Toress Lahl looked at Shokerandit in dismay.
“Will they attack us?”
“They have a marked aversion to water, but they could easily get along that spit of sand and board us. We’d better see if we can find any fit members of the crew—and quickly.”
“We were the first to go down with the Fat Death, so we may be the first to recover.”
“We must see if there are any weapons to defend the ship with.”
Their search of the ship horrified them. It had become a slaughterhouse. There had been no escape from the plague. Those who had locked themselves into cabins alone had succumbed and, in some cases, died alone. Where two or three had shut themselves away, the first to show symptoms had perhaps been killed. Any animals aboard had been killed and devoured, their remains fought over. Cannibalism had prevailed in the large hold, where the Odim family was. Of twenty-three members of the family, eighteen were already dead, killed mainly by their relations. Of the five remaining alive, three were still suffering from the madness of the disease and fled when shouted at. Two young women were able to speak; they had undergone the full metamorphosis. Toress Lahl took them to the safety of the closet where she and Shokerandit had sheltered.
The hatches to the crew’s quarters were locked in place. From below came animal noises and a peculiar singsong, intoning endlessly
In a forward storage cupboard, they discovered the bodies of Besi Besamitikahl and the old grannie. Besi lay staring upwards, a puzzled expression frozen on her face. Both were dead.
In the forward hold, they came on some sturdy square boxes which had remained untouched throughout the disaster which had overwhelmed the ship.
“Praise be, cases of rifles,” Shokerandit exclaimed. He opened the nearest box and pulled away some sacking. There, each item wrapped in tissue paper, lay a complete dinner set in purest porcelain, decorated with pleasant domestic scenes. Other boxes contained more porcelain, the finest that Odim exported. These were Odim’s presents for his brother in Shivenink.
“This will not keep the phagors off,” Toress Lahl said, half laughing.
“Something has to.”
Time seemed to be suspended as they wandered the bloodied ship. Because it was small summer, the hours of Batalix’s daylight were long. Freyr was rarely far above the horizon, rarely far below. The cold wind blew continually. Once a sound like thunder came with its breath.
After the thunder, silence. Only the dull pound of the sea, the occasional knock of a small ice floe against the wooden hull. Then the thunder again, this time clear and continuous. Shokerandit and Toress Lahl looked at each other in puzzlement, unable to imagine what the noise was. The phagors understood it without thought. For them, the noise of a flambreg herd on the move was unmistakable.
The flambreg lived in their millions below the skirts of the polar ice cap. Their progeny filled the Circumpolar Regions. Loraj, of all the countries of Sibornal, offered a variety of territories most suited to flambreg, with extensive forests of the hardy eldawon tree, and a landscape of low rolling hills and lakes. The flambreg, unlike yelk, were mildly carnivorous, with a fondness for any rodents and birds they could catch. Their main diet was of lichen, fungi, and grass, supplemented with bark. The flambreg also ate the indigestible moss called flambreg moss by the primitive tribes of Loraj which hunted them. The moss contained a fatty acid which protected the animals’ cell membranes from the effects of cold, enabling the cells to continue efficient functioning at low temperatures.
A herd of over two million individuals was nearing the coast. Many of the Loraj packs were several times larger. This herd had emerged from an eldawon forest and was running almost parallel with the sea. The ground shook under its multitudinous hoofs.
On the shore, the phagors showed signs of unease. Their crude cooking operations were suspended. They marched back and forth, scanning the horizon, manifesting a humanlike uncertainty.
Two escape routes lay open to them. They could climb to the top of the house-sized boulder, or they could attack and take possession of the ship. Either alternative would save them from the approaching stampede.
There was a living forerunner of the herd. Above the heaving shoulders of the animals flew a cloud of midges, intent on drawing blood from the furry noses of the flambreg. The midges were the enemies also of a fly the size of a queen wasp. This fly now darted ahead into freer air. It appeared from nowhere and landed smartly between the eyes of one of the phagors. It was a yellow-striped fly.
The ancipital group broke into an uncharacteristic panic, rushing back and forth. The individual whose face the fly had alighted on turned and ran straight into the rock. He squashed the fly and laid himself out senseless.
The rest of the group gathered together to confer on a plan of action. Some of the newly arrived group carried with them a small and wizened emblem, an ancestor in tether. This shrunken symbol of themselves, this illustrious and moth-eaten great-grandstallun, though almost entirely transformed into keratin, was still a degree or two from nonbeing. In it, some faint spark still served to focus their attempts at ratiocination. Comprehension left their barneys. They communed. The currents of their pale barneys entered into tether.
From an area of total whiteness, a spirit emerged. It was no bigger than a rabbit. The phagor whose ancestor it was said inwardly, “O sacred forebear, now integrating with earth, here you see us in grave danger by the edge of the drowning world. The Beasts-we-were run upon us and will trample us down. Strengthen our arms, direct us from danger.”
Through their harneys the keratinous figure transmitted pictures the ancipitals knew well, pictures flowing fast, one to another. Pictures of the Circumpolar Regions with their ice, their bogs, their sombre enduring forests, and of the teeming life that ran there, even there, on the edge of the ice cap. The ice cap then much greater in extent, for Batalix ruled alone in the heavens. Pictures of hunted creatures hiding in caves, making an alliance with that mindless spirit called fire. Pic tures of the humble Others taken as pets. Terrifying pictures of Freyr roaming, coming mottled black down the air-octaves, a giant spider-form, eddre-chilling. The retreat of beautiful T’Sehn-Hrr, once silver in the tranquil skies. The Others proving themselves Sons of Freyr, running off carrying the mindless spirit fire on their shoulders. Many, many ancipitals dying, in flood, in heat, in battle with the monkey-browed Sons of Freyr.
“Go fast, remember enmities. Retreat to safety of the wooden thing afloat on the drowning world, kill all Sons of Freyr. Stay safe there against the running of the Beasts-we-were. Be valiant. Be large. Hold horns high!”
The tiny voice fled to lands beyond knowing. They thanked the great-grandstallun with a deep churring in their throats.
They would obey its word. For the voice was his and the voice was theirs and there was no difference. Time and opinion had no place in their pale barneys.
They advanced slowly on the beached ship.
It was an alien thing to them. The sea was their dread. Water swallowed and extinguished them. The ship was outlined against the smouldering orange of Freyr, snoring just below the horizon, ready to leap from its hiding place in that same hungry sea.
They clutched their spears and moved with reluctant step towards the New Season.
The sand crunched beneath their tread. All the while, their twitching ears picked up the thunder of the approaching flambreg.