Floe by Arlan Andrews Sr

Author:Arlan Andrews Sr. [Andrews, Arlan Sr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2023-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

28.

Captain Lork stood on deck as his crew came aboard carrying their gunnysacks, the heat of the bright sun providing a bit of welcome warmth against the slow but steady eastern wind. In the distance, Hillmork, the volcano goddess, was belching up an intermittent column of black smoke. Look like she’s going to spew out more lava, he thought. I hope the metalsmiths are already up there and prepared.

Centuries of lava-capture techniques, dipping godsmetal into the flowing molten rock, were the basis of Stonehaven’s trade in metals; its smiths took remnants of abundant ancient alloys—most often found in springlike coils that would fit on your arm, or as yard-long arcs of thin beams—and utilized the heat of lava to work a kind of magic with them, crafting iceboat skids and tillers, camshafts and skritchers, And my godspring harpoons, too! He smiled, rubbing his hand over the smooth barrels of the new ten-foot-long tubes. Six of the cylinders held godsmetal-tipped pronged spears, Big enough to bring down those huge sorihan and ice-bears, he recalled. Those tons of ice-bear meat we brought after the raid last month saved my skin, for sure! These new long-range harpoons will kill them even farther away. He shivered at the memory of that biggest ice-bear, tall enough to swipe above the gunwale, knocking the head off one of his icers.

Talking to himself out loud, he said, “But bringing that Kech guy in too, that helped.” The tall exotic stranger from some unknown foreign land out beyond Ice-End had proven such a novelty that Lork’s failed raid on the Dvora valley was all but forgotten. Not only did Alty-Moon tell tall tales of faraway places, but the man said he had traveled on huge ships that sailed on melt, “Five to ten times the size of your iceboats,” he said, “and on water—what you call ‘melt’—that can get wind-blown in waves up to ten to twenty feet high.”

After seeing that incredibly large melt-sea for himself when they had rescued Alty-Moon, Lork believed the rest of the stranger’s stories, too, as incredible as they were. In explaining what he had seen at Ice-End, Lork tried to have his fellow Stonehaveners imagine that their fresh-melt Lake Perido—measuring three miles wide by twenty long, all the way to the foot of Hillmork—was stretched from horizon to horizon, and that it was salty! Laughing at Lork and the crews who had been there with him, the townspeople dismissed such wild claims as just more icers’ wild ice-sea tales. They had no trouble believing stories of giant ice-bears and sorihan birds, since Lork had brought back pelts and leg bones. But a huge, salty ice-melt sea, that was just too much! Lork figured that someday he might bring back a jug of that melt, but knew the laughers would think he had salted it himself.

Even First Mate Attuk’s verification of finding Ice-End and the crevasse valley (“Attuk’s Valley,” the geographer had modestly named it, to Lork’s chagrin), and the new maps he

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