There was no sign of an end to the island as the icerigger raced nearer. Indeed, the ocean appeared to blend without a break into the island itself. A few minutes later his eyes widened in sudden realization of what was about to happen. With no land expected, the lookouts had grown lax. But now the one in the foremast basket saw the approaching mass and roared a warning to the ship.
“Come down speed… collision course!”
Hunnar was already chivaning back the portside icepath toward the helmdeck, yelling instructions as he went. The rigging began to quiver like a spider’s web as sailors swarmed aloft.
One sailor lay asleep across the path. Hunnar bent, kicked, and soared over the prone figure to land on the icepath beyond.
Ta-hoding was not yet awake and on deck, but a second mate named Fassbire was. He relayed instructions of his own as he coordinated with Hunnar’s information. Sails were trimmed and spars angled. The Slanderscree commenced to slow. A worried glance forward showed Hunnar that it was fast enough. Ice anchors would not be needed.
Dream-dull eyes showed as the morning crew stumbled out onto the deck. Cries of consternation came from those emerging from the fore cabin as they saw what was bearing down on them.
Ethan appeared on deck, followed closely by September. So acclimated to Tran-ky-ky had the humans become that their hoods were off and face masks down, exposing them to the chilly morning air, twenty-five below with a sixty kph tailwind. They soon had hoods and masks up, however, the danger of frostbite being too real to tempt.
Hunnar noted that Ethan was panting as he sealed his face mask, and had to remind himself for yet another time that the humans panted because they were short of wind, not to cool their bodies.
Spying Hunnar in the captain’s position, he ran toward the helmdeck. “What is it, Hunnar?”
The knight, all thoughts of ludicrous romantic competition now forgotten, pointed forward, then to starboard and port where the phenomenon extended.
“Teeliam’s myth is correct thus far, friend Ethan. ’Twas fortunate I was awake and… alert, for the lookout was sleeping or looking elsewhere, I think.”
Ethan ran to the railing, sliding across the icepath, to study the remarkable barrier ahead and the quilted reflections it shot at his eyes from wrenched and tortured ice. “The bent ocean,” he murmured in amazement. He repeated it to Hunnar after mounting the helmdeck.
“You find it pleasing, friend Ethan? Would it not unsettle you to see the ocean of your own world bent and twisted so abnormally?”
“A liquid ocean can’t be bent, Hunnar. Not in this fashion, anyway. I don’t know what it’s called, but I’ve seen fax… pictures of it on other worlds. Maybe some were taken on my own. I don’t know. It’s ice, exactly like the ice we’ve traveled so many satch across.” They continued to slow as they came close to the ridge of jagged ice blocks and spears, frozen girders and sparkling white boulders.
“But the ocean is bent,” Hunnar insisted, with the tone of someone describing a round globe as flat.
“Not exactly bent,” explained Milliken Williams from the other side of the helmdeck, “as much as compressed. This is a pressure ridge. Ages ago, this must have been one of the last areas of open water on Tran-ky-ky. Last minute freezing by two bodies of ice moving toward each other created this wall of broken floes. Clap your paws or hands together in a bowl of water and it will shoot up between them. That’s what has happened to the ocean here, Hunnar. It was created by hydrophysics and not by devils or daemons.”
“Did I say it was created by devils?” Hunnar spoke with great dignity. “Do you take me for a superstitious fool of a common sailor?”
“I’m sorry. I meant no insult,” the teacher replied plaintively. Hunnar accepted the apology gruffly, then quickly changed the subject.
“The concern should not be what name to give it, but how to pass through.”
Ethan studied the eerily regular ridge. “It can’t be more than twenty meters high. Surely we can get across somewhere.”
Scouting parties were sent out east and west, to locate a break in the ice the Slanderscree could navigate. Reluctant knots of sailors left the ship to explore the ridge itself, but only after being presented with anti-devil amulets rapidly sculpted by Eer-Meesach.
The icerigger lay facing the ridge, sails furled, awaiting their return. When the first explorers came chivaning back, Ethan and the others awaited their reports anxiously. They were not encouraging.
