It startled me when Captain Kharald suddenly stepped forward and said, 'What about The Pilot King? That's a good song for a night such as this.'
Alphanderry nodded his head agreeably and began tuning his mandolet. Then he smiled at Captain Kharald as he began to play:
A king there was in Thaluvale,
His name was Koru-Ki,
He built a silver ship to sail
The heavens' starry sea.
It was a sad song, full of wild longing and great deeds; it told of how King Koru-Ki, in the Age of Law, had sailed out from Thalu in search of the streaming lights of the Northern Passage, which was said to lead off the edge of the world up to the stars. It was a long song, too, and Alphanderry played for a long time. The moon was high in the sky by the time he finished.
'Thank you,' Captain Kharald told him politely. His men began drifting off, to their duties or beds. But he stood there a long while staring at Alphanderry strangely.
'Thank you, minstrel. If I had known you had such a voice, I wouldn't have let King Vakurun pay your passage.'
Then he, too, went off to bed and so did we.
We reached Ivalo late the next morning. We caught our first sight of it just as we rounded a hump of land along Eanna's northern coast. Like Varkall or Tria, it was a river city, built at the mouth of the Rune. But it had none of Tria's splendor and too much of Varkall's squalor. Too many of its houses and buildings were of wood and seemed jammed together in dirty, fetid districts that crowded the river. Unlike ancient Imatru a hundred miles farther up the Rune, it was a new city, scarcely a thousand years old. No great towers graced the muddy banks upon which it was sited. No gleaming bridges of living stone spanned the muddy Rune. Neither were there walls to catch the light of the midday sun. The Eannans, who were perhaps the greatest mariners in the world liked to say that they were better protected with wooden walls, and these were their ships.
Many of them were docked in the harbor into which we sailed. We saw luggers and whalers, barks and bilanders - and, of course, the galliots and warships of the Eannan fleet. These were all lined up along the docks jutting out from the Rune's western bank. The eastern bank was given over to ivalo's many warehouses and shipyards - and taverns and inns that served its sailors.
Here the Snowy Owl found berth along a wharf owned by one of Captain Kharald's friends. We tied up across the way from another bilander, commanded by a Surrapamer named Captain Toman, Both he and Captain Kharald were old friends.
Like Captain Kharald, he was a thickset man with a shock of fiery hair - though his beard had gone gray. When he saw the Snowy Owl strike her sails, he came on board and greeted Jonald and others whom he knew. Then Captain Kharald showed him into his cabin so that they might drink a bit of brandy and speak of their homeland.
'Well,' I said to Kane, 'we'd better get the horses off and find ourselves another ship.'
We went down into the hold to attend to this task. Altaru and the other horses had fleshed out nicely during the voyage. They seemed only too happy to remain in their stalls and continue feasting on oats. If any of them had suffered from sea-sickness, they gave no sign.
Just as I was leading Altaru onto the deck. Captain Kharald came out of his cabin and walked over to me. He waited until my companions and their horses had joined me, and then astonished us all, saying, 'If it's still your wish to sail to the Island of the Swans, I'll take you there.'
'It is still our wish,' I said, speaking for my friends. 'But why this change of heart?'
Captain Kharald's face fell angry and sad. He said, 'I've had bad news from Surrapam. The Hesperuks have broken the line of the Maron and are laying waste the countryside. There is much hunger in my homeland. I've decided to take on a cargo of grain and sail for Artram as soon as we're loaded. I'm willing to put in to the Island of the Swans along the way.'
'So, you're willing, and we're all glad for that,' Kane said. 'But willing at what price?'
'The Princess' purse will be enough,' Captain Kharald told us. He pointed at Atara's medallion and then looked at my ring. 'These other things are dear to you, and you should keep them.'
I could not quite believe what I was hearing. I thanked Captain Kharald and smiled as Atara hurried to hand him her purse before he changed his mind again.
'Now I must excuse myself,' Captain Kharald said as he tucked the clinking coins into his pocket. 'There's much to do before we sail.'
He walked off toward the stern and left us there with our nickering horses and our confusion.
