by Tanith Lee
He was a little boy.
In the end, she alighted on a floe of ice and shed tears of frustration and sorrow.
He would be dead by now. Yes, yes, he had been of exceptional calibre and obviously infused by some sorcerous force, but ultimately he could not withstand what had happened. The very thought of it – Brightshade and his guts – made her retch.
There had been a kind of ticking of Dayadin’s life, too, somehow in the air. It had now faded from her inner ear.
What had possessed him to approach the whale? He had tried to save them all by flattering it – and she had not seen, not properly, so caught up in her own dilemma and the temporary sticking of her powers. Heroes, she thought. Men, she thought.
She visualized rushing across all the sea for ever, looking in vain for Brightshade. She imagined going down under the ice after him and knew she never could. Besides, who but she could predict what else might be sent against her people? She was responsible for them. She had brought them away to make them safe. One life, even a peerless life, against so many must not be allowed to count.
He too was dead.
The field of small bergs sheltered the fleet for some days and nights, including one sleep nocturnal-diurnal.
The ships lay between slender needles and curving cliffs, parabolas and concaves of ice, that had in them, often even in the dark, mystic, lit lamps of ultramarine, lapis lazuli or green turquoise.
Saftri, as she wafted in over this scene after her fruitless quest, thoughtfully took in the likenesses and difference of the fleet itself – lighted only by individual cups of oil or torches at the prows. The Vormish ships she knew well, with their decor of shark, whale and cow horns. The Faz ships were very similar. The Kelps however had adorned their one hundred and forty-seven vessels with shells, along with the rest of the paraphernalia. They had gods made of shells, too. Nasty-minded raven gods, or preposterous shell-scaled fish with double tails and elephant trunks. Out of deference to Saftri, the currently ruling deity, these abominations were stowed at the rowers’ feet.
Saftri had more than once previously flown to and over the far continent, but going at a human pace now and on water, she began to note other features. Though she feared the deeps, the surface intrigued her. Tonight the gemmy lucific of the icebergs was enthralling, if only for a short while.
Altogether there were five Mother Ships in this adapted fleet. When she descended to the one that housed her, the Vormish shamans were performing one of their irksome and apparently irrelevant dances on the deck.
Shrieks and squawks and festoons of hysterical sparks enveloped Saftri. She swept through them into her between-decks hut. Here she glared about her. It was a ramshackle and unlovely space, and had the aroma of horsaz from below. Why had she always had to make do? The inhospitable east side of the exquisite palaces in Ru Karismi, the outcast and loveless bedroom where pregnancy, or awkward spirits, had seen her dumped when in her husband’s Jafn garth, Nabnish’s vile abode, Yyrot’s over-hot or dissolving ice-pyramids; mud, misery and mess. Even her sea-tomb had been frigid and smelled fishy. Insult to injury. Finally a goddess – this.
Now I am a god, to which god do I pray?
Oh, send me something – her heart wrinkled in embarrassed yearning – something I would – enjoy.
Oh, send me someone I can never fail, said her inner heart, too shameless and low for her to hear. I am so tired of loss.
Their initial days at sea had been fraught.
None of the remaining Holasan-garth knew anything about shipcraft. Nevertheless a scatter of men from Holas villages, men either redundant through frailty from the war or, less usual, too unenthused to have joined it, came to assist instead the Chaiord with the weird Thing ship. Some of them were fishermen and whalers. They knew at least the vagaries of their clinker-built boats, how to row, how to raise or furl sail, to steer, to sniff out weather. Nor were they seasick, unlike twenty of the thirty-three Jafn Holas from the garth, Arok not excluded.
Nirri was immune to the spooning of the sea, as were eight of the other women, two of the men, and two of the children – one boy and one girl. No one could explain why this should be so. The fishers said it was a gift from Great God. Better not question, just get on.
They, these fishers, quickly taught the younger stronger women who were well enough, and the rest of the people as they adjusted, what must be done about the huge, idiosyncratic ship.
