The Shining Ones
Page 9‘It won’t be when we reach the cove,’ she told him. ‘I’m going to make sure that you don’t get too much chance to examine that ship. I’m not really supposed to do this, so don’t get me into trouble.’ She looked sternly at Khalad. ‘And I want you in particular to keep a very tight rein on your curiosity.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. You’re too practical and too clever by half for my comfort. Your noble friends here aren’t imaginative enough to make any educated guesses about the ship. You’re a different matter. Don’t be digging at the decks with your knife, and don’t try to sneak off to examine things. I don’t want to drop by Cimmura someday and find a duplicate of the ship anchored in the river. We’ll go down to the cove, board the ship, and go directly below. You will not go up on deck until we get to where we’re going. A certain part of the ship has been set aside for us, and we’ll all stay there for the duration of the voyage. I want your word on that, gentlemen.’
Sparhawk could see some differences between Flute and Danae. Flute was more authoritarian, for one thing, and she didn’t seem to have Danae’s whimsical sense of humor. Although the Child Goddess had a definite personality, each of her incarnations seemed to have its own idiosyncrasies.
Flute looked up at the slowly darkening sky. ‘We’ll wait another hour,’ she decided. ‘The crew of the ship has been told to stay away from us. Our meals will be put just outside the door, and we won’t see the one who puts them there. It won’t do you any good to try to catch her, so don’t even try.’
‘Her?’ Ulath exclaimed. ‘Are you trying to say that there are women in the crew?’
‘They’re all females. There aren’t very many males where they come from.’
‘Women aren’t strong enough to raise and lower the sails,’ he objected.
‘These females are ten times stronger than you are, Ulath, and it wouldn’t matter anyway, because the ship doesn’t have sails. Please stop asking questions, gentlemen. Oh, one other thing. There’ll be a sort of humming sound when we get under way. It’s normal, so don’t let it alarm you.’
‘How…’ Ulath began.
She held up her hand. ‘No more questions, Ulath,’ she told him quite firmly. ‘You don’t need to know the answers. The ship’s here to take us from one place to another in a hurry. That’s all you need to know.’
‘That brings us to something we really should know,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To Jorsan on the west coast of Edom,’ she replied. ‘Well, almost, anyway. There’s a long gulf leading inland to Jorsan. We’ll put ashore at the mouth of the gulf and go inland on horseback. Now, why don’t we talk about something else?’
The fog seemed almost thick enough to walk on, and the knights were obliged to blindly follow the misty light of the torch Sephrenia held aloft as they rode down a steep bank toward the sound of unseen surf.
They reached a sandy beach and groped their way down toward the water. Then they saw other lights out in the fog – filmy, mist-shrouded lights which stretched out for what seemed an impossible distance. The lights did not flicker, and they were the wrong color for torchlight.
‘Good God!’ Ulath choked. ‘No ship could be that big!’
‘Ulath!’ Flute said sharply from out of the fog ahead.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
When they reached the water’s edge, all they could see was a dark, looming shape lying low in the water several yards out, a shape outlined by those unwinking white lights. A ramp reached from the ship to the beach, and Ch’iel, Sephrenia’s white palfrey, stepped confidently onto that ramp and clattered across to the ship.
There were dim, shrouded shapes on the deck, cloaked and hooded figures that were all no more than shoulder high, but strangely squat and blocky.
‘What do we do with the horses?’ Vanion asked as they all dismounted.
‘Just leave them here,’ Flute replied. ‘They’ll be taken care of. Let’s go below. We can’t start until everybody’s off the deck.’
‘The crew stays up here, don’t they?’ Ulath asked her.
‘No. It’s too dangerous.’
They went to a rectangular hatchway in the deck and followed an inclined ramp leading down.
‘Stairs would take up less space,’ Khalad said critically.
He stared at her in horror.
‘I told you that they’re not human,’ she shrugged.
The companionway they reached at the bottom of the ramp was low, and the knights had to half stoop as they followed the Child Goddess aft. The area below decks was illuminated by pale glowing spots of light recessed into the ceiling and covered over by what appeared to be glass. The light was steady, unwinking, and it definitely did not come from any kind of fire.
