“It will be not easy.” Ta-hoding was talking as much to himself as to his listeners. “Even if we do pass successfully into the trail, there are other dangers to be considered.” Ethan didn’t press him for an explanation.
“We must make a decision. We do have a choice.” He gestured within an arm toward the bow, his dan momentarily billowing with wind. “We have cut a path a kijat or two ahead of us. We can reset sail and make a run at the forest wall. If that fails, we will then have no room to maneuver, and it will be most difficult to try and back up for another run. Also, I should like to keep that option open, should the thunder-eater swerve and bear down on us.”
“Seems pretty obvious to me what we do,” said a new voice. September mounted to the helmdeck. “We wait and try to slip in behind it.”
Ta-hoding’s gaze traveled around the little knot of decision-makers. His usual jollity was absent now. He was all business. “It’s settled, then,” and he moved to the railing to issue instructions.
Twenty minutes of waiting followed the final preparations. All sailors were at their posts, knights and squires ready to assist when and where they could. The quns had vanished into their holes, and a last meworlf battered itself like a crazed mechanical toy against the stalks as it sought to race out of the area.
Presently, a deeper sound rose above the wind-choir, a periodic breathy grumble like a KK-drive slipping past lightspeed. From his single previous encounter, Ethan knew the noise was caused by the stavanzer’s method of locomotion. Expelling air through a pair of downward-facing nozzles set in its lower back, it could also pull itself slowly forward across the ice on its lubricated belly by means of the two down-thrust tucks protruding from its upper jaw—though that rubbery formation could hardly be called a jaw.
The rumble grew deeper. The Slanderscree quivered steadily as the ice beneath it shook to the rhythm of a monstrous metabolism.
Ethan experienced an unlikely urge to climb into the rigging, to get above the wavering crowns of pika-pedan so he could see. But he stayed where he was, out of the sailors’ way.
Murmurs drifted down from those in the highest spars, their eyes focused on something unseen. Their companions hushed them. Ethan let his gaze travel forward.
At the far end of the crude pathway they’d so laboriously hacked from the rusty forest a great mass slid into view. It stood perhaps twelve meters above the ice, a black maw inhaling felled pika-pedan with Jobian patience as the horny lower lip/jaw sliced off the nutrient-rich stalks flush with the ice.
Once, the upper jaw lifted and the huge tusks came slamming down into the ice hard enough to make the kijat-distant Slanderscree rock unsteadily. Ice, roots, protein-rich nodules were vacuumed indiscriminately into the Pit: proteins and nodules and bulk to be converted into fuel and cells, ice to be melted and flushed throughout the vast metabolic engine.
Tearing unconcernedly into the wall of fresh pika-pedan ahead of it, the massive head vanished from sight. Like an ancient snowbound train, the dark gray bulk slid across their path. Parasites and other growths of respectable size formed a fantastic foliage of their own on the leviathan’s sides and back, a private jungle none dared explore. The fluctuating howl from the intake and expulsion of air was deafening now.
Fortunately, the thunder-eaters had poor vision and poor hearing. They had no need for these faculties, having nothing to be alert against. The beast slid past, its blunt tail-end vanishing in quest of body and skull, without taking any notice of the Slanderscree or its anxiously silent crew.
It was gone, though they could still hear it eating its endless meal as it moved steadily off to the west.
Difficult as it was to be objective when confronted with so over-poweringly grand an example of nature’s diversity, Ethan estimated its length at somewhere between seventy and eighty meters. A mature specimen, but from what he’d been told, not an exceptionally large one. He’d seen bigger himself. He doubted this one weighed more than two hundred fifty tons.
They should have waited another half hour, to be safe, before getting under way, but the sailors were growing restless. Fear that the thunder-eater would perhaps change its path (they were notoriously unpredictable in their habits) and charge down upon them poisoned the sailors’ blood with fear. Finally, even the patient Ta-hoding could stand the waiting no longer.
“All sail on, snap to the windwhips!”
