a black, greasy substance. ‘What’s that smeared all over the walls?’
I asked uncle Beldin.
‘Tar,’ he replied with an indifferent shrug. ‘It helps to keep the
water out.’
That sort of alarmed me. ‘The boat’s made of wood,’ I said. ‘Isn’t
wood supposed to float?’
‘Only when it’s one solid piece, Pol. The sea wants to have a level
surface, and empty places under that surface offend it, so it tries to
seep in and fill up those spaces. And the tar keeps the wood from
rotting.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘I’m sure your opinion hurts its feelings.’
‘You always have to try to be clever, don’t you, uncle?’
‘Look upon it as a character defect if you like.’ He grinned.
After Beldaran and I had deposited our belongings in our tiny
cabin, we went back up on deck. Riva’s sailors were making the
vessel ready to depart. They were burly, bearded men, many of
whom were stripped to the waist. All that bare skin made me just
a little jumpy for some reason.
There seemed to be ropes everywhere – an impossible snarl
passing through pulleys and running upward in an incomprehensible
tangle. The sailors untied the ropes that held the ship up against
the wharf, and then pushed us a ways out and took their places at
the oars. One ruffian with an evil face sat cross-legged in the stern
and began to pound rhythmically on a hide-topped drum to set the
pace for the oarsmen. The ship moved slowly out through the
crowded harbor toward the open sea.
Once we were past the breakwater, the sailors pulled in their oars
and began hauling on various ropes. I still don’t fully understand
exactly how a sailor can tell one rope from another, but Riva’s men
seemed to know what they were doing. Large horizontal beams
With tightly rolled canvas attached to them crept up the masts as
the chanting sailors pulled on the ropes in a unison set by the rhythm
Of the chant. The pulleys squealed as the canvas-bearing beams rose
to the tops of the masts. Then aloft, other sailors, agile as monkeys,
untied the canvas and let it roll down. The sails hung slack for a
few moments. Then a breeze caught them and they bellied out with
a booming sound.
The ship rolled slightly to one side, and then it began to move.
Water foamed as the bow of the ship cut into the waves, and the
breeze of our passage touched my face and tossed my hair. The
waves were not high enough to be alarming, and Riva’s ship
mounted each one with stately pace and then majestically ran down
the far side.
I absolutely loved it!
The ship and the sea became unified, and there was a music to
that unification, a music of groaning timbers, creaking ropes, and
booming sails. We moved out across the sun-touched waves with
the music of the sea filling our ears.
I’ve frequently made light, disparaging remarks about Alorns and
their fascination with the sea, but there’s a kind of holiness in it
almost as if true sailors have a different God. They don’t just love
the sea; they worship it, and in my heart I know why.
‘I can’t see the land any more!’ Beldaran exclaimed that evening,
looking apprehensively sternward.
‘You aren’t supposed to, love,’ Riva told her gently. ‘We’d never
get home if we tried to keep the Sendarian coast in plain sight the
whole way to the Isle.’
The sunset on the sea ahead of us was glorious, and when the
moon rose, she built a broad, gleaming highway across the glowing
surface of the night-dark sea.
All bemused by the beauty around me, I sat down on a convenient
barrel, crossed my arms on the rail, and set my chin on them to
drink in the sense of the sea. I remained in that reverie all through
the night, and the sea claimed me as her own. My childhood had
been troubled, filled with resentments and a painful, almost
mortifying sense of my own inadequacy. The sea calmed those troubled
feelings with her serene immensity. Did it really matter that one
little girl with skinned knees felt all pouty because the world didn’t
genuflect every time she walked by? The sea didn’t seem to think
so, and increasingly as the hours passed, neither did I.
The dawn announced her coming with a pale light just above the
sternward horizon. The world seemed filled with a grey, shadowless
luminescence, and the dark water became as molten silver. When
the sun, made ruddy by the sea mist, mounted above the eastern
horizon, he filled my heart with a wonder such as I’d never known
before.
But the sea wasn’t done with me yet. Her face was like molten
glass, and then something immense swelled up from beneath
without actually breaking the surface. The resulting surge was untouched
by foam or silly little splashings. It was far too profound for that
kind of childish display. I felt a sudden sense of superstitious terror.
The mythology of the world positively teems with sea-monsters,
and Beltira and Belkira had amused Beldaran and me when we
were very young by telling us stories, usually of Alorn origin. No
sea-going people will ever pass up the chance to talk about
seamonsters, after all.
‘What’s that?’ I asked a sleepy-eyed sailor who’d just come up
on deck, and I pointed at the disturbance in the water.
He squinted over the rail. ‘Oh,’ he said in an off-hand way, ‘those
be whales, my Lady.’
‘Whales?’
‘Big fish, my Lady.’ He squinted at the sea again. ‘It’s the time of
year when they flock together. I’d guess that there be quite a few
down there.’
‘Is that why the water’s bulging up like that – because there are
so many?’
‘No, my Lady. One whale all by himself can make the sea heave
that way.’
I was sure he was exaggerating, but then an enormous dark form
erupted from the water like a mountain aborning. I couldn’t believe
what I was seeing! Nothing alive could be that big!
Then he crashed with a boom back into the sea, sending great
sheets of water in all directions, and he slapped his tail down against
the surface with another huge noise and disappeared.
Then he jumped again, and again.
He was playing!
And then he was not alone. Other whales also came surging up
out of the sea to leap and play in the morning sun like a crowd of
overgrown children frolicking in a play yard.
And they laughed! Their voices were high-pitched, but they were
not squeaky. There was a profound depth to them and a kind of
yearning.
One of them – I think it was that first one – rolled over on his
side to look at me with one huge eye. There were wrinkles around
that eye as if he were very, very old, and there was a profound
wisdom there.
And then he winked at me and plunged back into the depths.
No matter how long I live, I’ll always remember that strange
meeting. in some obscure way it’s shaped my entire view of the
world and of everything that’s hidden beneath the surface of
ordinary reality. That single event made the tedious journey from the
Vale and this voyage worth while – and more.
We were another two days reaching Riva, and I spent those days
,filled with the wonder of the sea and of those creatures she
supported as a mother supports her children.
The Isle of the Winds is a bleak, inhospitable place that rises out
‘Of a usually storm-tossed sea, and when viewed from the water the
city seems as unwelcoming as the rock upon which it’s built. It rises
steeply from the harbor in a series of narrow terraces, and each row
of houses stands at the brink of the terrace upon which it’s built.
The seaward walls of those houses are thick and windowless, and
battlements surmount them. In effect this makes the city little more
than a series of impenetrable walls rising one after another to the
Citadel which broods down over the entire community. Whole races
could hurl themselves at Riva with no more effect than the waves
have upon the cliffs of the Isle itself. As the Master said, ‘All the
tides of Angarak cannot prevail against it,’ and when you add the
Cherek fleet patrolling the waters just off the coast, you have the
potential for the extinction of any race foolish enough even to
contemplate the notion of making war on the Rivans. Torak’s crazy,
but he’s not that crazy.
Beldaran and I had taken some rather special pains to make
ourselves presentable that morning. Beldaran was to be Queen of Riva,
and she wanted to make a good impression on her future subjects.
I was not going to be the queen, and my target was a certain specific