Wagner Karl Edward - In the Wake of the Nught.pdf

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IN THE WAKE OF THE NIGHT
an excerpt
Editor’s note: In the Wake of the Night was a long-planned Kane novel about
the voyage of the Yhosal-Monyr, originally referred to in Bloodstone.
Conceived to be 150,000 words long when finished, Karl recalled: “I’ve been
working on it since 1970, back during my stay in Haight-Ashbury, when
inspiration grabbed me while I was tripping on acid at a Procol Harum concert
at the Fillmore. “Although never completed, the following is from the novel’s
prologue.
Kethrid’s Dream
Rush, crash,
Waves fall back—
The sand, the surf;
Surf, sand—and back again.
At night...
Waves climb high, climb higher, and crest;
Then fall with a crash I can hear a thousand miles.
At night...
At night the black surf is a pounding beat,
A surging roar of the earth’s vast heart—
Pulsing life-flow of the universe of night—
A heartbeat I can hear a thousand miles.
At night...
When sleep will not come,
And restless, I feel the pulse, hear the roar
Of seething black surf on distant dark shores,
Where night has lain a thousand years.
And on what unseen coasts, on what untrod sands—
Where does the night close a veil never rent,
Only rippled by the roar of distant black surf?
To sight these coasts, to tread these sands,
To scale these cliffs, to know these lands,
Beyond the wake of the night...
The surf lures me on, sighing promises upon broken rocks.
Dare...
An unspanned ocean, to cross an unknown sea;
Know the vision of distant coasts,
Know the touch of unknown sands.
Dare to follow in the wake of the night.
The roar of the surf on uncharted shores—
Heartbeat of infinity, its pulse eternal—
Calls to me at night, as it will through night eternal.
Black surf in the night, challenging distant shores—
I hear its call ten thousand miles,
Across ten thousand years.
Prologue
How long the ship had lain there, no man could say. A century?
For the ship was there when man first came to this shore. Perhaps it was
there when man fled the flaming death of Eden. It may have been there at the
moment of man’s birth. Or long before.
Perhaps a thousand years.
The ship.
Like some unthinkably huge sea monster the ship rested against t.he shore.
 
For the span of a thousand feet it was the shore—a curving black cliff that
rose from the sand, ten times the height of a tall man.
A dead leviathan cast forth by the sea. No grave could hold a corpse so
vast. Perhaps it was too huge to decay. Not the rotting hand of time, not the
scouring brush of waves and sand, not the searing breath of the wind could
erode the immovable strength of its black shell.
Perhaps the leviathan only rested.
But its sleep was as great as its size, for the ship had rested throughout
the memory of man.
The first men to sight it had crept into its shadow on legs tense with
awestricken fear. Minds inured to the marvels of the Earth’s elder races were
nonetheless stirred with wonder at the silent giant. Might it not awaken and
devour them, or in its slumber roll and crush them?
No. It was dead. A great wound gouged through its back. Sand and seadrift
filled its belly. It must lie here in death.
And the men passed by and left the ship on its bier of sand—wreathed in
seaweed, shrouded in spray. A hundred miles down the coast men raised a
village upon the broken ruins of prehuman dream; the village grew into a city
and men called it Carsultyal. But the ship remained, vast and lonely— for few
cared to disturb its ghost.
If, indeed, it was dead.
I. Vision
Riders in the surf.
Horses’ hooves smacked against the wet sand—the sound of their passing
swallowed in the roar of the waves. A handful of men, cloaks streaming in the
sea-wind, rounded a point of headland and paused in the shadow of grey cliffs.
“There,” spoke Nays, pointing needlessly.
Kethrid’s breath caught, then hissed unheeded in a long “Ahhh. . .” He
raised his spare frame against his stirrups and gazed intently ahead. His
yellow eyes shone in the morning sun.
Sprawled against the shoreline beyond, the ship resembled some beached whale
of fantastic size. Its ebony hull dwarfed the grey cliffs behind it. Its mass
must be immense, for countless seasons of storms had not been able to force
the ship back against these grey fangs. Instead the ship had stolen the
shoreline from the cliffs, for even in these deep waters the ship lay grounded
immovably some distance offshore. In the shelter of its hull, waves piled up
sand and drift, so that the ship and its bier made a promontory.
“You seized prey too great to swallow,” mused Kethrid aloud. “And now it has
strangled you.”
Nays glanced at him, then nodded—he had been with Kethrid long enough to
follow the twisting course of his thoughts. “It would only have broken its
fangs on its shell. The material of that hull is less yielding than the rock.”
Kethrid continued to stare, entranced. The sea-wind flapped the azure cloak
about his bony frame, hung bits of spray in the tightly curled brown hair that
haloed his thin, beardless face. Solid Nays sipped brackish water from a
canteen, and passed it among the rest of their party—a dozen soldiers, eyes
wary for mermen, and Bryssla, flat face alert and unreadable. The merchant
prince waved aside the canteen and unstop-pered a small flask of wine from his
panniers.
“You can see more from up close,” Nays reminded sardonically.
“Surely,” Kethrid agreed, shrugging off the mazed spell. “Let’s be getting
there, then.”
The horses started forward, slowly covering the distance of a few miles that
separated the men from the ship. Kethrid was too stricken with wonder to
fidget with his customary impatience. On the barren shoreline the wreck had
seemed less than a mile away. More than ever the realization of the ship’s
enormous size was borne upon him.
Even then, his imagination was overwhelmed as they reached their goal and
 
