6

As long as Sharina held her breath, the most amazing thing about the village of Floating Folk was the iceberg in the middle of it. The ice winked in sunlight like an immense jewel in a bezel of skin boats; the ice mountain's size dwarfed Folk houseboats which were impressive by any other standard.

When Sharina had to breathe, it was still the smell that made the greatest impression.

"I suppose I'll get used to it," she muttered. That was the most frightening thought of all.

The four islanders rode in the belly of Sleepsalot's boat. Nonnus and Sharina squatted side by side, facing forward. The nobles were just ahead with their backs to the bow, so close that Asera's knees almost touched Sharina's.

As soon as the catcher boats reached the village, Sleepsalot's crew had moored the dugout to their own houseboat—one of sixty or eighty similar vessels tethered by long lines in a circle around the iceberg. Then the catcher boats with all the family's healthy adults set off toward the pair of houseboats tied together catamaran fashion a quarter mile around the circuit.

"Where are they taking us now?" Meder asked; he no longer added "my man" when he directed a question to Nonnus, though Sharina wasn't sure whether appreciation of the hermit's abilities or simple fear had led to the change.

"It's the royal residence," Nonnus said, nodding toward the double vessel. "The king lives there with his family and guards. There's a deck between the hulls where the citizens can gather for a council."

"Citizens?" Sharina asked.

"If you can help crew a catcher boat," the hermit explained, "you're a citizen. Otherwise you're the property of anybody who chooses to feed you. And if nobody wants to take that responsibility, well, it's a big sea out there."

The islanders had boarded Sleepsalot's houseboat while Folk tied the dugout to it. Sharina had gotten a view of the remainder of the family, a score of prepubescent children and six old adults—five of them women—who gaped at the islanders in a mixture of awe and loathing. The children hid from the strangers' direct glance.

One little boy hung on the outside of the hull. He dipped down every time Sharina looked in his direction and popped his head back up over the gunwale as her gaze passed. His toes must be in the water, but the sea didn't seem to concern the Folk at any age.

Threefingers stood in the bow of Sleepsalot's boat. The youth was apparently Sleepsalot's son, but Sharina suspected that kinship among the Floating Folk was a complicated question.

At intervals, every twenty or so paddle-strokes, Threefingers blew on an ammonite's coiled shell; it would have made a horn eight feet long if straightened. The shell's surface reflected sunlight in a soft iridescence that should have been lovely; to Sharina it unexpectedly touched her the way the stench of the village did.

Nonnus was looking at the horn also. "They say the Folk worship the Great Ones of the deep," he said, pitching his voice just above a whisper. "But they say a lot of things, and they say things about Pewlemen too."

He smiled with sad memory. "The truth is usually bad enough, I've found."

Meder listened to the hermit's words while glancing about his new surroundings with an expression of lively interest. The procurator by contrast sat in abject silence, too miserable for her face to have any expression at all. Sharina was shocked at how much thinner Asera had become since she'd arrived in Barca's Hamlet. The change hadn't been obvious till now when Sharina saw her among other people for the first long time.

The iceberg was an incongruous mass dominating the floating village. Depending on how light struck the ice, its facets glittered blue or white or green.

Nonnus followed Sharina's eyes to the iceberg. "Food isn't a problem at sea," he said. "Fresh water can be. You can't count on rainwater and besides, it's hard to store."

He gestured to the ice. "Glaciers on the Ice Capes calve bergs every spring. They follow the same pattern of winds and currents that the Folk do. A village circles a berg until in a year or more it's melted enough to break up; then they find another."

"Are icebergs fresh water?" Sharina said. "Oh. I guess they must be if they come from land."

"It's rare a tribe has to move more than half a mile," Nonnus said, "but sometimes you can see a whole village paddling across the open sea because they waited too long to shift. That is a sight."

Horns wound from the royal catamaran. Members of the Folk left the other houseboats to head for the residence in catcher boats and strange little one-person pontoons—skin bladders with a whalebone outrigger on one side; the user rode the bladder like a horse and drove himself along with strokes from a double-ended paddle. The sea crawled with vessels built in styles undreamt of on Haft.

"They'll have a palaver," Nonnus said. He spoke softly, but his right hand lightly caressed the shaft of his javelin. That displayed his tension to one who knew him the way Sharina did. "There'll be an argument over us, but not much of one. And there'll be an argument over how the log's divided—that may go on all night."

The skin boat moved as if it were alive and ill-tempered. The frame was sawn from sections of whale rib, pegged together and tied with sinews. The hull sheathing was whaleskin, sewn on the inside with standing seams; at no point did a needle pass completely through the hull. Even so the seams were caulked with thick grease, probably the renderings of whale blubber.

