He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 34 (Patreon)

I am tired of looking at this chapter. Hopefully it makes sense.

XXXIV

The Mouse and the Sky Ship

Marilda of Hull was underneath a hull.

This was not unusual. She had spent half her life underneath, inside, on top of, and beside hulls, in the workshop her father kept on the timber street that ran along the waterline at Hull. The workshop was open to the weather on three sides-a roof of tarred shingles, posts of dark oak, walls of nothing but the sea breeze and the smell of salt and sawdust. Her father was a shipwright, and he built boats the way other men built houses.

She was fourteen years old, and she was small for her age-small and quick, with dark hair that she kept cut short because long hair got in the way when you were climbing around in hulls, and brown eyes that missed less than people expected them to, and a face that was pretty in the way that a knife is pretty. The boys of the town called her Mouse.

She was intelligent. She was adventurous. She was, at this particular moment, covered in sawdust and lying on her back beneath the skeleton of a fishing skiff her father was rebuilding, holding a plank in place while her father drove pegs into the frame above her.

"Hold it steady," her father said.

She adjusted her grip. The peg drove home. Her father grunted-satisfaction, not displeasure- and moved to the next one.

She adjusted again. The peg drove. Her father moved on. The rhythm of the work settled back over them-the tap of the mallet, the creak of the wood, the distant wash of the tide against the shingle.

She heard footsteps. Three sets, moving fast. She slid out from under the skiff and sat up, brushing sawdust from her hair, and they appeared around the corner of the workshop-Tom first, then Ben, then Milo, in that order, because Tom was always first when there was something to see and Milo was always last because Milo was the slowest runner in Hull and had been since they were all six.

Tom was out of breath. His face was red, his chest heaving, his dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He bent double, hands on his knees, and tried to speak, and what came out was not so much words as a series of sounds.

"You have to come see this, Mouse," he managed.

"What's put such a fire under you?" she asked, standing and dusting off her breeches.

Tom straightened. He swallowed. He opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked at Ben.

"There is a thing on the western beach," Ben said. He was calmer than Tom, but only by a fraction. Ben was fifteen, broad across the shoulders, with the beginnings of a beard that he was inordinately proud of and that consisted, in its entirety, of seven hairs on his chin.

"It's huge, and it's made of metal," Milo said. He was the youngest of the three-thirteen, still growing into his feet, with a face that was all eyes and ears and the promise of a jaw that had not yet arrived. "My da says he saw it fall from the sky last night."

Marilda looked at him. "Fell from the sky."

"Aye. He was out late-checking the nets, he said-and he saw a light. Bright, he said, brighter than anything. And then something came down. Over the headland, west. He said the ground shook."

Marilda turned to her father. He was standing at the skiff, mallet in one hand, peg in the other, watching the three boys.

"Da," she said. "I'm going out. I'll be back before supper."

Her father looked at her. He looked at the three boys. He looked back at her.

"Be careful," he said, and went back to his pegs.

She grabbed her shoes from the post where she'd left them, pulled them on, and followed the boys out of the workshop and onto the track that ran along the waterline toward the western beach.

The town of Hull sat on the northern shore of Driftmark, beneath the walls of the old castle, where the island looked out across the mouth of Blackwater Bay toward Dragonstone. It had been a fishing village once, in her grandfather's time. Then Lord Corlys had come home from the ends of the earth with his holds full of gold, and the shipyards had come after, and the ropewalks, and the chandlers, until Hull was a port that smelled of tar and hemp and new-sawn oak from one end to the other-shipwrights and rope-makers and fishermen, a sept built of tarred timber, a long stone quay where the cogs tied up and the cargo was sorted and the wives stood and waited for their husbands to come home. The land rose behind the town in low, grassy hills, and before it the water stretched away to the east, grey-green and vast, so that on the clearest mornings the old men swore they could make out the smoke of Dragonmont on the horizon.

The western beach was a half-mile walk along a track that wound through the dunes and the sea grass, past the old watchtower that hadn't been manned since Marilda's grandfather's time and the wreck of a galley that had run aground twenty years ago and been left to rot. The beach itself was wide and flat, a crescent of pale sand backed by low bluffs of grey stone, and it was usually empty-usually being the word that Marilda was already questioning, because the boys were still excited and Tom had started talking again.