'I don't understand,' Maram said, watching the sailors and wharf hands swarm the deck in preparation for unloading and loading cargo.
And then Master Juwain explained: 'Their whole lives, men fight battles inside themselves. And sometimes, in a moment, the battle is suddenly won.'
After that, we took the horses down to the wharf and led them through Ivalo's noisome streets to give them some exercise. We spent the day wandering about the waterfront districts, trying to keep out of the way of the throngs of people who crowded by us. The Eannans, I saw, were a mixed people: many showed hair as red as Captain Kharald's while many more were fair-skinned blonds who must have traced their ancestry to the Aryans who had conquered this kingdom so long ago.
There were women and men who had the brown hair and darker complexions of the Delians, even as did Maram, and more than a few bearing the lineaments of the Hesperuk race, with their mahogany skins and long, black curls. We tried to avoid them all. We kept our hoods close to our faces and kept to our business as well. For Eanna, as we had been told, was a land of assassins and spies, plots and usurpations. Here Morjin had great strength in the Kallimun priests who were said to have established themselves in secret citadels and even within the palace of old King Hanniban himself.
Late that afternoon, on a low hill about a mile from the shipyards, we found ourselves on a narrow lane called the Street of Swords. I visited the various smithies and shops there hoping to find a blade to replace the one I had broken. But the swords I saw were of poor quality, and I wouldn't consent to trade my medallion for any of them, even though 1 longed to fill up my scabbard with a length of good steel again. I resigned myself to practicing with the wooden sword I had whittled. It wouldn t do for battle, of course, but at least I could keep my skills sharp until I found something better.
We returned to the ship before dark, and there we waited for its bales of sealskins and barrels of whale oil to be unloaded and great canvas bags of wheat berries taken on. This took the wharf hands most of three days. When the holds were finally full again, Captain Kharald walked the decks inspecting the rigging and the balance of the ship And then, on the tide, we sailed for Surrapam by way of the Island of the Swans.
The first hundred miles of our voyage were easy enough, with fair skies and good wind. On the following day, however, as we rounded the Cape of Storms at the very northwest corner of the continent, the seas grew much rougher. The skies darkened, too, though strangely there was no rain. With the great island of Thalu ahead of us somewhere to the west we sailed south, into the Dragon Channel.
Here the wine-dark waters pitched the Snowy Owl up and down as if testing her timbers and the skills of those who sailed her. These, as 1 saw, were as great in their own way as any of my brothers' prowess with arms. Captain Kharald came alive with the rising of the wind and seas; often he stood near the bow grinning fiercely with his red hair blowing back behind him. At the sharp commands he barked out above the ocean's roar, Jonald and the other sailors turned the ship back and forth against the wind and made progress across the waves even so. The magic of this maneuver amazed me; Captain Kharald called it tacking. We spent most of the next three days tacking back and forth along a line leading mostly south toward Surrapam.
On our fifth day out from Ivalo, we came upon a sight that chagrined us all: this was the wreckage of a merchantman listing badly and dead in the water. As we drew closer to this stricken ship, however, we saw that it had not run aground on the
numerous rocks and reefs off Thalu as Captain Kharald first supposed. Fire had taken her to her doom: the shreds of blackened sails still hanging from her spars and the charred wood there gave sign of this. There was also much sign of battle. Black arrows stuck from the masts like a porcupine's quills, and the hacked corpses of many sailors lay about the bloodstained deck The terrible stench issuing from this death ship told us that none had survived this devastation. Captain Kharald wanted to board her to make sure this was so, but the rough seas about us prevented any such maneuver.
'Who do you think did this?' Maram asked him as everyone gathered along the Snowy Owl's port side to look at this ship.
'Pirates, likely,' Captain Kharald said. 'There are many pirate enclaves on Thalu.'
Maram shuddered at this and muttered that nothing could be worse than such lawless, marauding men. And then the sea turned the black ship slowly about, and what we saw told of something much worse. For there, nailed to the main mast, hung the burned and tormented body of a man.
