by Hegira (lit)
Bar-Woten took instruction in ship's mechanics. He enjoyed the challenge of the engines more than he thought he would - more than he let on he did - and soon was apprenticed to the boiler-tender and his thirty helpers.
Barthel, least literate of the three as far as the Teutans were concerned, was given standard mast-monkey duties and was contented with such exertions. Though he frequently had to crawl out on a yardarm over open, churning water, his fear of the sea diminished to a healthy respect. His skin became even more bronzed. His muscles developed into flexible and agile bulges, which he thought he might put to good advantage in other places besides the rigging. The crew of the Trident was integrated, male and female.
Kiril sighed at this eventuality and resigned himself to quiet regret. Bar-Woten began his inevitable romancing. For the first few weeks, however, the voyage went smoothly enough.
The work of the day was over for their watches when Kiril and Bar-Woten met on the quarterdeck to talk and relax before the evening meal. The ship would soon be midway between Obelisks, where the ocean air would be cooler and the weather less predictable. Thus far the Trident had avoided the seasonal storms that plagued parts of the coast south of them. They talked about rough storms and what they must be like as they leaned over the brass railings, looking into the water. The hazy horizon was interrupted by shadows of distant coastline.
"I sometimes think we'll forget what we're really after," Kiril said. "Or you will, at least. It isn't as immediate a goal for you."
"It's a goal," Bar-Woten said. "No need to worry about that."
"I can't even remember her face," Kiril admitted. His throat caught suddenly. "I hardly remember what it was like to hold her."
"Then tell me about her. Maybe that will help."
But Kiril found words difficult, especially before the burly Ibisian. "She was at least as tall as Barthel, perhaps a centimeter or two taller," he began. "Blonde hair as long as her waist when it wasn't tied in a bun, with a tail down to her shoulder bkdes. She had... has a soft voice. Can I still say she has?"
"I don't know," Bar-Woten said.
"Small feet. She seems so far away now. I'm not even sure I'm the same man who loved her."
"Men have gone off on more foolish journeys for less certain reasons."
"You know, hm?" Kiril said, not intending to gibe.
Bar-Woten didn't take offense. "I know," he agreed. "What was her family like?"
"They didn't like me much. I suppose no family likes a suitor - they bring too many changes. But I didn't fit in with their activities. She never accused me of that, or minded, but her family was very clannish, played games and sports together all the time - she had a huge family, twelve brothers and sisters. Her father was a quiet man. He managed a business in a small town called Torres de Cristobal. He owned a small ranch and raised cattle. I was a scrittori - not a very reliable occupation, not much better than being a student or a theologian. But I was doing well enough that they couldn't fault me my choice of lifetimes."
"Choice of lifetimes?"
"Of course. A man chooses when he is to be born, to carry out a certain task on Hegira. If he chooses wrongly, then he comes at an inopportune tune, and he can only turn out bad or useless. I was doing well enough not to be useless."
"What was her name?" Bar-Woten asked.
"Elena," he said.
Barthel began taking lessons in navigation from three deck officers. He was getting better with the language, and two of his teachers could speak passable Lucifan. In turn for his lessons he offered them lessons in Arbuck, which some of the western coastal countries spoke and which had always been a mystery to the crew of the Trident.
Navigation on Hegira, they explained, was entirely differ-ent from navigation as described by the Obelisk texts. There were different objects to be sighted and different problems to be dealt with. The meteorology of Hegira was radically different from old Earth, and there were no stars or sun or moon to use as guides. Instead the paths of certain fire doves were charted, and each fire dove was given a name according to its peculiar qualities. In all there were at least five hundred different fire doves, two dozen of which were easily discernible. They could be identified by color and brightness, not unlike the methods used by the First-born to distinguish stars, but the fire doves were obviously not stars. They were not fixed - they wandered in relation to each other according to complex orbits, all of which appeared to be centered on Hegira. Not all the orbits had been calculated, however. Only ten especially bright fire doves were used for most navigational problems.
One of the major problems of navigation was knowing when a fire dove would be illuminated. Each had its own cycle of light and dark, which ranged from seven hours to six months. It was considered bad form to be tracking a fire dove and have it unexpectedly go out on you.
During the day prevailing winds - which seldom shifted - were used to indicate direction, according to how the ship ran with them. Some ocean currents were also used as guides. When weather permitted, the Obelisks were referred to, and these fixed points were the most reliable. The four points of the compass weren't used in their normal sense by Hegirans. Magnetized needles didn't point any particular direction, though it was rumored that lodestone poles did exist to the very far northwest. The side of an Obelisk that began with the invocation text was called the north side. Left of it was west, right east, and opposite, south. Beyond that one traveled by original orientation, using Obelisks and fire doves as references.
The Trident would soon lose sight of the Obelisk Tara in Mediweva, and of the Obelisk Onmassee east of it in the central highlands of Fedderland. Trincoma was the western-most port of Fedderland, and while the Obelisk Onmassee was not visible from that city, a kilometer out to sea brought it into plain view.