Seventeen masts? What odds. If you could manage one, that only meant managing it seventeen times over.
There were also five wise-women from the villages both inland and off the shore, and one werloka from another clan, who had, he said, been ousted by a younger – and less able he also said – fellow.
All these had come to Arok with the villagers, and been useful in first unearthing the ship from the ice.
The Thing had stood there since the dawn of the ice. Long ago Arok, then a boy, had been brought with his father and other kin of the Holas Chaiord to a meeting here with the Kree and Irhon, under green truce torches.
Each of the five wise-women was adamant. The ship might be used, but they must first ask her permission.
‘A she?’ queried Arok.
None of them deigned to reply.
The ship was buried to its or her waterline in ice. The Thing Place was surrounded also by a ring of black spar. He thought, even if they could raise the Thing it would fall to pieces.
From sunset to rise the wise-women went round and round with burning brands, calling to the ship, singing to it, sometimes stroking the surrounding ice sheet with fire, which made little impression. The werloka sat outside the spar ring, looking on. He had offered no comment on the efficacy of any of this.
After the sun rose the women came to Arok. ‘Dig now.’ So they dug, hacking away chunks of ice, permafrost and colourless dead snow. Then the women performed another ceremony, anointing the ship with an elixir, chanting to it of the sea.
‘Bring the ropes now.’
Arok shrugged, annoyed by it all yet fearful too – but of the ship’s shattering or coming out whole? He was unsure.
They tied on the ropes and only then did the werloka ramble about, attaching amulets, speaking in some garble. The other ends of the ropes were fastened to the last five chariots, with the last ten lions in the traces. The men would pull too, and some of the young women. Nirri stepped up, and Arok frowned at her. But she shook her head. ‘You made me queen. Am I to sit on my rump when your people toil?’
Arok slapped the whip against the air and everyone began the task in a nimbus of thaumaturgic lights.
To start with it seemed impossible. He thought the lions, not to mention some of the older men, would drop dead. Then he heard a big awesome bark behind him. He knew the sound. It was ice breaking deep down. Then they put their last strength into the ropes and with a noise now of smashed glass, sawing blades, earthquake boom and wailing wood out the Thing came, showering them in a hailstorm of ice and frost.
It was intact. Or she was.
The long centuries of cold had turned her hull and masts to something like petrified light granite and her keel to hollow vitreous. Where there seemed any fault or flaw it was tended to by the whalers, who built their fires on the ice and smelted pots of liquid iron, or charred hard wood harder. The canvas came from a hundred or more abandoned little boats, sewn together with metal thread. By the time she was rigged, she had gone down along the sheet ice on runners and been towed out to anchor in the moving sea.
Arok stared at the ship. It was real then, all this. Now they would have to go.
‘Name her,’ ordered the werloka. ‘You’re the Chaiord.’
Arok glanced at Nirri. He was getting used by now to female things.
‘Her name is Hawk.’
The day before they set out, as the last provisions were coming in and the last carpentry was effected on huts and shelters on deck and in the wide hold, which had also, like the rest, mostly been maintained by the ice, one of
the fishermen brought in his son. Others had already brought their sparse families, a handful of women and two or three babies. The story ran that most of the original wives had left those men who did not join the Rukar war, connecting themselves to those who had and going south-west with them. These women here had been left by their husbands, and now found partners among men called formerly cowards. Well, the cowards were still alive thanks to their cowardice. However, this fisherman was different. He had been to the war, and come back. Arok had not known that, not till now. For the fisherman’s son walked hand in hand with his mother, who held her head high as any royalty. The child was about seven from the look of him, probably not in fact.
‘Do you allow it, sir?’ asked the fisherman. ‘She said,’ he indicated his woman, ‘you might refuse us, seeing why you want the voyage and all.’
‘Of course I allow it,’ said Arok, stiff as any mast on the ship.
The boy was black. He was another get of Chillel’s, therefore Dayadin’s one-third brother, if this man did but know it – and maybe he did.
