Джеффри Лорд: The Crystal Seas

The captain's name was Foyn, that of his ship was Green Mistress. Both hailed from the Sea Cities of Talgar. The Sea Cities were a group of six artificial floating islands anchored in a shallow part of the ocean about a thousand miles to the west. The ship was now off the coast of the Empire of Nurn, the principal trading partner of the Sea Cities. Captain Foyn said that last phrase with a curse and a sour-faced grimace.

Blade grinned. «Why do the Sea Cities trade with the Empire, then, if their merchants make so much trouble and pay so ill?»

«How do you know what they do?» said Captain Foyn sharply.

Blade shrugged. «I have traveled far in my time. When I see honest sailors or merchants mention someone with a curse or a grimace, I know that someone is usually cheating them. Am I right?»

Foyn managed to blush slightly under his weather-beaten skin and close-cropped gray beard. «You flatter me, calling me honest on such short acquaintance. But you are right. We bring coral and fish and metal nuggets to Nurn, enough to fill our ships. But we take back to the Cities no such wealth. If we had any choice-«He sighed. «But we do not, and have not had for many generations.»

«Why not?»

«The war with those filthy, slime-reeking Fishmen!» the captain exploded. «They've been our enemies for three hundred years. If the armorers of Nurn didn't make the best weapons, by the Silver Goddess, we'd go elsewhere! But no one else makes what we need to fight the Fishmen. Without Nurn, we'd be lost. The Sea Cities would sink down among the coral and the weeds and vanish from sight or memory.»

So the Sea Cities of Talgar warred with the merpeople. Blade suspected there was more to the story. But he decided it would not be wise to bluntly ask why, and even less wise to ask about the merpeople or mention his own brief encounter with them. Apparently Foyn accepted the merpeople and the war with them as something changeless and inevitable, like the tides or the storms of the sea.

Just as apparently Svera did not. She swung her eyes from Blade to her father, and Blade saw them harden. «If we did not sail into the seas the Fishmen call their own, to take the fish and coral and-«

«Daughter, be serious!» said Foyn sharply. «Who cares now about the rights and wrongs over three centuries? I don't. What I do care about is that the Sea Cities of Talgar still float upon the waves and the Fishmen still skulk beneath them. Would you have things differently?»

«Yes, I would,» Svera snapped. «What about my brother? And my mother-your wife, by the Silver Goddess! They couldn't be any more dead than they are, whatever had happened to the Sea Cities! And the war isn't over yet, anyway! Are you sure it will all be worthwhile in the end?»

Captain Foyn glared at Svera with a fury that embarrassed and disturbed Blade. For a too-long moment it looked as if Foyn were going to slap his daughter in the face. Then his broad shoulders slumped, and he let out a long sigh. It was the weary sigh of a man who has been over the same hopeless argument with someone he loves a dozen times before.

«Daughter, go to your cabin,» he said quietly. «Whatever we may say to each other, I will not have it said before a stranger and a guest aboard Mistress. Would you disgrace the name that your brother and mother bore?» Svera bit her lip and was silent. Then she rose and went out. At the door of the cabin, she stopped and turned to stare hard into Blade's eyes. He had the impression that she was weighing him in some sort of mental balance. He rather wished he knew what she was looking for. Then he turned back to Captain Foyn, who was pouring out some more seaweed cordial.

The captain put his cup down on the table and shook his head wearily as he looked at Blade. «I am sorry that my daughter has no discretion,» he said. «What she said is a family argument that sometimes seems to have been going on nearly as long as the war with the Fishmen.»

Blade shook his head. «No need to apologize. I'm very good at forgetting things I should not have heard. And if I'm going to be spending much time among the people of Talgar, I'm going to be learning a lot about the war sooner or later.» He filled his own cup again and looked at Foyn. «Do others think the way Svera does, about the war?»

Foyn nodded. «Quite a few. But mostly they are young people, like her. Also there are some of the poorer Brothers-the ship captains and officers-who resent the taxes we must levy to pay for the war. They make a tremendous amount of noise every time there is a council election or a vote for new taxes, but they can never command many votes.»

Foyn sighed again. «The terrible thing about them is that I wish I could be more certain they were wrong. If — if our coral mines on the Black Reef, for example, are to the Fishmen what their raids on the fishing fleets or the moorings are to us-something too terrible-«He was obviously fumbling for words to express doubts he could neither openly admit nor completely deny.

Blade wished he knew enough about the situation to be able to supply those words, but for the moment there wasn't anything he could do except sit still and keep his mouth shut. For the moment. He had the feeling that he was about to land in a horribly complicated situation. Finding out what was going on between the Sea Cities and the merpeople might turn out to be more than just satisfying his curiosity. It might turn out to save his neck as well.

Eventually Foyn fumbled his own way out of his uncertainty. «The Silver Goddess alone knows who has the right of this whole stinking mess. But I will not do anything or let others do anything that would put the Cities in danger.» On that fine and determined sentiment, he poured out two more cups of the cordial. Since the green drink was stronger than it looked, Blade really didn't want to take any more on an empty stomach.

Fortunately the captain's servant came in with dinner a few minutes later. There were three kinds of fried or baked fish, a soup made of seaweed, and a flagon of beer made of still more seaweed. Blade had the feeling that he was going to have to get used to a lot of fish and seaweed in this dimension.

Blade ate more than he really wanted, to help absorb the alcohol. It worked. By the time the steward cleared away the tableware, his head no longer felt vaguely fuzzy. Instead he felt packed solid from throat to groin and more than suspected he was in for a bout of indigestion. That would be a ludicrous way of ending his career as a Dimension X traveler-developing a digestion too delicate to handle strange and exotic foods. The thought made him smile, then laugh, and generally put him in a better mood. He was still smiling when he went out on deck to take a walk around Mistress's decks and clear his head with the sea breezes.

Mistress was a fair-sized ship, over a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide at her widest point. She was obviously designed for rough seas and heavy cargoes, with massive timbers a foot square, planking like armor plate, and high castles both fore and aft. Her two masts were massive tree trunks, the forward one carrying a single sail and the mainmast carrying two. All three were set now, to catch the offshore wind. Looking aft, Blade could see the black shapes of the headlands on the coast of Nurn silhouetted against the sunset. Mistress was running before the offshore wind, so it seemed, heading out to sea toward the Cities.

Blade stood by the railing, watching the waves develop whitecaps as the breeze freshened, watching the light fade from the sky-for at least an hour. He could hear ropes creaking and blocks banging overhead in the rigging, the occasional calls of the lookout in the crow's nest, and the more frequent calls of the men at the tiller aft.

Eventually the breeze became chill enough and strong enough to get through Blade's borrowed sailor's jacket and trousers. He decided to go below, to his cabin in the aftercastle. Mistress had accommodations for a good two dozen passengers, but there were never very many going from Nurn to Talgar. These days, with the war apparently becoming hotter than usual, there were hardly any.