Old habits die hard. As Kelski and the group she was with settled into ship life, the Kelvic would still wake in the morning, do a quick check of the cargo and horses, then she’d slip off in her Sea Eagle form and scout.
Life on a ship wasn’t exactly what she felt was good exercise. She felt horrible for the horses and mules in the hold that could not even come up on the deck for fresh air like the humans could. Eighteen days on the boat didn’t seem like much, but Kelski thought it was time eternal to be pent up. But there were things to do with her mind.
What she truthfully wanted was to learn the lay of the land. And as the ship sailed southward from Sunberth, shadowing the coast, Kelski would track its motions over land. She learned what the beaches looked like as they traveled southward. She crossed rivers that she noted on her mental map, and would make sure she understood how the land lay against the sea and what shaped it.
And truly she fell in love with the wild places. She loved the place where wind met waves and the land dipped into the sea. Kelski had never had the privilege of living wild before, not on her own and not totally free. She’d tasted Lhavit’s wilderness, living out of a cave for a time, but this was different. Then, she’d been on the run from a dead owner. Now, she was her own person, free and wild, and her choices were endless. The more she flew the more she knew she didn’t want to live in a city anymore, not like she had in Sunberth. People were dangerous. The Wilds were too, but not nearly as dangerous as actual people with their wants and needs.
The scouting had dual purposes too. It kept her fit as they traveled. She covered lots of miles by air and had that taste of danger trying to find the ship along their route at the end of her flights. The acute awareness that she might miss the ship kept her sharp and very aware if its rate of travel and its direction of travel. And if she grew gone to long, following something inland, she practiced her navigation, noting where the ship was and tracing mental grids over the water, and combing each one dropping further and further south until she found the ship again.
Sometimes she’d arrive exhausted. And sometimes her trips were cut short. Rain was no good on even healthy feathering, so when the weather didn’t allow flight, she stayed in and talked to the sailors. The Navigator was one of her favorite people. He taught her a bit about navigation. Jalisth talked about how to read water – that every ripple, wave and swell contained detailed information about what the wind was doing, what it has been doing, and what it might be doing soon. One example he gave her was looking at reflected and refracted swell patterns in the waves they saw. Waves rolled straight across them, in dual lines, but when they hit bodies of water they changed and bent… when approaching they bowed outward away from the island, crossing back over the straight lines of waves. When they passed islands, they created bows that pointed towards the islands and eventually criss crossed in X’s behind the big waves the further from the island they got. So when waves swelled across them headed towards the shore… when their patterns changed Jalisth would often point this out to Kelski and if she took wing, she’d usually find an island in the distance, usually where aboard ship they couldn’t even see one.
It was incredibly useful information, and something she could see from the air when she was scouting. From talking to Jalisth, she learned more about the sun. She always thought it rose in the east and set in the west, but the man denied it. He said the world they were on was such where it rocked seasonally, and that the only day the sun truly rose and set in a perfect alignment was on Midsummers day and Midwinters Day of each year. Then and only then did the sun rise perfectly in the east and set perfectly west. The rest of the year, the sun rose and set further and further off course. When the solstices happened, the sun would rise and set further from east and west to the point it would be extremely off the true points getting travelers lost. Jalisth talked about sailing extremely north and in those areas the sun was so far off west and east it rarely set at all but simply migrated around the sky.
It took a bit for Kelski to wrap her mind around that one. The Navigator explained it to her this way. If you were to walk in the direction of sunrise during Spring and then turn around at the end of the day and head back towards sunset you stand a good chance of finding your way back to where you set out from (out east, back west). If you try the same thing in midsummer or midwinter you will get horribly lost. If you walk towards sunrise in midwinter you would need to walk with the sunset over your left shoulder to get back to the same spot at the end of the day (out southeast, back northwest). He even drew a diagram for her…
Aproximate Sunrise Directions
Northeast East Southeast
Summer Solstice Equinoxes Winter Solstice
Then he set a ball directly under where he wrote EAST on the wall and let the rocking of the ship side to side roll the ball back and forth between northeast and southeast to mimic the turning of the wheel of the year and the movement of the sun. With that in mind, Kelski realized navigation got a bit easier when speaking of the sun.
However, according to Jalisth, the sun wasn’t so unreliable if used other ways. The shortest shadow, for example, cast by a stick each day will form a perfect north-south line anywhere in the world at midday. So, if there was clear weather, good sunshine, and a stick available when the sun was directly overhead, Kelski always could keep a compass with her. With that in mind, Kelski could always get a ‘bearing’ on her compass line and know where she was going.
With that, Jalisth promised to teach her about the stars, wind, moon and maybe more about sun navigation the next day.
Kelski could see that both Vasin and Anja were keeping themselves entertained similarly, with Vasin cozying up to the captain and learning from him. Anja, of course, was making other kinds of friends. Ember and Ebon were sticking close together. Mercy was occupied with Caitlyn who was violently sea sick almost the moment they stepped foot on the ship. And Dess simply watched her, taking his time to make sure Mosa got time on the deck and playing cards with Gilthas to pass the time. They looked happy, all of them, to be away from Sunberth.
Zeltiva had such promise. Too bad, Kelski thought sadly, she wasn’t going to settle in the city.
