Khalad sighed and rolled his eyes upward.
‘I gather you’re going to embarrass me in public again,’ Sparhawk said. ‘What am I overlooking?’
‘The rafts, Sparhawk,’ Khalad said in a weary voice. ‘Sorgi’s gathering up the rafts to take them south to the timber markets. He’s going to lash them all together into a long log-boom. Put the knights in the ships, the horses on the boom, and we can all make it to Matherion in one trip.’
‘I forgot about the rafts,’ Sparhawk admitted sheepishly.
‘That log-boom won’t move very fast,’ Ulath pointed out.
Xanetia had been listening to their plans intently. She looked at Khalad and spoke diffidently, almost shyly. ‘Might a steady wind behind thy logs assist thee, young Master?’ Xanetia asked Khalad.
‘It would indeed, Anarae,’ Khalad said enthusiastically. ‘We can weave rough sails out of tree-limbs.’
‘Won’t Cyrgon—or Klael—feel you raising a breeze, dear sister?’ Sephrenia asked.
‘Cyrgon cannot detect Delphaeic magic, Sephrenia,’ Xanetia replied. ‘Anakha can ask Bhelliom whether Klael is similarly unaware.’
‘How did you manage that?’ Aphrael asked curiously.
Xanetia looked slightly embarrassed. ‘It was to hide from thee and thy kindred, Divine Aphrael. When Edaemus did curse us, he did so arrange his curse that our magic would be hidden from our enemies—for thus did we view thee at that time. Doth that offend thee, Divine One?’
‘Not under these circumstances, Anarae,’ Flute replied, swarming up into Xanetia’s arms and kissing her soundly.
2
The log-boom Captain Sorgi’s sailors had constructed from the rafts was a quarter of a mile long and a hundred feet wide. Most of it was taken up by the huge corral. It wallowed and wobbled its way south under threatening skies, and it was frequently raked by stinging sleet-squalls. The weather was bitterly cold, and the young knights who manned the raft were bundled to the ears in furs and spent most of their time huddled in the dubious shelter of the flapping tents.
‘It’s all in attention to detail, Berit,’ Khalad said as he tied off the rope holding the starboard end of one of their makeshift sails in place. ‘That’s all that work really is—details.’ He squinted along the ice-covered line of what was really much more like a snow-fence than a sail. ‘Sparhawk looks at the grand plan and leaves the details to others. It’s a good thing, really, because he’s a hopeless incompetent when it comes to little things and real work.’
‘Khalad!’ Berit was actually shocked.
‘Have you ever seen him try to use tools? That was something our father used to tell us over and over. “Don’t ever let Sparhawk pick up a tool.” Kalten’s fairly good with his hands, but Sparhawk’s hopeless. If you hand him anything associated with honest work, he’ll hurt himself with it.’ Khalad’s head came up sharply, and he swore.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Didn’t you feel it? The port-side tow-ropes just went slack. Lets go wake up those sailors. We don’t want this big cow turning broadside on us again.’ The two fur-clad young men started across the icy collection of lashed-together rafts, skirting the huge corral where the horses huddled together in the bitterly cold breeze coming from astern.
The idea of making a log-boom out of the rafts was very good in theory, but the problems of steering proved to be far more complex than either Sorgi or Khalad had anticipated. Khalad’s thickly woven fences of evergreen boughs acted well enough as sails, moving the sheer dead weight of the boom steadily southward ahead of Xanetia’s breeze. Sorgi’s ships were supposed to provide steerage-way by towing the boom, and that was where the problems cropped up. No two ships ever move at exactly the same rate of speed, even when propelled by the same wind. Thus, the fifty ships ahead and the twenty-five strung out along each side of the boom had to be almost constantly fine-tuned to keep the huge raft moving in the right general direction. As long as everybody paid very close attention, all went well. Two days south of Bhelliom’s wall, however, a number of things had gone wrong all at once, and the log-boom had swung round sideways. No amount of effort had been able to straighten it out, and so they had been obliged to take it apart and reassemble it—back-breaking labor in the bitter cold. Nobody wanted to go through that again.
When they reached the port side of the boom, Berit took a dented brass horn out from under his fur cape and blew a flat, off-key blast at the port-side tow-boats while Khalad picked up a yellow flag and began to wave it vigorously. The pre-arranged signals were simple. The yellow flag told the ships to crowd on more sail to keep the towing hawsers taut; the blue flag told them to put out the sea-anchors to slack off on the ropes; and the red flag told them to cast off all lines and get out of the way.
The tow-ropes went tight again as Khalad’s crisp signal trickled down through the ranks to the sailors who actually did the work aboard the ships.
‘How do you keep track of everything?’ Berit asked his friend. ‘And how do you know so quickly that something’s wrong?’
‘Pain,’ Khalad replied wryly. ‘I don’t really want to spend several days taking this beast apart and putting it back together again with the spray freezing on me, so I’m paying very close attention to the things my body’s telling me. You can feel things change in your legs and the soles of your feet. When one of the hawsers goes slack, it changes the feel of how the boom moves.’
‘Is there anything you don’t know how to do?’
‘I don’t dance very well.’ Khalad squinted up into the first stinging pellets of another sleet-squall. ‘It’s time to feed and water the horses,’ he said. ‘Let’s go tell the novices to stop sitting around admiring their title and get to work.’
‘You really dislike the aristocracy, don’t you?’ Berit asked as they started forward along the edge of the corral toward the wind-whipped tents of the apprentice knights.
‘No, I don’t dislike them. I just don’t have any patience with them, and I can’t understand how they can be so blind to what’s going on around them. A title must be a very heavy thing to carry if the weight makes you ignore everything else.’
‘You’re going to be a knight yourself, you know.’
‘It wasn’t my idea. Sparhawk gets silly sometimes. He thinks that making knights of my brothers and me is a way of honoring our father. I’m sure that Father’s laughing at him right now.’
They reached the tents, and Khalad raised his voice. ‘All right, gentlemen!’ he shouted, ‘It’s time to feed and water the animals. Let’s get at it!’ Then he critically surveyed the corral. Five thousand horses leave a great deal of evidence that they have been present. ‘I think it’s time for another lesson in the virtue of humility for our novices,’ he said quietly to Berit. Then he raised his voice again. ‘And after you’ve finished with that, you’d better break out the scoop-shovels and wheel-barrows again. We wouldn’t want to let the work pile up on us, would we, gentlemen?’
Berit was not yet fully adept at some of the subtler forms of magic. That part of the Pandion training was the study of a lifetime. He was far enough along, however, to recognize ‘tampering’ when he encountered it. The log-boom seemed to be lumbering southward at a crawl, but the turning of the seasons was giving some things away. It should have taken them much longer to escape the bitter cold of the far north, for one thing, and the days should not have become so much longer in such a short time for another.
However it was managed, and whoever managed it, they arrived at a sandy beach a few miles north of Matherion late one golden autumn afternoon long before they should have and began wading the horses ashore from the wobbly collection of rafts.
‘Short trip,’ Khalad observed laconically as the two watched the novices unloading the horses.