by Alison Baird
“I don’t remember anything about that in the stories,” Ailia remarked.
“The order was a secret one. Few in Trynisia knew of it.”
Heavy boots pounded along the deck above, and a babel of bellowing voices rose. Ailia’s relief at the storm’s passing vanished. What new danger threatened them?
DAMION GAZED ABOUT him in wonder.
The rain had ceased and the sea was calmer now. A few ice floes were scattered on the rolling waves, the largest no bigger than a rowboat. The air was mild, even balmy: the sailors had shed their heavy coats. He saw Jomar standing not far off and staggered toward him. Without speaking, the Mohara man proffered his tin flask. Damion took a quick swig of the contents, which burned in his throat.
“What happened?” he rasped, handing the flask back. “Where are we?” Jomar merely shrugged.
The Zimbouran captain and his underlings were in the middle of a vociferous conference.
“What are they saying?” Damion asked.
Jomar frowned. “The captain says all the ship’s compasses have stopped working. It must be the storms: lightning can do that to lodestones. But some of the sailors think it’s magic. They’re terrified.” He snorted. “Idiots.”
“They can’t sail by the sun, either—not with all this cloud.”
“Wouldn’t make any difference if they could see it. You haven’t noticed, being below decks, but the sun’s been doing strange things lately too.”
“What?”
There was a shout from the crow’s nest, and all the sailors on deck looked toward the bows. Damion looked too. The sky above the sails was still overcast, but far ahead, on the northern horizon, a gap had opened, windowlike, in the clouds. Through it he could see the sun shining in a far-off blue sky, and below it lay some darker shapes that seemed to sit upon the sea like icebergs. Clouds? As Damion stared the wide arching gap slowly shifted its shape, but the darker forms beneath did not change: they looked solid, and seemed to be nearer than before. Mountains—the profile of a distant land?
He studied the shapes with interest as the ships sailed on—saw them resolve themselves into a blue distant coast. Could it be Trynisia? If it was, then they had succeeded where no other explorer had . . . A warm breeze off the water caressed his face, which only minutes ago had tingled with cold. How it was that this place should have a separate climate he could not understand, but he was ignorant of geography, so he did not waste his time on speculation. This could indeed be Trynisia—the “warm and verdant” land of the north. In spite of himself, he was excited.
There were a few rocks protruding above the water, not large enough to be called islands: others lurked below like sea monsters, shadowy and dangerous. As he stared over the side into the blue-green depths to starboard, the surface broke in a trail of white spray about a stone’s throw from the hull, and something gray and gleaming came and went, so quickly that for a moment he half wondered if he had imagined it. Then he saw it again—a long lithe shape, keeping pace with the ship’s progress through the waves. It might have been an enormous fish, longer than a man is tall, but its sleek, streaked sides bore no scales, and the fin that divided the water above it was a smooth sickle-shape rather than a fish’s fin of webbed spines. A dolphin! How often had he watched these graceful creatures swimming in the Kaanish seas? He had thought they only liked the warm waters of the south.
The dolphin raised its head above the water, revealing long beaklike jaws full of small pearly teeth, and a large eye that looked up at him. Damion marveled at the gaze of that great dark eye, so unlike a fish’s. It seemed to gleam with intelligence—as though the ocean, having thus far endured his inquisitive regard, now inspected him in its turn. Damion stared at the dolphin, and it stared at him, and something moved between them: the creature’s toothy grin widened, and it uttered a merry chirruping sound.
In a moment Damion regretted his prolonged scrutiny of the dolphin, for one of the soldiers noticed it, and, rushing into the cabin, reappeared with a spear in one hand, hefting it like a harpoon. At the last moment, however, one of the sailors saw and ran toward the man, seizing the butt-end of the spear and screaming at him in Zimbouran. The soldier’s face darkened: he clouted the sailor across the face, sending the man spinning to the deck. But he lowered the spear and turned away from the railing.
“What was all that about?” Damion asked Jomar.
Jomar’s lip curled. “More superstition. The sailor said the Elei were friends with dolphins and could speak their language. He thinks that if we kill it the Elei gods will get angry and cause another storm, and our ships will be wrecked.”
