Ship of Dreams Read Free Page A

well, better to waste a few minutes here than a year or so in some dungeon under Celephais.”
    Eldin might have continued the argument had he not noticed the frown suddenly grown on Hero’s face and the way his eyes peered at the darkening sky far beyond the city’s silhouette of spires, turrets and minarets. “Ah! You’ve spotted them, have you?” he asked instead.
    “Um? Those lights, d’you mean?” said Hero. “What the devil are they?”
    “Lights in the sky,” Eldin chuckled, “What else?”
    “Stars, d’you suppose? They’re pretty low in the sky for stars, and they seem to be … moving?”
    Eldin sighed. “You’ve never been to Celephais before, have you? This was your first trip here—and you spent most of it looking after me, right?”
    Hero nodded, never once taking his eyes from the bright points of light in the sky far beyond the city.
    “You know, lad,” Eldin went on, “you really should pay more attention when I talk about the things I’ve done and the places I’ve seen. Don’t you remember when first we decided to come here, how I told you what I knew of Celephais? How Celephais had wonders
other than the permanently snowy peak of Mount Aran?”
    Hero turned his head to peer into his friend’s gloom-shadowed face and frowned in concentration. “Something about ships that sail into the sky?” he hazarded.
    Eldin sighed again, this time in resignation. “All right,” he said, “we’ll start again at square one. Only this time listen:
    “Celephais lies in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai. Those hills over there, they’re the Tanarians, and the desert behind us is the Oon. Aran you already know; but you don’t know about the timelessness.”
    “Timelessness?” repeated Hero.
    Eldin nodded. “Time’s queer in the dreamlands, sure enough,” he said, “but more so in Celephais. Things don’t age greatly here and the seasons don’t come around so often. That’s one of the reasons, I fancy, why there’s always snow on Aran. The whole place seems to resent, to resist change.
    “And it’s this timelessness and continuity that attracted Kuranes to Celephais. He was once a dreamer same as us, but he’s gone a ways since then. Still, he’s more a benevolent old oracle than a king proper, more a prophet than a power. He spends half his time here in Celephais, the rest of it in Serannian. Now Serannian, that’s a really fantastic place!”
    “That’s what you said about Celephais—before we got here and you started to hit the bottle,” Hero grumbled. “Serannian,” he tasted the word. “Isn’t that the mythical sky-floating city I’ve heard mention of somewhere?”
    “Right,” said Eldin, “but it’s no myth, I promise you. I’ve never been there myself, mind you, but according to all the stories I’ve heard about it—”
    “I think it’s dark enough now,” said Hero.
    “Damn me!” Eldin grated. “Even now you haven’t been listening, have you?”
    “You can tell me later,” Hero answered. “We can talk as we go—so long as we keep it quiet. Come on then, let’s head for the foot of the mountain. But go carefully whatever you do. Old Leewas Nith wasn’t joking when he tossed us out. If we’re caught again …” And he let the sentence hang.
    They cut across the scrub of the desert, moving as shadows, and as they went so Eldin spoke of this marvelous valley and the legends he remembered of it. By the time they reached Aran’s foot and climbed it to where the ginkgos waved their fanlike foliage in a light evening breeze, he was telling Hero of the city’s fabulous harbor.
    “It’s said,” (he related), “that ships sailing out of the bay of Celephais cease to be governed by the law of gravity. The sea out there,” and he nodded his head toward the rolling expanse of ocean beyond the city, “is a funny sort of sea. Normally when you look out to sea the horizon only seems to meet the sky. Here in Celephais it really does! That’s why most of the