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3

Nonnus adjusted the sail with the same precise care Sharina had seen him use in cleaning a wound before he sewed it up. The breeze was fretful and varied, a fitting counterpart to the gray skies above.

The hermit let go of the shrouds and sank back to his squat beside the tiller. Sharina smiled at him; not too desperately, she hoped.

"It's possible," Nonnus said with jagged calm, "that this air will take us in a direction that I'd be willing to go if asked. But I wouldn't stake my life on it."

His expression grew bleaker. He added, "I wouldn't stake my soul. I've already staked all our lives, I'm afraid."

"You didn't hold a knife to any of our throats to get us aboard," Sharina said. She wasn't just trying to cheer up a friend: it was the truth. "And we had to get off Tegma."

"That we did," Nonnus agreed as he scanned the overcast. Sharina knew the winds driving the high clouds weren't the same as those here on the surface that would fill the sail, but there might be connections between the two.

Of course, many folks thought there was a connection between the stars and human lives. Likely there was: it was all one cosmos. But it was a very complex cosmos, it seemed to Sharina, and certainly beyond the capacity of a human mind to chart all its interactions.

Asera and Meder huddled in the bow looking as bedraggled and angry as cats caught in a downpour. When things settled down after the turtle dived, Meder had made an attempt to explain to Sharina why she'd been wrong to dispose of his chest of paraphernalia.

Memory of that last conversation made Sharina glare toward the wizard afresh. She hadn't needed to pitch her voice low to prevent Nonnus from hearing her words.

Nobody likes to be called a fool and a skulking liar while everybody in the present circumscribed community listens. Meder hadn't spoken to her since.

"There's rocks well north of the Isles where seals breed," Nonnus said, shifting his attention back to the empty horizon. "If we made landfall on one of them, there's a chance we'd meet some Pewle hunters. Of course, it's the wrong season for that now."

"We have fish and even if it doesn't rain our water—" Sharina began.

Nonnus leaped up and sprang to the mast in three strides along the port gunwale. He snatched the lifting tackle free of the bitt to which it was tied; for a moment Sharina thought he was going to cut through the line instead of taking the few extra seconds to unlash it.

Instead of releasing the fall to drop the spar, Nonnus sagged and wrapped it back around the horns of the bitt. "Too late," he said as he straightened. "They'll have seen us by now."

"Land!" the procurator cried. She stood with the creaking awkwardness of an old woman, pointing off the port bow. "Look! Look! There's land on the horizon!"

"It's not land," Nonnus said as Meder wobbled to his feet also. Sharina wondered if either of the pair could swim well enough to be saved if they went overboard. "It's a colony of the Floating Folk."

Sharina saw a brownish blur that looked like land to her; it was certainly too big for a ship. Flecks left the main mass, bobbing in the direction of the dugout.

Nonnus sighed. "Catcher boats," he said. "Well, they had to have seen us."

He returned to the tiller with a cold tension very different from the flaring activity of a moment before. "Maybe it's just as well. We're farther into the Outer Sea than I ever wanted to be on a floating log."

The nobles were coming sternward with a care that their clumsiness fully justified. "Are these your own people, my man?" Asera demanded. "Or friends of yours?"

Nonnus his head slightly. "Pewlemen and the Floating Folk know each other," he said. "We're about the only ones who do know the Folk, since there's nothing in these seas to bring settled people out. But friends, no. The Folk don't have any friends except others of their own sort."

Half of his mouth quirked in a grin. "And not really even of their own sort."

He hauled on the sheets, furling the sail instead of dropping it and the spar in a tangle as he'd started to do. "We don't want them to think we're trying to get away from them," he explained. "Since we can't. Not with the breeze as it is."

The two boats approaching the dugout had no masts or sails; they were being paddled by a dozen men apiece. The vessels rode much higher than any boat Sharina had seen previously, and their hulls writhed over the waves like swimming snakes.

"When they reach us . . ." Nonnus said. His eyes were on the boats; his three companions watched him with an unease Sharina hoped she hid better than the nobles did theirs. "Let me do the talking, if you please."

"Yes," the procurator said. "Yes, of course."

"If I had my . . ." Meder murmured. He broke off when his eyes turned reflexively toward Sharina and realized that she was almost tense enough and angry enough to throw him into the sea.

"They never come ashore," Nonnus explained quietly. "Oh, they'll set up hunting camps on the Ice Capes and they comb the rocks beyond the Isles for driftwood, but except for that they spend their whole lives in their boats."

