At times the sunbeams slanted down into the deeps, picking out shoals of fish, ranging from tiny things glittering like glass shards that swept this way and that in clouds of light, to bulky, barb-finned things uh long as a man, their flattened flanks gleaming iridescent as they glided effortlessly past the speeding ship.
Mostly the men marvelled, but from time to time Roc would lower a line among the speeding mass, and the formation would dissolve into a threshing tangle of jaws as ready to snap at hooks unbaited as baited; it often took the two of them a long struggle to hoist up the catch, and many of the huge fish flipped themselves free against the ship's flanks. Often a school of porpoises would come to leap and sport like merry children around the bow, mocking its man-made sleekness with their speed and grace; for Elof and for Roc they could never come often enough nor stay too long, but they soon grew bored with the unresponsive ship and sped off. More than once their greater cousins came to alarm; immense whales rising singly or in vast schools that appeared in a line of white water mist-crowned along the horizon, like breakers upon some vast and impassable shoals. Remembering the Hounds of Niarad, Elof steered well clear of them, feeling like a mouse among the tall cattle he had once herded, and for the most part they left the
Seafire
equally alone.
Not all such encounters were as harmless. Very early on they grew used to sharks circling the cutter, and after an alarming experience of Roc's they were careful never to trail hands in the water; the beasts came in all sizes, but even a small one was well able to remove a finger. Some were vast and solitary monsters far longer than the cutter, but apparently harmless, idling by the
Seafire
with enormous mouths hanging witlessly agape. "Though I have heard of others as large that live in deep waters and hunt like their lesser cousins," Elof remarked. "The headman in Asenby kept a tooth of one…"
"And?" prompted Roc nervously.
"Bigger than my two hands," Elof said tersely. "You could drive a cart through such jaws as-held it."
"Do you try it if you like! How'd you tell'em from these peaceable brutes?"
Elof shrugged. "Go for a swim around one…" Roc shuddered. Needless to say he never took Elof up on his suggestion; and Elof himself came to regret making it. For it brought home to him very uncomfortably, when he had already had time to grow used to the sea and considered himself a hardened hand, just how vast a deep there lay beneath these fragile boards, where light and warmth gave swift way to blackness unending and chill; what secrets might not such depths contain?
Yet it was not from any depths that their next hazard was to come. In all their voyage till that day they had seen no other craft, and that was no surprise to Elof. So when one clear morning in the sixth week of their voyage he heard Roc's hail, he came running up from the little cabin at once. "A sail? It can't be! Where?"
Roc simply shrugged and pointed northward into the wind. Then Elof saw it at once, a high triangle of whiteness fust rising above the horizon that might indeed have been some great sails gleaming fair and clean in the sunlight, spread wide to run before the stiff breeze. But when they had watched it in silence for some minutes, Elof shook his head doubtfully; he strode forward to the mast, scrambled up it as far as he dared with the ship thus heeling on a beam reach, and, shading his eyes, strained to make out what lay below the horizon. Roc, seeing him start, called up "What manner of hull has it, then?"
"No hull!" was Elof's curt reply, and he came sliding down to the deck and ran to the helm. "No hull, because it isn't a ship, and that whiteness is no sail; it rises sheer from the water."
"Hel's blue teeth! What is it, then, man?"
"Something I should have known sooner; I saw enough of them in my childhood home, come the fall. When the ice-islands came drifting southward, then it was time to beach all the larger fisher-craft of the village, and only the little skin-boats would go out, buoyed with blown-up skins."
"Ice-islands…" echoed Roc uneasily.
"Aye. Great drifting chunks of it, fallen from the greater mass to the north, no doubt; some are very hills and towers afloat. I thought them evil things even before I learned what lay behind the Ice. But they were harbingers of winter, then, and melted away with the spring; I would never have looked to see one this far south, and in this season."
"Might be a stray," suggested Roc, "a leftover from this winter past, slow to melt…"
Elof nodded "It might; though if that is melting, what size was it at first? And where one strays, so might a flock; we would do well to watch for more. At least we will be able to outrun them, if the wind holds from the north."