According to the scouts the ridge ran in an unbroken line almost due east and west. It extended as far as a Tran could see to the distant horizons. In some places the monstrous chunks of ancient ice rose considerably higher than the twenty meters they presently faced.
Having met no devils, the ridge climbers returned equally unharmed and equally discouraged. While the ridge was barely a hundred meters wide, it was as solid as the ship’s runners.
“We can’t go around it, and we can’t go over.” Ethan was standing on the crest of the ridge, staring at the inviting expanse of open ice ocean on the far side. “We certainly can’t go through. The Slanderscree’s no thermprow.”
“What’s a thermprow?” Hunnar asked, his chiv digging deeply into the ice, holding him steady against the wind.
“In the arctic regions of other worlds they have ships with powerful heat elements built into their bows and sides to melt the ice. I’ve seen pictures on the tridee.” He glanced back at the icerigger. Sailors were moving listlessly about on deck and aloft, trying to keep busy to stave off discouragement. “If we had sufficient recharge capacity we could melt our way through with our beamers.”
“Come now, young feller-me-lad.” September indicated the massive ice blocks surrounding them. “It would take us a hundred years using these bitty little beamers to melt a Slanderscree-size traverse through this ridge. What we need is a proper shipyard torch.” He gazed westward, ice particles buffeting his mask. “All to move a few blocks of ice.”
“Blocks.” Ethan stamped a foot. “How much would you say this one we’re standing on weighs? Ten tons… twenty?”
September eyed his young companion, then looked back at the anchored Slanderscree. “Might be possible at that. If the wind holds steady.”
“Have you learned naught of my world?” Hunnar spoke critically, but gently. “The wind is always steady, day and night, year and shayear. If the wind dies, Tran-ky-ky turns upside down.”
“Never mind the theology, Hunnar. Do you think it can be done?”
“’Tis not for me to judge, friend September. Best to put the question to the Captain…”
“If Ethan and September and Williams believe this thing is workable, who are we to disagree? Besides, I think it a most excellent idea,” said Eer-Meesach.
Ta-hoding made a gesture of concurrence to the Tran wizard, then set about giving the necessary orders.
Pika-pina cables were wrapped tight around the lowest boulder in the ridge opposite. Meanwhile several intricate maneuvers had turned the great icerigger stern-first to the ice barrier. Cables were tied aboard, back of the helmdeck, made fast to the members of the raft’s hull.
Ethan and September stood with the cable party on the ice nearby, watched as spars and sheets were adjusted to catch maximum wind. The Slanderscree strained, groaning and creaking like an old man. Cables hummed in the wind, dug at a single chunk of ice that weighed a good fifteen tons.
“Think they’ll hold?” Ethan spoke without turning, watching the ship.
“The cables?” September snorted. “From what I’ve seen of pika-pina properties, it ain’t the cables I’m worried about. The cables’ll hold, but the ship’s only wood.”
Timbers moaned within the ship as the icerigger remained motionless. Her runners might have been welded to the ice for all the progress she was making.
It made the glass goblet splintering sound of the ice block all the more startling when it suddenly loosened from the ridge. Towing a mass the size of a shuttle-craft, the Slanderscree
began to move ponderously northward.
Those sailors not immediately occupied let out a cheer. Sails held. So did the cables and the deck to which they were bound.
The icerigger started to slow. Ta-hoding bellowed a command. Spars were shifted. Now the ship swung ten, fifteen degrees north-eastward from its initial heading, putting pressure on the ice block from a different angle.
With a crackling that sounded like a headstone being uprooted, the block came free of the ridge, following in the wake of the icerigger. It was several minutes before Ta-hoding could order sails furled and spars reset to cut the Slanderscree’s mounting speed.
Humans and Tran skated and chivaned to examine the enormous frozen mass. White and irregular, it rose as high as the underside of the raft.
Williams was gazing at the extensive gap in the pressure ridge. Ethan was reminded of a tooth knocked from its socket.
“Better than we could have hoped for,” the teacher was saying. “In pulling free this block from the bottom we dislodged a not inconsiderable quantity of ice above.”
