Part 11 (1/2)

The grinding of the runners became a slick abra-sive noise as the huge s.h.i.+p 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 swingho!”

Both helmsmen strained at the ma.s.sive wooden wheel. Inefficient muscle worked where hydraulics would better have served. A nerve-sc.r.a.ping _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 ma.s.s on the port side of the wheel and Tahoding added his. With four bodies straining, the runner stayed turned and the s.h.i.+p continued to come around even as her speed increased.

Then Tahoding 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 s.h.i.+p to settle on her own forward head-ing. 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 re-sumed their positions, tested the wheel and found it handled easily once more.

At sixty kilometers an hour they rushed down the slough. Pikapedan pulp stained the ice below the run-ners, and the unbroken growth paralleling them be-came a green blur on both sides of the s.h.i.+p. With the wind behind them, m.u.f.fled 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 pre-cious 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.

Tahoding 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-slos.h.i.+ng spray of shattered stalks and sap. But now the s.h.i.+p was moving so fast the forest offered no real impediment.

Pikapedan trunks vanished on all sides as the weighty bulk of the icerigger slashed through.

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 rig-ging rushed as fast as he or she was able to the star-board side of the s.h.i.+p.

With the steering runner hard over until its bolts creaked, the sails properly trimmed, and all movable ma.s.s s.h.i.+fted 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p?

All sailors aloft held on for their lives. If they fell over-board 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 s.h.i.+p. A voluminous black gullet like an empty place in s.p.a.ce loomed over the far railing. There was the sound of an intimate thunder, and suc-tion 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 s.h.i.+p had already shot past.

Ethan leaned over the railing to look back, saw the tusks strike ice and send tenkilo 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 s.h.i.+p settled back to an even keel. A dull _thrrrump_ sounded, like a t.i.tanic belch, as the portside 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 no-ticed. As for himself, he was sweating heavily despite the survival-suit's compensators. Thermotropic mate-rial 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 EerMeesach at the doorway. They entered together.

” 'Twas a herd guide we first encountered, not a solitaire or rogue.” The wizard, for once, did not ap-pear 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 s.h.i.+p 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 rea.s.suring 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 pikapedan and were traveling across pikapina once more. Soon Ethan could no longer look astern and see the gap where they had emerged.

Three days more and they left furry b.u.t.terflies and green ice fuzz behind and were again chivaning across open ice. Tahoding's relief was palpable, that of his men almost too intense to bear.

When they pa.s.sed 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 sur-mise they had reached Trannish heaven. They had not, but the normal world of free ice and other s.h.i.+ps 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 Hun-nar. ”We will try to make more time for asking with the next s.h.i.+p we pa.s.s.”

That s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed.

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 s.h.i.+p was traveling in the right direction.

They pa.s.sed other vessels. Commerce here was not heavy, but it was steady. Several rocky islets grew, slid past. A couple showed signs of habitation. Even-tually they grew so numerous that Tahoding ordered some sails taken in.

They were traveling through a region of many tiny islands. Smoke curled from chimneys of steep-roofed houses cringing like brown barnacles to miniature har-bors or crawling antlike up talus-strewn slopes. Neatly laid out and carefully cultivated fields of pikapina huddled in the lee of sheltering islets. Startled Tran would glance up as the _Slanderscree_ flew past, set to murmuring by the wondrous s.h.i.+p they might or might not have seen.