Bela had spent so much of her life running from the songs that had grown up around what she’d done as a girl—the deeds of Belakané, Hero of the Harbor—that it felt strange to be sad to know there’d be no songs of future deeds. No matron would give a ship to a woman who couldn’t even turn its wheel, after all. No Seaborn girl would look upon Bela One-Hand and dream. What could she do now that was worthy of honor and memory?
She was so weak, so useless, that when she gave up her seat on the second boat to begin walking, it felt like a triumph.
Oni, of course, had pleaded with her to remain seated, to let them keep pulling her along with the supplies. It had only been a couple of days, she insisted. Bela had lost so much blood, and she didn’t weigh that much to begin with, so …
Bela had nodded and gotten out anyway. She’d walked to the lead of the first boat and taken hold of the rope with her one remaining hand. She’d tried to pull. She was determined to prove—to her crew, to herself—that she still had strength enough. That she wasn’t useless.
But she was. The crew said nothing. They pulled alongside her and let her feel she was helping. But by some unspoken signal, they took their next breather early. And when they rotated positions to begin anew, there wasn’t a free spot to pull. Even Tewrick had a place on the lines.
So as they pulled ahead, she fell behind, trudging along on the smooth band of snow that the passing boats had packed down.
Even then, it took all her willpower to keep moving one foot in front of the other, to not just lie down in her exhaustion and let the blowing snow cover her over in a blanket of white.
Step by step.
Minute after minute.
Hour after hour.
*
Two days later, around midday, Bela was so lost within the cold stillness of her mind that she nearly stumbled into the boat ahead of her when it stopped unexpectedly.
She shook herself as if waking from a dream, trying not to weep at the imbalance of her missing arm. It was a day of little wind, of blue skies and bright snows. Bela blinked against the light, trying to make out her crew ahead.
They’d dropped the ropes. And they’d all gone forward to stand in a kind of line around Sanyu, who’d been in the lead of the first boat.
As Bela looked up at them, Oni was turning back around to look at her. The maiden’s face beamed with joy. “Come quick!” she shouted. And then, before Bela could respond with even a single step, Oni was running back to help her shipmistress make her way forward through the unbroken snow around the sides of the boats.
“What is it?” Bela asked.
“You’ll see,” the younger woman said. “You’ll see.”
The crew parted when Bela came up to them, gave her pride of place in the middle of their line. Sanyu pointed, as if to help them believe.
At the horizon, cutting into the blue sky like icy teeth, were the crisp edges of sharp peaks.
“Ealond,” Tewrick said, and his voice broke the spell of their astonishment. Neka began to laugh, a deep and rumbling sound. Malaika did too. Oni, her arm already around Bela to help hold her up, pulled her into an embrace that seemed to go on for minutes. Even Tewrick got a hug from Sanyu.
“Let’s push hard today,” Bela said when they finally began to quiet down. “Try to get only a few miles offshore and then stop for the night. The ice may be fissured and broken as we get close, so we’ll want full light and a full day for the final bit tomorrow.”
To her relief, no one argued. Whatever she’d lost when she’d lost the arm, they still listened to her for now.
*
The next day, Bela didn’t walk behind the boats. Though she didn’t have the strength to pull them, she was determined to guide them. So she walked ahead, watchful for any sign of fissures, listening for any hint of cracking or shifting ice.
To her relief, the only thing she could hear was the growing sound of braying, a cacophony of untuned horns.
“What is it?” Oni was leading the pull on the first boat, closest to her mistress.
“Is it another bear?” Eshe asked.
Bela tried not to cradle the stump of her right arm. “The one that attacked me didn’t sound like that.”
“Seals,” Malaika called up from the second boat. “I think it’s seals.”
Bela nodded, then waved them on.
Only an hour later, they crossed over what seemed like a swale in the icy landscape. And then they were there.
Ealond.
