by James Enge
“All I know is that I hate Kaen,” Morlock admitted. “My feet bleed whenever I think about that coastline.”
“Is that metaphor some charming Northerner slang with which I am unfamiliar?”
Morlock sat down on the deck and pulled off the shoe and footpads from his right foot. He solemnly held it up for her inspection. “From my last trip along the Kaenish coast,” he explained gruffly, since she seemed to be equal parts amused and bemused.
“I don’t exactly— Are those scars?” she asked, interrupting herself and pointing at the sole of his foot.
“From the rocks on the shore.”
“Hm. I like a rocky coast myself. But the rocks there must be like blades!”
Morlock grunted and put his footgear back on.
“The people are almost equally hospitable,” Deor said impishly. “You should ask him how he got the scar on his neck.”
Morlock was moments away from strangling his harven-kin and closest friend when Aloê gave the dwarf a golden glance and said casually, “He mentioned it to me on another occasion.” If Morlock was not misreading her, she understood that Deor was teasing him and declined to be a part of it.
“Gleh.” Deor seemed disconcerted. “All right. Maybe I’m putting too much wear on you both. My apologies.”
Morlock kicked him companionably and sat back against the deckhouse, and the three remained in silence for a while.
They came at last to Sandport on the southeast coast of the Wardlands. Now the boat was riding down the Long Canal that ran alongside the blue-gray Grartan Mountains. At notch in their southern foothills lay Sandport, a sleepy town on a silt-filled, rock-rimmed harbor.
There the ship awaited: Flayer, a galley with three ranks of oars. The crew was already assembled: it turned out that Aloê had already been down to tend to the ship a number of times.
Also awaiting were two Guardians in red cloaks: bitter white Noreê and tall fair-haired Jordel.
“You probably thought you’d seen the last of me,” Jordel started saying, shouting across the water at Aloê before the boat had tied up at the riverside dock, “and I hope you’re not seeing the last of me now. I had a bad dream last night, so I thought I’d come down to see you off. You, too, Morlock, of course.”
“I want to hear all about your dreams, Jordel,” Aloê called back, as the boatmen snickered, “but why don’t you wait until we’re all on solid ground?”
“That’s just it. I—”
“Wait!”
Jordel waited, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. Noreê, standing next to him, was still as a stone.
Once the boat was alongside the dock, Aloê leapt lightly off the boat down beside the two waiting Guardians. Morlock followed her, less gracefully but with even more enthusiasm. Deor waited until the boatmen threw down the walkbridge, but he watched and listened to the Guardians’ conversation with open amusement.
“So I had this dream—”
“Do you really want to talk about this here and now, Jordel?” Aloê said.
“Why not? We’re under the Guard. There can’t be agents of the Two Powers listening. So I had this dream about you—”
“Is this going to be excessively intimate or personal, Jordel? We don’t want to shock the stevedores.”
“I had this dream and I’m not the only one. You were in a prison without walls. The Two Powers had changed you into sand of different colors, and they were sifting it into different piles with a sieve made of mist.”
“Oh.” Aloê became serious. “That sounds bad. Others had this dream?”
“Another friend of yours saw you being dissected by a knife with two blades. Different dream; same omen. That’s what Illion says. And Illion himself—”
Morlock interrupted, speaking to Noreê: “Have you collated these dreams?”
She replied without looking at him. “There has not been time. And only one has been caught in a dream glass.”
“Would you suggest that we delay our departure until you have time to collate the dreams and meditate on them?”
“No. We can always send a message after you if it seems needful.”
Morlock grunted and walked away, just as Deor joined the group. The dwarf looked at them, looked at his harven-kinsman, and then followed him away, calling out, “Wait a moment, Morlock. Wait a moment. Canyon keep you, slow down!”
Jordel looked after them, an unusually solemn expression in his hazel eyes. “I’m afraid that fellow thinks I dislike him. It’s too bad, really.”
“Why would he think that, Jordel?” Aloê wondered.
