Страница 20 из 32
Ishmael had put on his dark clothes and blacked his face. A moment later, Namalee, similarly dressed and darkened, joined him. Ishmael gave his final instructions to Pavashtri, the first mate, who would be in command while Ishmael was gone. Then he and the girl went down a ladder to the main walkway and along it to a whaling boat port. There were six others who would go with them in the boat, since this had been built especially large. It strained against its moorings, the bladders having been fed earlier until they had made enough gas for a swift rising. The crew climbed aboard and strapped themselves in. Each wore in a sheath a long sharp knife made of a bamboo-like plant. Their short spears and short stout bows and quivers of arrows were in leather cases on the bottom of the boat. The bows were something that Ishmael had had to force on the Zalarapamtrans. They knew about them but despised them for some reason lost in their past. Men did not use them, they said. Ishmael had replied that in his time -- stretching time a little but for a good cause -- bows were very manly indeed. The point was that they were deadly and the pathetically tiny party invading Booragangah needed all the firepower it could get. Ishmael knew this was true because the gods had said so.
By this time, Ishmael was not above telling them that he knew what their gods wanted of them. He acted as if he were receiving divine commands by thought transmission, and the others began to act as if he were. Perhaps they did so because they wanted to believe that their gods had not entirely deserted them.
There were no lights permitted aboard, of course, so the signal to release all six boats simultaneously was passed by yanking on a system of lines rigged for the occasion through the ship.
The lines restraining the boats were slashed, and sailors shoved the boats out before they would rise and get stuck in the hull. The side of a boat bumped against the upper part of the wide port as it shot up. A sailor was feeding the amorphous mostly-mouth beasts at the necks of the bladder, and these were manufacturing the gas to increase the buoyancy even as the boat ascended.
The moon had passed below the western horizon before the Roolanga had entered the final fifty miles of her journey. The immense shelf above placed the small boats in shadow. The front of the mountain, a vertical cliff here, went by at a distance of several hundred yards. The boats, their sails folded and the masts and arms shipped and folded, rose at the mercy of the wind. This was slight at this point, so the boats drifted about half a mile before they were just below the overhang. Karkri, in charge of maneuvering, began to let the gas out. The other boats also slowed their ascent. The men in charge were born to the air. Almost without thinking, they estimated to an inch the amount of buoyancy to lose. The top of the fat oval ring that formed the outer part of the boat bumped against the stone. The people in it were stretched out flat on their faces, but even so outcrops scraped against the backs of some. Then the crews turned over on their backs and propelled the boat slowly outward by reaching up and grabbing the rough stone and pushing.
It was slow and laborious work, since the shelf projected for a half mile from where they had first struck it. And they could not go swiftly if they had wished to. It was a matter of pulling and hoping the scraping of the hull against the rough stone would not abrade through the skin. The skin was tough but very thin for the sake of lightness.
Above the hard breathings of the crew Ishmael heard a hissing from the boat behind and to the right of them. Ishmael told the others to stop, and the boat slid to a halt, pressing against the rock bottom. To see what was going on, it was necessary to push against the rock to lower the boat. Ishmael squirmed around while everybody else pushed. The boat to the right was about six feet away and was only a dim shape in the blackness.
Vargajampa, the third mate, said softly, "Joognaja! There is a shaft in the rocks here!"
"What size?" Ishmael called back. He hoped that there was no one listening at the upper end of the shaft.
"Just large enough! There is a grille of wood in the opening, however!" Ishmael gave the order, and his crew began working the boat toward the other, while that one moved away.
Namalee had told him that, as far as she knew, no one had ever penetrated into an enemy's city in this ma
Despite this, however, the possibility of such was recognized. That explained why the shafts were screened and sometimes guarded.
When the boat was centered under the shaft, Ishmael gripped the latticework of wood set into it and pulled. The grille failed to yield. By probing through the spaces between the bars with a slender stick, he determined that a rope was secured with hard wooden pegs to each corner on the inside of the screen. The other end of the ropes must be secured to the inside of a grille set in the top end of the shaft. It was possible that a pull on this grille would drag the other down and set off an alarm mechanism.
To avoid this, he inserted a slender stick with a flint knife on one end and cut the ropes. Then, after some hard pulling and prying with a sharp stick, he managed to get the grille loose. He stood up slowly and pulled himself up by one of the ropes into the shaft. After that, to avoid pulling the grille loose, and so precipitating himself down the shaft, he braced himself against the walls. It was not easy to climb in that ma
The grille above him came out with a skreaking that tore at his nerves as the stone had torn at his leather clothes. He waited a while after it had come loose and then inched up, expecting to have his head split open by a stone ax when it emerged. But there was no one waiting for him. He lit a match and looked around. The room, a cube cut out of rock, was empty except for some boxes in one corner.
He hoisted himself out and lay for a moment on the floor, which trembled beneath him. When he rose, he went to the open doorway and looked down it but could see nothing because of the darkness. He returned to the shaft and uncoiled the rope bound about his waist. It fell down the shaft and was seized by someone below and given a tug. Ishmael sat down, holding the rope, his feet braced against the opposite lip of the shaft. He held on while Namalee climbed up it. After she was out, she helped him hold the rope while Karkri came up.
Karkri and she held the rope while the next sailor came up.
Ishmael took a small torch Namalee had carried up in a sack. He lit it and then proceeded down the hall corridor. The open entrances on either side gave to more storerooms. At one end, the corridor stopped against stone; at the other, it opened into a stairway cut out of the rock. This curved around and up. Ishmael decided not to go any further until all of the men had come up the shaft. This was a slow process. The empty boats had to be slid away, and the balancing of each boat required a careful moving around. Every time a man went up a shaft, the equilibrium of the boat was affected.