Lihan Taifun
Buying passage on a Human ship was simple enough. Aztryd's clan-sisters, being unsure of prices, had provided her plenty of coin, not to mention the jewels and worked gold hidden inside her belt. Apparently ships travelled frequently from this port – “Pelargir” they called it, affecting an Elvish name – to the northern ports such as Grey Havens, connecting the latest generation of Human settlers in the newly-revived Human North Kingdom with the older Human South Kingdom.
At first, the sounds and smells of the sea had filled Aztryd with nostalgia, remembering times when, as a child, her indulgent grandparents had let her ride in the wagon with her brothers, down to the market at the Grey Havens. The smells of salt and tar, fish and seaweed, carried on a wind ever so much steadier than the mountain winds. The creak of wooden ships, the flapping of linen sails. The piercing calls of the sea birds, like the cry of eagles and yet unlike. The unfamiliar warbling of Elvish voices.
But quickly the past memories of visiting a port were pushed aside by the present realities of riding on a ship. Whatever has she and her clan-sisters been thinking, to include a ship in their plans! They had assumed that riding on a ship was like riding on a giant wagon. But in fact, the ship rocked and swayed constantly. Sickeningly. Relentlessly. The sailors assured her that this was normal, and nothing to alarm her. The motion affected her stomach like spoiled stew, and she kept to her tiny closet of a cabin. The sailors, solicitous of their passengers, brought food to “the little master”, as they called her. She did not correct them, nor did she mention the presence of Nizl. She managed a few sips of watered beer, and nibbled at some hard, thin, tasteless travel bread.
Then the weather turned stormy. Day was hardly distinguishable from night, lit only by sharp flashes of lightning. Water sloshed in under the door of her cabin, though she neither knew nor cared whether is was rainwater or or the towering waves that crashed across the deck of the ship. Aztryd gave up all pretense of eating or drinking, concentrating mainly on not being flung out of her bunk by the ship's pitching. If they died here, they died, and there was nothing she could do about it. Maybe Aztryd muttered a prayer to the Maker, but how could even He hear anything here, far out in his wild brother's domain? And what could he do about a storm at sea, anyway? Nizl, upset by the thunder that rattled them to the teeth, wailed constantly. But no one else noticed, over the roar of the storm. Time had no more meaning in this storm than it did in the deepest hearts of the mountains.
Aztryd must have slept, because she suddenly realized she had awoken. The ship had returned to merely its ordinary rolling, the wind nearly silent compared to the storm. Aztryd sat up shakily, and tended to Nizl. Nearly a week of barely eating was beginning to affect Aztryd's milk production, and Nizl was not satisfied, but she did settle down from wailing to a petulant whimpering.
Aztryd left Nizl in the cabin, and went out to assess the situation. The decks were still wet and slick, but the skies showed a pale pearl color, cloudless, and nearly windless. She guessed it was the still before dawn. The deck was not, however, silent. The Human sailors were about their work, soaking wet, moving a bit slowly and stiffly, but professionally doing whatever it was that sailors did with their ropes and sails and wheels.
“What news?” she asked one.
“Good morrow, little master. It seems the ship is still in one piece, and we make good thanks to Lady Uinen for that!”
“When will we be arriving at Grey Havens?”
“Ah, now, little master, we don't rightly know that, yet. Daren, he says he doesn't rightly know himself where we are just now. And he's the Navigator; it's his job to know. But he says, what with the Morning Star gone missing, it's not so easy to calculate our position.” Aztryd had heard sailors back in the port saying something about stars, or stars moving, or a star missing, but she had not paid any attention to a matter of astronomy. “It didn't matter as long as we kept near enough to see the coastline. One could say we were lucky the storm blew us away from the coast, and not onto it and the rocks. But where in Lord Ulmo's great ocean we are now, that is a good question.”
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