by David Drake
Samlor smiled so that the implication of danger wouldn't be the first answer his wife received. "The real boat might be able to-enter the realm where we'll find the book," he explained, "But nothing alive could travel with it for the entire distance. We'll be perfectly safe in this vessel-" he patted the waxen side, without quite touching it " – and the other will carry the equipment we need."
Ahwere hugged him but would not meet his eyes as she said, "Well, I shouldn't have disturbed yotl'll go now."
"You don't disturb me," Samlor said.
Ahwere started to turn away. Samlor seized h^r and said fiercely, "My love, I need you! You don't disturbme. And you mustn't worry."
She nodded, her face against his chest, but Samlor was sure he heard her sobbing as she climbed back down the stairs.
He took another block of wax, set it in place, and began to shape it. His princely face was as calm as the wax itself, but his mind was filled with images of fire and terror.
After he finished the boat, he would form the six oarsmen to drive it. …
CHAPTER 16
SHAY CARRIED A rope knout as he oversaw the transport of the wax boat to the water, but he repeatedly slapped his own thigh with it instead of the workmen.
The wax vessel was a light burden for so many hands, temple servants as well as Nanefer's sailors, but it was also fragile. The bosun had no intention of making someone stumble with a flick of the rope-end-and Samlor would have flayed Shay if he had taken that risk.
"Easy, then," the bosun ordered, stepping backward ahead of the procession.
Rather than use the stone quay, Samlor had ordered the priests to build a temporary ramp of bundled reeds across the swampy stretch and down into the river. At first the end of the new ramp floated. The reeds undulated down into the muck as they took Shay's weight. The team of men and the boat they carried would submerge the ramp, permitting the vessel to bob in the water without the risk of damage that any other launch would entail.
Beside Samlor stood Ahwere. Her bright smile could have been sculpted in stone for any movement it had shown. He touched her hand and realized the grin he flashed her was almost as false.
"Come on, come on, ye buggers!" roared Shay. "Are ye afraid the fishies'll eat yer bollocks?" The bosun was in knee-high water, but the loaded men behind him were driving the ramp deeper even though they were nearer the bank.
"Your highness," said Tekhao, rubbing his sweaty hands together. "And you, your highness," he added with a nervous nod to Ah were. "I trust the arrangements are to your satisfaction?"
Samlor was keyed up to the point that the question, intruding into his imagined future, had the impact of a blow. His face went pale and he opened his mouth to rip out a curse at the fat priest.
Before the words came awareness and contrition. He gripped Tekhao, forearm to forearm as if they were brothers taking leave, and said truthfully, "More than satisfactory, Tekhao, from beginning-" he nodded toward the temple enclosure. Another ramp of reed fascines led down from the roof where Samlor had constructed the wax boat.
"- to now."
"Now hold it, ye buggers!" roared Shay, dog-paddling against the sluggish current. "Don't let it float to bugger-all down the bloody river!"
"But now you'll have to excuse me," Samlor continued, "because it's time for my wife and I to-proceed."
"Oh, Prince Nanefer," mumbled the chief priest in a voice thick with emotion. "Oh, your highness. You don't know what that means to me. .»
As Samlor and Ahwere strode quickly down to the stone quay, he wondered what sort of man Tekhao would have been if he could give his god the sort of devotion he reserved for human superiors. A saint, very likely.
And very likely a much worse administrator of the temple and the land which it governed on behalf of the king.
Sailors splashed in the water to keep the boat from slamming into the quay. The wax vessel rode higher than a boat of wood, so the breeze was a greater danger than the current near the shore.
By contrast, the royal yacht sagged very low and the men who were swinging its bow to the stern of the wax vessel had to struggle hard. The mast, oars, and all moveable tackle had been stripped from the yacht, but it was now loaded with loose sand carried from beyond the edge of the river's annual flooding.
Samlor's armor and weapons lay atop the sand near the bow along with a bronze shovel. There was no other cargo.
