The Caldera Read online

  The ship, slowing gradually, ran on for another twenty to thirty meters, then the way came off her and she pitched and rolled in the violent wind and sea of the squall. Hal crouched down, one hand still on the tiller, although Heron had no steerageway on her. He strained his eyes aft and to port, searching for the first sign of Vulture, fearful that she would spot them and turn toward them.

  For’ard, the crew lay flat, faces pressed to the deck. Stig found himself studying a rough line of splinters a few inches from his nose, where a dropped piece of equipment had gouged a scratch in the deck planking. Have to take care of that when this is over, he thought.

  Heron, without any forward motion, pitched and rolled awkwardly in the uneven seas. At the steering platform, Hal held his breath, as if the sound of it rasping in and out might carry to the other ship. Then he heard her. He heard the creak and groan of her rigging as she shouldered her way through the turbulent waves, heard Myrgos’s harsh voice as he called orders to his men—although Hal couldn’t understand the language.

  This time, despite the Heron’s feint left, Myrgos had elected to keep going straight ahead, and his decision brought him terribly close to the Heron, which lay silent and unmoving, seeming to crouch in the darkness.

  Then Vulture slid into view—a black shape, darker than the surrounding night, moving swiftly through the water and barely fifty meters away. Hal’s heart pounded in his chest as he waited for the shout that would tell him they had been discovered.

  But it never came. The pirates were scanning the sea ahead of them, looking for the first sign of Heron, for the lighter-colored triangle of her sail. They didn’t see her, lying still and silent and barely a stone’s throw away. And as Hal peered carefully out from the narrow space between his watch cap and the wound scarf, the black ship slid out of sight into the darkness and rain that surrounded them.

  “They missed us,” Lydia whispered from her position a few meters away. He scowled at her, although the effect was lost behind the scarf and cap.

  “Quiet,” he warned her, in a low voice. He crouched, waiting, straining his ears to hear the receding ship. He could still hear Myrgos’s voice, and the sound of her passage as she thrust her way through the waves. But the sounds were getting fainter, and eventually they faded altogether.

  “Hoist the sail!” he called softly.

  Ingvar, Stefan and Jesper grabbed hold of the halyards and sent the sail sliding up the mast. Ulf and Wulf sheeted home without the need for further orders, and Heron began to glide through the water again, accelerating to her normal cruising speed. The wind and waves buffeted her, but Hal swung her to port until the wind was dead astern and she was traveling in the opposite direction to the big black ship.

  If he’d guessed correctly, when they emerged from the squall, the line of dark cloud and rain would be behind them and Vulture would be on the far side, with both ships hidden from each other.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  chaptertwenty-nine

  The weather cleared an hour before dawn. When the sun finally made its appearance above the horizon, the Heron was alone on the sea. The sky was clear and blue, the swell gave the ship an easy, rolling motion and the wind was strong enough to let them run at a good speed, without having to plunge and fight the waves.

  As the light came up across the sea, Hal scrambled onto the bulwark beside the steering platform, balancing himself with a hand on the backstay, and scanned the horizon through a full circle. In the bow, Stefan did the same.

  There was no sign of the Vulture. They had run all night on the direct opposite course to the one they had last seen her on. Assuming she had stayed on that course to search for them—and there was no reason to think she hadn’t—she would be at least fifty or sixty kilometers away by now.

  They had traveled southwest throughout the night, and Santorillos lay somewhere to the northwest of their current position. Now that he knew what island they were looking for, Hal quickly found it on his charts. Hal gestured to Edvin to take the helm and stepped to the chart table. He placed his sun compass on the map to gauge their current direction, making a mental note that he would have to recalibrate it soon. Sun compasses needed to be calibrated every three or four days.

