by David Drake
He thrust the wooden dagger under his sash and ran into the water. He didn't dive since he didn't know how deep it was. The far shore was about a hundred feet away; the only reason he could see it in this mist was that the pond was black, while rosy phosphorescence dusted the mud of the shore.
Garric splashed two steps in to reach knee height, then threw himself forward and began swimming. The water was warmish and had a cleansing feel, unlike the tidal millpond in Barca's Hamlet where he'd learned to swim.
He felt a flash of white pain when he stretched out his right arm for the first time in a crawl stroke, but then he settled into a rhythm. He supposed he hadn't stuck his arm straight overhead since he'd gotten the shoulder wound.
Stretching's good for it, he thought, his mind grinning though his mouth was too busy sucking in air. Of course if I'd fainted and drowned, that wouldn't have been so good; but it might not make a whole lot of difference. Unless maybe the cat men can't swim?
"They swim better than you do," the Bird said in its dry mental voice. "Get out of the water quickly. Run!"
Stagger rather than run was the word for the way Garric left the pond, but at any rate he got out as quickly as he could. Every muscle hurt and it felt as though his feet were sinking in deeper on this side than they had in the forest on the other side.
Maybe they were; certainly they were cutting ankle deep through the mud and leaving swirls in the fungus on the surface. Unless the cat men were blind, they'd be able to track him easily.
"Even if they were blind they could follow your scent," the Bird said. It landed in the crotch of a tree that branched like a candelabrum. "Can you climb to here?" it asked, fluttering its wings to call attention to itself. "It will help some if the Coerli manage to cross."
The crotch was only fifteen feet in the air, and the rough trunk provided a good grip. Ordinarily Garric would've been up it with a few quick hunches of his shoulders and kicks of his tight-clamped legs.
In the present circumstances it was much harder, but it was necessary regardless. If the cat men had to climb to get at him, it gave him a chance to kill one or two that he wouldn't have on the ground surrounded by creatures so lethally quick.
Garric made it, throwing himself into the crotch and letting his tensed abdomen hold his weight. He whooped for breath through his open mouth as the Coerli came like lithe ghosts from the trees on the other side of the pond.
The maned leader followed the tracks to the water with his eyes, then up the far bank to the tree where their prey sat wheezing. "There's the animal!" he cried. "The heart and lungs to the warrior who drags him down!"
Instead of depending on his warriors to do the job, Grunog leaped into the pond and started across. He moved as smoothly as an otter despite holding his wooden mace out in front of him. His warriors arrowed into the water to either side of their leader.
To Garric's surprise, he hadn't lost the knife in swimming. The Coerli didn't have bows and didn't throw their spears. They'd use their hooked lines at first, but by keeping close to the trunk he'd be able to keep from being wrapped by them and dragged down.
The hooks would probably pull off chunks of flesh, but pain didn't matter much now. The Coerli were going to kill and eat him before the business was over, after all.
The warrior on the right side of the line disappeared, thrashing all four limbs. The other cat men didn't appear to notice. They'd reached the middle of the slow stream.
"Bird?" Garric began.
Grunog let out a scream like skidding rocks. He twisted and raised his mace to strike. Before he could, he sank straight down. A moment later the mace bobbed to the surface; the wood was dense and floated very low in the water.
"Large salamanders live in the lake," said the Bird. It was clinging to the tree sideways, just above the level of Garric's head. "You crossed at the boundary between the territories of two of the largest. The splashing drew them to investigate, but they're sluggish. You'd reached the shore before they arrived."
Garric didn't ask how much clearance he'd had; it didn't matter, after all. There wasn't any other choice.
The remaining warriors milled uncertainly in the water. Garric stood on the branch, no longer exhausted and perfectly confident. He pointed his dagger at the cat men and shouted, "Begone, interlopers or I will loose the rest of my minions on you!"
A Corl gave a hacking cry and thrust his stabbing spear beneath him. Blood bubbled to the surface. He called out again and went down. From the roiling water rose a corpse-white creature with an oval head and a tail as fat as the body proper. It rolled under again and disappeared.
