An Excerpt From “Caesaria: Book I”

CHAPTER I 

The lamp at his bedside crashed to the deck, rescuing Axel from his nightmares. His gasps only stirred his stomach, and with the next toss of waves, he leaned over his bed and expelled his dinner. The watery gruel smacked the floor as if fresh from the bowl, though bile still stung his throat. He gave a final parting spit before sucking in the rusted air, barely noting the mushy oats stuck in his golden hair.

He wiped his mouth upon the rotting mattress, sampling the salt of his sweats. The straw that stuffed his bed stank of mould. Next to his supper, one brave candle flickered in the dark, still seated in the fallen lamp. A corroded hole glared where the bracket ripped from the wall, large enough to make a porthole. With the next great toss of the waves, the sconce went grinding towards his door. 

The waves battered the hull around him, thumping with the hammering in his head. His muscles tensed with each metallic groan; their strength sapped by the shivers of a man too far from home. His aching eyes begged for the release of slumber, yet when he closed them, he saw only water. 

The crystal ripples, once blue as summer skies, now poisoned red. The monsters left her to float where they had violated her. The child screamed for her. Long into the day, and deep into the night. 

He blinked the water away. There would be no sleep for him. 

His bare feet kissed the floor, its rusted grit nicking his heels. He dressed at the mercy of the sea, strapping dagger to leg and hoping it stayed that way. As he tied his boots and belted his trousers, a clang made him jump; he slumped as his chamber pot rolled before him, the piss he took the evening before washing out the final candle. Alone in the dark, he shuddered along the wall for his door, the pit in his stomach a widening chasm. 

Peering down the bobbing corridor, the wrongness of what Axel saw made him hiss. A ship, twisting and turning; bolted-down benches and sconces holding their place, all while he and the torchlight rolled this way and that. His insides churned. The hiss of the waves accompanied his shuffling feet, washing against the straining hull like a tin can. It made his gut wish for something more to expel. Even after a league down the hall, he had not seen a single crewman. The empty creaking of the mess hall, then the lounge, even the stairwell, made his skin crawl. Even if the tribals wanted nothing to do with him, their presence had always eased his nerves. Now, he had only a long shadow to accompany him. 

The ship rolled again, slamming Axel into a crumbling wall on the next floor up. Pain exploded in his shoulder. He shuddered at the roars of that suffocating dark that enveloped him, shutting his eyes and covering his ears and begging the gods to take him. A scream rose in his throat, a scream that he had carried long into his days and deep into his nights. Tears pooled in his eyes, struggling to remember, fighting to forget. His pulsating head promised a night of agony, accompanied with a sudden clanging. Constant, beating, eager. It grew louder and louder, until Axel made out the footsteps. 

From the dim recesses of the passageway ahead, one of the younger sailors emerged, torch in hand; Donkey, he had called him, for his braying laughter that echoed from the mess each night. But to Donkey, Axel could have been a ghost; he spared not a glance as he shot past him, disappearing down the stairwell Axel had only just ascended. 

Another man followed, and then another after that. Each was drenched, dripping puddles, each paler than the last. The third man stumbled after his brothers on legs of jelly, ragged and whimpering.

The fourth and final tribal Axel knew by name. Silisa was lean from her decades at sea, tanned by the coarse and salted winds. Over her right eye, she wore a patch, but Axel was familiar with its unseeing glare. Her son, Reegar – Axel had nicknamed him Quiet until the young tribal had grown on him – was one of the few aboard who would speak to him, although in endless questions. When Reegar had first introduced them, he had eyed his mother with a hard frown. Silisa’s own glare was even harder, though hers was for none other than Axel.

Silisa’s feline eye locked upon him, its stormy depths red-ringed. Her leathery face bore the dark creases of her frown, her scarred leathers clinging to her wiry form. Replacing her stoic sourness, a look Axel supposed she was born with, were wide eyes, and bloodless cheeks. Axel’s heart sank.

“Owsida,” she panted. “Go up,” she pointed above. “Up. Help. Help my son. Reegar.” Her callous manner was held together only by her quivering lips, purple and thin. “Please, Aks-ell,” pleaded the mother, the first time she had said his name. 

He blinked. His eyes went dry as the sands of his home, the sands upon which he had taught his own child to hunt, a decade past. He remembered the child; how his copper hair burned beneath the desert sun. 

