The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  Kris laughed. “Yeah, but I know that too. Something about your father.”

  Andie nodded.

  “If it’s any consolation, this time I’m not going,” Ezra told them.

  “It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you shot up all of the rounds for your rifle?” Kris asked archly.

  “Who me? No, I knew they were going to take it away. Eventually someone would have figured out how to make it work. I just got there first.”

  “And we’re back to being honored guests?” Andie asked.

  “Yes. They are going to start making crossbows tomorrow and want you to look in on it. Then, after lunch, they have small ship that they want you to look at, hoping that you can make it sail upwind.”

  “Going back to what you said, how is it that Collum is going south?”

  “He’s still a private,” Ezra told her. “He’s had Melek name the junior-most, most diffident, lieutenant to command the expedition. Undoubtedly before they leave, Melek will pat the young man on the back as veterans are wont to do and tell him to listen to his sergeants if he wants to stay alive and get back with a ‘mission accomplished’ under his belt.”

  * * *

  There were all sorts of things that someone in charge of a city had to do that Melek had never contemplated. Like listen the ranting of the city councilman whose son he had killed, complaining about Melek’s new position. The more Melchior talked, the more the other members of the council shifted nervously, and finally their chairman told the man to be quiet.

  “You are wasting the captain’s time. It is a sad thing your son is dead, we all cried when we heard the news. But he was stupid twice -- once to try to cut the purse of someone on market day in the square, and then when faced with a market guard, trying to kill him. We have important things to do, and little time to do them in. Please, Melek, tell us more of these new bows the little woman has shown us how to make.”

  Melek explained the crossbows and explained how that thin iron rods were the best material to use for arrows, and the way that Andie had had men make them, one man for each task.

  “Won’t they won’t get bored?” someone asked.

  Someone else laughed. “Not if they get a gold coin for their part in the labor. These bows are going to be worth a hundred gold, easily. We’ll need to pay the carvers two or three gold, but most of the rest just a single gold.

  “That’s a lot of money for a bow,” one of the other merchants mused.

  “I saw Andie and Collum kill a dozen dralka. How much are the weapons that can kill a hundred dralka worth? A thousand dralka? Especially since we know that Mardan was hiding them, to try to show us how much we need Dralka.” Melek spat on the floor, and the assembled men nodded. Only six people had been injured when the huge flock had attacked. It should have been worse. Much worse.

  “Once we get crossbows being built, proper steel staves for them, and bolts being prepared, then Andie has promised to demonstrate how to make a ship that sails upwind. There is, however, a demand she had made. I talked to Collum earlier before our soldiers headed south, and he says that his recommendation to the King will be to agree.

  “However, we need that kind of ship now, today, not in three months when the King can learn of the request, decide, and get back to us. For one thing, Collum is certain that the King will be heading here with a big chunk of the army and all the fighting orders, except the Dralka, will be sending strong contingents of their own.”

  “What does she want?” the head of the council asked. “If she can make these weapons, I’m in favor of giving her anything she wants. A ship that can sail upwind? She can name her price!”

  “It is no small thing she wants, and so she is willing to give us other secrets of her knowledge, again of the sea. She says that she will give us instruments that will tell us where on the sea we are within a mile or so.” He lowered his voice. “Anywhere on the sea, so long as you can see either the sun or Big Moon.”

  “That’s not possible,” Councilman Melchior.

  “So is killing a dralka with one shot from a bow that a child can hold,” Melek told him.

  “She says that in order for the knowledge she can give us to be useful, however, we will need to do two things. We will have to send expeditions along our coastlines to carefully measure them, rather than now, where we just guess. Then we will have to prepare maps and give them to seaman to use. Without accurate maps, knowing where you are is useless.”

  A lot of faces that had been nodding or beaming in pleasant anticipation turned pale. “Maps are treason!” the obstructive councilman exclaimed.

  Melek laughed. “And we all know that most sea captains have secret maps some place close by when they sail. Do you understand that with this knowledge that a man could sail southwest from here, round the Middle Finger, turn west and end up at the entrance to Tirala harbor, without ever once having seen land?”

  “But maps...” the head of the council exclaimed, shaken at the idea.

  “Maps,” Melek told him. “Chaba, the woman whose chains were broken, was nothing but a household slave, but her owner commanded their soldiers. Still, she knew that their ship sailed against the wind, and she knew they had maps that told them where they were. If not this time, at some point, one of their ships will find us, and then they will have maps and will be able to explore our shorelines.

  “Surely we can fight them, but unless our ships can go upwind, they will sail away from us and laugh at us. Then they will sail home and return with chains for us here -- and for our wives and children.

  “We failed to stop them once before, and the cost has haunted us until today. And now, evil men have tried to make us forget! They don’t speak for me! They speak for no soldier that I know of! Many of the Dralka hang their heads in shame today that their leaders could be so faithless.

  “We have the chance, with the help of our courage and our abilities, to use the gifts we’ve been presented with! No, we don’t know the King’s mind about this, but how do you think he would fare if he denies us the ability to defend our families and homes? If he denied us the chance to sail east and free our ancestors?”

