And they did—only a few of them at first, but then more and more as their deep bellow drowned out the sirens’ honeyed voices and released other hes from their enchantment. Shouting like mad things, we rushed at the sirens, and they broke and fled before us. Now they did not sing seductively, but squalled out their dismay. And well they might have, for we trod more than one under our hooves, and suffered but a few bites and scratches in the unequal battle.
“Back to the ship,” I said then. “We have done what we came to do, and more besides. The faster we get away now, the better.”
Those sirens had nerve. They could not close with us, but they tried to sing us back to them as we rowed away. But we kept on shouting, and so their songs went for naught. We pulled out to sea, until we were far enough from land to hear them no more.
“That was neatly done, Cheiron,” Oreus said, as if praise from him were what I most sought in life.
Well, this once maybe he was not so far wrong. “I thank you,” I said, and let out the long, weary sigh I had held in for too long. “I wonder what other things we shall have to do neatly between here and the Tin Isle—and when we have got there, and on the way home.”
We were not tested again until we left the Inner Sea and came out upon the heaving bosom of Ocean the Great. Heave that bosom did. Anyone who has sailed on the Inner Sea will have known storms. He will have known them, yes, but as interludes between longer stretches of calm weather and good sailing. On the Ocean, this business is reversed. Calms there are, but the waters more often toss and turn like a restless sleeper. Sail too close to land and you will be cast up onto it, as would never happen in the calmer seas our ships usually frequent.
The day after we began our sail upon Ocean the Great, we beached ourselves at sunset, as we almost always did at nightfall on the Inner Sea. When the sun god drove his chariot into the water, I wondered how he hoped to return come morning, for Ocean seemed to stretch on to westward forever, with no land to be seen out to the edge of the world. I hoped we would not sail out far enough to fall off that edge, which had to be there somewhere.
But for our sentries, we slept after supping, for the work had been hard—harder than usual, on those rough waters. And the sentries, of course, faced inland, guarding us against whatever strange folk dwelt in that unknown land. They did not think to look in the other direction, but when we awoke someone had stolen the sea.
I stared in consternation at the waters of Ocean the Great, which lay some cubits below the level at which we had beached the Chalcippus. I wondered if a mad god had tried to drink the seabed dry through a great rhyton and had come closer than he knew to success.
We tried pushing the ship back into the sea, but to no avail: she was stuck fast. I stood there, wondering what to do. What could we do? Nothing. I knew it all too well.
As the sun rose higher in the east, though, the sea gradually returned, until we were able to float the Horse of Bronze and sail away as if nothing had happened. It seemed nothing had—except to my bowels, when I imagined us trapped forever on that unknown shore. Little by little, we learned Ocean the Great had a habit of advancing and withdrawing along the edge of the land, a habit the Inner Sea fortunately fails to share. Ocean is Ocean. He does as he pleases.
Here we did not go out of sight of land, not at all. Who could guess what might happen to us if we did? Better not to find out. We crawled along the coast, which ran, generally speaking, north and east. Were we the first centaurs to see those lands, to sail those waters? I cannot prove it, but I believe we were.
We did not see other ships. Even on the Inner Sea, ships are scarce. Here on the unstable waters of Ocean the Great, they are scarcer still. And Ocean’s waters proved unstable in another way as well. The farther north we sailed, the cooler and grayer they grew—and also the wilder. Had we not built well, the Horse of Bronze would have broken her back, leaving us nothing but strange bones to be cast up on an alien shore. But the ship endured, and so did we.
We had thought to travel from island to island on our way to the Tin Isle. But islands proved few and far between on the Ocean. We did sail past one, not long before coming to the Tin Isle, from which small cattle whose roan coats were half hidden by strange tunics—I know no better word—stared out at us with large, brown, incurious eyes.
Some of the sailors, hungry for meat, wanted to put ashore there and slaughter them. I told them no. “We go on,” I said. “They may be sacred to a god—those garments they wear argue for it. Remember the Cattle of the Sun? Look what disaster would befall anyone who dared raise a hand against them. And these may not be cattle at all; they may be folk in the shape of cattle. Who can say for certain, in these strange lands? But that is another reason they might be clothed. Better we leave them alone.”
And so we sailed on, and entered the sleeve of water separating the Tin Isle from the mainland. That was the roughest travel we had had yet. More than a few of us clung to the rail, puking till we wished we were dead. Had the day not been bright and clear, showing us the shape of the Tin Isle blue in the distance, we might have had to turn back, despairing of making headway against such seas. But we persevered, and eventually made landfall.
Oreus said, “Like as not, Ocean will steal the ship when our backs are turned. What would we do then, Cheiron?”
“Build another,” I answered. “Or would you rather live in this gods-forsaken place the rest of your days?”
Oreus shivered and shook his head. I did not know, not then, how close I came to being right.
Something was badly amiss in the Tin Isle. That I realized not long after we landed there and made our way inland. The Isle proved a bigger place than I had thought when setting out. Simply landing on the coast did not necessarily put us close to the mines from which the vital tin came.
