Page 17 of Across the Sapphire Sea
5
Elias, Present, 1432 Common Era
The cog ship rocked with the swell of each surging wave. In the distance, thunder rolled, drawing closer. The bitter tang of pine tar rode on the wind. Elias stood on the deck, hands on the rail, Valeri at his side. He wanted to watch the storm come in before escaping to the galley, and Valeri didn’t like him wandering around alone.
Around them, crewman dropped the sail in preparation for the incoming weather. If they wondered why their passengers were awake and above deck in the dark hours of the early morning, Elias couldn’t say.
“How is your stomach?” asked Valeri over the rattling of the wind against the rigging.
After a week aboard the ship, Elias had grown used to the constant queasy rumbling in his gut. But tonight the waves swelled to enormous heights, like nothing he’d seen the first time they’d made this voyage, and his stomach paid the price.
“Getting worse, I’m afraid.” Elias gazed out at the churning sea, searching for the horizon, but it was obscured by dense fog, impossible to see where water ended and sky began.
Valeri slipped a hand to his lower back. “We should go below. We’ll be in the way soon, and rain approaches.”
“Just a little longer?” The tiny cabin and cramped galley had begun to feel like a prison. Elias longed for solid ground and open spaces.
Lightning flashed in the sky, sideways bolts jousting on the backs of churning clouds, putting on a show. A loud clap of thunder boomed too close for comfort, shaking the boards beneath their feet. Perhaps Valeri was right.
“All right,” said Elias. “Let’s go.”
They turned from the rail just as a sailor hollered from atop the stairwell. “All hands on deck.”
A nervous jitter skittered along Elias’s spine. That sounded rather serious.
The captain bellowed orders. “Set the lines!”
“Set the lines!” repeated a crewman farther down so the others could hear.
Rain began to fall as Elias and Valeri crossed the deck to head below and out of their way. A sudden swell thrashed the ship, tilting the ground beneath Elias’s feet at an angle he couldn’t have anticipated. He stumbled, lurched sideways, and would have fallen, but Valeri caught him easily under his armpit.
Too easily. He’d plucked Elias, a grown man, mid-fall with one arm as if he weighed no more than a kitten, lifting him clear off his feet before gently setting him down. A sailor who’d witnessed the save stopped in his tracks. The man’s eyes widened, and he took a step back. One man shouldn’t have been able to lift another so effortlessly, and this sailor knew it.
Elias clung to Valeri as they hurried to the stairs. “He saw that.”
Valeri arched his brows. “You’d rather I let you fall?”
“No, but he will suspect.”
“Shall I throw him overboard?”
Elias blew out a frustrated puff of air. “Of course not.” That Valeri could say such things in such a casual manner would never fail to stun him. It was something he hoped he’d never grow accustomed to, lest he become as callous as his sire.
The rain went from the first misting drizzle to spewing angry pellets in the span of a breath. Water sprayed Elias’s face. Taking cover downstairs, they narrowly avoided a drenching. The ship’s passageways bustled with crewmen rushing in the other direction to assist. They crowded to the side to avoid them.
A sailor shoved into Elias’s shoulder in his hurry to get by, jostling him.
“Watch it,” Valeri snapped.
The sailor didn’t even turn to look back.
“Perhaps you should throw him overboard too,” Elias mumbled.
“Don’t tempt me.”
Amid the chaos, the others had gathered in the galley. Elias and Valeri slipped in from the hall.
Valeri caught his gaze. “All right?”
