“It is the building up of enough speed that is critical,” Eer-Meesach finished.
“Kinetic energy,” Ethan murmured, and then had to try and explain the unfamiliar-sounding Terranglo term in Trannish.
“It will be not easy.” Ta-hoding was talking as much to himself as to his listeners. “Even if we do pass successfully into the trail, there are other dangers to be considered.” Ethan didn’t press him for an explanation.
“We must make a decision. We do have a choice.” He gestured within an arm toward the bow, his dan momentarily billowing with wind. “We have cut a path a kijat or two ahead of us. We can reset sail and make a run at the forest wall. If that fails, we will then have no room to maneuver, and it will be most difficult to try and back up for another run. Also, I should like to keep that option open, should the thunder-eater swerve and bear down on us.”
“Seems pretty obvious to me what we do,” said a new voice. September mounted to the helmdeck. “We wait and try to slip in behind it.”
Ta-hoding’s gaze traveled around the little knot of decision-makers. His usual jollity was absent now. He was all business. “It’s settled, then,” and he moved to the railing to issue instructions.
Twenty minutes of waiting followed the final preparations. All sailors were at their posts, knights and squires ready to assist when and where they could. The quns had vanished into their holes, and a last meworlf battered itself like a crazed mechanical toy against the stalks as it sought to race out of the area.
Presently, a deeper sound rose above the wind-choir, a periodic breathy grumble like a KK-drive slipping past lightspeed. From his single previous encounter, Ethan knew the noise was caused by the stavanzer’s method of locomotion. Expelling air through a pair of downward-facing nozzles set in its lower back, it could also pull itself slowly forward across the ice on its lubricated belly by means of the two down-thrust tucks protruding from its upper jaw—though that rubbery formation could hardly be called a jaw.
The rumble grew deeper. The Slanderscree quivered steadily as the ice beneath it shook to the rhythm of a monstrous metabolism.
Ethan experienced an unlikely urge to climb into the rigging, to get above the wavering crowns of pika-pedan so he could see. But he stayed where he was, out of the sailors’ way.
Murmurs drifted down from those in the highest spars, their eyes focused on something unseen. Their companions hushed them. Ethan let his gaze travel forward.
At the far end of the crude pathway they’d so laboriously hacked from the rusty forest a great mass slid into view. It stood perhaps twelve meters above the ice, a black maw inhaling felled pika-pedan with Jobian patience as the horny lower lip/jaw sliced off the nutrient-rich stalks flush with the ice.
Once, the upper jaw lifted and the huge tusks came slamming down into the ice hard enough to make the kijat-distant Slanderscree rock unsteadily. Ice, roots, protein-rich nodules were vacuumed indiscriminately into the Pit: proteins and nodules and bulk to be converted into fuel and cells, ice to be melted and flushed throughout the vast metabolic engine.
Tearing unconcernedly into the wall of fresh pika-pedan ahead of it, the massive head vanished from sight. Like an ancient snowbound train, the dark gray bulk slid across their path. Parasites and other growths of respectable size formed a fantastic foliage of their own on the leviathan’s sides and back, a private jungle none dared explore. The fluctuating howl from the intake and expulsion of air was deafening now.
Fortunately, the thunder-eaters had poor vision and poor hearing. They had no need for these faculties, having nothing to be alert against. The beast slid past, its blunt tail-end vanishing in quest of body and skull, without taking any notice of the Slanderscree or its anxiously silent crew.
It was gone, though they could still hear it eating its endless meal as it moved steadily off to the west.
Difficult as it was to be objective when confronted with so over-poweringly grand an example of nature’s diversity, Ethan estimated its length at somewhere between seventy and eighty meters. A mature specimen, but from what he’d been told, not an exceptionally large one. He’d seen bigger himself. He doubted this one weighed more than two hundred fifty tons.
They should have waited another half hour, to be safe, before getting under way, but the sailors were growing restless. Fear that the thunder-eater would perhaps change its path (they were notoriously unpredictable in their habits) and charge down upon them poisoned the sailors’ blood with fear. Finally, even the patient Ta-hoding could stand the waiting no longer.
“All sail on, snap to the windwhips!”
The ice anchors had long since been hauled in. Ponderously, but with far more grace than the thunder-eater, the Slanderscree began to move forward. Ship’s bones groaned as the five duralloy runners broke clear their slight accumulations of drifted snow and ice.
The grinding of the runners became a slick abrasive noise as the huge ship picked up speed. Two, four, ten, fifteen kilometers an hour. Twenty. Thirty and a familiar whisking zing rose from where duralloy lacerated ice. They were nearing the end of the brief clearing the crew had bought from the forest.
“Hard a’port! Sparmen swing-ho!”
Both helmsmen strained at the massive wooden wheel. Inefficient muscle worked where hydraulics would better have served. A nerve-scraping screel came from the fifth runner, the steering runner, as it slowly turned. Sailors aloft fought to adjust sail and trim adjustable spar lines.
And steadily, with unexpected sharpness, the Slanderscree hove to port.
Both helmsmen struggled to hold the wheel steady as their feet left the deck. September threw his mass on the port side of the wheel and Ta-hoding added his. With four bodies straining, the runner stayed turned and the ship continued to come around even as her speed increased.
Then Ta-hoding and September could let go. The feet of the starboard side helmsman touched wood again as the extreme angle of turn was relaxed. They were racing down a broad avenue of clear ice cut by the stavanzer.
On command the two helmsmen let go the wheel, to allow the ship to settle on her own forward heading. With the westwind directly behind them now, there was no worry of swerving violently from the trail. The wheel turned freely to a halt, spinning fast enough to crush a man’s skull. The helmsmen resumed their positions, tested the wheel and found it handled easily once more.
At sixty kilometers an hour they rushed down the slough. Pika-pedan pulp stained the ice below the runners, and the unbroken growth paralleling them became a green blur on both sides of the ship. With the wind behind them, muffled by the surrounding forest, they seemed to fly below the surface instead of above it, submerged in emerald silence.
The quiet made audible to the relaxing crew the horrified shriek of the foremast lookout.
Ethan looked forward, ignorant of the loss of precious seconds. One, no two gigantic black pits like the mouths of caves were coming toward them, completely blocking the trail. As they raced nearer, a mysterious whisper became a fearful murmuring, then a tornado of roaring and bellowing that shook his teeth inside his head.
Ta-hoding desperately shouted instructions to the mates and the men in the rigging, trying at the same time to direct his helmsmen.
Again the steering runner turned, terror lending the Tran at its spokes a strength normal minds and bodies never possess. Again it dug and chewed at the ice. The Slanderscree angled to the south, slamming into the forest with a deck-sloshing spray of shattered stalks and sap. But now the ship was moving so fast the forest offered no real impediment. Pika-pedan trunks vanished on all sides as the weighty bulk of the icerigger slashed through.