strong for fourteen. Arducius felt the change in the energy trails on the hot breeze. Ossacer tensed and Mirron began to mouth 'no' but it was all too late. Gorian ducked under the rigger's grip, straightened and slapped a palm over his eyes. There was the briefest flare and the rigger fell back, screeching, his hands to his face.
'No,' said Gorian. 'I warned
you.'
'He's blinded me, he's blinded me,' wailed the rigger, dropping to his knees.
His mates bunched and ran, shouting their threats and promises. Kovan drew his gladius.
'Halt your movement!' bellowed Patonius.
Down on the oar deck, voices called up and the rhythm was interrupted. Oars clashed before the stroke man brought them back under control.
'Nobody take another step,' continued Patonius. She strode up the ship towards them, pausing briefly by her crew. 'You, get Anthus down below to the surgeon. The rest of you get back to your work. Do it now. I'll handle this.'
Arducius could see Gorian standing proud and defiant. Behind him, Mirron was staring open mouthed at the rigger, Anthus, who was helped sobbing to his feet to be led away.
'I could help him,' whispered Ossacer.
'I don't think this is the time,' said Arducius.
'Put up your sword, young Vasselis,' said Patonius, stepping up to the bow deck. She stood square in front of Gorian. 'There is only one person who dispenses discipline on my ship and that is me, not some stupid little boy.'
'I told him to stop and he wouldn't. He deserved it,' said Gorian.
Patonius's face was bleak. 'He was having a little fun. Had he laid a finger on you or Mirron, I would have stopped him and I would have administered any punishment I saw fit. What you think does not matter on my ship and it never will. Tell me, is he permanently blind as a result of this devilry that my Lord Marshal is so keen to protect?'
Gorian shrugged.
'He doesn't know,' said Ossacer quietly. 'He never knows.'
He was massaging his wrist where the frost-burn scars were.
'I have a crew behind me who will demand retribution for what you have done,' said Patonius. 'Our rules out here are very simple. Like for like. Should he be blinded, so shall you be.'
Mirron gasped but Gorian merely shook his head. It was Kovan who spoke.
'I'm sorry, Captain, but I cannot let you do that,' he said. 'I beg your pardon?'
'My father has placed the Ascendants in my care and they are not to be harmed.'
'In your care but not under your control,' she said. 'Nevertheless such an act cannot go unpunished. I'm sure your father would agree. But for now, my judgement is this. All of you are confined below. You, Gorian, will be lucky ever to see the sun again. Mirron, this is for your own good. The blood of fertility has run from you?'
Mirron nodded, blushing.
'It's a sign from God,' said Patonius. 'And grown men can smell it on you as if it were freshly squeezed juice from ripe fruit. Keep yourself out of the way. Now all of you, get out of my sight until I order otherwise. Never mind what you possess, you are a long way from enough protection should my crew seek vengeance.'
On his way past Patonius to the ladder below, Arducius paused and squinted at the trails in the air emanating from the south-east, beyond Kester Isle. He frowned.
'Something wrong?' she asked.
'You might want to steer us closer to shore. The first of the solasfall storms will be here in seven days.'
Patonius turned a slow circle, staring at the unbroken blue sky. 'I hardly think so, Arducius. This is the Tirronean Sea and we are a long way from the turn of the season.'
Arducius shrugged. 'Seven days,' he said.
She glared at him, insulted. 'Ridiculous notion. Get below.'
Chapter 46
848th cycle of God, 39th day of
Solasrise 15th year of the true Ascendancy
Arducius was pitched from his bunk and struck the wall opposite. He checked himself over quickly. He'd been lucky. Nothing was broken but he'd have some bad bruising. Ossacer would need to look at it later. Assuming they didn't sink, of course. It was pitch black, the candle having long since toppled over and snuffed out. He shook his head and opened his mind to the energies surging about him. It was like a cascade of ice-cold water through his mind, washing away everything else.
He could see Gorian and Ossacer's energy maps with stunning clarity. Both of them were sitting up, clutching the sides of their cots and sampling the power that thundered around them. Beyond the walls of their tiny room and away beyond the confines of the ship, was the thrashing life of the storm that had boiled out of the southeast exactly as he had predicted, and rapidly overtaken them. It presented itself to him as a blaze of yellow-white light, coiling, spinning and spitting out strands and sheets of energy that had huge force but which dissipated the next instant.
Arducius had felt it approaching like a steadily increasing weight on his back. The others had sensed it too, though not as keenly or for as long. He had no idea whether Patonius had decided to move inshore but it didn't feel much like it. Pushing his mind out, he couldn't sense the steady rhythms of the land anywhere nearby, though that might have been because the storm obscured all else.
'It's incredible,' breathed Gorian.
'It's making me feel sick,' said Ossacer.
'Surprise, surprise,' said Gorian. He was very much back to his old self following the brief remorse that had gripped him the day after
he'd blinded the rigger. Arducius had wept too when he'd heard Gorian begging Father Kessian for forgiveness in his prayers.
