The Druid Queen - Douglas Niles [86]
A scent came to Tristan that he well recognized-the salt air of the sea. Then forest opened away from them, breaking into scattered clumps of trees dotting a broad expanse of pasture and grainfields. Before them, they caught sight of a gleaming surface through the trees, and the High King knew that at last they approached the Strait of Oman.
Then something closer caught his attention as the hounds flew past the horse in a frenzy of barking and snarling. The dogs leaped into a thicket lying directly beside Tristan's path, and the king immediately heard deeper, more unnatural snarls.
In another moment, several large shapes sprang from the underbrush, sending the steady war-horse rearing backward in fright. They were already too close for his lance, so the king discarded the long shaft and grimly his sword, facing the onslaught of no less than a dozen trolls.
* * * * *
The Princess of Moonshae finally approached the two enclosing peninsulas, preparing to depart Codsbay-admittedly somewhat less gracefully than she had entered. Nevertheless, Thurgol and his firbolgs had finally begun to, if not master, at least comprehend the art of propelling the sleek vessel through the water.
Also, the giant chieftain had thought of another precaution, one that gave him a somewhat smug sense of satisfaction. Before they sailed from the harbor, he had ordered his crew of giants to paddle to each of the fishing boats floating in the placid bay. They had kicked several planks out of each hull, so by the time they reached the mouth of the bay, every ship of the tiny fleet rested on the bottom.
With the threat of pursuit thus minimized, Thurgol concentrated on getting his villagemates to propel the longship with some modicum of control. By limiting the oarsmen to a pair on each side, the chieftain found that the giant-kin could row with a reasonable chance of striking the same cadence-at least, a good part of the time.
Thurgol himself stood in the stern, holding the long rudder pole. At first, he had tried to help by swinging this pole back and forth, but he soon concluded that the ship progressed better if he just let the rudder trail into the water behind them. It was a lot less work that way, too.
"Row!" he called, his bass voice rumbling across the smooth-watered bay. "Row again!" In this way, he tried to synchronize the pace of the oarsmen. Once these laboring giant-kin had learned to lift the blades out of the water on the return strokes, they actually made pretty good progress.
As the proud longship emerged from the bay, the haze of the strait parted as if by magic. There before them, breathtaking in its majesty, sweeping above the lowlands with snow-covered peak and jagged, rocky slopes, loomed the Icepeak. Though the mist still cloaked the bulk of Oman's Isle, the mountain summit itself stood out in clear relief, outlined by the late afternoon sun into patches of shadow and stupendous, rose-tinted light.
"It seems so close," Garisa said. The old shaman sat upon the stern platform, resting her weary bones, the Silverhaft Axe across her lap. Now that they had seized a ship and embarked onto the water, the withered hag felt a sense of profound wonder.
"Won't get there before dark, though," Thurgol mused, with a rough approximation of their speed thus far. "Row… row again!" he shouted as a pair of oarsmen clanked their bladed shafts together.
"But we'll get there," the shaman declared, her tone soft with amazement.
"Didn't you know that?" Thurgol asked, surprised. After all, this had been her idea.
"There was a time when I wasn't so sure," Garisa admitted. Of course, she well remembered her incantation in Cambro, designed