Swords From the Sea (22 page)

And the fresh tracks from the ship to the shore had been made after the last storm. One man, possibly more, had left the ship within the last days. Thorne picked up the candle and looked at the globe. He had some skill at chart reading-having watched many a time the Cosmographer drawing the outlines of the earth-and he knew that this was a complete mappamundi. Both hemispheres and the northern and southern seas were traced on the great copper ball very clearly.

And he saw, running due east, from the island of the Wardhouse, a long body of water, a strait that extended to the mark of "Cathay." But the natives said no such passage existed, and the journal of Sir Hugh bore them out.

Durforth's globe was false. It had been drawn to mislead Sir Hugh, even as Renard's agent had been sent to put an end to the voyage. This had been done, and the lives of two hundred men snuffed out like so many candle flames.

Thorne lifted his head, hearing, in the utter silence of the ship, a footfall in the main cabin. It was as light and elusive as an animal's, yet he was certain that it drew closer to the door by which he was standing.

Drawing his sword and taking the mitten off his right hand, he put out the candle with a sweep of the blade. Waiting until his eyes were accustomed to the gloom, he lifted the latch with his left hand and opened the door with a thrust of his foot. The half-light of the outer cabin disclosed Kyrger.

"Ostiaks," murmured the hunter, and glanced expectantly at the white man.

Kyrger was as restless as one of his own reindeer in a pen. When he moved it was as if his feet slipped over thin ice. He kept one eye on the deck beams within inches of his skull. In all his life he had not stood within four walls, certainly never in the maw of a giant's ship such as this. One that went forward against the wind.

"Faith, here's a coil," thought the armiger. "I'd best go with him to see what's in the wind."

But Kyrger did not wish this. Motioning for Thorne to watch, he began the pantomime which all primitive races understand. First he impersonated the voyagers, sitting around the fire. Then he jumped up and grasped at his bow, sending an imaginary arrow at an enemy.

By degrees Thorne understood that Ostiak tribesmen had attacked the camp; they had bound Joan and Peter and the reindeer. They had chased Kyrger nearly to the bay.

A very few of the Samoyed's words Thorne had picked up in the last months.

"Sinym ka-i-unam?" he asked quickly. "Has the little sister gone to the regions below?"

By shaking his head Kyrger signified that Joan was still alive. So was Peter, thanks to the mail jerkin the shipman wore.

Looking through a crack in one of the boarded-up ports, Thorne saw that the hunter had been telling the truth. On the shore a group of natives were descending toward the ice with two sledges drawn by dogs. Thorne counted eleven of them, armed with long spears and clubs.

He cast a glance aloft. The battle nettings that might have been slung from the quarterdeck rail to the forecastle, to keep out boarders, were not to be seen. Turning into the roundhouse, he looked at the racks where harquebuses and crossbows should have been stacked about the butt of the mizzen. None were there, and he found time to reflect that Durforth must have taken them from the ship.

But his eye fell upon a weapon more potent than any firelock, a murderer.

Bolted to a pivot on the quarterdeck rail was one of the light cannon that could be trained at will upon any part of the waist or foredeck. Sign ing to Kyrger to watch the approaching Ostiaks, he dived below, searching until he found an open keg of powder in the hold.

Dipping up a good quantity in his cap, he climbed the after companion to the roundhouse, which served as the armory. Here he filled a small sack with bullets, nails, and scraps of iron. Here, too, he found flint and steel and a slow match.

Back at the gun again he rammed home the loose powder, stuffed in wadding and his shot. Then he primed the touch hole and drew Kyrger back with him to the far angle of the roundhouse where they could not be seen by the natives climbing up the starboard ladder.

It did not take long to strike a spark that ignited the long fuse in his hand. Nursing the slow match, he waited, listening to the chattering talk of the Ostiaks and smiling at the sudden silence that fell when the first of them saw the dead helmsman.

Then he walked out to the quarterdeck rail. Nine pairs of small, bleared eyes fastened on him instantly and a spear whirred through the air, striking the chest of his fur jacket. The heavy skin and the leather jerkin under it broke the bone point of the spear, which did no more than shake him.

