Hegira (10 page)

Bar-Woten remained quietly puzzled by the Trident. She had no true home port, though most of her crew called the country of Weggismarche home. They were heading there now, by way of a few ports along the Bicht av Genevar, a broad archipelago between Weggismarche and the Obelisk Daana. In a few months they would pass the Ocean Obelisk. The Trident had spent most of her half-century in these waters plying trade between the islands and Weggismarche. In this way she had developed a good reputation that sustained her when she had been isolated from her previous owners through several revolutions in Weggismarche. For a few harsh years she had become a pirate of sorts.

But that was all past now. The Trident carried only a token complement of guns that were powerful enough for defense, but would never let her play the role of a raiding ship. Besides, she wasn't fast enough.

What puzzled the Ibisian was the spirit of cooperation that powered the ship almost as much as the wind. Survival in the tough trade of the Bicht av Genevar and elsewhere was apparently determined by blatant and dependable honesty. He had never known a system run in such a way. He doubted its efficacy.

Kiril accepted it with a joyous heart. He listened intently to stories told by the crew of dozens of encounters with civilizations that had never known foreign trade, or even foreigners — without a single mishap. “She's a goddess!” he told Bar-Woten enthusiastically, patting the varnished oak railings. “One king even called her a Kwan-Yin — Mercy. What a ship we chose to join!”

The Ibisian kept his silence and learned all he could about the lands the Trident had visited. He kept a notebook in which he drew his maps and charts and recorded private observations.

They had been at sea for three months without sight of land, navigating by the Ten Agreeable Fire Doves, when a call for general quarters was rung. The crew took positions in a few minutes. Nothing could be spotted from the decks, but the lookout in the mainmast tower-nest had spotted something odd ahead of them. Within a quarter hour people on the decks spotted it too.

Kiril was standing next to a wiry old man who usually supervised repairs to the ship's sails and deck canvas. The old sailor's eyes were sharper than Kiril's — he held his hand above them and mumbled something about it being the largest he'd ever seen.

“What is it?” Kiril asked, almost shaking. The sea was suddenly a very unpleasant place again, green and cold and unknown.

“Untersay draken” the canvasmaker answered.

“What's that?” Kiril wanted — and at the same time didn't want — specifics.

“Spruten.”

“I don't know that word.”

“Ochobras, diesbras, dolfijn-manker.”

No better off than before, he turned his eyes back to the horizon and saw it. At first it looked like a thick tangle of what the sailors called sargass, a weed that formed in ocean eddies like floating islands. But its pulpy tendrils took on a ropey sort of life which made his neck hairs crawl. Sometimes it was pink, sometimes blue. He regretted ever leaving his landlocked home.

“Polypus,” another sailor said, approaching the rail to get a better view, pointing with a lean brown finger. Kiril looked at him, and the man raised his shaggy eyebrows urging him to see it while he could. “Rare sight!” he explained. “Makes a seaman of you.”

“Or a pudding,” another said. A few women and one young girl joined the group, and Kiril tried to pull himself together for their benefit. But he still trembled.

The polypus — a word close enough to the Mediwevan equivalent that he could understand they were talking about a squid — was basking without much concern off the port side, barely a hundred meters away. The Trident was giving it a wide berth. It was common knowledge that untersay drakens, like fishermen's floats, carried nine tenths of their bulk below the water line.

At night the sea was alive with growing lights. This was truly the realm of drakens, Kiril learned — a hundred leagues of squid and glowing fish and fliegen-say-drakens, which could land on deck and squash a man, but were harmless otherwise. Then there was the possibility of meeting a pack of true serpents, not shy like the squid, not harmless like the flying beasts, but carnivorous and nasty and difficult to drive off.

Bar-Woten was unpleasantly awed as he stared over the railing and saw the lights pass and flash in the depths. Overhead were the fire doves in the velvet black sky, and below that the glowing soup of the sea's surface, and beneath that luminous spots like eyes as wide across as the spread of his arms. The night was alive with seeing things and glowing things and curious unknown things. He had never known discomfort — or even fear — like what he felt now, even on the worst and most wretched nights of the March.

