The City of Ice

by K. M. McKinley

  “Do you see, Ilona?” said Trassan, riding the waves of pain throbbing out from his testicles. He felt sick. “I couldn’t bring you with me.”

  “What? Because my entire life no one has thought to teach me anything but needlepoint and dressmaking? Because I’m a girl?”

  “No, dear cousin. I—”

  “Well I’m here now. You have a sailmaker, don’t you?” said Ilona to Heffi. “He sews.”

  “It is not the kind of sewing you are accustomed to.” Heffi said, uncomfortable that his attempt to patronise Ilona into submission was backfiring.

  “Then teach me!” she rounded on Trassan again. “I will not be a burden. And you will regret doublecrossing me.”

  “It was for your own good!” protested Trassan.

  “I shall decide what is for my own good and what is not!” she shouted.

  “Where do we put her?” said Bannord.

  “See, women on board ship are nothing but trouble. Now you need your own cabin,” said Trassan.

  “I have managed perfectly well in a freezing hold with a wooden pallet for a bed.”

  “You can always go back,” said Trassan.

  “I will move one of my people from the common room. We can make space for her there, and I will watch over her,” said Tyn Gelven.

  “Sleep with the Tyn?” said Ilona.

  “Do you have a better idea?” said Trassan. “It is a good job you were uncovered when you were. A few hundred miles further south and you would have frozen to death.”

  Tyn Gelven gazed at her with large brown eyes. Ilona mastered her distaste. “Thank you goodtyn.”

  “Is the correct response!” said Heffi cheerfully. “Let’s find the poor girl some clothes.”

  “We’ve spare parkas and cold weather gear in the stores,” said Drentz. “I’ll send for something.”

  “That settles that then,” said Trassan. “Bannord, get her out of here. We’ve business to attend to, and it can’t wait.”

  A knock sounded on the door jamb.

  “For the love of all the driven gods, what is it now?” demanded Trassan.

  Issiretz, the lookout, put his head into the room. “Forgive me goodfellow captain. There are lights on the horizon. Ship’s lights. We’re being followed.”

  “Persin,” said Trassan.

  THE SHORT NIGHT was nearly done. The moons were gone and the Twin was lowering itself below the eastern horizon. The sky behind its black bulk glowed with the promise of the sun. Drentz took Ilona away to kit her out for the cold, coaxing her to follow with promises of a warm bath. Trassan and Heffi trained their telescopes to the dark blue northern sky. Lights twinkled where sea met sky.

  Trassan snapped his eyeglass shut. “Persin. It must be. We’re being followed.”

  Heffi kept his trained on the horizon. “I count three, maybe four ships.”

  “His ships are faster than I feared,” said Trassan. He cursed and performed a quick calculation. At the top of the wheelhouse they were fifty feet above the water. The maths was simple. Persin was only six miles away. “We’re leaving. Now.”

  Heffi nodded. “All crew, prepare for immediate departure!”

  The order emanated out from Heffi, through the first mariner, the second, the third, out to the heads of the teams under their command, then into the teams themselves. The ship erupted with action. “Antoninan, get a message to the Sorskians, thanking them for their hospitality.”

  Possessed by the urgency of the moment, for once Antoninan had little to say and hurried off to see it done.

  “Bannord,” said Trassan. “I am entrusting you with Ilona’s safety.”

  “I have enough to handle without being your cousin’s babysitter,” said Bannord. “If Persin’s got three ships, how many men will he have? I’m going to have my hands full keeping the marines sharp enough to take on twice their number. I don’t need the distraction.”

  “I don’t give a damn!” said Trassan, rounding on the bigger man. “I am the one paying you. Keep her safe!”

  “If you insist.” Bannord adjusted his sword belt.

  Trassan calmed. “Persin will not attack us. He will seek to overtake us, to reach the city first. If we get there before him, then perhaps we need to worry about fighting. He and I can come to some arrangement.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I do not think she needs much care,” said Trassan. “She’s assaulted both of us in one night. Perhaps you best capitalise on that.” He squinted at the lights. They were drawing closer. Persin might have relied on floatstone for his ships, but he was getting more speed from them than most others could. “Teach her to fight.”