  It was hilariously funny, because Melek didn’t have the nerve to say the name that they all knew. It was Melchior who said the name that was close to treason in this context. “Ganno...”

  “Our King is not named Ganno,” Melek said roughly, making it sound like a rebuke.

  “How say you, councilors? If we take this decision together, all of us, the King will know how important we feel this is and give the matter extra consideration.”

  The vote was taken, and then Ezra, Kris, and Andie came in. Andie spoke of the various parts of a crossbow, showing them separately, then showing them a competed weapon and firing it into the wall, a few feet from the hole Ezra’s weapon had made.

  As everyone who had seen the weapon fire had done, they looked at the bolt buried in the wall. “This will kill dralka, we saw that,” Melek told the councilors. “I think it may also kill dralha. Contemplate that!”

  He could see them do just that and then he turned to Kris and spoke to her through Ezra. “Please let us talk among ourselves a little more.”

  Kris bobbed her head, somehow making the gesture look regal.

  “Shall we do this?” Melek ask after the trio of strangers retired.

  “We have no choice,” Melek’s critic told the council. “This is too much, it is too important.” He pointed at Melek. “I want to see this man dead -- he killed my son. But I can’t ignore that these strangers have shown us the way to kill dralka and perhaps even dralha. They have told us that they will show us how to sail upwind, even if I can not imagine how that can be possible.

  “I can’t ignore the betrayal of Dralka -- they have betrayed the King, our ancestors, and their own oaths. Now we find that not only did Dralka betray us a little, they deliberately harbored dralka and launched them at the city, no doubt in the hopes of showing how much we need them.

>   “I will never like Melek. His Sachem, however, is a fair and wise man. Dralka’s leaders are worms -- what you hope never to see. I want Melek’s head -- but I am a loyal man no matter what. We must do this. Yes, we don’t know the King’s true mind, but I can’t believe the King is as stupid as Dralka.”

  There were chuckles at that, and the vote ran unanimously for Melek and the strangers.

  Melek led the city council down to the docks after lunch, hoping that Andie could once again do what she had done before.

  He was appalled to see a dozen men building what looked like a thick fence. He was even more shocked when the “fence” was done to see Ezra supervising gangs of workers who looped ropes around the one mast of the ship selected and men who pulled mightily on the ropes, rolling the ship over on its side, revealing its bottom.

  Men took the heavy fence down the hull and hammered it into place. When that was done, the ship was righted and more men swarmed up the mast, hauling down the sail. For an hour, men moved at Andie’s direction doing things that Melek could not fathom.

  Not far from the dock, men worked to measure the heavy fabric of a sail along the diagonal, then cut and shaped it into the new form. To his surprise, they didn’t attach the new section to the top of main part of the sail, but to the bottom, only sideways.

  It was irony, of course, when the ship was ready to sail against the wind, that there was no wind. After bit, the sail was lowered and everyone went to dinner. Melek thought Andie would be upset, but she smiled at him.

  “It will be ready tomorrow?” he asked her.

  She laughed at him. “Well, as ready as the wind. Melek, you have to know that I’m not stupid, and Kris is even less stupid than I am. Please, Melek, don’t do what you seem to be trying to do -- putting off showing us those maps. Trust me, Melek, without maps I’m not going to show you how to find your ass with either hand, much less where your ships are. This is for all the marbles.”

  Melek didn’t know what the phrase meant that Ezra was trying to explain to him, but he did bow his head. “I was not attempting to fool you, Andie. The council has voted in your favor. I am a little boy, watching my grandfather assemble a toy that I’ve long wanted. I cannot begin to describe how wonderful I feel.”

  “Deeds, Melek,” Kris had Ezra tell him.

  Melek bowed his head. Yes, after all, Kris, Andie and Ezra hadn’t threatened to kill him -- it was the other way around. Why should they trust Melek’s people? Or him, for that matter?

  He sat down at a table and sketched the map as he knew it. There was a map of the world in Tirala, hidden in the inner sanctuary of the Chain Breakers, and he’d seen it many times and more times he’d had the general description told to him.

  When he finished, Andie looked at Ezra and said something in her language and Ezra nodded. “Melek, this is what you described back at the cave. Andie wants to know about islands -- small bits of land out to sea.”

  “There is a string of such off the East Finger,” he told Ezra. “It isn’t difficult to find the first two in the north, and from those you can find the last three well enough. They are about a hundred miles east of the peninsula.”

  “Andie asks if the reason the northern ones are easy to find is that they are long?”

  Melek nodded. “Yes, a hundred miles long and about ten miles wide for the largest, half that for the smaller. Our ancestors landed on that one, long ago when we first came here. For twenty years we lived there, until a galley found the mainland to the west. It took another thirty years before most people decided that they wanted to live on the mainland.”

  Melek paused, “Some stayed, of course, although most moved on, because there was far more opportunity on the mainland. We quickly found deposits of coal, iron and copper and it made more sense to move the people to the ore than the ore to the people. Carrying cargo from west to east was difficult, and for heavy cargoes it was almost impossible.

  “When the storms came, for a few years people were very busy trying to fix things. A few ships came from the islands and no one remarked for months that they stopped coming the third year. Two ships went to the old town of Valon, and found only a few battered pieces of debris where the city has once been.

