On the twentieth day, we had seen the last of any land for some while. Gull was stocked below with kegs of water and wine, salt meat and dried fruits. The air of adventuring and excitement continued. My best hours had become those twelve when I could bury myself with the pole of the ironwood oar, mindlessly turning in the dark toward the unknown faceless thing on the horizon of my wilderness.
It would take three Masrian months to achieve the western shores, four or five months of the Hessek calendar, some seventy-six days in all, discounting the time we had already used up getting through the southern islands.
Open sea. Featureless some days, on others alive with the life beneath, with leaping fish, striped as tigers or spotted like cats, with birds above going landward to the north. In the sky vast cloud lines, armies of cumulus on the march, at sunset scarlet galleys rowing there with green and silver sails, or the storm warning, that dark chimney with the head of an ax, a screaming vent of wind. We had three or four storms but weathered them. None was as bad as that hurricane I myself had mastered.
Events marked each day from another.
Some with rain, some with wind, some with the fall sun and the calm of the turquoise water-meadows beneath us.
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Some with fights and brawls. One noon two men were hung to whine on the foremast, a punishment; brought to me to be healed with black lips and crying eyes after, so they would be fit for evening duties. Nights were marked with random sodomy, heard and glimpsed in the dark, not always willing.
Sometimes there was a sight of a distant fleck of land spotted at sunup; later, one or two minuscule islands where fresh water was gathered, and a big crab, the size of a small dog, might provide dinner for Lanko and his favorites, which had not been its intention. Incidents. A rower, tough as bullhide, starting to weep because he had dreamed of a boy lover of his youth, a mixie boy sent to be a whore in Bar-Ibithni; a man drowned in a sudden storm, which had caught him obeying nature at the bow; another vanishing, having spit in the eye of Lanko’s second. After forty days at sea, some of the biscuit went to mildew, and they shouted at me to say a spell and make it good. It was not my plan anymore to revive the dead; even this food-death, absurd though maybe the comparison was, sent me weak in the legs, images of Lellih swimming up in my brain, and that other necromancy. When I refused, there was bad feeling. I told them I would miss my own rations two days out of every four; I ate little in any event, but the spectacular gesture drew off their wrath. The magician was contrary. They let him alone.
Each day differing. Yet each day the same.
I came to know the oar, to understand its physical person as one would come physically to understand a woman one lies with forty, fifty nights. My iron-wood wife, with her blue blade combing the water and her slim hard body in my arms, across my breast and thighs. Six hours of copulation, then another six. A demanding lady. Yet she left my mind free. How many hours of how many days of how many months the shadows and the fires crossed my brain as I sat in that black ill-smelling hole, while the oar opened my palms on their own blood, no protective scars to armor me, and the faint pink light of dawn at the hatches faded into gray and into pink once more at the day’s decline. The climate had cooled, the skies, when not obscured by cloud, had a purer, thinner look to them; by night the stars shone large and brilliant. On the winds that blew down from the west came an aroma of winter, like the old winter of the northlands, biting bitch gale, lash of sleet, marble weather with a thick snow down.
On the fifty-first day there was a fog. The ship sailed into it, and a chill silence settled on everything. The sea below
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was gray with a staring blue beneath; the masts scaled over with rime. Lanko’s men cursed and put on their jackets and cloaks. The sun showed as a lemon-metal ring. Nobody looked for naked witch-girls riding on pillars of ice.
Through this soundless blanket we rode, the oars making a sucking, muffled noise. The southerners did not care for the fog, neither this particular penetrating clarity of cold. The winters of Seema, Tinsen, and Bar-Ibithni are not positively cold, cold simply by contrast with the blaze of summer; dust winds blow and rains descend; hail and thunder and black clouds. But snow never falls on the golden lands of the south and east, and only on two or three high mountains of the archipelago do they find it, and then they bring it down in clever sealed flasks to cool the drinks of lords, that, obviously, being its only purpose.
I at my oar, deep in waking, blind-eyed dreams (of Tathra, of Demizdor, of Eshkorek and the black krarl, of the Crimson Palace, of Malmiranet, of a silver mask), suddenly heard the cry around me, men with labor-sweating faces leaning from their stations.
“The magician brought us here, promised us gold. Let him lift the freezing fog.”
I looked about at them and they fell quiet. Their faces Were hostile. I was no longer lucky.
“Well,” the man on the other side of me demanded. He was a felon from some southern town, a mix with no ears. “Well, can’t you do it, mighty sorcerer?”
“The fog is a natural thing and will pass. You need not fear it.”
The mix laughed, showing me off to the others about him, as we all, without a break, bent and straightened with the pull of the oars.
“I am thinking the Sri magician is also a natural thing, and will pass.”
I thought, I could lift the fog, shut up their din. Easy. Why not? But that was how it had begun; why not walk on water, why not fly through the air, why not raise the dead: I thought, I can suffer this. God knows it’s little enough.
They chaffered and bawled at me a while.
I paid no heed. How I had altered.
A couple of hours later we rowed out of the fog, straight on our western course.
By the seventieth day they had begun to fret for land. Ra-
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tions were low, mainly due to the greed of Lanko and his second officer-I honor him with the title-and the lack of organization aboard. Thieves by trade, they stole also from each other. Hardly a night now without someone caught in the hold with his fingers in the stores. Lanko devised an extravagant execution; a man apprehended drinking koois was beld head down in the koois jar and drowned. Lanko then offered the jar to any who wished to drink. Lanko’s own private stores, kept separate from the crew, were never raided.
They had had one old brown map, pinned by a lady’s brooch to the table in Lanko’s cabin. This scrap indicated the West land, a vague melted shape with no bays or harborage marked in, more guesswork than charting. According to this map, however, the land should by now have revealed itself. Yet the sea, blue-green and cold, was featureless.
They were like men waking from opium. Their adventurous spirit had guttered out; they seemed to come to and discover themselves, like sleepwalkers, miles from home. What were they doing here in this chilly water-desert, with its scents of snow and emptiness?
Some ice went floating by, miles off to the south, like sails of rusty glass. Muffled in oddments of clothing, skins and pelts and furs subtracted from the cargoes of merchant ships, the sailors pointed to the ice with fear. They had told stories about it, but somehow they had not expected to see it. At least, in the stories, it had been warmer.
Suddenly an image of the sea demon of Old Hessek, Hessu, was set up in the prow. Apparently Seema acknowledged him, too. There he sat, astride his lion-fish, lightnings in hand. His copper was all green, and the enamel wings of the fish had lost their luster. They rubbed him over and began to offer to him libations of wine, the odd inedible sea-thing dragged up on the lines at the bulwarks. Gods indigenous to Seema were mentioned, too; even an occasional grudging scared dawn prayer was offered Masrimas.
On the seventy-fourth day, when I was due my abbreviated rations, none were forthcoming. I did not need to ask why. Their mutterings, the shifting near me in the night, once waking to behold a man at my pack, who scuttled away when he noted me stirring-these had tutored me. I went to where Lanko’s second was engaged in doling out pieces of gray biscuit and strips of salted gristle. He winked at me, and smiled about.