Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

He’d done very little real work, but his body had burned plenty of calories. In any case, there was something reassuring and normal about eating.

He’d had enough of the extraordinary to last him for a while.

THE NEXT TIME THE lookouts cried out, it was in a more normal voice, tinged this time with excitement of a pleasured kind.

Minutes later, without warning, the green forest vanished and began to shrink behind them. They’d emerged from the pika-pedan and were traveling across pika-pina once more. Soon Ethan could no longer look astern and see the gap where they had emerged.

Three days more and they left furry butterflies and green ice fuzz behind and were again chivaning across open ice. Ta-hoding’s relief was palpable, that of his men almost too intense to bear.

When they passed a small trading raft, its single small deck piled high with strapped down goods, the cheers of the crew would have led an onlooker to surmise they had reached Trannish heaven. They had not, but the normal world of free ice and other ships was as much as the lowliest hand could wish.

The trader’s crew crowded its railing to stare in awe at the enormous icerigger. Clearly, they’d never heard of it, a measure of how far from Arsudun the Slanderscree had come. Both crews barely had time to exchange a few brief shouts and queries before the impatient wind separated them.

“Where are they going?” Ethan asked Hunnar.

“Not to Poyolavomaar,” said a disappointed Hunnar. “We will try to make more time for asking with the next ship we pass.”

That ship turned out to be another trader, one twice the size of the first they’d encountered, nearly thirty meters long. It even boasted a central cabin. Its crew’s amazement at the sight of the Slanderscree, however, was no less than that of the first raft they’d passed.

Although traveling on a course similar to that of the icerigger, the trader was not proceeding to Poyolavomaar. But its crew gladly gave confirmation that the great ship was traveling in the right direction.

They passed other vessels. Commerce here was not heavy, but it was steady. Several rocky islets grew, slid past. A couple showed signs of habitation. Eventually they grew so numerous that Ta-hoding ordered some sails taken in.

They were traveling through a region of many tiny islands. Smoke curled from chimneys of steep-roofed houses clinging like brown barnacles to miniature harbors or crawling antlike up talus-strewn slopes. Neatly laid out and carefully cultivated fields of pika-pina huddled in the lee of sheltering islets. Startled Tran would glance up as the Slanderscree flew past, set to murmuring by the wondrous ship they might or might not have seen.

Two weeks later, after negotiating undulating archipelagos and dangerously low-lying islands that were scattered like reefs in the ice, they reached Poyolavomaar.

Needle-topped crags and spires towered out of the ice, rising to some of the most impressive heights Ethan had encountered on Tran-ky-ky. A few rose three thousand meters into the clear blue sky. The sharp arrogant angles indicated a geologically youthful region, for such spires could not long retain their glory under the ceaseless assault of the planet’s eroding winds.

The lofty islands that formed the near-circle Ta-hoding’s captain friend had spoken of nearly touched the Slanderscree ’s flanks, titanic stone dancers frozen forever only an earth-beat apart. Twisting around the granite needles, the wind acted strangely, as if conscious of the unusual setting it played in. Ta-hoding’s task looked difficult, until he saw they could simply follow one of the numerous rafts converging on the island necklace and trail it in.

Homes and other structures, including armed ramparts, crowded the afterthought slopes which muted the cliffs where they entered the ice. Connecting the visible islands, and probably all of them if the garrulous merchant back in Arsudun was correct, were high stone walls built onto the ice. Each had a wide gate in its middle to permit entry or egress. Fortunately, no arch covered the one they approached, or both masts and masonry would have suffered. As it was, there was barely enough room for the icerigger to squeeze through, while guards in the flanking towers gaped or shouted orders.

They made their way inside the ring of towering islands. Near the center of the frozen enclosure lay a seventh island, as unlike its companions as they were unlike Arsudun or Sofold. It was almost flat, rising to a peak of barely fifty meters at its highest point. All around, docking piers extended onto the ice from its shore.

Ethan had noticed docks on the surrounding islands also. But judging from the vast number of rafts tied up here, this had to be the center of commercial activity.

Crowning the high point of the island was a three-tiered stone castle as impressive as that of Wannome. Smoke drifted to the west from flues and chimneys.

“What a magnificent place,” Ethan murmured. He searched for better words, but they escaped him. Occasionally he wished for the tongue of a poet instead of a huckster.

“Aye, young feller-me-lad. A more perfect settin’ for a harbor would be hard to imagine. And all they’ve got to do is defend those connecting walls. No enemy’s going to climb over those mountains.”

Williams was studying the heavily forested slopes. “Lumber rich, too. Without transportation problems. They need only cut a tree down and it will slide most of the way to the ice.”

“Truly Captain Midan-Gee did not deceive us.” Ta-hoding was already hunting for an open landing. “This is a wealthy, powerful state.”

“A good place to begin the confederation,” Ethan added.

Hunnar snorted skeptically, stalked away. He still held only the slimmest of hopes for the human’s bizarre idea that the Tran could agree on anything except their hereditary fear, suspicion, and hatred of strangers.

Williams suddenly clapped his hands together, starting like a little boy who’d just found a coin in the street. The survival suit gloves muffled the sound of the clap and what wasn’t smothered was carried away unheard by the wind, but Ethan saw the movement.

“See something interesting, Milliken?”

“Not that, not that, Ethan. I just realized what this place is!” That unspecific announcement rekindled Hunnar’s attention. “Poyolavomaar is a caldera.”

“A what?” Hunnar, naturally, did not recognize the Terranglo term. But neither did Ethan.

The diminutive teacher tried to explain. “Some time in the past, Sir Hunnar, these peaks we see now rose even higher, and this circular harbor we now traverse was a solid mountain several satch high. It was a volcano, like the smoking mountain you knew as The-Place-Where-The-Earth’s-Blood-Burns.

“And like that volcano, this one too blew up in a cataclysmic explosion, leaving only fragments of its outside wall. A central cinder cone started to build a new mountain inside the hollow left by the old one, but never got started before the flow of magma—molten rock—stopped. The soft cinders wore down quickly, leaving the central island we’re heading for now. The original volcano was probably more than twice the height of the surrounding island peaks.”

It was discomfiting to realize they were traveling through the throat of a ghost mountain and that somewhere far below, plutonic pressures could even now be building up enough energy to erupt unexpectedly. Ethan was glad when the small, streamlined ice raft pulled up alongside them. It gave him something else to concentrate on.

One of the Slanderscree ’s mates exchanged words with the operators of the small vessel, then reported to Ta-hoding.