"Boats like those?" Meder said, staring at the vessels squirming nearer. The hulls were made of skin: where the sunlight slanted onto the inside, Sharina could see the shadows of the vessels' ribs and the kneeling crew.

"These are catcher boats," Nonnus said, watching the Folk with an appearance of utter calm. "They use them to hunt. The houseboats are much bigger and they lash them together."

He paused and almost smiled. "Though I don't think you'll find them comfortable," he added.

The skin boats had come close enough that Sharina could see some of the paddlers were women: all the Folk were naked to the waist. They had red hair and very white skins gleaming with grease. Straps, bone jewelry, and either tattoos or paint adorned their bodies.

"There'll be fifty or a hundred houseboats in a tribe," Nonnus said. His javelin lay across the gunwales before him; the fingers of his right hand rested on the shaft as if merely to keep the weapon from rolling away. "That's what we're seeing on the horizon. In these latitudes the communities of the Folk ride the currents and the winds in a circle between the Isles and the Ice Capes, never touching land unless a storm strands a catcher boat."

"You said 'hunt,' " Sharina said, trying to copy the hermit's placid voice and manner as she watched the Folk approach. A harpoon with a savagely barbed ivory point lay beside each paddler. "What do they hunt?"

"Whales mostly," Nonnus said. "They build their houseboats from the skin and ribs of whales. Other sea beasts. Driftwood. Shipwrecked sailors when they think the odds are right."

Asera's face went cold; Meder glanced from Nonnus to the catcher boats with wild surmise. The hermit didn't look directly at the nobles, but Sharina saw the hint of a smile play across his lips. "We should be all right," he said. "They know better than to play games with a Pewleman. But let me do the talking."

The boats came alongside the dugout, one to either flank. They were amazingly handy but Sharina noticed that they drifted almost as easily as the spume from their paddle-blades: because of the boats' high sides and shallow draft, they'd be almost impossible to paddle against a serious wind. Paddlers caught the dugout's outriggers to keep the three vessels together.

The Folk wore straps and bangles for adornment. The notion of clothing for modesty's sake clearly wasn't a part of their culture.

The skin boats and their crews gave off a charnel reek. Meder gagged and the procurator covered her nose with a fold of her cape. Even Sharina found the smell dizzying, though her own standards of hygiene had slipped considerably since she'd embarked on the trireme.

The Folk weatherproofed their bodies with blubber that quickly turned rancid. Whalebone had been formed fresh into the frames of the catcher boats: rotting marrow added to the blubber's effluvium, as did the half-cured hides of the hull.

"Hey Sleepsalot!" a crewman of one boat called to the older man in the stern of the other. His accent was thick but intelligible. "This log's got wood-lice in it!"

"That's easy enough to fix," said the wormy-looking youth in the bow of Sleepsalot's boat. He hefted his harpoon; his right hand was missing the last two fingers. The crews were in a joking mood, but it was the cheerfulness of a cat which knows its prey has nowhere to run.

Nonnus rose to his feet. He faced Sleepsalot and deliberately slanted his javelin over his shoulder with the point in the air behind him. "I claim the right to join your community, Sleepsalot!" he said. "For myself, my women, and my son!"

"It's a Pewleman!" a woman snarled. "What's a puking Pewleman doing floating on a chunk of driftwood like this?"

Sharina kept her eyes on the other boat rather than Nonnus and the Folk leader. She knew that the hermit for all his apparent nonchalance could spit anybody who threatened him in the direction he was facing, but even Nonnus didn't have eyes in the back of his head.

A woman whose breasts sagged to her waist despite being within a few years of Sharina's age made a stealthy adjustment of her harpoon. Sharina tweaked her hand axe so that sunlight glanced from the blade into the woman's eyes. The would-be backstabber snarled deep in her throat, but both her hands lifted from the harpoon.

"I claim the right to join your community!" Nonnus repeated. "I bring you wood worth six men's price: we are only four. Take me to your king, Sleepsalot—or fight me, as the Law is, if you refuse my gift!"

Sharina risked a glance behind her. The hermit barely moved: only a slight shift in the way his knees bent, but still a crouch from which he could spring into the skin boat's stern.

Sleepsalot cringed visibly. "Fah!" he said. "Threefingers, Gulleater, tie lines to this log."

"We'll break our backs getting it to Home," Threefingers muttered.

Sleepsalot ignored him. "All right, Pewleman," he added in a venomous tone. "The Law says you can join the tribe, that's true. But you'll never leave!"

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