For a second he looked down into flat, swollen faces, fringed by ragged and greasy hair. About each neck was coiled a string of something whitish, the entrails of deer, he discovered a moment later, which served the Ostiaks for food as well as ornament. Then he trained the gun and touched it off as two more spears flashed by his head.

Kyrger bounded his own height from the deck when the murderer roared. Coughing, as the dense powder fumes swirled back, the Samoyed saw that three of the nine Ostiaks who had come over the rail were stretched on the deck and that two others were limping around in the smoke, yelling with pain.

Never before had Kyrger heard a gun go off, and he was struck with the awfulness of his leader's magic. Perceiving that he himself was without hurt, he plucked up heart and glided to the side bulwark, from which point of vantage he shot one of the natives who had remained on the ice, before they recovered from their astonishment.

Meanwhile Thorne had descended to the waist, sword in hand. Four of the Ostiaks snarled at him, and rushed through the eddying smoke. They had thrown their spears and wielded knives or clubs, and Thorne ran the first one through the body before they realized the length of his sword.

Then a thin man came forward, armed with the shank-bone of some animal. He wore a woman's leather skirt and his long black hair hung to his shoulders, over a kind of crude armor-so Thorne judged it to be. A multitude of iron images were suspended on cords slung from neck and waist. These images were of dogs and sheep and birds, crudely wrought, but covering his emaciated body completely.

Thorne remembered that this leader of the Ostiaks had been in the very path of the cannon's discharge, but had come through unharmed.

"So you are for your long home, my iron rogue," he gibed, for it was his way to talk when steel was out.

He stepped forward and thrust at the Ostiak's side. But his blade seemed to pass through air, or the loose tunic of the strange man, who screamed at him and struck with the bone club.

Thorne would have been brained if he had not ducked instinctively, the club smashing down on his shoulder blade.

He recovered for a second thrust, but the old native glided away from him, and disappeared under the waistcloth. The armiger sought for him along the rail, but saw him presently running over the ice.

Turning quickly, he was just in time to ward the knife of an Ostiak who had crept up from behind. Slashing at the throat of this newest antagonist, he sprang after the man of the iron apron, seeing that the few surviving tribesmen were fleeing in as many different directions.

"Shoot him!" he cried to Kyrger, who had been watching the annihilation of the remaining foemen with interest.

Believing that Thorne was aided by supernatural powers, it had not occurred to the Samoyed to join in the melee. Now he shook his head.

"Shaman menkva," he grunted. "A wizard and a devil."

It would have been quite useless to send an arrow after a wizard, Kyrger knew. Had not his friend and the wizard tried to slay each other and failed? How then could Kyrger be expected to slay the shaman?

Thorne swore under his breath and started in pursuit of the Ostiak. The lanky shaman seemed to float over ice ridges and rocks, his long hair flying out behind, his iron tunic rattling. Gaining the shore, he shrieked at his dogs and set to work to tie the second team by a leather thong to the first sled.

When this was done he hopped into the rear sled, cracked his whip, and glided off as the beasts dug their claws into the trail and strained at the traces. The sleds picked up speed and presently whirled out of sight in a smother of snow, the shaman peering back at his pursuer, his pointed teeth gleaming between writhing lips.

Thinking of Joan and Peter bound in the camp, Thorne settled down grimly to the trail. His heavy boots made clumsy going on the hard sur face, and the cries of the wizard and the snapping of the whip drew farther away from him.

Kyrger had lingered on the Confidentia to visit each of the wounded Ostiaks, and when he dropped from the ladder of Durforth's ill-fated ship, had added to her crew of dead men.

Chapter XV

Darkness

By the fire that Kyrger had built, Thorne found Peter stretched like a stout log in the snow, his arms bound to his side, and a blue bruise swelling in his tangle of red hair. He was still breathing, and Thorne dragged him into the Samoyed's sledge, covering him up with the skin of the white bear to keep him from freezing to death. Joan was gone; so were the dogs and their master, and the reindeer. After a little Kyrger appeared and took in the scene with a comprehensive glance.

As best he could, Thorne explained to the attentive hunter that they must follow the dogsleds. All other matters must wait until he had set Joan free from the creature in the leather apron.

"Sinym-sinym thusind," muttered Kyrger, nodding assent, for he saw that the outlander was very angry. "Young sister-the pursuit of blood atonement."

