Except for Milla, who Tal realized had been above him, up the mast, all along. Listening and watching, ready to drop on him if he attacked the Crone.
"A fine story, there," said one of the Icecarls, a huge man with a beard dyed blue and plaited into three strands. "Do you have any others, boy?"
Tal stared at him. Clearly the man thought he'd made it all up.
"It's true," he protested. "I am one of the Chosen. I come from the Castle."
The Icecarl chuckled and said, "You'd not be the first boy who lost his ship and went storytelling around the Clans. But if you're not a storyteller, you must be a thief on our hunting grounds."
A murmur went around the crowd of Icecarls at the word thief
Tal felt a new hostility directed at him. Whatever these people did to thieves, it couldn't be good.
"If he is a thief, Forkbeard," the Crone said, "you can give him to the ice, and the Merwin will take him."
"I'm not a thief!" exclaimed Tal. "And I am telling the truth. I'll prove it to you!"
He pointed up to the flickering Sunstone, past Milla's scowling face. She spat downwind, a clear indication of her opinion of Tal's truthfulness.
"Your Sunstone must once have given a clear, steady light," he said. "Now it flickers and changes color."
"Any fool knows that!" said Forkbeard. He looked angry now and was stroking his ax. "Any fool who's seen a Sunstone, though there's few enough around the Clans. Give him to the ice, I say!"
"But I can fix it," stammered Tal. "It just needs tuning."
"Good," said the Crone. "I was hoping you would say that. If you can mend our Sunstone, we will spare your life."
"If he can't mend it, can I fight him?" asked Milla. She dropped down from the mast, landing lightly on her feet. Tal instinctively moved back, closer to the urn with his shadowguard in it.
"No," said the Crone, her voice stern. "If he fails, he goes to the ice - and the Merwin."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tal had expected the Icecarls to bring the Sun-stone down to him. But the Crone explained that they only did that when the ship was anchored. They needed the Sunstone's light to see any dangers that might lie ahead.
When Tal refused to climb, Milla took special delight in describing exactly what a Merwin was, and Tal's chances of surviving a meeting with one.
"Most Merwin are about ten times as long as you are tall," she said. "They have a single, shining horn that sticks out the front between their eyes. See Kral over there? That sword of his is a baby Merwin's horn. They stop glowing once they're dead. Now, the Merwin slide over the ice faster than you'd be able to run, because their skin is so slick, and they've got four big flippers to push themselves along. Mostly they stick their horn through whatever they're after, and then they bash it up and down on the ice. You'd be better off fighting me. All you have to do is ask. If you ask to fight me, the Crone will let you."
Tal ignored her. He didn't understand why she was so keen to fight him, but he knew that the Crone would protect him… as long as he fixed the Sun-stone.
"I'll need my shadowguard," he said. "I need it to help me climb and fix the Sunstone."
The Crone looked at him again with those creepy, glowing eyes. Then she said, "No you don't."
Tal sighed. He didn't really, absolutely need his shadowguard, but he felt very strange without it nearby, dizzy and sick to his stomach. Climbing the mast would be ten times as hard without the shadow-guard, even if it just followed him like a normal shadow.
"Milla will help you climb up," said the Crone.
"I will not!" exclaimed Milla. "He's a lying thief! You cannot believe his talk of hundreds of lights and this `castle' thing"
The Crone turned her gaze to the girl and said,
"You wish to be a Shield Maiden, Milla, but you won't follow orders?"
The threat was clear. Tal didn't know what a Shield Maiden was, but Milla obviously really wanted to be one, and the Crone had the power to stop her.
Milla turned to Tal with a murderous scowl on her face and said, "All right! Start climbing, thief!"
"My name is Tal Graile-Rerem," Tal said. "I shall permit you to call me Tal. And even if I was a thief, you don't have anything I'd want to steal!"
At least, he told himself, he wasn't a thief as far as the Icecarls were concerned.
"Tal, Smal, Bal, Wal - whatever you call yourself," Milla said. "I don't suppose you can climb a line, so we'll have to go up the mast itself."
She pointed at the spikes that were stuck into the mast every stretch or so. Tal went over and put his foot on one, testing its strength. Then he reached up and started to climb.
The mast appeared to be a single bone of some kind, though Tal couldn't imagine what kind of monster would have a backbone forty stretches long. And the handholds weren't spikes as he'd thought. They were smaller bones that had been sawn off. Once they would have been like the bones of a fish, curving out from the backbone.
"Hurry up," called Milla from below.
Tal ignored her. The mast was swaying, and the ship and the ice seemed a long way down. For some weird reason it was scarier than when he climbed the Red Tower, though that was hundreds of times as high. Perhaps it was because there was no shadow-guard to save him.
Milla kept harassing him all the way to the top, calling out and trying to crowd him. Tal focused his mind on climbing and ignored her.
Finally, Tal came to the Sunstone. It was held to the top of the mast by what seemed like large, curved teeth that were somehow bonded to the bone. The stone was so bright Tal had difficulty looking at it without his shadowguard to automatically shield his eyes.
Milla fell silent as they approached the stone. She also stopped several stretches below, instead of crowding Tal as she'd done all the way up. Her head was bowed. Clearly she couldn't stand the brightness of the Sunstone, not this close.
This high up the mast, Tal had the strange illusion that he was still, and it was the ship and the ice below that swung from side to side like a pendulum. Each time the worl
d swung by, Tal had to fight back the feeling that he was going to fly off into space.
To make it even worse, he had to let go one of his handholds to touch the Sunstone. It was a powerful stone, but Tal knew it was also very old. Sunstones did wear out eventually, and had to be taken up to a Tower to be revitalized above the Veil.
Making sure he had a good grip with his left hand, Tal reached out and touched the Sunstone. He could feel the currents of power within it. Just as he learned in the Lectorium, Tal closed his eyes and focused his thought upon the Sunstone.
As he'd thought, it badly needed tuning. What power it had left was working against itself, rather than together. The energy bands needed to be realigned, brought back into harmony.
Tal carefully let go of the big Sunstone and reached into his shirt to pull his own Sunstone out. It brightened as he focused upon it, to find the correct pattern of energies and project it at the Icecarls' Sun-stone.
It was hard work with the wind all around, and the mast swaying, and his stomach suddenly deciding it didn't like the Crone's warming cordial after all. But
Tal did it. A beam of pure light shot out of his Sunstone and into the Icecarls' larger stone.
"I've done it!" exclaimed Tal triumphantly. The Icecarls' stone shone bright and true.
Then it went out, and so did Tal's own stone, leaving him in total darkness, save the faint green glow of the moth-lamps on the deck far below.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The roar of anger that came up from the deck was almost animal in its intensity. Tal had never heard anything like it. He glanced down, but couldn't see anything, not even Milla. Still, he could hear what was happening.
Every Icecarl aboard was leaping onto the ropes and rigging, climbing up to kill the boy who had ruined their Sunstone, their greatest treasure.
Tal's only hope was to get it going again. Unfortunately, he didn't even know why it had gone out.
Desperately, he grabbed his own Sunstone, no longer caring if he fell off. He focused on it, feeling for its power. It felt like his whole body and mind was bent on this one thing, every particle of his power concentrated on one small stone.