The quarters to which their little guide led them were more conventionally illuminated by candles, however, and the ceilings were high enough for the tall knights to stand erect. No sooner had Ulath closed the heavy door to what was in effect to be their prison for the next five days than a low-pitched humming sound began to vibrate in the deck beneath their feet, and they could feel the bow of the strange vessel start to swing ponderously about to point at the open sea. Then the ship surged forward.
‘What’s making it move?’ Kalten asked. ‘There’s no wind.’
‘Kalten!’ Aphrael said sharply.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘There are four compartments here,’ she told them. ‘We’ll eat in this one, and we can spread out and sleep in the other three. Put away your belongings, gentlemen. Then you might as well go to bed. Nothing’s going to happen for five days.’
Sparhawk and Kalten went into one of the cabins, taking Talen with them. Talen was carrying Khalad’s saddle-bags as well as his own.
‘What’s your brother up to?’ Sparhawk asked the boy suspiciously.
‘He wants to look around a bit,’ Talen replied.
‘Aphrael told him not to do that.’
‘So?’
They all staggered a bit as the ship gave another forward surge. The humming sound climbed to a whine, and the ship seemed to rise up in the water almost like a sitting man rising to his feet.
Kalten threw his saddle-bags onto one of the bunks and sat down beside them. ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ he grumbled.
‘You aren’t supposed to,’ Sparhawk replied.
‘I wonder if they’ve got anything to drink aboard. I could definitely use a drink about now.’
‘I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high, and I’m not sure you’d care to drink something brewed by nonhumans. It might do some strange things to you.’
Khalad came into the tiny compartment, his eyes baffled. ‘I don’t want to alarm you, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘but we’re moving faster than a horse can run.’
‘How do you know that?’ Talen asked him.
‘Those curtains in that central cabin are hanging over openings that are sort of like portholes – they’ve got glass over them, anyway. I looked out. There’s still fog all around us, but I could see the water. We passed a floating log, and it went by like a crossbow bolt. There’s something else, too. The hull curves back under us, and it isn’t touching the water at all.’
‘We’re flying?’ Kalten asked incredulously.
Khalad shook his head. ‘I think the keel’s touching the water, but that’s about all.’
‘I really don’t want to know about this,’ Kalten said plaintively.
‘He’s right, Khalad,’ Sparhawk said. ‘I think this is one of the things Aphrael told us was none of our business. Leave those curtains closed from now on.’
‘I can live with it.’
‘You don’t mind if I speculate just a bit, do you, Sparhawk?’
‘Go right ahead, but keep your speculations to yourself.’ He sat down on his bunk and began to pull off his boots. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to follow orders and go to bed. This is a good chance to catch up on our sleep, and we’ve all been running a little short on that for quite some time now. We’ll want to be alert when we get to Jorsan.’
‘Which only happens to be about a quarter of the way around the world,’ Khalad added moodily, ‘and which we’re going to reach in just five days. I don’t think I’m put together right for this kind of thing. Do I have to be a Pandion Knight, Sparhawk?’
‘Yes,’ Sparhawk told him, dropping his boots on the deck. ‘Was there anything else you wanted to know before I go to sleep?’
They all slept a great deal during the next five days. Sparhawk strongly suspected that Aphrael might have had a hand in that, since sleeping people don’t wander around making discoveries.
Their meals were served on strange oblong trays which were made of some substance none of them could identify. The food consisted entirely of uncooked vegetables, and they were given only water to drink. Kalten complained about the food at every meal, but, since there was nothing else available, he ate it anyway.
On the afternoon before they were scheduled to arrive, they gathered together in the cramped central compartment. ‘Are you sure?’ Kalten dubiously asked Flute when she told them that they were no more than ten hours from their destination.
She sighed. ‘Yes, Kalten, I’m sure.’
