Wreck of the Frost Finch (Aetherium, Book 0 of 7)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Chapter 6

  For two more days the Frost Finch cruised up the western coast of Europa following the ragged line where the glaciers met the sea. They passed over deep ravines and long fjords that reached inland like bony fingers. In those gaps in the earth, Kosoko and Riuza pointed out the tiny fishing villages that they had already discovered and visited. Blaye, Acres, Royan, Fouras, and Charron. The names did not sound very Rus to Omar’s ear, but the captain assured him that the people there did speak a sort of Rus mixed with Espani. Each village was home to fewer than a thousand people, each one clinging to a fragile thread of life between the angry sea and the towering glaciers where they fished the cold waters of the North Atlanteen for seals, crabs, eels, and whales.

  On the fifth day of the expedition, after crossing the vast green plateau of the Mayenne Glacier where the late Garai Dumaka had believed a forest was thriving hundreds of feet below the ice, the Frost Finch emerged from a cloud bank above a black spit of land thrust out into the white sea like an accusing finger. At the tip of the finger Omar could see the pale gray shapes that he had come to recognize as Europan buildings hidden between the frozen snow on the ground and the frozen snow on their roofs. But this village was larger than the last few and he pointed it out. “Have you been there before?”

  “Once,” Morayo said. “It’s called Cherbourg. About seven thousand people.”

  “You’ve only been there once?”

  The engineer shrugged. “Sure. Kosoko mapped it, Garai picked some pinecones, and we got the name of the place. So why go back? There’s nothing special there. They don’t even have enough spare food to trade with us.”

  They sailed on across the white sea to another dark shore that was marked Alba on both Kosoko’s new map and Omar’s old one. The Aegyptian slouched against the window, peering down at the world through his blue glasses. “It just goes on and on, doesn’t it? Just snow and ice, rocks and trees.”

  The cartographer shrugged. “Well, of course it does. What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know,” Omar said. “Something more interesting.”

  Kosoko raised an eyebrow as he chewed yet another tiny sliver of his ginger. “The captain said you came along because you want to see if there’s snow on an island at the top of the world. That hardly sounds interesting to me.”

  Omar smiled. “No, I don’t suppose it does. Still, I do want to know. Very, very much.”

  On the morning of the sixth day, Omar awoke to a soft babble of new sounds and the strange sensation of stillness. Through the window beside his seat he saw that they were on the ground with the hatch open and a small crowd of people stood outside the airship talking to Kosoko while Riuza and Morayo ran their mooring lines around a few large stones sitting in the snow. He stood up, intending to hurry out and help them with the chores of securing the Finch, but the motionless deck beneath his feet seemed to tilt and weave and he stumbled into the wall of the cabin. After a moment, the dizziness passed and he stepped outside into the thick snow to help with the lines. 

  “I almost couldn’t walk,” he said to Morayo as they tied the last rope to a boulder. “I felt seasick, but we were on the ground.”

  “You were landsick,” she said. “You got used to the Finch shivering around under your feet all day and night, and you forgot what it’s like to walk on solid ground. That’s all. Happens to everyone.”

  “Even you?”

  “No.” She grinned.

  “So what’s this place called? Where are we?”

  She pointed across the field to the snaking line where the frothing white sea lapped up on the dark gray stones of a beach, and above that beach stood a town. It was encircled by a ragged stone wall twice as tall as a man so that all Omar could see of the homes within were the peaks of the roofs and the tips of the chimneys, but suddenly his gaze was drawn to a dark shape rising high above the top of the wall. “What is that?”

  It was a rude but solid structure of black stones that rose three times the height of the town wall, and Omar counted three small towers at the corners of the keep. Slate tiles covered the roof, though they were grimed with frozen filth, and what few windows he could see were all shuttered and sealed. No light escaped from the building, but smoke poured upward from half a dozen of its chimneys to mingle with the smoke of hundreds of other homes high above the town. The sight of so many columns of smoke reminded him of the tales of dragons sleeping in their lairs, their burning bellies spilling dark fumes from the ancient mountains. “Is that a castle?”

  “Yes it is, and home to the king of Edinburgh.”

  “A king? Here?”

  “I admit, it’s not much of an accomplishment.” Morayo laughed. “If you like, I can tie a string around your head and call it crown, and you can be the king of the back of the cabin.”

  Omar smiled. “Very funny. Though I’ve seen men rule over less. I was just surprised to hear someone up here in the middle of nowhere style himself as royalty.”