But the fisherman looked at Nirri now, worriedly.
Nirri spoke in a dry little voice.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Fenzi.’ Arok saw Nirri’s hand flutter out on its own, as if to call the child to her and hold him. She mastered herself. Admirable. ‘Perhaps a good omen,’ she said.
The sky was clear the morning they embarked. Gazing back at the shore Arok asked himself if he was the only one to see, abruptly, as though a blindfold disintegrated from before his eyes, how unknown the land was, his birthplace, sheathed in its infernal cold obduracy of white.
I won’t miss it, he thought. It’s people you miss.
Bad weather entered the equation on the second night. By then several were queasy, and with the extra momentum they gave way.
The worst side of it, Arok surmised between bouts of lunatic vomiting, was that the illness never truly eased, even in the intervals.
Meanwhile the ship was run quite spryly.
Cheese-faced, Arok watched the unnauseated ones striding about, swinging aloft over spars – eating Great God forgive them …
The weather settled, but his sickness did not abate. To his chagrin Arok found himself the last of the severe cases. By then most of them were bright-cheeked and cheerful, glad to feel better. But with every shift of the wind Arok leaned over the side, trying to expel his soul into the waves. The medicines of the wise-women did nothing to alleviate his plight.
He determined throughout this, and through an inevitable growing weakness, to uphold his position as Chaiord and protector. He stood on deck, and attended at the helm as the whalers steered the ship among currents and floating packs of ice. They knew such steering devices, having needed them for their own heavier vessels in the past.
Every so often Arok went unspeaking to the side, and returned shivering, pretending indifference. He took his temper out on Nirri, snapping at her, calling her names. Now she made no remonstrance. Well, she had got her way, had she not?
Nearly two Endhlefons had passed.
It was about midnight.
Arok stood in the bow, looking at the chill icicles of stars the whalers had begun to teach him. Until his belly, for the thousandth time, came looking up his throat for an exit.
‘Be damned to this – be cutch damned to it …’ Spitting and breathless, he felt a firm strong hand cup supportively over his forehead, as a kind father would do it with a sick child.
‘Lift your head, Arok,’ said a youngish man’s voice.
Arok thought this must be one of his men. Impertinent – and odd. Usually they kept well clear of him at such moments, not to humiliate him further.
‘The trick of it, you see,’ said the unknown man, ‘is to breathe with the sea. Some do the opposite in storm too, to quiet the gale. That’s not so easy.’
Too far gone to resist, Arok said dubiously, ‘Breathe with it—’
‘Look there. The wave rises. Breathe in. Yes, that’s it. Well done. Now, watch as it folds over, and breathe out in company. It’s that you help the sea then. Do you understand? You breathe as it breathes, and make it an ally. In turn—’
‘I don’t feel sick,’ said Arok. ‘By the hand of God, where’s it gone?’
‘Breathe now,’ continued the kind and only slightly amused voice. ‘Soon you’ll keep pace without thinking.’
Arok felt his world hurrying back. His blood began to run normally. Presently he was ravenous.
He turned to discover who had been so intelligent – and the deck behind him was empty under the great billows of sails and sky.
Arok began to hear the tales then. He heard how the lions, restless in the hold and unruly when let on deck, had grown calmer. He heard how a baby crawling towards some unsuitable station of the ship was picked up and carried to his mother. She had thanked the man. She was the only one sure she had seen him.
‘He was a noble, so I thought. And I thought, but that can’t be right, all the noble Holas are standing with Arok there.’
Others said he was, though quite young – about thirty years – white-haired as the Jafn often were. Well built and worth looking at too, the woman who saw him said.
Arok, now hale and in charge, went to see the wise-women in their belowdecks bothy.
‘Some say it’s a ghost, ladies.’
They conferred.
‘Not quite that,’ said the oldest one.
‘Nor quite alive. Alive once,’ said the other elderly one.
‘Surely then a ghost. As I said.’
