My temples throb, pounding and pulsing from both sides of my head. My brain feels attacked, fighting just to think. A cool cloth presses against the left side, where I'd been hit.
"Well, I'll be," remarks Simon from somewhere nearby. "There must be ships from every century sunken here. Every culture!"
"But, where is the light coming from?" asks Mrs. Marks. "It's like a dream."
I slowly open my eyes. The candlelight in the room offends them, and I sluggishly let my lids crawl back together. I try again, and again. Dr. Oswald presses the cloth to my brow and hushes me. A loud scraping noise grates against my ears and shudders along the ship, sending a jolt up my spine. I cringe.
The captain howls curses from the helm above us.
"My word!" Simon exclaims, pointing out the window at whatever it was we'd run over. "Would you look at that, Lydia? A Viking ship! What is that? Circa... eight-hundred AD? Nine-hundred? From the Sooth Lands? Pity we've broken it. Beautiful figurehead. Certainly priceless!"
"Eight-hundred, I think," Lydia replies. "Look above, Simon! Look at those lights."
I press my hand to my bandaged wound and sit up. Dr. Oswald shakes his head.
"Walter, lie down. You must be terribly sore."
"Where are we?" I ask, ignoring him. Unnatural blue-hued light trickles from the ship's wake and twinkles above in small specks skewed over the cave wall. Otherwise, the outside is dark. Inside, the candles serve as comfort.
Squinting out the window, I spy masts and bowsprits and deteriorated bits and bobs from all manners of boats broken and jutting from the jagged walls and up from the rushing water below. We're moving quickly in the current, like the rapids of a river. Someone cries out on the deck, and the wake reveals how the ship alters its course in result.
"Aha!" Simon squeals a moment later. "A Bezoar warship! Almost intact, too! Remarkable!"
He swivels and dashes for his bed with childish excitement. He heaves his case from underneath and quickly opens it. After withdrawing his notebook and pencil, he shoves the case back and scurries back to the window.
I lower myself from my hammock, entranced by those peculiar lights. Nearer to us, they are diluted by the great lanternlight radiating from the deck like the very sun.
Dr. Oswald touches my shoulder. "Walter, you took quite a hit."
I brush him away and carry on. "I'm fine."
He sighs and folds the damp cloth over his arm. He sets it on the stool and follows me to the window. The fish people chatter and click in the next cabin.
Looking directly down, it's like I've stumbled upon a museum showcase. The eerie blue-white glow fills the water, illuminating its mysterious depths. I can see the sandy bottom in some places, but in other places, I see nothing more than snapped masts hinting at the wonders beyond the light's reach.
In the light, hundreds of ships clutter the cave floor, piling over each other. The passage had looked so narrow from a distance, but once through the crack in the Giant's Ring, I suppose it must have widened. It is a good hundred feet from wall to wall, and the ship runs through a channel in the middle that is treacherously hazarded by the skeletons of long-since grounded wrecks. The depth varies unpredictably, hence the constant action of our rudder to steer away from the sudden shallows. With every shout from above, the ship teeters in a new direction.
"Wow," I breathe, for I've never seen anything so extraordinary, and for once I can relate to the professor's excitement.
He furiously scribbles in his notebook, eyes flicking feverishly between the view and the pages.
"In the closer ones, we've seen a few skeletons," says Lydia. "My Graham," her husband, "will envy this adventure when I recount it."
"Really?" I gasp, and I find myself even keener to press my cheeks to the glass and strain my eyes. I've never seen a skeleton. It would be exciting to.
"Oh, and some fresher sailors," Simon murmurs, attention divided, "From within the last five years. A decade at the most."
A little bit of dread comes to mind at this, instinctually, I suppose. Recently deceased sailors? Their families would never know where they went. If I were to never return to Praedor, I don't think anyone would notice. I'd just disappear. It would be like I never existed.
"You know, I lost track of my father's ship three years ago," Simon announces, turning to address Dr. Oswald, shaking his pencil in the emphasis of his thoughts, "Do you think it might be here?" He doesn't wait for an answer and returns to his scribbling. "No, I suppose that is silly."
"I would doubt it, Simon," Dr. Oswald dismisses. "I'm sure your father is well."
"I'd hope not," Simon mutters, attention lost.
A wreck rises on our left and I squeal at the sight of it. A grand galleon, disparaged by painted images of violence that are beginning to fade. Torn red sails peek from the water's shifting surface. "Pirates!" Exotic!
"Pirates," Simon confirms with distaste. He squints to the ship beneath, which is older and crumbling. "Twelfth century!"
I don't know how he can tell, but it's gone before I can study it any further. It didn't seem so fantastic to me.
I'm able to make out some scattered shouts from the deck. Only those from Leslie and one or two of the other larger men, though I can't tell which. The sails are being pulled up, and the cave is coming to an end, and something about... a swallowtail?
"Did anyone else hear Swallowtail?" Simon asks, and his book quickly closes.
The ship collides with something enormous. The force of the collision again throws us all off our feet. Simon hits the window, I hit the partition wall, Lydia hits her bed, and Dr. Oswald simply staggers to the floor. The boards tremble and quiver and threaten to give way, threaten for us to join the rest of the sunken piles of nothing below. I don't want to disappear. I don't want to.
"What's that ship?" Simon cries, fumbling with his spectacles, which had flown from his nose in the impact.
Dr. Oswald crawls to the window and searches the water as the object we've hit passes, and the horrifying, fear-inspiring quaking and creaking of our ship calms. It's a new ship. Large and broadsided in a shallower depth, painted in the cream, blue and gold of Praedor, its country flags clinging to the mast by threads, almost torn away by the current.
Tangled and trapped in snaking ropes, I see uniformed men, and my eyes grow suddenly wet. They don't look dead. Their eyes are all open and frozen in panic, and everything else is moving. Their hair, their limbs. It's all moving, as though their fighting to swim to the surface, but they can't. And that'll be me next. I'll be the one drowning when we hit the rocks or the wrecks or the shoals.
"Simon, don't look," Dr. Oswald whispers.
Painted on the side of the bow is the ship's name. H.M.S Swallowtail. It hardly matters. If we ever make it out alive we can report it, see to the sailor's families. But that would only be if. I can't help but doubt.
If I have to die, I don't want to drown. I'd like something quick and painless. A bullet to the brain, perhaps? One big blow to the head, with just the right angle and force?
Simon, glasses held to his nose with his finger, gapes in horror at the Swallowtail's receding memory. He locks eyes, living to dead, with the ship's badged admiral. He mouths a word, and a part of me believes that it's something snooty that he's saying. Something disrespectful.
Dr. Oswald winces, and I can see his heart bleeding for Simon, and I don't understand why. And Lydia! Just as sympathetic! She starts to reach towards him.
"Father," the professor squeaks, louder. Suddenly, I feel even sicker.