City of Ice

by Laurence Yep

  As Prince Tarkhun had warned them when they had first entered the town, dragons were a rarity. As they turned onto a broad, crowded avenue, a dwarf stopped scraping the barnacles from a hull to stare and all along the street humans, trolls, and the city’s other inhabitants gaped.

  A frost giant, his hair and beard pale and pointed as icicles, was so stunned that he just stopped in the middle of the road with a barrel on either shoulder. “Is there a parade?”

  “Yes, a short one.” With the suppleness of an eel, Bayang slithered around the living roadblock, ducked under the sign hanging in front of a restaurant, and slogged on, dodging around other obstacles.

  “The Sogdians must not have put a price on our heads yet,” Kles observed. “Or someone would be taking potshots at us.”

  “Just as a matter of discussion,” Koko speculated, “how much do you think we’re worth?”

  “The Lady Scirye is priceless.” Kles sniffed. “You, on the other hand—well, I’d pay them to take you off my paws.”

  “Now, now, Kles,” Scirye scolded mildly. She’d developed a soft spot for Koko. “A talented badger like you is worth his weight in gold.”

  “So my mama always said,” Koko said smugly.

  Bayang twisted to her left down a side street that led to the great gates of the caravanserai.

  Without Roxanna by their side, the walls looked as high and forbidding as a prison’s, and Bayang slowed. Suddenly dozens of rifles pointed at them from through the wall’s slits and the huge gates began to swing open.

  Scirye pressed an arm around Kles. “They’re already expecting us.”

  “A lookout must have seen Bayang flying over the harbor,” Kles reasoned.

  Lady Miunai strode out with a bandolier strapped across her body and a rifle that looked large enough to put a hole even in a dragon. “Where is my daughter? Why didn’t she come back with you?”

  Over the years, Scirye had seen her mother calm the ruffled feathers of countless foreign diplomats. Scirye was not sure she could do the same, but she was determined to try.

  She slid off Bayang. It was a small gesture that might help ease Lady Miunai’s state of mind, since she wouldn’t have to tilt her head back to see Scirye’s face.

  “She’s staying with Upach, who was shot by Roland,” Scirye explained quickly. “They’re both safe with Uncle Resak.”

  Lady Miunai started at the third name, then glanced around the street and motioned them into the caravanserai. “I think you’d better come inside so we can talk,” she said, shouldering her weapon.

  “Is that a good idea?” Koko muttered.

  “You can stay out here and get shot if one of the chakar gets trigger-happy,” Bayang said as she trotted after Scirye and Lady Miunai.

  “Naw, I’m tired of being in a shooting gallery,” Koko said, and pressed himself flat against the dragon’s back to make himself a smaller target.

  After they had crossed the courtyard and entered one of the warehouses, Lady Miunai ordered all the workers to leave. “And close the doors behind you.”

  It took a few minutes for them to exit through the several doors. Each seemed to shut with the ominous thud of an executioner’s axe.

  Finally, except for the fire imps on the walls, they were alone in the cavernous room. Lady Miunai spoke in a low voice, her breath frosting the air in the vast, cold room: “So you survived the phantoms?”

  “As I think you knew we would,” Scirye said.

  Lady Miunai folded her hands in front of her. “But we couldn’t be sure.”

  Scirye told her about their encounter with Uncle Resak and the subsequent fight within his palace and their own adventure in returning to Nova Hafnia. “Uncle realizes that his secret is out, so he wants your husband and Roxanna to act as his go-betweens with the humans.”

  “It was only a matter of time before the truth came out,” Lady Miunai observed. “His secret was safe enough when hardly anyone lived up here, but every year brings more people, more ships, and more airplanes.” Her fingers tapped the stock of her rifle as she considered the next step. “I’ll send word to my husband so he can head to Uncle’s.”

  “Upach will need Dr. Goldemar,” Leech said, and explained about Upach’s situation.

  Lady Miunai nodded. “I’ve a man who has handled the supply route to Uncle. He can take the doctor. But what will you do now?”

