‘Do you know,’ said Arok, ‘your people are all dead?’
‘We all come to it,’ said Athluan levelly.
‘Some of us less completely than others.’
‘Long ago, a ghost leapt through me when I was still a living man. Possibly that has something to do with it. Or the uncanny manner in which Rothger murdered me. Maybe that.’
Athluan moved steadily forward, and put out his hand.
Arok could smell a healthy human smell, washed hair and clothing. Reaching out, he clasped Athluan’s hand. It was solid and warm. He knew it immediately.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Athluan. ‘Well, it’s hard luck to get so sick. Anything I could do.’
‘My thanks. What now in return?’
‘You must alter course.’
‘Why?’
Athluan said simply, ‘You’re on the wrong track.’
‘Vormland.’
‘Your son isn’t in the Vormland, not any longer.’
‘Do you say – do you say—’
‘No, I never meant he’s dead. He lives. Another land, beyond the reivers’ isles. He’s there, where I suspect he has to be to fit with one more pattern of this strange design.’
‘There are no lands beyond the north.’
‘Another continent.’
‘Why would you lie?’
‘Yes, why? I’ve not lied.’
Arok prowled about as the lions so often did, setting them off. Everyone then prowled in circuits, only the ghost of Athluan and the hawk staying still.
‘Then I’ll ask another question,’ said Arok at last. ‘Why are you on the ship?’
‘I’ve somewhere to go myself. And sometimes, Arok of the Holas, I like to do things as I’d have had to when made of flesh and blood. So I ride the ship and look at the stars. Sometimes I lie down to sleep a couple of hours. When you’re dead you can do most things at will. Even choose not to. But I’m bound for the continent I spoke of. It’s my pleasure to travel with you.’
‘Are you always here?’
‘Not always. Sometimes I go somewhere else to – shall I say think.’
‘Where, in God’s name?’
‘There you have it,’ said Athluan quietly. ‘In God’s name, and only God knows.’
‘God,’ said Arok; he muttered, ‘gods.’
‘All of those. All part of the same material. As are we. How else do we get by at all?’
Arok turned his back, then childishly spun round again to see if Athluan would vanish.
Perhaps like a sensitive father playing hide-and-seek with his boy, Athluan had obliged him. Only the hawk circled high up a moment before dropping straight down to Arok’s shoulder, with a definite weighty thud. It was still sitting there when he emerged again on the upper deck. Then it flapped off to a lower mast. Arok thought he would go back to Nirri and leave the watch to their own wakefulness. Sleep nocturnals were supposedly for slumber not canoodling. But his body seemed to have remembered Nirri’s abruptly. It was itching to get at her. Sleep, like ghosts, could wait.
Under their own volition now, the fleet drove west of north.
The days were calm and cinder-coloured, the sun a smudge of lemon light. Enough wind blew to abet their progress. If the wind failed they surmised the goddess would be able to summon one. They were very confident in the goddess now, only careful of her temperament. Dayadin’s devouring had been their main source of discontent, but this faded. The Faz, heartless perhaps or pragmatic, declared it a necessary sacrifice to the gods of the sea, one of which had either piloted or inhabited the enormous whale. Saftri after all had smitten the whale. The death of the child was therefore tit for tat. The Kelps made no comment. They had two such hero boys among their own jalees. The Faz for that matter had one. Even the Vormlanders were left with one black child of their own. Used to deprivation and to going on in spite of it, they swiftly put Dayadin behind them in thought as literally they had in miles.
Krandif alone stayed unappeased.
He fumed and pushed off the would-be consoling hand of his brother Mozdif.
An evening came when the ships had stopped rowing, sitting a while so the crews could eat and drink, on a veldt of sea that still glowed blue from the leftovers of a sunk sun. Krandif lowered himself into the water and swam vigorously over to Saftri’s Mother Ship. Men applauded his action, cheering, thinking the ship-lord used the freezing ocean for exercise, like the let-out horsazin who were frisking and playing all around in the waves.