Sharina found it odd to be at sea in a boat driven by paddlers looking forward rather than oarsmen facing the stern. The high sides made her feel trapped rather than protected; she didn't like the way the boat flexed, and she really didn't like the way it smelled.

But she could see that these craft would ride out storms that overwhelmed a planked boat: they floated like oil on the water. They'd have to if they were to survive winter in northern latitudes.

Sleepsalot's boat drew alongside the residence and halted with a quick swirl of all the paddles together. Sharina hadn't heard any commands during the quarter-mile spurt to the catamaran: Threefingers' horn signals were directed at the village, not to the crew of his own boat. The paddlers stroked to time without any outside control.

Sharina thought of schools of fish or flocks of pigeons, scores or even thousands of individuals acting as one without visible signals. And the Lady knew, from what she'd seen thus far the Floating Folk were like beasts in more ways than their ability to work together.

Folk lined the gunwale of the catamaran. Sleepsalot's family hopped aboard carrying harpoons, jostling and being jostled by the king's household. A woman fell into the water, bobbed up, and pulled herself onto the catamaran in a motion that reminded Sharina of a porpoise leaping.

"Hey!" Sleepsalot shouted. "Tie the boat up, you! Somebody tie her up!"

The crew ignored him. Sleepsalot, heavier than his juniors, clambered over the catamaran's gunwale. Nonnus gave Sharina a wry grin. He strode to the bow and looped the painter in the bow around one of the upjutting ribs of the houseboat's hull.

The rope was cut as a single square section of hide instead of being braided from multiple strands. Only half-cured, the leather was stiff and thick enough that the muscles of the hermit's forearms bulged as he twisted it into a knot.

"What would they do if their boat floated away?" Sharina asked.

"Swim after it," Nonnus said with a shrug. "The Folk can do most anything in the water. On land, well, I suppose they'd make about as good fertilizer as the same weight of seal guts."

He grimaced as he thought about what he'd just said. "Sorry, child," he murmured. "I'm back where I was when I was a younger man, and I'm sounding like I did when I was young and stupid too."

Though Sleepsalot's crew left the islanders—old news to them—behind without a glance, members of the king's household packed the side of the vessel to look at the strangers.

The men were loudly interested in Sharina. Her face stiffened. She'd worked the bar during Sheep Fairs with a lot of outsiders in the hamlet, but Reise kept a respectable house. If a drover drank too much to remember that, well, Garric and the neighbor men were on hand to remind them.

Here she had Nonnus.

The hermit leaped in a single motion to the houseboat's rail. "Make room for my women!" he roared, twirling the javelin above his head between the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand. "Make room for my son!"

There was a briefly angry response from the Folk. Nonnus kicked with his right foot, then his left, then his right again. From behind he looked as if he were executing a complex dance. In a manner of speaking that's what the hermit was doing: every time his foot lashed out, the callused heel smacked one of the Folk in the forehead and flung him back from the railing.

"Come on!" Sharina snapped to Asera and Meder. She let the hatchet slip back into its belt loop and half-helped, half-dragged the procurator onto the catcher boat's rail. "Nonnus, we're coming!"

The breeze was light and the catcher boat was in the lee of the high-sided residence. Sharina boosted Asera onto the houseboat's gunwale squawking; Nonnus bent and snatched the procurator over the side, dropping her into the bigger vessel at his feet. He and Sharina couldn't have done better if they'd practiced the maneuver.

Meder climbed up himself and rolled over the railing. He was awkward, but at least he spared himself the indignity of being tossed like a sack of grain.

Sharina knew she hadn't the hermit's balance, but she was young, proud, and keyed up by the circumstances. She hopped to the railing beside Nonnus, poised there for a moment, and dropped into the belly of the houseboat without stumbling. Chuckling deep in his throat, Nonnus walked down the frames as if they were steep stair-treads instead of jumping as she had done.

Forty-odd Folk clustered around the islanders. Seated or kneeling in their boats, the Floating Folk had the physique of gods. Their chests were deep, and rippling muscles corded their throats and arms.

Standing, their stunted lower quarters gave the Folk a misshapen, nightmare look. They walked with a shamble like monkeys just down from the trees. A houseboat's length was as far as any of them ever moved on his own legs.

"Get them over here!" shouted a man on the platform joining the two hulls. "Don't you be fooling with them! They're mine to judge!"

"You heard the king," Nonnus said to the crowd with a grim smile. He swept the butt of his javelin before him to clear a path. "Keep close," he murmured to the other islanders as he strode toward the platform.

