“None for you.”
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I reached across and picked up the ewer of wine and water and drank from it, then selected a segment of the brick-dust biscuit, which I ate. He did not try to stop me, but when I was finished-it did not take long-he produced his knife and showed it to me.
“See this, lovely boy? Lanko says you are to starve, and so that’s what I say, too. If you come up here again I’ll make a pattern on you so nice you’ll never tire of looking at it.”
Conversation being pointless, I turned my back on him and started to walk away. He did not like that, and threw his knife at me. It would have hit me under the left shoulder and gone through into the heart; he meant business. Every defense of mine leaped. In the splinter of a second I was aware of the knife, next moment I experienced a surge of energy rising and thrusting from me, at my direction, yet so fast it seemed almost to move of its own instinctive volition. The knife sizzled and spun away as if it had hit an electric shield, and the clustered watching men groaned and backed off. They had anticipated magic and were not amazed, only disheartened. They had wanted to see their bad luck killed.
Their bad luck did not bother to glance around. I went below to take up my oar again, noticing the sinking tingle of the shield as it retreated into me. It seemed this Power, which mostly I would not use, was stronger now than it had ever been.
Word got about.
A man crawled up to me in the rowers’ station, begging me to say if we should ever reach a shore.
I knew we were near to land, sensed it with certainty. In two days or less we would make it out from the opaline greeness of the ocean.
The next day a flock of gulls went over, white gulls with black-barred breasts and red eyes; some perched on the masts of the ship, screaming and beating with their wings, as the gulls in my fever had beat in the vitals of Lyo’s corpse. The sailors grew more cheerful, drank wine. One brought me his frostbitten fingers to heal, like a gift.
Then on the seventy-sixth day out from the islands, the ninety-sixth day out from Semsam, they saw what they believed I had sent them to.
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5
The land rose from a flat platinum sea. A broken paving of thin ice glittered on the ocean’s surface, under a gray sun; it was bitter cold. The land itself was an irregular pinnacled whiteness. Nothing moved there. No inlet gave access to the interior. The cliffs were sheer.
It was plain to me we had come, after all, too far southward. Lanko’s instruments were doubtless faulty, and the clever navigator, though he would boast he could thread a ship through the eye of a bone needle, had no genius for direction.
Winter arrives swift and absolute at the southwestern tip of this continent, and we had sailed to meet it.
Men gathered at the rail, their breath blue, and acid with fear. Lanko strode from his cabin wrapped in red Tinsenese bear furs, the second at his heels. They made straight for me.
“Where’s the gold, Sri-boy? Eh?”
The second observed me narrowly. He said, “He doesn’t feel the chill like a normal man. His dirty magic keeps him warm.”
It was a fact that I had come above in just my tunic and breeches, having no other clothing to get into against the weather. Though, in truth, it seemed I could now control my body heat-involuntarily, almost without thinking, as I had deflected the murderous knife. I did not notice the cold more than as a mild discomfort, and now the second put his hand on my arm.
“He boils like the copper!” he shouted, and snatched his hand away again.
“Come,” said Lanko, “he won’t hurt you. Will you, eh, my darling? He’s good for all sorts of tricks, but he’s no stomach for a fight. Ah, I know, his sprite-familiar pushed off your knife. I say it was your pox-mucky bad aim.”
The second remonstrated. Lanko shut him up with a look.
Lanko put his arm over my shoulders.
“Well, now, I was asking, where’s the gold? Not up those snow cliffs.”
“You’ve brought your ship too far south,” I said to him.
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Not that I imagined he could really be reasoned with. “Set Gull for the north, keeping this coast on the left hand. Seven or eight days of oars, even without a following wind, should see a milder climate.”
“You swear this for a certainty?”
“I reckon it to be so, yes.”
“And how would you know, my fine boy? The same way you knew I should get rich here?”
The second broke in, in a flinty scared voice trying to be menacing, “I’d say, Lanko, that he’s a devil who led us here to get vengeance. Maybe some Masrian wizard set a curse on us and this is his instrument, eh, Lanko?” He laughed, attempting now to make a joke in case he became the joke instead. “A nasty devil-sending to lure us to our deaths.”
Lanko said to me, “Our stores are nearly gone, magician. Care to magic some up for us, see us over these eight or nine or ten or a hundred days of sailing up the coast?”
“Lanko,” I said gently, “need only open his private store to feed the whole ship.”
He smiled. Even the sharp little eyes smiled. He liked me for enabling him to despise me.
“And you,” he said, “won’t ask for further rations till we reach landfall. Will you?”
“Since there is so little, I will agree to that.”
“Ah,” he said. He bowed, took my hand and kissed it. “Now get below, you bloody Sri bastard. Get to your oar.”
There was no guilt in me at their fate. They were at best robbers, and most a deal worse than robbers, and besides, I never imagined they would perish here. I was not the angel of their deaths, contrary to popular opinion aboard, nor their bad luck. What I said to them I knew was exact-the winter was less severe northward. Somewhere a river opened into the land, part frozen at its mouth. The cliffs were the fortress walls; we had only to search out a door.
Still, I had grown aware of what was due.
I was sleeping in the below-deck at the end of my second shift, though at my bench, while some were yet rowing in response to Lanko’s hurry to leave the cold behind.
I woke without alarm to find men binding me with thick cords. I lay quiet, and let them do what it reassured them to do. My use for the ship was ended. I sensed something before me, some test, some knowledge I must achieve, that waited for my solitude. I was not afraid, nor angry.
They finished with the rope, whispering. I opened my eyes
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and let them discover I was alert. They stumbled back, cursing with fright. When I did not struggle, thinking me restrained, they became more courageous, and one kicked me in the side, another wrenched my head up by the beard and dropped it back so I should see diamonds flash in my brain. I did not defend myself with Power. I said, “Be careful,” and they trampled over each other getting away from me.
Then someone shouted from the hatch, Lanko’s second. The braver men hoisted me, and presently I was out on the deck under the dome of polished jet that passed for a winter sky.
The sea roared softly around us. The wind was getting up, and the great sails spread to it lovingly, and aft the windcatcher creaked as it was drawn over.
They were burning incense before the Hessu god; I could smell the cloy of it. I could not see Lanko about; maybe he was sleeping off his fat ration of wine, missing the resurrection of these ancient customs. For I was to be the scapegoat, the sacrifice. The sea did not care for me, was peeved at my presence; as a mark of her displeasure she had misled the ship, rotted the rations, hidden the green and gold of the land behind hard white armor. So they would give me to the sea to eat, drown their bad luck, and fortune would beam on them once more. They did not even keep my pack, nor anything in it, but threw the bundle with me; bad luck was bad luck.
I did not confuse the transparency of their belief with protestations, threats, or unnecessary miracles.
Not till they flung me, with a hilarious shout, over the rail did I cause my bonds to part like frayed wool. Not till my feet touched the water did I stay my fall, and catch my bundle neatly as I stood on the sea.