'So, 'I've heard the Thalunes are without mercy,' Kane said. 'But I've never heard that they are crucifiers.'
'No, they're not,' Captain Kharald admitted. 'This is certainly the work of a Hesperuk warship. It's said the Hesperuks have taken to crucifying in the Red Dragon's name.'
'They'll crucify us if they catch us carrying wheat to Surrapam,' one of Captain Kharald's men said. 'Or feed us to the sharks.'
After that, Captain Kharald gave orders for an extra sailor to go aloft and stand watch on the crow's nest high on the foremast. We all cast nervous looks about the gray ocean as the wind drove the Snowy Owl ever further south and we left the death ship behind us.
But it is one thing to sail away from such sights on a fleet ship built of stout oak; it is quite another to leave them behind in one's soul. That night, terrible dreams nailed me to the deck of the ship. For what seemed hours, I tried to shield myself from Morjin's fell, whispered words that burned me like the breath of a dragon. It took all my will finally to fight myself awake. I sat up trembling and sweating and peering through the darkness for any sign of land. And wordlessly, whisperlessly, Atara came over to touch a dry cloth to my face.
'Here,' she said after a while, wiping my forehead, 'you were dream-ing again.'
'Yes, dreaming,' I said.
The sea beneath us swelled and fell as the ship's wooden joints moaned like an old man. The wind off the cold water suddenly chilled me to the bone. It seemed that I could still smell the stench of the blackened ship we had passed.
'Of what were your dreams?' Atara asked me.
I looked at Maram snoring on top of his furs nearby and our other companions stretched out peacefully on the deck. And I said, 'Death. My dreams were of death.'
A terrible sadness fell over her then. She sat down facing me and wrapped her arms around my sweat-soaked back. She held me tightly against her warm body as she began weeping softly. And then, through her tears, she murmured, 'No, no, you can't die. You mustn't. You mustn't - don't you see?'
'See what, Atara?'
'That if you died, I'd want to die, too.' For a long time she sat there kissing the tears from my own eyes as she stroked my hair. And then, to further comfort me, she said, 'Surely the Lightstone can take away any such dreams.'
'The Lightstone,' I said. 'Have you seen it, then?'
'No, I think Mithuna was right,' she told me. 'No scryer can ever behold it. But I know we're, getting close to it, Val. We must be.'
I prayed that what she said must be true. As I held her against me, I looked over her shoulder, out into the darkness of the sea. And there, many miles to the south, beyond the black and rolling waves, I thought I saw a bit of golden light breaking through the clouds and drawing us on.
The next morning at sunrise, the lookout in the crow's nest called out that he had sighted the disjant rocks of the Island of the Swans.
Chapter 27
It was nearly noon by the time we had sailed close enough to the island to get a good look at it. This western part of the world was a realm of clouds and mists that lay low over the land and often obscured much of it. The rocks that the lookout had espied proved to be the highlands of four smaller islands just to the east of the Island of the Swans. The island itself, like a seahorse with its head pointed west and tail curling southeast, was a much greater prominence about fifty miles in length. Along its central spine, three conical mountains pushed their peaks toward the sky. From the centermost and tallest of these, it seemed that a great plume of smoke issued forth and fed the gray-black clouds above it. Captain Kharald's men feared that this must be dragon smoke; they called for the Snowy Owl to flee these accursed waters before the dragon descended upon us in a flurry of leathery wings and burned us with his fire.
'Dragons, hmmph,' Atara said as we all stood near the rail looking at the island.
'There hasn't been a dragon in Ea for two thousand years.'
'None but the Red Dragon,' Master Juwain agreed. 'And he has no power here.'
I clenched my teeth as I remembered the last night's dreams, but I said nothing.
'No men, I think, have power over the Island of the Swans,' Kane told us. 'It's said that men have never conquered it or made a king-dom here.'
If true, I thought that was very strange. The Island of the Swans lay scarcely sixty miles across the Dragon Channel from Surrapam, and even less distance from Thalu to the north. And while the Surrapamers had never been conquerors like the Thalunes, they weren't above grabbing bits of land to add to theirs like everyone else.