  “Well, he’s the master of twenty thousand souls,” the engineer said. “That’s more than I can say for myself.”

  With the ship secure, Omar found Riuza and asked, “Can we go see the town now?”

  “No, we stay with the ship at all times.”

  His smile vanished. “But why?”

  She jerked her chin at the stream of people coming up the icy road from the town. Most of them carried sacks or trays or even pulled small carts behind them. “They come to us. Talk. Buy. Sell. Whatever you like. Just don’t fight with them. These are the friendliest people we’ve found this far north. We need to keep them friendly. But we don’t leave the Finch.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t trust them.”

  “Because they’re Europan?”

  “Because they’re primitive savages.” She gave him a serious look and then walked away.

  For the rest of the morning, Omar wandered through the cluster of merchants with their wares spread out on blankets on the snow. He saw crudely carved figures of rock and bone, poorly polished stones of no particular value, bruised fruit, ragged blankets, and rusty tools. The only things that really caught his eye were the fresh fish and the huge cuts of seal steak laid out on the snow. Since Garai’s death, they had only stopped on the ground once more to refill the boiler and have one hot lunch. Every other meal had been cold rations, all salted and dried and tiresome. The allure of a savory seal steak supper quickly had him haggling with the fisherman, and he walked away with several pounds of meat in exchange for all of his spare gloves and hats. 

  After stowing his precious treasure, Omar found Kosoko engaged in an intense discussion with two elderly locals about the markings on the cartographer’s working map. Through the broken bits of their mismatched Rus dialects, Omar picked out the points of confusion about this island or that mountain and he pulled out his own leather map for comparison. Instantly the two northerners’ faces brightened as they scanned the ancient writings, pointing excitedly at this symbol or that word. As the pair muttered to each other, they confirmed to Omar that his old Rus map was indeed correct, at least for this area.

  They were still leaning over the map when a low horn blast echoed across the field from the south where a line of small fir trees obscured the woods beyond. In a heartbeat, every merchant had his wares bundled up and was trudging quickly back to their walled home. The two old men peered at the southern edge of the field with pained looks of worry wrinkling their brows. A moment later the stunted fir trees shivered, shaking loose their coats of frost and shining icicles, and a pack of wolfish hounds darted out into the field. They were shaggy beasts with fur the color of old iron, and they ran with their black tongues lolling from the sides of their mouths. But they slid to a halt in the center of the field and turned to face the bracken behind them. Again the little firs bent apart and now a band of men in brown fur coats came charging out of the wilderness with axes and bows in hand. 

  Omar took a nervous step back, his gl
oved hand straying to the hilt of his seireiken. 

  The men raced across the field and when they passed through the hounds the animals turned to follow their masters. Together the hunters converged on the Frost Finch, and Omar could hear them shouting in their strange Rus accents, “One horn! One horn!”

  He frowned at Kosoko, who merely shrugged back. But the two old men beside them snatched up their walking sticks and set off for the town.

  The hunters running across the field angled away from the airship, heading for the town, and the dogs stayed close to their masters. But they stopped short of the town gate and turned to stand shoulder to shoulder and form a small shield wall on the icy road. The archers nocked fresh arrows and made ready to fire while the others raised their small hatchets to hurl.

  A deep-throated bellow erupted from the trees across the field, and Omar’s first thought was that an elephant had followed him all the way from North Ifrica to this frozen hell. But the beast that came crashing through the firs was no elephant. It charged through the underbrush with its head lowered, smashing aside the brittle trees with its massive legs and shoulders. Of its head, Omar could only see that it was long and broad with tiny black eyes and tiny brown ears set on either side. Its thick coat of brown fur shook and shuddered with every thundering step that the beast took, and Omar wondered if this might be a monstrous sort of bear.

  But then the creature shook its head and Omar saw it, for brief a moment, in profile.

  One horn. They must be shouting its name. They call it a one-horn.

  An enormous curving horn rose from the animal’s snout above the nose and below the eyes, but it was unlike any horn Omar had ever seen before. Long ago he had hunted with a bow, stalking the swift oryx and gazelle in Ifrica and taking their long slender horns as drinking cups and walking sticks. And only a few years ago he had hunted with an Italian rifle to bring down a huge red elk with a massive rack of branching antlers. But the beast charging across the field had armed its skull with an enormous scimitar, a weapon long enough to skewer three men back to back, and Omar suspected that was exactly what the creature had in mind now.