  “We’ll head to the Kushan Empire,” Bayang said.

  Kles gave his purring chirp at the prospect of going home, but it only made Scirye uneasy. She had not seen the empire since she was a small child, and most of the Kushans she had met since then had never made her feel welcome. They usually looked down at her because she did not act like a proper Kushan girl—which made her decidedly inferior. In the small, self-contained world within the embassies that had been bad enough, but the Kushans there had never numbered more than a few hundred. There would be millions of them in the empire, and all of them would wear the same disapproving expression.

  Still, she had already done a lot of things she didn’t think she could, so she would treat this just like she had any other problem.

  “Ah,” Lady Miunai said, “if you ever need help when you are in the empire, find my husband’s great-aunt, Princess Catisa, and she will give you whatever you wish.”

  If Princess Catisa was anything like her kinswoman, Scirye thought, they wouldn’t have any worries. Lady Miunai was only too happy to supply them with more of the powdered emergency rations—Leech kept Koko’s grumbling to a minimum. She also thoughtfully added a tiny water imp in a portable distillery. She wanted to give them more equipment, but Bayang did not want to overload the straw wing, which was in need of repair.

  However, Lady Miunai was amused when they asked for fireworks. “I think it’ll take more than a flash and a bang to scare Roland.”

  “They’re to summon Naue the wind, who’ll take us into the air so we can catch him,” Scirye explained.

  Lady Miunai shook her head in amazement. “My husband said that meeting you was like wandering into a tale of marvels.”

  “Believe me. It’s not all that wonderful when you’re smack in the middle of it,” Koko mumbled.

  Lady Miunai set her palm upon Scirye’s head in blessing and said in formal Sogdian, “May thou pounce upon thine enemy like the mighty griffin. And may Nana keep thee and thine safe.”

  Scirye answered her humbly in the same formal tongue: “I thank thee, Lady Miunai, for in thy kindness thou hast been like my own mother. Knowest thou that I will.” If I’m alive, she added to herself.

  The lines of worry on Lady Miunai’s face and the sadness in her eyes suggested the opposite of her cheerful words. She obviously shared Scirye’s own concerns.

  That made Scirye think of her own mother. Even though there had been no time to do it, Scirye felt guilty that she hadn’t written or called her. “And will you send a message to my mother that I’m all right and headed to Bactra? Her name is Lady Sudarshane and she’s at the San Francisco Consulate.”

  “Of course. She must be as worried sick about her little chick as I am about Roxanna,” sympathized Lady Miunai. “But that’s what happens when your children become the stuff of wonders.”

  Not satisfied with having re-supplied them, Lady Miunai insisted on escorting them personally. Some of her men went along as porters for her gifts. Others carried the dogsled on their shoulders. The driver, a short, stocky man, was busy handling his dog team. Behind him waddled Dr. Goldemar wearing a derby hat, which he had secured with a long scarf knotted beneath his chin, his medical bag resting on his shoulder.

  They marched out of the caravanserai and eventually down the broad street. The frost giant clapped his huge hands together with childish delight. “I knew there was going to be a parade.” He fell into step behind them, windmilling his hand at the bystanders encouragingly. “Come on; come on. Join in.”

  There was not much in the way of entertainment in a small town in winter, and the news spre
ad like lightning. People poured out of houses and stores so that soon they had a hundred people of all species, dogs, cats, and even a parrot trailing them along the avenue. A man with a concertina wheezed out a jaunty marching tune for everyone to step to.

  Lady Miunai took the friends down a boat-launching ramp that they hadn’t noticed before.

  Bayang skidded a bit on the frozen harbor but recovered nicely to polite applause from the expectant crowd. Then, while the dogsled was assembled and the team harnessed to it, the dragon unfolded the wing again.

  In the meantime, Lady Miunai put herself in charge of the pyrotechnics and oversaw her helpers as they unpacked the rockets, throwing excelsior all over. Several were propped against a now empty crate. The rockets were genuine Chinese ones, for Lady Miunai was determined to give them a grand and glorious send-off.