The countryside was lovely, though very different from that around the Inner Sea. Even the sky was strange, ever full of fogs and mists and drizzles. When the sun did appear, it could not bring out more than a watery blue in the dome of heaven. The sun I am used to will strike a centaur dead if he stays out in it too long. It will burn his hide, or the parts of it that are not hairy. Not so on those distant shores. I do not know why the power of the sun god is so attenuated thereabouts, but I know that it is.
Because of the fogs and mists and the endless drizzle, the landscape seemed unnaturally—indeed, almost supernaturally—green. Grass and ferns and shrubs and trees grew in such profusion as I have never seen in all my days. Not even after the wettest winter will our homeland look so marvelously lush. High summer being so cool in those parts, however, I did wonder what winter might be like.
Hard winters or no, though, it was splendid country. A he could break the ground with his hoof and something would grow there. But no one and nothing appeared to have broken the ground any time lately. That was the puzzlement: the land might as well have been empty, and it should not have been.
I knew the names of the folk said to dwell in those parts: piskies and spriggans and especially nuggies, who were said to dig metal from the ground. Those names had come to the Inner Sea along with the hide-wrapped pigs of tin that gave this land its fame there. What manner of folk these might be, though, I could not have said—nor, I believe, could anyone from my part of the world. I had looked forward to finding out. That would have been a tale to tell for many long years to come.
It would have been—but the folk did not come forth. I began to wonder if they could come forth, or if some dreadful fate had overwhelmed them. But even if they had been conquered and destroyed, whatever folk had defeated them should have been in evidence. No one was.
“We should have brought shes with us and settled here,” Nessus said one day. “We’d have the land to ourselves.”
“Would we?” I looked about. “It does seem so, I grant you, but something tells me we would get little joy from it.”
Oreus looked about, too, more in bewilderment than anything else. Then he said one of the few things I have ever h
eard him say with which I could not disagree, either then or later: “If the folk are gone out of the land, no wonder the tin’s stopped coming down to the Inner Sea.”
“No wonder at all,” I said. “Now, though, we have another question.” Confusion flowed across his face until I posed it: “Why have the folk gone from this land?”
“Sickness?” Nessus suggested. I let the word lie there, not caring to pick it up. It struck me as unlikely, in any case. Most folk are of sturdy constitution. We die, but we do not die easily. I had trouble imagining a sickness that could empty a whole countryside.
Then Oreus said his second sensible thing in a row. Truly this was a remarkable day. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe their gods grew angry at them, or tired of them.”
A cool breeze blew down from the north. I remember that very well. And I remember wondering whether it was but a breeze, or whether it was the breath of some god either angry or tired. “If that be so,” I said, “if that be so, then we will not take tin back to the Inner Sea, and so I shall hope it is not so.”
“What if it is?” Nessus asked nervously, and I realized I was not the only one wondering if I felt a god’s breath.
I thought for a moment. With that breeze blowing, thought did not come easily, and the moment stretched longer than I wished it would have. At last, I said, “In that case, my friend, we will do well enough to go home ourselves, don’t you think?”
“Do our gods see us when we are in this far country?” Oreus asked.
I did not know the answer to that, not with certainty. But I pointed up to the sun, which, fortunately, the clouds and mist did not altogether obscure at that moment. “He shines here, too,” I replied. “Do you not think he will watch over us as he does there?”
That should have steadied him. But such was the empty silence of that countryside that he answered only, “I hope so,” in tones suggesting that, while he might hope, he did not believe.
Two days—or rather, two nights—later, a nuggy came into our camp. I would not have known him from a piskie or a spriggan, but a nuggy he declared himself to be. I had sentries out around our fires, but he appeared in our midst without their being any the wiser. I believe he tunneled up from under the ground.
He looked like one who had seen much hardship in his time. I later learned from him that was the true aspect of nuggies, but he owned he had it more than most. He was ill-favored, a withered, dried-up creature with a face as hard and sharp as an outcropping of flint. In other circumstances, his tiny size might have made it hard for me to take him seriously; he was no larger in the head and torso than one of us would have been at two years, and had only little bandy legs below, though his arms were, in proportion to the rest of him, large and considerably muscled.
His name, he said, was Bucca. I understood him with difficulty. We did not speak the same language, he and I, but our two tongues held enough words in common to let us pass meaning back and forth. His rocky face worked with some mixture of strong emotion when he came before me. “Gods be praised!” he said, or something much like that. “Old Bucca’s not left all alone in the dark!” And he began to weep, a terrible thing to see.
“Here, now. Here, now,” I said. I gave him meat and bread. Had we had wine, I would have given him that as well. But for us to carry wine would have been like stags carrying fire with which to roast them once they were slain.
He ate greedily, and without much regard for manners. Though he was so small, he put away a startling amount. Grease shone on his thin lips and his chin when he tossed aside a last bone and said, “I hoped some folk would come when the tin stopped. I prayed some folk would come. But for long and long, no folk came. I drew near to losing hope.” More tears slid down the cliffsides of his cheeks.
