'You must be mad!' he shouted. 'At the first sign of a little wind, you plead to go ashore and now you wish to head out for the open sea? You would take us from safety to disaster! What do you wish to do, drown us all? To shore, Argus!'
'You fool,' Delaney said. 'It's too late now. We won't even reach the shore in these conditions, whether the gods are watching over us or not! We'll be battered to bits by the waves or smashed upon a reef! Our only chance now is to head out to open sea and ride the storm out!'
'And if your house were to catch fire, you would run into the flames? I have never heard such nonsense! Argus, steer to ward shore!'
'Jason, my lad, I'm about to show you something else that happens at sea sometimes,' Delaney said. 'It's called a mutiny.'
He dropped Jason with a hard right cross to the jaw. 'Lash him down!' he yelled to Steiger. 'The rest of you, take some rope and tie yourselves to something or you'll be swept overboard!'
He ran back to join Argus and they lashed themselves to the tiller together. The other Argonauts were in no mood for argument. The wind was screaming like a hundred banshees and the waves were crashing down upon the deck, soaking them all and knocking them off their seats. They moved quickly to secure the oars and tie themselves down.
Delaney estimated that the gale was at least Force 9. The waves were now cresting at about 30 feet and the Argo was being tossed about as if it were a toy. There was no point in trying to rig some sort of sea anchor, the Argo was too large for such a solution to be practical. The greatest danger to the ship was not the winds, but the seas shaped by those winds.
In such conditions, the Argo could easily be knocked down or the waves could come aboard and pound the deck to splinters. Even with the sail down, the mast might be torn away and if the distance between the waves was less from crest to crest than twice the length of the Argo, the ship would come over one wave and crash into the next as if it were a solid wall. The different movements of the water at the tops and bottoms of the swells created strong turning forces on the ship, inviting the danger of a broach.
Delaney was not for heaving to. It meant giving up control. An experienced sailor, his solution ran contrary to what common sense would seem to dictate. It terrified the Argonauts and even Argus thought it was insane. Both Steiger and Delaney were grateful for the fact that the crew had tied themselves down, otherwise they might have interfered.
Instead of taking down the sail, Delaney did just the opposite. With Steiger working on deck with the aid of an improvised safety line, they ran under full sail, surfing down the waves at a twenty degree angle to the crest. The idea was to keep the ship sailing as fast as possible and to avoid allowing the sea to get dead behind them, for if the ship sailed straight down a wave, the bow would almost certainly 'catch' on the next wave and the ship would flip end over end.
Riding out the storm in the open sea was far less hazardous than it would have been to take the ship close in to land. There, they would have risked running into unseen capes or sandbars or crunching on a reef due to lack of visibility. The currents close in to land in heavy weather would be completely unpredictable and there was the risk of outlying rocks and tidal bores, tidal floods which ran roaring into rivers or narrow bays in a succession of large, irregularly breaking waves that could broach the ship or hurl it up onto a reef or beach.
Delaney held the ship on course for the open sea as he and Argus leaned their combined weight on the tiller. The Argo rose up on the swells as if it were climbing vertical walls, then shot down the faces of the waves into the troughs between them. The Argonauts soon saw the reason why they had been directed to secure themselves, as the waves swept over the ship and forced their bodies to strain against the ropes which held them. With a modern yacht, such conditions would have been arduous enough, but with a primitive vessel like the Argo, it was torture.
Argus quickly assimilated Delaney's technique of running full tilt before the storm and ceased to require prompting, but after several hours of such punishment, the old shipbuilder's strength started to give out and soon he was little more than dead weight on the tiller. Suddenly Hercules appeared at Delaney's side, having fought his way back to them. He untied Argus and lowered him down, then secured him once again and took the tiller with Delaney. Together, with their hair and beards matted down and the spray stinging their muscles and threatening to blind them, they strained against the tiller and controlled the ship on its roller coaster ride up and down the swells. They fought the storm all night, sailing more by feel than by sight, for it was impossible to see well in the hurricane force winds.
By dawn, the winds started to die down and soon the sea was once more choppy and covered with whitecaps. As the sun came up, the storm moved past them and the seas grew calmer. They were out of sight of land. Argus, though still weary, took over the tiller and steered south toward shore as Hercules helped Delaney down, supporting his weight with an arm around his shoulders.
'Aren't you even tired?' asked Delaney.
'You have l-labored for m-m-much l-longer than I,' said Hercules. 'Sleep now.'
'Right,' Delaney murmured. 'Wake me when we get to Colchis.'
He closed his eyes and fell asleep almost immediately.
'Let him sleep,' said Jason, who had recovered from Delaney's blow in plenty of time to see the worst of the storm. 'He has earned his rest and my respect. We have seen Poseidon's fury unleashed and he faced it without fear. Truly, he must be in favor with the gods.'
'If he were,' Steiger mumbled under his breath, 'he wouldn't be here.'
'It is as I have always known,' said Jason. 'When right is on one's side, one must prevail. And we have prevailed. Titans, winged demons, clashing rocks, the fury of the sea, all have tried to stop us and we have prevailed over all. The mightiest of forces have been aligned against us and we have defeated each of them.'
'Yet not without cost,' said Idmon. He was staring off into the distance.
'Come, soothsayer,' Theseus said, 'after the fearsome foes that we have faced, what is there left to fear?'
'I cannot say,' said Idmon. 'My vision is not always clear. Still I perceive a danger that seems inexplicable to me. The vision seems quite strong.'
'What vision, soothsayer?' Theseus said. 'What danger is it that lies ahead of us?'
'One of us shall die soon,' Idmon said. 'I cannot see which one. Yet death seems very near. And death from a most unexpected source.' He looked around at all of them, as if something in their faces would make the vision clearer. 'You will think me mad,' he said, 'but I see that one of us shall be felled by a feather.'
'We must be getting close to shore,' said Jason, pointing to the south. 'See? A flock of birds.'
'Can you see land?' asked Theseus.
Jason shook his head. 'Not yet, but it cannot be far away. It will be good to reach our destination. I am weary of the sea.'
'We still have to return,' said Orpheus.
'But we will not be returning empty-handed,' Jason said, grinning. 'We shall have the golden fleece aboard with us and a kingdom will be mine to claim when we reach home.'
'What sort of birds are those, I wonder?' Argus said, looking up at the sky. 'They do not look like any I have ever seen.'
'It is a large flock,' Mopsus said. 'Perhaps they migrate.'
'It is not the season,' Argus said. The birds were almost overhead now and they could see how large they were, like frigate birds, with wingspans of forty inches or more. There were at least a hundred of them, flying in a V formation like migrating geese.
'See how they shine!' cried Hylas.
Indeed, the birds did appear to shine. Sunlight glinted on their feathers as they flew so that they almost seemed to give off sparks. Orpheus suddenly cried out and grabbed his shoulder. A steel shaft protruded from between his fingers, as if he had been shot with an arrow. Theseus carefully pulled it out.
'Why, it's a feather!' he said, astonished.
Something went 'phfft' and thunked into Mopsus' forehead. For a moment, he stood there openmouthed with a steel feather protruding from his skull, then he fell back onto the deck, lifeless. More feathers flew down at them, embedding themselves in the deck and sticking in the mast. Hercules swore as one stuck in his leg. Another shaft
