Sinbad and The Eye of the Tiger (18 page)

“Aye, and the moon waxes and wanes all too fast,” Hassan added.

Bahadin, at the helm behind them, called out, “Sinbad! Is it much further? A few more days of this and I’ll not be able to move!”

Sinbad grinned back at his helmsman. “Steady to the north, sailor. We have not yet gotten to the hard part!”

Hassan groaned, then looked into the gray-slate sky. “You, up there . . . never let me leave the Aegean or the Mediterranean sun again!”

The bronze-muscled Minaton steadily rowed the metal vessel northward, deep into the wake of Sibad’s ship. Within Zenobia’s cabin, her fingers and those of her son’s lightly touched a small model ship on a Ouija navigation board. The witch was sitting so that the folds of her dress covered her clawed foot. Her eyes were closed as she took her fingers from the miniature ship.

Gathering parchment sheets and a pen she began to reproduce the text and diagrams she had memorized from Melanthius’s scroll. Rafi looked on with rapt attention, watching the charts develop, and the strange text appear scratchily upon the paper.

His mother opened her eyes when she had finished and critically inspected her work. “The writing will take time to decipher . . . but look . . . the chart is clear.”

“The Valley?” Rafi asked, turning one of his ornate rings around and around his finger.

Zenobia pointed, then moved her finger and stabbed at a marking. “And here the Shrine that girl Dione spoke of, the healing Shrine.” Her eyes flashed and her mouth was set in a determined line. “This is where we must go.”

“We . . . ?”

Zenobia looked starkly at her son. “To restore my foot. It is my only chance. Only there, in the Shrine.” She nodded her dark head in remembrance. “No wonder the apothecary of Alexandria demanded so much gold.” Her gaze went to the map. “The liquid must have come originally from Hyperborea.”

Rafi leaned forward and touched his mother’s arm. “If the Shrine will heal you . . . then it might cure Kassim . . .”

“We will be there first.” She gestured forward. “We have the Minaton. We have a boat of bronze and brass that will cut through the strongest ice.” Her fist slammed down on the table. “We
must
be first!”

It took her a moment to control her fury, but at last she lifted an arm to her son. “Help me,” she said. Leaning on him, she limped toward the cabin door, her clawed foot scraping across the burnished metal deck. Neither she nor Rafi looked at it.

The Minaton rowed steadily on, repeating and repeating endlessly the same rowing motions. The oars beat at the sea, propelling the shining metal craft like a knife through the water.

Rafi looked ahead. The sky shaded into gray, into boils of slate and mountains of blackish storm clouds.

The lookout on Sinbad’s ship was muffled in a heavy hood and jacket sewn from furs and skins. He clung to the crow’s nest, bracing his back against one side and grasping the wooden sides of the tublike structure near the top of the mast with heavily mittened hands. The ship rolled from side to side and dipped its sharp prow into the salty water, sending chill sprays back over the ship.

The mast and shrouds were coated in a thin veneer of frost and ice. The sail was free of the freezing moisture because of the snapping and billowing, which cracked and dispelled the ice as it formed. Below the decks, cabin, railing, and all parts of the ship were covered in more ice and frost, which was growing with each minute as the sea spray enveloped the ship. The lookout knew that soon men would have to come out of the cabins and hack away at the ice, not only to relieve the ship of the weight, but so that the ropes and lines would be free enough to properly use the sails.

He batted at his eyebrows and thick black beard, cracking off the ice that had formed on them. Suddenly he stopped and grabbed the forward edge of the crow’s nest to peer through the spray, the mist, and the tipping, rising, billowing sea. He turned and shouted back to the helmsman, another ice-covered figure on the afterdeck.

“Ahead . . . ! Ahead! Dead ahead!” He took another deep breath and bellowed out his discovery. “The ice!”

Sinbad came from the cabin at once, shrugging into a heavy fur coat. “Where away?” he called to the lookout.

The lookout pointed straight ahead and Sinbad joined his crew in going to the railing.

What they saw was a fantastic alien seascape . . . in whites and grays, in ice-blues and slate seas, in mist and sharp-edged mountains. The drifting icebergs were as tall as the ship . . . and taller, rising above them like mountains. They were low and swept smooth and clean by the winds. They were steep and sharp, rugged and raw, great chunks of frozen water ripped from a continent of ice. Some had been melted by vagrant winds and warmer suns, shaped into fantastic shapes from nightmares, frozen monsters of dirty white. Holes and caves were pierced into the mountains that drifted so slowly, so magnificently unconcerned with the affairs of man, or even the tides of the seas that would eventually destroy them, shrinking them with the sun and wind, splitting them into smaller and smaller blocks until they melted into the seas of the world and disappeared as entities.