The houseboats were blunt-ended tubs a hundred feet long and forty broad. Bow and stern were decked over with whaleskin on a frame of whalebone, the same construction as the rest of the hull. The covered portions were fetid caves, filthy even by the standards of the Floating Folk.

The open well—the middle half of the vessel—wasn't a great deal better. There was no covering for the bilges nor means of pumping them. Vermin crawled through the muck. The four islanders crossed on the raised frames, but the Folk themselves splashed along oblivious of what might be underfoot.

"This is insane!" Asera muttered.

"This is what magic brought us to!" Sharina snapped in reply. Nonnus said nothing as he swaggered ahead of the others, holding the javelin crossways before him as a bumper, but he smiled faintly.

The houseboat's structure was an intricate mass of triangles with no cross-frames. It flexed even in the present moderate sea, but it wouldn't break in the most violent storm. The whalehide covering was tough, and the sinew-sewn seams could work to a degree no wooden hull could equal without cracking or leaking.

A platform forty feet square, made with a layer of whaleskin both above and below the bone frame, joined the two hulls at the gunwales. The houseboats had only about five feet of freeboard, so even on a quiet day like this waves whacked the bottom of the platform or even washed onto it as the hulls rose and fell on different cycles. The scores of Folk already standing or kneeling on the platform ignored the water.

Nonnus shepherded his charges onto the shifting platform, then followed them in a motion that was half a jump, half a lithe twist of his lower body. Sharina knew the hermit was almost as old as the procurator, but no one would guess that from the way he moved.

The man on the throne of walrus ivory and mother-of-pearl was heavy without being fat and older than most of the others on the platform. Six young men in good condition flanked the throne. They wore caps of seawolf hide and carried long, narrow shields of the same material; one of them had a steel cutlass as well as the ivory-headed harpoon that seemed the universal mark of a citizen of the Folk.

"They call the guards the King's Sons," Nonnus murmured into Sharina's ear. "They are his kin, like enough, but they don't have to be."

The old woman kneeling beside the throne peered at the islanders with sharp interest. At first the woman seemed to be wearing a blue garment, but as she hunched to her feet Sharina saw that her body had been tattooed in intricate swirls. She shuffled around the edge of the platform, leaning on a staff carved from a narwhal tusk.

Sleepsalot stood before the king, so close that a guard lowered his harpoon and pricked him back as he bellowed, "King Longtoes, these islanders were floating in the sea beside the driftwood I found. I claim the wood and the strangers also as my slaves."

Sharina put her hand on her hatchet. Nonnus thrust the butt of his javelin between Sleepsalot's ankles from behind and levered the man forward onto his face. A guard rolled Sleepsalot backward with his foot. The watching Folk laughed and pounded their palms against the platform to make it rumble like a drum.

"King Longtoes," the hermit said, "I am Nonnus, son of Bran, son of Pewle Island. I bring you the following wood as payment for my family's joining the tribe. Five poles this diameter—"

He formed the fingers of his left hand into a semicircle the diameter of an oarshaft like the four braces and the mainspar; his javelin point scratched a complete circle on the whalehide.

"—and this long." Nonnus strode twenty feet out from the throne. The crowd parted for him because he followed his javelin. "Three pieces this diameter—" The outriggers and mast made from the trireme's spars. He stepped another four feet outboard. "—and this long. And a log this diameter—"

Nonnus arched both arms into a broad crescent.

"—and this long, but hollowed out by a third of the volume. On my honor as a Pewleman!"

The crowd hooted in wonder. The Folk could make do with bone for most purposes, but scarcity gave wood a certain value. Logs the size of the dugout must rarely enter the great circuit in which the Floating Folk lived.

"And what's a Pewleman's honor worth!" demanded a voice from Sleepsalot's entourage.

"It's worth your teeth to me to wear and your heart to eat if there's a handspan's less wood than I say!" Nonnus said. "Shall we make that bargain, Threefingers?"

Threefingers retreated behind his father's bulkier body. Nonnus stalked forward again to face the king, his javelin resting on his shoulder. "The price of six citizens!" he said to Longtoes. "For me, my two wives, and the son in my care. He's sickly and can't hunt, but I swore an oath to my gods to care for him nonetheless."

"So-o-o, Pewleman," Longtoes said. It was the first time Sharina had heard the king speak since he demanded their presence before him. His voice was harsh and penetrating. "If you join the tribe, what family will you own? Sleepsalot's?"

The crowd continued to grow as folk from the outlying houseboats reached the residence. There was a general chuckle at the suggestion. It was pretty obvious that it would mean a death shortly—Sleepsalot's, beyond any question in Sharina's mind at least.