The ice anchors had long since been hauled in. Ponderously, but with far more grace than the thunder-eater, the Slanderscree began to move forward. Ship’s bones groaned as the five duralloy runners broke clear their slight accumulations of drifted snow and ice.
The grinding of the runners became a slick abrasive noise as the huge ship picked up speed. Two, four, ten, fifteen kilometers an hour. Twenty. Thirty and a familiar whisking zing rose from where duralloy lacerated ice. They were nearing the end of the brief clearing the crew had bought from the forest.
“Hard a’port! Sparmen swing-ho!”
Both helmsmen strained at the massive wooden wheel. Inefficient muscle worked where hydraulics would better have served. A nerve-scraping screel came from the fifth runner, the steering runner, as it slowly turned. Sailors aloft fought to adjust sail and trim adjustable spar lines.
And steadily, with unexpected sharpness, the Slanderscree hove to port.
Both helmsmen struggled to hold the wheel steady as their feet left the deck. September threw his mass on the port side of the wheel and Ta-hoding added his. With four bodies straining, the runner stayed turned and the ship continued to come around even as her speed increased.
Then Ta-hoding and September could let go. The feet of the starboard side helmsman touched wood again as the extreme angle of turn was relaxed. They were racing down a broad avenue of clear ice cut by the stavanzer.
On command the two helmsmen let go the wheel, to allow the ship to settle on her own forward heading. With the westwind directly behind them now, there was no worry of swerving violently from the trail. The wheel turned freely to a halt, spinning fast enough to crush a man’s skull. The helmsmen resumed their positions, tested the wheel and found it handled easily once more.
At sixty kilometers an hour they rushed down the slough. Pika-pedan pulp stained the ice below the runners, and the unbroken growth paralleling them became a green blur on both sides of the ship. With the wind behind them, muffled by the surrounding forest, they seemed to fly below the surface instead of above it, submerged in emerald silence.
The quiet made audible to the relaxing crew the horrified shriek of the foremast lookout.
Ethan looked forward, ignorant of the loss of precious seconds. One, no two gigantic black pits like the mouths of caves were coming toward them, completely blocking the trail. As they raced nearer, a mysterious whisper became a fearful murmuring, then a tornado of roaring and bellowing that shook his teeth inside his head.
Ta-hoding desperately shouted instructions to the mates and the men in the rigging, trying at the same time to direct his helmsmen.
Again the steering runner turned, terror lending the Tran at its spokes a strength normal minds and bodies never possess. Again it dug and chewed at the ice. The Slanderscree angled to the south, slamming into the forest with a deck-sloshing spray of shattered stalks and sap. But now the ship was moving so fast the forest offered no real impediment. Pika-pedan trunks vanished on all sides as the weighty bulk of the icerigger slashed through.
They were off the occupied trail.
And several gray curves showed above the crest of the forest like islands in a pea-green sea.
“Turn!” Ethan found himself pounding the railing and yelling till his throat hurt. “Turn!”
There were commands, but the experienced sailors knew the chance they had to take and the action to make it happen. Everyone on the deck and in the rigging rushed as fast as he or she was able to the starboard side of the ship.
With the steering runner hard over until its bolts creaked, the sails properly trimmed, and all movable mass shift
ed to one side, the Slanderscree’s portside runners lifted with infinite slowness from the surface of the ice ocean.
A few centimeters, a half meter, two meters. A few sailors wrestled their way back to portside. The ship held, heeling dangerously far over on its right side, balancing now on two runners. The duralloy would hold, but what about the iron and steel bolts and wooden braces holding the runners to the ship? All sailors aloft held on for their lives. If they fell overboard now, into the forest, they knew they could expect no rescue.
Ethan saw wood and sky as he looked toward the left side of the ship. A voluminous black gullet like an empty place in space loomed over the far railing. There was the sound of an intimate thunder, and suction tore at him, then was gone. Two tusks, each thicker than the Slanderscree’s mainmast, caught the sun and sent it tumbling into his mask, temporarily blinding him.
“By the Servants of the Dark One, she’ll go over!” someone howled.
The tusks came down, fourteen meters of solid ivory, tons of beauty in the mouth of a demon.
