Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [44]
“What’s it like?”
He sat back, squatting, fingers still caressing the swamp-lizard skin, and a meditative look came over his face. “First time was almost thirty years ago. Never forget it. West of the Gray, between the river and the Levels, the land is flat and mostly treeless. All mounted patrols in that wide-sky country. Our company commander had us all spread out, half a mile or more apart, in one long line—that sweep must have been fifty miles across. We rode straight south, day after day. Spring it was, the air all soft and blue, and new green coming up all around, and flowers everywhere. Best patrolling I ever did in my life. We even found one sessile, and did for it without hardly pausing. The rest was just riding along in the sunshine, dangling our feet out of the stirrups, scanning the ground, just barely keeping touch with the patrollers to the right and left. End of the week, the color of the sky changed, got all silvery and light, and we came up over these sand dunes, and there it was…” His voice trailed off. He swallowed. “The rollers were foaming in over the sand, grumbling and grumbling, never stopping. I never knew there were so many shades of blue and gray and green. The sea was as wide and flat as the Levels, but alive. You could feel with your groundsense how alive it was, as if it was the mother of the whole wide green world. I sat and stared…We all dismounted and took off our boots, and got silly for a while, running in and out of that salty water, warm as milk.”
“And then what happened?” Fawn asked, almost holding her breath.
Dag shrugged. “Camped for the night on the beach, turned the line around and shifted it fifty miles, and rode back north. It turned cold and rained on the way back, though, and we found nothing for our pains.” He added after a moment, “Wood washed up on the beach burns with the most beautiful strange colors. Never saw anything like.”
His words were simple and plain, as his words usually were; Fawn scarcely knew why she felt as though she were eavesdropping on a man at prayers, or why water blurred her eyes.
“Dag…” she said. “What’s beyond the sea?”
His brows twitched up. “No one’s sure.”
“Could there be other lands?”
“Oh, that. Yes. Or there were, once. The oldest maps show other continents, three of them. The original charts are long gone, so it’s anyone’s guess how accurate the copies are. But if any ships have gone to see what’s still there, they haven’t come back that I ever heard. People have different theories. Some say the gods have interdicted us, and that anyone who ventures out too far is destroyed by holy curses. Some guess the other lands got blighted, and are now all dead from shore to shore, and no one’s there anymore. I’m not too fond of that picture. But you’d think, if there were other folks across the seas, and they had ships, some might have got blown off course sometime in the last thousand years, and I’ve never heard tell of any such. Maybe the people over there have interdicted us, till our task is done and all’s safe again. That would be sensible.”
He paused, gazing into some time or distance Fawn could not see, and continued, “Legend has it there is, or once was, another enclave of survivors on our continent, to the west of the Levels and the great mountains that were supposed to be beyond them. Maybe we’ll find out if that’s true someday, if anyone, us or them, ever tries to sail all around the shore of this land. Wouldn’t need such grand ships for hugging the coast.”
“With silver sails,” Fawn put in.
He smiled. “I think that’s got to happen sometime. Don’t know if I’ll live to see it. If…”
“If?”
“If we can keep the malices down long enough for folks to get ahead. The river men are bold enough to try, but it would risk a lot of resources, as well as lives. You’d need a rich man, a prince or a great lord, to fund such a voyage, and they’re extinct.”
“Or a bunch of well-off men,” Fawn suggested. “Or a whole big bunch of quite ordinary men.”
“And one fast-talking