They were off the occupied trail.
And several gray curves showed above the crest of the forest like islands in a pea-green sea.
“Turn!” Ethan found himself pounding the railing and yelling till his throat hurt. “Turn!”
There were commands, but the experienced sailors knew the chance they had to take and the action to make it happen. Everyone on the deck and in the rigging rushed as fast as he or she was able to the starboard side of the ship.
With the steering runner hard over until its bolts creaked, the sails properly trimmed, and all movable mass shifted to one side, the Slanderscree’s portside runners lifted with infinite slowness from the surface of the ice ocean.
A few centimeters, a half meter, two meters. A few sailors wrestled their way back to portside. The ship held, heeling dangerously far over on its right side, balancing now on two runners. The duralloy would hold, but what about the iron and steel bolts and wooden braces holding the runners to the ship? All sailors aloft held on for their lives. If they fell overboard now, into the forest, they knew they could expect no rescue.
Ethan saw wood and sky as he looked toward the left side of the ship. A voluminous black gullet like an empty place in space loomed over the far railing. There was the sound of an intimate thunder, and suction tore at him, then was gone. Two tusks, each thicker than the Slanderscree’s mainmast, caught the sun and sent it tumbling into his mask, temporarily blinding him.
“By the Servants of the Dark One, she’ll go over!” someone howled.
The tusks came down, fourteen meters of solid ivory, tons of beauty in the mouth of a demon.
But by that time the ship had already shot past. Ethan leaned over the railing to look back, saw the tusks strike ice and send ten-kilo splinters flying. A tiny wild eye, set back of that monstrous maw, rolled dully at him and he fancied he could see through it and into a ridiculously small brain.
Dimly, he was aware of mates shouting orders. Spars were realigned, sails trimmed. Slowly the ship settled back to an even keel. A dull thrrrump sounded, like a titanic belch, as the port-side runners smashed back onto the ice. A wooden brace somewhere below deck cracked audibly, but both runners held.
Everyone had expected the impact, held on through the violent jarring. No one was shaken over the side.
“Too close,” Hunnar muttered as he mounted the helmdeck. The knight was panting steadily, Ethan noticed. As for himself, he was sweating heavily despite the survival-suit’s compensators. Thermotropic material can adjust only so fast.
Ethan moved carefully down to the main cabin. Anything still intact in the galley and capable of being heated would taste good just now.
He encountered Eer-Meesach at the doorway. They entered together.
“’Twas a herd guide we first encountered, not a solitaire or rogue.” The wizard, for once, did not appear excited by an interesting encounter. “In a herd, the stavanzer will proceed and eat in parallel line. We ran back along the guide’s trail, right into their line, and barely did we miss the end guards.”
Ethan saw too clearly in his mind’s eye the final bottomless gullet they’d just avoided. It was probably only his fevered imagination, distorted in his memory by fear and terror, but the last stavanzer had looked big enough to swallow the entire ship and use the mainmast for a toothpick.
He’d done very little real work, but his body had burned plenty of calories. In any case, there was something reassuring and normal about eating.
He’d had enough of the extraordinary to last him for a while.
VIII
THE NEXT TIME THE lookouts cried out, it was in a more normal voice, tinged this time with excitement of a pleasured kind.
Minutes later, without warning, the green forest vanished and began to shrink behind them. They’d emerged from the pika-pedan and were traveling across pika-pina once more. Soon Ethan could no longer look astern and see the gap where they had emerged.
Three days more and they left furry butterflies and green ice fuzz behind and were again chivaning across open ice. Ta-hoding’s relief was palpable, that of his men almost too intense to bear.
When they passed a small trading raft, its single small deck piled high with strapped down goods, the cheers of the crew would have led an onlooker to surmise they had reached Trannish heaven. They had not, but the normal world of free ice and other ships was as much as the lowliest hand could wish.
The trader’s crew crowded its railing to stare in awe at the enormous icerigger. Clearly, they’d never heard of it, a measure of how far from Arsudun the Slanderscree had come. Both crews barely had time to exchange a few brief shouts and queries before the impatient wind separated them.
“Where are they going?” Ethan asked Hunnar.
“Not to Poyolavomaar,” said a disappointed Hunnar. “We will try to make more time for asking with the next ship we pass.”
That ship turned out to be another trader, one twice the size of the first they’d encountered, nearly thirty meters long. It even boasted a central cabin. Its crew’s amazement at the sight of the Slanderscree, however, was no less than that of the first raft they’d passed.
Although traveling on a course similar to that of the icerigger, the trader was not proceeding to Poyolavomaar. But its crew gladly gave confirmation that the great ship was traveling in the right direction.
They passed other vessels. Commerce here was not heavy, but it was steady. Several rocky islets grew, slid past. A couple showed signs of habitation. Eventually they grew so numerous that Ta-hoding ordered some sails taken in.
They were traveling through a region of many tiny islands. Smoke curled from chimneys of steep-roofed houses clinging like brown barnacles to miniature harbors or crawling antlike up talus-strewn slopes. Neatly laid out and carefully cultivated fields of pika-pina huddled in the lee of sheltering islets. Startled Tran would glance up as the Slanderscree flew past, set to murmuring by the wondrous ship they might or might not have seen.
Two weeks later, after negotiating undulating archipelagos and dangerously low-lying islands that were scattered like reefs in the ice, they reached Poyolavomaar.
Needle-topped crags and spires towered out of the ice, rising to some of the most impressive heights Ethan had encountered on Tran-ky-ky. A few rose three thousand meters into the clear blue sky. The sharp arrogant angles indicated a geologically youthful region, for such spires could not long retain their glory under the ceaseless assault of the planet’s eroding winds.
The lofty islands that formed the near-circle Ta-hoding’s captain friend had spoken of nearly touched the Slanderscree’s flanks, titanic stone dancers frozen forever only an earth-beat apart. Twisting around the granite needles, the wind acted strangely, as if conscious of the unusual setting it played in. Ta-hoding’s task looked difficult, until he saw they could simply follow one of the numerous rafts converging on the island necklace and trail it in.
Homes and other structures, including armed ramparts, crowded the afterthought slopes which muted the cliffs where they entered the ice. Connecting the visible islands, and probably all of them if the garrulous merchant back in Arsudun was correct, were high stone walls built onto the ice. Each had a wide gate in its middle to permit entry or egress. Fortunately, no arch covered the one they approached, or both masts and masonry would have suffered. As it was, there was barely enough room for the icerigger to squeeze through, while guards in the flanking towers gaped or shouted orders.