But with morning the sea was blue and bright and the air was warmer. No more fleshy masses were spotted, and some cheer returned.

Barthel watched the temperature rise on the ship's thermometers as they entered the region of the Ocean Obelisk. He frowned each time he stood at the base of the mainmast, where the instruments were mounted on a mahogany plaque. He scratched his head and squinted comically. Then, when the Obelisk was in plain view, just before nightfall as the sky dimmed and turned gold and green, his frown cleared. He looked at the thermometers with astonishment and started to shout.

“It's simple!” he yelled. “It's so beautifully simple!”

Bar-Woten and Kiril took turns leaning on the wrench, grunting and straining in the close dark heat of the engine room bilge. The wrench was wrapped around a fist-sized nut that held a tension plate in position, keeping a secondary rod on the high-pressure cylinder in line with its swing alley. It had been rubbing for a day, causing a hideous screech with each pump and swing that echoed through the engine and made the crankshaft tremble and buck. With the gradual loosening of the nut the tension plate could be shifted by deft hammer blows until the cylinder rod crept back into line. It was rough, filthy work with old paint rubbing off on their pants and sweat flooding over their cotton brow-bands and prickling in their eyes. They set the wrench and hammer down for a rest. Bar-Woten rubbed the blisters on his hand.

Feet banged down the ladder from the upper engine room catwalk. “I've figured it out!” Barthel shouted. “I've got it!”

He sat down next to them on one of the main bearings, squirming on the uneven surface, and told them. It came out in a quick and happy babble, in Mediwevan, which most of the attending engine hands didn't understand, leaving them to sit and listen blankly on the port stringer beam and bilge keelson.

“That means the Obelisks have light and heat on top,” he concluded. “That explains why some deep canyons are dark the same way all the time and others aren't.”

Bar-Woten nodded, too tired to think. Kiril leaned against a condenser pipe and said it sounded convincing.

“It's very important,” Barthel said, disappointed that his excitement wasn't communicating itself. He looked from face to face and tried to explain it to the other sailors in broken Teutan. They nodded agreeably. Frustrated, he stood and brushed his pants off, turned around, and looked at the engine as though he distrusted it and all other deaf and dumb things he couldn't explain himself to. He climbed out of the engine-well and went about on deck to look for Avra.

Kiril and Bar-Woten switched with another pair of sailors, and the wrenching and hammering continued.

The water became warmer and more turbulent. Great spouts tore the sea into ragged shards to the west. In a few days the water cooled slightly, but the temperature increased the closer they approached the Ocean Obelisk.

Avra helped Barthel put his theory into writing, and together they gathered facts and figures to back it up. He was disappointed to find the idea wasn't original with him, but he still worked to prove his assertions, and Avra tutored him on how to go about the research.

The Ocean Obelisk passed on the port side the day after the engine overhaul was completed. Kiril watched it from the railing and thought about Barthel's theory, wondering how correct he was. His world was taking shape more each day. He thought he might have it all in the palm of his hand in a few more years. The Obelisks were higher than the air, and the sun did not rise or set on the Second-born, but grew bright or dim, and perhaps hid where nothing but its light could be seen ... He daydreamed for an instant, and the Obelisk turned scaly and writhed like the tail of a dragon. He shook his head briskly to clear it. In a week the Obelisk was in the horizon haze.

The smell of the sea changed as they approached the waters of the Bicht. Islands grew more numerous, some with small fishing settlements and huts on tall poles. The sea frequently rose above the islands during a storm, Bar-Woten learned. It was a rough life. Still people clung like barnacles, and he knew the glue that held them was the past. Where the past had meaning, people stayed.

The Trident did brisk trade between the islands, also acting as a hauler and mediator. Her principal load was destined for Weggismarche, but she had several tons of tools and nets which she'd picked up on other landfalls. Kiril and Barthel helped with the inventory. Bar-Woten drove one of the motor launches that delivered the goods to the islands lacking port facilities.

In these weeks they saw white beaches backed with palm trees that rustled and crackled in the breeze, and high green mountains thick with brush no man had ever crawled through, and islands so big there was no way to tell they weren't the mainland until you had sailed completely around one and seen the same banyan tree from two directions. Kiril breathed it in and blew it out and took energy from it all. At night he ran his hands along his back and felt the ridges of lash scars there, asking: Who did this? I did? Not I. The other one.

