City of Ice (28 page)

“Of course. She must be as worried sick about her little chick as I am about Roxanna,” sympathized Lady Miunai. “But that's what happens when your children become the stuff of wonders.”

Not satisfied with having re-supplied them, Lady Miunai insisted on escorting them personally. Some of her men went along as porters for her gifts. Others carried the dogsled on their shoulders. The driver, a short, stocky man, was busy handling his dog team. Behind him waddled Dr. Goldemar wearing a derby hat, which he had secured with a long scarf knotted beneath his chin, his medical bag resting on his shoulder.

They marched out of the caravanserai and eventually down the broad street. The frost giant clapped his huge hands together with childish delight. “I knew there was going to be a parade.” He fell into step behind them, windmilling his hand at the bystanders encouragingly. “Come on; come on. Join in.”

There was not much in the way of entertainment in a small town in winter, and the news spread like lightning. People poured out of houses and stores so that soon they had a hundred people of all species, dogs, cats, and even a parrot trailing them along the avenue. A man with a concertina wheezed out a jaunty marching tune for everyone to step to.

Lady Miunai took the friends down a boat-launching ramp that they hadn't noticed before.

Bayang skidded a bit on the frozen harbor but recovered nicely to polite applause from the expectant crowd. Then, while the dogsled was assembled and the team harnessed to it, the dragon unfolded the wing again.

In the meantime, Lady Miunai put herself in charge of the pyrotechnics and oversaw her helpers as they unpacked the rockets, throwing excelsior all over. Several were propped against a now empty crate. The rockets were genuine Chinese ones, for Lady Miunai was determined to give them a grand and glorious send-off.

An enterprising tavern keeper had come out with a tray full of steaming reindeer sausages. Koko sniffed the air woefully. “If only I had some money,” he hinted.

“Here, here.” The keeper shuffled forward and pressed the badger to take one, no—two. “Oh, why not? Let's make it three?”

As Koko happily munched away, the keeper returned to the crowd shouting that the sausages had been endorsed by the strange wonder beast.

“Badger,” Koko corrected the tavern keeper, but his mouth was so full of meat, the word came out garbled. Even if Koko had taken the time to swallow before he spoke, the keeper was so mobbed by customers that he wouldn't have heard anyway.

When Scirye and her friends had stowed their supplies carefully on the wing so it would balance right, they climbed onto it.

“Good-bye,” Leech called. “Please thank Roxanna and Upach for us.”

“I will, and fare thee well,” Lady Miunai said, and gestured to one of her men.

Lighting a match, he lit the fuses as he walked along, retreating to safety when all of them started to fizz. The fuses were of different lengths so the rockets would go off at different times.

Whoosh!
The first one soared up into the air in a plume of white smoke. A hundred feet above them it burst in a spray of paper scraps and more smoke.
Bang!
The little star of light spread petals of a shining red chrysanthemum across the sky. And the tingling smell of gunpowder descended thick around them.

Whoosh! Whoosh!
Rockets sped upward and exploded and more flowers blossomed in the field of the night.

Below, the crowd oohed and aahed at the spectacle.

Even as more rockets went off, they heard the roar of Naue. “Ho, a garden, a garden!” the wind shouted, as thrilled as the audience below.

In the air the fireworks' smoke and light trailed after him in his wake, and on the harbor snow swirled in wispy streamers across the frozen surface.

“I am Naue, friend of heroes, dancer among flowers,” Naue boasted as he darted in and out of the explosions, twisting the shapes of the fiery blossoms.

When the last rocket had gone off, Naue yelled, “Now
that
is how to greet Naue!” He circled far out to the mouth of the harbor and then slanted down toward them. Snow sprayed up in sheets as he sped toward them.

The wing, edges flapping, lifted into the air and rose swiftly on Naue as the townsfolk clapped and hollered good-bye in a dozen different languages.

Leech let out a long breath. “And I thought riding in a seaplane was exciting.”

When Koko thumped his belly, he gave a satisfied burp. “I'd settle for a nice, boring evening reading a telephone book.”

Below them, the dogs sped over the ice with the doctor tucked into the sled. Scirye hoped they could help Upach.

Leech poked Scirye's shoulder. “You okay? You're sitting so stiff. Don't worry about Roland. We'll get him the next time. Just think about going home.”

“Home,” Kles murmured happily as he snuggled inside Scirye's coat.

“Home,” Scirye echoed softly but not with any pleasure. She hadn't even been thinking about Roland but about all the Kushans waiting to scold her in Bactra—just for the crime of not being what they wanted: a proper Kushan lady.

Now she couldn't help wondering uneasily what new surprises Roland had in store for them.

And then there was the pact with Nanaia. Could she really keep it, and if she did what would be the price?

Bayang, who was at the control loops, had twisted her long neck around so she could see what was wrong with Scirye. “Think about now and not the future,” Bayang advised the girl. “Otherwise, you'll get so scared that you'll be afraid to go on. We're still alive and that's the important thing.”