‘Can you feel the hand of a ghost on your head? Does a ghost pick up a baby and carry it, or groom lions?’
‘We’ll ask. In our fashion,’ said the youngest, who was fifty years if she was a day. ‘Get along with you, Arok.’
He sent them a present of beer and dried figs from the stores. But they did not produce an answer.
Islands showed themselves far off. They had met no reivers, no shipping of any sort. Sometimes fish filled the water thick as vegetables in a stew, at others they could make out no living thing other than themselves.
Before they reached the Vormland, Arok knew they would need to plan what must be done. There were too few of them to plunge in and seize Dayadin, even once they knew his whereabouts. But there would be unpopulated areas where they might enter, moving then by stealth against whatever dirty village of the Vormland had him.
One evening, as the stars were splashing their snow over the sky and the ship was at anchor, only a watch alert for it was a sleep nocturnal of four hours, the fisherman with the black son Fenzi walked up to Arok, the boy at his side.
‘He has something he wants to tell you, Chaiord.’
‘Do you?’ Arok looked down at Fenzi, uneasy with hurt bafflement, almost envy, and curbing himself from such degrading emotions.
‘The ghost-man on the ship is a Chaiord too, but dead,’ said the boy without preface.
‘Yes?’ asked Arok, agog. ‘How do you know?’
‘He spoke to me. He said so.’
‘You could see him?’
‘Clear as you, sir.’
‘What does he want on my ship?’
‘He said he’d tell you, if you were willing to listen, one king to another.’
‘What—’ Arok paused. ‘What was – is his name?’
Fenzi beamed, pleased to aid.
‘Athluan of the Jafn Klow. He wed the yellow-flower-haired Rukar woman, Saphay, the lady who gave birth to the Lion-wolf.’
‘Yes. I know whose mother she was.’
‘Athluan said he would be down with the lions now, giving their manes a brush. He said they were old lions, and should be made a fuss of. But if you were to go down, he and you could talk a little.’
Arok pulled himself together. He thanked the sunny child and the perturbed father, and went over to where Nirri slept in their exclusive hut below the prowmost spar.
‘I regret waking you.’
She sa
t up. ‘Is something amiss?’
‘Perhaps. Or not. Do you recall Athluan of the Klow?’ She nodded. ‘His undead spirit is aboard the vessel.’
Nirri made a small ritual sign, but this action seemed practical rather than fearful.
‘What does he want?’
‘To talk to me. To discuss the grooming of the chariot-lions it sounds like.’ Nirri burst out laughing. Arok too, taking himself by surprise. ‘He was guardian,’ said Arok, ‘to him – or would have been, but Rothger killed Athluan, and that began the feud that began the war—’
‘Go down and see,’ said Nirri.
Arok went.
The belowdecks were dim-dark and smelled of foodstuffs, fish, stale water, fowls and lions.
The lion shelter was in a large fenced enclosure and here they generally prowled, mourning their imprisonment. Only feeding times or excursions above interested them. Arok’s own favourites were gone – wiped out like the rest at Ru Karismi. But these tough old beasts were worthy of honour and he could not, he thought, have killed them only to save them the voyage.
Coming into the enclosure he sensed a difference, and then even in the limited light he saw it. They had been smoothed, their claws well trimmed and the rings adjusted. Their manes were recently braided and full of beads and tiny nuggets of gold. Someone had been feeding them dainties too. Someone still was.
It was curious how Arok arrived at witnessing the ghost. There had, he thought, been nothing visible, but then the more he noticed about the lions the more he became aware of a figure just there – or there. The final view was precise. A white-haired man stood between three of the cats, placing slivers of what appeared to be deer-meat into their jaws. On his shoulder perched a striped hawk. The bird flared its wings and let out a thin screech and Arok jumped half a foot.
‘Greetings in peace. A fine night.’
Arok was transfixed. The Klow too had been wiped off the face of the earth by Lionwolf in person, which was of course the proper resolution of his feud with them.