The Messenger

“Stay afloat,” pouted the diminutive passenger, but he followed the elf’s instructions.

Kerrick made his way forward again, and ducked into the main hold. The saturated canvas he had jammed into the cracks was leaking badly, and he wasted no time in plastering caulk over it. By the time he was done his muscles ached, and his hair was stuck to his face with a mixture of sweat and caulk. With a sigh he came back up on deck and sat on the bench next to Coraltop, who was still pumping. A short distance away, rising in a great dome above the surface of the water, he could spot the dark shape of the massive obstacle that had almost doomed his little boat. He was just about to ask the kender about it, when his passenger preempted his question with a query of his own.

“What happened to your ear?”

The elf froze. His hand went to his scar, feeling the scab, the strangely rounded flap which once been a long, slender, elegantly tapered ear.

“I had an accident,” he said curtly.

“I’ve had lots of accidents,” Coraltop replied proudly, before frowning. “I never got half my ear cut off, though. That must have really been some accident! Tell me what happened. Don’t leave out any good parts.”

“No.” Kerrick slumped. He thought about raising the sail, but it seemed like far too much work. Instead, he leaned his head back against the gunwale and remembered Silvanesti. Closing his eyes, he imagined that he could smell the blossoms of the royal gardens, hear the songs of the flautists in their towers and the lyres of the wandering minstrels as they sang their way down the city’s winding streets. It seemed unthinkable that he was exiled from the center of his world. He missed Silvanesti with such inexpressible pain that, for a few moments, he actually toyed with the thought of throwing himself over the side, of ending his suffering right here. He knew he had had to fight the wave of self-pity that was washing over him.

“So, where are we going?” asked Coraltop. “Wouldn’t we get there faster if we put up the sail?”

Kerrick groaned inwardly and cracked open one eye. Again he saw that great, floating mass off to the side, already black against the growing darkness.

“How’d you end up on that thing, anyway?” he finally asked. “And what is it exactly?”

“Well, my last ship sank, and I would have sunk too, if I wasn’t a pretty darned good swimmer. ‘You swim like a whale,’ my Grandmother Annatree used to say. But of course whales swim better, probably because they have more practice. I wouldn’t mind being a whale, except for all the drawbacks. Of course, like my grandmother used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair-unless you’re lucky.’ Do you think I’m lucky?”

“I think … well, you must be, yes.” The elf chuckled dryly in spite of himself. Kender might be utterly fearless to the point of stupidity, but they were amusing. Well, he could use some laughs in his situation.

“What kind of ship were you on?” he persisted.

“It was a Tarsian trading galley,” the kender replied. He seemed almost sorrowful. “The captain was really nice. I met him just two days out of Tarsis, when I woke up from my nap and went on deck to say hello. He said he going to tie a stone to my foot and throw me in the water to see how well I could swim.” Coraltop sighed. “His wife was there, and she was even nicer. She pointed out that I couldn’t very well swim with a stone tied to my foot- although I can surprisingly well-she made me her cabin boy, and as long as I stayed out of the captain’s ‘dang- blasted way’ I got to roam all over the ship and see how things worked.”

Kerrick knew the kind of ship Coraltop was talking about. Indeed, the sturdy trading vessels were probably the most common large craft along the coast of southern Ansalon. Occasionally one would stop and visit Silvanesti, though the royal tariffs were exorbitant and insured that only elven captains made much profit bringing goods to or from the great port of Silvanost.

“What happened to the galley? How did it sink?” He knew that the trading galleys were famously seaworthy and offered a brief prayer to Zivilyn in memory of the doomed sailors.

“We got smashed up by a dragon turtle,” Coraltop replied cheerfully. “Boy, was that exciting! It had fins the size of your sails, and a mouth as big as a castle gate! Why, it bit that galley right in two. Some of the sailors got eaten up, I’m sorry to say. The rest of them tumbled into the water, but they didn’t swim as well as I did. Fortunately I was holding onto a barrel-it turned out to be a barrel half full of water, which is a good thing because you can’t imagine how thirsty a person gets-”

The kender prattled on, but Kerrick wasn’t listening any more. Instead, he was staring at the vast, domed shape wallowing in the waves, looking at it with a sense of dull horror.

