by Hal Clement
The really new thing about the ship, which opened Gizona’s eyes to a whole new field of knowledge, was on the outside of the hull at either side of the bow. On the smooth paint was a series of most peculiar marks, standing out clearly in black against the white band along the vermilion hull. They were not pictures, and they did not seem to be very good decoration. Gizona puzzled about them for a day or two, and then plucked up the courage to ask one of the Phoenician crew.
"That? That’s the ship’s name— Syrian Sun. I thought you knew that.”
"I knew that was her name, but I don’t see how these marks can mean it."
The Phoenician was a trifle surprised, as he had a right to be-it was common enough to find people who couldn’t read, but quite unusual to meet someone who didn’t at least know what writing was. It was rather odd that Gizona didn’t, actually; but the matter had never come up while he was on the Proteus or the Carthaginian galley, and he had not gotten to know the Egyptians well enough to learn anything of their peculiar script. Once the sailor had explained, of course, a lot of points were cleared up; and he learned to read in about the time it took to have the Phoenician alphabet named off to him. The sailor was a trifle surprised at the boys ability to repeat the letters after one hearing, and recognize each after it had been pointed out to him a single time; Gizona was so absorbed in the new knowledge that he forgot about the importance of keeping his ability secret.
He spent the next few days before sailing in a single-minded search for things to read. There was remarkably little, all things considered, since the Phoenicians had little or nothing in the way of books, and neither cargo list nor personal letters were left lying around. He did not mention his new ability to his masters. He knew that the Phoenicians must realize it, since one of them had taught him the art; but he did not stop to think what would happen if one of them should tell about it to Nimshi or Sargon.
He had been accepted casually on the ship as the slave of the two soldiers. The sailors had been friendly enough, but the officers ignored him completely at first. Only after the reading incident did Captain David occasionally watch the boy with a thoughtful expression on his face. Gizona did not notice this, and probably would not have thought about it if he had; but Numshi did, and began to do a little thinking of his own. The upshot of this was a set of instructions to Gizona, given the night before the fleet was to sail.
"I think the captain is interested in you for some reason, Gizona. I don’t know what he has in mind, but from what you heard him say about having special use for us I wouldn't be surprised if he were planning to use you as a a spy to see that we do whatever he says. If he talks to you at any time, you'll probably be able to find out; you're smart enough. I'd like you to play along with him, let us know what he’s up to, and of course not let him know we're on to him. All right?"
"I see, sir," Gizona replied. For once Nimshi seemed to notice this rather non-committal reply, and added another point to his instructions.
"l realize, of course, you can play that game with both sides, young fellow, Just remember that the man who tries to ride two horses usually gets a pretty bad fall. You remember things better than I ever will, but you don’t always think ahead fast enough. Just remember-I’ve caught you before, making you tell me things you didn’t want. Stop and think what might happend if you were caught both by me and Captain David. I think you'll find it safer to stick with me!"
Gizona nodded in understanding. "I know. There’s no use my saying I’ll obey you, because if I didn’t I wouldn’t mind lying about it."
"Say it anyway. You’re a poor liar, and if you break the promise later it’ll be easy to find out."
"All right. I'll let you know everything the captain says to me, and won't tell him I’m doing it."
The Judean nodded, and dismissed him to his own affairs. Gizona went to his favorite place under the rail at the bow, and sat down to think. He had plenty to think about, but as usual whenever he spent much time at it he went to sleep.
As it happened, the captain neither said nor did anything for a long time to confirm Nimshi’s suspicions; the boy finally decided that his master was just suspicious by nature. That, however, was long after the sailing.
The departure of the fleet was an exciting event. The whole population of the settlement was on the beach. The soldiers had gone aboard the two galleys. The decks of the merchantmen were much clearer than they had been the night Gizona had had his spying adventure, all the supplies having been stowed below. Sailors were busily at work on the ropes, some getting up the anchors and others busying themselves with the sails.
Normally these were brailed up to the single lateral boom near the top of the mast; but until now they and the booms had been on deck, since most of the ships had never been at sea. The one or two which had not been built especially for this voyage had been dragged ashore for repairs and cleaning and their rigging had also been brought down, so there was a great deal of hauling on ropes by the half-naked, heavily muscled Phoenicians. Nimshi and Sargon were too dignified and Gizona too young to bear a hand at this work, but they watched with interest; their previous experience had been in ships that depended mostly on their oars.
