Immortal At Sea (The Immortal Chronicles Book 1) by Gene Doucette Page A

is how I feel about the surface of large bodies of water.  (Also, the tops of mountains, and the moon.)  I was on this trip because it was destined for the Greek coast and I had business in Athens involving a religious cult that liked to worship me from time to time.  (Long story.)
    The boats moved across the sea through a combination of wind and rowing.  The sails were square-rigged and relied much more on favorable wind currents than the modern fore-and-aft rigs everybody uses now.  We planned the market schedule around favorable winds because rowing was an enormous pain in the ass.
    The captain, whose name I can’t recall, was a Hebrew whose personality was the kind of mixture of scrupulous honesty and degenerate violence that makes for a good sea captain.  He was the one who put a name to the thing in the water.
    We were roughly halfway across the sea when we lost the wind.  In Atlantic crossings (later, when people started crossing the Atlantic in ships) these are called doldrums, but on the Mediterranean we called it whatever curse word we had in whichever native tongue we preferred, and then we pulled out the oars.
    Well, I didn’t.  I watched.  Because I owned the thing.  And since there was no below-deck to speak of other than the hold where the supplies were, I had nothing much else to do except stand next to the captain and look out over the still waters of the sea, occasionally check in on the two boats behind us—which I also owned—and listen to the drum.  One of the sailors manned the drum from the prow, pounding a rhythm the oarsmen were trained to follow.  It was animal hide pulled over the mouth of a barrel, and it made for a deep bass that reminded me of at least one or two animal sacrifices from more savage days.
    Some time passed in which we did little more than listen to the grunt of the oarsmen and the drumming, when a cry went out from one of the sister ships.
    “What is it?” I asked the captain.
    He squinted at the trailing vessel.  “Is that the Assyrian?  Pah.”  He spat, as one did.  “He is an idiot.  Who cares?”
    My vessel captains were unreasonably competitive with one another, something that was not obvious unless at sea with them.  Ashore, they acted quite comradely.
    The captain cupped his hands around his mouth to shout.  “ Did you drop something?  Go back and get it!  We will wait! ”
    A second later, a torch was lit on the other ship.  The Assyrian captain performed an up-and-down sweeping motion with the flame, then turned to the third ship, trailing behind both of us, and did the same.  Then he doused the torch.
    “What does that mean?” I asked.
    The captain turned pale. 
    “Drop oar!” he commanded.  “Stop the drum!  Run still!”
    The first mate silenced his drum and repeated the order.  All the sailors, as one, pulled their oars in, stowed them on the deck, and then fell to their knees and covered their heads.  Entertainingly, it looked as if they were bowing to us.
    “What—”
    “ Shh! ” the captain silenced me.  He was listening to the sea, as much as it was possible to do such a thing when not in the water. 
    I looked at the other ships and saw they were doing the same thing: oars in, hiding on the deck.
    Then I heard something.  At first I thought one of the other ships had failed to silence their drummer, but the faint thrumming wasn’t coming from above the water, it was from beneath the surface, as if the sea had developed a heartbeat.
    The captain stepped to the railing of the foredeck and peered over into the water, looking for whatever it was that made the noise.  He gestured me over, and pointed.
    A terrible beast was moving below the surface.  It was serpentine in nature, if not in size. It was easily the largest animal I’d ever seen.  (I had seen larger trees, but for the most part they didn’t move.)  It slid through the water the same way a snake might across land: back-and-forth sideways motions.  It