Chapter 9: Surprises

We had not long rounded the Horn of Federation when we saw the storm.

It was bearing down on us from the north-west. The air smelt funny and the sky to the west was dark as far as we could see. Dazzle, the first mated was very worried, and I didn’t blame him. He recommended that rather than turn out to sea as were planning, we go further down the coast and look for a cove that we could hide in.

I had seen the results of one of these storms going over land and the mess it made to both the seashore and the forests was extensive. They could form huge waves that pounded the beaches and flooded inland.

Cavil had even spoken of storms they had weathered in the past. He said the storms were the reason that his family had moved away from the east coast. The position of their current home was a lot safer than where the previous home had been. The old home had been flattened in a tropical storm.

“We would need a cove with a protective inlet or even better a deep river with high cliffs,” I said.

Dazzle agreed with me. Our problem was we hadn’t passed a suitable cove so far, to go back too. Hails maps were sketchy, as not many people had made accurate maps of this coast past where we were as it was considered uninhabitable. Plus our ships turned for home at this the point in the journey.

The name Horn was a bit of a misnomer for this section of the continent called Federation. On the maps, the section of land looked a lot like a large rectangle that was twice as long as it was wide. It appears to have been dropped into a big bowl and then fallen to the east on a rough forty-five degrees angle.

The longer north-eastern side had been worn down over time and now sloped at a greater angle on the underside. The land was wider on the eastern end and narrower at the end sitting in the bowl. Under the bowl, a long spear of land jutted out to the north-west.

The land then rounded out to another larger roughly rectangle shaped block of land that sloped in the opposite direction to the horn. It was split from the third major land mass on this side of Federation by a wide inland sea. It too had a blockier shape on the map and disappeared under the southern ice cap.

Hails notes indicated that a large portion of the inland from the western side of the Horn past the equator was a desert. Green sections were found only along the coast. Most of the section of the coast we had been travelling down had high cliffs and a huge mountain range that stretched seemingly indefinitely.

It is thought that the range blocked any rain from this direction, so it was scrub and desert behind it. Not a lot of this region afforded land that was arable or usable by a large population.

Rains from the west tended to be less frequent throughout the year, and the land suffered long periods of drought. The eastern storms never made it here with enough rain left to do any good during those months.

We needed to find a gap in the range to protect us from the huge swirling storm that was bearing down on us. Dazzle thought we had a day, possibly two at the most to get out of its path.

This crew had encountered a similar storm several years before, but it had hit land before they came upon it. The seas had still been very rough with waves that washed over the ship. They had to sit and tough it out on the open sea. Dazzle and Hail were not in any hurry to do that again.

The Mercy was a tough, well-built wide bottomed two-masted ship, but even she had her limits. The crew were surprised they hadn’t capsized at the time. They had still lost a week fixing the sails and rigging. It had been a slow miserable trip home.

So we headed further down the coast. We sailed closer to land than we would normally. Dazzle and Hail mapped the land as we went. Hail mentioned that if we could find a decent river with fresh water inlets, it would be a good place to stop and refresh the ship before going around the Horn.

He wished there was a shorter route to Greco and Garson but ships had found travelling between Palatine and Saran wasn’t an option, as they rarely came back. The Palatines tend to board ships and then sink them after stealing the cargo. They were nothing but pirates as far as the Captain was concerned.

We had been at sea for six weeks and only had the last leg across the open sea to complete. On the return trip, it was critical we had sufficient stored for this leg. Along the eastern coast, were several places where we could stop to top up water, and even collect fresh produce if we needed too.

From here, it was normally thirty to thirty-five days of open water, depending on the winds and storms. Our trip out had been the fastest that Hail had ever made this trip. We had taken only twenty-five days, and he was hoping we would do that again.

My girls and I were fascinated by the coastline. The steep towering mountain sides were lush with tropical trees, large barren outcrops and sheer cliffs that dropped into the ocean. Every so often, we were surprised by a small cove with a beach tucked into a small valley, but they were not very accessible nor did they meet our needs.

By late afternoon, Dazzle informed me that we had travelled close to 120km further down the coast than they had ever been. We normally covered three times that distance in daylight with the help of my shield, but we had slowed down since we were looking for a cove.

When river water mixed with the sea, the discolouration from the silt can be seen far from the coast. Our lookouts were looking for this alteration, and they had kept us at a reasonable speed. The long stretches of cliffs and lack of beaches didn’t encourage us to dawdle any more than the storm that we were hoping to avoid.

