I didn't have to search for my foe. I plunged maybe five or six times my height, when our gazes locked upon one another. Her two eyes stared unblinking at me. They were both the same color, but for a different reason. One eye was red because it was red. The other was red because it bled.
Unlike other fish, the barracuda had intelligence sparkling in her gaze. There could be no mistake. Our fight made the monster aware of her origin and purpose. This giant barracuda was a Bhuta's tear of frustration. She was vengeance against the winners reborn in a fish form. A hunter thirsting for blood of every woman descendent from the ancient allies of the Divines, including me.
Under the ocean, I would fight one of the echoes of the Primordial War. My only hope to survive was that it was a very faint echo. I wanted fortune and glory, not an unmarked grave in the Gulf.
The barracuda's black maw sprung open like a trap. No matter which way I lunged, the monster presented me with the same view of sharp pointy teeth, none shorter than my thumb. They snapped less than an inch from my flesh on every racing heartbeat.
The spear, the knife and the hatchet didn't find their purchase when I struck out with them. All part of the plan, but my hands shook anyway.
I whipped the sea with my feet, launching toward the daylight.
The barracuda boiled the water in pursuit, shooting like a living bolt out of a catapult. She shut her snout to swim faster. The teeth snatched the bubbles where my toes had just been as I jerked my knees to my chest and flipped.
The momentum carried me past her terrible head to stab her flapping gills. Not with my flimsy knife, of course. I jammed in my remaining vial of valerian sleeping draught. I knew it might come in handy when I had stolen it from Anastasia's stores!
The monster convulsed from insult more than from injury. Her jaws chased my arm, snapping with those terrifying teeth.
I twisted away, swung the hatchet and chopped down. Then I chopped sideways or any way before my wild motions sent me floating askew from her.
The vial cracked under the frantic ax blade, flooding her gills with the sleeping potion.
I beat my legs even more desperately now, eager for a gulp of air. The magic clip Sharim gave me helped, but magic had both its limits and its price. In this case, the payment was coming due.
After what seemed like eternity of swimming through blue, I surfaced. Between shuddering intakes of breath I spat water, I pissed water and I frothed water with my wind-milling arms.
The terror kept me from looking into the abyss, but barracuda's black shape abandoned its chase when only two human heights of the water column separated her from Tashaya's sunlit world. She needed the watery blanket, because she still had the brain of a fish even though it was driven by Bhutas' hatred to kill.
I threaded water, conserving my energy and counted. If I was right, by the count of two hundred, the drug would slow the barracuda down to my speed of movement. Or maybe more, because she was a fish, despite her size. Once that happened, we could dance a dance of death. If I was wrong, then I had unleashed Bhutas' evil on my home's harbor.
Not that I could be completely sure it was entirely my fault even then. Strife attracted creatures like this and the barracuda appeared before I set foot on the Naiad. However, I doubted that Sharim's colleagues would engage in a symposium on the beach under Yansara's stars to determine the degree of culpability. They'd feed Sharim, me and the others to the barracuda before Queen Zinaida's watch would even scratch their asses and come to our defense.
With that lovely image for inspiration, I somersaulted and attacked the vile creature again.
It moved to meet me. However, she wasn't moving as fast as she did before. The Divines favored my plan!
Emboldened, I darted to the barracuda's side and stabbed it with my knife.
The blade shattered on impact.
Away, away I swam, bubbles trailing after me along with the dirtiest cuss out there, repeated for emphasis. And the crazy thought, we shall dance... we shall dance...we shall dance forever!
I rolled and grabbed the fish into my embrace, hacking at her with the hatchet, crashing the gills more than cutting them. Finally, the small ax lodged in her flesh firmly enough. I was pulling her up.
At the same time, the monster smashed into me, scraping off bands of skin, cutting in with her fins. She was pulling me in deeper.
But inch by inch, I won the deadly race.
One human height to the interface between the water and the air.
Half human height!
Someone plunged into the water next to me. Loop after loop, the rope wound around the red-eyed head of the barracuda.
The rope snapped taut. An invisible force of a winch on board of the Naiad pulled both of us up, the monster and me. Embraced, writhing, inch by inch, we came out of the water.
As soon as the air touched her nostrils, the barracuda bucked like a wild bull.
I held on to her. Even in my delirium of proximate victory, I didn't think I could stop her from dragging me to the bottom of the sea if the rope snapped. But I could teach mules to be stubborn. So, I held on.
The winch almost tore clean off its rigging with our combined thrashing. Every woman on board was pulling on it, scarring their hands raw on the strained rope.
The Bhutas' monster—full of hatred, with the drug almost washed out by water, as large as our boat—the Naiad's crew was pulling her on board. We all went mad, but when mad is the only way to victory, it pays to abandon sanity.
Abandon it or lose.
