The Hammer of the Sun (17 page)

It was as fierce a storm as they had faced in all their time at sea; all around them, closer and closer, the lightning stabbed and flickered through the driving rain. The wind's sharp gusts raised ever greater waves that plucked up the cutter's bows, bursting athwart them in vast wings of spray that were lit molten silver by the levin-bolts. Down their steep slopes it plunged as if to dash its bows into the trough, while the thunder drummed like harsh laughter overhead. But due rather, as Elof suspected, to her fair shaping than his own Seamanship, the little ship rode out each trough and climbed each crest anew. Even over the bellow of the storm they could hear her timbers creak and moan, as from the pain of old wounds reopened, now and then cracks like snapping bone. Yet for all those wounds she held firm, even when they were forced at last to strike the sails altogether from the tortured mast, and struggling and slipping with ropes along the storm-lashed deck, toss out an improvised sea anchor to hold the bows into the wind. Then they could do no more than lash themselves at their posts by tiller and rail, and bow their heads to the wind and their destiny.

But that was the worst, after which the storm soon slackened; and as it passed, and the heaving waters turned from black to grey, they found themselves blinking in the light of a cloudy afternoon. "Two or three hours, that was!" gasped Roc indignantly. "That's all!"

Elof sagged down over the tiller. "Seemed like an eternity, didn't it?" Then he pulled himself weakly up. "Roc, we've got to check the hull -"

Roc pushed him back with a grimace. "Sit tight; you had the worst of it at the helm there. I'll check; you gather your strength. Maybe you'll be needing it," he added as he undogged the hatch and disappeared below.

He emerged a short while later, fouled and grim. "You'd better come. I've never seen the seams work so, there's no getting the caulking to hold and we're shipping water faster by the minute…"

Elof glanced up at the sails, racked the tiller and staggered past Roc and down. All the seams were indeed working loose, the more so the lower down he checked. "It shouldn't be so… Unless…" He stooped into the blackened slime at the bow and ran his hands slowly and carefully along the huge timber that was the keel. Some third of the way along he stopped, pressed his fingers down and felt back along. His hands were half numbed by the filthy water; but his blood ran colder yet. "Roc!" he said, when he could "I know why she's working so much; the keel's cracked."

"What?" roared Roc. "Can't be! She'd have broken up at once -"

"Not right through; but with every wave… The Ice did it; it did get us, after all."

"We can't brace it? Patch it?"

"It's past that! She's filling, faster by the minute. Within the hour, a few minutes maybe -"

"Back on deck!" growled Roc. "This stench softens my brain!"

Elof sighed as he climbed up after him. "As you will, though there's little enough to think on now -"

"That so, hey?" Roc's red thatch was thrust back down the companionway. "Up here with you a minute -now, tell me truly, what d'you think that is?"

Elof scrambled up into the grey light, and peered the way Roc was pointing. Upon the eastern horizon there lay a smoky-hued smudge no different from a hundred other cloudbanks, save that its high crests… He had to swallow hard ere he could speak.

"It's land," he said softly. "A league and a half, at least, two if those are mountaintops…"

"Can we make it?" demanded Roc bluntly.

Elof shook his head mutely, choking down the bitterness rising in his throat. "She'd pull apart the moment we hoisted sail. We might make it on a raft or swimming with floats, a spar or a hatchcover -"

"Scant chance of that, with it so freezing and us weary! We'd never last long enough! Hel, but it galls me! To have got this far, and… There's no other way?" They could feel the little cutter settling under them now with every passing second.

"There is, by the High Gate!" blazed Elof. "Roc, take up your gear, and swiftly!"

For answer, Roc dragged a bundle out from under the thwart, and slung his bow across his back, with a closed quiver of arrows. "And yours?"

"Ail about me," said Elof, eyes sparkling. The cutter lurched sideways suddenly, and they staggered to the rail. "It's that will serve us - if you think you can hold tight for a half-hour or so?"

"For my life? Like the grip of the Ice its own self! But what to?"