"My brother says he and his crew saw a man flying over the Blackwater," Tom said.

Marilda looked at him.

"Like on a dragon?" Ben asked.

"No. On his own."

Marilda laughed. The sound was sharp and bright and entirely dismissive.

"Rubbish," she said. "Piss and rubbish. They must have eaten bad fish that day."

"My brother swears by it," Tom said, with the dignity of a boy whose brother's honor has been impugned.

"Your brother swears by a lot of things," Marilda said. "Last week he swore by the mermaid he saw off the point, and the week before that he swore by the ghost ship in the Gullet."

"This was different."

"It's always different."

They came over the last dune, and the western beach opened before them, and Marilda stopped talking.

It was there.

It lay at the far end of the beach, half in the sand and half in the surf, canted at an angle that said it had come down hard and come down wrong. The hull was dark-a black, pitted metal that looked like nothing Marilda had ever seen, not iron, not steel, not bronze, not any mixture of metals she could name. It was low and hunched, the shape of it something between a beetle and a ship, armored in plates that overlapped like scales, and it was large. Not as large as a galley, but large enough that the scale of it took a moment to settle in the mind-the kind of large that made you feel small, that made the beach feel smaller, that made the bluffs on either side seem to lean inward as if they, too, were trying to get a better look.

"What is that?" she said. Her voice was quieter than she meant it to be. "I've never seen anything like it."

Nobody answered. They were all staring.

They moved closer. The sand was churned around the thing-where it had hit, where it had slid, where the surf had washed in and out around it. She could see the seams between the plates, the faint, barely perceptible pulse of blue light that ran in threads beneath the surface, dimmer than it should have been, flickering, the heartbeat of something that was alive but barely.

They got closer still, and Marilda saw the marks.

They were on the hull-long, deep gouges in the dark metal, four parallel lines each, spaced evenly, the kind of marks that a claw makes when it rakes across something harder than flesh. There were holes, too-punctures, ragged at the edges, some small enough to put a finger through, some large enough to put a fist through, and the metal around them was blackened and warped in a way that suggested heat.

"You think a dragon did this?" Milo asked. His voice was very small.

"Probably," she said.

"Here! We can get inside," Tom said.

He was standing at the back of the thing, where a ramp hung open, the lower edge resting in the sand. The opening was dark. The interior was dark. The smell that came out of it was something Marilda had never smelled before.

She looked at the boys. They looked at her. The same thought was in all their faces: we are going inside.

The interior was dim. The light that came through the open door ramp was enough to see by, but only barely-the shapes of things emerging slowly from the dark as their eyes adjusted. The floor was metal, ridged for grip, and it was cold under their feet. The walls were the same dark material as the hull, with those same threads of blue light running through them, flickering irregularly, casting uncertain shadows. The ceiling was low enough that Marilda could touch it, though Tom, who was taller, had to duck.

"Are those seats?" Ben said.

They were. Two rows of them, built into the floor, made of the same dark material as everything else. They were shaped for bodies, but not quite for human bodies-the proportions were wrong, the backs too long, the armrests too wide, the headrests set slightly too high. Ben sat down in one. It fit him, more or less, and he sat there with his hands on the armrests and his eyes wide and his mouth slightly open, and Marilda thought: he looks like a child pretending to be a lord.

"It's a ship!" she said. The realization hit her all at once-the shape of the hull, the seats, the layout-and she said it again, louder, because saying it made it real. "It's a ship!"

"But my da said it fell from the sky!" Milo said.

"It's a ship that flies!" Marilda said. The words came out breathless, the excitement she had been suppressing breaking through. "A sky ship!"

"Seven hells!" Ben said. He had gotten up from the seat and moved to the front of the interior, where the hull narrowed and the walls converged and a panel of dark glass - or something like glass-stretched across the forward bulkhead. Behind the panel, lit by the faint blue light, was a seat that was clearly meant for one person-the captain, whoever sat here and made this thing do whatever it did. The seat was larger than the others, more complex.

And in the seat, motionless, was a figure.

"Is that a metal man?" Ben said.

Marilda moved to stand beside Ben.

