“On! On!” yelled the Hikdar, as though he led a regimental charge against swordsmen. A number of low huts against the fence contained repair materials. We were going to have to rebuild the damned fence if the gale persisted much longer. Soon I was employed lugging out lengths of lumber and running with them to the men propping the fences, reinforcing the props that had snapped, reweaving fresh withes between the uprights and diagonals to form fresh panels. It was damned hot work with that biting, burning wind scouring the air in the lungs and frying the eyes in the head. And, over all, the moons of Kregen shone down through the gale-torn gaps in the clouds. It did not rain.
Other men were there helping, and I realized that reinforcements had been brought up from somewhere, for these new arrivals were slaves. They were lashed into the work, while the soldiers labored through their own discipline.
A voller sliced down from above, riding on an even keel and without discomfort in the shriek of the gale. It was very clearly of that class of flier that moves independently of the wind, the forces in its silver boxes surrounding the voller with its own sphere of influence. A man in a blue cape gestured and the anger in his gesture was plain. The Hikdar yelled more fiercely over the wind and the slave overseers plied their whips.
Staggering up carrying a timber balk against the wind I cannoned into a Brokelsh who, with the crudity of that race, grabbed me for mutual support. He seized the other end of the balk and together we ran it across to the soldiers where they struggled to hold up a section of fence against the wind. In the lee of the half-raised fence the cessation of violence, streaming wind, and blattering noise cut and snuffed, I paused for a quick breather. The Brokelsh spat.
“These onkers’ll never get a section as big as this up. Look at ’em. . onkers!”
“It’s a tough one,” I said. A few paces further along the fence lay flat on the ground, rippling with the wind flow. Men clustered like flies on a honeyed rope as they sought to shove the fence up with their poles. A pole slipped from the upright against which it thrust. It ripped through the withes, tearing them like tissue as wind pressure smashed the fence down. Men jumped out of the way and the wind hit us again.
Ropes lay neatly coiled here and there. I had once been a sailor on the seas of Earth and had long experience in handling enormous weights and dealing with wind pressures, with the only power at my disposal the muscles of men.
The blustering yell of the wind made normal speech impossible. If I started to do what I intended, others would follow. . that is always the way. Once a man takes the lead there are always those who will follow. It just needs the right man in the right place at the right time. How all the gods of Kregen must have guffawed! How the Star Lords and the Savanti, if they were watching, must have snickered!
They say pride comes before a fall.
I, Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, jumped up and ran head-down into the wind. I snatched up the end of a coil of rope and sprinted for the flat section of fence. Once over that I could loop the rope around an upright and then, with the men I knew would follow my example, we could haul back and so raise the fence in proper shipshape fashion.
I saw the Deldar waving his arms at me, his face a most wonderful color, much like an overripe shonage, and his mouth opening and opening as he bellowed all silently in the wind rush. I waved my arm back, reassuringly. The rope felt thick and bristly in my hands. It felt wonderfully reassuring, also, bringing back many salty moments of the past. Running forward, bent over, I scarcely heeded where I was going. Just to get around the end of the fence and loop the rope up onto an upright, that was my task. I’d show these onkers of Hamal how a sailorman handled the wind!
As I say, pride goes before a fall.
I lurched against the wind past the end of the fence and for a moment I put my hand against the wood. I looked down.
To this day, as I sit here talking into this microphone, I can recall the utter shock of disbelief that thrilled through me.
The wind shrieked past my ears, the wood felt thick and sleazy in one hand, and the rope thick and bristly in the other — and I looked down. I stood on the very lip of a precipice. The edge of ground broke sheer away. At that instant the clouds parted. The four great moons of Kregen shone forth. And I saw.
I saw.
Far far below I saw the ground. I saw the ground moving past below. The sharp edge of the precipice did not join that ground; I stood on ground that soared above the earth like a flier. I yelled. The very shock of it, the incredible fact of it, hit me shrewdly. Land that flew through the air!
Volgendrin!
And then I slipped and pitched forward, spinning out into thin air.
Chapter 16
I fell.
The wind smashed at me. The world spun upside down and right side up, with the moons hurtling between my feet and the volgendrin Catherine-wheeling above me and then the hard earth far far below flicking into view over my head.
The rope burned through my hand.
My other hand came across as though I drew my rapier to face a treacherous attack from a Bravo fighter, and gripped. My two hands pained with a tearing agony that lanced up my arms and into my brain, but I held on. I held on and dangled. Now the distant earth was below me and above me the volgendrin showed its sheer side and the black rock crust. Above that the moons cast down their mingled pinkish light and I was rising and lifting in the air as willing hands hauled me back from death.
“By Havil!” said the Brokelsh as they hauled me over the lip. “And how were the Ice Floes of Sicce?”
“Cold.”
They landed me as a fisher lands a fish and I rolled over on the ground, getting my breath back. The wind had sensibly decreased in violence. The longsword poked out awkwardly as I sat up sideways and so rose to my feet.
“That is a strange cross on your shoulder, dom,” said the Brokelsh. The Deldar moved up, shouting, and we could hear what he was saying, the usual farrago of obscenities and orders to get back to work.
“Aye,” I said. “And here is the obbie.”
The ob-Deldar lashed his men on and, in that remarkable way these men have, requested me most politely, although at the top of his voice, if I would mind lending a hand. So we pitched in to re-erect the fences.
The whole time, as we labored and the wind dropped, sighed a few fitful gusts, then died altogether, I marveled at just where I was. So the word volgendrin held a precise meaning! I had not suspected the full truth, but, looking back, and with a little hindsight, I realized I had been blind. In all probability you who listen to these tapes will long ago have fathomed out just what a volgendrin is. No one went to their beds that night until the last fence had been firmly staked, lashed, and propped. It was now clear why the wind had risen so rapidly and then so rapidly died away: the volgendrin had passed from the lee of one mountain into the open maw of a pass before reaching the shelter of the next peak. Those barren, burning wastes of arid mountainsides with the wind tunneling through had poured that burning gale on us. Now the volgendrin in its eternal circling movement would swing around and away from the mountains before its course once more brought it back into the funnel of the wind. Just how high up we soared through the air was not too easy to determine; I thought we held the thousand-foot mark. With the earliest light of the next day I was up, ostensibly to fly back, in actuality to find out as much as I could about this marvel, this flying island, this volgendrin. And the first thing I saw with the suns was another flying island an ulm away, floating through the air like a cloud.