Dragon turtle! He had never before seen one-nor had he ever spoke to a sailor who had encountered one of the legendary ocean monsters. They were the stuff of nautical folklore, horrors of the deep that could reputedly crush a ship with one bite, scattering its crewmen into the sea, allowing the monster to leisurely gulp down the hapless adrift sailors.

That, he suddenly realized, was what the Cutter had rammed. With new wariness, he looked out at the floating blob, noting the knobs on its rough surface, gaping at its huge size. Yes, dragon turtle it was-and if he was lucky, it was stunned or sound asleep.

“Get to the mast!” hissed the elf. “We’re going to raise the sail!”

Was it his imagination or had the great shape twitched? He looked for a sign of a scaly head or a vicious, lashing tail, claws like iron battering rams.

A wave splashed against the hull, breaking to either side. Now the head was rising, a visage of ugly leather, crusty with barnacles except for a sharp, beaklike snout, impossibly, monstrously huge. Water spilled from the flat skull, a sheet of brine pouring like a waterfall. The monster craned its neck and yawned, revealing a slick, pink maw surrounded by a pair of serrated jaws wide enough, it seemed, to swallow the Cutter.

“The mast is that big pole, right?” Coraltop asked, standing up. “I’m becoming quite the expert sailor. What do you want me to-”

“Quiet!” whispered Kerrick, seizing the kender and yanking him down into the cockpit. His eyes just barely above the level of the gunwale, the elf watched the great dragon turtle, trying unsuccessfully to suppress the trembling that seized his limbs. The creature’s face was primitive, saurian. The one eye turned lazily toward the sailboat was black, cold, and easily as big as the elf’s armspan.

“Oh, we’re hiding?” Coraltop guessed, with an exaggerated whisper. “I like this game!”

Kerrick’s full attention was focused on the dragon turtle. The legends had spoken of a shell as long as Cutter’s thirty feet, but this monster was three times that, at least. The great armored plate slowly began to swivel towards him. Water churned, and the elf saw two huge webbed and taloned feet kick into the air. The shell angled down, and a large wave churned as it surged toward the sailboat in a rolling crest.

The beast dove, vanished. A long, scaly tail thrashed the air and followed into the depths, leaving a vortex of frothing water swirling on the surface. Kerrick and Coraltop clutched the gunwale as the wave heaved Cutter upward, rocking them violently back and forth as it passed on until, once more, they bobbed on a placid, featureless sea.

“Lucky for me-as my grandmother used to say-that it never did that while I was sitting on it,” Coraltop said.

The elf’s head was spinning. “You were riding on that dragon turtle.” He glared furiously at the kender, straining to keep his voice low. “I thought you said you were clinging to a barrel.”

“Oh, I drank almost all the water that was in that keg, I remember, and I was starting to get kind of hungry. Then the dragon turtle surfaced, and I think it fell asleep. Say, do you have anything to eat?”

“Yes-but first let’s get some canvas up. I want to be away from here before that thing surfaces.”

“Not much chance of that,” said Coraltop Netfisher. “It’ll be coming up real quick now, like it did when it ate my other boat. First you see it, then you don’t, then bang!” He leaned over the gunwale, stretching down so far that his nose was bare inches from the gentle swell.

The elf wasted no time staring into the depths. He scrambled past the cabin and started to unlash the sail from the main boom. If the dragon turtle had sounded merely to rise up and smash his boat, they would never get away in time. If it had dived for reasons of its own, they still had a chance.

His hands shook so badly that for a second he could only fumble with the lines. Forcing himself to be calm, he at last freed the ropes, one after the other, that bundled the sail onto the long timber. He was reaching for the