The boy’s attention was divided between the work of the sailors and the excitement in the crowd on shore— shouting and laughter, calls to the ships and the men on them, occasional shouts of anger and fights as men or women sought better vantage points. Small boats crowded the surface of the gulf, laden with people just as excited as those on shore-~more than one accident occurred as the people in them ignored all the rules of common sense. There was a north wind, which meant offshore, of course otherwise the fleet would not have been starting; and Nimshi remarked sardonically that some of the small craft were likely to wind up in Punt themselves. Gradually the apparent confusion ended. The sails spread their colored wings, and merchantmen and galleys alike began to move slowly through the water. The sounds from the shore gradually faded, and were replaced by the wash of the Red Sea along the ships’ sides and the humming of wind in the rigging. The helmsmen at the great steering oars gradually settled the great hulks onto the proper heading, and the greatest voyage the world had ever seen was under way.
CHAPTER 14
The next few months put a lot more detail into Gizona’s picture of the world, and once or twice made him wonder whether the sea was really the best highway. He had only once suffered from seasickness, but he had never encountered a storm as severe as those the Red Sea hurled at the fleet; and the first time the ships were caught at sea by such a tempest he was a very miserable young man. The Phoenician habit of letting their great tubs of timber ride out such weather, instead of hauling them ashore as the Carthaginians had done with their galleys, taught both Gizona and his masters that they still had much to learn of the sea.
Even in calm weather, however, things sometimes happened. In the region of the Dahalach Archipelago, before they were even out of the Red Sea, two ships were lost-one of the two galleys and a merchantman. The wind was strong, but not strong enough to worry the sailors; the danger lay beneath the water. In spite of the sharp-eyed watchmen at the mastheads, both ships grounded on reefs in the same day.
The merchantman struck first, and in spite of its low speed wedged itself firmly onto the jagged coral. No one was hurt, but two days’ work failed to pull her off, and the stores and men had to be transferred to other vessels. The galley struck when she was racing up to find what had happened-struck glancingly on a projecting spur that ripped the hull open below the water line for a quarter of its length. She went down in four or five minutes, and very few of the armed soldiers were dragged from the shark-infested waters. The Phoenician officers, not weighted down with metal, kept themselves afloat with bales until rescued.
Sometimes they proceeded for days with a fair wind; sometimes they were held up for weeks while the weather held against them. If the captains felt it was safe, they anchored near shore each night; if the weather seemed at all un
trustworthy the vessels were hauled as far ashore as the strength of the men permitted. If a really bad storm seemed in the offing they either made to sea to ride it out or sought shelter in a bay if they could find one. Gizona was rather surprised at first that none of the ships were lost in these gales; but gradually he began to get used to them, and to watch with interest the way in which the helmsman of the Syrian Sun handled the big vessel at such times.
He had made friends with virtually everyone aboard by this time, even the officers, and was not afraid to ask questions when he could not figure out the answers for himself; so by the time the fleet reached Babel— Mandeb he knew as much about seamanship as a moderately experienced Phoenician sailor. Some of the Phoenicians may have realized this, but if they did they said nothing. Sargon certainly knew nothing of it; he paid little attention to anything save his meals and amusements. The latter were restricted to telling his outrageous stories to whoever would listen, and occasionally fishing. Nimshi may have known, but if so he was as silent on the matter as the Phoenicians. He talked little, thought much, and spent a good deal of his time examining the shores they passed. Gizona suspected he was trying to memorize landmarks so that he could get back from the voyage even if he happened to lose his slave; the suspicion was confirmed by his habit of discussing the things he had seen with Gizona, thus checking his memory against the boy’s.
There were always landmarks, for the ships never went out of sight of the shore if they could help it, and never travelled at night. The only gaps in Gizona’s picture of the African coast were caused by the few storms which blew them southward, causing them to pass part of it at night, and he did not think these were very great.
Once out of the Red Sea and past Tadjoura Gulf the coast bent eastward, and Gizona almost made the mistake of remarking to Captain David that it looked as though the fleet would get back to the Red Sea instead of the Nile; but he caught himself in time. They reached Cape Guardafui, weeks later owing to poor winds, and the land fell away to the south and then the southwest. None of the Phoenicians seemed surprised; Gizona judged that the trading centers he had heard them mention must lie still farther south, so that they were acquainted with this part of the coast.
Spring gave way to summer, and summer to autumn, though the seasons did not act in quite the way the boy had known them to on the Mediterranean. The principal effect of the approach of autumn was a greater number of days on which the wind blew in the right direction, so they made rather better speed.
In spite of this, Gizona noticed as the weeks went by that the captain seemed to be growing anxious. He examined the shore often, with pursed lips, as though looking for some particular landmark. One day he ordered a slight reduction in the food ration, and several times when the ships came ashore he held long and earnest consultations with his officers and the other captains. The weather continued fine for many weeks, which was just as well, for the coast offered little in the way of shelter. Only one storm struck them during this time; it drove them well out to sea, and when they finally worked their way back to the west no one but Gizona was sure whether it was to a part of the coast they had already passed or not. No one asked him.
