The Rose Sea

by S. M. Stirling

  "Possibly. Our own ancestors were savage enough, in the old days, and look what we've done. Although I think they're hybrids around here, not pure jungleman, mixtures!—that's certainly possible, eh?"

  He nodded towards the fire. Karah looked, and blinked. Godsall. Tagog was wrapped around the chief like that python that had tried to swallow a mule, her heels kicking at the air. Maybe there was something odd in the palm wine; there were more combinations entangled all around the clearing. The natives didn't have contraceptive amulets, either, so a fair number of little half-Tykissians were going to be running through this jungle with bones in their noses in a few years, by the look of things.

  The two rose and linked hands, walking a little distance into the ruins. One of the hot springs ran from a rockface, into a pool it had worn for itself. Soft moss grew beside it.

  "We nearly died again," Karah said at last. "I don't think we could have pushed on through the jungle much further."

  Bren grinned at her, his face ruddy in the light of the distant fires. "We do seem to be making a habit of near-misses, don't we?"

  Karah nodded "I think we're near the end of our journey—and I'm afraid once we get there, and do whatever the gods want of us, they'll throw us away." She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. She stared into the falling water, watching the almost-pictures made by the dancing flames as they reflected in it.

  Bren stared down at his hands, and the grin vanished from his face. "We've been sharing dreams then, you and I."

  When he glanced up at her, she stared into his eyes. "Then you feel it, too? That death is just waiting—just biding its time?"

  He nodded slowly.

  Karah sighed "I kept telling myself that after this was over, I'd come to you, and tell you how I felt about you. I'd swear my love, and offer you my heartstone if you would have it." She stood and slipped her hands into the pockets of her breeches and paced. "I imagined the two of us courting, and how I would bring you home to the ranch and show you off t' my family. But I suppose I knew that wasn't going to happen. We're going to die here, and there will be no long tomorrows for us."

  The silence hung between them, and Karah began to wish she'd said nothing. Then Bren spoke. "I would give you the kingdom as your brideprice if I had it, Karah. I'd give you my heartstone, and my heart with it." His voice broke, and he looked off into the night, into the overhanging gloom of the jungle. "I love you. If we had forever, I would love you forever. But all we have is now." He stood and faced her, breathing hard. "If you'll have me now, I'm yours."

  "We aren't safe here." She waited to him, touched her hands to his.

  "Love is never safe."

  She nodded and kissed him once, lightly. She stared intently into his eyes, trying to discover if she really could see his soul staring back at her from behind his pupils, the way the poets said lovers could. But she saw nothing except her own reflection, and the reflected flicker of flames behind her.

  They kissed again, a harder, deeper kiss. Karah pulled away first, but only so she could begin to undress him. He smiled at her, and when he did, his upper lip trembled, and the smile died, to be replaced by a look of raw hunger.

  They pulled each other's clothes off as quickly as they could, then, and knelt on the ground, not quite touching, but so close Karah was warmed by the heat from Bren's body.

  He lowered his head and put his mouth to her breast. She sighed and ran her fingers through his hair. A part of her mind noticed the way the gold highlights in it gleamed like real treasure, while her fingertips traced the swirling pattern of the hairs themselves—but Bren's hands slid from the small of her back to her buttocks, and Bren's knees pressed her thighs apart and Bren's mouth traced its path from one breast to the other, and slowly up along her throat and the line of her jaw. Karah got lost in the rhythm of their touches, and forgot to notice anything. Then their mouths met, and he lowered her onto the makeshift bed they'd created with their cast-off clothes.

  She slipped her legs around his hips and pulled him against her.

  "Gods," he muttered, and she whispered, "Yes."

  They moved together, desperately. They were a tangle of arms and legs, a restless, shifting, sweat-slicked blur; images stayed in Karah's mind after they themselves moved or—her ankles wrapped around his neck, his chest pressed against her back, her hands pressing his shoulders flat to the ground while she slid down onto him.

  When it was over, and they sprawled, spent and panting, next to the fire, Karah clenched her fists tightly and wished she could believe there would be another time and another chance for the two of them.

  "We're leaving the horses?" Karah asked with incredulous horror, swatting at an insect. The stinging hordes were out in force again, buzzing through the hot mist of morning.