Sinbad called down to Princess Farah and Dione. “Come, see the great ice mountains! You, too, Melanthius!”

Bundled into furs, they groped their way over the slippery decks and held to the railings as the ship sailed into the valleys between the mountains of ice. The sea was less rough here, broken by the great ice blocks, smoothed into rolling water. For a long time Farah, Sinbad, Dione, and her father just looked at the spectacle all around them, silently pointing at one or another fantastically shaped block of ice.

“Look, a temple!” Farah said with delight. “Oh, and some kind of great beast! Oh, Sinbad, look over there! Doesn’t that look like a woman . . . or . . . no, a crouching panther . . . no . . .”

Sinbad laughed. “They look different from each direction. A few feet farther on you see them as something else.”

“They’re beautiful,” she said in a whisper.

“And deadly,” the sea captain added. “They are like rocks to hit, then sometimes turn over . . . or pieces fall off . . . or they split and flip over, taking any hapless ship close by right with them!”

“But they are still fantastic . . . and beautiful!” insisted Farah, and Sinbad nodded agreement.

“Yes, and beautiful. Only we won’t steer any closer to them than we must.”

They watched for a while longer until Melanthius spoke up. “By my calculations,” he said, “we’ve judged our arrival to within a hair’s breadth . . .”

The royal princess stared ahead, squinting against the icy wind. “How much further . . . ?”

Melanthius shrugged and hugged the heavy furs around him. “As far north as possible. We must try to sail for at least another four days.”

“Four days!” Sinbad said, looking at the thickening blocks of ice. “And a fourth full moon . . .”

The old man nodded. “The less distance we have to cover on foot the better.”

Sinbad, grim-faced but professional, shook his head. “Four days . . . ?” He, too, looked ahead at the dim gray horizon as they all sought to estimate the distance they could go by ship. “I doubt if we’ll be able to continue for more than four
hours.”
He waved his arm around at the ice-shrouded vessel. “My ship was never built to battle through conditions like these. Before long . . .” He jabbed a finger ahead. “The sea itself will freeze over. I’ve heard stories of ships caught by the ice . . . and crushed!”

Farah bit at her lovely lips, then gasped as a chunk of ice as big as the ship sailed dangerously close. Sinbad jumped to the ladder leading up to the poop deck and quickly scanned the sea ahead. There were icebergs, large and small, coming at them, drifting down from the vast polar cap.

“Careful, Bahadin,” he said.

“Aye, Captain,” the helmsman answered.

Sinbad knew his capable helmsman was doing his best. To avoid one iceberg it was sometimes necesary to sail close to another. The high cliffs of ice sailed by on either side, huge silent frost mountains. The ship wove its way through the bergs carefully, propelled by the stiff Arctic winds.

There was a rumble and Sinbad looked up through the ice-covered shrouds to see great blocks of ice falling from the white cliffs into the freezing sea below. The water splashed onto Sinbad’s ship and the waves rocked the ship dangerously. The thunder echoed off the other icebergs and brought down another avalanche of crumbling ice into the deep blue sea.

The wooden ship, which had once seemed sturdy and strongly built to Sinbad and now seemed to be made of paper as the great forces of nature concentrated on it, maneuvered through the chunks of frozen water torn from the eternal mantle of the North.

Another great cracking sound was heard and everyone looked up at the iceberg which towered over them. Wind and sun had carved a dangerous undercut and the iceberg resembled a frozen wave of seawater. The tip of the wave was cracking and Sinbad yelled a command at his helmsman. “Port! Hard aport!”

The ice broke away, falling down in a rustling, crackling, slither of sound, cannonading into the sea, where seconds before Sinbad’s ship had been sailing. The tidal wave from the falling ice rocked the ship badly, and the crew and passengers clung desperately to the iced railings and lines, their feet sliding from under them on the slanted, icy deck. The wooden ship creaked and ice showered down from the shrouds and sail, pelting those below with hard-edged shards.

“Starboard!” ordered Sinbad, and the ship twisted on the crest of the wave, leaning over, bumping against bobbing chunks of ice.

“Look!” Dione said, and pointed.