The Young One.

He worked with the loading crews on cargo watches until sweat covered him in a fine sheen. He helped trim and refit piping from the methane tanks and went with the boats to kelp beds to gather the great underwater trees. On deck they hung in canvas-covered bags until they were cut and stacked to dry. The smell was outrageous. In a few days, though, they were in neat odorless blocks, boxed and stored for use in the methane-generation tanks. The wind was from the sea, and the kelp was from the sea, and he knew, as he sweated in the day and felt his scars by night, that the Trident did nothing to the sea that any other sea creature didn't do. He was no longer a penitent, a traveler out of fear, but a crewman of the Trident.

Conversely, Bar-Woten enjoyed the work and grew familiar with the sea, but was not part of the ship. He could never wholeheartedly join anything again. He worked with the boilers and the engine and knew them for what they were, pieces of metal that filled and pumped and thrust, not parts of a living thing.

Barthel's enthusiasm seldom reached him. Most of what the Khemite was learning from Avra wouldn't be much use to them when they landed in the north and started the trek again. It seemed to Bar-Woten that the original journey was losing steam. It was being absorbed into this lesser, niggling trip across sea and between islands.

The central island of the Bicht was called Golumbine. It was twenty-five hundred kilometers from Weggismarche. On extremely clear days, the Weggismarche Obelisk could be seen from its northern side as an almost invisible line. The Trident sailed around the eastern tip, passing huge pillars of granite topped with temples carved from solid rock thousands of years ago. Above the beaches, in the craggy hills, three statues rose from the jungle. Each was a hundred meters tall, made from bronze almost black with the centuries. The central sculpture was a woman dancing, her right leg crooked to put her foot just over her left knee, both arms held out with palms up toward the sky. She was rounded and stocky, built to hold her weight as much as to resemble a woman. Her hair radiated in bronze sunbursts, a fan of metal twenty meters wide. To each side her companion statues were serpents curling around central columns of rock white as snow, except where the bronze had stained them green.

The Trident put into the deepwater port in the north of the island eight months after leaving Mur-es-Werd, and the brown, light-baked inhabitants welcomed them to Golumbine. Liberty was granted to all aboard the ship but a skeleton watch, of which Bar-Woten was a disgruntled member.

That evening the crew of the Trident feasted in a palace made of quartz. It was only the climax of a heady day spent as near-heroes, welcomed after a long absence at sea by a kingdom the Trident had saved from starvation during droughts three years before. The crew and officers were led along the bund in the late afternoon after the day's business had been completed. They were seated in a shady building of white wood slats and rattan roofing. While they were served drinks in the hard rinds of sari, a juicy red-fleshed fruit, wagons pulled by large island deer parked in front. They climbed in with drinks in hand and were driven along a path that snaked through an orchard, rose gently to a hilltop, and after an exhilarating downhill gallop, presented them to the stone city of Mappu.

Mappu was at least ten thousand years old, Avra told Kiril and Barthel as they rode in the cart. A thousand years ago it had been rebuilt because its stones had grown too worn to be dignified. In all that time it had known only three dynasties of royal families. Each had succeeded without bloodshed under the decrees of the priests and priestesses of Dat, the goddess whose statue rose on the island's eastern peninsula. There had been some war with western islands during the past two hundred years, but Golumbine was now at peace. Its hundred-and-fifty-kilometer length supported fifty thousand people comfortably.

She finished her history just as the carts pulled up to the crystalline palace. The officers and crew stepped down and milled at the base of the white marble steps. Footprints had worn grooves in the stone. Above the steps a half-circle arch of white quartz led to the alcove of the main hall. The arch was covered with etched figurines engaged in every aspect of living — fanning, herding, studying, building, eating, making love, giving birth, dying. . . coronation and funerals, life and death in dizzying detail. Barthel patiently ignored them. Kiril was less circumspect. He walked with the others into the alcove beneath the arch, frustrated and curious to examine it longer. They were taken into the main hall.