But by that time the ship had already shot past. Ethan leaned over the railing to look back, saw the tusks strike ice and send ten-kilo splinters flying. A tiny wild eye, set back of that monstrous maw, rolled dully at him and he fancied he could see through it and into a ridiculously small brain.
Dimly, he was aware of mates shouting orders. Spars were realigned, sails trimmed. Slowly the ship settled back to an even keel. A dull thrrrump sounded, like a titanic belch, as the port-side runners smashed back onto the ice. A wooden brace somewhere below deck cracked audibly, but both runners held.
Everyone had expected the impact, held on through the violent jarring. No one was shaken over the side.
“Too close,” Hunnar muttered as he mounted the helmdeck. The knight was panting steadily, Ethan noticed. As for himself, he was sweating heavily despite the survival-suit’s compensators. Thermotropic material can adjust only so fast.
Ethan moved carefully down to the main cabin. Anything still intact in the galley and capable of being heated would taste good just now.
He encountered Eer-Meesach at the doorway. They entered together.
“’Twas a herd guide we first encountered, not a solitaire or rogue.” The wizard, for once, did not appear excited by an interesting encounter. “In a herd, the stavanzer will proceed and eat in parallel line. We ran back along the guide’s trail, right into their line, and barely did we miss the end guards.”
Ethan saw too clearly in his mind’s eye the final bottomless gullet they’d just avoided. It was probably only his fevered imagination, distorted in his memory by fear and terror, but the last stavanzer had looked big enough to swallow the entire ship and use the mainmast for a toothpick.
He’d done very little real work, but his body had burned plenty of calories. In any case, there was something reassuring and normal about eating.
He’d had enough of the extraordinary to last him for a while.
VIII
THE NEXT TIME THE lookouts cried out, it was in a more normal voice, tinged this time with excitement of a pleasured kind.
Minutes later, without warning, the green forest vanished and began to shrink behind them. They’d emerged from the pika-pedan and were traveling across pika-pina once more. Soon Ethan could no longer look astern and see the gap where they had emerged.
Three days more and they left furry butterflies and green ice fuzz behind and were again chivaning across open ice. Ta-hoding’s relief was palpable, that of his men almost too intense to bear.
When they passed a small trading raft, its single small deck piled high with strapped down goods, the cheers of the crew would have led an onlooker to surmise they had reached Trannish heaven. They had not, but the normal world of free ice and other ships was as much as the lowliest hand could wish.
The trader’s crew crowded its railing to stare in awe at the enormous icerigger. Clearly, they’d never heard of it, a measure of how far from Arsudun the Slanderscree had come. Both crews barely had time to exchange a few brief shouts and queries before the impatient wind separated them.
“Where are they going?” Ethan asked Hunnar.
“Not to Poyolavomaar,” said a disappointed Hunnar. “We will try to make more time for asking with the next ship we pass.”
That ship turned out to be another trader, one twice the size of the first they’d encountered, nearly thirty meters long. It even boasted a central cabin. Its crew’s amazement at the sight of the Slanderscree, however, was no less than that of the first raft they’d passed.
Although traveling on a course similar to that of the icerigger, the trader was not proceeding to Poyolavomaar. But its crew gladly gave confirmation that the great ship was traveling in the right direction.
They passed other vessels. Commerce here was not heavy, but it was steady. Several rocky islets grew, slid past. A couple showed signs of habitation. Eventually they grew so numerous that Ta-hoding ordered some sails taken in.
They were traveling through a region of many tiny islands. Smoke curled from chimneys of steep-roofed houses clinging like brown barnacles to miniature harbors or crawling antlike up talus-strewn slopes. Neatly laid out and carefully cultivated fields of pika-pina huddled in the lee of sheltering islets. Startled Tran would glance up as the Slanderscree flew past, set to murmuring by the wondrous ship they might or might not have seen.
Two weeks later, after negotiating undulating archipelagos and dangerously low-lying islands that were scattered like reefs in the ice, they reached Poyolavomaar.