“The Kaans had a sort of reverence for dolphins too, now that I come to think of it,” Damion remarked. “They would never harm one, even if they were hungry.” Superstition aside, the ship’s occupants were soon glad that they had not killed the dolphin. It resurfaced in front of them, riding the bow-wave, and it became apparent that the creature, for reasons of its own, was guiding them through the perilous rocks. Had these animals some ancestral memory of swimming before Elei ships?
Damion, gazing after the creature, could not dismiss the thought that within its dark gleaming eye he had seen a soul.
THE THREE WOMEN LOOKED up as heavy footsteps approached their door. It was flung open, and Ailia cringed; but the two Zimbouran men did not enter. They merely stood and gestured to the women to come out.
Ana rose, leaning heavily upon a barrel. The two girls rushed to help her. “If you would hand me my cane, my dears?”
Ailia passed the stick to her and the old woman stood, a trifle unsteadily but with determination. Lorelyn slipped her own strong young arm under Ana’s, supporting her. Ailia stooped to pick up the gray cat, which was mewing anxiously.
“What’s all this about?” Lorelyn wondered out loud as she helped Ana across the lower deck and—with more difficulty—up the ladder. There could be no doubt about it: the wind blowing through the hatch above was warm. As she ascended the ladder behind Lorelyn, Ailia heard the other girl shout: “Land!”
Ailia scrambled up through the hatchway in her turn, hampered by the cat, which she held in her left arm. She passed the animal to Ana, then stood staring across the water.
There it was—a sloping sandy shore, lush verdure above it, and a range of green misty hills.
“We have come to the end of our journey,” said Ana. “But not of our mission.”
She looked much better now, Ailia noted. It must be the fresh air. All her own fear and misery had vanished in the glow of wonderment. “Welessan was right!” she exulted. ”About there being a warm land in the north.” The sea chart on the scroll had been real, after all. It had led their captors safely to their goal. “It is, it must be . . . ”
“Trynisia,” said Damion’s voice behind them. “They have found Trynisia.”
12
At the Back of the North Wind
THE PRISONERS HUDDLED together on the beach in a little silent knot, watching the noisy jubilant groups of soldiers and sailors. No more boats were coming ashore: King Khalazar apparently had decided to remain safe aboard his galleon until the soldiers had scouted the unknown land for hostile inhabitants and other dangers. The God-king’s ship lay apart from the others, its heavily gilded and ornamented aftercastle gleaming in the light of the setting sun. The flag of Zimboura, a black star on a red field, hung from the rigging: above it there streamed a banner with a man’s face in a golden sunburst. The royal standard.
“Just think,” said Ailia, shivering. “He’s on board that ship. So close!”
“I’d prefer not to think about it,” Damion muttered.
Sailors on the ships were engaged in lowering the livestock in canvas slings to large raftlike boats waiting beneath. At the shore, goats, sheep, and horses were herded from the rafts into the shallows, from which they emerged panting and dripping. Mandrake’s white palfrey came ashore in a spray of foam, snorting and tossing its sodden mane. Several vicious-looking guard dog
s were also brought over from the ships: Damion recognized the big black-and-white animals as a fearsome Zimbouran breed, half boarhound and half mastiff. Their great jaws were bound with leather muzzles, and even their handlers treated them with respect. The Zimbourans, it seemed, were taking no chances in this alien land.
Ahead of them rose low, sandy bluffs, and beyond these steep green hills, almost high enough to be called mountains, with summits lost in heavy hanging mists. Presently the sun disappeared behind them and its saffron-colored afterglow faded from the sky. In the gathering dusk a group of officers stood poring over the scroll by the light of a driftwood campfire, arguing and gesticulating. Then Zefron Shezzek tossed the ancient parchment into the flames, and the soldiers laughed and jeered as the once-precious document blackened and shriveled to ash. One of them thrust his sword-point down in the sand, and shouted something. Damion took it at first for a display of temper, then realized the man was probably enacting a ritual—claiming the land for Zimboura. The crescent of cliffs flung back echoes of his voice, as if in mockery.
Not far away a scout party had assembled, saddling some horses and laying heavy packs on others. Damion wished he could understand Zimbouran: there was a great torrent of conversation, much of it sounding quite heated. After some time had passed Shezzek approached the captives and spoke to them in Maurish.
