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

crested twice, a spiny back that rolled over the surface.
    I saw the head only once, briefly, on the second circuit.  It was a little like a horse’s head, if the horse had a head the size of an elephant.  The heartbeat—if that was what it was—got louder on each close approach, but never changed tempo.
    And then it was gone.
    For close to an hour we remained silent and motionless on the water, just drifting and hoping it didn’t come back.  Then the captain gave the all clear, the drumming resumed, and the sailors got to rowing again.
    I asked the question that had been on my lips the entire time.  “What was that thing?”
    “It is tanakh,” the captain said.  “And when you next speak to us about our commission you remember the risks we face out here.”
    *   *   *
    Tanakh, my captain said, was in the habit of destroying entire fleets, and it was only through the superior seafaring knowledge of he and his fellows that my riches had not ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean long ago.
    Had I not seen the serpent myself I’d have taken it for the usual exaggeration of a man trying to justify a higher bid. I still thought he was going a little over-the-top since I’d not seen the creature even acknowledge the boats he was swimming with, but that’s a little like saying prove to me that bomb can explode .  At some point you have to take an expert’s word for it.
    For a while I became obsessed with this Tanakh.  I am unreasonably well versed in many of the myths and legends of many of the early cultures of man, partly because I’m in a lot of them, partly because I was there when the thing that spawned the myth happened.  But there were fewer legends about sea monsters than I expected, and a lot of them sounded like a different creature. 
    The pursuit of one of these legends later brought me as far as China, where I ended up in a small village and confronted what turned out to be a water dragon.  They are (or rather were, since dragons are extinct) only a little similar to the tanakh, but much smaller and more akin to alligators.  They also go away when you hit them on the nose.
    I didn’t expect that to work with a real sea serpent, and I also hoped I would never have a chance to find out.
    *   *   *
    It was the early fifteen hundreds before I had another opportunity to contemplate the wisdom of being on a ship on a large body of water.  This is not to say I didn’t spend a lot of time using boats in the interim, only that the voyages were mostly uneventful.
    Sea travel was impossible to avoid completely.  I did spend a long time moving overland in Eurasia, along the Silk Road and so on, in a conscious effort to stay away from boats, but some places couldn’t be walked to.  England, for instance.  Also, the land route from India to Europe was time consuming and dangerous, especially in winter, so the wiser course was often to charter a merchant ship to North Africa.
    In 1530, or thereabouts, I was making a living as a traveling scholar/poet.  Back then, “poet” meant something slightly more general than it does now.  This was especially true in my case, where I interpreted epic poem to mean writing fictive prose however I want . I hardly ever completed any actual writing, and when I did it was actually non-fiction stories about my own life that nobody took seriously as non-fiction.
    Being a poet was mostly just a good way to get women into bed with me, but being a scholar was what paid the bills.  By this time in Europe there was a decent amount of gold bouncing around in the hands of a lot of uneducated people.  These people placed value in an educated man who didn’t answer to the church.  (Meaning, not a priest or a cardinal.  Everybody answered to the church.)  I was hired to teach reading, to consult important texts, to adjudicate legal issues, and so on.  I had patrons in houses in Italy, Portugal, Spain, and parts of France, and none of the houses knew about my