Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

Three bow shots away from the aett, the Ascommani kept a basin for their boats. It was a little ice crater open to the sea on the north head, and they had better than ten boat in it. Most were up on blocks, hoisted from the ice, so the men could labour in daylight hours to remove the rigs ready for the spring waters. But one was the aett-chief’s boat, ready to run at a moment’s nod. It was called ‘keeping it nocked’. You nocked the cleft of an arrow against a bowstring ready for tension, ready to fly. The chief’s wyrmboat stood on its runners on the hard ice, its sails ready to drop and fill, checked only by the anchor lines.

‘Into the boat!’ Fith ordered as they scrambled down the slope to the basin edge.

‘Which boat?’ asked Lern.

‘The chief’s boat!’ Fith snapped.

‘But it’s the chief’s boat…’ Guthox said, wary.

‘He’s not going to be needing it,’ said Fith. ‘Not as much as we do, anyway.’

Guthox looked at him blankly.

‘The chief’s sleeping on the red snow, you arsehole,’ said Fith. ‘Now get in the boat.’

They got into the boat, and laid the Upplander down in the bow. The Balt began to appear at the crest of the slope. The hersirs heard the air-buzz of the first arrows.

Fith dropped the sea sails, and they filled in an instant. The canvas cracked like thunder as it took the world’s breath. There was a hard snow-wind that morning, and he’d barely noticed it. The anchor lines creaked and strained as the wyrmboat mithered on the ice, impatient to slip.

‘Cut the lines!’ Fith yelled out.

Guthox looked at him from the stern, where the wind-pull was chaffing the taut lines against the rail.

‘He’s really not coming?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘The chief. You saw his thread cut?’

‘He’d be here if he was coming,’ said Fith.

They heard cracking sounds like green wood spitting in a fire. The iron heads of arrows were smacking into the ice around them, drilling up puffs of ice dust or cracking punctures into the blue-black glass of the crust. Two arrows hit the boat. One went into the main mast as deep as the length of a man’s forearm.

‘Cut the lines!’ Fith yelled.

Guthox and Lern cut the lines with their axes. The wyrmboat took off like an escaping animal, its sails bellied out full and as rigid as iron. The lurch shook them on their feet. The bladed runners of the ice rig shrieked as they scratched across the marble ice of the basin.

Lern took the helm. He was the best steersman of them. He draped his armpit over the tiller, loading it with his weight to drive the blade of the sternpost rudder into the ice, and balanced the tension of the ropes coming from the quarter rudders, one in each fist. Steering a rigger was a battle of muscle and wit. One bad judgement, one over-light feathering of the quarters, one heavy-handed dig of the main blade, and the combination of polished ice and raw wind shear could tumble even the biggest wyrmboat, and knock it into kindling.

They left the basin. They went through the sea-cut in the granite lip that let out onto the open water. But it wasn’t water. It was long past the great year’s glacial maximum, and time was turning, but this stretch of sea along the shadowed inlet remained the sky’s looking glass. In some places it was grey-green like an old mirror, in others blue like uncut sapphire, in others bright and clear like fine crystal, but everywhere it was thick to a depth two or three times the height of a man.

As soon as they were clear of the basin, and the boat’s runners were shrieking across the surface of the mirror sea like the baleful voices of the wights of the Underverse, the cold hit them. It was the open cold, the cold of the dull, iron-hard end of winter, the blunt cold of the open ice range. All of them gasped at the shock of it, and immediately laced up their collars or wrapped up scarf bindings to protect their mouths and noses.

Fith looked at the Upplander sprawled in the bow. He was panting from a combination of pain and exertion, and the breath heat was steaming out of him in great spectral clouds that the wind was stripping away.

Fith moved down the vibrating wyrmboat towards him, walking with the practised, rolling gait of an experienced ice-mariner.

‘Cover up your mouth!’ he shouted.

The Upplander looked up at him blankly.

‘Cover up your mouth! Breathe through your nose!’

‘What?’

Fith knelt down beside him.

‘The heat’ll bleed right out of you, with your mouth open like that. Breathe through your nose. Conserve it.’

He opened one of the woven-grass coffers tucked in under the boat’s rail, and pulled out a blanket and some furs. They were all stiff with cold, but he shook them out and swaddled the Upplander in them.

‘Through your nose,’ he reminded. ‘Don’t you know that? Don’t you know the cold?’

‘No.’

‘Then why the hell would you come to this land, if you didn’t know all the ways it would try to kill you?’

*

The Upplander had no answer. He couldn’t summon the effort. Renewed pain was gripping him, and it was extraordinarily comprehensive. It pinned his thoughts, and refused to allow him even a small reserve of mental power to use for other things. He’d never known pain like it, except perhaps once.

He could hear a clavier playing. The keys were ringing out a cheerful music hall melody that he could just pick out above the screaming of the runners and the roaring of the brutish crew.

He could hear a clavier playing, and he knew he ought to know why.

*

The Balt came after them. Lern shouted out as soon as he spotted them, and pointed astern. Wyrmboats were skating out from around the spithead. They were black-sail boats, rigged for a murder-make by night. The Balt were resolved to see the make through to its bloody end. Fith had hoped the Balt might give up once the main raid on the aett was over.

But no. The Balt had to be terrified to keep up the pursuit. They weren’t going to rest until everyone was dead.

What had their gothi told them, Fith wondered? What interpretation had he spouted that night when the broom star had sliced the sky, a ribbon of light that had left an accusatory glowing scar directly over Ascommani territory. How had he explained the land fall, the noise-shock of the star hitting ice?

What had he told his wide-eyed hersirs, his chief, the Balt womenfolk, the children woken up and crying because of the noise?

Fith had seen the Balt gothi once, three great years back, at a time when the Balt and the Ascommani had been on trading terms, when they could visit aett to aett for a barter-make with cargoes of pelts and grass-weave and smoked meat, and exchange them for preserved herbs, lamp-oil, whale-fat candles and ingots of pig iron.

There had been a formal meeting of the chiefs, with an exchange of gifts, a lot of bowing, a lot of long-winded rehearsal of lineage and bloodline from the skjalds, and a lot of blowing of the Balt’s bronze horns, which made a sound half like a sea-cave echo and half like a muffled fart.

The Balt gothi had been skinny, ‘taller than a warbow and twice as thin’ as the saying went, with a heavy jaw like that of a mule-horse or a simpleton. There were so many metal piercings in his lips and nose and ears, he looked as if he had been plagued with boils and cold sores.

He had a wand made of a bear’s arm blade, and a silver torc. Someone had braided seabird feathers into his long, lank hair, so that they made a white mantle around his bony shoulders. His voice was thin and reedy.