It was taller than any man Marilda had ever seen. On its chest, set into a diamond-shaped shield, was a number: 11.

"It is!" Marilda breathed. "Just like the stories from the Wall!"

All of them had heard the stories that came south with the traders and the sailors. Metal men, the stories said. Servants of the god beyond the Wall, who had punched through the Wall and caught the Realms Delight. Stories that the adults dismissed and the children repeated.

She reached out and touched the metal man's hand. It was cold. The surface was smooth and hard, and there was no warmth in it, no pulse, no sign of the thing that had moved and spoken and acted in the stories. The great eye was dark. The rings that should have glowed were unlit.

"But it looks dead," she said.

The roar came from outside.

Tom was at the entrance. He had been standing at ramp, looking out, and now he was inside- his face white, his eyes enormous, his mouth open in a shape that was trying to be a word and was not quite making it.

"It's Vhagar!" he said.

The name hit Marilda like a physical blow. The largest dragon in the world.

"Gods," she said.

The ground shook. The ship shook with it.

"Did you see a rider?" Marilda whispered. Her voice was barely there-a breath, a thread, the smallest sound a human throat could make and still count as speech.

"No," Tom whispered back. He was pressed against the wall, his hands flat on the metal, his chest heaving. "I didn't see - I just saw her. She came over the bluff. She's right there. Right there."

She could feel Vhagar's presence the way you feel a fire at your back-just the sheer, undeniable awareness of something enormous and dangerous and close.

The seconds stretched. A minute. Two. The dragon did not do anything. The ship did not move. The blue lights flickered and dimmed and flickered again, and the metal man sat in its chair and was still.

Marilda looked at the boys. All three of them were locked in the stillness of prey animals who had decided that stillness was their only hope and would maintain it until something changed or they died.

She moved toward the ramp-slowly, carefully. The boys watched her.

"What are you doing?" Ben whispered.

She shushed him. A sound so small it was barely a sound at all-a breath through closed teeth.

She reached the door ramp. She lowered herself to her hands and knees. She crawled forward. The sand at the bottom of the ramp was cool against her fingers. The air from outside was salt and brine and something else-something hot and sulfurous and thick, the smell of a dragon.

She reached the edge of the ramp. She looked around the corner, slowly the way a mouse looks around a corner when it knows the cat is there.

The dragon lay on the sand twenty feet from the ship, her massive body coiled, her wings folded against her flanks, her head resting on the sand like a horse rests its head on a stable floor. Vhagar was beyond enormous. She was a landscape-a thing of scale that belonged to mountains and rivers and coastlines, not to living things. Her scales were bronze shot through with green and blue, dulled by age, scarred by a hundred battles, each one the size of a shield. Her claws, folded beneath her, were as long as Marilda was tall. Her breathing was slow and deep, each exhale a gust of hot air that carried the smell of sulfur and ash, each inhale a pull that Marilda could feel in her own chest.

She was asleep. Her eyes were closed. Her jaw was slack, the teeth visible-long, yellow, terrible -even in rest.

Marilda pulled back. She crawled back into the ship, her heart hammering, her hands shaking, her mind running at a speed that left rational thought behind and operated on pure, animal calculation.

"She's sleeping," she whispered. "We can make a run for it."

The boys looked at her. The hope in their faces was painful to see.

Marilda turned back to the ramp. She took a breath. She let it out. She moved.

She crawled out of the ship, staying low, her eyes fixed on Vhagar. The dragon did not move. The breathing did not change. The massive body rose and fell with the same slow, steady rhythm, and Marilda moved along the hull of the ship, one hand on the dark metal, her feet finding the sand, her body bent almost double-

She turned the corner of the ship, and Meleys was standing there.

Marilda knew her at once-everyone on Driftmark knew her. The Red Queen, Princess Rhaenys's own dragon, scarlet as fresh blood. She was not sleeping. She was standing on the sand ten feet from the ship's flank, her long neck curved, her head turned, her golden eyes fixed directly on Marilda.

"Seven hells," Marilda said.

The words came out before she could stop them. Meleys did not react. She simply watched, her golden eyes tracking Marilda the way a cat tracks a bird that has landed on the wrong branch.