full awareness came to them. Muttering hushed exclamations, Kethrid let his
horse slowly pick his way past the piled drift that nested against the wreck.
The tide was at ebb, and although it took a quarter of an hour, they were able
to circle the entire length of the ship.
Standing in its shadow, Kethrid’s initial impression of a beached leviathan
held true. Its hull seemed organic, streamlined—like the shape of some
impossibly huge whale. The long, black, curved hull tapered toward either end,
with its stern slightly more rounded. The ship seemed to rest on its side. The
lower sections of its hull thrust against the surf—exposing a blunt keel like
the elongated dorsal fin of a shark. At the keel’s trailing edge, a number of
evenly spaced protuberances made dull blisters many yards across. Toward its
upper sections the hull flattened, appeared to frame onto a single open deck
for most of the vessel’s great length. But much was buried in sand here on its
shore-ward face.
And here the ship had received its deathwound. A jagged tear pierced through
the canted deck, like the blow of some gigantic harpoon through the back of a
whale. It had gored a path of perhaps fifty yards along the hull, making a
cavern into the ship’s belly.
Kethrid dismounted. The lips of the wound were about ten feet apart, ragged
edges strangely fused and pitted. So the black metal could be destroyed after
all, he mused, wondering what vast energies had burned such a cleft. Kethrid
had worked with samples of this metal in his forge in Carsultyal, and even
temperatures that transmuted iron into steel had not melted the alien alloy.
Lighter, yet harder than steel, the black metal would be of untold worth to
mankind, if he could only discover how to work it. There were countless
secrets hidden in the ruins of Elder Earth. Kethrid had wrested many such
secrets from oblivion already; perhaps the black metal would be next.
He stood before the cavernous rift and peered within. He heard the slap-lap
of hidden waters, stirred by the pounding of the surf. A strong stench of
stagnant sea and rotting jetsam came from within. Sand and shells had poured
into the canted ship; seaweed and driftwood festooned the opening. It seemed
an impenetrable tangle, and Kethrid wondered if the entire belly of the ship
were packed with such debris. The jagged wound seemed to have burned through
at least one of the lower decks and beyond.
“Strike us a light,” he ordered, poking his coffin-jawed face through the
aperture
“I wouldn’t go inside just yet,” Nays cautioned. “The hold stinks of mermen
and sea scorpions.”
Kethrid grunted, but did not press on. Bryssla joined him at the opening,
gazing about impassively while a soldier crouched to shelter his tinderbox
from the wind.
“Have you ever seen a thing like this?” Bryssla asked suddenly.
Kethrid shook his head. “No. At least, never all in one piece. I’ve seen
ruins that would dwarf this, but never an intact, free moving vessel of this
size.”
“Intact. Free moving.” Bryssla snorted and spat. “At the present this is
neither. I find it doubtful that such an enormous structure as this could ever
have floated.”
“Size is of no consequence,” Kethrid pointed out, “so long as the weight of
the ship is less than that of the water it displaces. And we know that the
elder races sailed craft such as this. Sailed the skies and sailed the stars,
it’s true—though we’ve lost the secrets that gave them such power.”
A sudden scurrying cut him off. The soldier had gotten his torch alight. As
he thrust forward into the shelter of the ship’s hold, a panic-stricken merman
came tumbling down from concealment within the tangled drift.
“Fire! Fire! Evil men!” it cursed them in Old Tongue—shielding its huge,
lidless eyes with a blue-scaled forearm. Half-blinded, it darted toward the
torchbearer—slashing with its black-taloned hands.
Swords flickered as the others closed on it. The merman squealed shrilly
—moving with the uncanny speed of its race. A sudden leap, a blurring slash.
 
Two men spun away from their smaller opponent—bleeding furrows ripped across
leather hacquetons and flesh. Then Nays lunged with a spear. The bulky man’s
thrust pinned the merman to the bunker of drift. It spat and cursed, clawed
out toward his face. Swords rose and hacked. Eventually its struggles ceased.
The men puffed and glared, looked to their wounds. Those slashed hurried
into the surf to wash their wounds in salt water, for a merman’s claws were
certain to cause festering.
“This is your ship!” scoffed Bryssla. “A den of vermin! A cargo of sand and
muck! This ship is dead, Kethrid. You’re a fool to dream of restoring such a
vessel!”
Kethrid touched the silent hull. Through the black metal he could feel the
drumming song of the surf. His eyes were lost in dream.
“I shall name her Yhosal-Monyr," he breathed. “In Old Tongue, Light Reborn.”
“You’re a fool,” swore Bryssla. “The ship is dead.”
But Kethrid was listening to the call of his dream. His answer was
unshadowed by doubt. “The ship will sail again.”
 

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