  "Be reasonable," Bren said. "We can't take them with us in these, can we?"

  The native canoes bobbed in the slow current at the end of ruined wharves. Buckled and uneven and overgrown, high with silt on their upstream sides, the wharves still served; even the bollards, stumpy little statues of grinning monkeys, were often useable for a mooring rope. Ropes had worn them halfway through, although the stone was iron-hard basalt, finegrained and tough. Some of the canoes they'd bartered for with spare bits of iron and cloth were thirty feet long or more, but none of them were much wider than man-broad, even with the outriggers on both sides. They had stubby sails, V-shapes made with two poles pivoting up from a common footing, but no decks—each canoe was hollowed from a single giant log with fire and stone tools. For all the crudeness of their making, they were comely craft, slender and fine-lined, with whimsical carvings at their man-high stemposts and sterns.

  "But—" Karah looked into Bren's face. "All right."

  She turned and walked away, knuckling at her eyes. Windrush whickered and lipped at her hair, ready to be off about the business of the day. She looked at the natives; one of them was fingering the haunches of a pack mule in a meditative way, while another stropped a knife.

  No! she thought, and stripped the bridle and hobble off her horse. She hadn't brought Windrush all the way from Grenlaarin-on-the-River to see him put into a jungleman's stewpot For a moment she hugged his neck, burying her face in the coarse mane and the earthy, grassy smell of horse. Then she darted back and slapped him smartly across the haunch with the tack.

  Windrush bugled and started. "Go!" Karah yelled, waving her arms as the horse circled nervously. "Get out of here. Go! Scat!"

  The horse hesitated, then plunged away across the square in a clatter of ironshod hooves. He'll just be eaten by a snake, or a lion, or a giant lizard or something, she told herself—a Grenlaarin was supposed to be practical about horses.

  To the One with that. Windrush deserved a chance, and she wasn't going to connive at cutting him up for giblets.

  One of the natives scowled at her, until she threw him the bridle; the metal in that made it a treasure. She stalked back to the docks; the rest of the troops were loading, many of them looking hangdog and a little the worse for wear, but without the brutalized exhaustion of the last days' journey through the jungle. One of Captain Tagog's company smothered a chortle as she winced slightly taking her seat in a canoe, then quickly bent to heave an ammunition crate aboard under her basilisk glare. Karah saw Bren's raised eyebrows, then his smile and nod. Warmth spread through her middle.

  "Dismounted Scout Troop, ready for action, First Captain," she said, saluting.

  He replied with a courtly bow, and handed her into the canoe. It rocked slightly. "The only throne I can offer you at present," he said lightly. Then in a serious tone: "Although, Holy Three be my witness, there'll be one beside me in Olmya for you, if we live through this."

  For a moment she simply smiled back. Then the sense of the words struck her—and the fact that he meant them, down to the bone.

  "Me?" It came out as a squeak. "I'm just a rancher's daughter!"

  "I'm just a bastard of the minor nobility and a first captain of the
XIXth Foot," Bren said, and for a moment his square face went very grim. "If the high haughty lords will take the one, they'll have to swallow the other—I'll see to that."

  Amourgin was looking at him oddly. "I believe you will, sir," he said quietly. "Well, we've had worse emperors. And odder, come to that."

  Bren nodded decisively. "Cast off there," he said "Dawn's making and we've a long way yet to go."

  The little fleet of outrigger canoes loosed the ropes that held them to the ruined docks and slid out onto the broad green surface of the river, through coils of mist that trailed across it and reached up like limp banners to the trees. A wind from the north slid by them, warm even now. The tall narrow sails of the canoes went up, and they turned their carved prows southwards.

  "Not one? You didn't capture even one?" Darkist-Colchob shouted, starting erect from his throne on the battlebarge.

  The guard captain knelt again and struck his forehead on the blue-and-green turrwood planks. "Slay me, Lord of Ten Thousand Years, but spare my men. The fault was mine—I underestimated how elusive the forest savages would be."

  Darkist-Colchob blinked. "Slay you? A man who actually accepts responsibility? Nonsense." He reached down and gripped the young officer by one ear. "Obviously, the towhairs bartered for boats here. A prisoner would merely have confirmed details. You are promoted to Captain of Two Hundred. And do not fail me again!"