Marilda backed up. She did not turn-she did not dare turn, did not dare take her eyes off the scarlet dragon-but she moved her feet, step by step, back toward the ramp, back toward the door, back into the dark interior of the ship.

She reached the ramp. She stepped over the edge. She crawled back inside.

Tom was there. His face was white. "Why are you coming back?" he whispered.

Marilda sat on the floor. Her whole body was shaking.

"We're dead," she whispered. "Princess Rhaenys's dragon is standing that way." She pointed- left, toward the far side of the ship. "Vhagar's on the other. We're between them."

"So what do we do?" Milo asked. His voice was very small.

Marilda closed her eyes. She thought of her father, standing at his workbench, driving pegs into a skiff.

"Pray they don't burn us to ash and leave," she said.

Hours passed. The light through the door ramp changed from the bright white of afternoon to the dim grey of evening, and then the rain came. It started as a patter on the hull-a soft, irregular drumming that grew steadily louder and more insistent until the whole ship rang with it, a hollow, metallic sound that filled the interior and made conversation impossible without raising your voice. The surf rose with the rain, the waves washing higher up the beach, and the ship groaned and shifted in its sandy bed, and the blue lights flickered and dimmed and flickered again.

The boys slept. Tom curled up in one of the seats, his knees drawn to his chest, his mouth open, snoring softly. Ben lay on the floor between the seats, using his arm as a pillow. Milo had wedged himself into a corner, his arms wrapped around his knees, his head down, his breathing slow and even.

Marilda did not sleep.

She sat on the floor near the captain’s seat, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up, her eyes on the metal man. She studied it. The closer she looked, the more she saw-the fine joints in the fingers, the way the plates of the arms overlapped, the faint seams in the neck where the head met the shoulders, the craftsmanship of a thing that had been built rather than born, made rather than grown. The number on its chest-11-was set into the diamond shield with a precision that no smith in Westeros could have matched. The great eye was dark, but when she looked at it from the corner of her own, she thought she saw the faintest trace of light in the innermost ring, like an ember buried in ash.

She wondered what it would do if the light came back. If it would move. If it would speak. If it would look at her the way Meleys had looked at her.

The rain drummed. The dragons breathed. The hours stretched.

Then she heard a voice.

It came from outside-a boy's voice, clear and calm, speaking words she did not understand. High Valyrian. She knew it was High Valyrian because she had heard it before.

The voice was close, and getting closer.

Marilda's heart hammered. She turned to the boys.

"Wake up, boys," she whispered. "Someone's coming."

They stirred. Tom's eyes opened first-bright, alert, the sleep gone in an instant. Ben sat up, rubbing his face. Milo unwound from his corner, blinking.

Footsteps on the ramp. A figure appeared in the doorway.

He was hooded-a heavy red cape drawn up over his head against the weather, so soaked with rain that it had gone the dark color of old wine, water dripping from the hem. He stood in the doorway for a moment, framed against the grey rain behind him, and then he reached up and pushed the cape back from his head.

"Well met," he said.

He was her age. Fourteen, perhaps fifteen-dark-haired, blue-eyed, with a face that was serious and kind in equal measure. He was dressed like no one she had ever seen in Hull, and yet like someone out of a song: a deep blue vest, close-cut and laced at the front, worn over a plain shirt with the sleeves pushed back from his forearms; dark breeches; plain boots, wet to the ankle. The red cape hung from his shoulders, fastened at the collar with two simple clasps.

She looked for some sign of what he was- a crest, the colors of some lord. There was none. The clasps were bare; the vest was plain. He wore no mark at all.

"Who are you?" Marilda asked. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. The fear was still there, but it had been pushed aside by something else-curiosity.

"Kallen," the boy said. "Or Kal, if you prefer."

"Are you a dragonrider?" Ben asked. The words came out in a rush.

Kallen looked at him. The corner of his mouth twitched-not quite a smile, but the ghost of one.

"No," he said. "Come. I'll see you to safety."

He turned and walked back down the ramp. The boys looked at Marilda. Marilda looked at the boys. Then she stood up, and they followed him.

