PoraBora

Chapter Forty-Six

It had started to rain. Pora was glad. He figured the smell would wash away.

It didn't. It was made worse. Wet feathers and soggy chickens covered the ship. The warriors complained incessantly, he assumed. They surely wished the god had been put on another ship, for somebody else's misery.

Pora had not felt the storm coming. Maye's prison was too stuffy, too humid, and too covered in fowl for him to make guesses about the encroaching weather. But he felt it now as it tumbled under the boat, lifting and dropping the bow. Pora slid with the birds, who squabbled and rolled, while Maye was large enough to keep his place.

Pora glanced at the window when he came to a stop next, knowing the air would be fresher. And that if he was going to hurl, it would be best out there. Pora didn't think of himself as a hurler. He had spent lots of time on boats around Wai Polu, and in his own search of his island, and even recently, and never once had he felt sick. But the birds, and the humidity, and the swells all concocted the right circumstances.

He just needed to remove one. Pora stood, took four steps, and was dropped back to his hands and knees. The boat swelled, and his stomach swelled with it. He had no doubt that if he moved suddenly, his stomach would be out his throat.

So he crawled and slid back and forth as the bow went up and down again. He scrambled at every opportunity to get closer to the window. Then, Now, he thought, as the bow went up again, and he dashed, threw himself at the windowsill, and held on for all his breakfast was worth (lunch and dinner had had to be skipped, after they coiled up the hanging lines).

Pora pushed open the porthole, breathed, and stared.

There were jellyfish everywhere, glowing like cool lanterns, purple and blue and pink. Every white cap was a soft, sharp blue, and every splash of rain left a mark of disturbed bioluminescence.

"Maye," he gaped, "What's going on out there?"

The god did not respond. He didn't need to. Pora could see it himself.

"There's no oil," he noticed too, and he breathed as much clean and salty air as he could. There was still a little musk, from the oilwell and the room behind him, but it was otherwise air that cleared his head and made him smile.

What he really needed was a swim, but a sea filled with jellyfish wasn't the place. He knew little about them. He'd passed some on his outrigger, and seen a couple from his beach, but never had he been in the water with them. At Wai Polu, he was told to be careful of them, and appreciate them from a distance, because even gentle contact could injure the fragile creatures.

He couldn't imagine what a fleet plowing through them could do. Pora laid his chin on the porthole's sill. He didn't know how he was going to get to the keys to save Maye, now. Probably he'd have to break the links instead, but he didn't think he could sneak a cannon into the hull. He thought even less that he could smash the chains without hurting the god. But maybe something as heavy as that he wouldn't have to fire at all. He could roll it onto the links where they were the most brittle. Not that that solved how he would get a cannon into the ship by himself. He'd have to get it through the hatches and ladders and thin halls without anybody hearing him. Without anybody walking by.

Could he lower one by rope from the outside? No. The porthole barely fit him.

A swell washed over Pora, pushing water into the room and causing the fowl to flap their discontent.

Okay, thought Pora. Not a cannon.

Could a jellyfish use its tentacles to open the lock from the inside? Or an octopus? He wasn't sure they would, even if he asked politely, and he couldn't get off the ship to go and look for one.