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Finally, Daulhamra, the greatest of the captains now that Baramha was dead, rose. He stared around the room and then said, "Zalarapamtra dies unless it gets new blood. It needs this stranger who claims to be the grandson of long-dead ages. Perhaps he has been sent by the gods. If we accept him, then we use the gift of the gods. If we reject him, we deserve to die. I say behold the Grand Admiral!"
And thus Ishmael, who had never had any such ambitions, who had been content to be only a fo'cs'le hand, surpassed the dreams of his most ambitious bunk-mates.
From that time on, it was as if he transmitted courage to them. They no longer walked around with downcast eyes and muttered when they talked or squatted for hours staring silently at the ruins. Now they moved briskly and talked much and loudly and laughed. This would not last long, Ishmael knew, unless he kept them moving with words and example. So he went down to the eternally quaking ground and the shaking jungle to search for ghajashri. This was the plant which burned so furiously and the smoke of which had an odor of stone-oil. Ishmael collected great quantities. In a large chamber of the city, he crushed the vegetation between two millstones the sailors had made under his direction. The pressure squeezed out a dark oily substance which caught fire quickly in the open. When the ghajashri oils were kept in a skin bag, their vapors accumulated. A burning fuse would set a bag of the oil off with a roar, and the oil would splash far and burn fiercely.
Ishmael set everybody who could be spared to collecting the plant and pressing out and collecting the oil. Since it took enormous quantities of the vegetation to get a small amount of oil, the work was long and hard. Meantime, two more whalers came home, and it was necessary to convince these newcomers that the pale-ski
Ishmael had expected that he and Namalee would be married very soon. But he quickly learned that the marriage would take place only after Zoomashmarta and the little gods had been rescued. A Grand Admiral never took his first bride until he had performed some heroic feat. Usually, this was the successful harpooning of ten whales or of twenty sharks in one day or leading a raid on an enemy city or an enemy ship and capturing it.
Ishmael, to prove his ability, would have to do what no man before him had ever done.
Ishmael then ordered a ship built which would be twice the size of the largest so far. As usual, the Zalarapamtrans did not jump to obey but wanted to know the reasons for his orders.
"It is true that there is no cause to build larger ships for hunting the whales," he said. "But this ship is a warship. With it I plan to destroy a whole city. Or at least a good part of it. It needs to be built as soon as possible because it will have to start out far ahead of the rest of the fleet. It will be so heavily loaded it will go very slowly."
The other ships had to have repairs and had to be stocked. And his men had to be trained for the raid into Booragangah. Also, the city had to be kept stocked with food.
Namalee's sisters and half-sisters insisted that they must accompany the ships on the expedition. Otherwise, they said, the ships would not have good luck.
Ishmael argued against this. If a ship went down, it took with it an invaluable and irreplaceable asset, a future mother. It was going to take long enough as it was to build the city into a strong and populous community nation again. If any more women were lost, the regrowth of Zalarapamtra might be impossible.
Ishmael did not argue any more. He could do just so much with these people. After that, he was wasting his breath and also losing his authority.
He worked as hard as anybody and harder than most. His hours for sleeping were not as many as he wished. It was difficult at first to sleep during the long day, when he knew that there was light to work by. The original cycle of eight hours of sleep and sixteen of waking still conducted men's lives. The lengthening of day and night had not interfered with that rhythm. These people were born to the practice of sleeping part of the daytime and working part of the nighttime. He found it a practice to which he, accustomed to strange hours of on-watch and off-watch, soon became adjusted.
The time came when the great ship was built and loaded with supplies and the cargo of fire-oil bombs. The ten men who were to crew it said goodbye and the mammoth vessel, the Woobarangu, lifted slowly, its sails spread, its goal the city of Booragangah thousands of miles to the northwest.
Four of the whaling vessels followed it five days later, that is, twenty of the days of Earth when its sun was white-hot. Ishmael commanded the Roolanga, the flagship. They were headed for a group of mountains which Ishmael thought had once been the Hawaiian Islands, though he could not be sure. In all the millions of years, possibly a billion or more, islands must have sunk and new ones risen and in turn been eroded to nothing and other islands taken their place. And all this long before the oceans dried up.
Sailing at an average of ten knots ground speed, the fleet could have reached its destination in about two hundred hours or two days and nights. But Ishmael had ordered that supplies be very short, since he wanted to use all the space he could for bombs and weapons. Thus, it was necessary on the second day to hunt whales to add to the food supply. And they were held up again when they caught up with the giant Woobarangu. They trimmed their sails to keep pace with it. When they were several hundred miles outside Booragangah, they began to circle, waiting until another long night began.
At the same time, they kept a sharp watch for enemy sails, since whaling ships could be coming from any direction this close to the city.
The giant red disk finally dropped, its weak rays turning the distant top of the mountain that was their goal to a purplish point.
The captain of the other ships had boarded Ishmael's for the last conference. Once more, he made sure that each understood his part. Then they drank a toast in shahamchiz and departed. They looked pale but determined. The existence of their nation depended upon them, and their nation could not afford to lose even one of them, no matter if all the gods were restored. Moreover, if they were taken alive, they would suffer horrible torture. The enemy knew how to drag out agony and put off the end of it as the sun knew how to drag out the light.
As if stuck in the throat of night, the sun hung on the horizon. Then it was swallowed and in a moonless night the ships ceased circling and beat to the wind toward the distant spire. After an hour the top of the moon rose leprously above the east horizon and quickly flooded the dark with a bright illumination. It shone dully on the sails, which had been dyed black, and on the hull, also black. A second deck had been added to the bridge. This projected above the top of the hull and increased wind resistance, but it couldn't be helped. The captain and the steersmen had to see where they were going.
At an estimated hundred miles from Booragangah, all except the flagship began to circle upward. They would rise as high as they could, their crews breathing from wooden flasks of compressed air which Ishmael had designed. They would then sail to a point above their destination and begin circling again. After an hour, as regulated by the sand clocks Ishmael had made, they would descend. They would do this slowly until they saw the signal, after which they would release gas swiftly. The great Woobarangu would discharge its gas even more swiftly.
The Roolanga continued straight ahead, steadily descending. When it was about twenty feet above the tops of the shivering vegetation, it leveled out. Long before the other ships had reached the top of their spiral, it was sliding along quietly and slowly into the wind, its sails furled, its lower mast drawn up. Grappling hooks dragged through the jungle, making more noise than Ishmael cared for. But eventually the hooks caught, and men swarmed down the lines and secured them to plants.