Axel nodded, and for Silisa, that was enough. 

With all the suddenness of the waves, Silisa raced down the corridor, vanishing on the dimming trail of her comrades. The rapid tap of feet on steel faded into the workings of the vessel. Once more, Axel was alone. The air around him was thick with blood. The sea roared around his rusting coffin. 

The labyrinth of corridors before him blurred by. The higher the deck, the darker the halls, candles snuffed and torches rapping upon the metal ground. He cracked his shins off stairs and gripped the walls against each wave; he slid down passages and hiked up the rest. Reegar had helped him remember the landmarks; scratches here, dents in the bulkhead there; most were so benign against the overall state of the ship, it was a wonder anyone noticed them. Axel missed a few turns, backtracking through flurries of curses. His body carried him as it had long ago been taught to do, ignoring his pounding heart.

In what could have been a long blink, he soon stood below the hatch to the outside. Wind wailed through a pock in the metal above. From it, trickled a stream of the sea, sloshing around the ladder with each toss of the waves.

Axel clenched the first rungs of the ladder, his feet heavy upon the floor. He shivered. All the living feel fear, Axel recalled. But you’re already dead. 

He sighed away his thoughts. He darted up the ladder. At the first crack of the hatch, the torrent wailed into the crawlspace, nearly ripping the handle from his grip. The rain whipped over his cheeks, even through that brow-sized gap. The frothing waves towered high as palaces and dipped low as the western canyons, monstrous in the lighting and quaking in the thunder. The awesome might of the gods had rendered the largest ship in the Erie armada no more than a speck.

Another bolt struck behind him, so close as to shake the rivets in their seats. From it, Axel glimpsed the flame of hair, just to portside; a man, struggling against something deep in the dark. Before Axel could close the hatch behind him, the man was yanked out of view, swallowed by the dark. 

Axel cut into the storm, leaving the hatch to slam about in the wind. He yelled the young mate’s name, but the storm roared ever louder.

He found Reegar a dozen yards away. A rope snared his ankle to a cannon, the artillery buckling against the rusting rails of the deck. With trembling fingers, Axel’s knife freed the sailor as the rivets began to pop. The cannon plummeted with the railing to the fathoms below, another raindrop in the storm. As the ship levelled again, Axel threw Reegar and himself against the nearest mast.

Axel gulped for air, hugging the timber as the ship continued to roll. Streams of rainwater and ocean spray dripped from his lips, the salt tingling on the tip of his tongue. He was drenched, saved from the cold only by the rush of the rescue. “You think your god will appreciate the offering of artillery?” he yelled. 

“You should be below!” Reegar shouted, his voice as spotty as the freckles on his nose. “It is too dangerous!” 

Axel spat a mouthful of bitter bile, still flavoured with half-digested gruel. “What the hell’s happening, Reegar? Why was your mother headed below?”

Axel thought he heard him grumble, struggling to hear him through the rain thrumming his skull. “The engine is failed, Owsida,” Reegar coughed. “It needs repair. And we must keep sails tied, lest we –” the tribal broke into a coughing fit, and Axel had to resist the urge to clap his back. 

Axel had only seen the old machine once since they left Polis—

the engineers had asked the captain to keep him out of the engine room thereafter— but even a child could hear the choking and know it ran on borrowed time. Again, he cursed. How the gods love me so. 

“Capsize,” Axel finished, mouth twisted into a grimace. “Is the captain alive?”

“No. Given to sea. Along with half the deck,” Reegar answered. “The ship… the ship is hurting, Owsida.” 

In calmer weather, he could live with Erie personification, even appreciate it, but his head could only shake with the rest of him. “Can I help?”

Reegar shook his head, a growl escaping him. “Did she send you up here?”

“Of course she did. You think I want to be here? To enjoy the air?”

Reegar hissed. “She treats me as if I am child!”

“That’s what she’s supposed to do, fool. Now tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

Reegar hesitated, chest heaving for breath, a puffing shadow in the dark. “You tie knots? Climb? We keep cargo and cannon secure, sails up or we—”

“—or we sink, yes, I know,” Axel snapped. Axel had seen the Erie ascend their nets in the roughest weather, the way they rappelled off the deck to patch a breach. Even their footing cast them in a different light; as he and Reegar yelled to one another, the tribal had hardly gripped the mast, only looping an arm about it and leaning with the wind. His muscles tensed to keep him level, clenching his arms and legs until they numbed.