  Stig and Thorn joined him as he studied the chart, marking the spot where he estimated they had been the previous night. He set a straight edge from that spot heading southwest and marked what he thought their current position should be. His sailing notes said there was a northerly current in this part of the sea that would have taken them north of the line he had measured, so he adjusted accordingly. Stig and Thorn watched with interest as he did all this. Navigation was a mystery to them. It was a combination of knowledge of local conditions, measurement of speeds and distances, and a generous helping of instinctive reasoning. Hal, they knew, was a master of the art. After several minutes studying the chart, he straightened and marked a spot on the map with a thin piece of charcoal.

  “We’re there, more or less,” he said. As ever, he checked the telltale before estimating how long it would take to reach Santorillos. “Maybe a day and a half or two days’ sailing.”

  The others nodded. That much they could work out for themselves, once he had ascertained their current position.

  “If the wind holds,” Thorn said.

  Hal grinned at him. “You’re always saying that.”

  His friend shrugged. “Winds come and go. Only a fool would assume otherwise.”

  “We’ll come about and head northwest,” Hal said, stepping up to take the tiller from Edvin. The rest of the crew, seeing him resuming command, readied themselves for the change of course.

  They came about and bowled along on a constant tack to the northwest. In spite of Thorn’s pessimism, the wind stayed steady for the rest of the day and night. Early in the afternoon of the next day, Lydia called from the for’ard lookout that she could see land off to starboard. The vague shadow that they saw at first gradually altered into a hard outline.

  Hal frowned to himself. He’d wanted a perfect landfall but he’d been off by about ten degrees. The perfectionist in him was dissatisfied, although most navigators would have been more than pleased with the result. He nudged the tiller and brought Heron around to starboard, heading for the land.

  He consulted his sailing notes, purchased several years before from a Phyllirican trader. He could see three prominent spurs of rock on the spine of the island.

  “That’s Santorillos, all right,” he said, and the crew studied the approaching island with interest.

  They were approaching from the south, which was the side opposite the huge caldera. From this angle, they would see a rocky coastline with only a few suitable landing places. As with so many of these islands, there was no harbor. Ships would run ashore on the sandy beaches that were interspersed along the rocky coastline. The largest and most accessible of these was the site of a village on the island. Hal headed for it now. There were half a dozen small fishing boats drawn up on the sand, and inland was a haphazard cluster of whitewashed buildings, mostly single story, gleaming in the sun.

  Behind the settlement, the island rose steeply. The ground was rocky and inhospitable, with little in the way of trees to provide shade. Several kilometers in from the shore, it was broken up by a steep rocky escarpment. At the top, Hal could make out several buildings, whitewashed as seemed to be the custom here. A rock wall joined them, creating a fortification at the crest of the slope.

  “That’ll be Myrgos’s lookout,” he said, studying the buildings and the lay of the land. “Be pretty hard to get close to that without being seen.”

  “Maybe it’ll be easier from the lagoon side,” Stig said.

  Hal nodded. “Maybe,” he said doubtfully. Then he set himself to the task of running the ship up onto the sand.

  Once they were aground and the hull propped level, he turned his attention to
two locals who had watched their approach. They were middle-aged men, clad in flowing white linen robes, with head coverings made from the same material and hanging down at the back to shade their necks.

  “Good afternoon,” he said in a friendly tone. “What island is this?”

  The first of the two locals, a grossly overweight man, regarded him with a less-than-friendly attitude.

  “Who’s asking?” he said bluntly.

  It occurred to Hal that these villagers carried on their daily lives under the umbrella of Myrgos’s protection. Presumably, the village supplied the pirates with meat, vegetables and fish. Hal leaned over the railing and smiled at the man.

  “This ship is the Heron,” he said. “We’re from the north. My name is Hal Mikkelson.”

  The fat man turned to his companion, who was of average height and build.

  “Skandians,” he said, his tone making it clear that he was not an admirer of northerners.

  “Raiders, more like,” his companion said, but Hal held up a hand.