Samlor unlatched the gold pin which bound the ends of his sash, then handed the garment to a waiting temple servitor. He pulled his richly-embroidered tunic over his head and tossed that to the man also before stepping out of his sandals.
The stone was warm and a welcome reminder of the cosmos as he walked to the edge of the quay. Ahwere, nude also and regally beyond self-consciousness, was beside him.
Shay had pulled himself aboard the royal yacht and was waiting in the bow with a coiled line. One end of the line was tied to the support of the forward steering oar. The bosun was eyeing the sternpost of the other craft doubtfully, since it too was made of wax.
Samlor stepped down into the wax boat, supporting his weight on his arms as long as possible so that his feet touched rather than slammed the planking. The wax slipped beneath the pressure of his toes. The men treading water to keep boat and dock from smashing together cursed as the hull wobbled and thrust them beneath the surface.
Ahwere followed with the natural grace of a gull banking through the air. Samlor reached a hand out to her, but he found the best help he could provide was to lean toward the other side of the high-floating vessel so that it did not tilt so much.
"Nanefer, are you sure. .?" called Shay from the bow of the other vessel. The bosun's concern for the situation had driven normal honorifics from his vocabulary.
"Yes, yes," Samlor agreed, making his way cautiously to the stern between the lumpish pairs of wax «crewmen» with fragile oars in their ill-formed hands. The steering sweep in the stern was becoming increasingly transparent as full sunlight raked through it, evidence that the wax was softening and would soon begin to sag.
"Throw me the rope!" Samlor ordered as the bosun hesitated.
"Sir!" Shay muttered and tossed the hawser expertly to his superior. The coil opened as it flicked across the water, so that Samlor caught only the final loop; just enough to take a turn around the wax sternpost and bind the vessels together.
Ahwere hugged herself, not in modesty but as if she stood naked in a cold rain. The sunstruck hull shifted greasily beneath Samlor's toes. He bound off the hawser with a face as emotionless as the clear sky above them.
"Jump out now, Shay," Samlor called to the man in the other vessel.
"Nanefer, I-"
"Jump out!" Samlor cried in a voice thin with fear. "On your life!"
Shay nodded and obeyed by leaping like a baboon to the quay where sailors fended the vessel from the stone with poles.
The wax boat wobbled. Its sternposts started to give as the current put strain on the hawser. The six wax oarsmen bent forward, then leaned back against the drag of their oars. Ahwere cried out as the vessel surged away from the quay despite the inertia of the sand-laden boat it towed.
The sternpost held. There were real planks beneath Samlor's feet as he took the steering oar.
The oarsmen were no longer crude parodies but humans in all but color and their stony lack of expression. They stroked at a measured rate, plunging their blades so deep in the water that real oars would have fractured under the strain. The wax shafts held, and the waxen torsos bent and lifted, driving the linked vessels against the current.
The oarsmen's faces were turned toward Samlor by necessity of their position, but the blank eyes paid him no attention.
Ahwere stood near the bow, facing her husband. She was afraid but no longer crying. He had thought when he asked her to join him that she would prove steadfast where no one else could be trusted. Now, looking into the love in her eyes, he knew he was right.
The crowd on the quay were watching the
vessels, but the few who tried to walk along the bank beside them were stopped at once by the swamp. Reed bracts waved sluggishly in a breeze that did not touch the sun-hammered surface of the water.
They had reached midstream. The Wall of Tatenen was a black stroke between the river and the vegetation beyond it on the starboard side.
Samlor leaned against the steering oar. The starboard oarsmen feathered their blades for the space of three mechanically-powerful strokes by the wax figures on the port side.
The vessel's bow came around while the towed yacht eased closer, slackening the hawser between them.
All oars striking together, the wax boat drove for the bank. The hawser thrummed taut and the yacht unwillingly obeyed its pull.
Samlor let go of the steering oar, needless now that they were committed whether he would or no. He walked forward, between the wax men who cared nothing for him or for anything, and put his arms around his wife.
