Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [143]
“Hila!” the anchorman whirled the hooks round his head and threw.
The cluster hit the braid, grabbed and stuck fast in the web. The anchorman flung his whole weight back, tightening the throw rope.
“Gong!” he yelled.
Rhodry grabbed a padded stick he found dangling from a chain and swung hard. The boom echoed and quivered over the sound of the white water. With a creak and almost human groan the wheel began to turn, and the webbed strip began to move, hauling them upstream against the current while the rowers bent and sweated. It was no wonder Haen Marn had the reputation of being so inhospitable, Rhodry thought, if it took all of this to bring strangers in. With the anchorman clinging and leaning to the rope like a groom, the boat bucked like an angry horse, but they moved forward, creeping past the rough stone walls toward a small and distant patch of light. Rhodry heard the helmsman yell something in Dwarvish.
“Keep striking the gong,” Garin yelled, translating. “He says our lives might well depend on it.”
Rhodry struck, grabbed the stick in both hands, and swung again, finding and keeping a regular rhythm as the boat inched along, its slender figurehead bowing and rising, the helmsman cursing a steady stream as he fought with the current. If the prow should dash against the stone wall, they were all lost. When he glanced up between strokes, next to the widening square of light Rhodry saw another wheel. Just beyond, on a sandy strip of beach, two dwarves bent over a crank such as turns meat on a spit.
“Hila!” the anchorman called.
“Hola!” they called in return.
The boat inched past the wheel, then broke free of the dark, scooting with a sudden lunge to the rope’s length out to gray light from an open sky and Haen Marn. While the anchorman struggled to free his hooks from the web of ropes, and the two dwarves who’d been cranking the pulley scrambled aboard, Rhodry stared across the lake, wide miles of dark water, surrounded by hills that plunged down steeply without a sign of level shore. He could just make out forests marching down, deeply shadowed in the last of the sunlight. Directly across from the entrance flashed a silver glint that seemed to be a waterfall pouring into the lake from some great height.
Out in the center rose a small island shaped like the crest of a rocky hill and topped by a strange tower, all right angles and built square, with other rectangular buildings huddled beneath it. Off behind this main island rose islets, some no more than huge boulders poking their heads above water. He found himself remembering Jahdo’s description of Cerr Cawnen and Citadel, because mist rose heavily in the far reaches, hinting at warm water bubbling up from springs.
“Gong!” the helmsman screamed. “Gong now!”
Rhodry realized that he’d been so taken with the sight that he’d slacked off. He swung two-handed, found his rhythm again, and kept it up while the new dwarves bent to the oars. With fresh oarsmen the boat darted across the lake. Echoing off the distant hills, the sound of the gong fled before them, then turned to greet them again as the island came closer and closer. Garin scrambled to his feet and moved up next to Rhodry.
“They say the noise drives beasts away,” Garin yelled. “I’ll take a turn.”
Rhodry surrendered the stick gladly and moved away from the boom, which was beginning to throb in his temples with a tangible ache. He found a spot on the other side of the figurehead where he could lean on the prow and have a good look round. When he looked behind, the flat cliff rose high about the water level, then leveled at the top in a suspiciously regular manner. So, then, the entrance ran through some sort of dam, and