And hold it did; for so long, so steadily and so chill, that Elof came to conclude it must be blowing straight down across the Ice from its northernmost heart in the frozen oceans at the summit of the world, where no man might pass. That, too, seemed strange in late spring; what little weatherlore there was of the open ocean predicted cool easterlies off the Ice at this season, and some milder westerlies further south. But the cold blast southward reigned, and though it might falter at times it seldom gave way to any other wind for long, a day at most; they began to think of it as the only thing constant upon the changing ocean. And on its back, as they were soon to find, it bore many ice-islands more. On that first day they only appeared to northward, but on the following afternoon a great jagged band of white lifted against the leaden sky almost in their path. It was no danger to them, being easy enough to avoid in the wide ocean, though to do so meant a series of long and annoying tacks. They glared at it as it glided by them, its flanks glistening against the dull clouds, scoured into strange bluish ridges by sea and sun, slick now with meltwater like the slime of some unclean beast.
In the few days of peace that followed Elof steered to the southeast as far as he dared, to avoid more ice. The sailing was all too easy, bearing away effortlessly before that southward wind when it blew, or running comfortably on the weaker westerlies; in these latitudes the air was milder, and while there was some heavy weather even the water that came roaring over the bows seemed warmer, or at least less chill. Roc revelled in the change, but Elof distrusted it, fearful of straying into the sudden calms for which southern waters were notor-ious. He kept careful watch on their position and progress; and thus it was that they were not taken by surprise. For it was as he attempted to trace the sun one overcast noontide, by a subtle instrument with thin sheets of spar crystal, that he noticed the dark speck cresting the southward horizon; against that sullen sky, shaded in charcoal and lead, they might otherwise have quite missed their peril till it was too late. But now it was his turn to hail, and Roc's to come running in disbelief. When he saw, though, he whistled, long and low. "Well! A sail it surely is this time, and a big 'un! Now what…" He stopped then, and swallowed audibly.
Elof nodded; his own mouth had gone suddenly dry. "It's black, yes."
"But… Not
here
!" burst out Roc, in violent disbelief. "They've no way onto this ocean!"
"I know!" muttered Elof. Memories arose at the sight, old and bloody. "And yet…" He stared suddenly. The black speck was distorting, shivering, settling into a new shape. "They're going onto a new tack! And I'll give you one guess why…"
Roc nodded grimly. "They've spotted us! Want to hang around and see who they are?"
"No, indeed!" grated Elof. "Ready on the winches! If I bring her closer to the wind we should be able to keep our distance long enough to lose them… whoever they may be!" He unlatched the tiller and bore down on it; the nose swung around from southeast to due east once more and the
Seafire
heeled as Roc wound in the headsail, riding the strong northerly like a spirited steed. It was the first time he had been wholly thankful for that wind, as they began to pick up speed and skip and slice along the wavecrests, and he saw the black sail seem to slip away beneath the horizon once again; he smiled with cold satisfaction. But then Roc seized him by the sleeve and pointed, and what he saw dashed that smile from his lips. Over the brink of the waters ahead two more dark peaks arose and grew with startling speed, their squaresails angled to sail close to the wind; 11 icy were hurtling down on him as fast as he toward I hem. Another minute, while he hesitated, looked wildly about, and their bows lifted into view, high-arched, knife-edged and cruel, black as the sails save for the white beast-patterns they bore.
"Ekwesh they are!" cried Roc. "Turn back! Go about! Or within the hour they'll have us -"
Elof felt a sear of bitter cold in head and stomach. "They're too close! They'll have us anyway if we turn! There's only one way now - ready on those winches, I'll take her on as close a reach as I dare!"
"Close to the wind?" yelled Roc. "You mean northward again? Among the ice-islands?"
"Northward indeed!" barked Elof. "And right up to the Ice itself, if need be!"
"Are you gone stark mad?"
"Think, man! They're four times our size, and what rig have they, but one squaresail? On the open sea they can run us down - but among the narrow ice-roads? Now stand to that winch, and haul, man,
haul
!"
