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I can't do that like she can."
Ryan looked at Rodriguez as the landlord came back in, carrying a metal tray
with three small glasses. Two were plain, and one had a faded red flower
painted on it.
All three glasses were three-quarters filled with amber liquid. As he placed
the tray on the table, the glasses chinked and rattled.
"The usquebaugh, my masters. The water of life is what it's called. Gives a
man great strength."
Donfil took one of the two glasses, and Ryan reached for the one with the
flower.
But Rodriguez stayed his hand. "That's my own, if thou mindest not. My lucky
glass, as it were. Drink the crystal-clear spirits and part as friends."
Ryan thought that the moonshine liquor was a way off being clear as crystal.
Milky as a chem cloud, more like.
"A stern wind, a short chase, a clean strike and the try-pots brimming,"
toasted the tavern keeper, downing his shot in a single gulp.
"A clean shaft and a swift passing for my brother the deer," Donfil responded,
sinking the glass in a long swallow.
"A better tomorrow," Ryan said quietly, draining the glass of spirit.
It was fiery and bitter, scorching as it scalded its way down his throat.
There was also a slightly dull, unpleasant aftertaste, like the cold ashes of
a dead fire.
"Another?" Rodriguez asked.
"No," Ryan replied, feeling the liquor eventually find its way into the pit of
his stomach, where it lay in a sullen, curdled pool.
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"Can't say I care for this water of life." Donfil pulled a face at the flavor.
"Hot enough, I'll give you that. But a taste like a vulture's claws. No more
for me. I'm for bed. You, Ryan?"
"Yeah."
Ryan started to rise, but he suddenly felt sick. He blinked, putting a hand to
his forehead. The light from the flickering oil lamps was dimmer than earlier
in the evening, and his first thought was that the clam chowder might have
gone off.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the whaling hands at the far
table were all standing up, drawing cudgels and belaying pins from their
belts, grinning to one another.
"Ryan," Donfil warned, his voice vibrating from a long way off.
"Gently, Master Cawdor. Gently& " said Jedediah Rodriguez.
Then Ryan knew. Knew with the bitterness of cold iron. And he carried that
raging knowledge with him into the careening deeps of a great blackness.
Chapter Seventeen
While I was yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, I could see naught in that
brute but the deadliest ill.
Moby Dick
, by Herman Melville
DARKNESS, PIERCED by the needle point of a slim silver dagger; noises, soft
and muffled, like the distant beating of a slack-skinned drum; movement,
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
pitching
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and regular, like being in some giant's cradle; the smell, cramping and
sickly, overlaid with the unmistakable stench of death and the sea.
Consciousness was slowly coming back to Ryan Cawdor.
The dreams seemed to have lasted for all of a dismal, bleak eternity. Swaying,
pitching dreams that carried Ryan across gray mountain passes where his breath
smoked like fire, through featureless swamps of turgid brown water, broken
only by the gnarled roots of dead trees. Occasionally a bubble of foul gas
would plop to the surface, leaving a tiny circle of frozen ripples in the
scum.
Ryan had fallen by the wayside, and he had watched a parade of the hopeless
and damned file past him with scarcely a glance in his direction. There had
been a tall man in black, white collared, riding a great raw-boned stallion
whose head was a fiery-eyed skull.
A pair of women, both of them slender and barefoot, swayed along the center of
the dreary highway through a steady fall of drizzle. Their faces were covered
in masks of black muslin, and they were singing in a foreign tongue. But Ryan
could recognize the word "death" repeated again and again.
A child, with golden hair and the sweetest smile, was herding along a flock of
bedraggled sheep, aided by two slavering hounds. If any of the bleating
creatures attempted to delay, or go to the side of the track and nibble the
rank grasses, the dogs would pounce on them, rip open their bellies and claw
out greasy loops of intestines, letting them dangle in the dust.
And all the time, the little boy smiled innocently and whistled a merry tune.
"Ryan. You& "
Two ragged men, sitting on a slope, were both staring at Ryan as he swayed
with exhaustion. They were in the shade of a stump of a tree bearing only a
handful of curling leaves. One of the men had his boots unlaced, and the other
was nibbling on the end of a scrawny carrot. Eventually they looked away from
him and carried on with their own waiting.
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"Come on, Ryan. Wake up& Come on.... Open your eye, brother."
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