The face in the middle of the stone wall was beginning to blaze. It was already brighter than the sun, and its color was the blue of lightning crashing in the heart of a storm. The linked vessels were stroking toward it as fast as a man could walk on level ground.
Ahwere put her arm around Samlor's waist so that they stood side by side, watching the visage of Tatenen grow into a glaring tunnel that pierced the stone and the swamp and all the universe beyond.
They plunged into the tunnel. Hell roared around them.
Where the wax prow should have flattened on stone, the vessel bucked. Samlor heard Ahwere murmur, "Nanefer-" and her arm tightened around his bare waist, but they needed one another for physical support for the moment. It was no more than that, support, without a hint of panic.
The blue flames licking from every side were as real as the angry light they cast, but they spread and dodged away from an invisible barrier. Neither the wax boat, its crew, nor the two naked humans clutching one another in the bow were touched by the snarling blaze.
Samlor glanced behind them. The royal yacht pitched and yawed like a living thing which the flames were tormenting. The railings were beginning to scorch, while the towline blackened except for orange sparks where tufts of rope flashed into miniature fires themselves.
"How long-" Ahwere said, forming great syllables so that they would be heard over the echoing furnace-roar of the flames.
Before she could complete the sentence, the wax vessel lurched again and surged from the tunnel into surroundings which resembled the fire only in that both were hellish.
It was a swamp, but the sky above was so overcast that the noon sun was a red disk. It was nothing like the landscape anywhere along the River Napata.
Ahwere's mouth was open with the words she did not need to speak. The mouth of a beast standing belly-deep in ten feet of muck opened and blatted at them in surprise.
Samlor felt his wife's arm clamp around his waist, but her fear was only reflexive. She thrust her jaw out as she faced the monstrous head that swung closer. Samlor's mind was reminding itself that they could not be harmed-not here, not yet-so long as they remained in the wax boat.
It would have been very easy to hurl himself over the side in a mad attempt to escape. Ahwere's warm presence kept him calm where intellect could only have controlled him.
In size the beast was less like an elephant than a whale roiling the thick waters of a cycad-fringed swamp. Its neck was long and serpentine-slender for the body but still too large for Samlor to have encircled it with both arms.
The head was in scale with the neck. The teeth fringing the jaws were peg-like, not shears. Even so, the bass screech the beast directed at the boat was loud enough to drive the couple in the bow half a step back by its physical impact.
The monster's breath smelled of pinebark and turpentine, pungent but not unpleasant.
The oarsmen continued to stroke, as unaffected by the monster as they had been by the tunnel of flame. The boat's course slid it under the rounded snakelike head. The beast jerked up its neck, then pulled a foreleg from the swamp and pawed with it. The blunt claws dripped mud and scraps of vegetation which splashed and streamed away in the air a few feet over Samlor's head.
The claws themselves hit a barrier there also, though there was no sound of impact nor did the vessel rock under the blow.
The monster gave another blat of deafening amazement and bolted away from the wax ship. Waves the color and almost the consistency of mud surged across the swamp, but the oarsmen pulled obliviously and the wax prow slid on without feeling the shock of the water.
Behind them, the yacht jerked and staggered. Waves broke over it and streamed away from railings which the touch of the blue flames had left asmolder.
The monster the boats had startled was threshing toward the firmer ground in the distance. It sounded like a traveling waterfall. The volume of viscous muck its legs churned up was enough to rate a place in the landscape. Another creature like it roared from somewhere in the haze.
The wax boat bucked, stern down and then rising, as fiercely as it had when they penetrated the tunnel of flames. The landscape did not change. Ahwere turned around and screamed briefly before her own hand clamped over her mouth.
The monster that had surged away from them was a creature of imagination only, nightmarish but for that reason easy to disregard when the nightmare was past. Something had-just crawled half onto the deck of the royal yacht, and it was a terror familiar to any Napatan.
