15

The captain fanned himself with his cap, the most wind anybody on the open-decked trading yawl had felt all day. He spat over the stern rail, a recognized custom for summoning a breeze. His lips and those of his four crewmen were stiff with puckering to spit, all for nothing.

"If we don't get a breeze come morning," the captain said, "it's out with the sweeps. There's no help for it."

"It's mighty hot," the wizened mate said, looking toward the northern horizon. Erdin was there, a good day's sail distant. An eternity distant if they didn't get a wind.

The yawl was loaded with oranges from the island of Shengy in the southern arc. Citrus fruit brought a good price in Erdin. The captain had decided to risk being becalmed in the center of the Inner Sea rather than take the slow but safe voyage around the western periphery—Shengy, Cordin, Haft, and finally Sandrakkan across the long passage. They'd had a steady south wind for the whole trip—until now, when they should have been making the final run for port.

The captain tried to spit again. His mouth was too dry. The three ordinary sailors watched him glumly. "Tomorrow, the sweeps," he croaked. "Unless there's a wind."

The mate stood, then scrambled like the monkey he resembled to the top of the short, forward-slanting mast. He wrapped his legs around the pole and stared north, shading his eyes with his paired hands. "On the horizon!" he called. "There's something moving."

The captain hopped onto the rail and walked along it until he could see past the limp triangle of the lateen sail. There was something moving.

"It's a man on a raft," the mate said. "Sister swallow me down but it looks to be a man on a raft!"

"How's he moving, then?" asked the helmsman, standing also. The yawl rocked gently as her crew's weight shifted.

The thing, whatever it was, disappeared; either over the northern horizon or under the oil-smooth surface of the sea. The yawl was alone again except for the pair of gulls circling near the zenith of the sky.

"No," said the captain. He shivered as he stepped down from the rail. "It was a whale that spouted. That's what looked like a man."

The mate looked at him, then lowered himself to the deck again in three long arm-over-arm snatches at the mainstay. He said nothing.

"I feel a wind," the captain said, as much a prayer as an announcement to his crew. He turned his head slightly; the long hairs growing from the upper curve of his ear tingled.

"I feel a wind!" he repeated, this time with pleased assurance. "On the starboard quarter. Get the mast around and we'll be in Erdin by midday!"

He grabbed one of the lines himself, glad not only for the wind but because it let him forget what he thought he'd seen. The captain's eyes were better than those of any other man he knew, but the distance had been too great for any certainty.

The object had looked very like a plump man in a burial sheet, seated on a simple raft with nothing else aboard it. A blue haze surrounded the thing; and it moved. There could be no question but that it moved.

No question either that the captain hoped he'd never see the thing again.