“Well, I sort of told him I couldn’t stand him, once. But that was before I really knew him. You have to admit he’s not easy to know.”
“Do you know him now, Jordel?”
“No, but now I know that I don’t, and that—Listen, who cares? It’s you I’m worried about. Noreê seems to disagree, but I don’t think you should go on this mission.”
“I don’t disagree,” said Noreê, surprising Jordel very much (to judge from the height he jumped).
“You just said we shouldn’t delay sailing,” Aloê pointed out.
“But there’s no need for you to sail with the ship,” Noreê replied.
“I’m not in the business of avoiding danger.”
“If there is need to face it. There is no such need here. You have value to the Graith, to the Wardlands. The danger seems to fall on you specifically.”
“Then, if I don’t go, the danger may fall on someone else. Specifically.”
“You’re not doing a good job of selling this,” Jordel said to Noreê anxiously. “Can’t you just shut up and look foreboding while I talk?”
“It doesn’t matter what either of you say,” Aloê replied. “Jordel. I’m glad you’re worrying about me, but I’m sorry to be a worry to you. I gave my word and I’m going.”
“I hoped to change your mind,” Noreê said, “but I didn’t expect to. Good luck to you, Vocate. Come and see me when you return.”
“Maybe we should go along?” Jordel suggested.
“Four vocates on shipboard with a crew of thains?” Aloê said, with real dismay. “No. I’ll sail with Morlock, because he won’t try to share command. Apparently he doesn’t like sea travel.”
“Ha ha ha. You’ll find out.”
“But I won’t have any doubt about who’s in charge at sea. It’s not safe, Jordel. There isn’t time for debate in the middle of a storm.”
“You’re right, of course. So I’m back to asking you not to go at all.”
Noreê threw up her hands and walked away.
“Finally,” Jordel muttered. “I wondered if I was going to have to talk all day to drive her off. Sometimes I think—”
“Did you want to say something to me in private, Jordel?”
“Give you something.” He handed her a woolen cylinder. “Message sock. Only me and Illion can use it from this end; only you can use it from that end.”
She deftly tucked the sock into her wallet and said, “Thanks. Why?”
“You might need it. And there’s something weird going on. Maybe we can see all of the elephant if we look at it from different angles.”
“What is an elephant?”
“Legendary beast.”
“I thought that was you, J.” She hugged him good-bye and ran off to catch her ship.
Morlock was already on board, having said farewell to his harven-kin. His pale face was paler than ever, and covered with a slight sheen of sweat.
“Don’t mind it, Vocate,” she said, pounding him companionably on his lower shoulder. “The ship does bounce around a bit at anchor, but she’ll glide along like a seabird once we get under way.”
His wretched deep-sunk eyes glared a little, but she didn’t let it bother her. Seasick people tended to be touchy, she knew (although she wasn’t sure why, never having been in the state herself).
“Thain Koijal,” she called out to her second. “Are the oar-thains in place?” She cou
ld she they were.
“In place and ready to row, Vocate,” Koijal replied.
“Cast off. Port-siders push off from the dock. Starboard-siders, five strokes in reverse. Get us out of here, Thain. I want a fish caught in the middle of the Narrow Sea for my supper.”
“I hear you, Vocate,” Koijal said formally, and gave his orders to his thirds-in-command at the sides.
Aloê glanced at Morlock; she assumed she would find him stealing a last look at dry land. Instead he was eying the maneuvers of the oar-thains.
It was something to see: the long white oars swinging in unison through the air, dipping as one into the green-blue water and out the other side, each oar leaving a trail of foam behind, scarring the dark shining surface. Not just once but time after time—a bit like a seabird, perhaps, but really like nothing else. As a maker, Morlock was no doubt impressed.
“Just wait,” she said. “We’ll put up the sail in a bit: we can usually catch a breeze off the Grartans. That’ll be something to see.”
“Inefficient,” he replied curtly.
The truth dawned on her. That sour expression wasn’t just from an unhappy belly. He was seeing the same thing she saw, but he didn’t like it.