Only the head and forequarters were visible above the surface of the reedy water, but they alone were longer than the full length of the biggest crocodile Samlor had ever seen. Its jaws opened in laughter or challenge as one of its eyes glittered at the humans on the wax boat.
The oarsmen continued to stroke, fighting the mass which held the yacht in its clawed grip, but the hawser between the vessels was humming with strain.
"Ahwere," Samlor's lips were murmuring. "My love, my sister, my only love," and he could hear her scarcely-voiced, "Nanefer. .," as well.
The crocodile clawed more of its broad, bone-armored body into the yacht. The over-ballasting of sand was suddenly an advantage, because even a beast the size of this one could not overturn the heavy vessel.
The crocodile got one of its hind legs onto the yacht's rail. Hooked black claws gouged long splinters from the wood.
The mind in which Samlor resided was terrified though steadfast. The caravan master had shut down all his emotions when wax simulacra had begun working as if they were men and more than men. This, though… a crocodile, monstrous in size but a natural thing-It could be fought, even if he couldn't defeat it, and he was wondering what to use for a weapon while the body he did not control crooned to a woman and awaited death.
Streaks of light, unburnt cord were popping out on the surface of the hawser as its skeins stretched under the strain. In a moment they would begin to give way. The rope would part with a crack like stone shearing, and
the wax boat lurched. In front of them was not swamp but gray waste, a membrane of change through which the bow slipped, the humans and the not-human oarsmen, the sternpost with the stretching hawser-
The crocodile threw itself over the side of the royal yacht. The beast's mouth was open. Past its ragged teeth Samlor could see its corpse-white throat contract as if the crocodile were bellowing at them. No sound penetrated, not even the slap of the waves that the fifty-foot body hurled up as it struck the water and all the landscape disappeared into the gray diaphragm which sealed behind the yacht.
The oarsmen continued to stroke. The vessels moved forward as if the oarblades were not pulling through the air-or something more empty than air.
There was no sky, only stars like needle points, and the horizon was an etched jumble of gray stone against blackness. The wax boat surged ahead, never less than six inches above the surface.
Samlor thought at first that the ground was of finely-divided sand studded with jagged volcanic boulders. By squinting and looking at a point far enough ahead that motion did
not blur it, he corrected his error. The ground was glass or glassy slag, and the appearance of sand came from the crazing of the smooth surfaces which threw back light in a myriad of directions.
They were not on a plain but a complex of broad craters, shouldering into one another like the pattern raindrops start to make on a beach. The sharper boulders rimmed craters which had not been battered by latter hammerings. Without guidance or need for a man on the rudder, the wax crewmen slid between these obstacles the way human boatmen would avoid treestumps turning in a flood-swollen river.
The yacht skidded along the ground behind them, grinding away bits of shattered glass which spun and glittered as they fell back. The fragments did not tumble as quickly as they should have, and the pitching of the wooden vessel was of curiously long duration. Laden as it was, the yacht ought to have smashed its hull to splinters each time it hit the ground after bounding over an irregularity.
This was not a place Samlor had ever heard of before.
But then, he shouldn't have expected that it would be.
The wax boat was skirting a crater so fresh and extensive that its rim was a glassy sawblade slashing through half the horizon. They were ascending the slope as they rounded it, though the ultimate direction was confused by the shattered landscape of crater flattening crater in dikes and gulleys.
The sun above had no compromise. Its light fell in knife-edge shadows, though sometimes long cracks drew feathers of illumination through the glassy surface. When Samlor tried to look up at the orb, squinting past the edge of his hand as he would normally do on a bright day, he was almost blinded.
There was no halo round the sun here: the sky was either blackness or radiance, with no gradations between.
The rim was close enough to starboard that Samlor thought he could, with care, spit the distance-though perhaps not in this slender royal body.
The crewmen paused. Samlor glanced back at the wax figures, but he could see only their humping shoulders and bull necks. Their faces would have told him nothing about assuming they had their feelings, their intentions. either.