Chapter 1

Óðinsdagr 23, Ýlir, 3423—Whence comes The Man From Beyond

The squall should have killed me. It struck purely without warning, bringing powerful winds and rain hammering downward and across, all but liquefying the air and sundering the Capercailye as if she were made of nothing but pine and dressmaker's muslin. Hardly any time was allowed to fling oneself overboard, never mind gaining purchase upon something that might support the weight of a grown man at least somewhat above water. Floundering, my hands found what turned out to be the midsection of a center mast and I seized it tightly with one arm.

My other arm was seized and I was nearly dragged beneath the waves. A gasping breath cut into the air as another of the crew emerged, choking mid-scream. Waves crashed over the crewman’s face and my own—saltwater forcing itself into nose and mouth and he knew we were both engaged in the same flirtation with drowning.

The addition of the crewman's weight dragged with mine upon the mast piece to which I so desperately clung, and I had no confidence at all that it would hold against our combined weight. But the decision to continue holding on to the crewman or saving myself was wrested away. In the same instance that I thought of it, the crewman was torn from me. The force of it all but dislocated my arm and the younger man was swallowed up by the ocean.

His name was Delmer, and though younger than me by a little over a decade, an experienced seaman and my guide to becoming less inept in my new, temporary occupation. Just that prior evening I had spent some time on the deck conversing with him, as we often did. He enjoyed my sleight-of-hand, but we had a great deal of work and little time for idle entertainment. His loss of life was not inconsequential in the lack of familiarity, but intensely significant in the sheer terrible simplicity of it.

Please understand, in stating that I should have been killed, it was not that I believed it should have been me vanishing into tumultuous seas in his stead. Never have I been more certain that absolutely no one was meant to survive. My full expectation was that very shortly the Reaper’s cold fingers  would touch my own flesh, for in my mind the South Pacific had become the embodiment of death.

Sea water both caressed and battered me, compelling me to eject it from my stomach while simultaneously forcing itself into me. The teeth of its currents tore at me, the sister-winds screamed like banshees in the night. Light itself conveyed utter malevolence—having already changed from darkness to unnatural white of moonlight reflecting off clouds and water, it changed again to an obtuse combination of all the colors in a profusion of sickening brilliance. Suddenly the water became colder than it should for those seas at that time of year, so much so that it was purely shocking.

Then all at once I was no longer immersed in water. Though I had not been lifted free, nor tumbled up onto a beach, I was suddenly and simply clear of it. Tightly clutching the mast in both arms, I wrapped my legs around it as well as I went from icy water to freezing air so quickly that my clothes froze to my body and to the mast. My hair became stiffly ice-encrusted and I thought my eyes might become orbs of ice in their sockets, ringed by frost-dusted lashes. I closed them and anticipated the onset of the quiet sleep of death.

Shouting?

Men's voices raised in alarm and anger. The words were foreign and at first unintelligible. Opening one eye, I found that I had begun to spin—in mid air. An impossible feat, an improbable activity yet there I was suspended and rotating at once. Quite soon I would have to fall. Yet it never happened.

Something grabbed hold—my ankle taken firmly in hand—and hauled me forcibly downward. I did fall, though a far shorter distance than expected and not against any kind of stone or sand, but onto stout wooden planks. Lying on my back, still curled around that mast, I dared not move. When the mast was being tugged from me, I grasped hold of it with keen desperation, my entire being fully surrendered to survival.

Someone shouted at me again, forcefully as the tugging continued. I opened my eyes to look upon my adversary, an action not easily done with eyes frozen shut.

An exceedingly cross looking Chinaman glared back at me, his wispy mustache and thick spectacles failing to obscure a particularly severe glower. He gave the mast a most tremendous tug again as he shouted more unintelligible words at me. He was speaking his native tongue, of which I had some transient command, though this dialect was not known to me. My grasp of the language had come to me while working small theaters in San Francisco on the edge of the neighborhood known as Chinatown. Not exactly what one might call higher learning and ultimately I understood far more of the language than I could confidently speak.

This Chinaman was firmly repeating what I believe was one short, succinct phrase that translated to two words in English. What sounded like songshaw was actually, “Let. Go.”

More than strength was required from me to comply, as my arms were locked in place from holding on with such desperation. Luckily, He of the Wispy Mustache was only too willing to oblige in wresting my arms from the mast. Once released, my limbs were still severely reluctant to move. Laying there, in the bottom of what I now perceived to be a long boat, straightening my arms seemed to be impossible and I questioned why I should bother with it if I was to shortly perish. Dimly, I saw that Wispy Mustache was joined by two others who lifted the mast and tossed it overboard. There was no splash to indicate that it had struck water or fallen into it, though all three men paused to watch as if it did. In fact, I could hear water rushing only distantly, rather than in waves about to fold themselves completely on top of me. Neither was there any sound of water lapping the sides of the boat. Inching my way to the edge of it, I was able to get my head up and dared to peer over.

Into nothing. That is to say, there was no water, no sea, nothing of the sort to create a vanishing horizon. Rather, I found myself staring into infinity, with great swirls of color against deep twilight blue and a myriad of multi-colored stars that appeared to be strung upon a strand of pure brilliant turquoise wrapped in silver. A clear night sky completely alien from the one I knew. Sufficiently disoriented, I turned away from it, lifting my gaze upward and was startled to see more of that night sky above me. The conformation was quite similar in the colors, the strands and stars but also obviously different as the Southern Hemisphere was different from the Northern, yet this was neither. Quite far from it.

Perhaps the Reaper had taken me after all.

Two of the men spoke amongst themselves, their sharp syllables and phrases in that Oriental tongue going by too fast for a rudimentary speaker to comprehend. I caught one or two words that I thought might be outside and new. Joss had to do with the Chinese complex notions about luck and huài was bad. Meanwhile, I was chilled right through to the bone, shivering so abominably that my teeth refused to part long enough to chatter.

A woman’s voice spoke sharply in the same tongue and shortly thereafter I was enveloped by sheepskin that descended upon me with deep, weighted warmth. A body slipped in behind mine under the sheepskin. An arm came around my waist as a means to pin us together.

The woman spoke again—from directly behind my head—and the two men scurried about to work. We began moving, which startled me as the bow of the longboat was behind me and prevented any observation of our progress. When I attempted to turn to it, the arm around me transformed to steel to hold me still.

“Do not move,” was spoken in tilted English directly into my ear, the woman’s voice firm but gentle. The knowledge of a female form pressed against my back had the adequate effect of increasing my body temperature from within while the sheepskin kept the cold air from my skin and trapped the heat of the body next to mine. I looked around as I could at any rate, hoping to see some form of a ship’s mast appear.

Rather than the mast, I saw the ship—the whole of it from the most unusual perspective of the underside. Truly a view that none were granted, save those who built such things or were keelhauled beneath them, this one was possessed of a strange blue light coursing down the centerline seam of the keel. As I watched, our longboat moved directly beneath it to the port side, then rose slowly upward, bringing us past the ship’s outer hull. There was no water around us, only cold but breathable air.

That last realization was beyond what could be fathomed. Already wracked by the terror of the squall, the sinking ship, witnessing death and nearly freezing to death, it was a small wonder that my eyelids fluttered shut. The voices faded into a distance while I was enveloped by a shroud of warm, comfortable black.