  “We’re not raiders,” he said. He indicated the crew gathered on the deck. “As you can see, there are just a dozen of us. We’d need more than that to be raiding. We’re carrying a cargo of amber and we’re looking to trade.” Amber was a product of the north and it didn’t take up a lot of room. So a small ship like Heron could well be an amber trader.

  “Hmmmph,” said the fat man, unconvinced. “You’d better not be raiders. This village is under the protection of Lord Myrgos. And we’re not interested in your amber.”

  A pirate to protect them from pirates, Hal thought. He’d been right. There was obviously a cooperative relationship between the village and Myrgos.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to make him angry,” Hal said. “Where would I find him?”

  “He’s at sea—” the fat man began, but his companion nudged him savagely, cutting off his words with a grunt.

  “He’s around,” he said firmly. “And you’d better not make him angry. His ship would trample this little cockleshell underfoot.” He cast a disparaging look at the neat shape of the Heron.

  “I’ll make sure we don’t get offside with him,” Hal said. “In the meantime, we need to buy fresh food and stock up on water and firewood. Where can we do that?”

  The unkindly looks vanished. Greed and the desire for profit trumped suspicion any day, Hal thought. The thinner man jerked a thumb toward the untidy village.

  “You can do that here. Market is open tomorrow,” he said.

  “Well then,” said Hal, “we’ll make camp here on the beach for the night, if that’s all right.”

  The fat man waved a magnanimous hand. “Make yourselves at home,” he said. Then he spoiled the apparent welcome. “But stay clear of the village tonight. We don’t like strangers causing trouble.”

  “We’ll be no trouble,” Hal promised. “As a matter of fact, we might even anchor offshore for the night.” He turned to Stig and added in a low voice, “Wouldn’t put it past the villagers to come calling while we’re asleep.”

  Stig nodded. The thin man’s next words seemed to confirm Hal’s suspicions.

  “No need to go to that trouble. You’re welcome to camp here,” he said. He glanced angrily at his companion, sensing that his unfriendly tone had alienated the newcomers.

  But Hal waved his objections aside cheerily. “It’s no trouble. The sea’s calm and the cove is sheltered. It’ll save us the trouble of making camp.”

  “Suit yourself,” the thinner man said. But there was a tinge of disappointment in his voice.

  Hal ordered Stig to prepare the ship for unbeaching, then turned back to the two locals. “My charts say there’s a caldera on the far side of the island,” he said. “I’d quite like to see that.”

  The thin man yawned. He was losing interest in the new arrivals. “Go ahead,” he said. “But you’ll need to come back here for the night. The lagoon is far too deep for anchoring and there are no moorings on that side.”

  “Still, now that we’re here, we may as well take a look,” Hal said, feigning no more than a casual interest.

  The villager grunted and gestured to his friend. The two of them turned away and began to make their way back up the beach. A few meters on, the fat one turned around and called:

  “Remember, the market is tomorrow.”

  Hal waved acknowledgment, saying in an undertone, “And I’ll bet you take a healthy share of the profits.”

  Thorn looked at him and grinned. “That’s the way of the world.”

  “True enough,” Olaf put in. After years in Byzantos, he was used to the system of bribes and kickbacks that prevailed everywhere. Skandians eschewed such behavior. They tended to expend their energies avoiding making payments—particularly when it came to taxes.

  Stig had the Heron ready for unbeaching. As they climbed back aboard, he and Ingvar put their shoulders against the prow of the ship and heaved, their feet finding purchase in the loose sand. The ship resisted for a second or two, then the hold of the sand released and she began sliding backward into deeper water. With a final shove, Stig and Ingvar reached up and hauled themselves up and over the bulwark. Stig hurriedly took his place on the rowing bench. Ingvar, now that there was no danger in sight, was relieved from rowing duties. His massive strength tended to send the ship off line.

  They backed the ship for twenty meters, then, with one set of oars going ahead and the other astern, they turned her in her own length.