“Here now,” I said again, wanting to embrace him yet fearing I would offend if I did. Only when he came over and clung to my foreleg did I take him up in my arms and hold his small chest against my broad one. He was warm and surprisingly hard; his arms, as they embraced me, held even more strength than I would have guessed. At last, when he seemed somewhat eased, I thought I could ask him, “Why did the tin stop?”
He stared at me, our two faces not far apart. Moonlight and astonishment filled his pale eyes. “You know not?” he whispered.
“That is the truth: I know not,” I replied. “That is why I came so far, that is why we all came so far, in the Horse of Bronze—to learn why precious tin comes no more to the Inner Sea.”
“Why?” Bucca said. “I will tell you why. Because most of us are dead, that is why. Because where they are, we cannot live.”
I did not believe all Bucca told me. If I am to speak the whole truth here, I did not want to believe what the nuggy told me. And so, not believing, I told a party of hes to come with me so that we might see for ourselves what truth lay in his words—or rather, as I thought of it, so that we might see he was lying.
“You big things are bold and brave,” Bucca said as we made ready to trot away. “You will have grief of it. I am no bolder or braver than I have to be, and already I have known griefs uncounted.”
“I grieve for your grief,” I told him. “I grieve for your grief, but I think things will go better for us.”
“It could be,” Bucca replied. “Yes, it could be. You big things still believe in yourselves, or so it seems. We nuggies did not, not after a while. And when we did not believe, and when they did not believe . . . we died.”
“How is it that you are left alive, then?” I asked him. This question had burned in my mind since the night when he first appeared amongst us, though I had not had the heart to ask him then. Now, though, it seemed I might need the answer, if answer there was.
But Bucca only shrugged those surprisingly broad shoulders of his. “I think I am too stubborn to know I should be dead.”
That, then, meant nothing to me. I have learned more since than I once knew, however. Even then, I wanted nothing more than to get away from the nuggy. And away we went, rambling east into one of the more glorious mornings the gods ever made.
It was cool. It was always cool on the Tin Isle, except when it was downright cold. A little mist clung to the hillsides. The sun had trouble burning it off. This too is a commonplace of that country. But oh! the greens in that northern clime! Yes, I say it again. Nothing round the Inner Sea can match them, especially not in summertime. And those hills were not stark and jagged, as are the hills we know, but smooth and round, some of them, as a she’s breast. The plains are broad, and roll gently. Their soil puts to shame what goes by that name in our land. Yet it grew no wheat or barley, only grass. Indeed, this might have been a countryside forever without folk.
As we trotted east, we left the hills behind us. The plain stretched out ahead, far broader than any in our own homeland. But only a cold, lonely wind sighed across it. “Plague take me if I like this place,” Oreus said.
“We need not like it,” I answered. “We need but cross it.”
Though I might say such things to Oreus, before long the stillness came to oppress me, too. I began to have the feeling about this plain that one might have about a centaurs’ paddock where no one happens to be at a particular time: that the folk are but gone for a moment, and will soon return. About the paddock, one having such a feeling is generally right. About this plain, I thought otherwise.
There I proved mistaken.
I found—the entire band of hes found—I was mistaken some little while before actually realizing as much. We hurried through the tall grass of the plain, making better time than we had before, and did not think to wonder why until Hylaeus looked down and exclaimed in sudden, foolish-sounding surprise: “We are following a trail.”
All of us stopped then, staring in surprise at the ground under our hooves. Hylaeus was quite correct, even if we had not noticed up until that time. The earth was well trodden down, the grass quite sparse, especially compared to its rich lushness elsewhere.
Nessus asked the question uppermost in all our m
inds: “Who made it?”
What he meant was, had the trail survived from the days when folk filled this land—days Bucca recalled with fond nostalgia—or was it new, the product of whatever had driven the nuggies and so many other folk to ruin? One obvious way to find the answer crossed my mind. I asked, “How long has it been since any but ourselves walked this way?”
We studied the ground again. A trail, once formed, may last a very long time; the ground, pounded hard under feet or hooves, will keep that hardness year after year. Grass will not thrive there, not when it can find so many easier places close by to grow. And yet ...
“I do not think this trail is ancient,” Hylaeus said. “It shows too much wear to make that likely.”
“So it also seems to me,” I said, and waiting, hoping someone—anyone—would contradict me. No one did. I had to go on, then: “This means we may soon learn how much of the truth Bucca was telling.”
“It means we had better watch out,” Nessus said, and who could tell him he was wrong, either?
But for the trail, though, the land continued to seem empty of anything larger than jackdaws and rooks. It stretched on for what might have been forever, wide and green and rolling. Strange how the Tin Isle should show a broader horizon than my own home country, which, although part of the mainland, is much divided by bays and mountains and steep valleys.
There were valleys in this country, too, but they were not like the ones I knew at home, some of which are sharp enough at the bottom to cut yourself on if you are not careful. The valleys that shaped this plain were low and gently sloping. The rivers in them ran in the summertime, when many of the streams in my part of the world go dry.
Atlantis and Other Places Page 25