Bayang was right. The more Scirye thought about Nanaia's mission, the more terrified she became. There were better people than Scirye for this quest, but for whatever reason it had fallen on her. As Uncle Resak had said, all she could do was follow the path that the goddess had set for her. At least she wasn't alone. She had friends—more friends than she'd ever had before in her life—and they had managed so far.

When Naue passed through the clouds, their moisture pattered against the travelers like a light drizzle. They burst out of the cover into a glorious black sky full of stars and a moon that hung like a large round lantern to light their way.

As she stared up at its face, the moon seemed to smile gently as Nishke would have.
Yes, you will,
her sister seemed to whisper to her reassuringly the way she had when Scirye was small.

And her heart soared upward as she flew on into the night.

Into the promise.

Into the future.

Many years ago, I read about an opera troupe that was performing Humperdinck's
Hansel and Gretel
in small Alaskan towns near the Arctic Circle. The children of each town were asked to paint a backdrop of a forest. However, this was in the days before satellite dishes and the Internet, so one group of Inuit children had to imagine what a forest looked like. I've always wondered what they came up with. If they'd had gold and jewels instead of poster paints, perhaps they would have created a tree like Uncle Resak's.

I should also say a word about the general background of the novel. While everyone knows about the gold deposits in Canada, there are also diamond mines in the Far North. And centuries ago the Danish began to explore the Arctic territories. Jens Munck was a real explorer who died in 1628 trying to find the Northwest Passage for the ambitious King Christian of Denmark. The Thirty Years War, which began in 1618, drew his attentions and finances elsewhere, or perhaps the Danes would have claimed northern Canada just as they control Greenland to this day.

While this is an alternate history, I want to emphasize that the Sogdians are not an imaginary people. The beginnings of their city Afrasiab, which became known as Samarkand later, date back to the seventh century
B.C.
Clever and energetic, the Sogdians dominated the Silk Road for centuries, so that their tongue became the language everyone used for business transactions. Led by merchant princes, they established a network of trading posts that stretched all across Asia. And their music and dance became all the rage in medieval China, and these are often depicted in the art of the T'ang dynasty. Some of them even rose to high positions in the Chinese government, and one of them, An Lu-shan, nearly toppled the government when he raised a rebellion. As for the Arctic itself, I am fortunate to have a wife, Joanne Ryder, who not only took me up to the Arctic to see the Aurora Borealis firsthand but also has written several books about the environment and the creatures who live up there. The Wastes themselves are an exaggeration of the pressure ridges that were shown in a BBC Two program,
Top Gear: Polar Special
, which a friend kindly provided me. The narwhals are in the National Geographic special
Masters of the Arctic Ice.

These are some of the sources consulted for this book:

 

Adams, Douglas Q.
A Dictionary of Tocharian B.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

Asarpay, G. “Nana, the Sumero-Akkadian Goddess of Transoxiana.”
Journal of the American Oriental Society
96, no. 4 (October–December 1976): 536–542.

Bayliss, Clara Kern.
A Treasury of Eskimo Tales.
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1922.

Cribb, Joe, and Georgina Herrmann, eds.
After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Ghose, Madhuvanti. “Nana: The ‘Original' Goddess on Lion.”
Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology
1 (2006): 97–112.

Juliano, Annette L., Judith A. Lerner, and Michael Alram.
Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China.
New York: Abrams, 2001.

Masters of the Arctic Ice.
DVD. National Geographic, 2007.

Nuttall, Mark, and Terry Gallaghan, eds.,
The Arctic: Environment, People, Policy.
Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000.

Rasmussen, Knud.
Eskimo Folktales
, trans. W. Worster. London: Gyldendal, 1921.

Rink, Dr. Henry.
Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo.
Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons, 1875.

Rosenfeld, John M.
The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Sims-Williams, Nicholas.
Bactrian Letters II.
London: Nour Foundation with the cooperation of Azimuth Editions, 2007.

Vaissière, Étienne de la.
Sogdian Traders: A History,
trans. James Ward. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

Read on for a sneak peek at

 

City of Death,

 

Book 3

in the City Trilogy

“How fast do storms come in here?” Bayang the dragon asked. She was sitting at the apex, steering the giant triangular wing that had been magically woven from straw.

Dark gray clouds boiled rapidly through the sky toward them. A mile across and two miles long, the misty wave cast shadows that plunged the mountains beneath them into an ominous twilight.

The great wind, Naue, began to rise as he reassured them in his booming voice, “Ho, fear not, lumplings. No little drizzle can stop Naue the magnificent. He will just carry you above it.”

Koko the badger rolled his eyes. “Or,” he muttered, “you can talk it to death.”

“It's following us,” Leech said in alarm, for the storm cloud had arched upward to intercept them, its sides churning and writhing like a giant panting worm.