  “Are you serious?” said Bannord.

  “If I get you to teach her some of the more masculine arts, perhaps it will blunt her fury at me,” he said. “The women in my family! None of them seem content with their lot. She reads too many books.”

  “There is your sister, yes. Another frightening woman.”

  “To be frank, I blame Katriona for encouraging Ilona.”

  “Do you think Katriona helped her aboard?”

  “I doubt it. She would think Ilona’s actions the height of idiocy, she would prefer Ilona go to school and become a yellow band thinker. That’s not Ilona’s style. She’d rather go to war. But it’ll be Katriona’s example that has inspired my little cousin to take this course. Gods’ shit! And I thought she was not present at the departure because she was angry with me.”

  “She is angry with you,” pointed out Bannord. “So you want me to put a sword in the hand of a hot-tempered girl in order to wriggle your way back into her good graces? She kicked you in the balls not ten minutes ago. Had she a sword she’d likely have cut them off.”

  Trassan lowered his voice. The dark shapes of the crew went to and fro on the deck below, preparing the ship for departure. Steam wisped from the funnels, growing thicker by the second. Without the new glimmer engines, they would never build steam in time to evade Persin.

  “She is the only human woman on a ship of two hundred men,” he said. “There’s more at stake here than me ingratiating myself.”

  Trassan glanced at the blue-tinged steam. The ship’s main lights were out, but if Persin had not seen the Prince Alfra before, the flag of vapour lightening the night overhead would tell him exactly where it was.

  “We need to get far ahead of him, or he’ll follow our steam all the way to the Morfaan docks. I’m going below,” he said, and left Bannord alone to watch Persin’s expedition drawing closer.

  “Marines!” Bannord shouted down to a pair of his men on the main deck. “Send out the order, to defensive positions.” He raised his telescope to his eye. Persin’s expedition focused into three individual vessels. “Just in case,” he said to himself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Further into the Sotherwinter

  WITH PERSIN HARD on their tail, the Prince Alfra maintained full speed. Lookouts posted up the mast and at the prow kept watch for icebergs. Trassan confidently asserted that they were the only things that posed any danger to his ship, but Heffi was taking no chances, instructing his men to watch out for ice dragons and leviathans. Midsummer approached. The sun lingered long in the sky. During the brief nights they kept nervous eyes astern, searching for the smoke plumes and lights of Persin’s expedition. They saw no sign of their rivals, and when Trassan was sure they had outpaced Persin, he ordered the ship’s powerful glimmer lamps activated so that they might press on through the brief night. The weather grew colder. Ice thickened on the ship’s structure.

  Bannord was good to his word, and instructed Ilona on the use of the boarding cutlass. Seeing his charge take such delight in his lessons, Bannord grew enthused, and only partly because Ilona was such a very pretty girl. He taught her the rudiments of small sword fencing, sabre fighting, and shooting. She was a quick learner, and he found her sharp tongue entertaining. When the weather closed in, forcing them off the deck, he had part of the hold where Ilona had been hi
ding cleared so that they might fence there. The aft became something of a gathering place, where men off duty came to practise their swordsmanship and bet on the outcome of bouts. Despite the Ishmalani’s reputation for pacifism and their holy book’s ban on warfare, many of them were adept knife fighters, and from them Ilona received further instruction. Ardovani and Vols Iapetus attended often, Vols showing a wholly unexpected appreciation of fencing. His excitement at the more technical matches helped endear him to the crew.

  All the while the engines of the Prince Alfra throbbed, steam turbines turning screw and wheel. For three weeks the ship headed south, entering waters few vessels had plied, and fewer had returned from. The sea became gelid and sluggish, covered from horizon to horizon in jostling plates of thin ice that the Prince Alfra smashed its way through. Icebergs became more common, and soon thicker patches of pack ice were forcing short detours that made Trassan swear and Heffi roll his eyes.