The surviving cat men paddled back the way they'd come. When they reached the shore, they scrambled up and vanished into the forest. They hadn't said a word after Garric had called his empty threat.
"I see what you mean about big salamanders," Garric said. He wasn't feeling pain, but his whole body was trembling from reaction. "That was a good six feet long, including the tail."
"That was a small one," said the Bird. "Normally they wouldn't come close to their larger fellows for fear of being eaten themselves, but when they smelled the blood they were too excited to keep away."
"Oh," said Garric. His blood. The Coerli themselves had been taken too recently for their blood to have spread far. "Just as well I scraped myself, I suppose."
"Yes," said the Bird. "Now to the cave. It's not far. I hope we won't have any more difficulties before we get there."
Garric lowered himself by hanging from the limb with both hands, then dropped to the ground. His knees flexed but didn't buckle as he'd thought they might, especially the left one.
"Yes," he said. "I hope that too."
***
"'Now some of these days and it won't be long,'" sang Chalcus, his voice soft in the still air. "'You'll call my name and I gonna be gone.'"
"I hear water close," said Merota, walking a step behind Ilna with her hands pressed tightly together in front of her. She was obviously very frightened, but she was trying in every way she could to hide the fact. "I hope we're near the lake."
Ilna pursed her lips. The child was talking because she was afraid, not because the words would do any real good at all. It made Ilna angry Because Ilna was afraid also, afraid that she wouldn't be able to get Merota and Chalcus out of the trap they were in because of her. Which made her want to snarl at whoever was closest to let out the anger and fear churning inside of her.
With a tiny smile of self-mockery, she said, "It's just the other side of the hedge to our left, I believe, but it may be some way before I find a passage through-"
The aisle kinked to the right. She stepped around it, her back straight and a knotted pattern closed in her hands ready for need. White mist rolled through the gap in the hedge, clean-smelling and the first thing in this garden that had felt cool.
The mist was as thick as a feather pillow. Ilna couldn't see through it.
Chalcus joined her in the opening, keeping Merota between them. He reached over the child's head and stroked Ilna's cheek as lightly as a butterfly's wing.
Merota knelt and thrust a hand down into the mist. "I can feel the water!" she said excitedly. "It's running really fast!"
"Stand up, dear one," Chalcus said. "We're not swimming out into that without being able to see more than I can now. Not unless we have to."
"There'll be a way across," Ilna said. "I just need to follow it through in my mind."
She sounded grim, even to herself, because she was frustrated that she hadn't already found the way to cross. That was the path she'd been following, the one that would take them to the temple. She was sure of it!
"'I wish I was a rich man's son…,'" Chalcus sang and let his voice trail off. To Merota he said, "I came from honest folk. Honest but poor as the dirt they scrabbled in to earn enough to eat, or almost enough. I swore to myself that I'd never be poor the way my parents were."
Ilna stared at the mist. She couldn't see through it, but there were currents a
s surely as there were in the stream she heard purling beneath its concealment. She followed a whorl, dense white on dense white but forming a pattern in her mind.
"I haven't always been honest, child," Chalcus said. He tousled Merota's hair, but it seemed to Ilna that he was speaking as much to his own younger self as he was to the girl. "And often enough I haven't had money. But I've never had to beg the straw boss for something to buy a crust for my family. Nor sent my wife to beg him when he wouldn't grant it to me."
Merota put her hand in the sailor's. He squeezed it, then released it and edged aside. He was carefully not looking toward Ilna.
Ilna's fingers were taking apart the pattern she'd knotted for defense-or attack, if you wanted to call it that. Defense to Ilna had never meant riding with the other fellow's blows.
There were probably ways to puff air or wave her arms in the mist to change the way it flowed, but there were other ways too. If she matched the rippling white on white with the right sort of links in the yarn she carried, it would She held up the pattern she'd created. There was movement in the mist.
"Ilna, I can see something!" Merota cried. "It's a bridge! I see a bridge!"