“You are all to come with us. Do as you are told and no one will be hurt.” He then added something in Zimbouran to Jomar. The Mohara man grunted a reply, then watched with resentful eyes as Shezzek strode back to the scout party.
“What did he say?” asked Lorelyn.
“I’m going to be their tracker,” said Jomar. “They must be afraid of wild animals.”
Ana stooped to pick up Greymalkin, but when she carried the cat toward the horses Shezzek stepped forward shouting and waving his arms threateningly. The gray cat hissed at him, then sprang from her mistress’s arms and fled across the beach. Ailia and Lorelyn cried out.
“No! She’ll die in the wild!” protested Lorelyn.
The half-breed turned on her, scowling, and Ana placed a restraining hand on Lorelyn’s arm. “Greymalkin can take care of herself, dear. She has lived in the wilderness before.”
“It’s cruel.” Lorelyn glared at Shezzek, but he had already turned his back on her, shouting orders at the soldiers.
The captives were forced to mount horses, Zimbouran riders taking the reins of their mounts and leading them. Lorelyn was placed on the white palfrey. Damion found something vaguely disturbing in that choice of mount; then he remembered that in ancient Zimboura human sacrifices had been led to the altar on white horses. There were a dozen mounted soldiers, including Jomar, and a couple of dog-handlers with several muzzled guard dogs on long leads. Shezzek snapped a command in Zimbouran, and the party rode farther down the beach to a place where the bluffs became a gentle sandy slope. Beyond and above this lay a steeper slope, coarse meadow-grass giving way farther up to thick-forested hills. Between the nearest two lay a wide pass, through which nothing at all could be seen but the grayness of trailing mists. The dusk did not deepen as they rode uphill: in fact, it seemed to Ailia as they rode into the woods that the misty twilight under the trees was lightening. But that’s not possible, she thought. The sun only set a couple of hours ago . . . She glanced through the tree trunks to the northeast. That was the dawn, streaking the sky with yellow and crimson!
A line from an old story came to her. “In Trynisia the sun never set all summer long, nor rose in wintertime.”
As they rode up the slope toward the pass, the blazing limb of the sun rose from behind the hills, only a short distance from the place where it had gone down.
AS THEY RODE with their captors down the far side of the range Damion emerged from his worried thoughts and noticed his surroundings. A vast valley lay below them, through which a river wound from east to west in long shining coils: on its far side were more hills, and far beyond them lay true mountains, taller than those of the Maurainian coastal range, with jutting peaks of ribbed rock capped by ice. As the party rode slowly downhill the pines and firs gave way to a leafy forest even thicker than the aged groves of Selenna. There were great, centuries-old oaks and elms, wide around as temple columns, mottled with moss and frilled with fungi. Most of the trees were in early green leaf, and some were in flower: though Damion was no better versed in botany than geography, he recognized the white and rose-pink garlands of wild cherry and apple trees, and flowering almonds still in bud, and hawthorn bloom like drifts of blowing snow. Presently his gaze fastened on one clump of ancient trees, with trunks so gray and gnarled that they looked more like rocky outcrops than living wood. Surely those were olive trees, such as he had seen growing in the Archipelagoes of Kaan? And climbing the trunks and limbs of one huge cedar, right up to its towering crown, were great tangled skeins of what looked to him very much like grapevines run wild. He had seen many such vines, pruned and tamed, growing in neat rows in Maurainian vineyards. But how could they grow and thrive here, where the winter must be infinitely harsher?
Through the trees blazed a gold-orange brilliance, like a fire burning among the boughs: the glow of the already returning sun. Here was yet another oddity. What was this place, that it should have not only an unnaturally warm climate but so brief a night as well? Damion seemed to recall reading of northern lands where for half the year the sun never went down at all—where night never came for months on end. Not understanding how this could be possible, he had always dismissed it as fancy. Now it seemed that this old fable, too, had some basis in fact.
There was a shout from up ahead: their captors had called a halt. Some of the soldiers dismounted, apparently to examine something on the forest floor. The dogs snuffled at it and whined excitedly through their bound jaws. It appeared to be the spoor of a large animal. Jomar, after studying the prints with the intensity of an experienced tracker, said he could not identify the creature that had made them.