  The officer looked more terrified at his promotion than he had at the prospect of a long death—possibly rightly. The Yentror of Tarin Tseld turned, surveying the ruined city. Tall were its towers, he remembered from the last time he had seen it. Tall, and lit with fire, as his armies swarmed over the walls. Now the forest had reclaimed it, and only here and there did stone loom out of the greenery into the hot mists of afternoon. Nothing moved save birds and beasts, no sound came to him save the screams of parrots and somewhere the hunting call of a gurr-tiger. The battlebarges waited, their oars dipping just enough to keep station against the sluggish current of the mile-wide Tiram.

  There were a dozen of the craft, each forty feet broad and a hundred long, shallow-draft and carrying light cannon on the deck over the oarsmen. Their sides sparkled with inlay and metal and enamel; his own was a blaze of gold leaf and scarlet and lapis, with the canopy over the quarterdeck cloth of silver. It was still very hot and very damp, and the barge stank like any slave-rowed vessel. Darkist-Colchob waved aside servitors with flasks of iced pomegranate juice and shrugged back the woven-feather cloak that trailed from his shoulders.

  He turned to the priests. There were two of them, on either side of a three-foot sphere of crystal held in the jaws of a cast-bronze dragon. Both were naked and had been trimmed of all hair on eyelashes, nose, external ears, and genitalia. One was written all over in scars that traced out the legends of the One in High Tiranese; the other was covered by a network of lines, with a sharp silver pin inserted at each junction. They busied themselves with their work, and the Yentror did not disturb them. At last the pinned man looked up.

  "Still south, with the river—we follow their amulets, Yentror of All Men. But look—"

  He indicated the globe. An uninstructed man would have seen only empty crystal; Darkist-Colchob made out mist, threaded with points of light He passed a hand over the surface and felt chill air, the chill of northern snows.

  "Shadows grow; the Three Unnamed Ones extend their hand over their votaries. Keep watch." He looked up. "Southward!"

  "Ukk!"

  An officer not two paces away from Willek pitched backward into the mud with a blowgun dart quivering in her throat—none of them were wearing their gorgets anymore, not after a month in the jungle. The woman's body arched and quivered, already dead but still reacting to the neurotoxin smeared on the point of the dart. A deafening volley sounded as the musketeers on either side blasted away into the foliage, and then the whole body charged through the screen of bushes and ferns. Willek followed with her sword out and a pistol in her left hand; they'd learned the natives could appear around a tree like ghosts, and always when you least expected them.

  Screams and shouts and the clash of metal against stone and wood sounded from ahead She passed dead junglemen, and dead Tykissians and Shillraki mercenaries, dead sailors, and one man who'd run into a trap and lay impaled and still alive ten feet below in a pit. The natives were good at booby traps, too.

  Sweat trickled and chafed as she walked down the path, senses pricked to inhuman alertness; the coat of light chain-mail she wore under her jerkin was hot and heavy, but better sore than dead. Soon she passed through the screen of jungle, into banana groves and patchy fields of cassava amid the charred stumps of giant trees, the mark of slash-and-burn cultivation. The barbarian longhouses stood helter-skelter down to the muddy riverbank, full of figures who ran and fought and died. The troops were killing everything that moved, down to the babes in arms.

  She came to Brigadier Multin, wild-eyed, stuffing a cassava cake into his mouth with one hand, the other still holding his bloody sword. There were weeping sores on the back of both hands, and another at the corner of his mouth; most of them had them by now. And—

  "We surprised them this time," she said.

  Only two of the villages canoes had put out into the broad greasy-green waters of the upper Tiram, and both were drifting helpless, emptied by the fire of the musketeers on the bank. Imperial sailors or Shillraki bundled into others and paddled out to tow them in; most of that breed had some experience in boats.

  "We've got river transport now," Willek said, sheathing her sword. It took a few tries; she was almost as hungry as the rest of them. "We'll… we'll rest here a day or two, feed up, then take to the waters."

  Multin choked down the dry cassava and licked the crumbs off his hand, peering at the mud beach. "There aren't enough—we've still got nearly two thousand effectives. Those canoes won't take more than a half of that."