Dazzle even suggested that if we kept our course, we might have travelled far enough to avoid the worst of it. Our new problem became travelling at night. On our previous course, the crew knew were to sail, so night travel hadn’t been an issue.

Being in uncharted waters, we would have to travel slowly. We could also miss the cove we wanted. Hale told the lookouts to keep their eyes peeled. The light was fading early due to the western storm. We watched as the mountain range moved further from the shore and we noticed the fore-lands were wider and lower.

The lower land was heavily forested up to the lower rocky shoreline, so it was hard to tell the true nature of the land. We rounded what we realised was a spit of land and a lookout cried out, “River water, I see river water.”

How the hell he could see it in the gloom I couldn’t work out. Most of the crew were bent over the rails on the foredeck. Hail yelled for them to drop the mail foresail to slow the ship. I quickly touched the lantern that held my shield spell and told it to stop the wind.

The ship slowed, and we cautiously followed the curve of the spit of land around to the east to enter the bay. I think we were all speechless. We had sailed through an opening that was roughly between the third and fourth quarters of the bay.

The entrance to the bay was very deep water. It was close to 600m wide at the mouth and 700m long before we cleared the two spits of land that created the mouth. We discovered the bay was roughly elliptical.

It was about 12km at its longest and 5km at its widest. Three-quarters of its length ran east of north behind the spit of land we had rounded. If we kept travelling straight ahead for 3km, we would enter the mouth of a river that was over a klick wide.

The force of the river and the action of the sea entering and leaving the bay dragged the surface silt out into the sea. However, that was only part of the reason we were speechless. Running down the north side of the river was a long wide wharf that continued into a jetty that jutted out into the bay for at least a klick.

The wharf along the foreshore ran for at least another 2km, and two more jetties jutted out into the bay at equal intervals. The foreshore had a long wide paved road that ran to the north at the back of the pristine beaches, and feed side streets that ran east.

A multitude of buildings that appeared to be warehouses and businesses took up the other side of the foreshore along the length of the wharf. The buildings after them consisted of what I could only assume were other types of businesses, manufacturing and homes.

One thing that I found out of place was on the southern shore. It was obvious that this area had once been well populated in the past, but some form of cataclysm had occurred, as it was now mostly overgrown rubble.

The forests had long since taken over most of the area. The ruins of what had once been a very large building could be detected mostly because of the large area and the fact the trees hadn’t been able to take root for some reason. Only half of one tower had been left standing.

“Hey, Bron! Did you notice something odd as we entered the bay?” Bea asked me.

“What, something like the ruins of a city being here?” I asked with a cheeky grin.

Bea thumped me in the arm. “No silly. The energy field or whatever it was.”

I looked at her curiously. I turned to look back at the entrance of the bay and then the sky above it and us. I closed my eyes and let out my senses. I snapped them open and looked at Bea in surprise. “The Bay and the buildings in the immediate area are protected by a shield,” I told her.

She nodded and pointed out the outer surrounding land. I too could see that the area for roughly 3km around was still in serviceable condition. This being that the land wasn’t overgrown and the building were standing.

I then noticed that at the end of the middle jetty was a stone turret with windows. It was about 25m square and 80m high by my calculations. A metallic looking tower rose another 20m, and the top seemed to hold a bright beacon.

We should have seen that beacon from the sea. It was then I realised the circle of protected area radiated from that point. The beacon must contain magical crystals to feed the protections spells. The fact they still worked astounded me.

If the shield worked anything like the one that I erected when protecting the herd at night, then no one sailing past wouldn’t have seen the entrance to the bay. If they saw the silt in the sea, the spit would have looked continuous.

The new question was why had we been able to see the mouth and been able to enter the bay. I had to chuckle when Dazzle said, “Hey Bron, how come, your funny lamp flashed really bright several times as we came past the end of the spit?”

“I guess it was talking to the shield that protects this Bay and was asking for entrance,” I said.

That statement got me several raised eyebrows, but the crew accepted that with me being a mage I should know. We’d had a charmed trip so far so why shouldn’t our luck continue.

Captain Hale told the helmsman to head up the river a bit.

We estimated that we had a week or two up our sleeves.

With my shield protecting the ship and increasing its speed, we had time to explore, and everyone wanted to do just that. I wasn’t in that big of a hurry to get back even though I missed Greta. I hope she wasn’t too cranky when she found out that I had two more spouses.

One of the large warehouse type buildings was in fact set up for livestock, so we shifted the snufflers, the bulls and cluckers into it. Each of the enclosures down one side had a long run attached so the animals could graze a little and get some sun during the day.