  “Oars in,” Hal called, and the oars were stowed with their usual clatter. “Port sail,” he ordered.

  As the yardarm ran up, he turned to Lydia, who was standing nearby. “Now, let’s take a look at this caldera.”

  chapterthirty

  The lagoon was huge—an immense circle measuring nearly ten kilometers across, with precipitous cliffs rising from the sea.

  Originally, the circle had been continuous, but over the years sections had crumbled and collapsed into the ocean, leaving large gaps in the rock wall that bounded the caldera. Now there were five entrances to the lagoon that Hal could see. But the eastern wall, covering nearly two-thirds of the circle, was virtually complete.

  They sailed into the huge lagoon. Almost immediately, Hal ordered the sail down and oars out. “We’ll stay close to the cliffs,” he told Thorn. “That’ll make us harder to see if there is a lookout up top.”

  Craning to look up at the massive cliffs, they could see no sign of habitation. But after they’d cruised halfway round, staying no more than thirty meters from the shore, they spotted a small building clinging to the top of the cliffs. There was no sign of a lookout, no sign of anyone moving up there. Hal kept the ship hugging the rocks and they rowed on in silence.

  “There’s a cable,” Lydia said as they came closer to the whitewashed building high above. She pointed and they could all see the thin black line stretching down to the cliff’s base. It emanated from the building, but where it ended they couldn’t as yet see.

  Then it became obvious. There was a narrow inlet in the base of the cliffs, concealed from sight until they were almost upon it. It was ten meters wide and forty deep. It had probably begun as a natural fissure in the rocks and had been dug out and widened by hand, and a timber dock had been built there. The black line of the cable was fastened at the end of the dock. Now they were closer, they could see it was a double line, forming a loop around what appeared to be a windlass or a winch of some sort.

  Lydia, shading her eyes, was peering intently at the cliffs.

  “There’s a basket of some sort up there, attached to the cable,” she said eventually. “Looks big enough to hold three or four people.”

  “That’ll be the elevator,” Olaf said. “They must moor the ship at the dock, then ride up and down in the basket.”

  Hal steered for the narrow inlet, calling to the rowers to keep a dead slow pace.
At his order, Jesper came aft with a hawser ready to throw over one of the bollards they could see on the dock. As he did, he took the strain, gradually taking the way off the ship until she bumped gently against the rough timbers.

  “Let’s take a closer look,” Hal said, stepping onto the planking of the dock. “Maybe we can ride their elevator up to the top to fetch Constantus down.”

  But they couldn’t. As they examined the windlass, the reason for the lack of a lookout became obvious. The handle to the windlass was missing.

  “They must take it with them when they go to sea,” Stig observed.

  Hal nodded absently. He was busy examining the axle of the windlass, over which the winch handle would fit. He’d hoped it might be a regular square-shaped piece of iron, which might have allowed him to rig a replacement handle. But it was a complicated shape, in the form of a five-armed cross. The arms of the cross were thick and blunt. The winch handle was obviously shaped to fit over them and turn the geared wheels that would bring the cable, and the elevator basket, down to the dock.

  “No need for a lookout up there,” Stefan said, looking up at the top station of the elevator. They could see now that it was an open-sided shed that held a large wheel, around which the cable was wound. “Without the winch handle, nobody can go up or down.”

  He was interrupted by a deep rumbling noise out in the lagoon. Startled, they all turned to look and saw what appeared to be a giant bubble breaking the surface. A low wave, perhaps two-thirds of a meter high, emanated from the spot, traveling in a circle. It washed onto the narrow inlet, setting the ship rocking wildly and grating against the dock. The fenders squealed noisily and the planking under their feet shook. Eventually, the disturbance eased and the unsettling movement ceased.

  “What was that?” Ulf asked. Nobody answered.

  Finally, Thorn put forward a theory. “They say this used to be a volcano,” he said. “Maybe it’s not totally extinct.”