The Man Who Counts

XVI

The island called Dawrnach lay well beyond the archipelago’s end, several hundred kilometers north of Lannach. However swiftly the Flock flew, with pauses for rest on some bird-shrieking skerry, it was a matter of Earth-days to get there, and a physical nightmare for humans trussed in carrying nets. Afterward Wace’s recollections of the trip were dim.

When he stood on the beach at their goal, his legs barely supporting him, it was small comfort.

High Summer had come here also, and this was not too far north; still, the air remained wintry and Tolk said no one had ever tried to live here. The Holmenach islands deflected a cold current out of The Ocean, up into the Iceberg Sea, and those bitter waters flowed around Dawrnach.

Now the Flock, wings and wings and wings dropping down from the sky until they hid its roiling grayness, had reached journey’s conclusion: black sands, washed by heavy dark tides and climbing sheer up through permanent glaciers to the inflamed throat of a volcano. Thin straight trees were sprinkled over the lower slopes, between quaking tussocks, there were a few sea birds, to dip above the broken offshore ice-floes; otherwise the hidden sun threw its clotted-blood light on a sterile country.

Sandra shuddered. Wace was shocked to see how thin she had already grown. And now that they were here, in the last phase of their striving — belike of their lives — she intended to eat no more.

She wrapped her stinking coarse jacket more tightly about her. The wind caught snarled pale elflocks of her hair and fluttered them forlorn against black igneous cliffs. Around her crouched, walked, wriggled, and flapped ten thousand angry dragons: whistles and gutturals of unhuman speech, the cannon-crack of leathery wings, overrode the empty wind-whimper. As she rubbed her eyes, pathetically like a child, Wace saw that her once beautiful hands were bleeding where they had clung to the net, and that she shook with weariness.

He felt his heart twisted, and moved toward her. Nicholas van Rijn got there first, fat and greasy, with a roar for comfort: “So, by jolly damn, now we are here and soon I get you home again to a hot bath. Holy St. Dismas, right now I smell you three kilometers upwind!”

Lady Sandra Tamarin, heiress to the Grand Duchy of Hermes, gave him a ghostly smile. “If I could rest for a little—” she whispered.

“Ja, ja, we see.” Van Rijn stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out an eardrum-breaking blast. It caught Trolwen’s attention. “You there! Find her here a cave or something and tuck her in.”

“I?” Trolwen bridled . “I have the Flock to see to! ”

“You heard me, pot head.” Van Rijn stumped off and buttonholed Wace. “Now, then. You are ready to begin work? Round up your crew, however many you need to start.”

“I—” Wace backed away. “Look here, it’s been I don’t know how many hours since our last stop, and—”

Van Rijn spat. “And how many weeks makes it since I had a smoke or even so much a little glass Genever, ha? You have no considerations for other people.” He pointed his beak heavenward and screamed: “Do I have to do everything? Why have You Up There filled up the galaxy with no-good loafers? It is not to be stood!”

“Well… well—” Wace saw Trolwen leading Sandra off, to find a place where she could sleep, forgetting cold and pain and loneliness for a few niggard hours . He struck a fist into his palm and said: “All right! But what will you be doing?”

“I must organize things, by damn. First I see Trolwen about a gang to cut trees and make masts and yards and oars. Meanwhiles all this canvas we have brought along has got to somehow be made in sails; and there are the riggings; and also we must fix up for eating and shelter — Bah! These is all details. It is not right I should be bothered. Details, I hire ones like you for.”

“Is life anything but details?” snapped Wace.

Van Rijn’s small gray eyes studied him for a moment. “So,” rumbled the merchant, “it gives back talks from you too, ha? You think maybe just because I am old and weak, and do not stand so much the hardships like when I was young… maybe I only leech off your work, nie? Now is too small time for beating sense into your head. Maybe you learn for yourself.” He snapped his fingers. “Jump!”

Wace went off, damning himself for not giving the old pig a fist in the stomach. He would, too, come the day! Not now… unfortunately, Van Rijn had somehow oozed into a position where it was him the Lannachska looked up to… instead of Wace, who did the actual work — Was that a paranoid thought? No.

Take this matter of the ships, for instance. Van Rijn had pointed out that an island like Dawrnach, loaded with pack ice and calving glaciers, afforded plenty of building material. Stone chisels would shape a vessel as big as any raft in the Fleet, in a few hours’ work. The most primitive kind of blowtorch, an oil lamp with a bellows, would smooth it off. A crude mast and rudder could be planted in holes cut for the purpose: water, refreezing, would be a strong cement. With most of the Flock, males, females, old, young, made one enormous labor force for the project, a flotilla comparable in numbers to the whole Fleet could be made in a week.

If an engineer figured out all the practical procedure. How deep a hole to step your mast in? Is ballast needed? Just how do you make a nice clean cut in an irregular ice block hundreds of meters long? How about smoothing the bottom to reduce drag? The material was rather friable; it could be strengthened considerably by dashing bucketsful of mixed sawdust and sea water over the finished hull, letting this freeze as a kind of armor — but what proportions?

There was no time to really test these things. Somehow, by God and by guess, with every element against him, Eric Wace was expected to produce.

And Van Rijn? What did Van Rijn contribute? The basic idea, airily tossed off, apparently on the assumption that Wace was Aladdin’s jinni. Oh, it was quite a flash of imaginative insight, no one could deny that. But imagination is cheap.

Anyone can say: “What we need is a new weapon, and we can make it from such-and-such unprecedented materials.” But it will remain an idle fantasy until somebody shows up who can figure out how to make the needed weapon.

So, having enslaved his engineer, Van Rijn strolled around, jollying some of the Flock and bullying some of the others — and when he had them all working their idiotic heads off, he rolled up in a blanket and went to sleep!