"To me!" cried Elof. "Follow!" And springing up on l he port rail he sprang for the sea. Roc shook his head only once before he scrambled after.

They rose together, gasping with the water's chill. "Should've slung my furs -" gurgled Roc.

"No need!" cried Elof, and dashed the salt sea from his eyes. "See, our
Seafire
lists, true friend that she was! We'll need to be out from under, fast, or follow her down!" He was delving in his jacket as he spoke, and drew out with a cry of triumph a thing that glittered in the murky air.

"Hella's claw…" Roc yelled, but was cut off by the rush of water against the cutter's deck.

"Hold you tight now!" shouted Elof, and drew the metal about his brows.

The cold sting of it seemed to surge through him. He shuddered, and felt the water boil around his massive limbs; dimly a protesting shout reached him, and he remembered to stay still a moment, felt a weight at his side, arms close around the roots of the high fin at his back. Then he kicked out once, and was away. The sea surged behind him, and he was aware of the long mass that slid slowly down into the green depths; but he forgot his brief flicker of grief in the rushing joy of the waters. He had taken this shape for its strength, and because he had worn it briefly once before, hoping that might help him endure it longer. He had not bargained for the gradual change it brought to his perceptions. Sight and scent dimmed, but a strange new awareness filled his mind that had some aspect of hearing about it and some of sight; a world of floating shapes it drew him, swaying and darting, suspended among shimmering swirls and currents, a world of beauties and mysteries he could only guess at. It allured him to dive down, to explore all the marvels half-guessed at in this alien setting, this otherworldly sea; so strong was its call he came dangerously close to forgetting his burden, and in panic he forced the new sense from his mind. Lifting his head above water, he could dimly make out the shore, and that way he drove, acutely aware of how little time he had. Already his thoughts were beginning to blur, to waver with the strain of maintaining the mask; sooner or later it would slip, and be hard to regain. On he swam, the world an unregarded wonder about him save for the weight that dragged at his back, and the explosive outburst of his own breath.

The current came as a shock, a sudden upsurge, warmer than the rest, that lifted him suddenly and dashed him forward the way he was headed. His eyes lifted above the surface, and suddenly they saw only too clearly the high and jagged barrier out-thrust before them. In a sudden flash of panic he thrust out his hands to stave it off - and they were human hands. The mask had dropped, and his heavy clothes were dragging him own. He heard one sharp cry from Roc, felt a hand clutch at the soaked furs on his shoulder and tear free in the swirling water; he reached out blindly, but there was only water - and scouring, scraping stone. The surf threw him against it, dragged him back, threw him again - but this time he caught it, gripped and clung though it scraped the skin from his finger, clung as his legs were dashed against the stone. He let the flow carry him to a foothold, then with one desperate heave he kicked and hauled himself up ere the undertow could pluck him away again, clasped tight to the stone as the next wave roared over him like green glass, and painfully pulled himself to a secure hold.

Only then, gasping with effort and the chill of the water, could he spare a moment to look up. He found that he was crouching on a long spit of jagged black rock, one of many out-thrust into the sea by a coastline that was all rough cliffs, sculptured strangely by the sea that besieged their walls. He scrambled hastily higher, beyond the reach of the waves, and stood up, scanning the sea and the rocks around, ready to dive back in at the slightest glimpse of any form. He could see nothing living save himself and the few gulls that swooped and screeched about the wild air. "Roc!" he yelled, over the drumming of the surf, and again, many times, till his salt-raw throat protested. A gust of cold panic closed over him, and he scrambled back up the rocks, higher and higher, yet from every new point of vantage he saw no more, nor were his calls answered. He looked up desperately at the promontory above; it would be no hard climb, and it would give him a commanding view. As swiftly as the thought he set his weary limbs to the rockface.

