“No. You can’t tell where you are from looking at clouds.”
“That’s true, lad,” Blake replied. “But there are things you can tell from looking at them.”
The wind was raw and damp. Telly could see that the clouds covered most of the eastern sky, with patches filling in to the west. He studied the clouds and saw what looked to be a touch of false dawn—a faint bit of color against their underside.
Then he looked again. It was too early for the Furnace to be peeking over the horizon.
“What is that?” he asked, pointing towards the color.
“What do you suppose?” Blake asked. “I spotted it myself more than a week ago, just after sunset. We’ve come back near this point once each side-day since, but always during the daylight. This is the first time we’ve returned when it was dark.
“Silly lad,” Blake laughed. “Do I have to spell everything out to you? It’s another float, by God’s Plan. Not more than a few miles over the horizon. Those are the lights of their cookfires and lamps.”
Telly felt embarrassed by his innocence, but resisted the impulse to use it as an excuse before his teacher. He just sighed appreciatively.
“So what do you think, boy? Do you feel like going a’calling?”
Six
There will likely come a time in the life of every Navigator when he is called upon to do more than pilot his vessel through the waters of the world. Since the Fall, Okeanos has seen many eras of great trouble.
In the 3rd Century, we saw the Religious Wars as the Determinist Pastorate split over questions of doctrine. Within four side-years, the seas ran red again with blood from the Metal Wars as float fought float over the wealth dredged up from the sea bottom. And in our own lifetimes we have seen the Pirate Wars, with renegades seeking to profit from the growth of trade among the civilized peoples of Okeanos.
So clearly every Navigator—indeed, everyone who sets hull to water—must be prepared for battle.
“Rockets!”
Ivan and Eppie shouted together, but Telly knew before they yelled what had happened. The canoe had fired on them. He’d seen a sudden puff of orange flame torn away from one canoe by the wind, and a long thin cloud of white smoke begin to unreel in the narrowing gap between the Prospero and the war canoes.
The single-masted Prospero was large enough for six—Horatio Cady from the council as official representative of Schenker Float, Telly as pilot and navigator, Eppie Borges to run the heliograph, with Ivan Hayes and two others to fill out the crew.
It had taken more than two hours with a thick, sluggish wind behind them to reach the midpoint between the two floats. And when they did, they found they were not alone on the seas. A fleet of ten canoes filled with hard-stroking oarsmen cut through the waves.
And as they approached, two of the canoes had broken away from the main group and headed their way.
Telly had put the long glass to his eye and studied them carefully. Only a few thousand yards of metal-gray water lay between them. Through the glass, he could see the faces of individual rowers, though their expressions told them little.
Then he scanned across the length of one of the canoes in the center of the formation. Seated at its rear, rising above the others, was a man decked out in armor.
He wore a leather-and-wood-plate helmet that reminded Telly of Duncan Blake’s Trojan headgear—only this one had a brush of a good foot long, painted bright orange, that gave the man the look of a giant. Straps and checkplates hung loose on either side of the helmet, revealing a face covered with a beard that was almost the same color as the brush.
More lacquered wood plates covered his breast and shoulders, and Telly could see a long spear grasped in one hand. The man was not rowing, but shouting commands.
A chill had run up Telly’s spine. Who were these people? He couldn’t imagine why they wished the people of Schenker Float ill.
The two canoes coming their way were full of men—twenty or more each. They were barely three thousand yards away when they fired the rocket.
Everyone on the sailboat had seen them by now, alerted by the warning shout.
Telly kept a white-knuckle grip on the tiller, not sure which direction to turn. Cady was no help, but sat amidships in a slack-jawed wonder at the approaching canoes.
He put the tiller over hard and the Prospero swung to one side, the mast tilting towards the sea.
The rocket seemed to hang in the air, growing steadily larger, but wavering not a bit from its course—which was straight towards them. Telly steadied up on a bearing that took them at right angles to the rocket’s course. He held his breath, trying to coax the wind to blow harder, the seas to part, and the small craft to hurry on its way.
At the last minute, everyone aboard the boat turned their heads at once when the rocket soared past their stern harmlessly.
Telly barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief when he heard Ivan shout. “Here comes another one!”
This one seemed to be leading them slightly, and Telly turned again to avoid it. As he came about, a third missile was fired in their direction.
He felt a moment of panic, then shoved the tiller over in the opposite direction. The bow spun around until it was facing straight at the two canoes. The nearer rocket was almost upon them to port, while the other approached to starboard.
Each of them passed close by the Prospero and continued on to the empty sea behind it.
The canoes were due south of them now and less than a mile distant. The main body had continued on to the west and were now between the sailboat and Schenker Float.
Telly looked about, trying to decide what to do next. Not far to the north, a mile or two away, was a full-size pontoon more than a thousand meters wide and covered with low vegetation. He made his decision quickly and set course for its shelter.
With the wind off the port bow and picking up, the Prospero surged ahead. Ivan and his mates trimmed the sails, and they accelerated, the boat leaning into the long swells as if it were enjoying itself.
Two more rockets came their way, but Telly had set an oblique course that must have been hard to plot for the crews of the canoes. Both of them fell short of their target, and the canoes fell quickly behind.
A few minutes later, they rounded the far side of the pontoon, putting it between them and the canoes.
“We’ve got to warn them back home,” Cady said.
“What about it, Eppie?” Telly asked.
She looked up at the sky. “You don’t have to ask me, Telly. You can see for yourself.” The clouds were still there, bearing down on them from above like a shroud. There was no light bright enough to give the heliograph any use but making noise.
“Then we’ve got to get back,” Cady said. “Turn the boat around.”
“I certainly will, sir,” Telly said. “But the wind is against us. I’m going to have to tack upwind to get to Schenker, and that’ll take us longer than the canoes. I’m afraid there’s little we can do.”
Cady sputtered, and Eppie sighed. Ivan shook his head and looked as though he felt every bit as powerless as Telly did.
By the time they had circumnavigated the pontoon and set a course on a southerly tack, their two pursuers had headed back for the main body. According to Telly’s calculations on the plot board, it would take them more than two hours to return to Schenker—if the wind held.
It did not. And long before they made their way home, plumes of thick white smoke began to rise from the float.