Krandif drew himself up the ladder, fisted his forehead politely to the shamans, and took hold of Jord’s arm.
‘Where is she?’
‘Our Lady – she’s below in her hut there.’
‘I’m going down.’
Jord looked unencouraging. As one of Saftri’s priests he had responsibilities. ‘Perhaps … you wait a while. She’s—’
‘In one of her moods she is?’
‘As you have said it.’
‘By my father’s skull,’ said Krandif, ‘in one of my moods I am.’
Saftri heard the loud banging on her flimsy door, and caused it to fly open. There stood Krandif, his brows knotted, his mouth clenched.
The rage of men still caught Saftri off guard from time to time. In her former life she had had to be wary, and old habits were ingrained. But she said frigidly, ‘What?’
‘Do you never consider him?’
She knew exactly what he meant.
‘Of whom,’ she said, ‘do you muse?’ Somehow she had transcibed the syntax of Vormish to extreme Rukarian city-speak.
‘The lad I brought you. The fallen star who was our luck. From his father and his people I tore him and gave him you, for your—’
‘I never required him of you. You should have let him be.’
‘—interest, to care for him, as would any of our kind.’
‘I am,’ said she with great hauteur, ‘no longer a woman. And when I was, never of your kind.’
‘Our luck’s gone,’ said Krandif.
‘I am your luck.’
‘You,’ he said.
Foolish, Krandif. She had berated herself enough over the fate of Dayadin, did not need another to do it for her. She flicked her slim hand through the air and a flame whacked Krandif flat on the cabin floor. He lay there and said nothing.
‘Go,’ said Saftri, ‘before I am really angry.’
He got up, suppressing a series of groans. Above, Jord and another of the priests helped him along the deck.
‘Gods are unfair,’ observed Majord. ‘It’s their nature.’
Krandif shook them off at the rail. He called to one of the horsazin he rode on land and when it swam over he mounted it and was borne back to his jalee.
He stood on his own deck wrapped in a fur cloak, even now leaning a little from her blow.
Only to Mozdif did he say, ‘When we are to come ashore, if ever there is a shore, I and mine go our own ways. Do you agree?’
Mozdif looked dismayed but he nodded.
As with gods, when Krandif really decided something you had better go along with it or the discord might never end.
The wind woke in the night.
It charged up from the bottom of the sea as the whale had done, throwing a waterspout hundreds of feet into the sky. They saw this in the distance and then the waves ran down on them, high as the houses of the Rukarians.
Sail clapped, jolted and split on the masts. It was black as all-night, no stars or moons, and the air was made of water.
‘I said. Our luck he was. Gone.’
But there was no true space for maledictions or reproach.
Saftri poised in the prow of the Mother Ship, as always ignoring the antics of the shamans whose flung rainbow sprays seemed to do nothing but add to the confusion.
About the ships she built rings of protection. They held, then gave way, like walls that bricks fell from.
She breathed upward into the wind to disperse it, and it veered from her and struck this way and tha
t among the fleet.
Three ships of the Vorms, two of the Faz, were already capsized and going down. Men clung to broken spars and planking, whirled over and over by the blustering water.
Saftri threw herself upward into the wind.
She seized it with her hands. It felt to her like ropes. ‘Is this you?’
Even in her strength, she sensed once more her powers were not now sufficiently vital. It must be Zeth Zezeth’s doing, this tempest. The undersea was his country too.
All night she fought with it, grappled it, sometimes taking on inadvertently almost her lioness aspect. She kept some of the storm off for sure, but all of it she could not. Below her, ships were wrenched apart, spilling their souls of men and women into the sprinting sea.
At dawn the storm was abruptly dead, killed by her ceaseless assaults or, more likely, having lived to its full potential.
Bleached sunlight showed the water now spattered with the remains of things.
In all they had been robbed of twenty-one ships, including one of the Mothers with its staff of shamans. But the fleet had been blown on west of north; the wind had pushed them where they had been going, as if to jest with them – See? This is what it takes.