It seemed like hours before the barracuda stopped moving. It seemed like a miracle that the boat didn't overturn, because the monster looked bigger strewn on the deck than she did in the water, more than twice my height, almost three times even. And she was more vicious than a thousand crocodiles.
Many legendary victories were won like that, by inches, by tenacity, by refusal to let go, but at the moment only this one mattered to me.
When the realization came that we'd won, when my teeth unclenched and the muscles relaxed, then the onslaught of pain hit me. I screamed.
Sharim splashed a bucket of water into my face. "The fight is over, Safic."
I blinked, breathed and counted.
"That's it, that's good," she said, thumping my back. Then, without as much as one intake of breath, she added, "It'll hurt now. If you hit me, I'll throw you overboard. Understood?"
I spotted a needle with a gut thread in her hand. Sticking gaping wounds with it sounded like a really unfair and rotten way to do business, but I nodded and stared at the sky. It was as blue as the water, but full of air. A marvelous thing, air.
While Sharim sewed and I ground my teeth to stifle screams, the divers washed blood off the deck and crowded the monster. It was softening in the sun, rotting faster than a normal fish would.
"We should get rid of her before she poisons us with her death-stench," one of them said, referring fortunately to the barracuda, not me.
"No." Sharim frowned. "Everyone needs to see proof that she's dead. And we need today's pay."
"Do you think there is a treasure in its belly?" The same woman prodded the bloating belly with her toe.
"Let's find out, shall we?" Sharim muttered with a disgusted grimace at the stench.
I swear, she slowed down her doctoring to torment us all. Not until the last scrape, the last bruise was examined and attended to or deemed unworthy of the aid, did Sharim take the hatchet to the monster's gut.
The despicable goo of rotting entrails and teal slime came out first. The Captain chopped grimly to release more and more stink and indescribable fluids. Yet we converged onto the sight, heads touching, eyes eager.
Finally, Sharim found the bulge she was looking for and pulled it out. I couldn't hear anyone breathe for self-evident reasons.
A grimy knife sliced the barracuda's stomach wall. Its contents sprayed us, poured out, the sight both nauseating and mesmerizing. Tears spurted out of my eyes. It was so bad. But it was worth it!
The same ancient consciousness that drove our barracuda to kill must have given it a preference for the oysters hoarding pearls. In the soggy mass of the almost digested mollusks and other prey, the pearls looked reddish and ugly, but when dropped one by one in a bucket of clean water, our prizes glittered.
Most of them gleamed white or bluish, like snow on the mountain tops, but some were deeper blue and sea-weed green, or even a soft hue of peaches. Three were the most prized color--black.
And one, so perfectly round that it rolled away, was blood-red. It wasn't as large as the others, but the color was irresistible to me, because it was Mythra's. My foot moved before my consciousness did. The tiny treasure fit neatly between my toes.
***
Battered as I was, there was no question about swimming all the way to Gala's Rock that night. Instead, I left the bonfires of the impromptu celebration early, trusting my Safic disguise and someone's old saree to conceal me.
An epic kill and a cup of wine would rob a wiser woman of sense—and I was seventeen, basking in Divines' favor and women's praise, with her first lover waiting.
This was the hour in Palmyr when the townspeople made beelines for the temples and taverns after their busy day.
I threw a longing glance toward the houses and stalls hiding the theater... and didn't turn toward it. I made a beeline for the Temple and mixed with the pilgrims.
I crossed the grounds with reverent shuffling steps, knelt before the bronze statues, added handfuls of rose petals to the cups with the prayer candles. I asked Gala to cleanse me of the violent thoughts and deeds, for many of them plagued me that day.
Then I slunk away and hid in the deserted library to wait for the last ringing of the bell, the shutting of the gates, the acolytes and the priestesses hurrying back and forth.
Then I waited even longer—it felt like hours—for the sweetest moment of my day.
I traded my hiding hole in the library for the one by the seawall. From that nook, I watched Kozima pace in the thickening shadows. He rubbed his forehead, grew agitated, peered into the sea until the night extinguished every color in the sky above him. First stars came out. He was still waiting.
I stepped out of my hiding spot and whispered his name.
With a muffled cry, he half-climbed, half-tumbled down, clutched me to his chest, kissed the top of my head with his hot, soft lips.
His chin scratched me a little, a brand-new sensation. "How? Are you back? What..." he asked me in a flurry of joy.
"Easy, sweetheart, easy." Euphoria buoyed me, a twin to his joy. "I'm held together in three places with medical gum and gut thread."
He gasped, released me, and cleaved to me again. The stonework never felt warmer against my back.
Before I allayed his fears, before I let him inspect the stitches, before I even told him the glorious tale of slaughtering the sea monster, before I sheltered his hardening wanderer, I said the most important thing.
"Kozima," I said, "I know what we must do about Lydia's courtship."