“It’s a cat—but not a lion or a leopard,” the puzzled Mohara declared as they moved on. “It looks almost like a cross between the two.”
“A libbard,” said Ailia.
“A what?” Jomar stared at her.
“A libbard: a lion-leopard. I read about them in Welessan’s travel book. Libbards were supposed to be mythical creatures, like unicorns and dragons. But perhaps they’re real.”
“They sound dangerous to me. I hope this one isn’t lurking in the bushes somewhere,” remarked Damion.
Jomar shook his head. “It’s an old track.”
Shezzek turned in his saddle and barked, “No talking!” Jomar fell back sullen-faced, and Damion looked warily around him. Trynisia, he reflected, as an isolated continent might well have its own unique fauna. He thought of the giant flightless birds and other peculiar animals that haunted the Outer Isles, far away in the Lesser Ocean. The trees of this land might be familiar, but who could say what strange creatures might dwell among them?
As they moved deeper into the forest they soon began to glimpse its animal life. In one glade they surprised a young hind at the edge of a stream and saw her leap away, all grace and fear; in another a whole flock of wild pigeons whirred up from the grass at their approach, the sudden loud applause of their wings startling the horses. And once, in the distance, they spied a whole herd of what seemed to be hornless, dapple-gray beasts of the antelope kind: but when these bounded in alarm from the shelter of the trees into full sun, the color of their coats showed a soft bluish-purple, spattered with white spots like stars.
“Pantheons!” exclaimed Ailia, forgetting that she was not allowed to speak. The star-beasts! Welessan wrote about them too. They lived in Elarainia’s country, Eldimia; but the Fairfolk brought a few to Trynisia. As they rode on Ailia tried to remember what else she had read in the book of Welessan the Wanderer. “Trynysia, that som calle the Londe at the Back of the Northe Wynd, lyeth farre to the northe, where ben the Ocean of Ice. In that londe the sun setteth not all
sommer longe, ne riseth in wynter-time. Therein dwellen the Elei, the Chyldren of Fayerie, wyth the Spirits of the Woodes and Wateres, and Beestes passyng straunge: gryphons, unicornes, grete wormes, and the lyke . . .” Then was this really Trynisia? If so, Welessan had not been a complete fraud, after all. There were no such things as gryphons or “great worms,” and his fabulous “vision of the spheres” might be dismissed as a flight of fancy, but that was not to say that his descriptions of Trynisia itself were unreliable. The warm and verdant island in the north existed, exactly as he had described it.
After a few hours they entered a clearing, a wide grassy expanse scattered with pale rocks and surrounded by more gray-trunked olive trees. Here Shezzek called a halt, and they all dismounted. Ana and the others were herded together at spear-point, while the Zimbourans gathered kindling and made two rings of pieces of loose rock to set campfires in. Once the flames were burning high and strong, two huge iron pots were set up over them, to cook a sort of soup made with dry salted meat from the ship’s stores. The prisoners were not offered any. Jomar, who had volunteered to stand watch over them, was not allowed to eat either until he was relieved. Damion guessed that the Mohara man preferred to be their guard since he could then wait for his meal and eat it alone, rather than join the Zimbourans by the campfires.
Ailia, Damion, and Lorelyn sat down wearily on the ground, but Ana approached the cook-fires, offering amiable advice to the men stirring the pots. It was ill received, and at an angry shout from Shezzek she shrugged and returned to the others. They were all growing hungry, trying hard not to look at the pots or smell the aroma of their simmering contents. Ailia leaned back against one of the larger stones rising from the meadow-grass. It was flat on top, but had a rounded shape; her fingers, running idly over its chalk-white surface, encountered grooves too regular in shape to be natural. She looked at them sharply, then at the other pale fragments strewn across the clearing. She saw, now, the fallen stone columns that had been indistinguishable at first from the trunks of rotting trees, so heavily covered were they in lichens and creeping vines. Getting up, her weariness forgotten, she examined one more closely. Its marble sides bore lines of carving in bas-relief, a pattern of leaves and flowers. Worn and weathered as it was, its delicate intricacy was unmistakable.