"Aye, a bridge," said Chalcus in a quiet, neutral voice. "And where, dearest Ilna, would you say it'd come from, eh? This bridge."
"It was there all the time, Master Chalcus," Ilna said. It was a humpbacked affair with a floor and railings of pink stone on a gray stone frame. The supports were carved with leaves and flowing stems, but the pink slabs which feet or hands might touch were mirror smooth.
"Heart of mine," Chalcus said, not testy but with a hint of restraint in his gentle tone. "The fog is thick, I'll grant you, but Lady Merota paddled her little fingers in the place where the abutments now rest, gneiss and granite and each harder than the other."
"It was always here, Master Chalcus," Ilna repeated. "I had to turn it so that we could see and touch it, that's all."
She smiled faintly, wondering if a person who had more words in her tongue could've explained what she'd done. Perhaps, but it might be that a person with more words couldn't have wrapped the mist in just the right way to wring the bridge into sight.
"Ilna?" Merota said. "Who's the lady?"
For a moment Ilna didn't know what the child meant: there was only the bridge arching its back to mid-stream before falling into the mist in the direction of the central island and the temple. On the railing, though, slouched and then straightening with the grace of a cat waking, was a woman.
Wearing silk, Ilna thought, but it wasn't silk. The woman was dressed in her own flowing hair; her hair and the mist. She looked at them but didn't speak.
"I'll lead, then, shall I, darlings?" Chalcus said. He made the words a question, but he was swaggering up the pink stone before they were out of his mouth. Though his hands were empty, Ilna knew he could have a blade through the woman's throat before she had time to suck in a breath.
Merota started to follow the sailor; Ilna put a hand on the child's shoulder and held her back. Merota sometimes needed guidance, but she never objected when matters were serious.
Everything in this garden was serious, to Merota's mind even more than to her guardians.
While Chalcus was still a double-pace away the sinuous woman smiled and said, "Welcome, strangers. Have you come to use my bridge?"
Her voice was musical but pitched a little higher than even a slender woman's normally would be. Her face and mouth were both narrow, but her smile was welcoming.
"Your bridge," Chalcus said easily, letting the words stand without emphasis. "Would there be a toll for that use, milady?"
The woman laughed. "My, so formal?" she said. "A small toll, stranger-a very small one. Few people visit me here and I never leave. If you would tell me a story, any story you choose, that would give me a pleasure I could revisit in the long days when I'm alone. But if you can't or won't-"
She shrugged, a graceful movement that shimmered down her whole covering of hair.
"-then what could I do to block a strong man like you from crossing with your companions? No, a story if you choose to tell a lonely woman a story, and free passage regardless of your courtesy."
The mist was clearing. Ilna saw the wooded island beyond the moat. In the middle of the woods gleamed a temple with a golden roof.
Chalcus glanced back, careful to keep the woman in the corner of his eyes. "Ilna, dearest one…?" he said.
"I'll never be known for courtesy," Ilna said, sounding harsh and angry in her own ears. The woman on the bridge was very beautiful, and her voice was as pure and lovely as a bird's. "Still, I've always paid my debts. Give the lady a story, Master Chalcus, and we'll cross her bridge."
The woman looked at her and smiled sadly. "You don't trust me," she said in a tone of regret. "You've had a life of disappointment. I see that in your eyes."
She gestured up the bridge beyond her and toward the island. "You and the child are free to pass, mistress," she said. Every gesture, every syllable, was a work of art and beauty, though there was nothing studied about her. "All three of you may pass freely, as I said."
"Come along, Merota," Ilna said. She hated herself-well, hated herself more than usual-for her jealousy and lack of trust. "Master Chalcus will tell the lady a story to pay our way."
Ilna walked briskly up the smooth surface. The slope was noticeable, but she didn't slip even though the mist had coated the gneiss.
She could've held onto the handrail, but that would've meant touching stone with her fingers as well as her feet. Ilnahated stone. Even if she hadn't, she'd have hated every part of the bridge that this lovely, graceful woman claimed.
