September had concluded his own examination of the kossief’s house. Ethan gave him a hand out and thanked him simultaneously.
“I’d feel better about acceptin’ your thanks, lad, if it’d been less of a near thing. I missed my first shot. The ice here is pretty clear, but I could see just the barest outline of a shape down there and forgot to allow for diffraction.” He glanced back at the ominous hole. “Let’s get back aboard—and let’s both watch our steps…”
It took four days to properly repair the huge runner. They were in a race with the cut-over pika-pedan, which grew in behind the icerigger to heights of six and seven meters and pressed insistently against the bottom of the raft.
Williams paced anxiously about, trying to form botanical and zoological expeditions to search out the secrets of the homogenized forest. Even Eer-Meesach had sensed enough danger to veto those suggestions. No man could tell what lurked in the depths of such dense aggregations of verdure. The horrors that were known, such as the kossief, were enough to keep a prudent man aboard his ship. No need for them to hunt up new, exciting ways to die.
The disappointed schoolteacher still found enough wild life nearby to keep him occupied. Like a child playing with a new toy, he watched fascinated as another kossief living near the first took a six-legged herbivore browsing among the dried-out stalks behind the ship. Its flat crab eyes rolled in terror as dull grinding teeth snapped futilely at the leather-tough tendrils dragging it downward.
Ethan watched also, his a fascination of a different kind. The herbivore’s scream was no less pitiable for its alienness. He had a chance to see what his own fate would have been had September not rescued him.
As soon as the kossief had sucked enough blood out of the hapless grazer to immobilize it, the burrower generated heat. Ice melted beneath them both, refroze above them, sculpted and filled by water from the anal nozzle Hunnar had pointed out. Safely protected from scavengers and nonburrowing predators by a meter and a half of rock-hard ice, the kossief settled in to enjoy its meal.
Ethan shuddered. Not a neat way to die. He made a personal promise never to venture alone where either variety of the triangular green plant grew.
On the last day the sailors sped their repairs at the news that a lookout had heard the distant, reverberant cry of a droom. Fortunately, the monster did not come near enough to be seen and the prevailing wind was away from the direction of the cry.
Small four-legged quns the size of Ethan’s hand roamed up and down nearby stalks of mature pika-pedan, burrowing and eating their way in and out of the thick trunks like mice turned loose in a king-sized cheese. They began near the crest of a stalk and munched their way downward, leaving nothing to waste. They preferred damaged or sick stalks, thus helping to preserve the vitality of the forest.
Ethan’s favorite was a thing Eer-Meesach called a meworlf. It had a sausage-shaped body from which dangled thin, jointed, two-meter-long legs. A sack ran the length of its cylindrical back. When inflated, the sack swelled to balloon size. Maneuvering on the subdued breeze within the pika-pedan, the meworlf would drift from stalk to stalk, anchoring itself with four of its ten wiry limbs to a selected trunk and using the other six to pluck away bits of plant and convey them to the small mouth. When finished feeding, the meworlf would remain bobbing lazily in the breeze or release its grasp and let the wind carry it through the forest, bouncing like a ball from one stalk to the next.
Fascinating as the extraordinary fauna of the pika-pedan forest was to Williams, it soon began to pale for Ethan. By the fourth day, he was as ready as any of the common sailors to be moving again.
But when full sail had been put out, the worst fears of the experienced icemen were realized.
“We’re not moving,” Ethan observed, concerned. He turned to the captain. “What’s wrong?”
“I worried much on this, friend Ethan.” Ta-hoding’s expression was glummer than usual. “We had no choice, though. The runner had to be repaired.”
“Of course it did.” Ethan indicated the gently billowing sails low on the masts, the gustily taut ones higher up, above the roof of the forest. “You mean, we don’t have the momentum necessary to get us started?”
He saw the problem now. While the Slanderscree was traveling at a respectable speed, she had enough energy to plow easily through the soft pika-pedan. But once stopped, with the thick green pseudopods practically growing over the railings, she couldn’t get moving.
“So what can we do about it?”
“We cannot back up,” said Ta-hoding solemnly, gesturing behind them. “The pika-pedan has grown too tall and thick behind us while we have waited here.”
“What about sending out a crew with axes and swords to cut a clear path ahead of us?”
“We may have to try precisely that, friend Ethan. But I wish I could think of another way. By the time our people could cut a path wide enough for the ship, a decent distance ahead of us, the pika-pedan they first felled would be growing up stiff behind them.
“However,” he said, executing a Tran gesture indicative of hopelessness mixed with resignation, “I confess I see nothing else to be done.” He waddled off to give instructions to Hunnar.
Everyone not immediately concerned with the operation of the icerigger was sent over the side and was soon frantically hacking away at the forest ahead of the ship with axes, kitchen cleavers, anything that would cut. The huge stalks fell easily, squirting water and sap over the frenzied group of foresters, who knew they were racing against the growing time of the stumps behind them.
Even Ethan, using his sword, could cut down a ten-meter tall column of pika-pedan in ten minutes or so, though the constant swinging was wearying to muscles not used to such activity. To provide a path expansive enough for a ship the size of the Slanderscree, it was necessary to fell a great many pika-pedan. They couldn’t stop. When the pika-pedan behind them reached underbelly deck level of four meters, they would have to retreat and try to break out as best they could.
As it turned out, they had to quit before they wanted to.
All eyes, on board and in the work party, went to the main-mast observation basket, whose wicker-enclosed lookout was screaming while pointing frantically to the east.
“Stavanzer!”
“How far?” roared Ta-hoding, cupping thick paws to his lips.
“Twenty, maybe thirty kijat,” the reply came back from the lookout.
“Coming this way?”
“It is difficult to tell, Captain, at this distance.”
“How many?”
“Again hard to tell. I am sure of only one.” A pause, then, “Still only one.”
There was no need to give the order to abandon cutting and return to the ship. At the news of a stavanzer in the vicinity, a retreat to the raft was a matter of instinct, not debate. Everyone was chivaning or running through the maze of felled pika-pedan stalks without having to be told.
“What now, Captain?” Ethan asked Ta-hoding when he’d made his breathless way back to the helmdeck.
Eer-Meesach was standing at the railing, peering forward out of old eyes. “To most it hints of death’s proximity, friend Ethan. But it could also be our salvation.”
“How can that be?”
“Consider if the thunder-eater passes close to us, Ethan. You know how the stavanzer travels by pushing itself across the ice. In so doing it smoothes everything in its path as flat as a metalworker’s forge.”
“I see. So we can go out the way it comes in?”
“More than that, friend Ethan.” Ta-hoding, overhearing, elaborated. “Once we build up enough speed traveling back down the thunder-eater’s trail, we can then turn the ship and continue in any direction we wish.”