I am already dead, Axel repeated, wishing for that numbness. I am already dead. He saw no other sailors nearby. Whether they lived or died, Axel had to reach Rom. Too much had been given to this journey for it to all be a waste.

“Is the pilot still alive, Reegar?” he asked, heart skipping a beat.

“I do not know. So many gone that I am in charge of this part of deck,” he said, voice cracking. 

“Would you be able to read the rudders?” 

“Not as well as those who trained.”

“But can you get us there?” Axel barked, heart racing, hope ballooning it. 

“Not so fast. But I can, yes.”

“Thank the gods,” Axel mumbled.

 “Did you see Maria, Owsida? The bosun?”

Axel scrunched his brow. “There are a dozen fucking Maria’s aboard this—” 

“Only one bosun, Owsida!” the boy hissed. “She is beautiful and kind with kind yellow hair—” 

“—pretty!” Axel shouted as a wave dashed against the ship's prow; the whole ship jerked back, but held upright. 

“What?” Reegar shouted. 

“Hair is pretty, not kind. Unless her hair can talk.”

“What—blyt,” the Erie cursed. “Have you seen her or not?”

Axel nearly slapped him upside the head. “No. Haven’t had much time for people watching in this shitstorm. Now,” he huffed, “provided that you’re done musing about women when we’re about to fucking drown, I ask you: what are your orders?”

A reluctant grin entered the Reegar’s first decree. “Survive.”

 Axel stumbled after Reegar cannon to cannon, starboard to port. Most cargo had shot overboard in the chaos, and one of the ratlines to the main mast had snapped from its rigging. Narrowly avoiding the snares of the snapping rope and securing one of the only steel crates left, a scream for help pealed through the dark. There was a final rattling cry above them, then a gristly snap. When next the lightning flashed, a pair of feet dangled above.

“I think your man on the mast just hung himself,” Axel shouted.

Before Reegar could see for himself, a mounting wave swept them off balance. Reegar grabbed Axel before he slid out of reach, sending them both skidding across the deck and slamming into the portside rails. Bright flecks of white spattered Axel’s vision, pain exploding across his back. The ship jerked hard to starboard with the next furious gust, Axel and Reegar scrambling for a grip on the rungs at their backs. A woman’s shriek flung from their side of the deck to the other below. Then, a resounding crash. The next flash of lightning illuminated the bubbles of the now-sinking cargo, frothing weakly upon the stirring waters. All those months spent brokering it, lost at the bottom of the Great Lake. 

Next to him, a child cried; when Axel jerked his head to see the source, there was only Reegar. Quivering and babbling at the nightmare before them, Axel swore he heard him call for his mother. Axel’s eyes met the fathoms below, an oily maw gnashing its frothing teeth.

You’re already dead, you’re already dead, you’re already dead. 

The waves turned from black to purple, purple to red. Crimson, thick and hot and steaming. The scent filled his nose, the smell of screams. He squeezed his eyes shut against the stinging rain, dreading the faceless glare floating below, watching him, waiting for him to drop. Please stop, she would beg, mouthless, but not voiceless. She was weeping. Please stop, please stop, stop, STOP.

And then he was home, blanketed in the sun’s embrace. 

The travelled breeze of the sapphire seas whispered their tales over the sands. The homey smell of terracotta, baking in the sun, brought to mind a summer’s morning. The scent of lemons danced through the windows, swirling curtains of glittering gossamer. Golden meadows danced with the breath of the ocean. And there they were, the boy and his mother, dots on the white beach accompanied by the gulls, puttering along the shore. It had been so long. Axel stepped towards them, toes breaking the burning sand, but every step forward shrunk his kin smaller. The sea of grass between them widened, imprisoning his voice behind the reeds. He yelled himself hoarse. The boy’s final words echoed across the grass, in a hollow chamber deep as a mountain is tall. I will keep her safe, said his small, hopeful voice.

Then the child was there, close enough to touch. Blood dripped from the boy’s nose, but when Axel reached out to staunch it, to hold him, he had no hands to reach. He had no body. The child coughed; instead of phlegm, blood gurgled from his lips. The child wept crimson tears. Axel fought to scream, to fight for control of a body that was not there. The child’s own body began to crumble away, dropping to the desert in clumps of sand. The golden sheafs of grass wilted away. Windswept dunes rose around them. The boy watched his own decay in silent screams. His neck shrivelled to a stump, skin pruning, browning beneath the sun. Flies nibbled at his eyes, laying their maggots in their jelly. The shadows of condors darkened the sands. Despite death and desiccation, the boy maintained a lasting look of horror, of the great betrayal of the man he called father: Why did you let them do this to me? 