'If there are no dragons here,' Maram said, pointing at the smoking mountain, 'then what curse lies upon this land?'
None of us knew. Not even Captain Kharald could tell us why, for as long as anyone could remember, ships from Surrapam - as well as Eanna and Thalu - had avoided the Island of the Swans.
'Perhaps,' I heard one of his men grumble, 'it's because any ship that sails for this island never returns.'
His fear spread to his shipmates from tongue to nervous tongue, and even Jonald seemed reluctant to steer the Snowy Owl any closer to the island. Captain Kharald, his face set as sternly as the rocks toward which we sailed, walked among his crew and met them with his steely eyes to give them courage. If any decided that this was no voyage for them, he wanted to remind them of their duty before they began talking of mutiny.
We spent all that day sailing along the island's north shore looking for a place to land. But the forbidding walls of rock there warned us away; the currents were bad, too, and Captain Kharald kept a wary eye out for any reefs which might splinter his stout ship like kindling. We spent the night farther out at sea where we would be safe from running aground. And then the next morning, we rounded the island's westernmost point - the top of the seahorse's head - and made our way along its
'nose' for about five miles. When we reached its tip, we turned again, this time heading straight for the belly of the island, which bulged out to form a great deal of its southern shore. Here the waters grew calmer and the currents less swift. As we drew closer to this misty land arising out of the ocean, we saw beaches giving way to the green-shrouded heights beyond. Captain Kharald chose a likely looking expanse of sand, and steered the Snowy Owl toward it.
With one of his men sounding the water's depth with a length of a weighted and knotted rope, Captain Kharald finally ordered the Snowy Owl anchored about a quarter mile offshore. Along with Jonald and six other sailors, he joined us to the starboard and watched as Jonald directed the lowering of the skiff that would take us to the island. 'This far we've come against our better judgment,' Captain Kharald said to us. 'But I can't ask my men to accompany you onto the island.'
I stood armored in my mail, wearing my black and silver surcoat and my helmet with the silver swan wings projecting upward from the sides. I held the throwing lance that my brother Ravar had given me and my father's gleaming shield. Kane bore his long sword and Maram his shorter one; Atara had her saber and her deadly bow an
d arrows. Liljana and Alphanderry had strapped on their cutlasses, even though they had chipped them badly on Meliadus' rock-hard hide. And Master Juwain, of course, would carry no weapon. In his gnarly old hands, he clutched his copy of the Saganom Elu as if it contained whole armories within its leather-bound pages.
'Thank you for bringing us here,' I said to Captain Kharald. 'It will be enough if you'll wait until we return.'
From near the mast behind us, I heard one of his men mutter, 'If they do return.'
'Three days we'll wait, but no more,' Captain Kharald said. 'Then we'll have to sail for Artram. You must understand, my people are hungry.'
'Yes, they are,' I agreed. 'But hungry for more than bread.'
I stared off at the wall of green rising up beyond the beach. I was sure that somewhere on this lost island, we would finally behold the Lightstone that we had crossed the length of Ea to claim. And then we would find a way to end war and suffering, and people would never be hungry again.
We climbed down to the skiff on rope ladders hanging over the ship's side. It disquieted me that we would have to leave the horses behind, but there was no good way of getting them ashore. I sat in silence in the skiff with my companions as.
Jonald and the other sailors rowed the open boat toward the beach. The rhythmic sound of the oars dipping into the water seemed to measure out the remaining moments of our quest.
After Jonald and the others had put us ashore and set out to sea again, I stood with my friends on the beach's hard-packed sand. The island stretched out twenty-five miles to the west and as many to the east. We guessed that it must be at least ten.
Miles wide at its widest part In listening to the wind pour over this considerable length of land, I suddenly realized that I had no idea of where the Lightstone might be found.
And neither did any of my friends. Maram squinted against the squawking seagulls flying above us and said, 'Well, Val, what do we do now?'
I turned to Atara to ask her if she had seen anything in her crystal sphere. But in answer Atara only held out her hands helplessly and shook her head.
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