To the left and the right, the land abruptly rose up from the frozen sea in jagged escarpments of fierce stone, cragged and broken, with menacing shadows and hanging ice, that quickly built to the towering mounts they’d seen the previous day. But here, where chance or the Mother’s mercy had led them, there was a shoreline rough with rocks and drifted with snow, yet more welcoming than the impenetrable walls of the land that they could otherwise see. And on the stone-beach shoreline, massed in a noisy herd, were hundreds of fat, braying seals.
They’d been sparing with the bear meat, so the sight of so much potential food made Bela’s stomach speak up with sudden, sharp pangs. And the thought of the warmth of the oil in their blubbery hides made her one remaining arm shiver.
“Mother bless us,” Oni said, looking at them and surely having some of the same thoughts.
Neka laughed, saying she was ready to eat one raw. Bela wasn’t certain it was a joke.
“All right,” Bela said, trying to focus them away from any immediate hunger, “let’s get the boats ashore. Then let’s see about a good meal.”
Her crew needed no further encouragement. They quickly had the two outboats pulled up onto the shoreline, the wooden hulls scraping across its rough, rocky sand. A few bulls trumpeted at them, but the reaction of the beasts was otherwise one of annoyance at being disturbed.
“Why don’t they try to get away?” Eshe asked.
“I don’t think they’ve ever seen people,” Tewrick replied. “They don’t know to fear us.”
“Don’t know yet,” Malaika said. She was weighing the sword in her hand and grinning. Bela cleared her throat, still intent on maintaining the order in the group.
“Neka, Tew, Sanyu, Eshe—let’s get these boats as far up the shoreline as possible. Malaika and Oni—the two of you take the swords. Head downwind. Go as far as you can, to the most distant and isolated beast you can find. Don’t split up, and don’t get greedy. We don’t want our food to get the idea of fighting back.”
“Aye, shipmistress,” Oni said. “It’ll be quick and quiet-like. These pups here won’t know what happened.”
“Good. Step to it, then. Don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m starving.”
Oni and Malaika headed down the shoreline while the rest of them maneuvered the outboats up through the maze of noisy animals and then sat down on the rocks.
It wasn’t long before Malaika was back.
Bela, despite her exhaustion, stood to receive the veteran woman’s report. “Find one?”
Malaika grinned and held up the sword. The edge was still wet with blood. Someone’s stomach rumbled loudly, and Bela wasn’t sure whether it was her own or not.
“That’s not all we found,” Malaika said. “Come see.”
The animals shuffled around them as Bela followed Malaika down to the far end of the shoreline, where a sheer cliff of granite cut across the beach before crumbling into black boulders in the white of the frozen sea. The two women had done as Bela ordered. Near the base of the cliff, far from the other animals, lay the carcass of a freshly killed seal.
But Oni wasn’t beside it. She was instead standing some yards away, leaning back against the stony wall, smiling. Malaika nodded Bela toward her before going over to their kill.
Bela cocked her head, confused, but as she got closer, she saw that there was a jagged rift in the rocks beside her maiden. Tall enough for a person to pass through, and wide enough at its base to fit an outboat. “A cave?” she asked.
Oni pushed off the cliff wall and gave a nod. “Wait until you see inside, mistress.”
The two of them stepped through, blinking at the sudden dark after the bright light of the sunny ice outside. Not far inside, the cut in the rock opened up into a roomy cavern almost fifteen strides square with a floor of coarse sand.
Looking up, Bela saw how the outside rift was a jagged crack across the ceiling. She reached up with her one hand and felt the air circulating in through the entrance and up to some higher point in the rocks above them.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Oni asked.
Bela nodded. “Good airflow. And wherever this crack leads, it looks bent and broken.”
“We can clamshell the boats against the entrance,” Oni said. “Then tie the canvas rigging across the hulls to form a door. A bit more upright than we had out on the ice, but Sanyu will figure it out.”
Malaika walked in, holding the first cut of the still-steaming seal meat. “Nice place, shipmistress?”
“It is.”
Oni was still looking up at the crack. “We think it’ll work for a chimney.”
There was blood on Malaika’s teeth as she grinned and held up the blubbery, oily chunk of flesh in her hands. “Then let’s try it out.”