Barthel studied the books and charts given to him. They obviously did not come from Obelisk texts. Therefore the crew of the Trident, though they came from a land that had access to an Obelisk, didn't share the prejudices of the Mediwevans. He read voraciously.
One of his teachers was a deck officer named Avra, a woman at least twice Bar-Woten's age, with thick black hair and a thin, stern face. Her eyes were the same green as the phantom lights that formed rings in the waves at night. She spoke in a small, precise voice and carried her shoulders with an arrogant squareness belying her personality, which was pleasant and gracious. She was a widow. Her husband had been a methane-tender, and they had sailed on the Trident for twenty years together in more foreign ports and strange seas than anyone else aboard, even the captain, who had joined the ship four years before. At age fifteen she had hired on as a cook, and all her training and schooling had been aboard the Trident. She was an excellent teacher, and she found the Khemite an eager pupil.
Bar-Woten remained quietly puzzled by the Trident. She had no true home port, though most of her crew called the country of Weggismarche home. They were heading there now, by way of a few ports along the Bicht av Genevar, a broad archipelago between Weggismarche and the Obelisk Daana. In a few months they would pass the Ocean Obelisk. The Trident had spent most of her half-century in these waters plying trade between the islands and Weggismarche. In this way she had developed a good reputation that sustained her when she had been isolated from her previous owners through several revolutions in Weggismarche. For a few harsh years she had become a pirate of sorts.
But that was all past now. The Trident carried only a token complement of guns that were powerful enough for defense, but would never let her play the role of a raiding ship. Besides, she wasn't fast enough.
What puzzled the Ibisian was the spirit of cooperation that powered the ship almost as much as the wind. Survival in the tough trade of the Bicht av Genevar and elsewhere was apparently determined by blatant and dependable honesty. He had never known a system run in such a way. He doubted its efficacy.
Kiril accepted it with a joyous heart. He listened intently to stories told by the crew of dozens of encounters with civilizations that ha
d never known foreign trade, or even foreigners - without a single mishap. "She's a goddess!" he told Bar-Woten enthusiastically, patting the varnished oak railings. "One king even called her a Kwan-Yin - Mercy. What a ship we chose to join!"
The Ibisian kept his silence and learned all he could about the lands the Trident had visited. He kept a notebook in which he drew his maps and charts and recorded private observations.
They had been at sea for three months without sight of land, navigating by the Ten Agreeable Fire Doves, when a call for general quarters was rung. The crew took positions in a few minutes. Nothing could be spotted from the decks, but the lookout in the mainmast tower-nest had spotted something odd ahead of them. Within a quarter hour people on the decks spotted it too.
Kiril was standing next to a wiry old man who usually supervised repairs to the ship's sails and deck canvas. The old sailor's eyes were sharper than Kiril's - he held his hand above them and mumbled something about it being the largest he'd ever seen.
"What is it?" Kiril asked, almost shaking. The sea was suddenly a very unpleasant place again, green and cold and unknown.
"Untersay draken" the canvasmaker answered.
"What's that?" Kiril wanted - and at the same time didn't want - specifics.
"Spruten."
"I don't know that word."
"Ochobras, diesbras, dolfijn-manker."
No better off than before, he turned his eyes back to the horizon and saw it. At first it looked like a thick tangle of what the sailors called sargass, a weed that formed in ocean eddies like floating islands. But its pulpy tendrils took on a ropey sort of life which made his neck hairs crawl. Sometimes it was pink, sometimes blue. He regretted ever leaving his landlocked home.
"Polypus," another sailor said, approaching the rail to get a better view, pointing with a lean brown finger. Kiril looked at him, and the man raised his shaggy eyebrows urging him to see it while he could. "Rare sight!" he explained. "Makes a seaman of you."
"Or a pudding," another said. A few women and one young girl joined the group, and Kiril tried to pull himself together for their benefit. But he still trembled.
The polypus - a word close enough to the Mediwevan equivalent that he could understand they were talking about a squid - was basking without much concern off the port side, barely a hundred meters away. The Trident was giving it a wide berth. It was common knowledge that untersay drakens, like fishermen's floats, carried nine tenths of their bulk below the water line.
At night the sea was alive with growing lights. This was truly the realm of drakens, Kiril learned - a hundred leagues of squid and glowing fish and fliegen-say-drakens, which could land on deck and squash a man, but were harmless otherwise. Then there was the possibility of meeting a pack of true serpents, not shy like the squid, not harmless like the flying beasts, but carnivorous and nasty and difficult to drive off.
Bar-Woten was unpleasantly awed as he stared over the railing and saw the lights pass and flash in the depths. Overhead were the fire doves in the velvet black sky, and below that the glowing soup of the sea's surface, and beneath that luminous spots like eyes as wide across as the spread of his arms. The night was alive with seeing things and glowing things and curious unknown things. He had never known discomfort - or even fear - like what he felt now, even on the worst and most wretched nights of the March.