  Morayo and Riuza were already running for the Finch, so Omar grabbed Kosoko and propelled the old cartographer into the cabin, but he paused by the open hatch to watch.

  The one-horn stampeded over the snow, its pillar-like legs crashing through the snowdrifts as though they were mere snowflakes. And as the seconds ticked down, Omar realized that the beast wasn’t following the tracks of the men and dogs toward the town. It was charging toward the Finch.

  “Stay inside!” he shouted as he slammed the hatch shut.

  As he strode out across the snow toward the woolly juggernaut, Omar gripped the hilt of his seireiken and said, “Little brother, I’d appreciate your help again. Any suggestions would be appreciated.” He could feel the frozen earth shuddering under his boots with the vibrations of the one-horn’s huge feet.

  Slaughtering animals is a task for butchers, not samurai, the dead man answered.

  Omar tightened his grip on the sun-steel sword and he reached down into the burning metal with his own soul to grab the ghost of Ito Daisuke and tear a flood of images from his memories. Omar saw strange castles and silken robes, men practicing with wooden swords in a gravel yard, a young woman standing on a bridge with an umbrella on her shoulder. Image after image appeared, too fast for him to comprehend any of them.

  I submit! Daisuke cried out.

  “That’s better.” Omar blinked to clear his mind as he drew his seireiken, letting its white light dance on the face of the unbroken snow. The one-horn tilted its head back to bellow its final challenge before lowering its snout and leveling its massive horn at Omar’s chest. But already he felt the soul of the samurai guiding his hands and feet, and Omar moved.

  At the last moment before contact, he dashed left and forward, slashing swiftly to his right and guiding the edge of his blade along the side of the beast’s head. The behemoth moaned and crashed down into the snow as though its legs had been torn out from under it. Omar whirled away to the side and sheathed his blade, hiding it once again inside his coat. Before him the great beast lay dead and still, an ugly black scar running from its mouth through its small black eye, over the ear, and down the side of its throat in a long snaking line. Omar studied the smoking cut with no memory of having guided his hands around the contours of the animal’s head like that at all. He nodded and exhaled. “Thank you again, little brother. Maybe next time you’ll be a bit more eager to help.”

  And the ghost whispered, Yes, Bakhoum-dono.

  The airship hatch banged open and footsteps thumped lightly in the snow to his right, followed closely by many more footsteps approaching on his left. Morayo was the first to reach him. “That’s amazing,” she said, her warm breath swirling around her face in a cloud of vapor. “How did you do that?”

  “With the wisdom of many years’ experience in killing giant furry one-horned beasts.” He smiled. “Life is mysterious that way.”

  “Life isn’t mysterious at all,” Riuza said dully. “Most things die when you slit their throats.” She indicated the final cut behind the one-horn’s ear. “But why is the wound cauterized?”

  “What?” Morayo leaned closer and poked at the wound. “Hey, it’s all dry and hard. Feels like bacon.”

  “Oil,” Omar said abruptly. “There’s a special oil on my sword. It’s an ancient Aegyptian practice. The oil burns when it mixes with blood, and seals the wound shut. It makes the internal wound worse. That’s what happened.”

  Riuza frowned at him, and then looked away. “If you say so.”

  The other local hunters jogged up, inspected the kill, and erupted into cheers. They descended on Omar with brotherly affection, embracing him and lifting him off the ground, laughing and shouting, and roughhousing with their excited hounds. Eventually they set to work butchering the carcass, from which they offered their guests many choice cuts of meat, of which Omar accepted a few but returned most, encouraging his new friends to enjoy the bounty on his behalf. They were happy to oblige him.

  The rest of the afternoon passed quietly as some of the merchants shuffled back out to try to sell their stones and furs. Riuza and Morayo refilled the boiler with ice and refilled the hopper with coal bought from local miners. Meanwhile, Omar and Kosoko stood in the snow with several more elderly gentlemen, comparing maps and struggling to understand each other through the barriers of four different languages. 

  For supper, Omar prepared a small feast of seal steaks and one-horn ribs, an experiment that quickly proved that no one liked one-horn ribs no matter how well seasoned they were. Eventually the sun set and with no wind to power the lights, a soft darkness settled over the field. Starlight glowed on the snow on the ground as well as on the town, and Omar fell asleep with a full belly and a smile at the thought of continuing north in the morning.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll cross the Sea of Ice and we’ll see it. Ysland. Tomorrow.