Saftri thought, It was never him. The tempest had been only weather. Despite that, she was proved unequal.
Other voices were muttering now on the vessels. The consensus was that with Dayadin’s subtraction, the fortune of the fleet went too.
Before noon, across a long stretch of water, the shoulders of a mighty landmass gradually and mistily appeared.
Another great silence settled.
On every vessel, faces turned only that one way, eyes looked only in that one direction.
So. It was true.
Saftri, who had known it was, having seen the vast dish of land from the air on more than one occasion, felt herself vindicated. By mortals.
But the sight of the land rather than encourage them oddly seemed to depress them. It was mostly that the solution of landfall had come too late to save their comrades, that the very agent of their quick arrival – the wind – had deprived so many of their number of ever benefiting from it. Also, the land scared them almost witless. This was not the known and often attacked South Continent. It was new, untried, and might be infested with anything. Their legends were full of such regions, shores discovered in unexplored seas where inimical creatures lurked and dragons laired.
Stoically then, they set course for the coast.
The vista opened slowly and inevitably.
It was like other places, at least at first impression. Long sweeps of ice aproned the littoral. Behind, the terrain went up. Cliffs, maybe mountains, flat-topped, blurred by distance and the foggy overcast, took on extravagant altering shapes – the heads of colossal men or beasts, axes, anchors – as the mists wrapped and unwrapped them.
‘Something moves out there. Along the sea.’
Saftri too squinted her eyes.
The sun was at the zenith now, a halo with only an inner pinpoint of light. Quasi-lit by this, huge white triangular sails were setting off from around the shores, sailing out to meet the incomers.
‘They want a fight? Are they giants?’
In murmuring clusters they realized the truth.
‘Icebergs,’ confirmed Saftri.
Though tapering upward, the bergs were tall and wide, as was often the case. Sometimes too their kind might drift about with unnerving speed. Generally, however, the advance was ponderous and reasonably to be prophesied. They were independent of each other also.
These moved in another way. They moved altogether and at once, and very fast. Already it was possible to see the wind-sculpted quills of burnish snagging what little light the sun gave, and the caves and ornate pillarings, the cores of electric blue, or the bizarre shadows of things trapped in them long, long ago.
Straight at the fleet they came.
Five hundred or more great bergs, bearing down on ships and men.
There was shouting now and cries. The horsazin kicked and the cows mooed in the holds as at every upsetting event they had.
Majord stood at Saftri’s side. She had not seen him arrive. He gaped at the iceberg fleet with open mouth. No well-rhymed hymn for this circumstance then.
Saftri rounded on him. ‘We can’t get wide of them. There are too many.’
Majord nodded his horrified head.
‘Look there!’ The shout went up from a hundred throats. A much smaller berg, only adrift and not part of the vast oncoming hunting pack, stood aimless and becalmed in their path. Two of the advancing icebergs slewed towards it in total and undeniable unison, and mashed it between them like two white doors slamming. All across the lessening margin of water there came a roar and a crunching. Slabs of ice flailed upward and crashed down, and waves peeled off, slopping cumbersomely into the fleet which juddered at their collision. Only as the displacement re-balanced did most of the reivers see that the little iceberg had been pulverized.
Saftri soared into the air.
She felt a type of frantic courage, a berserker genius she had only been told of, and based only loosely on her by now lowered confidence in godhood.
As the bergs sailed towards her adopted fleet, she sprang to meet them.
At the last instant, only then, utter terror swamped her. She saw their true form. Inside their pillars and delicate wind-carvings, they were all the same. They were all pyramids of ice, blue-green at their bases, dirty like uncleaned quartz, holed with mysterious glows that had nothing it seemed to do with daylight. Pyramids. Like that living tomb in which she had been cast up from the sea of her first death. Like the storehouses of Yyrot, Lover of Winter, where he had incarcerated her she thought until she was fit for the onslaught of Zeth’s whale and her first death’s re-enactment. But these rose far higher – twenty or thirty times the height of any man.