But with morning the sea was blue and bright and the air was warmer. No more fleshy masses were spotted, and some cheer returned.
Barthel watched the temperature rise on the ship's ther-mometers as they entered the region of the Ocean Obelisk. He frowned each time he stood at the base of the mainmast, where the instruments were mounted on a mahogany plaque. He scratched his head and squinted comically. Then, when the Obelisk was in plain view, just before nightfall as the sky dimmed and turned gold and green, his frown cleared. He looked at the thermometers with astonishment and started to shout.
"It's simple!" he yelled. "It's so beautifully simple!"
Twelve
Bar-Woten and Kiril took turns leaning on the wrench, grunting and straining in the close dark heat of the engine room bilge. The wrench was wrapped around a fist-sized nut that held a tension plate in position, keeping a secondary rod on the high-pressure cylinder in line with its swing alley. It had been rubbing for a day, causing a hideous screech with each pump and swing that echoed through the engine and made the crankshaft tremble and buck. With the gradual loosening of the nut the tension plate could be shifted by deft hammer blows until the cylinder rod crept back into line. It was rough, filthy work with old paint rubbing off on their pants and sweat flooding over their cotton brow-bands and prickling in their eyes. They set the wrench and hammer down for a rest. Bar-Woten rubbed the blisters on his hand.
Feet banged down the ladder from the upper engine room catwalk. "I've figured it out!" Barthel shouted. "I've got it!"
He sat down next to them on one of the main bearings, squirming on the uneven surface, and told them. It came out in a quick and happy babble, in Mediwevan, which most of the attending engine hands didn't understand, leaving them to sit and listen blankly on the port stringer beam and bilge keelson.
"That means the Obelisks have light and heat on top," he concluded. "That explains why some deep canyons are dark the same way all the time and others aren't."
Bar-Woten nodded, too tired to think. Kiril leaned against a condenser pipe and said it sounded convincing.
"It's very important," Barthel said, disappointed that his excitement wasn't communicating itself. He looked from face to face and tried to explain it to the other sailors in broken Teutan. They nodded agreeably. Frustrated, he stood and brushed his pants off, turned around, and looked at the engine as though he distrusted it and all other deaf and dumb things he couldn't explain himself to. He climbed out of the engine-well and went about on deck to look for Avra.
Kiril and Bar-Woten switched with another pair of sailors, and the wrenching and hammering continued.
The water became warmer and more turbulent. Great spouts tore the sea into ragged shards to the west. In a few days the water cooled slightly, but the temperature increased the closer they approached the Ocean Obelisk.
Avra helped Barthel put his theory into writing, and together they gathered facts and figures to back it up. He was disappointed to find the idea wasn't original with him, but he still worked to prove his assertions, and Avra tutored him on how to go about the research.
The Ocean Obelisk passed on the port side the day after the engine overhaul was completed. Kiril watched it from the railing and thought about Barthel's theory, wondering how correct he was. His world was taking shape more each day. He thought he might have it all in the palm of his hand in a few more years. The Obelisks were higher than the air, and the sun did not rise or set on the Second-born, but grew bright or dim, and perhaps hid where nothing but its light could be seen... He daydreamed for an instant, and the Obelisk turned scaly and writhed like the tail of a dragon. He shook his head briskly to clear it. In a week the Obelisk was in the horizon haze.
The smell of the sea changed as they approached the waters of the Bicht. Islands grew more numerous, some with small fishing settlements and huts on tall poles. The sea frequently rose above the islands during a storm, Bar-Woten learned. It was a rough life. Still people clung like barnacles, and he knew the glue that held them was the past. Where the past had meaning, people stayed.
The Trident did brisk trade between the islands, also acting as a hauler and mediator. Her principal load was destined for Weggismarche, but she had several tons of tools and nets which she'd picked up on other landfalls. Kiril and Barthel helped with the inventory. Bar-Woten drove one of the motor launches that delivered the goods to the islands lacking port facilities.
In these weeks they saw white beaches backed with palm trees that rustled and crackled in the breeze, and high green mountains thick with brush no man had ever crawled through, and islands so big there was no way to tell they were
n't the mainland until you had sailed completely around one and seen the same banyan tree from two directions. Kiril breathed it in and blew it out and took energy from it all. At night he ran his hands along his back and felt the ridges of lash scars there, asking: Who did this? I did? Not I. The other one.
The Young One.
He worked with the loading crews on cargo watches until sweat covered him in a fine sheen. He helped trim and refit piping from the methane tanks and went with the boats to kelp beds to gather the great underwater trees. On deck they hung in canvas-covered bags until they were cut and stacked to dry. The smell was outrageous. In a few days, though, they were in neat odorless blocks, boxed and stored for use in the methane-generation tanks. The wind was from the sea, and the kelp was from the sea, and he knew, as he sweated in the day and felt his scars by night, that the Trident did nothing to the sea that any other sea creature didn't do. He was no longer a penitent, a traveler out of fear, but a crewman of the Trident.
