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Ishmael stepped out by the grounded shark, but not close enough to be struck by the thrashing of the tail. Though the hollowness of the tail and the lightness of its bones meant that the tail lacked massiveness, its abrasive skin was to be avoided. He threw another branchless stem straight into the gaping mouth of a shark diving at him. The jaws closed, and the plant broke in half; the shark swallowed the part in its mouth. Ishmael leaped back into the jungle. A moment later, he saw the beast writhing as if its entrails had been pierced, which was probably the case. The other sharks closed in upon it, biting large pieces of its wing-sails, its tail and its head. The wind carried the dying monster and its raveners out of sight.
Presently two whaling boats descended, tacking, and one settled down into the clearing while the other stayed fifty feet up, its sails furled and an anchor made of many hooks entangled in the vegetation.
Namalee recognized the first mate, a Poonjakee, who got to his knees and bowed until his head touched a pile of vegetation. He was overjoyed that the daughter of Se
Grief must pay homage, like everything else, to necessity, which is governed by time. The men ceased their wailing and applied webs to the wounds. These, Ishmael was to learn, were woven by a wingless, featherless, fuzzy bird-thing.
While two sailors cut out pieces of the shark's heart, lungs and liver and removed its stomach, others searched for the fourth man. After about fifteen minutes, he was found under a canopy of vines and great leaves. He had crawled there and died while creepers entered his wounds and sucked.
The boat in the air was drawn down and Chamkri and the injured sailor were taken aboard. Namalee and Ishmael got into the first boat, where they sat on the thin transparent skin that was both the deck and the bottom of the hull. They secured themselves with a fragile-looking but tough skin belt around their waists. The belt had a buckle of bone and its other ends were sewn into the deck-skin.
The first mate ordered that more meat be fed to the amorphous russet and pale green lump of flesh attached to the neck of each of the six bladders secured around the periphery of the boat. Presently the boat began to rise as the bladders swelled. Both vessels unfurled their side sails and, later, the undermast and its boom were lowered through the central shaft in the deck. The shaft was of hollow bone and was the center of twelve spokes which ran to the sides of the boat, where they were co
Some boats, as he was to find out, also had an upper fore-and-aft rigged mast, though this was always shorter and carried less sail than the undermast.
The ascent to the ship took two hours and several more feedings of the gas-generating animals attached to the bladders. Ishmael sat patiently, having mastered the art of waiting during his whaling voyages. Evidently, the sea of the air demanded even more acceptance of the demands of time.
At last, the boats approached the ship at the same altitude and on a parallel course. Lines were thrown from the boat to the ship, where sailors stood inside an enclosure of bone with three sides and a deck. These sailors were tied to the bone beams by lines around their waists so that they would not be pulled out into the air if a gust of wind or an air pocket jerked the boat outward or vertically.
Ishmael found himself inside a long open corridor which was the main walkway. There were catwalks and ladders ru
Ishmael had expected the ship to be covered entirely with skin. But it was a skeleton of a ship with patches of skin here and there, most notably on the bow and aft. The central part was the most open, and this was so because the wind must not be barred from going through to push against the sails on the leeward side. Your ship of the water has no need to consider such a design, since the masts are sticking above the surface and exposed on every side to the wind. But the ship of the air had to be as drafty as possible to sail close-hauled and at the same time permit the wind to push against the square-rigged sails on both port and starboard.
Individual cabins, the galley, some storage spaces, and a few other places were wholly or partially enclosed by skin. But elsewhere the wind, hot or cold, soft or savage, blew on the sailors night and day.
The bridge, or quarterdeck, was situated on the top of the vessel, aft, in a cockpit about two-thirds of the distance back from the bow. Here one steersman handled the wheel, the muscle to move the rudder being provided by headless, footless creatures whose sinews were grown to the end of lines of leather. These had been conditioned to respond to the tuggings and relaxations of lines attached at one end to their muscles and at the other to the shaft of the wheel.
The captain, Baramha, was a tall man on whose forehead was tattooed the symbol of his position: a black ship's wheel crested by a scarlet three-pointed crown. His orders were transmitted by voice to those near him, by signals of hands in the daytime and by lanterns, cages of huge firefly-like insects, at night.
Baramha, hearing Namalee's tale, turned gray and wept and wailed and gashed his chest with a stone knife. After this, he placed himself at the disposal of Namalee. She questioned him about the supply of water and food and shahamchiz, a fiery liquor. He assured her that there was enough for them to sail to Zalarapamtra, though the last seven days would find them on short rations. They had killed ten whales so far and stored flesh and water from the carcasses. And they had found in one of them a large vrishkaw. This, apparently, was the main reason for the hunting of the leviathans. Ishmael did not know what a vrishkaw was, but he determined to find out at the first chance.
The ship put about and sailed close-hauled to keep it in the general direction of the city, which lay to the northwest.
Namalee and Ishmael were conducted to the captain's cabin. This was on the bottom of the hull, directly below the bridge. Since the floor was transparent, Ishmael got an unhindered view of the world thousands of feet below. It also gave him a feeling of anxiety to be standing on such a seemingly frail floor. The skin sagged under each placing of his foot, and it was with relief that he sat on a bone chair which was firmly attached to a bone beam. The cabin was small but open at one end, privacy evidently not being desired by Zalarapamtrans. There was a many-angled desk of reddish bone with a small flat surface on which the captain made his navigational computations or wrote in his log. The log itself was a large book with thin, vellum-like pages on which were large characters in a black ink. The characters looked like no writing that Ishmael had ever seen.