Only the Worthy by Morgan Rice Page B

ELEVEN
     
    Royce slowly
opened his eyes to the gentle sound of sloshing water, and he looked about,
disoriented. He was lying face down on the upper deck of the ship, his face in
an inch of water, lapping gently against his cheek. Water splashed over his
chin, up his cheek, and into his ear, and he wondered briefly if he was dead.
    Royce lifted his
head slowly, half of it dripping, the other half dry and sunburned, and blinked
several times as he wiped salt-encrusted water from his eyelids. His head was
splitting, his throat parched, and his body felt like one big bruise.
    He slowly rose
to his hands and knees, breathing hard, wondering what had happened, and
wondering how he had survived the storm.
    The silence was
most unnerving of all. During these past moons the ship had been clamorous,
filled with the sounds of boys groaning, shrieking, fighting, dying. It had
been filled with the ubiquitous sounds of soldiers relentlessly ordering,
whipping, beating, killing. It had been filled with ever-present sounds of
agony and misery and death.
    Yet now it was
silent, still. Royce looked out and saw the sun breaking over the sky, a dull
red, and it felt as if he were the last man alive in the world. How had he
survived? How had the ship survived?
    He looked around
and saw it was badly listing, limping along in the open waters, which were now
calm as a lake. Royce felt something bump against his knee, looked down—and
wished he hadn’t. There was a corpse, a boy who looked to be his age, lifeless,
eyes open to the sky as he floated across the deck, bumping against him.
    Royce turned and
scanned the deck and, in the breaking dawn, saw dozens more bodies floating,
some face up, some face down, all sloshing on the ship. He felt a wave of
revulsion. It was a floating graveyard.
    Royce shook his
head, trying to push the image from his mind. The storm had taken nearly all of
them. He closed his eyes and tried not to hear the screams, tried not to think
of all the faces, of all the boys who had died, now somewhere overboard,
carried off in the wind and waves.
    And yet he
supposed he should be grateful. If things had stayed as they were, if he had
stayed down below, he would surely have died eventually, of plague or the
dagger, if not starvation. This storm at least had allowed him to get out from
below; indeed, he turned and looked over at the hatch below, saw its edges been
shattered, and was shocked to see it was now entirely filled with water.
Floating up from out of it were several dead bodies, sloshing across deck.
    Slowly, there
emerged sounds of life, a distant splashing, and Royce turned to see one boy
rising to his hands and knees from the deck as the sun rose in the sky. Then
came another.
    And another.
    One by one,
signs of life began to return.
    Soldiers began
to rise, too, one at a time, and soon dozens of members of the ship came back
to life. As the sky lightened, Royce realized with a combination of relief and
dread that he was not the only one. Somehow, despite it all, others had
survived.
    As the new day
broke Royce looked out and was amazed at how calm the sky was, how calm the
waters were, as if a storm had never happened. The water was shockingly still,
no sound audible save for the slightest lapping against the hold. It was like
sailing on a lake.
    As Royce looked
he was startled to see something else: there, on the horizon, was a landmass.
He spotted craggy black cliffs rising up from the sea, as if a sulfur monster
had emerged and hardened. It looked to be a bleak, unforgiving place, yet
still, Royce’s heart quickened: it was land, at least. The first land he had
seen in weeks.
    And clearly,
their destination.
    “Slaves, get
back to work!” called out a rough voice.
    Royce sensed a
commotion behind him, and found himself pushed, stumbling forward. He couldn’t
believe it: already the soldiers were rounding up the boys, ordering them
around as if nothing had changed, despite the carnage around them.