Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

Pika-pedan was the giant relative of the smaller pika-pina, rising to heights of as much as ten meters.

Hunnar appeared on deck, folded his dan and skidded to a stop. “Weather and ice are your concern, Captain. Do what you believe best.”

“Poyolavomaar is through this,” Ta-hoding pointed out. “We do not know the extent of the field to east and west. My directions do not take detouring into account. If we try to go around, we could become hopelessly lost and never reach our destination.

“Therefore, we must try to go through.” He moved forward, to the front railing of the helmdeck. “Hello the deck!” Acknowledgement sounded instantly from waiting mates.

Ta-hoding ordered additional sail put on. There was good-natured grumbling from the sailors on spar duty as the sheets they’d just recently taken in were let out again, billowing taut in the steady wind.

The Slanderscree was once again traveling under full sail. She picked up speed steadily, massively.

“What would you have ordered, good friend Ethan?”

Startled, he turned to see Elfa staring at him. He hadn’t seen her come up on the helmdeck. Great searchlight eyes shone down at him, competing with the sun.

“We have to go through, of course.” He tried to sound as positive as Ta-hoding had.

“The bolder decision, but typical of you.” She favored him with a searing Trannish smile, then moved away to ask a question of Eer-Meesach before Ethan could explain that he was only agreeing with Ta-hoding’s decision.

Ethan turned, caught Hunnar glaring morosely at him. As soon as the knight saw that his stare had been noticed he turned away, chivaning down the ramp to the main deck.

Ethan considered following him, to explain, and then decided not to. Apparently repeated protests had done nothing to mollify Hunnar’s absurd jealousies. Repetition of his innocence would have no more effect than before.

A subtle jar shook the ship, forcing him to clutch at the nearest support. It felt as if the Slanderscree had rammed a gigantic sponge. The sweeping panorama of green fields and blue sky had been obliterated by the columnar emerald wall now sliding past on both sides of the ship. Moving at over ninety kilometers per hour, the icerigger had struck the pika-pedan forest and was grinding smoothly through it.

A glance astern showed a lengthening highway unrolling like a ribbon, the pika-pedan stalks cut off four meters above the ice by the speeding mass of the ship. Flat-sided green logs lay strewn across the stumps, fragments from the broom of a chlorophyllic colossus.

Without distant landmarks to measure by, it was difficult to estimate their speed. Ethan guessed the ship had slowed some since impact, but was still traveling steadily ahead at a respectable velocity. Water and pulp spattered his survival suit, and he had to turn away to keep his vision clear. Up by the bowsprit, he knew the situation must be far worse.

It seemed incredible that the dense vegetation would give way so easily before the ship. But while the pika-pedan looked more solid and treelike than its miniature relative, it was equally mushy inside, consisting mostly of water-soaked soft fibres which snapped instantly under the weight of the Slanderscree.

A harsh, husky screech sounded just to port. Ethan looked in that direction in time to see a pair of startled guttorbyn—winged, dragonlike predators—take to the air. For several minutes they paralleled the ship, hissing and screaming imprecations at the crew, before veering off southeast. A flock would have attacked. There being only two, and two surprised ones at that, they chose retreat over challenge.

The furry butterfly-things were abundant in the high vegetation, and once Ethan thought he spied something long and luminous, like a writhing sunbeam, slithering away from the ship’s path with incredible speed. Instead of screaming, it sang weird flute notes back at him as it vanished into the dense evergrowth, and Ethan never knew it was not the creature itself he had seen but its radiant shadow.

Below the tops of the pika-pedan, the wind penetrated fitfully. It was unusually quiet on board, not only from the absence of the familiar gale, but because each crewmember was attending to private thoughts as well as cooperative sailing. Ethan knew the Tran did not enter and explore the rolling forests of pika-pedan. They did not do so because of its usual impenetrability, and because of herds of a certain creature which fed within.

Yet this time the Tran had an advantage. The masts of the Slanderscree towered above the crowns of the forest. So did the spines of the animals they feared. From the several lookout baskets, those heaving backs could be spotted in time to give the ship a chance to escape.

Perhaps the lookouts were too intent on sighting that particular danger. Perhaps they might not have been able to spot the trouble anyway.

Suddenly the ship lost forward momentum with a violent shudder. Ethan and everyone else not holding on to something was thrown to the deck. Even as his bulging form was rolling around behind the wheel, Ta-hoding was shouting commands.

Accustomed to sudden, unpredictable gusts of wind, the sailors in the rigging had actually fared better than those on deck. None had fallen, though for several minutes a couple of those in the highest spars hung from a paw or two before regaining their footing.

Tilted twenty degrees to port, bow dipping drunkenly iceward, the Slanderscree continued to lurch awkwardly forward.

Back on his feet, Ta-hoding braced chiv against ice and bellowed orders toward the deck. The stern ice anchors were released. They immediately gouged a purchase in the ice and pika-pedan stumps astern. Several seconds of screeching, teeth-scraping progress slowed the out-of-control icerigger to a crawl. She came to a full stop when the last sail was finally taken in.

Ethan, September, Hunnar, Elfa and Ta-hoding went over the side, made their way down a pika-pina ladder. Detailed inspection wasn’t necessary. Something had knocked the port bow runner badly askew. It hadn’t been torn completely away, but the duralloy rods which braced it to the ship’s hull had nearly been wrenched from their moorings. Plates and bolts were missing, and the wood they’d ripped free of was torn and full of gaping holes.

While Ta-hoding began to direct repairs, Ethan and the others retraced the path of the Slanderscree. They followed the path cut by the disabled runner, forced to walk single-file between walls of four-meter-high pika-pedan stumps, constantly slipping and sliding over gelatinous globules of rapidly freezing watery sap.

They traveled less than a couple of hundred meters before coming on the cause of the crash. Small rocky spires, showing the mark of the broken runner on them, protruded from the ice. It wasn’t any wonder the lookouts hadn’t spotted them, buried as they were in thick vegetation. They were barely two meters high, too low to rip into the hull of the ship, but high and solid enough to wreck the impinging runner. Only good luck had saved the other runners a similar fate.

Hunnar bent, indicated a whitish groove in one frozen mass of granite. “See… ’twas here the ship struck. We were fortunate the islet was no larger than this.”

“Islet!” September grunted. “Why, we’re standin’ atop a mountain, friend Hunnar. These spires go down to the bottom of this frozen ocean we’re sailing across.”

“We can’t be sure of that, Skua.” Ethan struggled to visualize, say, six or seven thousand meters of mass below their feet. “These could just be very large boulders frozen in the ice, deposited by glacial or ice action. Or maybe the ocean here is only a few meters deep. We might be traveling across a shallow sea covering an old desert. These could be rocks on a plain.”