Kushiel's Justice - Jacqueline Carey [303]
Sleeping was cramped and uncomfortable. Once the sails were stretched across the boat and lashed into place, our body heat warmed the trapped air, but it soon grew to smell stale and rank. Our meals consisted of salt cod, hard biscuits, and starka, which we drank in sparing amounts.
There was no way to carry water without it freezing solid, and nothing with which to build a fire on the floes. Skovik showed us how to scrape ice and pack our waterskins with it, wearing them under our clothing so the ice would slowly melt over the course of the day or night. Between that and the starka, it was enough to keep us from growing parched. I'd thought the melted floe-ice would be salty and unfit to drink, but strangely, it was only a bit brackish. When I dipped my hand into the sea and tasted the open water, it was bitter. Why that should be true, I cannot say, but it was.
The worst danger was the smaller floes, the ones that lurked at the surface of the water, barely visible. They didn't look like much, but they were larger beneath than above. With a strong wind at our back, if we struck one, it might breach the hull.
And if that happened, we were all dead. I was a strong swimmer, but I had no illusions on that front. The winter sea was deadly cold. If we were pitched into it, we'd freeze and drown in a matter of minutes.
On the first day, Skovik posted one of his men, an experienced spotter, in the prow. By the second day, he realized that Phèdre had grown as adept as a Vralian sailor at spotting dangerous floes and let her take over the task. She had a keen eye, trained to observe since childhood, and the patience not to be distracted. More than once, we were saved from a collision by her warning.
There were a few close calls nonetheless. With sufficient notice and a good wind, Skovik was able to avoid most of them, but when we came up hard and fast on a wallowing chunk of ice, we had to take to oars, rowing frantically to help change the boat's course, while his men balanced perilously, shoving at the ice with their barbed pikes.
Those were terrifying moments, the grey water rushing past our hull, the boat lurching precariously as Skovik's fellows leaned on their pikes. The first time it happened, I thought for sure we were doomed. Wood scraped along the ice, groaning. I was on the side nearest the floe, so close I couldn't even put oar to water. The pikemen shoved and grunted. Seawater sloshed over the railing, soaking our feet.
And then we were past it, sailing onward. The floe spun lazily behind us, barely visible, awaiting its next unwitting victim.
"By Lug the warrior and the Black Boar himself," Urist said with heartfelt feeling. "I swear, if I get my feet on Alban soil, I'm never leaving again.”
We all felt it. But there were times when it was glorious, too, in a stark way. The nights were grueling and unpleasant, but the days could be lovely. Our luck with the weather held. We sailed through a world of empty sky, grey water, and ice. Farther north, we saw seals from time to time, although not often. They were comical creatures, ungainly on the ice, but graceful in the water, with dark, plaintive eyes and whiskered faces. Skovik and his men eyed them with regret, but with nine people in the boat, there was no room to take on additional stores if they'd gone hunting. I wasn't terribly sorry.
Later, as we went farther south, the ice ledge began to retreat and there were fewer floes and more birdlife. Great flocks of gulls and terns wheeled overhead, and we saw ducks and geese taking wing from the water.
"Spring's coming," Skovik observed.
It seemed hard to fathom. I'd lost all track of time. It felt to me as though it had been winter forever and would always be winter.