  “If we’d thought of it, we’d have known, because the wind piled up water against the cities on the mainland as well, killing many people. After that, once people saw the clouds, they ran for the hills. Valon and her people were gone. No survivors were found. If we’d stayed there, we would all have perished.” Melek chuckled. “We’d have probably perished sooner, as there would have been too many people for the islands to feed.”

  “Are there any others, say south of the Fingers?”

  “Not that we’ve found, but you understand, a hundred miles is a dangerous distance to be from shore. We’ve never made an attempt to explore systematically.”

  Andie asked what the name of the ship they were working on was. Melek didn’t know, and when the man he’d sent returned it left him scratching his head. “Yellow Branch,” he told Ezra who translated for Andie and Kris.

  Kris laughed first and said something to Andie. Andie chuckled and said something to Ezra. Ezra finally turned back to Melek. “It is how we speak, you and I. It is simple words that we use, not more complex words. There is a name of a learned book that we know from home that is similar, but with more fanciful names that mean the same thing.”

  Melek could only shrug. How do you explain to someone from far away that his people revered a tree found in high rocky places that had yellow wood and blended in with the sandstone found here in the northern reaches of the Finger, and that if you could reach the lowest branch, you were safe from dralka and most of the smaller predators. That the Yellow Branch, the golden bough, was considered a place of safety and refuge, and when you went to sea you needed all of that you could get.

  * * *

  The next morning they assembled, a dozen of them on the deck of the ship. Andie had arranged for two row galleys to pull them southwards, and in short order the ship began to move away from the dock. It wasn’t, Melek thought, Andie’s finest moment, no matter how much she sniffed at her critics.

  Finally she called them all together and had Ezra translating. “None of you trust me, and I wish that wasn’t so -- because if you don’t trust me, you should ask me why I should trust you? You could also ask yourselves when was the last time I led you astray?

  “Still, I made a promise, and even if you are all idiots, I will deliver on my promise.”

  She had Ezra explaining about how ships sailing into the wind needed a lot of “sea room” she called it. Then she had two stout men cast off the tow lines to the galleys who quickly pulled away. Men went to hoist the sail on Andie’s command, and a few moments later a puff of wind filled the sail.

  It made Melek dizzy, after a few seconds. He felt the wind on his face, he saw the sea next to the ship, and he saw which way the ship was heading. It made absolutely no sense. Nothing of what he saw seemed real. It made him dizzy.

  Slowly, Andie made progress explaining to them. The wind blew one way, the water resisted another, and the ship moved in another direction. No matter how incredible it seemed, ten minutes later the ship was headed south, pushed by a wind that came from the southwest, something Melek couldn’t have imagined as possible, and to the astonishment of the city councilors, Collum, Melek and the ship’s master.

  The ship shifted and started west. Melek’s entire being shouted that it wasn’t possible, but the ship didn’t seem to care. The fourth time the ship changed direction, he’d thought he’d figured it out. He went to Andie, frustrated that he still had to talk through Ezra, although Andie and Kris both were making more of an attempt to learn Arvalan. “You change course ninety degrees, even though the wind doesn’t change that much.”

  “Yes,” he was told. “Watch this!”

  Andie went to the men who were ready to deal with the ropes guiding the sail and signed what she wanted. Then she went to the til
ler and took it from the sailor. She changed course again, when they were well to the southeast of the town, turning back towards the city.

  She spent about twenty minutes adjusting the tiller and having the men adjust the sail, until finally she pronounced herself satisfied. Melek had no idea what was special, but Andie pointed towards Arvala and the ship’s master exclaimed in consternation.

  After that the ship’s master bombarded Andie with questions far beyond Ezra’s ability to translate. After five minutes of growing frustration, Melek broke in. “What is it, Ged? What are you trying to ask?”

  “Don’t you see?”

  “No,” Melek said patiently, “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  The ship’s master raised his hand and pointed at the city, approaching rapidly. “We drive straight for the city.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Before, we went where the wind blew us, Melek! If we went too far west, we’d have to lower the sail and row back eastwards. It was very slow and exhausting work. But now! Now we go straight as an arrow towards the city! This is stupendous, Melek! I don’t know what you paid her for this knowledge, but unless you gave her Arvala, you cheated her.”

  “I don’t believe she sees it that way,” Melek admitted. He translated the comment for Ezra who agreed.

  “What the captain sees as a treasure beyond measure is something her father taught her when she was sixteen, and she sailed for a few months and got bored with it.” Ezra spoke more to Melek about some other things.

  “Our people have had longer to learn things and there are many, many more of us,” Ezra told Melek. “To be honest, when we get home, some will criticize us for telling you these things. Where we are from, some societies fall apart when they are given too much too quickly.

  “However, it doesn’t always happen. One of our allies today was once very primitive, one hundred and fifty years ago -- they weren’t that much different, in fact, than you are now. They took to the learning that was required, they took care to deal with the dislocations that were caused by the changes. Fifty years later they were a rival, and after a hundred years they thought they had to fight us for dominion. They attacked us without warning and killed a very great many of my people.