by Andre Norton
There was a washing place off the sparsely furnished room and I made use of what that offered, standing when I was through to look into a mirror of polished metal on the wall. In my mind there had flashed memory of that picture on the cover of the book Lord Simon had brought back with him into our quarters.
My fair hair, bleached even lighter by the summer sun, had been chopped off at shoulder level—for I found the long braids a woman, must care for a hindrance. My skin was also colored by summer heat a brown which met the white of my body usually covered to form a definite line. I had the high cheekbones of the Sulcar also, but my chin was not so square and my mouth was certainly too large to give me any claim to even good looks, let alone equal comparison to most of the women I had seen.
It was my eyes which proclaimed the most sharply my alien status among the people whose blood I half shared. Where theirs were blue or in some cases green, mine were overlarge and of the color of well-forged steel. Being browed and lashed with black instead of that color which crowned my skull, those eyes appeared doubly prominent in my face, and, I thought, showed as chill as those floating hillocks of ice which could be often sighted in the far northern sea.
I held up my hair with my hands, straining it back so I could see what I might look like if I were shown as that pictured woman. The effect was in no way flattering and I went in to clothe myself thinking again that indeed I was not particularly favored by fate, physically as well as with those gifts which had done me more harm than good.
My hands sought Gunnora's talisman, which I settled carefully into place between my small breasts, I not being endowed in that direction either. It had been warm last night, but now it was cool and I latched my shirt high. There was a tap at the door of my chamber arid I hurriedly went to answer the summons. The Lady Loyse stood there. She was small, making me feel suddenly too large and clumsy.
“Destree, we meet again. Jaelithe has something she wishes to ask of you. Also they have brought in the morning food.” She smiled.
It was something I had thought about much since I had been so drawn into this circle of old friends and kin. It had been the Lady Jaelithe who had had me. summoned to the first meeting back in Es City; These famed ones who had wrought in their own ways—Jaelithe, Loyse, and Orsya—to bring peace into places of the utter Dark had accepted me without question, spoke to me as if I were almost bloodkin, or at least a battle comrade from another time. It had been that feeling of trust which had led me to tell the Lady Jaelithe of my beginnings, and the Lady Loyse had heard those same words. Yet she had not turned from me, jerking away her robe where it touched my sea boots as if evil could be scraped by such an encounter.
This acceptance was so new, and because of the past, I could not wholly accept it. What did I possess that these could use that they spoke me so fair and came to call me in person to a meal when a servant could well have been sent? I kept my thoughts veiled, yet they added to that cloak of depression which I had worn so long it had become a very familiar garment.
“It is a good day,” Loyse said. She paused by one larger inner window which gave upon the center court of the keep. There was a plot of flowers that seemed out of place guarded by such massive stone walls. But we could look down to three benches set near together, well away from those walls as if any who so gathered had .some uneasiness about being overheard—as if the walls might sprout ears. Save for Sigmun I saw that those who had come from Es on that call the night before were helping themselves to food from a table set on wheels.
We joined them speedily and they all gave me matter-of-fact greeting as if indeed I were a longtime comrade in some action of importance. Lord Simon sat drinking from a cup but his eyes were elsewhere, upon what rested on his knees: the book from the strange ship. But he looked up as Orsya put out her hand to summon me to a seat beside her. Kemoc sat cross-legged at her feet, watching his father with compelling intensity, as if he would force some information out of him by eye power alone.
It was the Lady Jaelithe who put down her own cup to look directly at me. I was instantly alerted. Now it was to come—what they wanted from me.
“You have farsight—and foresight—”
“Foresight,” I returned quickly and perhaps more sharply than I should have done, “I will not use—”
I saw both Lord Simon and Kemoc shaken out of their own preoccupation to look at me. But the Lady Jaelithe was continuing. “Have you also the talent of finding the origin of something from afar? That talent is often tied with the seeing.”
I was silent with surprise. In my years of roving—though those had hot been too many—I had never tried to set my gift working in that direction. Now that she spoke of it I had memory of small flashes of knowledge about people and things which had seemed to just coast into my mind when I took belongings into my hands. Yet I had always believed that that was merely my sensitivity to being more or less outcast and caused by my imagination, not any talent.
“Take this.” Lady jaelithe drew the alien book from her lord and actually thrust it at me with such a sharpness in her voice that it might have been an order she did not intend to have refused.
The book was very smooth to the touch and I found myself running my fingertips, as it rested on my own knees, back and forth across those lines of runes. They were neither incised nor standing above the surface as a touch on parchment might have found writing as I knew to be. In some way they were a part of the surface on which they appeared.
There was a stirring, not quite like the call to the seeings I knew so well, but of another kind. I closed my eyes and strove to open a mind door I had not been entirely aware I possessed.
There was a storm, such as even the most canny Sulcar sailing master would find difficult to fight for the life of his vessel. Also there Was fear—so overpowering and wild a fear as ran close to the borderline of sanity. I crouched in the large cabin of that strange ship. Foul sickness arose in my throat. I could see another shadow—for the lights in the cabin had failed—and knew it.