'Shut up the pair of you, I'm trying to concentrate.'
'What is it?' said Ossacer.
'It's getting stronger. Can't you see the energy being dragged from the top of the sky?' Arducius could. Like water sucked down a plug hole. Coursing into the heart of the storm. 'Oh no.'
'Where are you going?' demanded Ossacer.
Arducius pushed himself up the wall as another wave clattered them port and aft. The mess on the floor was rearranged and he heard someone's head strike wood. Gorian grunted.
'There's a bigger wind coming. Much bigger. I have to warn Patonius. We have to turn into the storm.'
'You can't go out there,' said Ossacer.
'I'd rather get flogged than sink. Stay here.'
The door slammed open. Patonius stood there with a crewman who held a lantern. Both were drenched from head to foot. She grabbed the collar of his night shirt.
'Come with me.'
'Careful,' he protested.
She dragged his face right to hers. 'Stow it, witch-boy. Time to prove to me you're of use to this world.'
Patonius hurried him along the lurching ship, past a blur of oarsmen trying to keep the ship travelling. It was a cacophony of shouts, creaks and grunts mixed with fear and the battering of water against timber. Water beat into the deck and sloshed around the floor beneath their feet. No one sought to clear it. Arducius felt the weight of their efforts as a solid presence in his mind, a wall of determination made up of the energy maps of their straining bodies.
He stumbled up the stern ladder as the ship pitched into the guts of the swell, hands dragging him through the hole and out into the storm. In the open, the world was black and bucking. Beneath them, the sea rolled and gathered to fling itself at the tiny ship that was alone in the darkness. Arducius could see the froth on the water and above, the clouds so low they seemed close enough to touch.
He grabbed the rail, planted his bare feet on the soaking, slippery deck and looked forward. There was no one ahead of him. The sail was down and furled rattling and slapping against the mast. Three men fought to keep the tiller steady and the ship moving ahead of the storm while the rain drove horizontally along the ship. A sheet of lightning split the night, offering Arducius a terrifying sight of the ocean, white-capped and huge above him.
The energy release of the lightning acted like a heavy slap across his face. He turned to Patonius. Their heads were almost touching.
'What do you expect me to do,' he yelled at her, his words tattered on the gale.
'You sensed this thing,' she shouted back. 'You tell me where it's going. When it will pass us.' She paused. 'Tell me which way to point my ship.'
Arducius already knew. 'You have to turn around into the storm. The wind will get worse.'
'I can't turn. Broadside we'll be capsized. I have to run ahead.'
Arducius shook his head, not knowing how he knew but seeing the pictures in his mind. 'The waves will sink us unless we are facing them.'
She stared at him. 'Then we will be lost. Look at the swell. We cannot turn.'
He felt the power above and below. The extraordinary energies nature threw together. And his mind, a calm oasis where they could rest.
'Wait. Bring the others up here,' he said. She frowned. 'Please, you have to trust me.'
The ship fell off the crest of a wave and slammed onto the down surge. The whole vessel shuddered. Wood flew across the deck, the remnants of a shattered oar blade.
'What do you have to lose?'
She gritted her teeth and nodded.
There was no fear in them where they knelt facing each other on the aft deck. Nervous crew stood around them, stopping them from sliding while the ship plunged and yawed around them. Patonius stood by the tiller, watching. Arducius had seen her mouthing prayers and making the symbol of the Omniscient over her chest.
The Ascendants linked arms around shoulders to keep themselves tight and their heads close together so they could hear Arducius speak.
'Feel the storm. Ignore the power in the water which feeds from it. Accept it in. Channel it through your bodies and back into the sky. Tell me you can do it.'
One by one they did and Arducius could see in his mind's eye, the circle completed. Together with their bodies linked by the lifelines surrounding them, they became as one with the storm.
'Gorian, you wanted to know what calling a storm would feel like? Remember this night.'
To create such power from the slight energies of the wind and sun on a cloudless day was still a dream to them. But the knowledge of the storm's magnitude told Arducius, told all of them, that they could create such a thing one day. It was not uncontrollable within them.
'Flatten the energy map in your minds,' said Arducius. 'Push it out just a little way.'
The effect was instantaneous. The Ascendants changed the nature of the energy cycle immediately around them. The twisting, bulging spirals and spikes were calmed in their linked consciousness and through their bodies, like teasing wool into thread. The wind about their heads died away. The rain stopped beating on their bodies Arducius was dimly aware of shouts of shock from around them and the shifting of feet.
'Good,' he said. 'Now push out further. Use the wild energy to create the calm and keep the circuit unbroken. Gently. We have to get this right first time.'
It was a time when he understood how far they had developed in the years since first emergence and the scant days since full emergence. Their minds and bodies were so much stronger. So much more capable of accepting energies and manipulating them in greater mass than before.
Together, they expanded the bubble of smoothed energy. Pushed it out towards the sides of the ship and into the space beyond. In their minds the bubble appeared as a flat neutral circle with frayed edges. Surrounding it were the clashing whites and darks of the storm beyond.