“Captain!” cried the lookout, clinging to the wildly heaving crow’s nest. “A cave in the ice ahead!”

Melanthius thrust back his fur hood to get a better look. Ahead of them was an almost solid wall of ice, with a jagged serpentine edge that squiggled away in both directions. In the face of that sheer cliff was a great ragged hole, a triangular shark’s mouth of a cave, heavily hung with stalactites and shading off into a deep and sinister darkness.

“Exactly as described in the scrolls,” Melanthius said. “The cave there is the entrance to the tunnel.”

Sinbad frowned as he studied the approaching cave. Behind them ice still cascaded down from the precipitous icebergs. “No way through for us,” he said. “The ice is too thick. It would crack a wooden ship like a walnut in a vice.”

Melanthius withdrew a scroll from an inner pocket and attempted to study it as the ship rolled. Farah helped steady him as Sinbad continued his inspection.

“A warmer current, coming down through there, must keep the cave open, else it would come and go and not be a feature on an ancient map.”

Melanthius got Sinbad’s attention and his finger traced a route across the scroll. “The longer route,” he said. “It’s the only way.”

Sinbad nodded. “Helmsman!” he shouted and pointed the direction. The ship heeled over and took the new tack. The ice still fell, now a constant thunder and splash. Ahead of them there was a snowfall from the top edge of the great wall of ice, then an ear-splitting crack like a great explosion. A mountain of ice broke away from the ice pack and rocked free, setting up more waves. Chunks and drift snow fell from the newly born iceberg as it rocked. There was a scream from Farah as the iceberg started to tilt and Sinbad grabbed at her, holding her waist with one strong arm while he seized the railing with the other.

The berg tipped—then with a slow majesty overturned. The huge dripping bottom came up, spilling chill water in foaming waves, and the new iceberg found its center of balance. Pointed and smoothed by the water, the bottom that was now the top was smaller than the part that had now submerged itself. The pointed iceberg started to drift away, beginning its journey of destruction southward.

Farah sighed within Sinbad’s arm and the ship sailed over the ice-strewn waters where the berg had been moments before.

“Steady as she goes!” Sinbad sang out.

Aboo-seer ran forward with a hefty pike, in case they had to shove ice cakes out of the way. Hassan began ordering men into the ice-covered shrouds to take in sail. Melanthius watched, his fur hood flecked with ice, condensed from his plumes of warm breath.

“We have less than three moons left . . .” he said.

The ship sailed on, into the Arctic world of ice and danger.

Zenobia’s ship cut through the slate-colored Arctic waters smoothly. The drifting chunks of ice made loud clanging sounds as they struck the metal sides of the swiftly moving ship or bounced noisily off the sharp prow as it raced northward.

The Minaton’s metal arms pumped remorselessly, tirelessly. But from the main cabin there was a single, wretched sob.

A
black rock thrust up through the ice. It seemed to be the only object in miles that was not icy water or frozen water. Near it Sinbad’s ship was embedded, her wooden prow caught by the ice, but with her stern still in the cold but unfrozen ocean. Sinbad went over the side of his ship, using a rope ladder, and dropped onto the solid, cold surface of the ice pack itself.

He stood and looked around. The mountainous ice pack had thinned and lowered here, no doubt due to the land beneath, for the biggest portion of the pack was on the sea. More of Sinbad’s crew came over the railing and down the ladder, carrying supplies. They trudged past him, kicking up puffs of loose snow on the top of the hard ice. Sinbad followed them toward the blazing bonfire at the edge of the black rock.

The captain stepped into the circle of melted snow, a muddy dish that surrounded the fire, and held out his hands to the flames. He pulled off the mittens and rubbed his cold hands together.

Near him, close to the fire, was the baboon, huddling with a blanket and looking miserable. Next to the animal was Princess Farah, wrapped in her fur garments, and beyond Dione, equally swathed in thick fur garments, was Melanthius, who was studying the parchment map. The crew was huddled around the small fire, with stores, sledges, and equipment piled in a semi-circle to act as a windbreak. Maroof covered the baboon’s cage after giving him a piece of meat. Aboo-seer looked up as Melanthius spoke to him. He handed over the requested chest and the Casgarian sage took a measuring device from it. “Thank you,” he said to the sailor as he set the device to a legend on the map. He measured a distance on the parchment then looked up as Sinbad approached. “It is a long journey through desolate and frozen terrain,” he said. “I was hoping we could have used the first route. It would have been shorter.”