  "The rest can make a garrison," Willek said, wiping a hand through the oily sweat that plastered her hair to her face. "Put up a stockade, wait for us to come back."

  "And eat what?" Multin said, "Our supplies are about gone, and we've eaten most of the horses and mules. This damned jungle is like a wet desert."

  "There's the plantain groves here, and the roots and such; and they can fish and hunt."

  Multin looked at her blankly. The jungle was buzzing like a hive of bees behind them after the passage they'd hacked through the sparse native villages, looting to feed themselves and killing to break resistance. Any soldier who so much as stepped around a tree to squat came back in pieces, and the savages were like ghosts, impossible to catch. The river was full of things that ate humans. They were short of ammunition, and the climate made slowmatch and powder sputter so that firing a musket was no better than an even chance.

  "And you, my dear Multin, will command the base. You need the rest."

  He looked at her with sick horror as she laughed.

  * * *

  "Heave, damn your arses!" Bren yelled over the thunder of the white water.

  The rapids stretched the full width of the river, nearly half a mile. In the middle, spray jumped twenty feet in the air over fangs of eroded black basalt and pale granite; the sound of it toned through teeth and bone like an everlasting earthquake. A hundred early morning rainbows marked the foam. The margins on the eastern shore were calmer, and it was there the Tykissians were trying to tow their vessels past the wild water.

  One by one the outriggers were emptied of their cargo on the rocky shore. Stripped to loincloths and boots, dozens of soldiers splashed into the chest-deep water, pushing and hauling at the hulls, the outriggers and the connecting poles. Scores more hauled on ropes from the bank or the shallows, and foot by foot the light craft lurched southward and upstream.

  "Sod this for a game of soldiers," Bren called, stripping off his shirt and jumping into the water to a cheer from the troopers. He bent and put a shoulder to the stern of the first canoe. "Let's see you idle lot do a l
ittle work here."

  Whooping, Karah joined him with a splash. The water was cool and silky, caressing her bare skin; she locked her palms on the checkered wood of an outrigger strut and heaved. The soldiers around her were laughing, proud that the commander joined them at their labor; they all took up a cadence chant, with a heave of grunting effort at the chorus, and the canoe began moving at walking pace. Karah could feel the current tugging at her thighs and torso like strong eager hands, and an occasional wave lapped at her face like the tongue of an over-eager dog. She spat out a mouthful of hair and took up the chant.

  It almost drowned out the screams of warning from the shore, but not the whipcrack of musket bullets.

  Karah looked up. For a moment her eyes refused to accept the scale of what they were seeing; back home on the Nyok plateau, alligators were narrow-snouted little fish-eaters the length of your arm, in the limestone sinkholes that dotted the hill country. In the Olmya River, they grew to a man's length, or a little more, and she'd heard of the huge saltwater variety, although those were rare in the Imperial Sea these days.

  This one was as long as the canoe, thirty-five feet from the flared nostrils to the end of the massive sculling tail that propelled it forward faster than a horse could run. Its square-tipped jaws were nearly as broad across as her leg was long, and they gaped open like a barn door, edged with four-inch ivory daggers. Breath like an opened tomb washed across her. Then the beast struck the canoe's outrigger like a three-ton battering ram.

  "Giant crocodile!" someone screamed.

  Tough wood cracked across with explosive force, sending splinters and chunks flying twenty feet into the air. The hull surged back against Karah with the unstoppable force of an avalanche, pushing her down into the water. For a moment she struggled, lost in tumbling green depths with the underside of the hull looming over her and threatening to trap her against the rocks.

  Then she braced a boot against a rock and pushed, her chest burning with the effort. Two strokes, and she came erect again in waist-deep water, coughing and shaking hair back out of her eyes. The crocodile had shattered the bow of the canoe with one blow of its tail… and now it was turning towards her. The water clung to her like glue, slowing her, as if she were in a nightmare where she ran and ran, but couldn't move. Only this monster was all too real. She could see musket bullets striking it, but the two-inch scales absorbed them. Reptiles took a lot of killing, and unless one of the shots found the tiny bone-armored brain, it wasn't going to stop.