Needle-topped crags and spires towered out of the ice, rising to some of the most impressive heights Ethan had encountered on Tran-ky-ky. A few rose three thousand meters into the clear blue sky. The sharp arrogant angles indicated a geologically youthful region, for such spires could not long retain their glory under the ceaseless assault of the planet’s eroding winds.
The lofty islands that formed the near-circle Ta-hoding’s captain friend had spoken of nearly touched the Slanderscree’s flanks, titanic stone dancers frozen forever only an earth-beat apart. Twisting around the granite needles, the wind acted strangely, as if conscious of the unusual setting it played in. Ta-hoding’s task looked difficult, until he saw they could simply follow one of the numerous rafts converging on the island necklace and trail it in.
Homes and other structures, including armed ramparts, crowded the afterthought slopes which muted the cliffs where they entered the ice. Connecting the visible islands, and probably all of them if the garrulous merchant back in Arsudun was correct, were high stone walls built onto the ice. Each had a wide gate in its middle to permit entry or egress. Fortunately, no arch covered the one they approached, or both masts and masonry would have suffered. As it was, there was barely enough room for the icerigger to squeeze through, while guards in the flanking towers gaped or shouted orders.
They made their way inside the ring of towering islands. Near the center of the frozen enclosure lay a seventh island, as unlike its companions as they were unlike Arsudun or Sofold. It was almost flat, rising to a peak of barely fifty meters at its highest point. All around, docking piers extended onto the ice from its shore.
Ethan had noticed docks on the surrounding islands also. But judging from the vast number of rafts tied up here, this had to be the center of commercial activity.
Crowning the high point of the island was a three-tiered stone castle as impressive as that of Wannome. Smoke drifted to the west from flues and chimneys.
“What a magnificent place,” Ethan murmured. He searched for better words, but they escaped him. Occasionally he wished for the tongue of a poet instead of a huckster.
“Aye, young feller-me-lad. A more perfect settin’ for a harbor would be hard to imagine. And all they’ve got to do is defend those connecting walls. No enemy’s going to climb over those mountains.”
Williams was studying the heavily forested slopes. “Lumber rich, too. Without transportation problems. They need only cut
a tree down and it will slide most of the way to the ice.”
“Truly Captain Midan-Gee did not deceive us.” Ta-hoding was already hunting for an open landing. “This is a wealthy, powerful state.”
“A good place to begin the confederation,” Ethan added.
Hunnar snorted skeptically, stalked away. He still held only the slimmest of hopes for the human’s bizarre idea that the Tran could agree on anything except their hereditary fear, suspicion, and hatred of strangers.
Williams suddenly clapped his hands together, starting like a little boy who’d just found a coin in the street. The survival suit gloves muffled the sound of the clap and what wasn’t smothered was carried away unheard by the wind, but Ethan saw the movement.
“See something interesting, Milliken?”
“Not that, not that, Ethan. I just realized what this place is!” That unspecific announcement rekindled Hunnar’s attention. “Poyolavomaar is a caldera.”
“A what?” Hunnar, naturally, did not recognize the Terranglo term. But neither did Ethan.
The diminutive teacher tried to explain. “Some time in the past, Sir Hunnar, these peaks we see now rose even higher, and this circular harbor we now traverse was a solid mountain several satch high. It was a volcano, like the smoking mountain you knew as The-Place-Where-The-Earth’s-Blood-Burns.
“And like that volcano, this one too blew up in a cataclysmic explosion, leaving only fragments of its outside wall. A central cinder cone started to build a new mountain inside the hollow left by the old one, but never got started before the flow of magma—molten rock—stopped. The soft cinders wore down quickly, leaving the central island we’re heading for now. The original volcano was probably more than twice the height of the surrounding island peaks.”
It was discomfiting to realize they were traveling through the throat of a ghost mountain and that somewhere far below, plutonic pressures could even now be building up enough energy to erupt unexpectedly. Ethan was glad when the small, streamlined ice raft pulled up alongside them. It gave him something else to concentrate on.
The Icerigger Trilogy Page 46