We left the back end open, as several acres of land had been fenced in behind it. We let the rest of the cattle loose into it. They could come back into the warehouse to sleep at night. The cattle were more than happy to graze on fresh grass after six weeks of hay.

I found an interesting contraption which, when I turned it, allowed water to flow into the troughs. It was similar to what they called taps back in Horn City. I was delighted, as I didn’t have to carry water. When I went to open the doors on the other side, I felt the spells on them. Intrigued as to why they were there, I opened the doors.

I entered to find rows and rows of shelving that held rectangular bales of hay on wooden trays. Upon inspection, the bales seemed like they had been put there yesterday, but I knew this couldn’t be true. We had not seen any sign of human occupation on the wharf.

One thing that did surprise us was the lack of large piles of dirt and leaves on the roads, wharfs and public areas. I remembered from a tour in one of the museums in Horn City that there used to be machines that cleaned our roads. They hadn’t worked for many centuries that I know of.

One of the older crew members must have also seen them too and commented on the way the road was swept that the cleaners must still work here. We decided it must have been a week or two since they had last cleaned.

Things were slightly dusty but not dirty, as one would expect of a city that hadn’t been inhabited for centuries or even longer. The lack of footprints suggested to us that no one lived here anymore. The interior of the shops and homes and businesses indicated they had been left and not touched since the occupant vacated the premises.

Many of the smaller homes had dust build-ups inside, but most other buildings seemed more dust proof. The possessions and furniture in some instances had deteriorated, but in other instances, they were as good as new. I came to recognise the spell that protected the contents of a room and taught Cora and Bea how to feel them.

If the house or building didn’t have the spells, we avoided it as we knew little remained that was useful inside. We had found a small house near the barn we were using and took up residence for the week. The crew found a dock tavern with accommodation.

The tavern was tucked between two warehouses just down from where we tied up, and they decided to make it their temporary home. We’d meet the crew for dinner each night, and we’d exchanged news of what we had found during the day.

We were all having a lot of fun exploring.

We had been in the city for three days when we first saw the cleaners.

Some of the crew members found them a bit creepy, but the rest of us were fascinated. The street cleaners looked like boxes on wheels. We could hear them making sucking noise as they moved along. They had a section on the back that collected the rubbish.

I followed one that had stopped cleaning. It backed into a metal square on a wall of a central building, and then after some time, it went back to cleaning. When I investigated the square, I found that it pushed open and a large chute went down. I wondered what happened to the dirt after that.

The other cleaners were far more interesting. They walked on two legs and were humanoid in shape but didn’t have proper faces. They were only about a 1.1m tall, like the average person of the Pix race.

The cleaners didn’t just clean things they fixed them too. If we got in their way, they just stopped until we got out of the way. We left them alone to do their jobs. After all, we didn’t want to clean the buildings and streets.

Captain Hail was amused when the next morning he found his ship cleaner than it had been since being built twenty years before. Every surface had been scrubbed and then revarnished or painted as required. The cargo areas smelt so clean it was weird.

I joked to the Captain that it was a shame we couldn’t get a cleaner to stay on the ship. We were shocked when one of the humanoid cleaners that were near us commented that this wasn’t possible as we didn’t have a power source available for it to recharge.

“Can all of you speak?” I asked it.

“Yes, sir. We noticed your speech was a little different to the previous occupants of Ochre City, so our controller has been monitoring you all to learn.”

“What is a controller?” I had to ask.

“That is the entity that looks after the city and us. You woke her when the ship passed through the shield to alert us to your presence. We hope you don’t mind, but we noted some of your stores were contaminated, so we have removed them and replaced them with fresh produce.”

“We also restocked your supplies as you seemed to be missing some of the basic foods and items that we normally would find on a ship such as yours. We have also fertilised and watered the trees for you,” the cleaner responded.

I still didn’t understand what a controller was, but it was obvious that not much missed their attention. The Captain looked at me perplexed at what items they have added or removed from the ship. We thanked the cleaner, and it went on its way.

The Captain and I went to check the storage areas of the ship. “Holy crap!” Captain Hail commented loudly. They had been totally reorganised. We had to hunt around to find where some things were. In the area where we stored the barrels and hay, the room was now divided into shelves.

The barrels were stacked on the funny trays underneath and the higher shelves. On the shelves, were more trays with the square hay stacked on them and tied down onto them.

I noticed a strange machine parked in front of a tray. We pulled it out and examined it. It had two long forks that could be lowered into place or lifted and folded out of the way. Two shorter horizontal legs had a set of wheels under them, and they could slide down either side of a tray.