Saftri screamed. But the scream was like that of a preying hawk. She dashed in among the looming driving ice, screaming and pushing the shapes away from her – not with her hands but with blasts and missiles of her hypernormal armament. It was not enough. Clearly, it was not. All about the bergs splintered and gave way, sloughing ledges and towerets and whole storeys of themselves into the exploding ocean, but even so they continued to swerve towards her and her fleet, their ragged ruins still vast enough to squeeze her, and all things only mortal, to a broken bloodless pulp.
Something in Saftri too gave way.
She changed, before she had known she could or would, into a detonating spiral of raw energy and fire.
In an abstract ecstasy of furious power she cut the icebergs to bits, revolving among them like a golden scythe. And while she did this she shrieked invective at Zeth and at Yyrot, two of the thirds of that unnatural god-thing, both her nemesis and her salvation. The atmosphere sizzled not only with psychic pyrotechnics but with off-colour language. Could even Yyrot fail to hear?
At last the thunders, cracks, crashes and sonic boomings ceased. Light died on a tapestry of choppy water and chopped up ice.
Saftri returned to her physical female form afloat in the lower sky, and gazing down saw the havoc she had created. She had brought defeat to the icebergs. Not one lingered there save in fragments.
Elated, Saftri glanced over towards the fleet she had rescued from destruction.
She had not rescued it. Oh, she had spared it the action of the militant bergs. But in doing so she had wrecked every last ship.
The ice had toppled in the sea, and the resulting tidal waves had over-washed and spine-snapped every surviving vessel in the jalees. All were gone, except for a flotsam of spars and oars, planks and casks and shreds of sails; most of the cattle had drowned and were lurching pitifully in the swell alongside horsazin, men, women and children who were also not always alive.
She had not thought – had she had the time – to protect them too. Perhaps anyway it would not have worked.
Whatever else, that which the tempest had overlooked
, Saftri’s rescue mission had annihilated.
Ashamed, she hung in the air, frightened as gods must be so often at her act – well meant, and too much to survive.
She had sunk some of their boats before. That had been in a fit of pique; she could not even remember why she had done it, only that she reclaimed the men at once from the sea, alive.
It was harder this time to save any of them. Some saved themselves, swimming, or riding the swimming horsazin. For the rest, two living cows positioned on a raft of planks, children locked in dumb fear in a series of waterlogged, refloated long ships, gibbering shamans perched useless as wet birds on a single horizontal mast – Saftri swept them all gently shore-wards on a conjuring of breezes strong enough to assist, not so strong they would make matters worse. But how impoverished now the landfall.
The land was white, like all lands. Nothing special to it and nothing welcoming.
As night gathered the haphazard camp was formed inland from the shore ice. Fire fluttered in the dark, and women wept and children gave in to terror. Only the four black children controlled this urge, although two of them had lost both parents.
The men came to Saftri in a body, Faz, Kelp and Vorm together, with Krandif at their head.
She had set herself apart as she nearly always did, but no shelter had been offered her and no fire. She did not need shelter or a fire, of course. She was a goddess. Nevertheless.
As the men approached, the flame-light behind them, Saftri stood up.
Krandif spoke.
‘There has been Assembly. We’re agreed. Hear this I say. Go away from us, go wherever you will, be it far, far off.’
Nonplussed, Saftri said, ‘How do you dare—’
‘How?’ Krandif pointed around at the cold alien familiar landscape, the sea which had drunk the ships, the laments. ‘Since you came to us, goddess, we have had too many troubles.’
‘I protected you from them.’
‘Fine to protect us from what you yourself brought down on us. That fire-wolf thing – your enemy he was, so it seemed. We only on his path to you. And the boy, the beautiful night child, the whale had him. And now this, the very country you made us come to in order only to please you – itself that country sends its ice to crush us all, and when you fight with it, everything’s done for.’