  One rare fine day Bannord and Ilona fenced on deck. The skies were clear and a strong sunlight blazed from ice so dazzling white it appeared like no earthly substance. In the sun they were hot, though the day was frigid, and to spar they had removed their parkas, exercising in their felt undershirts. Ilona fought with a short broad sword, better balanced than the cutlasses the marines favoured, and a thin stiletto. They were real weapons, though the edges were protected by leather sparring covers. Bannord fought with but a smallsword, his arm out behind him for balance. Tyn Rulsy warmed her back on the warm middle funnel, eating dried fruit while she watched. She wore a cut down parka that made her look like a child from behind, unnerving when she turned her wizened Tyn face upon whoever challenged her.

  “Adjust your stance a little,” Bannord said as Ilona circled him. “Keep up your offhand. You want to be able to threaten with it one instant, make your opponent forget it the next. When he does, that’s the time you can bury the knife up to the hilt in his ribs.”

  “Or her ribs,” said Ilona.

  Bannord smiled at her. “Sure.”

  “Perhaps when I get home, I will open a fencing school for women. There must be more like Kyreen Asteria in the world.”

  “I hear she’s more man than woman,” said Bannord.

  “She is more than a man, I think,” said Ilona. “Would you teach in my school when you leave the army?”

  “As tempting as it is to face the sharp blades of women rather than their tongues, you must keep my name out of your plans, if you would goodlady,” said Bannord. “My poor old man’s heart is weak.”

  She let out a sharp laugh and leapt at him. Bannord parried her sword and the knife that followed. “Steady!” he said as the knife passed near his ribs. “Under the rebating cover that thing’s properly sharp.”

  “Fight better then!” she taunted.

  A cry went up from the lookout’s nest. “Land ho!” Other voices passed the shout back along the ship. The whistles wailed triumphantly.

  Bannord dropped his guard and craned his neck to see forward. Ilona swiped at him again. He sidestepped. Over balanced by her blow, Ilona fell over.

  “Are we there already?” said Ilona as Bannord pulled her back to her feet.

  “Let’s go and see,” Bannord said. They put their parkas back on, and went to the front of the ship, Rulsy trailing after them.

  To the south the frequent teeth of icebergs merged into a white band that stretched out of sight. Black mountains crouched over the ice like a battleline sheltering behind shields.

  Bannord cupped his hand around his mouth. “How far?” he called to the lookout.

  “Twenty miles or more,” came the lookout’s reply, sharp as glass on the cold air.

  Whistles blew and sailors ran about. The ship drew to a halt and Trassan, Heffi and Antoninan came out onto the wheelhouse balcony and began talking animatedly. Bannord and Ilona watched them until they went back inside. With a rush of steam, the ship’s port wheel chopped into the water. Once more it began to move, turning so that it was parallel with the shoreline.

  “Well then,” said Bannord to Ilona, who was looking at the distant ice.

  “Well what?” she said.

  He slapped her backside with his blade.

  “Ow!” she shouted.

  “How dare you handle the goodlady so!” said Rulsy.

  “I didn’t slap your arse, Tyn,” said Bannord. “If you want to stop me doing that, Ilona, you better get back to your lesson. Come on.”

  “Do we have to?” she said. “My arms ache.”

  “I’ve got nothing better to do, and neither do you. If you were in a battle, you might have to fight all day. Trust me, then your arms would hurt properly, and if they did you would be dead. As women are weaker than men, strength and stamina are areas of your training we have to work especially hard on. I need to muscle you up, my girl.”

  “I’m no one’s girl,” she said darkly. “Who’d let me fight in battle anyway?”

  “Apart from the Pristians—who insist women are superior to men—the Fethrians who have no sex, and the Amaranth who make no distinction, there’s the Sorskians, Ferroki, Marovese, Suverese and the rest of the southern kingdoms. So, nobody at all,” he said. “But then, nobody at all let you on this ship or invited you on this expedition, and here you are, so I’d say there was a good chance of it wherever you are. Come on girl. Guard up!”

  “And I thought you were against all this,” said Ilona, readying her weapons.

  “I am,” said Bannord. “Giving women weapons is madness. Why do you think I don’t live in any of those places?”