“Are you saying the ship is badly designed?” she asked. But what she meant was: Are you saying my ship is badly designed?
“Half the crew,” Morlock said. “Put them to work on an impulse wheel. Go faster. Less weight, less provisions.”
“And use mechanisms to drive the oars? That would waste the crew’s energy, Morlock. These things have been discussed before—”
She was going to favor him with a brief course in ship design when he interrupted her. “No oars. Take the oar blades. Put them on a wheel. Put the wheel on the outside of your ship, under the water. The impulses drive the wheel of oar blades. You could have more than one—steer that way, more stable than a single propeller.”
“Propeller?”
“A wheel with little oar blades on it.” He sketched it briefly in the air.
“Brilliant!” she said. “I thought of something like that once. But, I, I guess I forgot it when a monster bonked me on the head this one time.”
As soon as she said this she was worried that it sounded like boasting—not a probable story, on its face.
But he didn’t seem skeptical, just nodded acceptingly and said nothing.
Which was for the best: she didn’t want to hear anything more just now. What he’d said already was sweeping through her like a wildfire on the prairie. Propellers to drive the ships. No sails needed—or maybe wind power could add to muscle power, giving strength to the impulse wheel. Ships could be redesigned. Ship routes could be redrawn. Would propellers work in the Sea of Worlds? What if . . . ?
She looked up and saw a day bristling with undreamed-of possibilities, a world that was utterly changed, that could never be the same.
The man who had changed it was bent over the taffrail, spattering the side of the ship with his vomit, to the amusement and disgust of the thains nearby.
Aloê sighed. This would be a strange trip. That much was clear.
NOTE
1. Blindly Death takes hold of the timid and the brave;
vermin devour the evil and good alike;
maker and miner sleep in the same silence;
Dragon and Dragonkiller fall under the same fell.
There is one darkness that ends all dreaming,
one light in which all living will awake.
Those-Who-Watch beyond death wait for the world’s waking;
Creator, Keeper, King stand at every milestone.
Aloê was feverishly sketching out designs for propeller-driven craft in the main cabin of Flayer. She didn’t want to discuss them with Morlock—not yet, not until they were ready for his cold judgemental eye. Morlock was in fact near at hand, but unlikely to notice her work. He was wrapped up in a hammock, with a bandage over his eyes, cotton stuffed in his ears, and he was snoring slightly. Seasickness had kept him from sleeping well, but he was sleeping now and seemed likely to sleep all day, which was fine with her. The less they interacted, the better she liked him.
She had a number of sketches complete, from the wildly unlikely to the fairly conservative. But there was one in the middle range that she thought even above Morlock’s criticism, and she was using it as a basis to plan out a whole new ship. She called it the New Flayer, as a sort of apology to her current command, the ship Morlock had taught her to despise.
She had been neglecting her duties a bit, as captain. She could not look at Flayer the same way anymore. The trireme was still a beautiful thing, with a wonderfully trained crew, but it was a thing of the past for her now, nothing so real as the ships that sailed without sails in her dreams. She let her thain-lieutenant do most of the ship-running, lest her attitude somehow become known to the crew. But she worked with her ears alert for anything that might be happening on deck, so she caught the first shout of, “Smoke in the sky! East and north, east and north, halfway to zenith! Smoke in the sky!”
It was the most dreaded cry in a shipmaster’s lexicon: a dragon sighting. Dragons preyed heavily on the commerce of the world, especially attacking cargo ships in shallow waters, where they could destroy a ship and hope to fish the remains of its valuables out of the pale bitter water along the coast. And Flayer was just passing through the famously shallow seas off the southern coast of Kaen, near the Tirganate of Tenagöros.
She should have been expecting this, Aloê realized, as she ran out to the main deck between the upper rank of oar-thains. That told her what face to present: this was a danger, but not a crisis—definitely not a shock. She must look as if she had been expecting this.
