by Hegira (lit)
They made inquiries that day in the shipyards about the need for seamen. The response was discouraging - blank stares and shaking heads. There was a glut on the market. Ten men for every berth. Still, foreign ships coming in frequently had room for new men - usually because a few had been lost at sea.
"The foreign ships won't be as picky about taking on strangers," Bar-Woten said. "We might have a chance with them."
They did odd jobs around the ports, walking from one duster of docks and yards to another. Kiril had his first taste of heavy physical labor and didn't like it. He resented the Ibisian's stoic indifference to the work.
They lived this way for three weeks. No foreign ships put into port, and no domestic ships put out. The season was difficult for trading. Soon big storms would lash the ocean into strips of wave-wracked lace. Spouts and hurricanes would begin within sight of land and continue unbroken for hundreds of kilometers. No, this was definitely the wrong time of year to think about putting out to sea.
There was one exception, but it was an ominous one. A large Lucifan freighter traveling on methane steam and sails put into Mur-es-Werd in poor condition. It had been at sea for two years but hadn't been damaged by storms. It had been shelled by a ship the likes of which they'd never seen, which raced across the water on huge feet. The strange ship had no sails, gave off no steam, and yet had easily averaged ninety to a hundred kilometers an hour. Some speculated it wasn't a boat but a crustacean from the Pale Seas farther north than anyone had traveled. The trio heard of it in pubs and restaurants. Soon it was a common story much enlarged upon.
The story changed the atmosphere around the ports rad-ically. But Bar-Woten maintained something else was up - a simple tale of strange doings at sea couldn't account for the way Mur-es-Werd was behaving. Kiril sensed it too. "Everyone's jumpy," he said. The Ibisian nodded.
The next day brought a warm, dry wind from the south-west. The skies were the color of bloody milk. Though the wind on the ground was mild, high above it tortured and twisted the clouds into thin, smooth ribbons and shot them with desert dirt. Mur-es-Werd was covered by a pink pall, and everyone walked warily as in a dangerous dream.
By evening it was clear and the winds died down. But the city was restless that night. The bars stayed open later than was normally allowed by law. Gangs of drunken men were herded home angrily in the early morning by women wielding cane brooms. The women wore dark dresses with strips of white tied around their arms. From a distance doves seemed to flutter around the men, driving them along the street with angry swishes.
Bar-Woten sat on the sand with his legs curled beneath him, watching and listening to the foamy waves. He thought they could tell him something. But they glowed and tossed and fussed incoherently, less powerfully than usual. Sud-denly, they slowed to an oily trickle, rushing along the shore with a drawing bead of light. His neck hair prickled, and he sat up on his knees wanting to run. It was near dawn - soon the sky would turn green at the zenith as it always had.
But ten minutes passed and the dark remained. Two fire doves twinkled pink and orange just above the northern horizon. A third, bluish in color, hovered above the western mountains.
They winked out.
Thousands in the city were awake, watching the sky with him. A low moan rose from the city, the sound of distant screams and wailing. Barthel and Kiril awoke abruptly and asked what was happening. Bar-Woten couldn't answer. How could anyone describe something they had never seen before?
The blackness of the sky turned muddy. Not a single fire dove was to be seen. Like the opening of two palms clasped together, the muddiness drew aside, and a vortex of dun purple, barely visible, spread across the sky, leaving another sort of darkness at its center.
This wasn't the warmly immediate, empty black that had always meant night for Hegira. It was a velvety dark strewn with glowing ribbons, and between and around and in these, twinkled points of light so fine no shape could be discerned. Gouds of light filled the sky. For the first time in memory of anyone living, starshine visibly brightened the land.
The city was silent under the frosty gaze of the stars. Barthel made a growling sound deep in his throat, and tears streamed down his cheeks. "Holy Allah," he said. "Blessed Allah."
Kiril's hand tightened around his belt. He felt like rolling in the sand and screaming.
The streets were soon crowded with crying, stumbling mobs. They washed onto the beaches and human waves met the water waves, forming a splashing tumult as the citizens of Mur-es-Werd tried to put out the mad fevers that caused them to see such visions.
The stars were crossed by sudden, silky ripples. Kiril's stomach sank. He felt his body crawling this way and that, yet he wasn't moving; his muscles weren't twitching. His head threatened to turn inside out, but painlessly - a dreamy sort of dizziness, disorientation. The ocean waves grew brighter, became almost turquoise. He heard a deep bass note like the buzzing of giant bees. If the whole world had been a tapestry and somebody had started flapping it to shake out the dust, perhaps this was how it would feel - he didn't know. For a time he thought he would be better off dead.
The rippling in the sky stopped, and the stars steadied. The beach was encased in silence. The people around them moved slowly; even falling they drifted like puffs of down.
Looking up, Bar-Woten thought he was going to black out. At the periphery of his eye he could see darkness close in, cutting out the stars. But the dizziness was gone, and his head seemed all right. The stars were being obscured again. At the edge of the closing circle the points of light became lines of purple, twisted, and winked out. The familiar empty black returned. One by one, flickering, the fire doves resumed their glows. The sky at zenith turned green, then purple, then bronze; the dawn was picking up where it had left off.
