He felt his heart twisted, and moved toward her. Nicholas van Rijn got there first, fat and greasy, with a roar for comfort: “So, by jolly damn, now we are here and soon I get you home again to a hot bath. Holy St. Dismas, right now I smell you three kilometers upwind!”
Lady Sandra Tamarin, heiress to the Grand Duchy of Hermes, gave him a ghostly smile. “If I could rest for a little—” she whispered.
“Ja, ja, we see.” Van Rijn stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out an eardrum-breaking blast. It caught Trolwen’s attention. “You there! Find her here a cave or something and tuck her in.”
“I?” Trolwen bridled . “I have the Flock to see to! ”
“You heard me, pot head.” Van Rijn stumped off and buttonholed Wace. “Now, then. You are ready to begin work? Round up your crew, however many you need to start.”
“I—” Wace backed away. “Look here, it’s been I don’t know how many hours since our last stop, and—”
Van Rijn spat. “And how many weeks makes it since I had a smoke or even so much a little glass Genever, ha? You have no considerations for other people.” He pointed his beak heavenward and screamed: “Do I have to do everything? Why have You Up There filled up the galaxy with no-good loafers? It is not to be stood!”
“Well… well—” Wace saw Trolwen leading Sandra off, to find a place where she could sleep, forgetting cold and pain and loneliness for a few niggard hours . He struck a fist into his palm and said: “All right! But what will you be doing?”
“I must organize things, by damn. First I see Trolwen about a gang to cut trees and make masts and yards and oars. Meanwhiles all this canvas we have brought along has got to somehow be made in sails; and there are the riggings; and also we must fix up for eating and shelter — Bah! These is all details. It is not right I should be bothered. Details, I hire ones like you for.”
“Is life anything but details?” snapped Wace.
Van Rijn’s small gray eyes studied him for a moment. “So,” rumbled the merchant, “it gives back talks from you too, ha? You think maybe just because I am old and weak, and do not stand so much the hardships like when I was young… maybe I only leech off your work, nie? Now is too small time for beating sense into your head. Maybe you learn for yourself.” He snapped his fingers. “Jump!”
Wace went off, damning himself for not giving the old pig a fist in the stomach. He would, too, come the day! Not now… unfortunately, Van Rijn had somehow oozed into a position where it was him the Lannachska looked up to… instead of Wace, who did the actual work — Was that a paranoid thought? No.
Take this matter of the ships, for instance. Van Rijn had pointed out that an island like Dawrnach, loaded with pack ice and calving glaciers, afforded plenty of building material. Stone chisels would shape a vessel as big as any raft in the Fleet, in a few hours’ work. The most primitive kind of blowtorch, an oil lamp with a bellows, would smooth it off. A crude mast and rudder could be planted in holes cut for the purpose: water, refreezing, would be a strong cement. With most of the Flock, males, females, old, young, made one enormous labor force for the project, a flotilla comparable in numbers to the whole Fleet could be made in a week.
If an engineer figured out all the practical procedure. How deep a hole to step your mast in? Is ballast needed? Just how do you make a nice clean cut in an irregular ice block hundreds of meters long? How about smoothing the bottom to reduce drag? The material was rather friable; it could be strengthened considerably by dashing bucketsful of mixed sawdust and sea water over the finished hull, letting this freeze as a kind of armor — but what proportions?
There was no time to really test these things. Somehow, by God and by guess, with every element against him, Eric Wace was expected to produce.
And Van Rijn? What did Van Rijn contribute? The basic idea, airily tossed off, apparently on the assumption that Wace was Aladdin’s jinni. Oh, it was quite a flash of imaginative insight, no one could deny that. But imagination is cheap.
Anyone can say: “What we need is a new weapon, and we can make it from such-and-such unprecedented materials.” But it will remain an idle fantasy until somebody shows up who can figure out how to make the needed weapon.
So, having enslaved his engineer, Van Rijn strolled around, jollying some of the Flock and bullying some of the others — and when he had them all working their idiotic heads off, he rolled up in a blanket and went to sleep!
XVII
Wace stood on the deck of the Rijstaffel and watched his enemy come over the world’s rim.
Slowly, he reached into the pouch at his side. His hand closed on a chunk of stale bread and a slab of sausage. It was the last Terrestrial food remaining: for Earth-days, now, he had gone on a still thinner ration than before, so that he could enter this battle with something in his stomach.
He found that he didn’t want it after all.
Surprisingly little cold breathed up from underfoot. The warm air over the Sea of Achan wafted the ice-chill away. He was less astonished that there had been no appreciable melting in the week he estimated they had been creeping southward; he knew the thermal properties of water.
Behind him, primitive square sails, lashed to yard-arms of green wood on overstrained one-piece masts, bellied in the north wind. These ice ships were tubby, but considerably less so than a Drak’ho raft; and with some unbelievable talent for tyranny, Van Rijn had gotten reluctant Lannachska to work under frigid sea water, cutting the bottoms into a vaguely streamlined shape. Now, given the power of a Diomedean breeze, Lannach’s war fleet waddled through Achan waves at a good five knots.
Though the hardest moment, Wace reflected, had not been while they worked their hearts out to finish the craft. It had come afterward, when they were almost ready to leave and the winds turned contrary. For a period measured in Earth-days, thousands of Lannachska huddled soul-sick under freezing rains, ranging after fish and bird rookeries to feed cubs that cried with hunger. Councilors and clan leaders had argued that this was a war on the Fates: there could be no choice but to give up and seek out Swampy Kilnu. Somehow, blustering, shining, pleading, promising — in a few cases, bribing, with what he had won at dice — Van Rijn had held them on Dawrnach.
Well — it was over with.
The merchant came out of the little stone cabin, walked over the gravelstrewn deck past crouching war-engines and heaped missiles, till he reached the bows where Wace stood.
“Best you eat,” he said. “Soon gives no chance.”
“I’m not hungry,” said Wace.
“So, no?” Van Rijn grabbed the sandwich out of his fingers. “Then, by damn, I am!” He began cramming it between his teeth.
Once again he wore a double set of armor, but he had chosen one weapon only for this occasion, an outsize stone ax with a meter-long handle. Wace carried a smaller tomahawk and a shield. Around the human’s, it bristled with armed Lannachska.
“They’re making ready to receive us, all right,” said Wace. His eyes sought out the gaunt enemy war-canoes, beating upwind.
“You expected a carpet with acres and acres, like they say in America? I bet you they spotted us from the air hours ago. Now they send messengers hurry-like back to their army in Lannach.” Van Rijn held up the last fragment of meat, kissed it reverently, and ate it.
Wace’s eyes traveled backward. This was the flagship — chosen as such when it turned out to be the fastest — and had the forward position in a long wedge. Several score grayish-white, ragged-sailed, helter-skelter little vessels wallowed after. They were outnumbered and outgunned by the Drak’ho rafts, of course; they just had to hope the odds weren’t too great. The much lower freeboard did not matter to a winged race, but it would be important that their crews were not very skilled sailors -