The Mark of Ran Read Online Free PDF Page A

him.
    No one else came out to try to stop him, though a pair of crossbowmen arrived and fired ineffectual bolts into the wind. Rol cut the anchor rope at last, unfrapped the mainsail, and hauled up first the throat and then the peak halliards. The mainsail broke open and
Gannet
began to cease her mindless wallowing and move with more purpose. The wind was a southerly, and the bulk of Dennifrey was mitigating its blast along this northern coast. Out at sea the swells would be unimaginable. Drenched, Rol sat by the tiller and brought the wherry’s head round to larboard. West-nor’west perhaps, he was not sure. He only knew that the wind was now striking the boat from somewhere behind his left ear. The little vessel staggered as the mainsail filled out with a sharp crack, and the mast itself groaned. But the sickening roll had stopped, and
Gannet
’s stem was laboring up and down like a rational thing. She was moving out past the murderous foam-smashed rocks, toward the open ocean. Rol sat at her tiller like a thing made out of stone.
    You are not human.

Three
    THE STERN MAIDEN

    BLACK WAVES, WHITE-TIPPED WITH FURY IN THE HOWLING night. Rol had outsailed the sheltering promontories of the deep-bitten north Dennifreian coast, and he was truly out in the open ocean now. The great swells that were looming astern had come all the length of the Wrywind and were monsters of their kind—or so it seemed to him with nothing but coastal squalls to compare them to. A numbness had set itself about Rol’s mind, and he watched the pitching horizon with a kind of dulled stubbornness, the tiller clamped grimly in one armpit. He ought to shorten sail, but the numbness kept him sitting there at the steering bench, and below him
Gannet
was hurled forward recklessly. In the hollow of the great waves it grew almost calm, but as the wherry coursed manfully up the side of the next swell the wind would take hold again, and the boat would stagger, the stem digging deep in the flanks of the sea, water foaming aft and flooding down into the hold. Already, she was lower in the water than she had a right to be, and her painful dance was becoming jerky as that of a mishandled puppet.
    There came a moment when Rol finally realized that he must see to his craft or perish there in the heaving night. Painfully, he rose and slipped the deadman’s lines about the tiller to hold the course, and then methodically set about reducing sail. As he loosed the halliards the gaff struggled against him, beating about the mainmast, but finally he had it lowered on deck and began gathering in the loose bunt of the mainsail. The canvas thrashed him in the face as it flapped and fought his fists but he managed to secure it to the gaff and then square away the yard,
Gannet
pitching and rolling under him like a wild horse all the while. Finally he set up a little triangle of a storm-jib that they kept in the forward locker for emergencies, and that was just enough to keep the wherry’s head to the wind and prevent her from broaching-to. The effort left him bleeding, bruised, and exhausted. He stumbled aft like a man who has been flogged, and then set about sealing the mainhatch with a swatch of tarred canvas. That done, he was able to collapse on the steering bench once more, securing himself there with a length of cordage.
    West-nor’west, the wind on the larboard quarter. Rol had no idea what speed
Gannet
was making, but even with the mainsail taken in, it was greater than any he had ever seen her achieve before. The wherry, broad-beamed as a duck, seemed to skate across the great swells, moving now with a more rational purpose. Rol bent and kissed the smooth wood of the tiller, momentarily loving the sturdy little craft and her valiant heart. She had not been designed for deep water, but seemed to revel in the challenge all the same. Some of the numbness that had fogged his brain seemed to lift, and his mind began turning again. He looked up and saw the stars