Bayang dug her claws into the interwoven straw and tightened her grip on the straps that steered the wing. “That's no normal storm cloud. Everyone sit down and grab hold of the wing. And that especially means you, Leech.”

“But—,” Leech began to protest.

“I don't want you hopping on your flying disks and going to check out the cloud,” Bayang snapped.

Leech reluctantly plopped down and grabbed some straps that had been placed strategically about the wing.

Scirye sat down and took hold of another pair of straps. “Do you think this is Roland's work?”

Kles, her lap griffin, uncoiled from around her shoulders and slipped inside her coat. “He might have set patrols as a precaution. Or it could just be our bad luck. The mountains are very old and full of magic. And there are monsters here that go back to the creation of the world.”

“Monster or Roland's slave, nothing can catch Naue,” the wind bragged as he flew even faster and higher.

Thunk-a thunk-a-thunk.

“That sounds like a drum roll,” Leech said.

A bolt of lightning shot from the cloud to blast the mountain beneath it, the light temporarily highlighting the curling mist of the storm.

Boom!

More and more lightning bolts crackled from the cloud's belly so that it resembled a giant centipede climbing after them on fiery legs. It was gaining on them very quickly.

“Ho, so you want to play tag with Naue? Then so be it,” Naue boomed.

And the next moment Naue banked sharply until he was zooming toward the cloud.

“No, no, go away from it!” Bayang shouted.

But the wind ignored her, and as they rushed toward the roiling surface of the cloud, the inky strands writhed like charcoal snakes.

Naue roared with laughter as he plowed through the cloud, whipping it into smoky tendrils. Their straw wing bucked and rolled as Naue twisted and turned, tearing the storm to shreds.

And yet through Naue's merriment the drum roll deepened until it was a steady booming.

“Ha, that will show it,” Naue announced as he finally circled away.

“Who's that?” Leech asked.

It was as if a huge ball of dark cotton had been ripped apart to reveal an inner core, a rough gray oval about ten feet long like a huge bar of soap. And upon the disk a creature danced on two stubby legs. He looked like a squat man but his skin was blue and tusks rose from his lower jaw. From his shoulders hung a wide strap of drums and in his hands were the bones he used to beat them.

Bayang swore an oath in an old dragon tongue. “What's a thunder lord doing here? He belongs in China.”

The thunder lord brought both sticks down upon one drum, and the next instant there was a flash of light and a bolt streaked from the drum across the sky and through Naue.

Boom!

“Aiee,” Naue cried out in agony and shock. “Naue hurts!”

The sudden flash made spots dance before Scirye's eyes, and the smell of ozone tickled her nose.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Naue screamed as each beat of the drums shot lightning bolts through him. It was all they could do to hold on as the wind whirled about, trying to escape, but the lightning was relentless. Too late, Bayang realized that their wing marked where the invisible Naue was.

“Naue…can…not…keep…together,” the wind gasped.

Though the lightning could not destroy the air that made up the wind, the energy was making it hard for Naue to keep his currents together. It was like unraveling the threads that make up a piece of string.

Naue bellowed in torment, and suddenly the wing was spinning earthward as they fell out of the injured wind's grasp.

With a ripping noise, a large scrap of the wing fluttered away and then more and more pieces. The wing was falling apart. The long trips and abuse had taken their toll upon the wing's woven straw. Through the numerous holes, Bayang could see the earth waiting for them three thousand feet below.

Bayang tried to test her injured wings to see if she could fly away with her friends, but pain shot instantly through her back.

Their only hope was to land the wing before it disintegrated. Her eyes searched the mountains below for a soft landing spot, but at first it was one fanglike mountain after another. And then she saw the silvery oval that must be some frozen lake in a bowl formed by the mountains.

She yanked at the left strap, trying to angle the wing toward it, only to have the strap tear off in her paw. Sometimes all you can do is trust your instincts, her old flying instructor, Sergeant Pandai, had told her. So she threw away the useless strap. Then she dug the claws of her left forepaw deep into the woven material itself and began to pull.

If she had used all her strength, she probably would have torn a whole section from the weakened wing, but instead she used a steady tugging. Bit by bit, the wing began to point toward the oval.

All Bayang could do was hope there was enough snow on the lake to cushion their landing and the ice was thick enough to take their weight.

Above them, Naue had stopped screaming. Bayang hoped that the wind was still alive and had gotten away.

The thunder lord could now direct his lightning bolts at them. A streak of dazzling light sizzled the air near them and her scales tingled with the electric charge.

Boom!

The lake rose toward them quickly. It looked about a mile long and about half that in width. Wisps of snow drifted across the top.

Even as she began to try to ease the nose up, something made her jink to the right. A lightning bolt shot past, just burning the port side.

Boom!

Her muzzle wriggled as smoke tickled her nostrils and she felt the warmth as the wing's edge caught fire.

What were they going to do now?