Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

The icerigger lay facing the ridge, sails furled, awaiting their return. When the first explorers came chivaning back, Ethan and the others awaited their reports anxiously. They were not encouraging.

According to the scouts the ridge ran in an unbroken line almost due east and west. It extended as far as a Tran could see to the distant horizons. In some places the monstrous chunks of ancient ice rose considerably higher than the twenty meters they presently faced.

Having met no devils, the ridge climbers returned equally unharmed and equally discouraged. While the ridge was barely a hundred meters wide, it was as solid as the ship’s runners.

“We can’t go around it, and we can’t go over.” Ethan was standing on the crest of the ridge, staring at the inviting expanse of open ice ocean on the far side. “We certainly can’t go through. The Slanderscree ’s no thermprow.”

“What’s a thermprow?” Hunnar asked, his chiv digging deeply into the ice, holding him steady against the wind.

“In the arctic regions of other worlds they have ships with powerful heat elements built into their bows and sides to melt the ice. I’ve seen pictures on the tridee.” He glanced back at the icerigger. Sailors were moving listlessly about on deck and aloft, trying to keep busy to stave off discouragement. “If we had sufficient recharge capacity we could melt our way through with our beamers.”

“Come now, young feller-me-lad.” September indicated the massive ice blocks surrounding them. “It would take us a hundred years using these bitty little beamers to melt a Slanderscree -size traverse through this ridge. What we need is a proper shipyard torch.” He gazed westward, ice particles buffeting his mask. “All to move a few blocks of ice.”

“Blocks.” Ethan stamped a foot. “How much would you say this one we’re standing on weighs? Ten tons… twenty?”

September eyed his young companion, then looked back at the anchored Slanderscree. “Might be possible at that. If the wind holds steady.”

“Have you learned naught of my world?” Hunnar spoke critically, but gently. “The wind is always steady, day and night, year and shayear. If the wind dies, Tran-ky-ky turns upside down.”

“Never mind the theology, Hunnar. Do you think it can be done?”

“’Tis not for me to judge, friend September. Best to put the question to the Captain…”

“If Ethan and September and Williams believe this thing is workable, who are we to disagree? Besides, I think it a most excellent idea,” said Eer-Meesach.

Ta-hoding made a gesture of concurrence to the Tran wizard, then set about giving the necessary orders.

Pika-pina cables were wrapped tight around the lowest boulder in the ridge opposite. Meanwhile several intricate maneuvers had turned the great icerigger stern-first to the ice barrier. Cables were tied aboard, back of the helmdeck, made fast to the members of the raft’s hull.

Ethan and September stood with the cable party on the ice nearby, watched as spars and sheets were adjusted to catch maximum wind. The Slanderscree strained, groaning and creaking like an old man. Cables hummed in the wind, dug at a single chunk of ice that weighed a good fifteen tons.

“Think they’ll hold?” Ethan spoke without turning, watching the ship.

“The cables?” September snorted. “From what I’ve seen of pika-pina properties, it ain’t the cables I’m worried about. The cables’ll hold, but the ship’s only wood.”

Timbers moaned within the ship as the icerigger remained motionless. Her runners might have been welded to the ice for all the progress she was making.

It made the glass goblet splintering sound of the ice block all the more startling when it suddenly loosened from the ridge. Towing a mass the size of a shuttle-craft, the Slanderscree began to move ponderously northward.

Those sailors not immediately occupied let out a cheer. Sails held. So did the cables and the deck to which they were bound.

The icerigger started to slow. Ta-hoding bellowed a command. Spars were shifted. Now the ship swung ten, fifteen degrees north-eastward from its initial heading, putting pressure on the ice block from a different angle.

With a crackling that sounded like a headstone being uprooted, the block came free of the ridge, following in the wake of the icerigger. It was several minutes before Ta-hoding could order sails furled and spars reset to cut the Slanderscree ’s mounting speed.

Humans and Tran skated and chivaned to examine the enormous frozen mass. White and irregular, it rose as high as the underside of the raft.

Williams was gazing at the extensive gap in the pressure ridge. Ethan was reminded of a tooth knocked from its socket.

“Better than we could have hoped for,” the teacher was saying. “In pulling free this block from the bottom we dislodged a not inconsiderable quantity of ice above.”

Indeed, several other massive white monoliths had fallen onto the flat ocean surface. They could be towed aside far more easily than the first block.

The Tran worked cheerfully at looping and securing the cables around the next chunk, now at least half certain that the ridge was not the road traveled by Jhojoog Kahspen, Daemon Lord of the open ocean, as some particularly imaginative members of the crew had first tremblingly suggested.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER A path wide enough for the Slanderscree had been nearly completed through the ridge. A few last blocks of intervening ice were all that kept them from the open ocean beyond.

Ta-hoding worried some about his ship and the strain the constant break and tow was placing on her superstructure, but he’d gained confidence as block after multiton block was torn free and pulled clear without any visible damage to the raft’s stern.

Three or four more tows of comparatively modest-sized chunks and they would be through. Cables were being readied for securing to one of those last blocks when work was interrupted by a frantic cry from the mainmast lookout.

“ Rifs! North northwest!”

Working with the cable-setting crew, Ethan heard that threatening word too. Like his nonhuman companions, he stopped working as if stabbed, whirled and glanced in the direction from which the danger approached.

They’d encountered a rifs only once before, one time too often. A rifs was a meteorological anomaly peculiar to Tran-ky-ky, the manifestation of extreme weather forming over an ocean that was cold and solid instead of liquidly warm. September had described it as a linear hurricane, packing winds of over two hundred kph force.

Moving awkwardly on his skates, September followed the rest of the cable crew back down the path through the ridge. By the time he emerged, a black line made innocuous by distance was visible off to the northwest. As he watched, it grew larger, overwhelming the horizon.

That black line was the aerial equivalent of a tidal bore, a sooty sky-swelling wall of wind compressed like an atmospheric sponge. It could scour the ice clear of life save for tightly rooted vegetation such as the pika-pedan or massive life-forms such as the stavanzers.

Neither well-rooted nor massive, the Slanderscree had to do what all other life-forms did before a rifs—run.

“’Twill never be cleared in time,” complained one of the anxious Tran standing by the stern port runner of the ship.

Ethan slipped free of his skates, mounted the nearest boarding ladder. He found Ta-hoding, Elfa and Hunnar in animated discussion on the helmdeck. Williams and September were nowhere around.

“We must loose the cables and run ’til the rifs blows itself out,” Elfa was saying.

“A rifs can blow for many days. We waste time,” Hunnar argued.