Roc shook his head, but he flung himself on the winches and wound with all his strength, while Elof leaned hard on the heavy tiller, and felt the
Seafire
begin to shift beneath him, take the waves from a different angle. Her bows dipped, and great wings of spray burst over the bows before he had her properly trimmed, flying shards of water that stung his face as if already hardened into ice. They were on a northeasterly heading now, sailing toward the wind on a close reach, good and fast. The chill of the northerly played across him like a hoary breath, and he clutched his jacket close about him. An inner chill was on him that no warmth could cure, save one; and from her now he felt as far as ever he had been.
Perhaps Roc sensed this, for he began to bustle about below, and soon reappeared bearing mugs of their precious ale, cakes of hard bread and deep bowls of stewed smokemeat. "There, get this down you while you can! Times like this you never know when your next meal's likely to be, and the longer the stove's quenched, the better, till our little friends are well out of the way!" He snorted. "Speaking of which, how in the iciest parts of Hel did they ever get into it? They were stuck the whole breadth of the land away!"
"Yet they took Morvannec that was," Elof reminded him.
"Aye, by marching a few thousand fanatics half to death across the Ice! You telling me they hauled a warship on their shoulders? Anyway, we cleaned out every last man-eater of that pack!"
"That we knew of! They had a year, they might have built one, and a few survivors fled in it… But where have they been since?" Elof clawed a hand through his dark hair in frustration. "Ach you're right, it makes no sense! But look south, and there they are…"
"True," muttered Roc. "And so's the Ice, look you north! And here we are, rushing like loons between them! And what sense d'you find in
that
?"
Thus they ran, through many long days and nights, and thus they were pursued. It was a time of terrible strain for them both, for the ice-islands arose in their path once more, monstrous jagged things that gleamed in daylight like the fangs of harsh mountains, and under moon and stars glimmered like fragments of a sickly dream. Elof feared a night of overcast and storm, when they could only heave to and await what the waves would send them, ice or Ekwesh; but the skies grew clearer the further north they went, and the hours of darkness shorter. Nonetheless they slept little and poorly, for neither could linger away from the deck; Roc could not handle the cutter on his own for long in the best of conditions, and in any difficulty Elof needed him - all this, while the enemies at their heels were well-crewed and tireless. Whenever Elof could, he studied them at their manoeuvering, saw how they twisted and turned their loose heavy sails to tack around the ice-islands he had passed; clumsy he found them, but skilled and swift, and in their pursuit inexorable. It was small wonder that at each dawning the black sails loomed that trace larger, that fraction nearer.
They were growing bitterly chill, those dawnings, and the rime upon the rigging was slower to disperse in i he sun. The ice-islands were more frequent now, appearing on every quarter, and the sea between them was no longer clear but filling gradually with smaller floes and drifting chunks still large enough to stave in a small craft's planking or to spring its seams. Elof steered with minute care, and gritted his teeth at every scrape or rumble upon the hull. At nights he had to take care lest the sail grew too heavily coated with ice, whose weight might easily capsize them; in such seas that would be death too swift for even their pursuers to pick them up. And one clear night, when the ocean seemed like a shattered dish of white under the full moon, he saw a dread sight rise up above its crazed rim, a mist of white like the starry River overhead, but lying all across the northern horizon. As a boy he had seen it first, as a man on the verge of a new life he had watched it fade behind him; what was he, now that he faced the Iceglow once again? Almost like a ghost he felt, a troubled spirit wandering uneasily in a body that galled it, yet dared not be cast off. He huddled deeper into his fur-lined cloak, and yearned for sunrise. But when it came they found themselves plunging on a freshening wind toward a sea that seemed almost solid with drifting islands and floes of white, and ended in a high wall of white that arose in the farthest distance, a strength and rampart that stretched all across the northern horizon, and on either hand vanished with it into the blur of distance, beneath the curve of the world. And as they looked they felt that cold, constant blast strike full in their faces, pouring down those frozen heights like an invisible foss, washing their ancient malice out across the oceans of the world.