‘How do you know? You haven’t been up on deck, and you haven’t talked to any of the sailors. We could have been…’ His words sort of faded off. She was looking at him with a long-suffering expression as he floundered on. ‘Oh,’ he said then. ‘I wasn’t thinking, I guess. Sorry.’
‘I do love you, Kalten – in spite of everything.’
Khalad cleared his throat. ‘Didn’t Dolmant tell you that the Edomish have some strong feelings about the Church?’ he asked Sparhawk.
Sparhawk nodded. ‘As I understand it, they look at our Holy Mother in almost the same way that the Rendors do.’
‘Church Knights wouldn’t really be welcome then, I gather.’
‘Hardly.’
‘We’ll need to disguise ourselves as ordinary travelers, then.’
‘More than likely,’ Sparhawk agreed.
Vanion had been looking at his map. ‘Exactly where are we going from Jorsan, Aphrael?’ he asked Flute.
‘Up the coast a ways,’ she replied vaguely.
‘That’s not very specific.’
‘Yes, I know.’
He sighed. ‘Is there any real need for us to go on up the Gulf of Jorsan to the city itself? If we were to land on the north shore of the gulf, we could avoid the city entirely. Since the Edomish have these prejudices, shouldn’t we stay away from them as much as possible?’
‘We have to go to Jorsan,’ she told him. ‘Well,’ she amended, ‘Jorsan itself isn’t that important, but we’re going to see something along the way that will be.’
‘Oh? What’s that?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘What time will we make our landfall?’ Ulath asked.
‘About midnight,’ she replied.
‘Landing on a strange shore at night can be a little tricky,’ he said doubtfully.
‘There won’t be any problems.’ She said it with absolute confidence.
‘I’m not supposed to worry about it. Is that it?’
‘You can worry if you want to, Ulath,’ she smiled. ‘It’s not necessary, but you can worry all you like, if it makes you feel better.’
It was foggy when they came up on deck again – a dense, obscuring fog – and this time the strange ship showed no lights. Their horses, already saddled, were waiting, and they led them down the ramp to a pebbly beach.
When they looked back out toward the water, their ship was gone.
‘Where did she go?’ Ulath exclaimed.
‘She’s still there,’ Aphrael smiled.
‘Why can’t I see her, then?’
‘Because I don’t want people to see her. We passed a number of ordinary ships on our way here. If anybody’d seen her, there’d be wild talk in every sailors’ tavern in every port in the world.’
‘It’s all in the shape of the keel, isn’t it?’ Khalad mused.
‘Khalad!’ she said sharply. ‘You stop that immediately!’
‘I’m not going to do anything about it, Flute. I couldn’t if I wanted to, but it’s that keel that accounts for her speed. I’m only mentioning it so that you won’t make the mistake of thinking I’m so stupid that I can’t put it together.’
She glared at him.
He bent slightly and kissed her cheek. ‘That’s all right, Flute,’ he smiled. ‘I love you anyway – even if you do underestimate me at times.’
‘He’s going to work out just fine,’ Kalten said to Vanion.
The hillside rising from the gravel strand was covered with thick, rank grass, and by the time they had reached the top of the hill, the fog had entirely dissipated. A broad highway of reflected moonlight stretched out across the calm waters of the gulf.
‘My map shows a kind of track a mile or so inland,’ Vanion told them. ‘It seems to run up the gulf in the general direction of Jorsan.’ He looked at Flute, who was still glaring darkly at Khalad. ‘Pending instructions to the contrary from higher authority, I suppose we can follow that track.’ He looked inquiringly at the Child Goddess again.
She sank a little lower in Sephrenia’s arms and began to suck her thumb.
‘You’ll make your teeth crooked.’
She pulled her thumb out of her mouth and stuck her tongue out at him.
‘Shall we press on, then?’ Vanion suggested.
They rode on across a broad, rolling meadow covered with the rank salt-grass. The moon washed out all color, making the grass whipping at the horses’ legs seem gray and the forest beyond the meadow a formless black blot. They rode slowly, their eyes and ears alert and their hands never far from their sword-hilts. Nothing untoward had happened yet, but these were trained knights, and for them the world was always filled with danger.