Indeed, several other massive white monoliths had fallen onto the flat ocean surface. They could be towed aside far more easily than the first block.
The Tran worked cheerfully at looping and securing the cables around the next chunk, now at least half certain that the ridge was not the road traveled by Jhojoog Kahspen, Daemon Lord of the open ocean, as some particularly imaginative members of the crew had first tremblingly suggested.
XI
SEVERAL DAYS LATER A path wide enough for the Slanderscree had been nearly completed through the ridge. A few last blocks of intervening ice were all that kept them from the open ocean beyond.
Ta-hoding worried some about his ship and the strain the constant break and tow was placing on her superstructure, but he’d gained confidence as block after multiton block was torn free and pulled clear without any visible damage to the raft’s stern.
Three or four more tows of comparatively modest-sized chunks and they would be through. Cables were being readied for securing to one of those last blocks when work was interrupted by a frantic cry from the mainmast lookout.
“Rifs! North northwest!”
Working with the cable-setting crew, Ethan heard that threatening word too. Like his nonhuman companions, he stopped working as if stabbed, whirled and glanced in the direction from which the danger approached.
They’d encountered a rifs only once before, one time too often. A rifs was a meteorological anomaly peculiar to Tran-ky-ky, the manifestation of extreme weather forming over an ocean that was cold and solid instead of liquidly warm. September had described it as a linear hurricane, packing winds of over two hundred kph force.
Moving awkwardly on his skates, September followed the rest of the cable crew back down the path through the ridge. By the time he emerged, a black line made innocuous by distance was visible off to the northwest. As he watched, it grew larger, overwhelming the horizon.
That black line was the aerial equivalent of a tidal bore, a sooty sky-swelling wall of wind compressed like an atmospheric sponge. It could scour the ice clear of life save for tightly rooted vegetation such as the pika-pedan or massive life-forms such as the stavanzers.
Neither well-rooted nor massive, the Slanderscree had to do what all other life-forms did before a rifs—run.
“’Twill never be cleared in time,” complained one of the anxious Tran standing by the stern port runner of the ship.
Ethan slipped free of his skates, mounted the nearest boarding ladder. He found Ta-hoding, Elfa and Hunnar in animated discussion on the helmdeck. Williams and September were nowhere around.
“We must loose the cables and run ’til the rifs blows itself out,” Elfa was saying.
“A rifs can blow for many days. We waste time,” Hunnar argued.
She sneered at him. “Better to waste days than the ship.”
“Perhaps,” put in Ta-hoding, desirous of serving as peacemaker while keeping one eye on the rapidly nearing storm, “But I think Sir Hunnar has another suggestion.”
“I do.” The knight gestured back aft. “We must move off, gather our speed, and try to break through.”
“’Twill be the ship that breaks, not the ice.” She noticed Ethan watching nearby, changed her tone completely. “What do you say, Sir Ethan?”
Abruptly he was aware of many eyes on him, sailors and captain, squires and knights. They did not cease their frenzied work, but they listened for his reply nonetheless.
Good. They’d all hear. “I think we should do,” he said loudly enough for everyone to understand clearly, “whatever Sir Hunnar decides. The rifs is a foe to be fought, and in matters of battle his judgment is always best.”
Hunnar stared at him for a long moment, mumbled almost as an afterthought, “We have no choice. We must try to break through.”
“’Tis settled, then!” Ta-hoding looked relieved, set about giving the appropriate orders. The crowd which had edged its way to the helmdeck scattered to stations. Hunnar and Ethan continued to eye each other for several minutes, until Hunnar half-smiled and broke for his own favored position.
Was he grateful—or angry at some suspected condescension? Ethan had no time to reflect on the knight’s state of mind. There were cables to stow, lines to straighten, sailors to reassure.
Commands reverberated around the deck. The icerigger commenced making a wide circle. Their course would take them in a curve eastward, then north, into the front wave of the storm. With its wind at their backs, they would hurtle back toward the nearly completed gap in the ridge and smash through the remaining ice blocks.