He lifted his head and called shrilly, and Thorne saw the two reindeer appear from the nearest thicket, munching at the branches as they came. They had been driven off by the shaman or had run away from the dogs. Thorne learned thereafter that dogs and reindeer were as hostile as the two tribes that were served by each animal.

Kyrger lost no time in putting the reindeer into the leather traces, tying the guiding thong attached to their off horns to the hand bar of the sledge. Then he beckoned Thorne, who discovered that the savage had picked up a pair of the wooden skates dropped by one of the Ostiaks. They were shorter than the Samoyed's and heavier, and Kyrger bound them firmly to Thorne's boots.

Then he led the outlander to the rear of the sledge and made him put his hands on the waist-high bar at the back.

"Thus," he murmured to himself, "we will go as swiftly as the white pigeon flying before the wind. Be quiet my master! Let your spirit be strong when we meet new enemies who dwell where winged things cannot enter and things with bones cannot pass. Kai-it will be a long journey, 0 Thunderer, 0 Leaner-Against-the-Wind."

He glided off and picked up the two staffs, which, pointed and bearing sizeable crosspieces a foot from the point, enabled him to push himself along rapidly where the snow surface was level, as if he were poling a light canoe through shallows.

Alone, he would never have started after the wizard, who could make the long journey to the hall of Erlik in the spirit world of the cold, underground region, or invoke ermecin the white bear.

But after the fight on the bark, Kyrger had immense confidence in Thorne. He believed that the armiger as well as the shaman was possessed by a spirit, whether the reindeer, the gull, the bear, or the eagle, he did not know. How else had he scattered eleven Ostiaks?

He went ahead of the deer, running at times, but oftener thrusting himself onward a dozen paces with the staffs. Faster he went and faster, squatting on his haunches when the head of a slope was reached and flashing down with the speed of a flying thing.

The reindeer struck into their loose-limbed trot that covered distance amazingly. Thorne for a while had all he could do to hang on and keep his feet. Once the toe of his skis caught in a fallen branch and he was thrown heavily. But he soon learned how to lift himself over obstacles and to keep his feet together.

The gray obscurity of the day merged into the flickering radiance of night with its attendant fires in the northern sky. Kyrger looked like a winged gnome, speeding over the slot in the snow; Peter was no more than a motionless bulk under the fur pelt. Thorne could not stop and make camp for the shipman's sake. Joan, somewhere ahead of them, was flying through this wilderness of unmarked snow.

The reindeer no longer seemed to him to be running. They flew through the air, their whitish bodies invisible in the smother of powdered snow, their black-muzzled heads laid back so that the horns rested along their shoulders.

How long they raced through the night he did not know. They were sliding down a winding gully where a few stunted larches thrust up through the drifts, when Kyrger whirled to a halt and strung his bow. His arrow sped and struck something invisible to Thorne. But the hunter pushed himself to where it lay and brought back a long white hare.

With his knife he stripped the skin off its back and offered it to the outlander. There was no time to stop to make a fire, even if wood had been at hand. The ache of hunger was strong enough for him to suck some of the blood from the hare; but then he handed it back to Kyrger, who ate the raw flesh, still steaming hot, without a qualm.

Meanwhile Thorne satisfied himself that Peter was breathing. From the gully they descended to the level surface of a frozen lake, down which the trail of the dogsleds ran. Here the reindeer, refreshed by the brief halt, made fast time and Thorne peered ahead for a sight of the Ostiak.

For hours they followed the windings of the lake, which grew steadily narrower. Trees appeared on either hand and soon they were moving between the solid walls of a forest of spruce and fir. When the strip of water was no more than a stream, Kyrger slowed down and halted his reindeer, which had been running the last few miles with tongues lolling out.

Coming to Thorne's side, the Samoyed pointed above the trees ahead of them and to the right, and after a moment the armiger made out what his companion had seen, a wavering line of smoke rising against the gray sky.

For the first time Kyrger turned aside from the trail, leading his deer into a grove of spruce where they were sheltered from the wind. Then he took up the crossbow that he had placed in the sledge, and the two advanced through the timber in the direction of the smoke, the hunter circling to keep away from the stream.