"I'm father of a family myself!" Nonnus said. "I'll live here at the residence, King, until I build my own houseboat."

The tattooed woman had vanished into the crowd. She appeared unexpectedly beside Meder and said something low-voiced. Meder jumped; Sharina half lifted the hand axe which her hand had never left since they boarded the royal residence.

"No, Pewleman, I don't think that's what we'll do," Longtoes said in a lazy drawl. His head turned slowly as he scanned the spectators. "Motherhugger, you'll take the Pewleman and his slaves aboard your boat. I don't think the extra weight will sink it, but—"

He smiled; he was missing the front teeth of his upper jaw.

"—if the gods are that angry, then I wouldn't want to lose a better-found boat. Hey?"

Everybody laughed except for a hulking, bald-headed man and the dozen Folk standing near him. "My boat's not so very bad," he muttered angrily.

Meder and the tattooed woman were talking with animation, their heads close together. Even Asera watched with some interest. Sharina relaxed, though it wasn't a development she felt comfortable with.

"All right, my king," Nonnus said, bowing. "I obey you under the Law."

He stepped back. Wrangling resumed with Sleepsalot and Motherhugger among the half-dozen older men who immediately put in claims for a share of the wood.

"This way," Nonnus murmured. "We'll be going off in Motherhugger's catcher boat and I want to be ready when he is. I was never much of a swimmer."

"I'm staying here, my man," Meder said unexpectedly. "Leadsthestars and I want to talk more. She says she'll see that I get to you before dark."

"Does she?" Nonnus said without expression. "As you choose, Master Meder. Any path you choose to take."

He turned away abruptly and said to Sharina and Asera, "Come!" Sharina wasn't sure what the procurator would do, but Asera followed willingly enough. She'd straightened noticeably since Meder and the old woman started talking.

Sharina couldn't imagine how the hermit had managed to place Motherhugger's boat among the scores that had descended on the residence, but it didn't occur to her to doubt his statement. The vessel, moored to the other hull of the catamaran, was in all respects like that of Sleepsalot's family.

"Will the houseboat really be in danger of sinking?" Sharina asked quietly.

Nonnus shrugged. "Things start to fall apart as soon as they're built," he said, "but the Folk's houseboats are better built than most things you'll find on land. If there's pegging and patching needed, well, that'll give us something to do while we figure out how to get out of this place."

A score of young males broke away from the council and surrounded the islanders at a harpoon's distance. They weren't hostile, precisely, but they obviously knew their presence wouldn't be welcomed.

Threefingers was one of them. "Look here, Pewleman," he said. "You're an old man. You can't do a young wife any good. We think you ought to give her up right now since you know she'll be sneaking around to us anyway."

Sharina pulled her hand axe from its loop.

The hermit's laugh was a challenge out of nightmare. He walked up the bone frames of the hull backward, never taking his eyes from the young men.

"Who'll take my women from me?" he demanded in a high, harsh voice, dancing on the gunwale. He leaped up and passed the javelin from hand to hand beneath his feet before he came down again. "Who'll do that? Threefingers, will you try me?"

The youths backed another step. Others of the Folk, mostly children from the royal household, were watching with interest.

"Oh, we can't fight you because you've got a metal spear," muttered a paddler from Sleepsalot's boat.

Nonnus jumped from the gunwale more suddenly than even Sharina, who knew to expect something, could follow. He switched his javelin from right hand to left while in midair and snatched the harpoon out of Threefinger's grip.

"Oh!" Threefingers shouted as he leaped backward, colliding with several of his fellows.

Nonnus hurled the harpoon butt-forward into the chest of the youth who'd spoken. Ribs cracked; the victim's breath whooshed out as he went over on his back.

"Do you fear my steel, little men?" Nonnus crowed as he backed to his perch on the gunwale. "Fear me. Fear me!"

The youths' startlement turned to uproarious good humor, all but Threefingers and the fellow who lay wheezing as his chest refused to suck in the air his lungs so desperately needed. One of his erstwhile comrades kicked the victim when he thrashed close.

The group broke up and drifted away, still laughing. The injured man managed to roll over and crawl off with his head hanging, making little mewling sounds.

Nonnus stepped back beside Sharina. "We'll be all right for now," he said softly. "But it wouldn't do to have us separated."

Sharina nodded.

Meder and the tattooed woman squatted on a corner of the platform, facing one another. Meder now held what looked like a carved walrus tooth. He gestured as he spoke. A faint helix of red light lifted from the platform before him.