The captains, after consultation, decided to go on rather than go back to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. This rather annoyed the boy, since as it happened this left another gap in his picture of the coast; but in another week even he decided that he couldn’t have missed much.
Sargon and Nimshi had understood from the stories they had heard that the Land of Gold was a very long journey from Egypt, but even they were beginning to feel a little surprised at the time it was taking when the captain finally appeared to relax. The rations were increased again, he stopped gazing anxiously at the shore, and his greeting to the other captains when they went ashore that night was largely made up of nods and smiles.
Two days later the coast changed its nature in one important way; a harbor appeared.
It was a great bay, opening in the direction from which the fleet had come and protected from the storms of the Indian Ocean by a long, broad peninsula. The water was quite deep enough for even the greatest of the ships, not only in the passage that led into the protected area but in the mouths of the rivers that emptied into the bay. The land in nearly all directions was covered by vegetation, some of it tall trees intertwined with vines and shorter undergrowth, some more open. It was country such as Gizona had never seen before; it fascinated him, and he spent all the time the fleet was bringing up in the mouth of one of the rivers in looking at every bit of shore detail he could see. There were sounds that caught his attentions, too-some that should be birds, hummings and occasional shrieks that might have been anything, and a rhythmic thudding that meant nothing to the boy but made his pulses pound in sympathy. He spoke to one of the Phoenicians who was passing behind him.
"Is this the Land of Gold? I don’t see any sign of people."
The fellow shrugged his shoulders.
"I’ve never made this trip before. I heard we were going to stay here for a while, but I don’t know anything else."
Another of the crew had no more to tell, and Gizona debated whether it would be wise to ask the captain. He had always been very careful about annoying David; perhaps this once he would not mind. The boy waited until the mooring of the Sun was completed and the officers seemed ready to relax; then he approached the captain.
David looked at him as he came. He did not seem particularly cordial, but on the other hand he did not seem annoyed, so Gizona plucked up his courage and spoke.
"Sir, is this really the Land of Gold? People don’t seem very excited about it."
A smile might, or might not, have played for a moment behind the captain’s beard.
"You seem to notice things, youngster. You are quite right; we are not yet at our journey’s end."
Gizona smiled.
"That won’t bother my masters. They haven’t had to do anything but eat for months; and when they don’t have to do anything, neither do I. I wouldn’t mind if you stayed here a year."
"It won’t be that long, but it will be several months."
Gizona was surprised.
"Why should it be that long? If this isn’t where we are going, I should think we’d be getting along sooner than that."
"We have to take care of supplies, boy. Food is running rather low. We will plant a crop of grain, wait for it to grow, and harvest it." Gizona glanced ashore. It seemed to him that the land around the lagoon was pretty badly overgrown to serve as a farm, and he said so.
"That’s true enough, but there are clearings where we can plant, and we can make more, even near the lagoon if we want to. A little way inland the country is a lot more open, and it may be easier to use that area."
"You’ve been here before then?" Gizona asked innocently.
The captain looked at him sharply, and the boy could almost read his thoughts.
"No, I haven’t, but other Phoenician ships have. What made you think I had?"
"Your knowing about the country away from the water. You couldn’t— "
"I see." David didn’t let him finish the sentence. For a minute or two the captain was silent; he was quite evidently thinking hard. Gizona had time to wonder whether he had said to much; it was hard to avoid mentioning items he had learned by eavesdropping even with a memory like his. If the captain was able to put two and two together, Gizona might find himself in serious trouble.
However, David seemed not to catch the idea that Gizona had betrayed himself; once again the boy marvelled at the leakiness of ordinary memories. Then he realized that the captain had something entirely different on his mind.
"Boy, as soon as we are ashore and my hut has been built, bring your masters to me. I have something to talk over with them; it may be that their idleness will end shortly." He turned away, ending the conversation.
Gizona delivered the message at once rather than waiting until the move ashore had been made, mostly because he wanted to hear
what Sargon and Nimshi would make of it. They had several ideas during the next day or two, but none of them seemed sensible to the boy-though they might have, he realized, if he had not known things his masters didn’t.
The crews moved ashore, not even waiting to put up huts; they were used to sleeping on the unprotected beach. Gizona had long ago stopped wondering about the danger of native people-it had been so long since any had been seen. No one else seemed to worry about such matters either, though everyone went armed as a matter of course.
The captain’s hut was quickly built, as it was simply an open-sided structure of logs and thatch, more for shade than any other sort of protection. Sargon and Nimshi approached as soon as the captain had moved his sleeping gear into it; Gizona came along, remembering the captain’s order to bring, not send, his masters. The captain watched silently as they approached, nodded them in, and indicated that Sargon and Nimshi should seat themselves on rugs. He himself had one of the few chairs that had been brought, a luxurious and overdecorated piece of furniture which must have come from Tyre itself.