The vision vanished. The thunder rolled through him, buzzing within the bars clenched in his fists. Waves licked the deck below his dangling feet. At his side, Reegar whimpered in the shadows, mewling in a way Axel had heard a hundred times before. Always in the dark, he pondered. 

“Reegar!” Axel tried to reach him, shuffling down the bars to reach the boy’s ear. Reegar was scrambling over the railing, getting one leg up and flailing the other. He was sobbing, squealing like a piglet. The ship still held its lean; if it ever rocked back, Reegar would be the first overboard. Axel called his name again and again, but the boy would not hear it. 

Axel heard something slapping in the gale. The sharp clink of spars drew his eyes upward, aided by the lightning. Up the hanged man’s mast, half the sail closest to the water was swollen with wind. 

“Reegar, I need you to listen to me,” Axel held his gaze, peering up at him through the railing. “The sail, do you see it?” 

“I hear… I hear it,” the boy quivered, face between the bars. His frozen fingers poked from his fingerless gloves, white as bone around the corroded rungs. 

“I need you to be ready,” Axel began, summoning a confidence that had no place in the plan he was making. “I’m going to climb up and tie the sail. You need to be on the other side of this rail before that happens.”

He lost then what little bit of attention he had won from the boy. Reegar shook his head again and again, droning on in Erie, racked with sniffles. 

“Reegar,” Axel barked, enough to jolt him out of his hysterics. “That is all you have to do. Think of your mother. Also, think of me. And what she’ll do to me if you end up dead, gods have mercy. In my culture, if someone’s asking for ‘divine mercy’, that means I’m fucked sideways.” 

This drew the boy’s eyes up to him, and in them, sparkled a brief hint of humour.

“You see that crate beneath us?” Axel asked. Only one was still secured to their end of the deck, despite their efforts. It was a blocky hunk in the gloom. “I’ll inch over on the bars and slide my way down to it. If it stays put when I hit it, then it should be sturdy enough for you. Just follow my lead. Understand?”

Reegar’s nods were shallow and frantic. Axel began to wonder how Silisa might try to kill him, if she was not already dead. 

Axel shimmied his way down the bars, lining up with the crate and releasing his hold with a curse. The angle of the deck was steep, and he slid down with only the soles of his boots to brace him. He dug his heels and dragged his hands against the decaying deck, scraping the skin from his fingers. When his feet hit the crate, it only buckled, though the impact shot a painful jolt up his legs. 

Axel tested his perch with a few stomps before calling Reegar as loud as he could. The rain cowed him to blindness each time he cast up his gaze to watch for him. Yet now below the mast, Axel finally heard it; the snapping of a sail, the waterlogged canvas swelled by the wind. 

When Reegar finally came shrieking down the deck, he nearly overshot the crate. Axel reached out to grab him to steady his landing, but it was too late; Reegar’s right knee rammed into the crate, legs split as the corner hit his crotch. His scream gave the storm competition. Axel tried to calm him, but his need to scream was one Axel had seen and known well. He could not help him with words. He did not bother telling him to stay put.

The jump from the crate to the mast was a dark one; Axel could make out the shadow of the timber just yards away, but little else. He would crack his head on the railing below if he missed; if he caught the lone ratline taut at its side, he might survive. Or I’ll just bounce off it and drown. Another choked laugh crept up his throat, but he swallowed it back in wake of the howling tribal at his feet. Going with the next gust of wind, Axel launched himself over the chasm. 

The mast rushed at him from the dark, slamming the air from his lungs. Gasping, he clasped his arms and legs about the timber, and began to shuffle up its length. Reegar’s cries faded and died; only the lightning gave him glimpses of the boy, still writhing below, but alive. The rain sliced at Axel’s back, retracing his old scars; he clenched his teeth, the timber slivering his raw palms; onwards, he crawled. 

When he reached the yardarm, he could have been miles high; all but the timber he straddled was devoured by the gloom. But he could hear the flapping of the sail, near and clear. Straddling the sail, legs tight as a vice, Axel wormed his way towards it, towards the sea. His head thrummed against gravity, pulsing with the blood his limbs sorely missed.