  The hull of the iron ship squealed through broken pack ice. Trassan stood atop the wheel house, his eyeglass fixed to a mount on the railing he had cobbled together. Summer had done for the ice what no human agency could, shattering it to pieces. Long leads of bright blue water snaked their way between icebergs. On these, Trassan and his crew kept a nervous watch. They glided by on their way to the shore, glowering at the intruder to their domain, threatening to huddle in to one another and crush the ship between them.

  Tolpoleznaen was a deft steersman and steered the ship past with inches to spare. That he could gauge the depth of water over the berg’s hidden lower portions seemed miraculous to Trassan, but the ship never once touched them. An occasional piece of the ice pack stubbornly barred the Prince Alfra’s way. In those instances, Trassan shouted warnings down the speaking tube into the wheelhouse, but the ship passed through without incident, the ice shattering before the ship’s strengthened bow.

  Heffi came up the stair onto the wheelhouse roof. Cheeks ruddy with the cold gave him the appearance of some minor, jolly god of good fortune.

  “The ship is performing well,” said Heffi.

  “And we’ve no icing on the whistle bells or inside the funnels,” said Trassan.

  Heffi made an equanimous gesture. Parts of the ship were almost unbearably cold now the heat had been rerouted. He was not going to bring that up again. “I was referring to our ice-parting capabilities.”

  “The Alfra has not been tested properly yet,” said Trassan darkly. “These fragments are no more than four feet thick. By my reckoning the ice is five times thicker in winter and some thicker portions might survive as late as Gannever. I am unhappy with the build up around the paddlewheels and prow. That could slow us significantly. We are lucky that Persin’s boats are even less well suited to this kind of sailing.”

  They drove on past another huge iceberg. In its bright shadow the temperature dropped. Heffi shivered. “There are more of these large bergs.”

  Trassan pointed ahead. “And more ahead. If they close in too far we will have to go around. How far is it to this double mountain ?”

  They looked over towards the shoreline, indivisible from the ice. The mountains were taller than they had appeared, blasted free of snow by wind coming from inland that carried long sheets of white from their summits in falling plumes. A gap in the mountains marked the bay they had originally intended to land at, but against the
whole coastline the frozen sea was rucked up into jagged embankments.

  “According to the last survey,” said Trassan, “this wall of ice was not present.”

  “It is tidal, I’d guess,” said Heffi. “Stacked by successive Great Tides.”

  Brown ravines gashed the wall. Huge overhangs hung on the point of collapse. There was no clear road through.

  “Climbing that would be impossible,” said Trassan.

  “We should go no further toward land,” said Heffi, “but sail back out to clearer water, and come inshore when closer. Sailing through this will impede us at best, risk the ship at worst.”

  “Antoninan wants to head for the shore,” said Trassan.

  “For what?” said Heffi. “To prove to Antoninan that his preferred landing site at Sea Drays Bay is inaccessible?”

  “Life would be easier if he accepted my judgment without making all this fuss,” said Trassan.

  “This ice might have blocked the harbour the spirit told us of as well,” said Heffi. “What then?”

  “We shall deal with that when it comes to it,” said Trassan.

  “There might not be a way,” said Heffi. “We should discuss the eventuality.”

  Trassan frowned. “There is always a way, Heffi. Always.”

  IN THE END, after much argument with Antoninan, Heffi and Trassan had their way. The Prince Alfra ran alongside the thickening maze of icebergs clustered about the Sotherwinter continent, and stuck to clearer water. The banging of ice from the hull became a constant. The men chipped at ice coating the ship, the ice in the ocean chipped back. Icebergs growled warnings at them. Eerie noises whooped and rumbled over the sea. Every night loud booms carried from afar would wake half the crew in fear that they had struck an obstacle.

  Midsummer approached. Some vagary of the current during Gannever’s White Moon tide cleared berg and pack ice away from the shore and allowed them closer to land for a while. The mountains intimidated them, their blue tongues drooping insolently from hanging valleys. Still the shore was hidden by ramparts of ice, and soon enough wide skirts of pack ice spread out again upon the ocean surface, this unbroken, and the Prince Alfra was forced further away. This was finally enough to satisfy Antoninan, and they sailed onward for the docks the spirit told them of without further debate.