There was some snow on the ledges, and he wondered briefly if he would find the Ice beyond the cliff top; but when he thrust over a hand for some hold to draw himself up, his fingers closed upon coarse plants and earth that was relatively soft. He scrambled more confidently over the rim and stood a moment, staring around. It was a bleak landscape that met his eyes, cold and hard, a rounded expanse of rocky, stone-littered slopes and vales clad in sombre shades of brown and purple; but it lived. Its colours were those of tough grasses and flowering scrub, moorland hues not unlike the Starkenfells of his Nordeney home; in the valleys there were clumps of green, and here and there a stand of stunted birches, but all over the slopes there were thick patches of spiky gloss-green, dotted with yellow flowers. A great clump of these bushes rose near him, and he knew they were a kind he had never seen before. It was only then that he fully realised what he had done, that he had crossed the sundering oceans, come to the lands of the ancient east, first among men to do so in well-nigh a thousand years. And he had taken a great step on his quest; yet desperately he wished it undone, so bitterly it stuck in his throat.

This way and that he gazed from the crest of the promontory, out to sea, along the cliffs and the little beaches that nestled below them. He could see clearly and far yet he saw nothing that he wished to, no trace of any human shape. Again and again he called, but his voice alone challenged the gull-cries over the bleak land, the empty sea. At last he slumped down at the cliff-edge and sank his head in his hands. He was beyond the release of mourning, of tears; the void that opened at his feet seemed less than that within him, and his loneliness infinite. Love lost, homeland renounced, friends forsaken; and now he had doomed his oldest friend, failed to save at this one crisis the man to whom he owed his life many times over. His life; what use was it to him? All that he had won with such effort he had tossed away. He sat here on a barren coast, in no better case than if he had never quit his hovel upon the Great Marshes, half a world away and many long years. Worse; for there he had its shelter, at least, the means to live, and a guilt that he could hope to expiate. Here he had - what did he have? Sword, hammer, pack with its precious burdens, all hung at his side - yet something was missing. He lifted his fingers cautiously, and clutched his salt-stiffened hair in tearing handfuls. There was no helm on his head. There had not been, he knew now, since he had climbed from the rocks; nor was it about his neck, for he had fastened it only loosely in his haste. The loss shook him rigid; yet he would have laughed it off to find his friend alive once more. The sky above descended on his shoulders, and it was made of granite harsher than any beneath.

But it was not so very long before he raised his head again. If there were the least thing he could do, he should do it; one folly did not excuse others. He must search for what he had lost. The Tarnhelm had almost come ashore with him; it would be folly to abandon it so easily. It could not have borne him across the oceans because he had never seen this shore and could not hold its image in his thoughts; but now he had. If he could find it, it might serve to bear him back, though the distance involved unnerved him; Bryhon Bryheren had travelled across the Ice with it, but only in short stages, with rest. He could not rest in mid-ocean. Meanwhile, there was a little food in his pack; while that lasted he would search for Roc. The clouds parted a little; the sun, still hidden, shed long beams over the land, touching the hilltops with a sudden glow of warmth, but shining cold upon the green waves and the steely peaks of distant ice-islands. He watched the sea awhile, noting the run and flow of the surf that had borne him ashore, and how it varied and shifted with this wind. Alive, Roc should have come ashore somewhere near; dead, he still might. The place most likely was a beach some way down the cliff from the spit he had climbed, wider and less steep than the others he could see, and leading up to a shallow valley, a depression in the cliffs filled with bushes and birch that had grown straighter than was usual here in its shelter. And yet the wind seemed to be stirring them now…

There was movement in those bushes. Too much to be just one man - and yet among the dark foliage there was a brief but definite flash of red that could easily be the hue of Roc's hair. He leaned forward, eager to shout or wave, yet hesitant. Whatever moved, it would be out in the beach in a moment; then he could see. If it was Roc…

It was! He sprang up as the square, burly figure emerged from the bushes, cautiously, as if expecting trouble. Elof waved, hailed, and saw him start, look up, and wave back - no ordinary joyful wave, but a scything, flattening gesture, urgent, sinister.
Danger! Come down
! Or did he mean
stay out of sight
? Elof half turned, hesitated -