The first ropes he passed held firm. They gradually slackened, and at each, Axel mimicked the expert ties of the last sailor as best he could—the hanged man, he assumed. Fantastic. 

The loose knots soon devolved into the untethered. The thrashing ropes were soon tied about the canvas, though the unfurled cloth only hung lower and lower with each rung. Where the sail hung most pendulously, the rope that would have bound it was a nest of knots. The other end fed into the dark below him, swaying in the storm. Axel tried to pull the line, testing its weight; he had only one arm to hoist it. It moved freely, and he knew whatever was on the end swung loose. Then, he remembered the feet dangling in the wind. 

Axel envisioned the sailor, gripping the slimy yardarm for his life. Grubby nails clawing at the ropes, scraping at the wet canvas fruitlessly as he plummeted to his death. Even on the windiest nights, the Erie sailors would dart across the yards like rats, balancing perilously on a single thick rope. Hubris or mastery, Axel had not been certain what to call it. The wind could have stolen the rope from his hands, ensnaring his neck in the debilitating dark. 

Axel cursed his gods, but was sure to ask a favour of mercy for what he was about to do. To the point he felt his thighs tear, he strangled the yard. The pain in his skull felt as if his eyes would pop from his sockets, and Axel allowed himself to scream into the storm. Pull after pull, the outline of the corpse came into view, the head soon anchored against the bough. Bracing himself and using the yard for leverage, Axel reached for the knot around the sailor’s neck; he was unsurprised to find it devilishly complex. He needed the rope, his vision clouding with white dots instead of black rain. A numb fuzz took over his tongue, the taste of blood rising in his throat.

Yanking knife from sheath upon his thigh, Axel began the grisly job of sawing the man’s neck. He had kept it sharp, but no knife could ease the work. A tingle of warmth entered his freezing fingers, hot, sticky blood steaming over his hands. His blade nearly slipped from his grasp more than once. 

He did not have to finish the cut before gravity severed the final sinews; the sailor dropped like a rock into the dark, head close behind. 

Axel huffed, squeezing the rope between his chest and the yard as he caught his breath. Axel kissed his brow to the timber, the pressure in his head finally released. The strain of his limbs never relented, but the circumstances surrounding him helped to plug out the pain. Axel savoured his next few breaths. He was not certain how Erie held with beheading, but he knew all their dead went to the sea. Poor bastard certainly did.

After a quick study of the sailor’s last successful knot, Axel gathered and tied the rest of the sail. Slowly, the ship teetered back to its hectic rock, and Axel allowed his limbs a bit of give. His eyes fell back to the deck, hidden below, where Reegar lay helpless.

When he scaled down the mast, the boy was still huddled behind the crate, rolled into a ball. “The sail?” Reegar strained the words through his teeth.

Axel crouched by his side. “Bound. We have to get you—”

The booming voice of the helmsman erupted, though they could not see him. So terrified he was, his roar was loud enough to battle thunder. 

“What?” Axel demanded. “What is it?”

“Wall?” Reegar mewled. “There are no… walls,” the boy trailed off as he groaned, clutching his crotch and leg. 

“Wall? What the hell do you mean, a wall?” 

Axel looked up and saw it; a bulwark of cliffs loomed before them, scraping the blackened sky. 

Axel nodded with a wan grin, running through a hundred scenarios in his head about how badly this night could end. He lowered himself, gripped the rungs at Reegar’s side in preparation for the inevitable crash. “Fuck the gods.” 

Trembling sobs were his only answer. He put an arm around Reegar, bracing. 

When they hit land, the deck jerked hard to starboard, heads knocked into the crate at their backs. The ship shrieked at the mauling, the deck quaking beneath them. Axel clung to the rungs, his nails drawing blood from his palms, the ropes drawing blood from his fingertips. His eardrums split against the death throes of the rusted titan beneath them. The ship rolled upon the shore with a final bellow, until they lay with their backs against their crate. The ship that had seen the end of the Old World met its final rest upon the shores of the new. The rain fell with a gentle, constant pattering. It was lukewarm upon Axel’s cheeks, sweet upon his tongue. The thunder rolled, amplified by the unknown lands beyond. Land. Blessed land.

The blackened sky consumed him as he slipped into unconsciousness. Axel did not dream.