“Miggy.” I mouthed a name but I could not hear my own voice, so savage was the storm. It had seemed to spring out of nowhere.
“Jim!” Again a, name, and, with that, came an even greater gust of feat if such was possible. Jim was gone— he had been licked into the sea as if a wave was a giant tongue lifting him up to gulp down.
Before the storm—I strove to reach that—what had happened before the storm? Somehow I managed to force memory to reply. There was sun, hot on a reach of sand. And a short quay to which there were several of the alien ships tied up. Miggy and Jim—they had been whispering together. There was some act which had a danger of its own. Yet danger made it interesting. It had to do with a boat—a boat and, out at sea, a bigger ship from which something would be transferred. That was the secret, one which was the source of danger. Still that danger was a lure. Now I saw the interior of the cabin—there were four people there. They were not uniform in appearance as were the Old Race and the Sulcars, carrying their kin-ship on their faces for all to see. She whom I knew for Miggy (and what manner of name was that?) had red hair. While Jim's was brown, with silver patches about his ears, and cut short, as was Miggy's also. But the other woman sat combing hers, which was streaked weirdly with several strands of silver through black. And the second man, seated by her, was burnt very brown, while his close-cropped hair was in the beginnings of curls against the scalp.
They were arguing but I could not hear what they said, only feel tension in the air—it was about the danger. Then—
Once more I was back in the storm, the ship in wild swing. There burst outside the ports, from the rims of which water trickled now and then to wash the decking, a lash of light which blinded. There was nothingness, then—
I opened my eyes to find that all the party was looking to me Slowly and trying as hard as I could about details, I recited what I had learned. If I had learned it and it was not born of some imaginative feat of my own. At that moment I could not be sure of a
nything, for I was spent. If I moved my head it seemed the whole courtyard took on the dizzying sway of the ship storm-tossed.
“The gate.” Loyse spoke first when I had finished. “How did they get through the gate? How can there be a gate in the open sea?”
I shook my head very gingerly, afraid to bring on an attack of vertigo. “The storm—and before that the beach—There was no more.”
Lady jaelithe reached over and took the book from my now-slack hold.
“They sensed danger, these whom you saw. What danger Was it? Perhaps the gate—”
“No.” That much I could answer. “It was something to do with another ship at sea. A much larger one, I think.”
“Sand and sea and many ships tied at a wharf,” Lord Simon said slowly, then he caught at the book and went flipping through its queer pages in a hurry. He had found another picture and held it for me to see. “There were trees like this to be seen?”
The one he pointed out had a long bare trunk, its branches all at the top, wide leaves made of many tapering strips set together.
“I saw no tree.”
For a moment he looked as one who had thought he had found a thing of value only to discover it was worthless.
“You knew of such a place in your own world?” Lady Jaelithe asked.
“Yes. Also there was a place in the sea which had strange legends of disappearing ships—legends which had been known for centuries. A sea …” he said musingly.
Kemoc added a question. “But if a ship comes through, where is the crew? We know well the gates—have we not had personal knowledge of them? But always it was that people came—alone.”
“It remains,” for the first time Lord Koris spoke, “that of this we must know more. Do we want another invasion from such as Kolder? Let us make sure as soon as we can of what chances in the south that such ships as that can appear there. The Sulcar will support such a venture, since they believe that they will be the first threatened as they have already been. What of their ships found derelict without crews? Can it be that perhaps the gate opens also the other way, dropping Sulcars into your world, Simon?”
“Who knows what has happened. But as you have said—we must learn what we can. And to learn that we need ships willing to sail south, though what perils await there who can say?”
I think that all there would have volunteered for such a voyage but there were still duty to hold a man. Lord Koris had taken the rule of Estcarp, and for him that remained the fact he could not deny. In the end there were five of us—Lord Simon, the Lady Jaelithe, Kemoc and Orsya, and I—because in me something said, This you must do. Though I believe that the Sulcars, had it not been for those I was to company with, would have refused me on board! Legend grows greater than action in the telling and I was considered to be one of the enemy, or at least tied to the Dark, by most of the captains.
There were two ships chosen Sigmun's and Harwic's. Beside the regular kin crew they each carried a detachment of Falconers, those dour fighters. But some precautions they did take. Though the Sulcar always sail in family groups, living more on board their ships than on land, this time they set ashore their children and such of their women as were pregnant, Lord Koris seeing all were well settled in comfort at the port.
There Was one time of difficulty when one who was a seeress aboard Lord Harwic's vessel showed temper and teeth to me, saying that I was so ill-omened as to bring the fate feared the most on any person—so what would I do with a ship?
Then the Lady Jaelithe took command, and so much in awe was she held by all, even more by those who possessed some bit of talent, that the woman gave way quickly when it was made clear to her that that vessel was to bear Lady Jaelithe and Lord Simon. While I was to sail with Sigmun and Kemoc and Orsya on the Far Rover.
With a cargo of wood and very well provisioned, we set sail at last after two ten days of hard labor, heading out into an ocean under the first colors of dawn. Over us the seabirds wheeled and called mournfully and under a fair wind our sails bellied, so that we were fast past the dismal shadow of Gorm with only the wide sea before us.