"Well then, milady," Chalcus said in a cheerful, lilting voice. "If you'll not think me immodest, I'll tell you of the time in my travels that I found a woman chained to the face of a cliff at the seaside. She was more lovely than any other, saving your own good self and Ilna, my heart's delight."
He nodded to Ilna and Merota as they passed. Ilna nodded back; coldly she supposed, but she couldn't help that. Merota squeezed his hand as she went by.
The girl was grinning happily; to be reaching the center of the maze probably, but Ilna didn't ask. If she spoke to Merota, it'd sound as though she was saying, "What do you have to smile about?" And that's what shewould probably be saying, so she kept her mouth shut.
"Why are you smiling, Ilna?" Merota asked.
"Am I?" said Ilna in surprise. "Yes, I was. At myself, I guess you'd say. I was thinking that I'm never going to learn to be a nice person, but I'm getting better at not saying what I think."
Ilna stopped at the hump of the bridge, a polite distance from where Chalcus stood speaking to the woman. His voice came to her faintly, "… rising out of the sea, an island to look at save for its bulging eyes and its teeth as long as temple pillars…"
"It's hard to hear him, Ilna," Merota said, frowning.
"We have no need to hear him at all, child," Ilna said severely. "He's giving her a good story. When he's finished, he'll join us and we'll go on together."
She deliberately turned her face toward the island. The temple was a simple one: round and domed instead of the usual square floor plan with a peaked roof, but she'd seen round temples occasionally in recent years.
There weren't any temples, round or square, in Barca's Hamlet or in the borough beyond. People had shrines to the Lady and the Shepherd in their houses. There they offered a crumb of bread and a drop of ale at meals; most people did. On the hill overlooking the South Pasture was a stone carved into a shape so rough that only knowing it was an altar let you see that. The shepherds left small gifts on it to Duzi, the pasture's god, at Midsummer and their own birthdays.
Ilna refused to believe in the Great Gods, the Lady who gently gathered the souls of the righteous dead and the Shepherd who protected the righteous living. Ilna believed in Nothing, in oblivion, in the end of all hopes and fears. She'd had few hopes in life and those had been disappointed, every one. Death wouldn't be
a burden to her; quite the contrary.
"You're smiling again, Ilna," Merota said.
"I shouldn't be," Ilna replied, "but that doesn't surprise me."
The mist was getting thicker; she could barely see the temple roof. She turned her head and found it moved glacially slow. Something was wrong.
Chalcus continued to talk with animation to the woman on the bridge below. His lips moved but Ilna could no longer hear his voice, even faintly. The mist between her and Chalcus was very thick, smotheringly thick.
Merota screamed, piercing the fog like a sword blade. The heaviness gripping Ilna's muscles released. Merota pointed into the water, suddenly clear where it'd been dark as ink since the bridge appeared. In its depths were bodies of the Little People, the Prey. There were more than Ilna could count, preserved by the cold stream; and they were all male.
Chalcus saw also. "By the sea-demon's dick!" he shouted. His sword flicked from its sheath and toward the lounging woman.
Swift as he was, the blade cut air alone. The woman-was she a woman?-slid into the stream like a water snake. For a moment she looked at Chalcus; then she trilled a musical laugh, gamboled for a moment among the drowned bodies, and vanished. Ilna couldn't tell whether she'd gone up or down stream, slipped into a hole in the bank, or passed from sight in some other fashion.
Chalcus joined them. His smile was forced and he dabbed his dry lips with his tongue.
"So, my fine ladies," he said. "Shall we cross the bridge as we planned?"
"Yes," said Ilna. "I'd like to get off it. I don't like stone."
And she hadn't liked the woman, either. She felt herself smile, this time because she'd had a better reason than mere jealousy to dislike and mistrust the creature.
"'Goodbye, pretty baby, I'll be gone,'" Chalcus sang as he finally sheathed his sword.
Although "'Goodbye, pretty baby, I'll be gone.'"
Because she was Ilna, she also had to admit that she'd been jealous.