The display had taken about five minutes. Everyone stood in silence for perhaps five minutes more, then looked at each other, embarrassed, and returned to their homes, trying to act as if everything was normal.
But Bar-Woten knew nothing would ever be normal again. He smiled crookedly. Then he began to laugh.
Ten
Barthel left the beach alone before midday and took a twisting road up the city's central hill. For a few hundred meters he walked alongside a crumbling wall centuries old. Grass grew in the chinks between stones. It had become part of the ground now, like the shell of a dead snail. The wall no longer served as armor but as a place for people to walk by and things to grown in. From the top of the Kassarva, the fortress that circled the summit, he could look down across the town and port and think with nothing to bother him. Insects buzzed hypnotically through the dried grass and sparse flowers. A large temple was visible through the trees far below, ceramic domes glinting at each of its five corners. Inside it, too, looked like a fortress. There was a courtyard and small buildings within the courtyard arranged in a tomoye. Birds flew above the temple - gulls, curlews, and others he hadn't learned the names of. Some resembled hawks but caught fish by the sea and had red and white feathers in their crests.
He felt singularly ugly and afraid. The predawn unveiling had struck him deeply. What had it told him, that message for all to see? He didn't know. But it made nun feel as tiny as the ants beneath him, carrying bits of white stuff in a line under his legs into a hole a few yards away. All these creatures - ants, birds, builders of temples - had been put here by the blessed One, Who had unveiled the sky that morning.
"I am Barthel," he told the sky with tears in his eyes. "I am small. Did you do all these things that I might see them, smell them? I've done nothing in return for you, Allah. I haven't even learned from them." He asked what it was Allah wanted him to do, and Allah told him this: Survive. He nodded. He would survive. The Bey had taught him how to survive. What else then? Father and mother and family.
That was all the voice said. Be to them what they would have wished you to be.
His lips curled. He stood up from the grass and gravel and brushed his ragged pants off. "I'll also find
out where your light comes from," he said. "You'll be happy to see I'm clever enough to figure that out."
Bar-Woten wandered through the closed and confused streets. Kiril followed half-heartedly, not wanting to be left alone on the beach. No shops were open, and the people who passed them were solemn and tired. The city was quiet.
"What was it?" Kiril asked after a long silence. "Have you ever seen anything like it where you've been?"
"No," Bar-Woten answered. 'The sky is the same wher-ever you go. What we saw last night was seen everywhere, even on the other side of Hegira."
"Then what was it?"
"You tell me."
"Stars, of course. But the Second-born have no stars over their heads. That's the way it's always been."
"Do we have stars over our heads now?"
"Not that we see. But something must stop us from seeing them - a lid, a hatch. And God opened that lid last night to show us glory."
"He showed us stars. Glory is what you feel when looking at them. Myself, I felt the glory perhaps. But more important, I learned that we are not so different from the First-born. We are not cursed. It may be - " But Bar-Woten stopped and shook his head.
"It was beautiful," Kiril said reverently, walking beside the Ibisian. He almost felt affection for the older warrior, as if they shared something no others did: their inner thoughts on an unprecedented act of God.
"It made my heart icy. It looked young out there."
"What do you mean?" Kiril asked.
"It wasn't all stars," he said. "There were a lot of other things out there. The fog. Maybe we didn't see a starry sky at all. Maybe we saw something else that we haven't read about yet."
They found Barthel wandering by the wharves, where all the moored boats knocked idle and empty against die pier buffers. They rejoined silently and walked along the lengthy quays, smelling the sea - which smelled no differently - and listening to the cat-cries of the seabirds. The birds sounded the same.
A five-masted steamer had docked at the end of a pier, three stacks poking jauntily above the steel hull. Gangs of sailors and stevedores hauled cargo from the holds amidships and scurried down planks, to a warehouse at the side of the pier. Cranes and winches lifted the heavier crates onto dollies. It was the only ship so occupied, and it wasn't Lucifan. They had never seen its flag before nor heard the tongue die men were speaking. Bar-Woten motioned for them to follow. They boarded unnoticed, or ignored, and watched the proceedings with interest.
Bar-Woten spotted a man who stood out from the clamor, walking with deliberate speed along the dock to the gangway. Khaki pantaloons ballooned from his legs, and he wore a tight blue waistcoat over a white linen shirt. He boarded as if he were long familiar with the swaying rope bridge and made his way to the forecastle, striding past the three where they leaned on the starboard railing. Bar-Woten stepped forward and addressed him in Lucifan.
"I'm busy," the man said. "What're you bothering me for?"
"We're looking for work and passage."
"Talk later." He hurried off. The Ibisian raised his eyebrow and winked at his companions. That was some sort of encouragement - not an offhand dismissal.
They inspected the ship in the meanwhile. Kuril counted their monies speculatively. "Look, with the cash from selling the horses - that and what we've earned - we can last four, five more days. Not much time."