There were other scenarios, other possibilities, which Ethan preferred not to consider.
As raftsmanship, the plan made excellent sense. Emotionally, it did not, for the storm seemed to reach out for them as they neared the halfway point of the circle.
So close to the bore front the sky was a vast sheet of black cast iron looming ominously on their left, ready to tumble down and smash soft wood and softer creatures to multicolored smears against the ocean. If they had miscalculated and the rifs struck the ship broadside, it would surely capsize her, splintering masts, cabins, deck and crew.
Like gold thread in a velvet cape, lightning found its way downward through the boiling darkness. Rumbles and crashes, the war cries of inimical weather reached the crew and impelled them to faster work, stronger efforts to bring the ship around.
The first touch of the rifs fumbled for the ship. Not violent yet, but not like the steady, friendly every-day winds of Tran-ky-ky. No longer did they blow steadily to the west. Disturbed zephyrs slid in confusion around Ethan. Idle gusts scudded dismally past him, twisting and darting in and upon themselves like frightened rabbits hunting for a hidey-hole.
“We’re going to cut it mighty close, feller-me-lad,” said September in as grim a voice as Ethan had ever heard him use. The giant had both arms wrapped tightly around a pair of mainstays. Ethan chose the more solid wooden railing, locking a leg around one supportive post, arms around the railing top.
As the Slanderscree came full around onto a southerly heading, the rifs, in a desperate grab for its prey, jumped onto them.
The sky turned from blue to black. Thunder battered ears curved and pointed. Great shafts of electric death hunted for the fleeing raft. They reminded Ethan of nothing so much as the pulpy, luminous cyclops-creature they’d fought below the surface when escaping from the dungeon of Poyolavomaar. Glowing eye, gigantic black mouth filled with jagged teeth. Only now the teeth were kilometers high and yellow-gold instead of transparent.
Ethan’s gaze turned with difficulty from the nearing ice ridge to the helmdeck. Looking more like a chunk of gray granite than their fat captain, Ta-hoding stood braced against the center of the huge wheel, struggling to aid his two helmsmen. They were already racing along at close to a hundred twenty kph, he guessed. Another blast of the full body of the rifs struck the ship, punching the sails still further ou
tward and accelerating the craft’s motion.
If they missed the gap at this speed, they wouldn’t have to worry about the rifs any longer. The icerigger would smash itself against the ridge. There wouldn’t even be smears left of her crew. Even if they struck the gap but angled too far to one side or the other, jagged ice boulders could tear away stays, bring down the masts on top of them, or even shatter the sides of the hull.
There was black overhead and white rushing toward them; Windborne particles of ice and snow whizzed like projectiles from a million tiny guns across his mask, making vision difficult. By then the roar of the storm seemed to originate somewhere between his ears, numbing his senses, playing tricks with perception. Hadn’t they reached the ridge yet?
A chalcedony tunnel obliterated much of the blackness as the Slanderscree entered the gap. He braced himself for the ultimate impact as did everyone else on board. There was a horrible crunching noise. Whether the ship had struck the jagged walls speeding past on either side or had been struck by lightning, he couldn’t tell. The icerigger rocked crazily for a second.
Then they were through, the white ramparts gone, clear ice vanishing beneath the ship’s runners. Fighting the wind, he looked astern and saw the pressure ridge from its southern side, receding behind them. His gaze went forward, toward what he knew he would see. Somewhere, the fates had determined the Slanderscree should not travel with a bowsprit. Otherwise the icerigger seemed to have handled the impact well. Masts had not fallen, no crevasse had appeared in the deck.
Something irritated his mouth. He parted his lips, sucked in salty fluid. With his face shielded from the wind, he nudged open the mask. Icy-gloved fingers probed at bare skin, felt the flow of blood from his nose. It did not feel broken. It felt worse, and the blood was making a mess inside his suit.
Looking around he saw other members of the crew picking themselves off the deck where they’d fallen or been thrown by the impact of smashing through the remaining ice blocks. How those aloft had kept from being thrown from the rigging was a miracle he chose not to question.
The Icerigger Trilogy Page 51