We had made other expeditions to Gorm to explore the derelict and Lord Simon had consulted the charts and other records found on board. He bad names for a crew of six, but there had been others on board—the women I had “seen” and whose clothing and belongings were still in one of the cabins, a double one. Of those he could learn nothing save that they had been aboard. While there were no notations in what he called the ship's “log” which explained either the purpose of the voyage or the reason for carrying the rotted vegetation which had been stored in the small hold. As for the reclaiming of the ship for any service he explained to Captain Harwic that the running of it did indeed depend on neither sails nor oars but on a complicated machine, such as the Kolders knew, which needed to be fueled with a liquid unknown in our world. Thus the vessel remained at Gorm's dock for the present under the guard of the small garrison there.
Though I am of half-Sulcar blood I had never been taken in to any ship's clan yet I had worked passage on many vessels, doing the lowliest of labor, never trusted to any position of skill or direct need in maintaining the voyage itself. This time I was left with nothing to do for my passage. Or I would have been had Orsya and Kemoc not sought me out in the first day. The Krogan girl was deeply amazed by the very fact that so much water lay always about her now. Her people in Escore depended upon streams and ponds, lakes and rivers, limited in their exploration on land because of their need for that same water to renew their bodies from time to time. Before our sailing Kemoc had made plain to Captain Sigmun that the ship must tow a boat from which at intervals Orsya could descend into the sea and swim for the space needed to restore her energy.
Since I was anything but welcome on board myself I yielded at once to their invitation to join them in the boat. Kemoc was a strong swimmer, though his one hand and arm bore still the signs of the-harsh wound which had made of him a left-handed and perhaps less efficient fighter. But he could be a child paddling in a puddle when his best efforts were compared to Orsya. Since her gills went into service in water she could dive and stay unseen for lengths of time which no one save a member of her own race could equal. Though Kemoc made her swear that she would not venture far from the boat. There were grim tales enough of what might lurk in the depths—strange water beasts and reptiles of which we knew very little were rumored to have their hunting grounds there.
To my surprise Kemoc had questions for me. I did not think, that the Lady Jaelithe or the Lady Loyse had repeated the story I had told them, the first time I had ever revealed the whole of it to others, but that the Sulcars considered me an outcast was plain, and also my reason for being in Es City, a wish to consult with some Witch, was generally known. He had seen me use a fraction of my talent and now it appeared that he wished to know the extent of my birth gift. There was no reason to hide aught from him; we were by fate members of a company Sent for a task and it was only just that each of us knew what might be expected from the others with whom he or she marched—or rather sailed.
I said that I had farsight, and foresight (which I also made plain I considered a flawed talent upon which I had no intention of depending) and, as he had seen, I had the reading sight after a limited fashion. But that I had any other of the .talents I doubted very much.
“Sometimes one cannot be sure,” he said musingly as if he had thoughts he did not share. “The Council thinks little of Lormt but there is much that can be learned by delving into the past. When the mountains turned, Lormt suffered the fall of two towers. But that same shifting of very ancient stones uncovered hidden rooms and spaces which held records no one had looked “upon for uncounted years. A comrade from the Borderers of my early fighting days now deals with some of these finds: When we return, seek out what Lormt may hold for you, Seeress.
“You give me a title which no Sulcar will grant, my lord. What I can see they distrust, even as they keep me apart—”
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��Would you be one with them?” It. was Orsya who asked that as she combed her silver hair, freeing it in part from the water which had sleeked it over her shoulders.
“I—” But I got no further for as I tried to weigh my desires, order my thoughts, I made a discovery which should not have surprised me. Did I want to be one with the women of the ship's cabins, labor at sails and all which kept the cabin home afloat, be at the orders, of those who were masters and mistresses of waves and servants of winds?
I looked up to the ship behind which our boat swung into the waves the Far Rover sent back to trouble us. Never would I be accepted aboard with anything but grudging consent. If I was of the true blood I would long since have been wed and one with kin whose single purpose was to advance the ship in seeking and discovering new markets, or plying stolidly back and forth between cities well known. There would have been nothing more for me than that advancement which was shared by all. I could not be a seeress; they, too, were bound by even tighter ties into the pattern of voyages. I was too long a wanderer on my own to accept any such commitment to the will of others. It had been a long time since I had felt any envy. Perhaps it was true my nature was twisted from birth and I was a ship without a home port or a rightful captain, always a-search.
Now I looked directly to the Krogan girl. “I think I would not be one with them unless I had been course set by them from birth. Though that I have never thought or said before.”
“Each one of us has many roads ahead; we make choices sometimes without asking our hearts if this is rightful for us,” Kemoc said-slowly. “Nor can many of us live to walk a path another has chosen for us, no matter how schooled we may be to accept another's will.” He turned his head a fraction and smiled at Orsya, taking one of her slender hands to hold it to his cheek. “Twisted indeed was our own path once but we came at least to where it ran straight and true. Though even now there lie shadows across our way—or so we must believe, being who and what we are. Still we would not have it otherwise. So,” now he spoke a little sharply, his eyes for me again, “you have three gifts that you are aware of. And how do you polish them? By careful use as is well?”