"I know nothing about ships," Bar-Woten said, making it seem of small importance to his judgment. "Nor I," Barthel concurred hopefully.
"We'll have to eat. I'm tired of a sandy bed. Tired of carrying everything I own on my back."
"We've got a long way to go, friend. There'll be a lot more of that ahead."
"We should take any chance we get to board a ship, though," Kiril pursued. Barthel looked at him with dismay.
"No argument," Bar-Woten said. "What do you think we've been planning? You're the one who's been reluctant."
"I, too," Barthel said. "The sea is an unpleasant bed, Bey."
"But I mean to say that I'd rather go to sea than live a vagrant."
"You're inconsistent. You were a vagrant on your pilgrim-age. I found you in an alley. You have a sudden taste for comfort?"
"Then let's not discuss it," Kiril said, growing angry.
"Certainly."
They waited until late afternoon. By then, the ship was unloaded, and the sailors and dockworkers had gone to ship's mess and homes on the land, respectively.
"The captain will take a walk after his meal," Bar-Woten predicted. "We'll talk to him again when he does."
The man reappeared just before dusk. The deck was deserted except for the three and a sailor standing watch on the stern. The captain walked over and looked at them sharply. "You want passage?" he asked. They nodded. "What ships have you sailed on?"
"None," Bar-Woten said.
"You think this is University of the Sea, eh?"
"I think we can learn fast enough not to stumble."
"You been to sea before, for a long time? A year or two?"
The Ibisian shook his head.
"Then what can I use you for? Mops? Who told you I needed hands?"
No one did.
"Then what makes you think I do?"
They weren't sure he did.
"Dammit, I have to take my stock where I can! Don't think that I like your faces because I say yes. Take it that the sky spoke and no one wants to sign on! They all believe the seas will swallow them when the world ends."
"It's not going to end," Bar-Woten said.
"Of course not. But sailors are bastards for a pretty story of ginnunga-gaps," the captain said. "You'll report to the quartermaster tomorrow morning. We sail with the second bell. I am Captain Prekari. Conditions are board and thirty standard dialers a month, your positions and rank to be determined according to merit and ability. Accepted?"
They nodded. The captain looked them over again and marched off muttering. Kiril turned around and looked into the filthy water lapping against the ship's side.
"Where do we spend the night?" he asked.
"On the beach. Say farewell to your sand fleas."
Eleven
The ship was called Trident and came from a land just south of the Pale Seas. Her crew was a quiet, strong breed with few quarrels and steady loyalty. Such emotions sustained a ship over the distances she had to travel - discontent could only sink her.
Bar-Woten studiously set to learning the language they spoke, which to Kiril sounded Germanic. He had never spent much time learning the Germanic texts of the Obelisk - so far as the Mediwevans had read, they consisted of incompre-hensible treatises on mechanics and a few scattered fairy tales mixed with heavy philosophy - but he knew enough to get along. Barthel had a harder time.
The Trident took her cargo of fiber, dried fish, and machine parts aboard a day after the three reported to the quartermaster. By the next morning they were at sea. They traveled along the coast eastward for several days, passing four inlets surrounded by cliffs several kilometers tall. Huge birds nested there, the sailors told them - albatrosses with webbed feet that could match a man's arm span. The exaggeration wasn't enough to make Bar-Woten think they were lying. Besides, now and then dark flying shapes could actually be seen, and at that distance they had to be impress-ively large to be spotted at all. No one lived in the fjords. Few people ever went there.
At a port called Trincoma they put off a cargo of dried fish and copra and took aboard more hemp as well as a number of unlabeled boxes. Kiril thought they might be drugs - Bar-Woten thought otherwise. "Spices," he ven-tured. "Did you smell the crates?" Barthel confirmed the Bey's guess by announcing they smelled like saffron - and there were several tons of it aboard.
The dark inhabitants of Mur-es-Werd had given way in Trincoma to light brown peoples with broad noses, thick lips, tall, noble foreheads and eyes white as bone. Kiril compared his own pale skin and regular features and found himself wanting. Each day he grew more dissatisfied with himself. But he was lear
ning the duties of a sailor rapidly enough and received few complaints.
They began their first push far from land by the end of the week. On Skeitag, the day after Geistag and the day before Duvetag in the language of the Trident's crew, the ship set her sails and brought her boilers to full steam. Her triple screws churned the water below the iron stern until she was outracing the gentle wind. Sails were pulled in, and Kiril was taught the art of maintaining the methane supply in the ship.
Tanks were kept on each side of the forecastle deck that gathered rainwater when possible or served as storage for seawater desalinated by the sun in plastic tarp-slings rigged between the masts. Into this water were placed quantities of dried seaweed and dormant infusion. The tanks were capped, and man-operated pumps began to collect and store the resulting gases in a few days. The stink that sometimes escaped was regrettable - but it kept the boilers going when the wind was low and provided electricity at all times. Small chugging cylinders operated two generators for the ship's current.