  An enterprising tavern keeper had come out with a tray full of steaming reindeer sausages. Koko sniffed the air woefully. “If only I had some money,” he hinted.

  “Here, here.” The keeper shuffled forward and pressed the badger to take one, no—two. “Oh, why not? Let’s make it three?”

  As Koko happily munched away, the keeper returned to the crowd shouting that the sausages had been endorsed by the strange wonder beast.

  “Badger,” Koko corrected the tavern keeper, but his mouth was so full of meat, the word came out garbled. Even if Koko had taken the time to swallow before he spoke, the keeper was so mobbed by customers that he wouldn’t have heard anyway.

  When Scirye and her friends had stowed their supplies carefully on the wing so it would balance right, they climbed onto it.

  “Good-bye,” Leech called. “Please thank Roxanna and Upach for us.”

  “I will, and fare thee well,” Lady Miunai said, and gestured to one of her men.

  Lighting a match, he lit the fuses as he walked along, retreating to safety when all of them started to fizz. The fuses were of different lengths so the rockets would go off at different times.

  Whoosh! The first one soared up into the air in a plume of white smoke. A hundred feet above them it burst in a spray of paper scraps and more smoke. Bang! The little star of light spread petals of a shining red chrysanthemum across the sky. And the tingling smell of gunpowder descended thick around them.

  Whoosh! Whoosh! Rockets sped upward and exploded and more flowers blossomed in the field of the night.

  Below, the crowd oohed and aahed at the spectacle.

  Even as more rockets went off, they heard the roar of Naue. “Ho, a garden, a garden!” the wind shouted, as thrilled as the audience below.

  In the air the fireworks’ smoke and light trailed after him in his wake, and on the harbor snow swirled in wispy streamers across the frozen surface.

  “I am Naue, friend of heroes, dancer among flowers,” Naue boasted as he darted in and out of the explosions, twisting the shapes of the fiery blossoms.

  When the last rocket had gone off, Naue yelled, “Now that is how to greet Naue!” He circled far out to the mouth of the harbor and then slanted down toward them. Snow sprayed up in sheets as he sped toward them.

  The wing, edges flapping, lifted into the air and rose swiftly on Naue as the townsfolk clapped and hollered good-bye in a dozen different languages.

  Leech let out a long breath. “And I thought riding in a seaplane was exciting.”

  When Koko thumped his belly, he gave a satisfied burp. “I’d settle for a nice, boring evening reading a telephone book.”

  Below them, the dogs sped over the ice with the doctor tucked into the sled. Scirye hoped they could help Upach.

  Leech poked Scirye’s shoulder. “You okay? You’re sitting so stiff. Don’t worry about Roland. We’ll get him the next time. Just think about going home.”

  “Home,” Kles murmured happily as he snuggled inside Scirye’s coat.

  “Home,” Scirye echoed softly but not with any pleasure. She hadn’t even been thinking about Roland but about all the Kushans waiting to scold her in Bactra—just for the crime of not being what they wanted: a proper Kushan lady.

  Now she couldn’t help wondering uneasily what new surprises Roland had in store for them.

  And then there was the pact with Nanaia. Could she really keep it, and if she did what would be the price?

  Bayang, who was at the control loops, had twisted her long neck around so she could see what was wrong with Scirye. “Think about now and not the future,” Bayang advised the girl. “Otherwise, you’ll get so scared that you’ll be afraid to go on. We’re still alive and that’s the important thing.”

  Bayang was right. The more Scirye thought about Nanaia’s mission, the more terrified she became. There were better people than Scirye for this quest, but for whatever reason it had fallen on her. As Uncle Resak had said, all she could do was follow the path that the goddess had set for her. At least she wasn’t alone. She had friends—more friends than she’d ever had before in her life—and they had managed so far.

  When Naue passed through the clouds, their moisture pattered against the travelers like a light drizzle. They burst out of the cover into a glorious black sky full of stars and a moon that hung like a large round lantern to light their way.

