For two days, Arn and the strange crew of the ship continued across the Deep. They passed a few more tiny islands, but it wasn’t until the third day that Arn saw it. He was helping a man loop up a rope into a manageable size when his eyes caught a dark mass on the horizon: land. He stepped toward it without even noticing his own movement. The land on the horizon was nothing like the little places they had passed, nor was it like the land where Arn had grown up—Razaad. It started as a brown smudge on the horizon, reaching from the rising sun past the limits of his vision.
By the end of that first day, Arn could still not comprehend its size. Rocky hills dotted the horizon from his right to his left. Forests clung to the shore, but were quickly blocked by enormous points, as though rock had begun to grow like giant trees. The sailors explained those were mountains.
For another day, they sailed along the coast of this strange land. They began to spot more ships, but the man in the crow’s nest—the name for the top of the mast—called out details about them and Captain Emrez chose not to give chase.
Four days after their attempted attack on another ship, they reached the next astounding sight. Arn had become convinced that the size of this land was likely the most incredible thing he would ever see, until they reached the “fleet,” as defined by Morlo—a gathering of ships. Arn had expected a handful; a subset of the ships he had seen over the years.
It began with a few distant ships. These turned their course to follow Emrez’s vessel from a distance. Emrez ordered his men to arm themselves with the swords from below deck, but everyone did so cautiously, slowly. Next, their craft came to a rank of six ships, spaced out a mile or so apart. Strange stilts seemed to drop off the sides of one, forcing it to turn in the water. Emrez’s boat approached parallel and the sails were raised. This vessel was twice the size of the one that carried Arn; how it stayed afloat was a mystery or a sorcery.
Arn stared at what he had compared to stilts—those were oars. There were a hundred of them, at least, as long as the guiding poles Arn had used for his rafts. Did that mean…. Spirits, there are hundreds of men on board! Arn glanced at Gamden, but the man was looking at the Captain. Arn needed another minute. The entire population of Razaad could fit on a pair of these ships, he imagined. No wonder there was so much land!
“Have you seen this before?” Arn asked, quietly.
Gamden nodded. “Of course. Combat ships can’t move with only the wind.”
“But there’s so many of them…” Arn muttered. Gamden smiled at him, then they both looked back to the adjacent ship.
“Kiaraka’ka waters, these are. Yema’toh here to yidosith?” called a man from the ship’s deck. He had skin like clay, rich but rigid and expressionless. He held a long spear in one hand—unlike Arn’s numerous spears of the past, this man’s was tipped with metal.
“I am!” Emrez shouted back. He spread his hands. “Dub I am edet to!”
The spearman looked along the faces of Emrez’s crew; most had gathered on the right side of the vessel to hear what transpired. “Mars are you?” the man questioned. “Okaggelan?”
“No, we’re dueran,” Emrez answered. “There are im’ursa of us. Kannoran and kedian we have—and a pirriva to lendath.”
The sloshing of the waves drowned out a few words exchanged between the spearman and men on his own ship. It was an overcast day, but at least it did not rain. Arn did not like it when it rained. On his raft, the excess water would run off into the Deep—easy. On the ship, it would collect near their beds some days, before it drained through strategic holes in the wooden floorboards and funnel out from the rear of the ship. Arn snapped his head from the skies when the spearman spoke again. “Go isena through. In Tiyess, ukiram, oda miles afo the vaker,” he called. Arn understood very little of the man’s words. It could be an accent—for the man had spoken differently from Captain Emrez’ crew—or he had just used words that were still strange to Arn.
Emrez waved to him and ordered for the sails to be lowered once again. Ahead of the ship was a rocky ridge, extending out from one of the larger mountains along the shore of this enormous new land. It took them about an hour to round the bend, and then Arn saw them—the real fleet. Arrayed along the coast, for as far as Arn could see, were over a hundred ships. Each looked different in some way, whether it was by the colour or design of the sail, the length of the vessel or its height above the water, or even the colour of the wood that constructed it.
Gamden had seemed less surprised at the number of oars on the guarding ship, but his jaw dropped at the sight of the fleet, too. “So many…” he breathed. Each ship they passed was dotted with dozens of men—Arn glimpsed women a few times, too. The sailors they passed waved or pointed as Emrez’s rudder steered them through the shallows.
As they made their way along the coast, they drifted past a ship covered in huge contraptions. A plank made of long wooden beams was raised upright from its front, like a narrow front wall. Maybe it was meant to block the rocks from enemy’s slingshots? This strange watercraft also had a massive horn where its hull met the waves. Arn got his closest look at the spectacle just as they began to leave the vicinity of the ship… and realized it was solid metal! Alone, it must have weighed as much as Arn’s entire raft. For the twentieth time since his rescue, Arn wondered if Jorik’s superstitions were true—surely, only magic could keep a massive structure like this floating over the hungry depths of the sea.
By the time Emrez’s little galley came to a stop, it was mid-evening. They had reached a settlement of sorts, after navigating around a twisting and turning coast. By the talk of the sailors, they knew this to be Tiyess, as named by the guardian with whom they had spoken. The setting sun illuminated twenty or thirty buildings, scattered with tents and work yards. Loud, poignant clangs echoed over the sound of wooden sawing and shouted voices. Torches dotted the shadows, adding to the tendrils of smoke over the sea—for the village was built on a rocky point of land.
It was then that Arn realized the cloud on the horizon was not a cloud. It was smoke. It rose a dozen miles west of them, reaching a few hundred feet into the air before dispersing into the hazy blue clouds. That was a settlement, too. How many hundreds had gathered here, between the ships and the settlements? Were they taking over this land? There were hundreds of hundreds of them, seemingly more than there were stars in the sky.
Emrez ordered them to sleep aboard the ship, while he took himself, his second-in-command, and the dark-skinned man who always carried a sword and went ashore. Many of the sailors turned in immediately, exhausted from their voyage. Arn and Gamden loitered on the deck, watching the Captain’s rowboat go ashore as more and more torches were lit up. The sounds of drunken arguments and passionate squeals drifted over the waves like an eerie chorus of this alien place.
“What do you think?” Gamden asked. Arn often forgot that Gamden had not grown up on a remote isle. He may not have been from this place, of this culture, or one of these people, but he knew how large the world was.
“I think,” Arn said, quietly, “that everything I did on Razaad meant nothing.” His words hung in the air, quietly fading into the hubbub of the shanty town.