Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 459 of 619

The coast was hunting out. Rowan's last tracks proved it, beasts fleeing north past Ajax's maps. One tracker and three men could no longer keep two ships full. Ajax needed a crew that could hunt as well as sail. So he called Marcus off his deep-water run for one day and turned the second ship's sailors into hunters. He gathered them on the dock at dawn. Four green sailors, Kael, and Rowan. Marcus stood at the rail with his arms crossed. "My men sail," he said, flat. "They don't fight beasts." "They will," Ajax said. "Or we sail south with a half-full hold and no reason to go." Rowan set the terms before anyone argued. "Bow first. Blade second. Nobody moves till the beast lowers its head." He handed each sailor a spear and showed them the grip, thumb along the haft, weight low. "You hold the line. You don't chase." Kael worked the knives. He put one in each sailor's boot and made them draw it a hundred times. "Faster," he said each time, and said nothing else. By noon the slowest of them cleared his boot before Kael counted three. Chalam poured masking oil and worked his staff until the sailors' footsteps went silent. He walked them across the loose rock in a line. "They move like this or the beast hears them," he told Ajax. They loaded before dusk and sailed south past the marked rocks into water no one had charted. The captain read the shore by feel, calling depth from the color of the swells. They anchored at a black cove by dark and rowed in. Rowan found the tracks within the hour, wider than any beast they'd killed. Two of them, down to a spring. "Bigger," he said. "We take them one at a time or not at all." They set the ambush at the spring. Kael crouched in the rocks with the two quiet sailors flanking him, spears grounded. Chalam worked his staff until the whole party went silent. When the first beast lowered its head, Rowan's arrow took the throat. Ajax came from the dark and drove his father's blade through its mouth. The second turned. This time the sailors held the line instead of running. Their spears bit its flank and slowed it. Chalam's roots seized its legs. Kael's knife found the eye, and Ajax finished it. They skinned both by first light. Four hides in the hold, glands salted, teeth pulled. Two crews now, and both could hunt. Marcus counted the pelts and said nothing for a moment. Then, "Show my green ones the grip again on the way back. They'll want it." Ajax had turned sailors into hunters. His two ships would sail full, into water no other house dared. The brotherhood held, and it grew.