The rain was lighter now-a steady, fine drizzle that misted the air and beaded on the dark hull of the ship and turned the sand to a pale, wet paste. The sky was grey and low, the clouds so thick that it was hard to tell where the afternoon ended and the evening began. The sea was rough, the waves white-capped and angry.

Kallen walked ahead of them, his red cape drifting behind him, his boots leaving no prints in the wet sand-Marilda looked twice, then a third time, before she believed it. He moved with the easy, unhurried confidence of someone who had done this before, who had walked past dragons before, who knew exactly how close was too close and how far was far enough.

Marilda looked to the right. Vhagar was still there. The great dragon had not moved-her massive body was still coiled on the sand, her head still resting on the ground, her eyes still closed. The rain ran down her scales in rivulets, pooling in the sand around her, and her breathing was a slow, deep rumble that Marilda felt in her chest.

She looked to the left. Meleys was there. The scarlet dragon was standing in the rain, her head turned toward the ship, her golden eyes fixed on the group of children walking single-file. She was watching them. She had been watching them the whole time.

Kallen stopped. He turned toward Meleys. He spoke-words Marilda did not understand, the High Valyrian flowing from his mouth with the ease of a language he had spoken all his life. His voice was calm, measured, carrying no fear, no deference, no urgency. The tone of someone addressing an equal.

Meleys regarded him. Her golden eyes moved over his face, his cape, the plain blue of his vest. Her head tilted. The long neck curved slightly, bringing her head closer to him, and for a moment the boy and the dragon looked at each other across ten feet of rain-wet sand, and Marilda held her breath.

Then Meleys stepped back. One step, then another, her wings shifting, her head lowering.

Kallen turned back to the children. "Come," he said.

They moved past Meleys, past the space where the sand was churned by dragon claws and the air was thick with the heat of dragon breath. Marilda walked with her eyes forward and her hands at her sides and her heart in her throat, and she did not look at the dragons, and she did not look back, and the distance between them and the dragons grew.

They reached the edge of the beach. The sand gave way to the dunes and the sea grass, and the path that wound through them toward the town was visible ahead, and the fear that had been living in Marilda's chest for the past several hours finally, slowly, began to loosen.

Kallen stopped.

"You'll come to no harm from here," he said.

Marilda looked at him. He was standing at the edge of the sand, his dark hair plastered to his forehead by the rain, his blue eyes calm, his red cape drifting in the wind. Behind him, the beach stretched back to the ship and the dragons and the thing that had fallen from the sky, and he was facing all of it the way a man faces a road he knows he has to walk.

"What about you?" she asked.

"I have work yet to do," he said. And he turned back, toward the ship and the dragons, and he began to walk.

"Strange one," she murmured, watching him go.

Then she turned toward the dunes, and she saw the crowd.

There were people at the edge of the beach- a small crowd, two dozen perhaps, gathered at the top of the dunes where the path came down. Guards in the livery of House Velaryon. Fishermen. Women. Children. She could see the faces, indistinct in the rain, and she could hear the sound of their voices-a low, anxious murmur that rose and fell with the wind.

And she could see the boys-running. Tom was in the lead, his legs pumping, his arms swinging, running full sprint toward the crowd. Ben was right behind him. Milo was behind Ben, slower as always but running with everything he had.

Marilda started running too.

She hit the crowd like a wave hitting a seawall, pushing through the bodies, and her father was there-among the guards, among the fishermen, his face grey with worry, his hands reaching for her before she had fully reached him. She fell into him. His arms closed around her. He smelled of sawdust and salt and the tar he used on the hulls, and his chest was broad and hard and warm, and she pressed her face into it and breathed.

"Are you hurt?" he asked. His voice was rough.

"I'm well, Da," she said. Her voice was muffled against his shirt. "I'm well."

She pulled back. The boys were, each of them being similarly embraced by their own families- Tom by his mother, Ben by his father, Milo by an older sister who was crying and hitting him at the same time. The guards were watching the beach, hands on their swords.

Then they heard it.

"Make way."

The voice was clear and sharp.

Marilda saw the cloak first. Dark, heavy, trimmed with fur, wet with rain. Then the boots- black leather, mud-spattered. Then the face beneath the hood-silver-gold hair, violet eyes, a face that was beautiful.

Lady Laena Velaryon had arrived.