  As she stared up at its face, the moon seemed to smile gently as Nishke would have. Yes, you will, her sister seemed to whisper to her reassuringly the way she had when Scirye was small.

  And her heart soared upward as she flew on into the night.

  Into the promise.

  Into the future.

  Afterword

  Many years ago, I read about an opera troupe that was performing Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel in small Alaskan towns near the Arctic Circle. The children of each town were asked to paint a backdrop of a forest. However, this was in the days before satellite dishes and the Internet, so one group of Inuit children had to imagine what a forest looked like. I’ve always wondered what they came up with. If they’d had gold and jewels instead of poster paints, perhaps they would have created a tree like Uncle Resak’s.

  I should also say a word about the general background of the novel. While everyone knows about the gold deposits in Canada, there are also diamond mines in the Far North. And centuries ago the Danish began to explore the Arctic territories. Jens Munck was a real explorer who died in 1628 trying to find the Northwest Passage for the ambitious King Christian of Denmark. The Thirty Years War, which began in 1618, drew his attentions and finances elsewhere, or perhaps the Danes would have claimed northern Canada just as they control Greenland to this day.

  While this is an alternate history, I want to emphasize that the Sogdians are not an imaginary people. The beginnings of their city Afrasiab, which became known as Samarkand later, date back to the seventh century B.C. Clever and energetic, the Sogdians dominated the Silk Road for centuries, so that their tongue became the language everyone used for business transactions. Led by merchant princes, they established a network of trading posts that stretched all across Asia. And their music and dance became all the rage in medieval China, and these are often depicted in the art of the T’ang dynasty. Some of them even rose to high positions in the Chinese government, and one of them, An Lu-shan, nearly toppled the government when he raised a rebellion. As for the Arctic itself, I am fortunate to have a wife, Joanne Ryder, who not only took me up to the Arctic to see the Aurora Borealis firsthand but also has written several books about the environment and the creatures who live up there. The Wastes themselves are an exaggeration of the pressure ridges that were shown in a BBC Two program, Top Gear: Polar Special, which a friend kindly provided me. The narwhals are in the National Geographic special Masters of the Arctic Ice.

  These are some of the sources consulted for this book:

  Adams, Douglas Q. A Dictionary of Tocharian B. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

  Asarpay, G. “Nana, the Sumero-Akkadian Goddess of Transoxiana.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 96, no. 4 (October–December 1976): 536–542.

  Bayliss, C
lara Kern. A Treasury of Eskimo Tales. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1922.

  Cribb, Joe, and Georgina Herrmann, eds. After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

  Ghose, Madhuvanti. “Nana: The ‘Original’ Goddess on Lion.” Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology 1 (2006): 97–112.

  Juliano, Annette L., Judith A. Lerner, and Michael Alram. Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China. New York: Abrams, 2001.

  Masters of the Arctic Ice. DVD. National Geographic, 2007.

  Nuttall, Mark, and Terry Gallaghan, eds., The Arctic: Environment, People, Policy. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000.

  Rasmussen, Knud. Eskimo Folktales, trans. W. Worster. London: Gyldendal, 1921.

  Rink, Dr. Henry. Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons, 1875.

  Rosenfeld, John M. The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

  Sims-Williams, Nicholas. Bactrian Letters II. London: Nour Foundation with the cooperation of Azimuth Editions, 2007.

  Vaissière, Étienne de la. Sogdian Traders: A History, trans. James Ward. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

  Read on for a sneak peek at

  City of Death,

  Book 3

  in the City Trilogy

  “How fast do storms come in here?” Bayang the dragon asked. She was sitting at the apex, steering the giant triangular wing that had been magically woven from straw.

  Dark gray clouds boiled rapidly through the sky toward them. A mile across and two miles long, the misty wave cast shadows that plunged the mountains beneath them into an ominous twilight.

  The great wind, Naue, began to rise as he reassured them in his booming voice, “Ho, fear not, lumplings. No little drizzle can stop Naue the magnificent. He will just carry you above it.”

  Koko the badger rolled his eyes. “Or,” he muttered, “you can talk it to death.”