She stepped out into a muggy, cloud-covered day whose very silence spoke of thunder. One cool breeze would release the rain in those heavy clouds. It had taken a keen eye to spot the trail of the dragon’s smoke in that sullen sky; she made mental note to commend the watch-thain who had sung out—Ekylen, she thought.
Aware of all the anxious eyes on her, Aloê glanced idly at the darker smear of smoke in the dead-gray sky, remarked casually to Koijal, “Doesn’t seem to be headed for us. Still: a good chance for some drill. Have the offcrew of the upper rank deploy the fire-nets. Have the offcrew of the middle rank stand by the missile weapons and prepare to engage if the dragon approaches. Have the offcrew of the lower rank stand by for firefighting. Maintain course and speed.”
“Yes, Vocate,” said Koijal gratefully, and began barking orders to his under-thains. She wondered if her title as dragonkiller was helping calm his nerves. She wished it would have the same effect on hers, but hypocrisy itself gave a certain comfort. She knew what she should pretend to feel, and that gave her something to do.
She watched the dragon’s flight at intervals between giving orders to Koijal and encouragement to the underthains actually doing the work. She tried to be especially encouraging to the thains constructing a ballista on the platform above the main walkway. She feared it would do little good against the dragon if it attacked, but it was the only weapon they had other than handheld spears. And if it came to that, many of her underthains would die. So she cheered them on as heartily as they could.
The dragon grew nearer, but not much nearer. It soon proved that the predator was circling them in the sky, well out of the range of their ballista or any other weapon. The dragon had spotted them, was interested in them, but was waiting for something. What? The rest of his guile? Some sign of wealth onboard? What did a dragon think worth waiting for?
“Take us south of here, Koijal,” she said calmly to her second in command. “I want deep water under our keel.”
“Vocate, I obey,” said Koijal—so readily, that Aloê suspected he had been itching to give the order himself. Maybe she should tell him to make suggestions . . . but a command deck should not be like a Station of the Graith, with everyone weighing in on the debate. She smiled quietly at her second and nodded.
The d
ragon had completed a second long smoky circle in the hot sullen sky when Morlock emerged from the cabin, a plug of cotton still adorning one ear, his hair wildly disordered from sleep, and muttered, “Hurs krakna!”
“Ath, rokhlan!” Aloê replied, as if she knew what he meant, and to remind her crew that there were two dragonkillers aboard. (Everybody knew that much Dwarvish these days.) “We have a visitor, you see.”
It was one of Morlock’s few admirable traits as a conversationalist that he never said anything when he had nothing to say. He watched the dragon circle in the sky for a time. Then he eyed the ship’s feeble protections: the nets latent with fire-quell magic, the ballista bolted to the platform over the main walkway, the long steel spears in the trembling hands of the deck-crew.
“Vocate Aloê, a word,” he said presently.
“Speak it.”
“A word in private.”
“Koijal, join me,” she said, glaring defiantly at this green-faced landsman with cotton absurdly sprouting from his ear.
The three Guardians stepped back into the cabin.
“Things could not be worse,” Morlock began.
Koijal exploded in a fury that surely masked a measure of fear. “You lie like a cowardly landgrubber! We have our defenses! We have our fire-nets and our spear-thrower, if the beast chooses to approach! There is no guile, only a single dragon! Soon we will be in deep water, where the dragon does not dare attack us!”
“A dragon’s tail could smash this ship to splinters,” Morlock said drily. “What use your fire-quell magic then? Dragons don’t fear water. And your spear-thrower might be useful if the target were nailed to some convenient quarter of the sky. Since everything you say is untrue, I ask you not to waste our time. I will have a word with your senior, my colleague. Be silent while we speak.”
Koijal was silent, largely because he was speechless with fury, and Aloê said quickly, “What’s your thought, Morlock?”
“I will go out in a small boat and challenge the dragon to a single combat.”
The plug of cotton was still protruding raggedly from his left ear as he spoke. His hair was sticking out like that of a strawman made to scare crows. His eyes stared out from dark holes in the greenish pasty surface of his face.